Bernie Sanders has a message for Democrats: Go after the ultra-rich corporations and oligarchs responsible for the struggles of millions of Americans.
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After being beaten with an economic message that fell flat, Democrats need to recalibrate and go after the oligarchs and corporations that are depriving Americans of choices while jacking up prices, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said Saturday.
It would behoove Democrats to pay attention because, when it comes to economic populism, the senator has been running circles around them.
In 2016 and 2020, he launched surprisingly competitive grassroots campaigns against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, both of whom eventually prevailed thanks in part due to the party’s full backing.
Still, Sanders’s economic message of greater equality and taking the fight to modern-day oligarchs and corporate behemoths proved to be very popular and gave the establishment a scare.
Now, the senator is urging Democrats to change their strategy accordingly.
“Our job in the coming months and years is clear,” Sanders stated. “We must defeat the oligarchs and create an economy and government that works for all, not just the few.”
The lawmaker pointed to some of the most egregious examples of how wealth is accumulating at the very top while most people get left behind.
“Today, while 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, three multi-billionaires own more wealth than the bottom half of American society,” said Sanders.
He added that these billionaires are using a tiny fraction of their wealth to influence politics, which is really just a polite way of saying “buying themselves the government they want.”
“Today, in America, we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class,” he stated. “In the recent elections, just 150 billionaire families spent nearly $2 billion to get their candidates elected.”
Of course, it’s not just personal wealth that is concentrated at the top.
Sanders also noted that an increasing number of huge corporations are dominating economic sectors ranging from health care, energy, housing, and food. This gives them outsized control over what Americans eat or how much they have to pay in rent.
Although these kinds of inequalities should play to the advantage of the Democrats, they lost millions of voters to Donald Trump and his GOP’s faux economic populism.
It’s understandable that this mystified them.
However, Trump simply scared voters into believing that the government was responsible for hard times… and not the billionaires and corporations who were raking in unprecedented amounts of money.
To counter that, Democrats tried to educate Americans about how macroeconomic factors drove higher prices, and how Trump’s tariffs and mass deportations would harm the economy.
However, the election has shown pretty clearly that voters aren’t interested in lectures (or reality); they just want someone to blame.
And Sanders rightly notes that this someone should be the people who are enriching themselves in unprecedented ways while the rest of Americans are struggling to make ends meet.
This is especially true because of how heavily involved some billionaires — first and foremost Elon Musk — are in the incoming administration.
It should not be difficult to point out how much they will benefit from the policies that Trump plans to put in place, from tax cuts for the wealthy to cutting programs that benefit regular Americans but not corporations.
The only question is whether Democrats will listen… or whether they are too concerned about “their” billionaires also being affected if they were to adopt a Sanders-style economic platform.
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
