Fight Oligarchy by Bernie Sanders Where We Go From Here
What's it about?
Fight Oligarchy (2025) examines how a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has gained unprecedented control over American economic, political, and media institutions. It argues that this concentration of power threatens democratic governance, and documents the rise of authoritarian tendencies under Donald Trump’s billionaire-backed administration. Drawing on historical examples of successful resistance movements and detailing grassroots organizing efforts through 2025, it presents a vision for reclaiming democracy through policy reform and mass mobilization.
Most Americans sense something is deeply wrong. They work long hours, but can’t pay their rent. They see grocery prices climbing while corporate profits soar. They feel powerless to change anything.
Bernie Sanders has spent decades in American politics, but in early 2025, something shifted. As he launched his Fighting Oligarchy tour, the turnouts were unlike anything he’d seen before. Thousands showed up in red states and blue states alike – not to support a candidate, but to join a fight against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite. In this lesson, you’ll encounter Sanders’s analysis of how a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has seized control of America’s economy, media, and political system – and why this threatens democracy itself. You’ll discover what history can teach us about overcoming impossible odds and the concrete steps that can reclaim power from the oligarchs. Let’s get started.
In December 2024, Congress hammered out a major appropriations bill to expand primary and mental health care, dental care, nutrition programs for seniors, and apprenticeship programs for young people. It was far from perfect, but it would have helped millions. Just as it was set to pass, Elon Musk fired off a series of posts denouncing the deal and vowed to fund primary challengers against anyone who backed it. Lawmakers folded, the bill collapsed, and months of work vanished.
That episode illustrates oligarchy: a system in which a tiny number of extremely wealthy people control the nation's economic, political, and media life. The numbers tell the story. Musk, worth nearly $400 billion, possesses more wealth than 52 percent of American households combined. The top one percent owns more than the bottom 93 percent. CEOs at large companies earn 350 times what their average worker makes. Ownership has become just as concentrated.
A handful of giant corporations now dominate sector after sector. Four companies control 80 percent of beef processing, 70 percent of pork, and nearly 60 percent of poultry. The pattern repeats across transportation, financial services, energy, and health care. Three Wall Street firms – Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street – are major shareholders in 95 percent of large corporations. They own General Motors and Ford, ExxonMobil and Chevron, Pfizer, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson. Whenever Sanders contacted company managers during labor disputes, he heard the same refrain: “We're not the owners, it’s somebody else.
” Media consolidation compounds the problem. Six international corporations control what 90 percent of Americans see, hear, and read. Billionaires own the platforms: Musk has X, Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post and Amazon Prime, Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta and its properties. The oligarchs have also captured politics. After the 2010 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited campaign spending, political expenditures jumped by more than 1,600 percent. In 2024, just 100 billionaire families contributed $2.
6 billion to elections. Musk alone dropped $290 million to elect Trump, then gained extraordinary power through his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Billionaire-backed groups like AIPAC use similar financial muscle to steer foreign policy, including defeating members of Congress who oppose US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. American elections increasingly focus less on policy platforms and more on competing billionaire-funded advertisements. This concentration of power has weakened democratic institutions, and played a significant role in Trump’s electoral victory.
At Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, the three wealthiest Americans – Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg – sat directly behind him. Behind them stood 13 more billionaires Trump had nominated to head federal agencies. The spectacle was a stark contrast to Lincoln’s Gettysburg vision of government “of the people, by the people, for the people. ” This was more a government of, by, and for the billionaire class.
Trump wasted no time delivering for his oligarch allies. His “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July 2025, handed the top one percent more than $1 trillion through tax cuts. Large corporations received another $900 billion. It was the largest wealth transfer in contemporary America – and it came alongside massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition programs, and education. Trump also pursued aggressive anti-union policies, effectively shutting down the National Labor Relations Board and breaking major federal trade unions. His rhetoric about waste and fraud in Social Security laid the groundwork for privatizing core programs.
Individual oligarchs got special treatment. Bezos accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia and secured a $5 billion contract. Zuckerberg paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against Meta – then received a $15 billion retroactive tax break in the “Big Beautiful Bill. ” Trump’s own family profited spectacularly: a record $239 million for his inauguration, a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, $1. 2 billion from his crypto coin, and lucrative real estate deals with Gulf monarchies. This oligarchic presidency grew from years of pain that Democrats failed to address.
While party leaders chased wealthy donors, trade deals like NAFTA and agreements with China shut factories and sent millions of jobs overseas. Wages stagnated as trillions shifted from the bottom 90 percent to the top one percent. Millions lived paycheck to paycheck, faced brutal housing and medical costs, and lacked retirement security. Trump filled that vacuum by posing as an anti-establishment champion. But he’s governing as a classic demagogue. Rather than confront the rigged economy, he’s inflaming racism and xenophobia, continues to insist he won the 2020 election while calling January 6 a “day of love,” dismisses climate science as a hoax, and brands mainstream outlets “fake news.
” He’s also spread wild stories about Social Security fraud to undermine faith in government and ease privatization. Immigration gives him both scapegoat and pretext for repression. He portrays undocumented people as rapists and invaders “poisoning the blood” of the nation. In reality, research shows undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens and kept the economy running as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Trump has poured $75 billion into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making ICE larger than the FBI and DEA combined – a huge domestic force an authoritarian president can bend to his will.
In 1886, Chicago workers organized to demand an eight-hour workday – a radical idea at the time. Their request was simple: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. ” At a rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded, killing workers and police. Authorities arrested labor leaders despite no evidence linking them to the violence.
Four were executed. The bosses wanted to make an example of them, to show dire consequences for anyone who stood up for themselves. But the workers eventually won anyway. The eight-hour workday became law. That pattern repeats throughout American history. When people organize against entrenched power, they’re told change can’t happen.
But it does. Nelson Mandela said it best: “It always seems impossible until it is done. ” In the 1770s, American colonists stood up to the most powerful monarchy in the world with no regular army, no navy, and little wealth. They had something the British couldn’t compete with: a vision rejecting the “divine right of kings” and declaring all people are created equal. They defeated the King of England. Decades later, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman rose against slavery despite being attacked as radicals with no chance of success.
They faced the entire Southern ruling class whose wealth rested on slavery. It took a brutal civil war, but slavery was abolished. Yet that victory didn’t end the fight. Jim Crow created a new regime of segregation and racial apartheid. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and John Lewis stood up to this injustice, they were called communists and investigated by the FBI. They faced violence, arrest, and assassination. In 1963, Alabama’s governor even declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. ” One year later, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination. The labor movement brought similar struggles. The Pullman strike of 1894 involved 250,000 workers in a nationwide boycott.
Federal troops were sent in, dozens died, and employers broke the strike. Yet the effort demonstrated labor solidarity on a national scale and helped establish Labor Day as a federal holiday. The 1914 Ludlow Massacre killed 21 people, including 11 children, when National Guardsmen attacked striking miners. The tragedy focused national attention on working conditions and helped end child labor. Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony fought for decades to win women the vote, enduring ridicule and imprisonment.
They succeeded in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. The LGBT community resisted centuries of persecution, with the 1969 Stonewall rebellion sparking a movement that won marriage equality in 2015. As Frederick Douglass stated, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. ” The limits of tyrants are set by the endurance of those they oppress. They did it then. The question is whether people can organize to do it now.
On March 8, 2025, Sanders held a rally in Warren, Michigan, joined by Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers. Four months earlier, during the general election, Trump had come to Warren and drawn 4,000 people. Now, with no one running for anything, the Fighting Oligarchy tour brought out 9,000. People were fired up about taking on the billionaire class.
The tour had started in late January with unexpectedly massive turnouts. In Omaha, Nebraska – a Republican district with a Republican congressman, governor, and two senators – organizers secured a union hall for 800 people. The RSVPs kept coming. They moved to a hotel ballroom that held 2,600, but still had to turn away 800 more. The pattern repeated in Iowa City, Iowa, and in Kenosha and Altoona, Wisconsin. Then came the Southwest tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Over 3,000 showed up in Las Vegas. In Tempe, Arizona, 15,000 filled a basketball arena to capacity. Greeley, Colorado drew 11,000 at an outdoor university event. And Denver? Sanders stood at the podium and literally couldn’t see the end of the crowd. Thirty-four thousand people packed the venue.
Three days later in Tucson, 23,000 showed up at a high school football stadium, overflowing onto the playing field. The West Coast tour brought even bigger numbers. Los Angeles hit 36,000 with union speakers, musicians, and members of Congress. Salt Lake City, Utah – 20,000 people. Nampa, Idaho – 12,500 in perhaps the reddest state in the country. Folsom, California brought out 30,000 in a rural community.
By the end of July, almost 280,000 people had attended 24 rallies across 14 states. But the goal went beyond big crowds. The tour built infrastructure for long-term organizing. Full-time organizers were hired in key states to run town halls, canvasses, and call-in campaigns targeting Republican members of Congress. Over 7,000 people signed up to run for office, from school board to Congress, with training sessions connecting them to progressive organizations. More than 40 percent wanted to run as Independents rather than Democrats.
The strategy worked. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani – a progressive who’d volunteered for Sanders in 2016 – defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor despite being heavily outspent by billionaires. The oligarchs openly announced they’d spend hundreds of millions to stop him. He won anyway, showing that a progressive economic agenda plus grassroots organizing beat billionaire money.
The rallies proved something the establishment doesn’t want people to know: They’re not alone, their views aren’t fringe, and they’re actually part of the majority. When people see thousands standing alongside them, they gain strength and hope. That’s why Sanders says building this movement matters – because winning requires people to understand their power and use it.
A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe life for people like themselves is worse today than it was 50 years ago. Think about that. We have lifesaving drugs, computers, smartphones, streaming entertainment, and countless modern conveniences that didn't exist in 1973. Yet most people feel life has gotten worse.
Only 19 percent are satisfied with how things are going. Why? Because wages have stagnated, housing is unaffordable, health care is broken, and the quality of life has deteriorated even as oligarchs accumulate unimaginable wealth. Trump positioned himself as the change candidate, but he’s only delivered change to benefit oligarchs while he’s betrayed working families. He didn’t campaign on giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent while cutting Medicaid for 15 million people. He didn’t campaign on raising health insurance premiums by 75 percent for 20 million Americans or taking away free school meals from 16 million kids.
He didn’t campaign on doubling student loan payments, firing 7,000 Social Security Administration employees, or gutting veterans’ health care. He didn’t campaign on breaking unions or creating a $50 billion voucher program that will gut public schools. Sanders says that what’s needed is a fundamentally different approach. Democracy must be defended by overturning Citizens United and moving toward public funding of elections so billionaires can’t buy power. The wealthy must pay their fair share through progressive taxation and a wealth tax – no one needs a billion dollars. Military spending of over $1 trillion a year should be cut significantly and redirected to human needs.
As technology advances through AI and robotics, workers must benefit through shorter workweeks with no loss of pay, not just see oligarchs profit further. Health care should be a right through Medicare for All, saving $650 billion yearly while covering everyone. Education from childcare through college must be affordable and accessible. Housing needs massive investment to end homelessness and keep rent affordable. Workers need the PRO Act to protect union organizing, a $17 minimum wage, guaranteed paid family and medical leave, expanded Social Security, and a return to defined-benefit pensions. But policy alone won’t win.
A political revolution requires people to get involved – running for office, volunteering on campaigns, organizing rallies and protests, using social media to spread truth, joining unions, supporting strikes. Democracy requires active participation, not passive observation. The oligarchs want people to feel powerless and alone, but the rallies have defied this. The fight ahead is about more than policy, says Sanders.
It’s about whether a handful of billionaires will control everything or ordinary people will reclaim democracy. If we don’t let Trump and oligarchs divide us by race, religion, birthplace, or sexual orientation, we can win. Solidarity isn’t just a slogan – it’s the path forward.
In this lesson to Fight Oligarchy by Bernie Sanders, you’ve learned that a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has seized control of America’s economy, politics, and media. Three Wall Street firms dominate corporate ownership, billionaires spend billions on elections, and oligarchs like Musk can kill legislation with a few posts. Oligarchy spans the globe, but history shows change is possible. Workers won the eight-hour day, abolitionists ended slavery, and the civil rights movement dismantled segregation.
The Fighting Oligarchy tour proved millions are ready to organize. The path forward means defending democracy, taxing the wealthy, guaranteeing health care and education, protecting workers’ rights, and building a movement where solidarity defeats division.
Fight Oligarchy (2025) examines how a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has gained unprecedented control over American economic, political, and media institutions. It argues that this concentration of power threatens democratic governance, and documents the rise of authoritarian tendencies under Donald Trump’s billionaire-backed administration. Drawing on historical examples of successful resistance movements and detailing grassroots organizing efforts through 2025, it presents a vision for reclaiming democracy through policy reform and mass mobilization.
Most Americans sense something is deeply wrong. They work long hours, but can’t pay their rent. They see grocery prices climbing while corporate profits soar. They feel powerless to change anything.
Bernie Sanders has spent decades in American politics, but in early 2025, something shifted. As he launched his Fighting Oligarchy tour, the turnouts were unlike anything he’d seen before. Thousands showed up in red states and blue states alike – not to support a candidate, but to join a fight against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite. In this lesson, you’ll encounter Sanders’s analysis of how a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has seized control of America’s economy, media, and political system – and why this threatens democracy itself. You’ll discover what history can teach us about overcoming impossible odds and the concrete steps that can reclaim power from the oligarchs. Let’s get started.
In December 2024, Congress hammered out a major appropriations bill to expand primary and mental health care, dental care, nutrition programs for seniors, and apprenticeship programs for young people. It was far from perfect, but it would have helped millions. Just as it was set to pass, Elon Musk fired off a series of posts denouncing the deal and vowed to fund primary challengers against anyone who backed it. Lawmakers folded, the bill collapsed, and months of work vanished.
That episode illustrates oligarchy: a system in which a tiny number of extremely wealthy people control the nation's economic, political, and media life. The numbers tell the story. Musk, worth nearly $400 billion, possesses more wealth than 52 percent of American households combined. The top one percent owns more than the bottom 93 percent. CEOs at large companies earn 350 times what their average worker makes. Ownership has become just as concentrated.
A handful of giant corporations now dominate sector after sector. Four companies control 80 percent of beef processing, 70 percent of pork, and nearly 60 percent of poultry. The pattern repeats across transportation, financial services, energy, and health care. Three Wall Street firms – Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street – are major shareholders in 95 percent of large corporations. They own General Motors and Ford, ExxonMobil and Chevron, Pfizer, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson. Whenever Sanders contacted company managers during labor disputes, he heard the same refrain: “We're not the owners, it’s somebody else.
” Media consolidation compounds the problem. Six international corporations control what 90 percent of Americans see, hear, and read. Billionaires own the platforms: Musk has X, Jeff Bezos has the Washington Post and Amazon Prime, Mark Zuckerberg controls Meta and its properties. The oligarchs have also captured politics. After the 2010 Citizens United decision allowed unlimited campaign spending, political expenditures jumped by more than 1,600 percent. In 2024, just 100 billionaire families contributed $2.
6 billion to elections. Musk alone dropped $290 million to elect Trump, then gained extraordinary power through his Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Billionaire-backed groups like AIPAC use similar financial muscle to steer foreign policy, including defeating members of Congress who oppose US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. American elections increasingly focus less on policy platforms and more on competing billionaire-funded advertisements. This concentration of power has weakened democratic institutions, and played a significant role in Trump’s electoral victory.
At Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, the three wealthiest Americans – Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg – sat directly behind him. Behind them stood 13 more billionaires Trump had nominated to head federal agencies. The spectacle was a stark contrast to Lincoln’s Gettysburg vision of government “of the people, by the people, for the people. ” This was more a government of, by, and for the billionaire class.
Trump wasted no time delivering for his oligarch allies. His “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in July 2025, handed the top one percent more than $1 trillion through tax cuts. Large corporations received another $900 billion. It was the largest wealth transfer in contemporary America – and it came alongside massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition programs, and education. Trump also pursued aggressive anti-union policies, effectively shutting down the National Labor Relations Board and breaking major federal trade unions. His rhetoric about waste and fraud in Social Security laid the groundwork for privatizing core programs.
Individual oligarchs got special treatment. Bezos accompanied Trump to Saudi Arabia and secured a $5 billion contract. Zuckerberg paid $25 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against Meta – then received a $15 billion retroactive tax break in the “Big Beautiful Bill. ” Trump’s own family profited spectacularly: a record $239 million for his inauguration, a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, $1. 2 billion from his crypto coin, and lucrative real estate deals with Gulf monarchies. This oligarchic presidency grew from years of pain that Democrats failed to address.
While party leaders chased wealthy donors, trade deals like NAFTA and agreements with China shut factories and sent millions of jobs overseas. Wages stagnated as trillions shifted from the bottom 90 percent to the top one percent. Millions lived paycheck to paycheck, faced brutal housing and medical costs, and lacked retirement security. Trump filled that vacuum by posing as an anti-establishment champion. But he’s governing as a classic demagogue. Rather than confront the rigged economy, he’s inflaming racism and xenophobia, continues to insist he won the 2020 election while calling January 6 a “day of love,” dismisses climate science as a hoax, and brands mainstream outlets “fake news.
” He’s also spread wild stories about Social Security fraud to undermine faith in government and ease privatization. Immigration gives him both scapegoat and pretext for repression. He portrays undocumented people as rapists and invaders “poisoning the blood” of the nation. In reality, research shows undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens and kept the economy running as essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Trump has poured $75 billion into Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making ICE larger than the FBI and DEA combined – a huge domestic force an authoritarian president can bend to his will.
In 1886, Chicago workers organized to demand an eight-hour workday – a radical idea at the time. Their request was simple: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will. ” At a rally in Haymarket Square, a bomb exploded, killing workers and police. Authorities arrested labor leaders despite no evidence linking them to the violence.
Four were executed. The bosses wanted to make an example of them, to show dire consequences for anyone who stood up for themselves. But the workers eventually won anyway. The eight-hour workday became law. That pattern repeats throughout American history. When people organize against entrenched power, they’re told change can’t happen.
But it does. Nelson Mandela said it best: “It always seems impossible until it is done. ” In the 1770s, American colonists stood up to the most powerful monarchy in the world with no regular army, no navy, and little wealth. They had something the British couldn’t compete with: a vision rejecting the “divine right of kings” and declaring all people are created equal. They defeated the King of England. Decades later, abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman rose against slavery despite being attacked as radicals with no chance of success.
They faced the entire Southern ruling class whose wealth rested on slavery. It took a brutal civil war, but slavery was abolished. Yet that victory didn’t end the fight. Jim Crow created a new regime of segregation and racial apartheid. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
and John Lewis stood up to this injustice, they were called communists and investigated by the FBI. They faced violence, arrest, and assassination. In 1963, Alabama’s governor even declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. ” One year later, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act outlawing discrimination. The labor movement brought similar struggles. The Pullman strike of 1894 involved 250,000 workers in a nationwide boycott.
Federal troops were sent in, dozens died, and employers broke the strike. Yet the effort demonstrated labor solidarity on a national scale and helped establish Labor Day as a federal holiday. The 1914 Ludlow Massacre killed 21 people, including 11 children, when National Guardsmen attacked striking miners. The tragedy focused national attention on working conditions and helped end child labor. Suffragists like Susan B. Anthony fought for decades to win women the vote, enduring ridicule and imprisonment.
They succeeded in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment. The LGBT community resisted centuries of persecution, with the 1969 Stonewall rebellion sparking a movement that won marriage equality in 2015. As Frederick Douglass stated, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. ” The limits of tyrants are set by the endurance of those they oppress. They did it then. The question is whether people can organize to do it now.
On March 8, 2025, Sanders held a rally in Warren, Michigan, joined by Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers. Four months earlier, during the general election, Trump had come to Warren and drawn 4,000 people. Now, with no one running for anything, the Fighting Oligarchy tour brought out 9,000. People were fired up about taking on the billionaire class.
The tour had started in late January with unexpectedly massive turnouts. In Omaha, Nebraska – a Republican district with a Republican congressman, governor, and two senators – organizers secured a union hall for 800 people. The RSVPs kept coming. They moved to a hotel ballroom that held 2,600, but still had to turn away 800 more. The pattern repeated in Iowa City, Iowa, and in Kenosha and Altoona, Wisconsin. Then came the Southwest tour with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Over 3,000 showed up in Las Vegas. In Tempe, Arizona, 15,000 filled a basketball arena to capacity. Greeley, Colorado drew 11,000 at an outdoor university event. And Denver? Sanders stood at the podium and literally couldn’t see the end of the crowd. Thirty-four thousand people packed the venue.
Three days later in Tucson, 23,000 showed up at a high school football stadium, overflowing onto the playing field. The West Coast tour brought even bigger numbers. Los Angeles hit 36,000 with union speakers, musicians, and members of Congress. Salt Lake City, Utah – 20,000 people. Nampa, Idaho – 12,500 in perhaps the reddest state in the country. Folsom, California brought out 30,000 in a rural community.
By the end of July, almost 280,000 people had attended 24 rallies across 14 states. But the goal went beyond big crowds. The tour built infrastructure for long-term organizing. Full-time organizers were hired in key states to run town halls, canvasses, and call-in campaigns targeting Republican members of Congress. Over 7,000 people signed up to run for office, from school board to Congress, with training sessions connecting them to progressive organizations. More than 40 percent wanted to run as Independents rather than Democrats.
The strategy worked. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani – a progressive who’d volunteered for Sanders in 2016 – defeated former governor Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic primary for mayor despite being heavily outspent by billionaires. The oligarchs openly announced they’d spend hundreds of millions to stop him. He won anyway, showing that a progressive economic agenda plus grassroots organizing beat billionaire money.
The rallies proved something the establishment doesn’t want people to know: They’re not alone, their views aren’t fringe, and they’re actually part of the majority. When people see thousands standing alongside them, they gain strength and hope. That’s why Sanders says building this movement matters – because winning requires people to understand their power and use it.
A 2023 Pew Research Center poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe life for people like themselves is worse today than it was 50 years ago. Think about that. We have lifesaving drugs, computers, smartphones, streaming entertainment, and countless modern conveniences that didn't exist in 1973. Yet most people feel life has gotten worse.
Only 19 percent are satisfied with how things are going. Why? Because wages have stagnated, housing is unaffordable, health care is broken, and the quality of life has deteriorated even as oligarchs accumulate unimaginable wealth. Trump positioned himself as the change candidate, but he’s only delivered change to benefit oligarchs while he’s betrayed working families. He didn’t campaign on giving a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top one percent while cutting Medicaid for 15 million people. He didn’t campaign on raising health insurance premiums by 75 percent for 20 million Americans or taking away free school meals from 16 million kids.
He didn’t campaign on doubling student loan payments, firing 7,000 Social Security Administration employees, or gutting veterans’ health care. He didn’t campaign on breaking unions or creating a $50 billion voucher program that will gut public schools. Sanders says that what’s needed is a fundamentally different approach. Democracy must be defended by overturning Citizens United and moving toward public funding of elections so billionaires can’t buy power. The wealthy must pay their fair share through progressive taxation and a wealth tax – no one needs a billion dollars. Military spending of over $1 trillion a year should be cut significantly and redirected to human needs.
As technology advances through AI and robotics, workers must benefit through shorter workweeks with no loss of pay, not just see oligarchs profit further. Health care should be a right through Medicare for All, saving $650 billion yearly while covering everyone. Education from childcare through college must be affordable and accessible. Housing needs massive investment to end homelessness and keep rent affordable. Workers need the PRO Act to protect union organizing, a $17 minimum wage, guaranteed paid family and medical leave, expanded Social Security, and a return to defined-benefit pensions. But policy alone won’t win.
A political revolution requires people to get involved – running for office, volunteering on campaigns, organizing rallies and protests, using social media to spread truth, joining unions, supporting strikes. Democracy requires active participation, not passive observation. The oligarchs want people to feel powerless and alone, but the rallies have defied this. The fight ahead is about more than policy, says Sanders.
It’s about whether a handful of billionaires will control everything or ordinary people will reclaim democracy. If we don’t let Trump and oligarchs divide us by race, religion, birthplace, or sexual orientation, we can win. Solidarity isn’t just a slogan – it’s the path forward.
In this lesson to Fight Oligarchy by Bernie Sanders, you’ve learned that a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals has seized control of America’s economy, politics, and media. Three Wall Street firms dominate corporate ownership, billionaires spend billions on elections, and oligarchs like Musk can kill legislation with a few posts. Oligarchy spans the globe, but history shows change is possible. Workers won the eight-hour day, abolitionists ended slavery, and the civil rights movement dismantled segregation.
The Fighting Oligarchy tour proved millions are ready to organize. The path forward means defending democracy, taxing the wealthy, guaranteeing health care and education, protecting workers’ rights, and building a movement where solidarity defeats division.
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