Bernie Sanders, progressive senator from Vermont, wants you to be as angry at capitalism as he is, and so he wrote a book telling you all the reasons. “It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism” came out in February 2023.
In this book Sanders expostulates about the issues that he has been fighting for, for decades. According to the publisher, the book is “a progressive takedown of the über-capitalist status quo.” Sanders refers to American billionaires as oligarchs. He specifically calls Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, “the embodiment of the extreme corporate greed that shapes our times.”
Chris Wallace wanted to know more about Sanders’ position on the issues when he invited him to his show, Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace? last Friday.
The book aptly encapsulates his raft of issues: income inequality in the United States, how the influx of money impacts democracy, how corporations are contributing to the climate crisis, technological unemployment stemming from increased automation, increasing taxes on companies that rely excessively on automation to cut costs.
The host confronted Sanders about billionaires and anger. “You say flatly [that] billionaires should not exist,” Wallace began. He continued by asking if Sanders really wants to “confiscate” everything entrepreneurs make over $999 million? The Waltons, for example, have tens of billions of dollars, Wallace suggests, but provide jobs to one and a half million Americans. Isn’t that a good thing?
Sanders dryly insisted that, while Walmart pays poverty wages, his critique isn’t of this or that individual billionaire but of an entire system that enables such grotesque concentrations of wealth.
In his book, Sanders also compares American billionaires to Russian oligarchs. He says that ours deserve the “oligarch” label because of their immense economic power and the way it’s intertwined with political power in our society. Wallace commented that, “Russian oligarchs are close associates of the central government who took over state-run industries. The people you’re talking about — the so-called American oligarch — are self-made entrepreneurs who created big businesses that employ millions of Americans.”
But Bernie already has the objection covered in his book: “It’s time to end a culture that not only accepts but actually creates the obscene degree of inequality, injustice, and uncontrollable greed that is so damaging to our nation and world. We have to start saying: Yes. It is immoral and absurd that our country has more income and wealth inequality today than at any time since the 1920s.”
Sanders blames both parties; Democrats must bear some of the blame for this shift. “[T]he Democratic Party, over the years, has helped create the political vacuum that allows these issues to fester. It has done so by turning its back on the American working class … [t]he coalitions the Democrats pull together these days are slimmer and more vulnerable than they should be. They lack the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-generational heft that is needed.”
Does Mr. Sanders offer any solutions other than an idealism that would have us crave Utopia? One solution is immediately applicable to the status of billionaires: he says the US government should confiscate 100% of any money that Americans make above $999million.
Other than that, we could say that in his presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020, he had the full opportunity to offer them. His loss in both of those primary elections seems to suggest that first, what he was offering was not convincing to the American electorate, and second that they weren’t angry enough about the issues to bring about the change that Sanders preaches on. Is Bernie’s anger a prelude to another campaign in 2024?
