On March 26, 2025, the Manchester Journal published the New York Times' Jacob Gallagher’s story on how Vermont’s Senior Senator, Bernie Sanders, is crisscrossing the country sounding the alarm on the influence of oligarchy.
It is so reassuring to me that Vermont’s crisis of housing, education funding, homelessness, flood recovery, physical and mental health, and crime is now behind us.
Why else would our State’s senior senator leave Senator Peter Welch and Representative Becca Balint, our other congressional delegates, to continue his work?
In late March, according to Gallagher, the Senator’s speaking trips were far from Vermont: Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. There have been other trips before and more to come, with fair-sized gatherings of spectators at each stop.
Such trips and the advance set-ups are expensive. Who is paying the bills for such costly endeavors?
Next question. When Bernie was electioneering in Vermont for his past two runs for the US Senate, did he inform us that he would be spending much time out-of-state? He had two presidential campaigns to run and the current crusade of the impact of the millionaires and billionaires. Could it be possible for us to get along with just one senator?
According to Gallagher, the message on the stomping trips is “about millionaires and billionaires and the 1% keeping the working class underfoot.”
Based on some internet research, there are about 800 billionaires worldwide and thousands more millionaires (including Senator Sanders).
Further research, noted in the February 28, 2025, WSJ, has revealed a new classification that Senator Sanders has not yet embraced: “The Superbillionaires.”
The piece defines a superbillionaire as someone with a net worth of $55.4 billion. There are 24; seven are not from the US (Prajogo Pangestu #24) up to #1, Elon Musk, at $419 billion.
In between are some well-known names in business/finance/politics: #3 Jeff Bezos (Amazon), #4 Larry Ellison (Oracle), #5 Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), and #8 Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway). Alice Walton of Walmart and Bill Gates of Microsoft are not in the top ten.
The WSJ piece also noted that most, if not all, of the 24 did not inherit their wealth but built it within the tech industry during the past 30 years or so. Unlike the millionaires of a century ago, whose millions came from developing railroads, shipping, and oil, the current cohort’s wealth is in stock investments.
What puzzles me is the Senator’s comment about “keeping the working class underfoot.” Regardless of what one might think of their politics, Gates, Musk, Walton, and Bezos created new industries and millions of jobs, all in non-existent sectors 40 years ago.
Bernie has one thing in common with the above. He, along with his colleagues in Washington, has created millions of jobs in the federal, state, and local governments, to say nothing about the astonishing growth in nongovernment organizations (NGOs). The latter receive taxpayer funds and are administered by battalions of government personnel.
Senator Sanders and his traveling companion, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.NY), should have learned from last November’s election. The working class no longer listens to the Progressive and Democratic parties’ message.
Their message lost its veracity. The so-called working class has no issue with the wealthiest class. It was the “new class,” the highly educated class who got their college and graduate school loans forgiven. Has Bernie or AOC ever mentioned, “let’s forgive the loan a construction worker has on his/her $60,000 pick-up truck? Or forgive the loans needed to acquire the $50,000 for tools in the truck’s equipment chest?”
If Bernie and AOC had the power to extract the cumulative wealth, approximately $2,7 trillion, of all 17 superbillionaires and use it to pay down the federal debt, presently $36 trillion, it would reduce the debt by 7.5%.
The traveling duo will not succeed in the above. For now, the millionaires, billionaires, and superbillionaires are safe. What might be in store for the next decade’s trillionaires?