Fight Oligarchy

Bernie Sanders’ latest book is titled “Fight Oligarchy”. Sanders is perhaps one of the rare senators who votes on behalf of the majority of Americans. He was elected as the mayor of Burlington in April 1981 when he was less than twenty year of age, and he held that position for eight years. In 1991 he was elected as a member of the house, the position he held for sixteen years. In 2007, Sanders was elected as a senator, and since then he has been representing the state of Vermont in the senate.

Our country has been going through many variations in the past half a century due to changes in rules and regulations, against the will of the majority of the citizens; changes overwhelmingly benefiting the rich and the powerful. From the time FDR was able to combat the great depression with his socialist agenda called The New Deal, to today’s laws and regulations benefiting a minority rich, this country has experienced rapid rise, and a sharp decline. United States moved to the highest position economically and socially through mid-1970s, and became the richest and the most affluent country in the world. Ever since, this country has been experiencing a downturn direction. There have been many events which helped America to stay on the top politically and economically and for so long before reversing to a downturn, due to attempts by various administrations in tearing apart the essence of The New Deal content one by one. Many important laws, such as minimum wage, working hours, overtime, and such laws and regulations helping the working class have been trampled by lawmakers in order to increase wealth of the rich.

The book does not mention the result of the last presidential election, and number of votes for Trump and his incumbent. According to some statistical analysis, only a little more than 65% of all American citizens participated in the last presidential election. In addition, the difference between percentage of votes Trump received versus his incumbent’s, Kamala Harris, was only one and a half percent.

Bernie’s book, Fight Oligarchy, details such changes. Some of the items he has documented in his book will be summarized here as bullet points, in order to see how we ended up with a president who is able to easily and comfortably erase all rules and regulations benefiting majority of the citizens of this country. The following quotations are copied from the first three chapters of his book. Page number of where the quotation is adopted from is mentioned at the end of each statement in parentheses:

• Oligarchy is a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy individuals control the economic, political, and media life of a nation (P.3).
•  In 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in the Citizens United case that billionaires could spend as much as they want on political campaigns…Elon Musk alone spent $290 million to elect Trump (P.9).
•  American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent $100 million in 2024 to oppose and defeat members of congress… who had the courage to oppose U.S. aid for the Netanyahu government (P.15).
•  In his “Big Beautiful Bill” passed in July 2025, the 1 percent received over a trillion dollars in tax breaks (P.21).
• Jeff Bezos used his support for Trump to accompany him to Saudi Arabia and obtain a $5 billion contract from Mohammad bin Salman (NBS), the repressive ruler of Saudi Arabia (P.22).
•   Not only did Zuckerberg contribute $1 million to Trump’s inauguration… also gave $25 million to Trump to settle… against Meta and Instagram(P.23).
• Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” contains a $15 billion retrospective tax break for Meta… Trump has accepted a $400 million luxury jet from the government of Qatar for his personal use (P.23).
• His son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia (P.24).
• During the same fifty-year period, there was, according to the RAND Corporation, a $79 trillion transfer of wealth from the bottom 90 percent to the top 1 percent (P.27).
• In the United States, at this moment, 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck (P.28).
• Over 20 percent of senior citizens are trying to survive on less than $15,000 a year (P.29).
• For Trump, creating hatred, fear, and divisiveness is nothing new (P.33).
• Trump claims that climate change is a “hoax” emanating from China (P.35).
• How we respond to people who break the law-including undocumented immigration. And this is an area where Donald Trump’s approach has been extremely racist, selective, and frankly, disgusting and self-serving (P.42).
• Much of the discussion about Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” dealt with tax breaks for billionaires and massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition, and education. The bill contains a massive $75 billion in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that will make it, by far, the largest federal law enforcement agency in America- bigger than the FBI and the DEA combined (P.49).
• At the end of 2022, at least $12 trillion in private household wealth was hidden in offshore tax havens…that represents roughly 12 percent of all the wealth produced in the world that year (P.52).
• The United States with 902 billionaires, is the center of global oligarchy (P.53).
• And since Trump was elected president, the four wealthiest people on the planet… have become more than $200 billion richer (P.54).
• While nearly half of the world’s population- over 3.7 billion people- live in poverty, trying to survive on less than seven dollars a day, just 3,000 billionaires throughout the globe have seen their wealth explode by more than $6.5 billion since 2015… the global billionaire class own more wealth than the GDP of every country in the world- except the United States and China… The world’s top 1 percent have become $33.9 trillion richer since 2015 (P.55).
• Today, while over 13 million Russians live in poverty, the wealthiest 500 Russians possess more wealth than the bottom 99.8 percent of the population- 145 million people (P.57).
• In May 2025, Donald Trump accepted a $400 million airplane from the royal family of Qatar…a family worth an estimated $335 billion (P.58).
• The house of Saud in considered to be the wealthiest family in the world (P.59).
• Saudi Arabia is considered one of the worst human rights violators in the world as it detains, tortures, and executes women’s rights activists and others who peacefully advocate for change… Since construction began on Neom, Saudi Arabia’s megacity of the future, an estimated 21,000 migrant workers have died (P.60).
• The Sultan of Brunei…owns 7,000 cars… a palace worth $350 million… he is the country’s prime minister, finance minister, defense minister, and minister of foreign affairs (P.61).
• In the United Kingdom, 156 billionaires now hold more than $835 billion (P.62).
• In 2000, Africa had zero billionaires. Today it has twenty-three, and their combined wealth has increased to over 50 percent in just the past five years. The four wealthiest… control $57.4 billion(P.63).
•  In 2023, nearly 850 million people in Africa experienced food insecurity (P.63).
• In Mexico, Carlos Slim… is worth more than $96 billion (P.64).
• India… with 1.46 billion population… has over 200 billionaires, whose combined wealth surged to $941 billion in 2025. Meanwhile, over 75 million people in India... survive on just three dollars a day (P.65).

      On chapter four, Sanders discusses historical struggles people of the United States made in order to better their lives, and lives of everyone in certain groups, almost equally. He discusses how in the 18^th century people in this country pushed back the most powerful empire of the world at the time, the British Empire. Then he reminds us of the abolitionist movement, workers’ rights movement, women’s rights, public education, LGBT rights, and sums it up by mentioning that when the idea was germinated and expanded by those believing in civil liberties, the government had no other option but to create laws and regulations in support of those ideas.

     Fighting Oligarchy is the title of the next chapter. In this chapter he discusses the tour of the US he began at the beginning of this year, in order to popularize his ideas and get a feeling of the population who agree with those ideas. His tour based on the turnout of people, he concludes to have been very successful.

     The last chapter of the book goes back to the reason Donald Trump was elected, which is mostly due to untruthful speeches he made in the primary. In addition, since American voters were tired of the direction this country was taking, and they were pursuing a real change, they thought of him as an ample candidate to run the government. He mentions some of the shortcomings happening in this country, and Americans’ hunger for a shift in the political system. But the most important question is what should be done, which is a question he answers by defining each of the following questions or items he raises:

-          Defend and expand democracy

-          Raise new revenue by making the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes

-          Cut military spending

-          Make certain that the working-class benefits from new technology

-          Guarantee basic human needs

-          Enact Medicare for all

-          Provide quality education for all

-          Make housing affordable

-          Improve wages and benefits for American workers

-          Pass the PRO Act

-          Raise the minimum wage to a living wage

-          Guarantee paid family and medical leave

-          Expand Social Security

-          Bring back defined benefit pensions

-          Encourage employee ownership

After explaining each of the above factors, he defines what a political revolution means. At the end he admits that the oligarchs have money and power, but continues that “if we don’t let trump and his fellow billionaires divide us up based on the color of our skin, where we were born, our religion, or our sexual orientation, we can beat the oligarchs and create a much better world. Not just for ourselves, but for our kids and future generations. Let us stand together and go forward. Solidarity forever” (P.140).