Oligarchy is fine when Bernie Sanders and AOC do it, according to Democrats | Opinion
Only Americans who are illiterate or comatose could have missed the fact that the Party of Oligarchy – the party of Sanders and AOC – the Democratic Party – had arrived to vanquish oligarchy.
You have to admire the moxie of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to bring their “Fight Oligarchy” tour to one of the most educated cities in Arizona.
I’ve not done the risk analysis, but I would imagine the odds were high in a college town like Tempe you could potentially attract well-degreed, well-read university professors and graduate students who have not been in a coma for the last 20 years.
Because only Americans who are completely illiterate or comatose could have missed the fact that the Party of Oligarchy ‒ the party of Sanders and AOC, the Democratic Party ‒ had arrived to vanquish oligarchy.
The arsonists had dragged in the fire hose.
Wait, don't the fat cats prefer Democrats?
“We’re gonna throw these bums out and fight for the nation we deserve,” AOC told the 10,000-plus people on hand.
Now, if you were in that crowd and weren’t intubated and drip-fed, you understood that it was the fat-cat Democrats who got the most money and spent the most money in the last presidential election.
By far.
I would have called their event the “How Stupid are You?” Tour, but I understand why they didn’t. That could have alerted any sentient beings at Arizona State University’s Mullett Arena that they were being conned.
They enjoyed so much largesse from billionaire and millionaire backers that they doubled Republican spending.
In fact, so much money poured into Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign coffers that even the Democrat-friendly New York Times couldn’t believe it.
“How Kamala Harris Burned Through $1.5 Billion in 15 Weeks,” The Times’ headline intoned.
Just how hard were the money clouds raining down on Harris?
So hard that even her closest campaign ally, Bakari Sellers, told The Times. “We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door.”
Democrats: Do as we say, not as we do
So, here’s what the “Fight Oligarchy” tour is really about.
Oligarchy is great when they’re our oligarchs. Oligarchy is evil when they’re not.
For decades now, the Democrats have hobnobbed with the rich and famous, and they've dutifully served their masters. Then some of the rich and famous ‒ the moneybags in Silicon Valley ‒ switched sides in 2024 and America’s liberal party suddenly lost its taste for caviar and champagne.
They won't tolerate it anymore.
“We will not accept a society today in which we have massive income and wealth inequalities where the very rich have never done better and working families are struggling to put food on the table," said the multimillionaire Bernie Sanders to the Tempe crowd.
And little point of clarity here. Understand that Sen. Sanders is rich. So forgive him his little faux pas on Thursday night.
When you’re part of the American aristocracy, you take your latte in bone china in leather chairs.
You don’t buy Joe in paper cups from Circle K.
“You got 9/11s here?” Sanders asked the crowd, as 20,000 eyebrows furrowed at once.
Silly him.
He meant 7-Elevens. That’s how the 5% connect. They draw from the dreary little lives of the 95% to make a metaphor that, in Sanders' case, had something to do with convenience stores and "CEOs of major corporations who are robbing us every single day."
Oh.
Where the 'Fight Oligarchy' tour should go next
Next stop for the “Fight Oligarchy" tour is Colorado and then back to Arizona and Tucson, reported The Republic’s Stephanie Murray.
Might I suggest a couple detours – ideal sites to rail against the fat cats who run the country. Here are just a couple:
Martha’s Vineyard. This is where the man who started it all for the Democratic Party now lives in luxurious, sunlit splendor.
Barack Obama.
In 2013, the nonprofit student political organization Democracy Matters – an organization once endorsed by Sen. Sanders – published a piece by one of its founding members that noticed how the Democratic Party had transformed in the age of Obama.
The essay titled “The New Oligarchy” noted, “The rise of a political oligarchy has changed the funding base of the Democratic Party more than the Republican."
Enough that by 2012, “affluent donors contributed four times more money to Democrats than did unions. ... In short, the Democrats cannot any longer be considered a bulwark against the power of wealth.”
David Samuels, who made his name writing commentary for The New Republic, The Atlantic and New Yorker, noted last year: "The policy of aligning the Democrats with the wealthiest Americans, while taking from the middle class and rewarding the poor with symbolic identity politics victories, was Obama’s creation – hardly a surprising coinage from a BLM-promoting Harvard Law School graduate who once told an intimate that the two things he wanted, as he left the White House, were a private jet and a valet.”
Added Samuels, "Obama’s central position in the Democratic Party is both practical and symbolic: in his person, he represents both the elite institutions such as Harvard Law School and the large American foundations and billionaire funders who backed his political rise in Chicago.”
Nassau, The Bahamas. This capital city was the headquarters of FTX cryptocurrency exchange, where billionaire Democratic Party benefactor and conman Sam Bankman-Fried “orchestrated one of the largest financial frauds in history, stealing over $8 billion of his customers’ money,” according to federal prosecutor Damian Williams in sentencing him to 25 years in prison last year.
“The scale of his crimes is measured not just by the amount of money that was stolen, but by the extraordinary harm caused to victims, who in some cases had their life savings wiped out overnight,” wrote the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Bankman-Fried stole the nest eggs of Americans to build a fortune of $26 billion. To keep the regulators off his back, he contributed more than $100 million in political campaign contributions before the 2022 U.S. midterm elections "to mostly Democratic candidates and causes," according to NBC News.
This is the party Bernie Sanders has served for decades. He is an independent, but he caucuses with the Democrats and has run twice for president in Democratic primaries.
For decades he has railed against oligarchy. He was, in fact, shocked, shocked, that the party he served had become the servants of oligarchs, marinating in their billions of largesse.
Which begs the question ...
If you couldn’t crush the oligarchy in your own party, what makes you qualified to crush it in the other?
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic, where this column originally published. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.