Going After the Oligarchs
A striking feature of January’s Presidential Inauguration was that some of the choicest seats were occupied by four of the world’s five richest men: Elon Musk, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg. The message was clear: the billionaires are now in charge. It’s called “oligarchy” where wealth, status, and influence rule.
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (pictured) is having none of it. At 83, he’s an old warrior but a warrior, nonetheless. For two months, the feisty Independent has been holding “Fighting Oligarchy: Where We Go from Here” rallies in cities large and small, in red states and blue, along with Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and others. Rally attendance has been spectacular with overflow crowds at every stop including 20,000 in Salt Lake City, 30,000 in Denver, and 36,000 in Los Angeles.
Sanders has warned about the influence of money in politics for years, but the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which ruled that “corporations are people” entitled to unlimited political donations, allowed campaigns to be flooded with so-called “dark money.” Elon Musk poured $250 million into Trump’s 2024 campaign. That kind of money can persuade a lot of voters.
In a radio Interview, Sanders, in his familiar Brooklyn accent, said, “Well, when I talked about oligarchy over the years, I think for some people it was an abstraction.” Now, however, “people understand you have to be blind not to see what we have today is a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.”
At the rallies, Sanders says that 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck while rich people have been enjoying hefty tax cuts (passed by Republicans in 2018 but expiring this year unless renewed) causing the wealth gap between the rich and the rest to grow each year. Today’s tycoons are much richer compared to most Americans than were Gilded Age tycoons like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers.
Such wealth disparity is unhealthy for a democracy where every citizen is entitled to an equal voice. So what to do? To fight oligarchy, Sanders, AOC, and other rally speakers advocate a series of reforms including Medicare for all, stricter campaign finance laws to reduce the political influence of corporate and private money, and a wealth tax—separate from the income tax—on excessive amassed wealth. Sanders and AOC suggest the Democratic Party return to its roots by focusing on issues popular with the working class, including the huge wealth gap, healthcare, childcare, and climate change. They strongly encourage grassroots participation in local and state elections as foundations of broader electoral success.
The Fighting Oligarchy tour got what Newsweek called “a major boost” last week when polling by the respected SurveyUSA showed that 50 percent of Democrats favor the party moving in a more progressive direction while only 18 percent favor it becoming more moderate.
Sanders’s pitch has broad appeal: “Because if you’re a working class Republican, you don’t think it makes a lot of sense to give a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the richest people in the country and then cut veterans’ benefits, go after Social Security, and make $800 billion cuts in Medicaid…. Republican, independent, Democrat… very few people think that makes any sense at all.” After a rally in Folsom, CA, Sanders wrote, “In a city of 85,000 in a Republican [district], more than 30,000 people came out on a Tuesday night…. We can and WILL defeat Trump and the oligarchs.”