What is Oligarchy?Oligarchy is a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy individuals control the economic, political, and media life of a nation. It is a system in which ordinary people have very little power to determine the future of their country. If you’re an American, it is the system in which you’re living. Increasingly, it is the system that is dominating people in almost every country on Earth.
In America today, we have more income and wealth inequality than we have ever had in the history of our country. Right now, the people on top have never had it so good. Meanwhile, while the rich get richer, the middle class struggles to pay the rent, put food on the table, and pay for health care. The poor live in desperation. Today, one man—Elon Musk—now owns more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households. Let me repeat that. One man, worth nearly $400 billion, now owns more wealth than the bottom 52 percent of American households. The top 1 percent own more wealth than the bottom 93 percent. And the CEOs of large corporations make 350 times more than their average employee.
But it’s not just income and wealth inequality that make this an oligarchy. In America today, we have more concentration of ownership than we have ever had, with a small number of giant corporations controlling sector after sector of our economy.
Do you want to know why the prices of beef, pork, and chicken are so high in our nation’s grocery stores? Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that just four companies in America control 80 percent of the processing of beef, 70 percent of pork, and nearly 60 percent of poultry.
And it’s not just agriculture. The same is true for transportation, financial services, energy, health care, Big Tech—you name it. In America today, a handful of multinational corporations determine what is produced, how employees are treated, and the prices we pay.
And who owns these multinational corporations?
Well, if you can believe it, three huge Wall Street firms. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street are the major stockholders in 95 percent of S&P 500 corporations. In other words, they have significant influence over many hundreds of companies that employ millions of American workers—and, in fact, the entire economy.
You want to know who owns General Motors? Well, their three largest shareholders are Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street.
Okay. But who owns Ford, GM’s supposed rival? If you guessed Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street, in that same exact order, you would be correct.
What about the big oil companies, ExxonMobil and Chevron? That’s right. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street are the three largest shareholders of both those companies.
How about Pfizer, Merck, and Johnson & Johnson, three huge pharmaceutical companies? Yup. Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street own all three.
Over the last several years, both as chairman and ranking member of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee in the Senate, I have advocated on behalf of union workers who were engaged in labor struggles against a number of corporations for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. And time and time again, when I contacted the managers of these companies, I was told, in so many words: “We’re not the owners, it’s somebody else.”
That opaque consolidation of power makes it harder to hold ownership accountable for their actions.
The media, which is supposed to objectively inform us as to what is happening in our country and the world, is now also controlled by a handful of giant international conglomerates and billionaires. That’s why issues that impact the working class of this country, or serious analyses of wealth and power, get relatively little airtime. That’s why there has never been a TV program focused on why the United States, alone among wealthy countries, does not guarantee health care for all or provide guaranteed paid family and medical leave. That’s why we hear virtually nothing about the growing gap between the rich and the poor. Topics like these are just not of great interest to the billionaires who own the networks.
In America today, we have more media concentration than we have ever had. Just six international media corporations control what 90 percent of the American people see, hear, and read. They own the traditional media—newspapers, radio and TV networks, movie studios—as well as much of the internet.
Elon Musk, the wealthiest man on Earth, owns X (formerly Twitter); Jeff Bezos, the fourth wealthiest person in the world, owns
The Washington Post, Amazon Prime, and the streaming platform Twitch; and Mark Zuckerberg, who is now the third wealthiest man alive, owns Meta, which controls Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. Larry Ellison, the second wealthiest man on Earth, just purchased Paramount, which owns CBS. Rupert Murdoch, another multibillionaire, owns Fox,
The Wall Street Journal, the
New York Post, HarperCollins, and right-wing media throughout the world. Billionaires own and control virtually every major newspaper and radio network in the country.
Oligarchy today has not only produced unprecedented income and wealth inequality. It has not only created an unprecedented concentration of ownership. It has also given us an extremely corrupt political system that is heavily dominated by billionaires and their super PACs. Increasingly, American elections are not about candidates and ideas. They are about the competing ads that billionaire-controlled super PACs produce.
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. And that’s what they’re doing. Since that decision was made, political spending on elections has gone up by more than 1,600 percent. In the 2024 election, 100 billionaire families spent $2.6 billion—double what they spent in 2020.
Elon Musk alone spent $290 million to elect Trump. His reward: He became the most powerful person in government and was able to establish the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), where he was allowed to implement his extreme right-wing ideology by dismantling federal agencies and throwing tens of thousands of federal employees out on the street.
But the impact of a corrupt campaign finance system goes beyond presidential campaigns. It goes right to the heart of the legislative process in Washington.
In early July 2025, Republicans in Congress passed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”—the most destructive piece of legislation in modern American history. While providing $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1 percent, this bill makes massive cuts to Medicaid, nutrition, and education.
Almost every Republican member of the House and the Senate voted for this horrific bill. Why? Do you think they didn’t know about the impact that these enormous cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act would have on their constituents—many of whom are working-class and poor? They knew. But what they also knew was that if they voted against that legislation, on the very next day oligarchs with unlimited resources would announce that their super PACs would be running a candidate against them in the next election. And the likely result is they would lose.
Copyright © 2025 by Senator Bernie Sanders. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
