‘More Power, More Control and More Wealth’: Sanders Lays Out Battle With Voracious Oligarchs
Senator sounds the alarm in a speech on the Senate floor
A very small group of ultra-wealthy business men are waging war against the American people — particularly the American working class — in a greedy drive for even “more power, more control, and more wealth,” according to Sen Bernie Sanders.
It’s a familiar message from the progressive Vermont independent, who has been sounding the alarm on oligarchy and growing wealth inequality in the United States with increasingly urgent terms.
Just three of the wealthiest Americans — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — own more wealth than the entire bottom half of American society, or 170 million people, Sanders noted.
The senator, who twice ran for president, gave extensive remarks on the Senate floor about what the American people face under this new Donald Trump presidency.
“Future generations will look back at this moment – what we do right now – and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism,” he said. “They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; ‘this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.’
“Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?” he asked.
“But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society – 170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had,” Sanders added.
It is also, he said, the rapid movement under Trump, toward authoritarianism.
“More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands,” he said.
Particularly, Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged.
Musk has been disrupting and dismantling agencies under orders from Trump.
“For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe,” Sanders said.
Standing up to this attack on US democracy won’t be easy — but it’s not hopeless, the senator said.
“The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans — Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old — come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few,” he said. “Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.”
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