- 2 days ago
Senator Bernie Sanders joins WIRED to answer the internet’s burning questions about the oligarchy.
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00:00We can send a guy to the moon, we can come up with all kinds of military stuff, and we
00:04can't build low-income and affordable housing?
00:06Really?
00:07I'm Senator Bernie Sanders, this is Tech Support Oligarchy.
00:16The first question, what does Bernie mean by oligarchy?
00:20Now that's a pretty easy question, I wrote a book on that one.
00:23Oligarchy means that you live in a nation in which a handful of extraordinarily wealthy
00:31people have enormous wealth and power, and with that wealth and power, they not only
00:38control the economy, they not only significantly control the media, but they also control our
00:45political system to a large degree, because we have a corrupt campaign finance system that
00:51allows billionaires to spend as much as they want on campaigns.
00:55So bottom line, never before in American history have so few, held so much wealth, so much power.
01:01That is oligarchy.
01:03This question is from Reddit.
01:05Why do we call Russian billionaires oligarchs while we call US ones entrepreneurs?
01:12We don't like Putin for a number of very valid reasons.
01:16The guy is a crook, a mass murderer, started a terrible war, a lot of reasons to dislike
01:22him and where Russia is right now.
01:24And after the Soviet Union fell, Putin and his friends cleaned up, they took over a lot of the
01:29state-owned industries and they became oligarchs, and everybody knows that.
01:33So it's easy to put a negative term on a country that we are not friendly with, that we don't
01:38like
01:39for a lot of valid reasons.
01:40When it comes back home, it's a little bit more difficult.
01:42But I think people are catching on.
01:45When you live in a society where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%, when
01:54you're living in a country where one guy, Mr. Musk, now owns more wealth than the bottom
01:5953% of American households, when you are living in a society where we do have more or less free
02:07elections. You can run for office, but somebody else has the freedom to spend all kinds of money
02:12to defeat you. So you're going to have a democracy, but it's going to be pretty hard to win elections
02:16when the oligarchs have the money. And they spend hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millions
02:22of dollars to make sure government represents their interests.
02:24So the reason we don't call what we have an oligarchy, and by the way, more and more people are,
02:29is this is our country, and it's much easier to be negative about another country.
02:35Victory Wing.
02:36I truly cannot fathom why billionaires want to replace the entire workforce with AI
02:41if no one is getting paid, no one is buying your shit, and we're all going to be broke.
02:47Victory, that's a very interesting thought. I don't think these guys stay up nights worrying about you
02:52or anybody else, as a matter of fact. And I don't know that they're doing long-term
02:56thinking about the consequences of their actions. AI has the potential to wipe out tens of millions
03:03of jobs in the next decade. We have people like Jeff Bezos, one of the wealthiest guys on earth,
03:09putting together a fund of $100 billion to do what? To automate factories and warehouses.
03:14That means there ain't going to be any more manufacturing jobs in America or warehouse jobs.
03:19It will all be done by robots. It is a massive transformation of society
03:25led by the wealthiest people in the world who could care less about you or my grandkids or anybody
03:31else. They're in it for more and more wealth and more and more power. And what I'm spending 24-7
03:38now
03:38is trying to stop them in any way we can. We are supporting a national moratorium on data centers.
03:46We've introduced legislation calling for an AI American sovereign wealth fund, which would allow the
03:53public to have half the seats on all of the major AI companies to stop what Victory is worried about.
04:00Massive job loss in this country. Debbie Fates asks,
04:04isn't there a limit to political donations or can billionaires just buy elections? Well,
04:10Debbie, the answer is billionaires can just buy elections. As a result of the disastrous Citizens
04:15United Supreme Court decision 15, 16 years ago, essentially what the Supreme Court said is that
04:22the wealthiest people in this country have the freedom to spend as much money as they want on
04:27elections. And what has evolved over the time is a structure called super PACs. So it's not an
04:32individual, you know, Mr. Jones can't put $100 million into a campaign. You do it through super PACs,
04:38political organizations. They put as much money as they want into a super PAC, and that super PAC
04:45does the political work. Elon Musk himself put $290 million into electing Trump. Democrats have
04:52their billionaires as well. So all in all, you've got a really corrupt campaign finance system. And it's a
04:58long, long way from the democracy that I believe in, that most Americans believe in, which is one person,
05:04one vote, where campaigns are about candidates actually debating the issues facing the American
05:10people. So today, what's about is billionaires and their super PACs running ugly 30-second ads,
05:15trying to destroy opponents. And that is something we've got to change. So at the top of my list,
05:21politically, we're not going to bring back the changes that we need as a nation, unless we get
05:25rid of this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and get rid of super PACs as well.
05:31Is it inevitable that the US will have a revolution with wealth inequality getting worse?
05:37When we were in school, we learned about the Gilded Age. Remember the Gilded Age? Rockefeller
05:41and Carnegie and Mellon and all those guys, they were incredibly rich. The situation today is much
05:48more unequal than it was during the Gilded Age. It is worse than it has ever been in American history.
05:54Some 60 percent of our people are living paycheck to paycheck. I grew up in a family that lived
06:00paycheck to paycheck. I know something about that. Today, people are living under enormous stress,
06:06how they're going to feed their kids, how they're going to pay the rent, how they're going to send
06:10their kid to childcare when the cost of childcare is so expensive. What happens if somebody in the
06:14family gets sick? How do you afford to go to the hospital? You have huge deductibles,
06:18go payments. A lot of people have no insurance at all. So you're living in a situation where people
06:23on top are doing phenomenally well and working families are struggling. And I think what you're
06:28seeing is politically more and more people beginning, just beginning to start talking about
06:35that issue. Do we want to live in a society where one guy, Mr. Musk, owns more wealth than the
06:42bottom
06:42half of American society? If we are the richest country on earth, why is it that we're the only major
06:47nation not to guarantee healthcare to all people? Why don't we have the best educational system in
06:52the world? Why do kids have to go tens and tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get a
06:57college
06:57education? Why are some 20 million households spending half of their income for housing?
07:02Doesn't make sense to me. We can't raise the minimum wage to a living wage so all workers are
07:06earning a decent wage. Strengthen the union movement in America. People at the bottom are seeing what's
07:10happening, getting angrier and angrier. The difficulty is we live at a time when you have a corporate
07:15media that is not going to discuss these issues very significantly. We live in a political system
07:20where these guys own many of the members of the Congress. But I think things are changing and
07:25people are catching up. Marisa Mendez asks, can someone smart who actually works in economics
07:32or something tell us what the heck is going to happen? There are no jobs, more being eliminated by the
07:38day. Housing is insane. AI is ramping up. Seriously, what does the future look like? How do we bounce back
07:45from this? What will it take? There is very little doubt that American society is in decline. The
07:52people on top are doing phenomenally well. But as you indicate, if you're an ordinary person,
07:57go to the grocery store, price of food is going up. Good, healthy food for your kids. People think it's
08:01just New York or LA. It's all over this country. It is Burlington, Vermont. The price of housing is
08:07skyrocketing. For young people today, the economists tell us the first home that they are going to buy,
08:13if they ever get to buy a home, will be, I think, 12 years later than their parents. Parents were
08:19able
08:19to get a home, I think, at 28. They're going to get their first home at 40. Why is that?
08:23Why are we
08:23the only country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all people as a human right,
08:28despite spending twice as much per capita as most other countries? Why the cost of prescription drugs
08:34so very high? Why do kids have to go deeply into debt just to get a higher education? And the
08:39answer
08:40is you've got a government that is controlled by extremely wealthy and greedy people who want more
08:48and more for themselves and could care less about the needs of working people. So Trump, in his so-called
08:55Big Beautiful Bill, the worst piece of legislation in modern history, gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks
09:01to the top one percent. Then he threw 15 million people off of the health care that they have.
09:06How do we bounce back from that? And the answer is really not hard. And that's what
09:10some of us are working on right now. We have to organize politically at the grassroots level.
09:18They have unbelievable and endless amounts of money, but we have the people. And when people get
09:26organized, when they get mobilized, when they participate in elections, we can win. And we
09:31have been winning in the last six, seven months, starting with Zeran Mamdani in New York and going
09:37throughout the country. You're seeing people never ran for office in their lives, winning primaries
09:42against democratic establishments. But we have to know what's at stake and we have to know the path
09:47forward. And bottom line, it is two things. We must take on Trump, who is the most dangerous
09:52president in the history of the United States. He is working for his fellow oligarchs. He does
09:58not believe in the constitution or the rule of law. He lies all the time. He has gotten us into
10:03a horrible war in Iran and on and on. But we also have to understand how Trump gets elected.
10:10And the answer is that millions of working class people looked at the alternative. They looked at
10:14the democratic body and say, what the hell are you doing? You guys had power. Did you create
10:19health care for all? Did you raise my wages? Did you build affordable housing that I need?
10:23Did you make the schools better? And the answer is no. So the struggle that we as progressives are
10:29engaged in are on two separate fronts. Number one, we're going to lead the effort against Trump
10:34and his disastrous policies. But number two, we have to transform the democratic party completely
10:41from being a party dominated by the wealthy and the powerful to a party of the working class
10:46and young people in this country. And that's what we're working on. That is the way out of this
10:51disaster. You are living in the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We can do extraordinary things.
10:57All people can have decent paying jobs. We can lower the work week. We can have health care for all
11:02people. We can have the best educational system in the world. This is not radical thinking. We can do
11:07these when you've got a government that works for ordinary people and is not owned by the billionaires. Thanks.
11:16you
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