Bernie Sanders never worked in a high salary position since graduating from college. He’s been in politics in fashion or another since the early 1970’s. He was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, from 1980-1989. He was in the House of Representatives from 1990-2007, when he took one of Vermont’s Senate seats, and has been there ever since. He’s made a lot of money along the way, somehow, and has three homes. He takes lots and lots of fossil fueled travel, and taken lots and lots of money from lots of big money Democratic Party donors. Yet, here he is, in an opinion piece in the UK Guardian
Let’s wrench power back from the billionaires
Here is where we are as a planet in 2018: after all of the wars, revolutions and international summits of the past 100 years, we live in a world where a tiny handful of incredibly wealthy individuals exercise disproportionate levels of control over the economic and political life of the global community.
Difficult as it is to comprehend, the fact is that the six richest people on Earth now own more wealth than the bottom half of the world’s population – 3.7 billion people. Further, the top 1% now have more money than the bottom 99%. Meanwhile, as the billionaires flaunt their opulence, nearly one in seven people struggle to survive on less than $1.25 (90p) a day and – horrifyingly – some 29,000 children die daily from entirely preventable causes such as diarrhoea, malaria and pneumonia.
At the same time, all over the world corrupt elites, oligarchs and anachronistic monarchies spend billions on the most absurd extravagances. The Sultan of Brunei owns some 500 Rolls-Royces and lives in one of the world’s largest palaces, a building with 1,788 rooms once valued at $350m. In the Middle East, which boasts five of the world’s 10 richest monarchs, young royals jet-set around the globe while the region suffers from the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, and at least 29 million children are living in poverty without access to decent housing, safe water or nutritious food. Moreover, while hundreds of millions of people live in abysmal conditions, the arms merchants of the world grow increasingly rich as governments spend trillions of dollars on weapons.
In the United States, Jeff Bezos – founder of Amazon, and currently the world’s wealthiest person – has a net worth of more than $100bn. He owns at least four mansions, together worth many tens of millions of dollars. As if that weren’t enough, he is spending $42m on the construction of a clock inside a mountain in Texas that will supposedly run for 10,000 years. But, in Amazon warehouses across the country, his employees often work long, gruelling hours and earn wages so low they rely on Medicaid, food stamps and public housing paid for by US taxpayers.
Bernie forgets to mention his own houses. And avoids attacking most of the other Democratic Party donors, like, say, all those Hollywood celebs making millions per movie, or the people who run Google, and GM, and so forth.
In the midst of all of this economic disparity, the world is witnessing an alarming rise in authoritarianism and rightwing extremism – which feeds off, exploits and amplifies the resentments of those left behind, and fans the flames of ethnic and racial hatred.
Interestingly, the authoritarianism comes from Bernie’s side, which loves them some big government
Now, more than ever, those of us who believe in democracy and progressive government must bring low-income and working people all over the world together behind an agenda that reflects their needs. Instead of hate and divisiveness, we must offer a message of hope and solidarity. We must develop an international movement that takes on the greed and ideology of the billionaire class and leads us to a world of economic, social and environmental justice. Will this be an easy struggle? Certainly not. But it is a fight that we cannot avoid. The stakes are just too high.
And how do you do that? With Big Big Big Government. And, of course, massive taxation of That Guy. You know, the ones who create jobs? How many people made a lot of money building those mansions for Bezos, or selling the Rolls’ to the Sultan? Think any policies of Sanders’ will do anything that increase poverty and, surprise surprise! reliance on government? Just look at Democratic run cities like Detroit. We’ve seen this schtick already in a place called the Union Of Soviet Socialist Republics. Bernie is just repackaging that garbage using modern language.
