
Bernie Sanders, Senator from VT, sent out an email yesterday. The subject line contained one word, “Oligarchy”. So, I read it. There is much truth here:
Dear Mark,
For years and years in the corporate media, you’d only heard the word ‘oligarch’ preceded by the word ‘Russian.’ But oligarchs aren’t uniquely a Russian phenomenon or a foreign concept.
No. The United States has its own oligarchy.
When I first started talking about this, many people didn’t understand what I meant. Well, that’s changed.
When the 3 wealthiest men in America sit behind Trump at his inauguration, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our government. They also understand that one of the major functions of government policy will be to make these incredibly rich people even richer and more powerful.
When those same 3 men control some of the largest media and information distribution channels in America, everyone understands that the billionaire class now controls our media. They also understand that one of the major functions of that billionaire owned media (think Musk and twitter) will be to manufacture massive amounts of disinformation and outright lies.
When 1 of those men spent hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump and another used his power as a newspaper owner to withhold an endorsement of Kamala Harris, everyone understands that the billionaire class now significantly controls our politics, as well. They also understand that one of the major functions of our political system is to maintain the pretense that we are a real democracy when, in fact, the average citizen has less and less impact over what goes on.
But it is not just Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Today in America we have more income in wealth inequality than we have ever had. We have more concentration of ownership in the financial services sector, health care, agriculture, transportation energy, food and housing than we have ever had. We have more media consolidation than we have ever had. And we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class.
Add it all together and what you see is a nation and world trending very strongly toward oligarchy – where a small number of multi-billionaires exercise enormous economic and political power over everyone else. Increasingly, government is just one more entity owned by these enormously powerful forces.
So, in the midst of all of this, where do we go from here?
First, we don’t have time to moan and groan and bury our heads in despair. Yes. Many of us are angry and frustrated at a Democratic Party establishment that continues to turn its back on the needs of working people. But our job now is not to look back, but to look forward.
Let me be clear. One of the tools that the Oligarchs use to maintain their position of power is to make it appear that real change is impossible, and opposition is useless. They have the power. Ain’t nothing we can do about it. That’s the way it is and always will be. Give up trying.
Fortunately, these masters of the universe are wrong. Very wrong.
What history has always taught us is that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice – and fight back. That is the history of the founding of our nation, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement and the gay rights movement. That is how we elected dozens of progressives to Congress and made the Congressional Progressive Caucus one of the most important entities in the U.S. House of Representatives. That is the history of every effort that has brought about transformational change in our society.
It won’t be easy but, together, we will educate, organize and build an unstoppable grassroots movement around a progressive agenda that is based on the principles of justice and compassion, not greed and oligarchy. Together, we will lead the fight to create the kind of nation and world we know we can become.
Sisters and brothers, we are right now in the midst of a struggle between a progressive movement that mobilizes around a shared vision of prosperity, security and dignity for all people, against one that defends oligarchy and massive global income and wealth inequality.
It is a struggle that, for ourselves and future generations, we cannot lose. Let us go forward together.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
What might be added?
First, Bernie’s oligarchy appears to have arisen only recently. The history of the last fifty years shows a continuous exercise of political power by the rich and corporations. “ ….we have a political system that is increasingly controlled by the billionaire class.” This is simply wrong. Both political parties, Republican and Democratics, have been in the thrall of millionaires and billionaires for decades. There is no place for the word “increasingly”. For decades, anyone who wanted to be, or to continue to be, a Congressperson or Senator spends many hours talking to millionaires and billionaires to raise the required campaign funds.1
Certainly, once Bill Clinton and his buddies in the New Democrats of the 1990s fully bought into the free-market, small government ethos promoted by the think tanks and mass media campaigns of the rich and corporations the Democratic Party was completely in the pockets of the rich and corporations. Clinton closed his Presidency with the passage of laws that deregulated the finance sector and set the stage for the speculation that led to the near collapse of the global financial system in 2008. Obama did nothing to bring to justice the king pins of that meltdown. The only people brought before a jury were low level traders. Every administration in the past fifty years has been crowded with former CEOs from the corporate world. This is particularly so in the area of managing the financial system.
The Most Successful Social Movement of the Past 100 Years
“What history has always taught us is that real change never takes place from the top on down.” Again, this is simply wrong. The last fifty years has seen the most successful social movement of the last 100 years, the top-down movement of the rich and corporations to control government and change laws and regulations in their favor. It has always been unfashionable to invoke class in American political. Time to understand that the rich and corporations have been conducting class war for fifty years. They have comprehensive won this war!
One symptom of this victory is the flatlining of income for the vast majority of Americans over the past fifty years. The American Compass, a self-described home of conservative economics, developed this very concrete example of the effects of flatlined wages
Their Cost of Thriving Index report for 2023 provides:
In 1985, COTI was 39.7 weeks. Costs totaled $17,586, while median weekly income for a man aged 25 or older working full-time was $443 ($23,036 per year).
In 2022, COTI was 62.1 weeks. Costs totaled $75,732, while median weekly income for a man aged 25 or older working full-time was $1,219 ($63,388 per year).
In 1985, a single male worker worked 39.7 weeks to pay for the basics of middle-class life for a family of four, food, housing, health care, transportation, and higher education. In 2022, the same worker had to work 62 weeks just to pay for the same basics.That is 22 more weeks of work to pay for an equivalent basket of basic family goods. But, of course, there are still only 52 weeks in a year. So, he ended up $12,344 short for the basics over a calendar year. This reflects the fact that, as measured by some, average wages in the US only grew by 17% between 1979 and 2020.(Productivity is the amount of output per hour of labor)
To be clear Bernie Sanders does recognize the facts and magnitude of the flatlining of wages. In recent speeches, Sanders has spoken of the $50 trillion shift of income from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%.2 A closer look at the data reveals that the vast majority of this heist of $50 trillion of income ended up the hands of th top 4% with a steep upward trend to the hands of the top 1%. The data for wealth inequality displays a far more vertiginous growth for the top 1% than even for income inequality.
Market Concentration and the Death of Competitive Capitalism
One closing note. Sanders does recognize how concentrated markets now dominate a broad range of the economy. The facts are that virtually any market you can mention is now dominated (more than 50% share) by just three or four companies. A study by economists from Harvard, U Chicago, and Leibniz U.3 reveals that “…since the early 1930s, the asset shares of the top 1% and top 0.1% corporations have increased by 27 percentage points
(from 70% to 97%) and 40 percentage points (from 47% to 88%), respectively.” So, what does that mean? The top 1% pf corporations own 97% of all corporate assets (buildings, machinery, etc.) and, further, the concentration of ownership is such that the top one thenth of a percent own 88%. Competitive capitalism in America is long dead. New business formation has been in decline for decades.
Why Does Market Concentration Matter?
Control of markets by just a few companies has a number of consequences.
- Higher prices dues to a lack of competition.
Lower wages and other benefits paid to workers because of a lack of competition for their labor. - Lower prices and loss of control up and down the supply chains of dominant companies.
- Less innovation in products and services.
Footnotes
- Listen to this podcast for more on what our political leaders actually spend their time on: Glass, Ira. “Take the Money and Run for Office.” This American Life. Accessed June 21, 2022. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/461/take-the-money-and-run-for-office.
- See this study from the Rand Corporation, famous for working for the Dept of Defense and other Federal agencies: Price, Carter C., and Kathryn A. Edwards. “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND Corporation, September 14, 2020. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html.
- Kwon, Spencer, Yueran Ma, and Kaspar Zimmerman. “100 Years of Rising Corporate Concentration.” BusinessConcentration.com. Accessed June 6, 2024. https://businessconcentration.com/.
Thank you Mark for validating what we know to be true with real data.
Now what do we do about it?
Look forward to your book
Very best regards to you
A
Thanks. I will be more specific about the politics and policies of addressing these issues in future posts.