Bernie Sanders Answers Oligarchy Questions

We can send a guy to the moon,

we can come up with all kinds of military stuff,

and we can't build low income

and affordable housing, really?

I'm Senator Bernie Sanders.

This is Tech Support Oligarchy.

[bright music]

The first question, what does Bernie mean by oligarchy?

Now, that's a pretty easy question.

I wrote a book on that one.

Oligarchy means that you live in a nation

in which a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people

have enormous wealth and power.

And with that wealth and power,

they not only control the economy,

they not only significantly control the media,

but they also control our political system to a large degree

because we have a corrupt campaign finance system

that allows billionaires

to spend as much as they want on campaigns.

So bottom line, never before in American history

have so few held so much wealth,

so much power that is oligarchy.

And this question is from Reddit.

Why do we call Russian billionaires Oligarchs

while we call US ones entrepreneurs?

We don't like Putin for a number of very valid reasons.

The guy is a crook, a mass murderer,

started a terrible war,

a lot of reasons to dislike him

and where Russia is right now.

And after the Soviet Union fell,

Putin and his friends cleaned up.

They took over a lot of the state-owned industries

and they became oligarchs, and everybody knows that.

So it's easy to put a negative term on a country

that we are not friendly with,

that we don't like for a lot of valid reasons.

When it comes back home,

it's a little bit more difficult,

but I think people are catching on.

When you live in a society

where the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 93%,

when you're living in a country where one guy,

Mr. Musk now owns more wealth

than the bottom 53% of American households,

when you are living in a society

where we do have more or less free elections,

you can run for office,

but somebody else has the freedom

to spend all kinds of money to defeat you,

so you're gonna earn a democracy,

but it's gonna be pretty hard to win elections

when the oligarchs have the money.

And they spend hundreds and hundreds

and hundreds of millions of dollars

to make sure government represents their interests.

So the reason we don't call what we have an oligarch,

and by the way, more and more people are,

is this is our country

and it's much easier to be negative about another country.

Victory Wing,

I truly cannot fathom why billionaires

wanna replace the entire workforce with AI.

If no one is getting paid,

no one is buying your shit and we're all gonna be broke.

Victory, that's a very interesting thought.

I don't think these guys stay up nights

worrying about you or anybody else as a matter of fact.

And I don't know that they're doing long term

thinking about the consequences of their actions.

AI has the potential to wipe out tens of millions of jobs

in the next decade.

We have people like Jeff Bezos,

one of the wealthiest guys on earth,

putting together a fund of a hundred billion dollars

to do what?

To automate factories and warehouses.

That means there ain't gonna be any more

manufacturing jobs in America

or warehouse jobs will all be done by robots.

It is a massive transformation of society

led by the wealthiest people in the world

who could care less about you or my grandkids

or anybody else.

They're in it for more and more wealth

and more and more power.

And what I'm spending 24/7 now

is trying to stop them in any way we can.

We are supporting a national moratorium on data centers.

We've introduced legislation

calling for an AI American Sovereign Wealth Fund,

which would allow the public to have half the seats

on all of the major AI companies

to stop what Victory is worried about,

massive job loss in this country.

Debbie Faits asks,

Isn't there a limit to political donations?

Or can billionaires just buy elections?

Well, Debbie, the answer is,

billionaires can just buy elections.

As a result of the disastrous

Citizens United Supreme Court decision 15, 16 years ago,

essentially what the Supreme Court said

is that the wealthiest people in this country

have the freedom to spend as much money as they want

on elections.

And what has evolved over the time

is a structure called Super PACs.

So it's not an individual, you know,

Mr. Jones can't put a hundred million dollars

into a campaign.

You do it through Super PACs political organizations.

So they put as much money as they want into a Super PAC,

and that Super PAC does the political work.

Elon Musk himself put $290 million into electing Trump.

Democrats have their billionaires as well.

So all in all,

you got a really corrupt campaign finance system.

And it's a long, long way from the democracy

that I believe in,

that most Americans believe in,

which is one person, one vote,

where campaigns are about candidates actually debating

the issues facing the American people.

So today, what's about is billionaires and their Super PACs

running ugly 30-second ads trying to destroy opponents,

and that is something we've gotta change.

So to the top of my list politically,

we're not gonna bring back the changes

that we need as a nation

unless we get rid of this disastrous

Citizens United Supreme Court decision

and get rid of Super PACs as well.

Is it inevitable that the US will have a revolution

with wealth inequality getting worse?

When we were in school,

we learned about the Gilded age.

Remember the Gilded age, Rockefeller and Carnegie

and Mellon and all those guys,

they were incredibly rich.

The situation today is much more unequal

than it was during the Gilded Age.

It is worse than it's ever been in American history.

Some 60% of our people are living paycheck to paycheck.

I grew up in a family that live paycheck to paycheck.

I know something about that.

Today, people are living on the enormous stress,

how they're gonna feed their kids,

how they're gonna pay the rent,

how they're gonna send their kid to childcare

when the course of childcare is so expensive.

What happens if somebody in the family gets sick?

How do you afford to go to the hospital?

You have huge deductibles, got payments.

A lot of people have no assurance at all.

So you are living in a situation

where people on top are doing phenomenally well

and working families are struggling.

And I think what you're seeing

is politically more and more people beginning,

just beginning to start talking about that issue.

Do we want to live in a society where one guy, Mr. Musk,

owns more wealth than the bottom half of American society?

If we are the richest country on earth,

why is it that we are the only major nation

not to guarantee healthcare to all people?

Why don't we have the best educational system in the world?

Why do kids have to go tens and tens

of thousands of dollars in debt

to get a college education?

Why are some 20 million households

spending half of their income for housing?

Doesn't make sense to me.

We can't raise the minimum wage to a living wage

so all workers are earning a decent wage,

strengthen the union movement in America?

People at the bottom are seeing what's happening,

getting angry and angry.

The difficulty is we live at a time

when you have a corporate media

that is not gonna discuss these issues very significantly.

We live in a political system

where these guys own many of the members of the Congress.

But I think things are changing when people are catching up.

Marisa Mendez asks,

Can someone smart,

who actually works in economics or something,

tell us what the heck is gonna happen?

There are no jobs, more being eliminated by the day,

housing is insane, AI is ramping up.

Seriously, what does the future look like?

How do we bounce back from this?

What will it take?

There is very little doubt

that American society is in decline.

The people on top are doing phenomenally well.

But as you indicated,

if you're an ordinary person, go to the grocery store,

price of food is going up, good healthy food for your kids.

People think it's just New York or LA,

it's all over this country.

It is Burlington, Vermont.

Price of housing is skyrocketing.

For young people today,

the economists tell us

the first home that they are gonna buy,

if they ever get to buy a home,

will be, I think,

12 years later than their parents.

Parents were able to get a home I think at 28.

They're gonna get their first home at 40.

Why is that?

Why are we the only country on earth

that doesn't guarantee healthcare

to all people as a human, right?

Despite spending twice as much per capita

as most other countries.

Why the cost of prescription drugs so very high?

Why do kids have to go deeply into debt

just to get a higher education?

And the answer is,

you gotta government that is controlled

by extremely wealthy and greedy people

who want more and more for themselves

and could care less about the needs of working people.

So Trump in his so called Big Beautiful Bill,

the worst piece of legislation in modern history,

gave a trillion dollars in tax breaks to the top 1%,

that he threw 15 million people

off of the healthcare that they have.

How do we bounce back from that?

And the answer is really not hard.

And that's what some of us are working on right now.

We have to organize politically

at the grassroots level.

They have unbelievable and endless amounts of money,

but we have the people.

And when people get organized, when they get mobilized,

when they participate in elections, we can win.

And we have been winning.

In the last six, seven months,

starting with Zohran Mamdani in New York

and going throughout the country,

you're seeing people never ran for office in their lives

winning primaries against democratic establishments.

But we have to know what's at stake

and we have to know the path forward.

And bottom line, it is two things:

we must take on Trump

who is the most dangerous president

in the history of the United States.

He is working for his fellow oligarchs.

He does not believe in the constitution or the rule of law.

He lies all the time.

He has gotten us into a horrible war in Iran and on and on.

But we also have to understand how Trump gets elected.

And the answer is that millions of working class people

looked at the alternative.

They looked at the Democratic body and say,

What the hell are you doing?

You guys had power.

Did you create healthcare for all?

Did you raise my wages?

Did you build affordable housing that I need?

Did you make the schools better?

And the answer is no.

So the struggle that we as progressives are engaged in

are on two separate fronts.

Number one, we're gonna lead the effort against Trump

and his disastrous policies.

But number two,

we have to transform the Democratic party completely

from being a party dominated by the wealthy and the powerful

to a party of the working class

and young people in this country.

And that's what we're working on.

That is the way out of this disaster.

You are living in the wealthiest country

in the history of the world.

We can do extraordinary things.

All people could have decent paying jobs.

We could lower the work week.

We could have healthcare for all people.

We can have the best educational system in the world.

This is not radical thinking.

We can do these when you got a government

that works for ordinary people

and is not owned by the billionaires.

Thanks.

[bright music]