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oligarchy
Sanders Heading to West Virginia and North Carolina for Latest Swing of 'Fighting Oligarchy' Tour
"Red state, blue state—the people of this country are opposed to an economy that works for the 1% and not for working-class Americans," said the senator.
Jul 31, 2025
For the first time since U.S. President Donald Trump signed his domestic policy into law, handing out tax breaks to the rich that will far outweigh those for working-class families and slashing healthcare and food assistance programs that millions depend on, Sen. Bernie Sanders will be face-to-face with voters in Republican districts this weekend for the latest leg of his Fighting Oligarchy Tour.
Sanders is headed to several towns in West Virginia Friday and Saturday and will make his way to Greensboro and Asheville, North Carolina on Sunday—all in deep red districts like those the Vermont independent senator has visited in states like Idaho and Texas as he talks to voters from across the political spectrum about "the takeover of the national government by billionaires and large corporations, and the country's move toward authoritarianism."
"I'll be heading to West Virginia and North Carolina to discuss the need for decent paying jobs, healthcare for all, and the end of a corrupt campaign finance system in which billionaires buy politicians," said Sanders.
So far, more than 240,000 people have attended Sanders' rallies, where he's been joined by musical guests and, at some stops, by other progressive leaders including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Greg Casar (D-Texas) and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain.
Well-attended rallies hosted by Sanders, a longtime critic of both Democratic and Republican lawmakers who take donations from billionaires and corporate interest groups, have frequently been dismissed by the political and media establishment, but the senator has argued that the crowds of people showing up to hear his message this year demonstrate that Americans across demographic divides, throughout the country, are fed up with politicians who don't fight for the working class.
"Red state, blue state—the people of this country are opposed to an economy that works for the 1% and not for working-class Americans," Sanders said Thursday.
More than two-thirds of people who have RSVP'd to the tour have been new to Sanders' mailing list, and about a third of them have not been registered Democrats. Livestreams of Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies have also been viewed more than 8 million times.
Sanders' latest stops in West Virginia and North Carolina will begin days after he and his team held an online "National Training" to organize around efforts "to defeat every member of Congress who voted for Trump's disastrous budget bill and elect progressives up and down the ballot."
"We have to organize people," said Misty Rebik, Sanders' chief of staff, on the call. "Over the past several months, we have organized thousands of people to attend rallies, canvasses, office visits, town halls in swing districts across the country. We've recruited more than 7,000 people to run for office. Over half of those are running as independents."
Americans are answering Sanders' call to help defeat oligarchy and Trump's anti-worker, anti-immigrant, and anti-democracy agenda, said Rebik, because they "do not think that billionaires should control our government and they are not sitting around. And that's why President Trump's so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' has to be the defining issue of the 2026 campaign. And as Bernie has said, no member of Congress who has voted for this disastrous legislation should be reelected."
The five cities Sanders will visit this weekend are all represented by Republicans who voted for Trump's so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act and are up for reelection in 2026.
Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards, whose Western North Carolina district includes Asheville, got thousands of calls from constituents urging him to vote against the bill, with nearly 300,000 of his constituents facing the possibility of losing healthcare and food assistance as a result of its passage.
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Sanders Says Billionaire Effort to Crush Mamdani Rooted in Fears of Nationwide Progressive Wave
"They are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country."
Jul 11, 2025
Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday reaffirmed his support for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a fellow democratic socialist facing fierce opposition from deep-pocketed establishment figures who fear the broad nationwide appeal of his people-over-profit agenda.
Faced with the growing possibility that Mamdani would win the June 24 primary, Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, real estate developers, mega-landlords, and others rushed to dump money into disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign coffers. Now that Mamdani is the Democratic nominee, they're pouring tens of millions of dollars into an anti-Mamdani war chest, despite not even agreeing on which candidate to back in November's mayoral election.
In a Thursday interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour—who noted that Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy tour "has been drawing record crowds"—the Vermont senator said that policies like "giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and cutting healthcare and education and nutrition from working-class families [are] not popular."
While acknowledging that "mainstream Democrats" have been unable to galvanize opposition to Republicans' pro-billionaire, anti-working class agenda, Amanpour pressed Sanders about what he would tell New Yorkers who say that Mamdani "has never run anything, and he says, free buses, and... is he antisemitic or not?'"
Watch Sanders' response:
"First of all, understand, he's going to have the entire establishment, the oligarchy, the billionaires coming down on his head, not only because he's demanding that the wealthy and large corporations in New York City start paying their fair share of taxes, they are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country when you bring people together to demand the government that works for all of us and not just a few," the senator said. "So, they really want to crush this guy."
"You have billionaires saying quite openly, 'We are going to spend as much as it takes to defeat this guy.' You have Democratic leadership not refusing to jump on board a campaign where this guy is the Democratic nominee," Sanders added. "So, most importantly, I'm going to do everything I can to see that Zohran becomes the next mayor of New York."
Some Democrats have done more than refuse to support their own party's nominee. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) falsely claimed last month that Mamdani had made references to "global jihad" and speciously argued that "globalize the intifada"—a call for Palestinian liberation and battling injustice—is a call to "kill all the Jews."
Freshman Congresswoman Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) also falsely accused Mamdani of "a deeply disturbing pattern of unacceptable antisemitic comments."
Congressional progressives including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), André Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.)—the four practicing Muslims in the House of Representatives—last month condemned what they called the "vile, anti-Muslim, and racist smears from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle."
Despite the attacks against him, Mamdani is leading Cuomo—who is now running as an Independent—by 10 points in a Slingshot Strategies poll of more than 1,000 registered voters published earlier this week. Mamdani also leads Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa by 21 points and scandal-ridden incumbent Mayor Eric Adams by 24 points.
Observers note that establishment Democrats' reservations about backing Mamdani seem to be fading amid the strength of his campaign. As Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) hold out on endorsing their own party's nominee, critics argue it's time to follow other lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerrold Nadler, Adriano Espaillat, and Nydia Velázquez—all New York Democrats—and endorse Mamdani.
"Mamdani won a record-setting primary victory, and unions, grassroots Democratic groups, and savvy elected officials are rushing to back him," The Nation's national affairs correspondent, John Nichols, wrote Friday. "Now it's the establishment's turn."
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The $50 Million Venetian Wedding of Robber Baron Jeff Bezos
Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Jul 07, 2025
With all the fawning coverage of Jeff Bezos’ storybook $50 million Venetian wedding, the news media lost sight of fact that Bezos—the third-richest person in the world—is hardly worthy of veneration. He’s been exploiting Amazon workers for years.
Historians have drawn parallels between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and what we are experiencing today. Like the first Gilded Age, Gilded Age 2.0 is marked by increasing economic inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a rise in populism and social unrest.
Jeff Bezos fits the profile of a latter-day robber baron to a T. Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Amazon terrorizes its workers
With their manifestly unsafe working conditions, Amazon warehouses are a 21st-century version of a Gilded Age sweatshop. Despite the company’s claims that it protects its workforce, an 18-month investigation released last December by a Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer risks its workers’ health and safety by prioritizing speed and profit, and it is doing quite well on that score. Last year, the company outpaced Walmart, the largest private-sector employer, by netting $59.2 billion—a 95 percent increase from 2023.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders said in a statement. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business.”
Based on Amazon’s own data, the Senate committee found its warehouses recorded 30 percent more injuries in 2023 than the warehousing industry average and that the company systematically underreported injuries to hide the fact that its facilities are significantly more dangerous than that of other companies. It also found that Amazon workers, who represent about 29 percent of the U.S. warehousing industry workforce, were nearly twice as likely to be injured as other company warehouse workers in each of the previous seven years.
The committee, which contacted nearly 500 former and current Amazon employees, also uncovered evidence that Amazon is aware that its oppressive productivity demands are causing frequent injuries. The company drafted plans to lower injury rates but never implemented them because it feared they would undercut profits.
Amazon pays its workers peanuts
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains the company’s executive chairman and biggest shareholder, paid himself a salary of $81,840 in 2020 and earned $1.6 million in compensation. That may not seem so excessive, but he makes the bulk of his money from stock. All told, between 2023 and this year, he made about $8 million an hour.
By contrast, Amazon’s 1.2 million warehouse workers are just scraping by. They make anywhere from $8.41 to $20.19 an hour, according to data compiled by Zip Recruiter. Their average hourly rate—$16.35—amounts to only $34,000 a year.
Roughly half of nearly 1,500 Amazon warehouse workers surveyed in the spring of 2024 by the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois Chicago reported that they struggle to afford enough food or a place to live. A third of them had to rely on public assistance, mainly in the form of SNAP benefits.
“Many Amazon associates cannot pay their bills, they can’t afford proper housing,” one survey respondent told CUED researchers. “Some of my coworkers have been forced out of their homes. We are stuck in a nightmare, living in an economy that puts no cap on worker exploitation, while our wages can’t keep up with the increase in our cost of living. This cycle has to stop.”
Most of the Amazon warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize have been squelched by the company, which spent more than $17 million on anti-union consultants from 2022 through 2023. In 2021, a labor activist group, the Congress of Essential Workers, founded the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully organized an 8,300-person warehouse on Staten Island in March 2022. ALU affiliated with the Teamsters Union in June 2024, but to date, no other warehouses have been unionized.
Amazon slapped with tens of millions in fines
Since 2000, lawsuits by government authorities and private parties have cost Amazon (including Whole Foods) more than $283 million for a range of violations, notably consumer protection, employment, environment, government contracting, and workplace safety offenses, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit group that promotes government and corporate accountability. Nearly 60 percent (101) of the 173 violations in those five categories involved workplace safety.
Amazon warehouse and delivery operation violations since 2020 are staggering.
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Amazon more than $1.35 million for 23 workplace violations. Three state agencies collectively fined the company nearly $600,000 for similar health and safety offenses.
- Federal and state authorities fined the company nearly $74.2 million for five wage and hour violations, while private lawsuits forced the company to pay $26.45 million in restitution.
- The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice fined the company $25 million for privacy law violations, including illegal surveillance and unauthorized medical inquiries. A similar privately brought case in federal court forced Amazon to pay $95 million.
Less enforcement under the Trump administration?
Will the Trump regime be as aggressive as previous administrations in prosecuting Amazon for its labor infractions? Given the efforts by Bezos and Amazon to curry favor with Donald Trump, probably not.
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and in January, it was widely reported that the company will pay a whopping $40 million to license an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump to be released in theaters and streamed on Prime Video. The first lady will serve as executive producer.
In February, Trump nominated Amazon’s former senior safety executive, David Keeling, to head OSHA. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, the company was cited numerous times for failing to meet the OSHA requirement “to furnish a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees,” according to the Department of Justice. (The Senate has yet to confirm his nomination.)
Since then, Bezos has gone even further to placate Trump. In late April, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon planned to display on its website how much Trump’s tariffs are inflating the price of each product. In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “a hostile and political act” and Trump phoned Bezos to complain. Bezos backed down immediately.
Then there’s what Bezos has been doing to wreck one of the top newspapers in the country—The Washington Post—which he bought in 2013. But that’s a column for another day.
Suffice it to say, the rap sheet on Bezos is long—and damning. Like his fellow robber barons of the day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a man who deserves our reverence. Uncritical worship of billionaires like Bezos just may exacerbate an already dangerous level of social inequality. So let’s not go gaga over Bezos’ grandiosity.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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