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oligarchy
We Have to Create a New Form of Society
Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country.
Dec 13, 2025
Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders delivered these remarks at the How We Win conference over the weekend of December 5 in New Orleans. They were originally transcribed and published by Jacobin. The conference was organized by the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, Jacobin, the Nation, and others for democratic socialist elected officials and their staff.
Thank you for inviting me to say a few words. Let me begin by thanking all of you for having the guts to run for public office. It’s a lot harder to go out and knock on doors to represent constituents with the problems they face seven days a week, so I want to thank you very much for that. Despite the horror in the White House right now, they’re out there all across this country. We’re seeing strong progressive growth. It is not just Zohran Mamdani in New York or Katie Wilson in Seattle. From coast to coast, you are seeing progressive democratic socialists standing up, taking on the establishment, and winning elections.
And one of the great secrets of the corporate media is that right now in the House of Representatives, the Congressional Progressive Caucus has about 100 members, including dozens and dozens of very strong progressives. That is the result of the hard work all of us have done over the last number of years.
I’ve been asked to give you some advice. What I’m gonna tell you is probably what you already know. No. 1, here is a radical idea: Do your job that you were elected to do. Now, I’ll tell you a story. I was elected to be mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and won it by 10 votes way back in 1981. We had a strong foreign policy. We had exchange programs. We dealt with national issues. But I’ll never forget, there was an article in the local newspaper, and the report asked some guy, “But what does it mean? What do you think about having a socialist as your mayor?” And the guy said, “Well, I don’t know much about socialism, but I do know they’re getting the snow off of the streets a lot faster than they used to.”
The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world—right-wing extremism—and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.
You gotta do your job. If you’re on the city council, the school board, the state legislature, you gotta do it. And if you do your job well, people will give you the latitude to talk about many, many other issues. But don’t lose focus regarding the job that you are elected to do.
Second of all, establishment Democrats have the brilliant idea that the only people they can talk to are establishment Democrats. They literally have lists of people: “Don’t knock on this door; don’t knock on that door. Only on these.” I strongly disagree with that suggestion. Knock on every door in your district. And what you’ll find when you do that is you’ll have the right-wing people slam the door in your face. You’ll have some unpleasantness. But by and large, what you’ll find is that there is a lot more commonality of interest than you might have appreciated. In my view, the reason Donald Trump is president of the United States today is not because people voted for a trillion dollars in tax breaks for the 1% or massive cuts in healthcare. He is the president of the United States because of Democratic establishment candidates’ failure to provide a real analysis and agenda that meets the crises that we face today.
Establishment Democrats believe that you can tinker around the edges, you can tell the world how terrible Donald Trump is, and that’s fine. But right now, what the American people understand is that übercapitalism—an oligarchic form of society, which is what we have today—is a disaster for the working class of this country. We don’t have to tinker around the edges. We have to create a very new form of society.
So for just your average person out there, you are in many cases going nowhere in a hurry. You understand that with real inflation accounted for, wages are basically the same as they were 50 years ago, despite a huge increase in worker productivity as a result of all of the expansion of technology. And almost all of the gains of that new technology have gone to the 1%. And ordinary workers know that there’s something wrong with 60% of our people living paycheck to paycheck while Elon Musk owns more wealth himself than about the bottom 52% of American society. They know that.
They know that there’s something wrong when we have a campaign finance system that is totally corrupt and allows billionaires in both political parties to buy elections. That’s a broken system. I say these things because you’re gonna have Republicans who understand this as well. They understand if you look at the basic necessities of life—just think for a moment: You’re living in the richest country in the history of the world, and it cannot even provide the basic necessities of life for working people.
Just take a look at the healthcare in your community. Talk about healthcare. Everybody will tell you that despite spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as any other nation, the healthcare system is totally broken. Everybody knows that. The educational system is largely broken, and the childcare system is a disaster. Kids can’t afford to go to college, or they’re leaving school deeply in debt. Public schools are under enormous pressure. Teachers are underpaid. They’re dealing with all kinds of disciplinary issues, kids who come from troubled families or are acting out in school. We are dealing with a situation where our food system, just nutrition... we are the most obese and unhealthy nation on Earth because you have a food industry that makes huge profit by selling our kids crap, and the price of groceries is soaring.
People understand that. I flew in from the National Airport in Washington; there was a four-hour delay because they couldn’t figure out how to deice the plane. All over the country, you are looking at basic problems people are struggling with. The system is failing. Our job is not to run away from that reality but to offer a real alternative. Because in my view, what the future is gonna be about isn’t establishment Democrats. All over Europe, for example, the establishment parties are fading away. The struggle is going to be between the Trumpists of the world—right-wing extremism—and a democratic socialist alternative, which recognizes the problems that we face and provides concrete and real and bold solutions for working families.
So what Donald Trump does is go, “Yeah, we got a lot of problems. And the problem is undocumented people, the problem is the trans community, the problem is that we have Somalians who are ‘garbage.’” That’s what demagogues do. They take the problems that we face—often that they cause—and then they blame a powerless minority. Our job is to recognize the problems are real and to put the finger on the real cause of the problem, which is the greed of the oligarchs in this country. So that’s where we’re at now. And it ain’t gonna be easy. Especially with Trump in the White House.
To summarize, the American people know the system is broken. They are hurting. They can’t afford groceries. They can’t afford health care. They can’t afford education. They can’t afford a lot of things. And at the same time, the billionaire class has never had it so good. The establishment Democrats cannot talk about these things because, very often, they’re getting funded by the billionaire class. So what we have gotta do right now is get out into the streets. We gotta talk to our people—all people, not just people within our zone of comfort. And we’re gonna be providing real solutions to the crises that we face. So once again, what you have done is extraordinary. I thank you so much and congratulate you for getting out on the streets, for winning elections, and for standing up for working people.
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Brutality, Oligarchy, Murder, Trump: What the Powell Memo Has Delivered
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media—particularly if you are willing to lie—you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
Dec 08, 2025
With so little pushback to Hegseth’s murders in the Caribbean and ICE’s cruelty and violence that highlight Trump’s brutality, we’re watching the final fulfillment of a 50-year plan. Louis Powell laid it out in 1971, and every step along the way Republicans have followed it.
It was a plan to turn America over to the richest men and the largest corporations. It was a plan to replace democracy with oligarchy. A large handful of America’s richest people invested billions in this plan, and its tax breaks and fossil fuel subsidies have made them trillions.
As any advertising executive can tell you, with enough money and enough media—particularly if you are willing to lie—you can sell anybody pretty much anything.
You can even sell a nation a convicted felon, rapist, and apparent agent of America’s enemies.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.
America was overwhelmed in the 2024 election by billions of dark-money dollars in often dishonest advertising, made possible by five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court, and it worked. Democrats were massively outspent, not to mention the power of the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News” and 1,500 hate-talk radio stations and podcasters, many subsidized by Russia and rightwing billionaires.
Open the lens a bit larger, and we find that it goes way beyond just that election; virtually every crisis America is facing right now is either caused or exacerbated by the corruption of big money authorized by those corrupt Republicans on our Supreme Court.
They’re responsible for our crises of gun violence, the drug epidemic, homelessness, political gridlock, $2 trillion in student debt, our housing crisis, our slow response to the climate emergency, a looming crisis for Social Security and Medicare, the ongoing brutality of ICE, and even the lack of affordable drugs, insurance, and healthcare.
All track back to a handful of Supreme Court justices who sold their votes to billionaires in exchange for extravagant vacations, luxury yacht experiences and motorhomes, private jet travel, speaking fees, homes, tuition, a spouse’s employment, and participation in exclusive clubs and billionaire networks that bar the rest of us from entry.
For over two decades, according to reporting, Clarence Thomas and his wife have been accepting millions in free luxury vacations, tuition for their adopted son, a home for his mother, private jet and megayacht travel, and entrance to rarified clubs.
Sam Alito is also on the gravy train, and there are questions about how Brett Kavanaugh managed to pay off his credit cards and gambling debts. John Roberts’ wife has reportedly made over $10 million from law firms with business before the court; Neil Gorsuch apparently got a sweetheart real estate deal and his mother had to resign from the Reagan administration to avoid corruption charges; Amy Coney Barrett has refused to recuse herself from cases involving her father’s oil company.
None of this is illegal because when five corrupt Republicans on the Court legalized members of Congress taking bribes they legalized that same behavior for themselves.
As a result, we have oligarchs buying and running our media, social media, and funding our elections, while the Supreme Court, with Citizens United, even legalized foreign interference in our political process.
Our modern era of big money controlling government began in the decade after Richard Nixon put Lewis Powell — the tobacco lawyer who wrote the infamous 1971 “Powell Memo” outlining how billionaires and corporations should take over America — on the Supreme Court in 1972.
In the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, the Court ruled that money used to buy elections wasn’t just cash: they claimed it’s also “free speech” protected by the First Amendment that guarantees your right to speak out on political issues.
In the 200 preceding years—all the way back to the American Revolution of 1776—no politician or credible political scientist had ever proposed that spending billions to buy votes with dishonest advertising was anything other than simple corruption.
The “originalists” on the Supreme Court, however, claimed to be channeling the Founders of this nation, particularly those who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, when they said that money is the same thing as free speech. In that claim, Republicans on the Court were lying through their teeth.
In a letter to Samuel Kercheval in 1816, President and author of the Declaration of Independence Thomas Jefferson explicitly laid it out:
“Those seeking profits, were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government.”
But the Republicans on the Supreme Court weren’t reading the Founders. They were instead listening to the billionaires who helped get them on the Court in the first place. Who had bribed them with position and power and then kept them in their thrall with luxury vacations, “friendship,” and gifts.
Two years after the 1976 Buckley decision, the Republicans on the Supreme Court struck again, this time adding that the “money is speech and can be used to buy votes and politicians” argument applied to corporate “persons” as well as to billionaires. Lewis Powell himself wrote the majority opinion in the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision.
Justices White, Brennan, and Marshall dissented:
“The special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only our economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process.”
But the dissenters lost the vote, and political corruption of everything from local elections to the Supreme Court itself was now virtually assured.
That ruling came down just two years before the Reagan Revolution, when almost all forward progress in America came to a screeching halt.
It’s no coincidence.
And it’s gotten worse since then, with the Court doubling down in 2010 with Citizens United, overturning hundreds of state and federal “good government” laws dating all the way back to the 1800s.
Thus, today America has a severe problem of big money controlling our political system. And now it’s hit its peak, putting an open fascist in charge of our government.
No other developed country in the world has this problem, which is why every other developed country has a national healthcare system, free or near-free college, and strong unions that maintain a healthy middle class.
It’s why people living in other developed countries can afford pharmaceuticals, are taking active steps to stop climate change, and don’t fear being shot when they go to school, the theater, or shopping.
It’s why—with the exception of Hungary, which Trump is now emulating—those countries are still functioning democracies.
The ability of America to move forward on any of these issues is, for now, paralyzed, even with the extraordinary showing in the streets with the No Kings protests.
This is not the end, though; hitting bottom often begins the process of renewal and the behavior and violence of this administration certainly qualifies as a “bottom” in modern American history.
Thus, right now we need to prepare for the 2026 elections, join with organizations like Indivisible to stand up and protest this corruption, and make sure everybody we know is registered to vote.
Many Americans will continue to speak out and fight for a democracy uncorrupted by the morbidly rich supporters of this neofascism.
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An Open Letter to Mayor-Elect Mamdani, a Political Moderate
The social democratic countries in Europe and other countries, including Canada, have long had much broader social safety nets that go far beyond what you have proposed. There's a deeper reason the oligarchy does not like you.
Dec 06, 2025
Dear Mayor-elect Mamdani,
It should not come as a surprise to alert citizens that your decisive victory in the Mayoral race has prompted your opponents – the privileged super-rich and their indentured servants in City Hall – to label you as an “extremist,” “radical,” or, in Trump’s view, a “communist.” How ludicrous! Your affordability agenda is hardly immoderate. Many Democratic politicians have taken these positions over time.
Free bus fares exist in some municipalities in the U.S., including Kansas City, Missouri, Tucson, Arizona, and Alexandria, Virginia. Proposing half a dozen city-run grocery stores in New York City’s “food deserts” (meaning a geographic area with limited access to affordable, healthy food options) is hardly radical. You could even have them structure these stores as consumer cooperatives (owned by consumers). Food co-ops have existed in numerous communities in the U.S. for years. Your rent stabilization proposal is not uncommon – many large cities have rent controls to protect powerless tenants from avaricious landlords, especially from today’s very large corporate landlords with their fine-print contract peonage. Also, there are cities in the U.S. offering partially publicly subsidized child care. New Mexico just launched a statewide universal child‑care program.
The social democratic countries in Europe and other countries, including Canada, have long had much broader social safety nets that go far beyond what you have proposed.
What the oligarchy and large corporations really do not like about you is that you are projecting a consistent and wide-ranging voice for the people, the workers, the poor, and the powerless in the corridors of political power of City Hall. They have had long-game statism, or a corporate state, at the local, state, and federal levels, with little opposition by the two-party duopoly.
Regarding your self-description as a democratic socialist, that doesn’t pass the laugh test. You are not arguing for nationalization of banks and insurance companies, utilities, not even, to our knowledge have you called for a “public bank,” which has existed so effectively in North Dakota (now a Republican stronghold) founded in 1919.
Indeed, President Donald Trump has become a corporate socialist par excellence. As The New York Times reported on November 25, 2025, (“$10 Billion and Counting: Trump Administration Snaps Up Stakes in Private Firms”) the Trump administration has de facto partly nationalized an array of private companies for ulterior political motives under the contrived banner of national security. The companies include Intel, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, MP Materials, Vulcan Elements, and MP Materials. This invites bribery by other means, i.e., a Trump donation in exchange for an administration sweetheart investment. The fabled Central Intelligence Agency now features a venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, ostensibly to fund commercial technologies to fortify the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense. But under Trump, partisan political motives likely will inform the CIA’s investment portfolio.
As for taking a stand on pending legislation ending the unconscionable daily electronic rebate of tens of millions of dollars in stock transaction taxes (a progressive tiny sales tax of one tenth of one percent on stock sales), you have been AWOL despite urgings by your numerous colleagues in the state legislature to sign on to a bill that would end the rebate and specifically allocate the many billions of dollars annually to mass transit, education, health care and environmental protection.
So far, your silence has put you to the RIGHT of former Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG. During his presidential run in 2020, he said:
“Harness the power of the financial system to address America’s most pressing challenges. Introduce a tax of 0.1% on all financial transactions to raise revenue needed to address wealth inequality, and support other measures – such as speed limits on trading – to curb predatory behavior and reduce the risk of destabilizing “flash crashes.”
Note, Bloomberg goes beyond a sales tax on STOCK transactions to include all financial transactions (such as bonds and derivatives).
In addition, a New York Times op-ed of April 17, 2000, by ROBERT E. RUBIN – big banker and former Treasury Secretary under Clinton – wrote, urging increasing revenues, “on a highly progressive basis, for example, by increasing corporate taxes, restoring individual rates, repealing pass-through preferences, AND IMPOSING A FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS TAX (our emphasis).”
Some reporters may wish to ask you, “Why, as a democratic socialist, are you to the RIGHT of Bloomberg and Rubin when it comes to tiny sales tax mostly on Wall Street’s high-frequency stock trades?”
As for your plans to expand the housing supply in New York City to make housing more affordable, all kinds of efforts are underway to do this around the country, including in the California high-priced housing market.
Check out the National Cooperative Bank in Washington, D.C., which provides loans to consumer co-op models in the housing, food, and other areas of economic activity. The Bank was established in 1978 with our support, by the Carter Administration, and then spun off by the Reagan regime. It might be useful in funding your housing and grocery store initiatives.
There is one more example in which you are conventional. So far, you are part of the class of public servants, which we have described as “incommunicados” when it comes to working closely with progressive civic leaders and citizen groups. (See The Incommunicados by Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein https://incommunicadoswatch.org/). Put simply, it is too hard for many progressive advocates to get through to you or your top aides. You may wish to assign a staffer as a liaison to these groups whose ideas, experience, and endurance can be of signal assistance to what will probably be a turbulent tenure.
Be guided by the adage that “NONE OF US ARE AS SMART AS ALL OF US.”
May you succeed and put forces in motion throughout the state and country of a deliberative democracy in successful action with sound civic engagement. The cardinal pillar of a democracy, worthy of the name, is JUSTICE, for without justice there is no freedom and liberty for the people.
We anticipate your considered response.
Sincerely,
Ralph Nader
Bruce Fein
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