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For only $27, you can buy a ‘Tax the Rich’ t-shirt and help an elderly progressive millionaire fly around the country to campaign against the oligarchy from the luxury of a private jet.
Sen. Bernie Sanders has been touring the country on his ‘Fighting Oligarchy Tour’ in which the elderly senator and assorted socialist sidekicks like AOC hold rallies in liberal areas to denounce big business…while doing some pretty big business.
Earlier this year, Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is 83 years old, filed to run for reelection in 2030 to be able to take office at the age of 89, and hold it until he is well in his mid 90s. Aspiring to spend nearly half a century in the halls of Congress would seem like evidence of oligarchy.
But despite having a campaign date in 2030, Bernie quickly shot to the no. 2 spot in current year campaign spending. Over $1 million went to Aisle 518 Strategies, a ‘progressive’ campaign operation created by Tim Tagaris, Bernie’s former senior advisor and digital fundraising director, for digital advertising, but as capitalists would say, you have to spend money to make money.
Over $220,000 went to private jet firms including $102K to Cirrus Aviation, which claims to have a “fleet of 30 luxury jets”, $80K to Ventura Jets, which describes itself as “New York’s Premier Luxury Jet Charter Service”, and $38K to N-Jet which pitches potential customers on “a flying experience that’s all about you in your luxury aircraft.” The social media accounts for the private jet charter firms show very wealthy people like Bernie enjoying a luxurious lifestyle.
A video clip appears to show AOC and Bernie dismounting from a Challenger 604 jet. This $5 million jet is usually used for international flights, rather than local travel the way that the two socialist politicians were using it, and offers “the ultimate experience in luxury air travel” allowing passengers to enjoy “the same comforts that one would expect at home or at a Five-Star hotel.”
Does Bernie Sanders really hate billionaires or does he just want to be one? With three houses and a net worth of over $2 million, Bernie has amassed enough to make him greedy for more.
But the most troubling thing about Bernie may be his own private little oligarchy.
The Sanders Institute was co-founded by Bernie’s wife, Jane O’Meara Sanders, previously under FBI investigation over the collapse of Burlington College over allegations of bank fraud along with a sweetheart deal for her daughter, Carina Driscoll, a perennial political candidate.
The other co-founder and CEO of the Sanders Institute is David Driscoll, Bernie’s stepson and Jane’s son, who has been paid an estimated $800,000 for his services after previously working for Burton Snowboards: a snowboarding company owned by a Bernie supporter. Its only other officially listed employee is Shana Frahm, Jane’s press secretary, who had also worked for Burton Snowboards. Jane serves as a ‘fellow’ but her compensation has not been disclosed.
The Sanders Institute is officially a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, but its funding comes from the Bernie Sanders campaign which kicked it off with a $350,000 donation in 2020, since then $755,000 has been moved from the Sanders campaign into the Sanders Institute.
Between 2023-2024, the Sanders Institute was the second largest recipient of cash from ‘Friends of Bernie Sanders’ after his actual 2020 campaign. And this campaign cash also made up a sizable share and occasionally the majority of the money funding the Sanders Institute.
These payments to an organization founded by Bernie Sanders family members, which employs his family members, and exists to promote him were described by the campaign as a “charitable donation” even though they were obviously providing a sizable benefit to the Sanders family.
That’s part of a long history of Bernie figuring out ways to move campaign funds to his family, including creating a department run by his wife, when he served as mayor of Burlington. When he ran for Congress, she took a sizable cut of his donations by acting as his media buyer, and put her daughter on his staff.
Things escalated when Sanders backed a proposal to move nuclear waste from Vermont to a small town in Texas and to add insult to injury, Jane, despite no apparent qualification, was appointed to a paying position as an alternate commissioner for the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission.
There is an inescapable pattern with Bernie’s campaigns going back decades. Between 2003 and 2004, Leadership Strategies, a consulting firm where Jane served as CEO, was the second largest recipient of Bernie’s campaign spending. The tenth was his stepdaughter. In 2016, when Sen. Bernie Sanders suddenly became a national figure, $82 million poured into a mysterious company for media buys linked to Jane’s associates. Nearly every listed job for Bernie’s wife involved benefits from his offices as mayor, congressman, senator and political candidate.
How much of that money did Bernie benefit from? He hasn’t been transparent about it.
But why does an 83-year-old man file in 2025 to run for office in 2030? Why does he go on a tour around the country? One answer is that the Sanders Institute isn’t going to fund itself.
The ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour claims that it’s “scaring the hell out of Elon Musk”. But mostly it’s raising money.
The front page has two seperate donate links at the top and a store where students struggling with debt can buy a “Cancel All Student Debt” sweatshirt for only $45. A ‘Tax the Rich’ t-shirt goes for $27 whose proceeds can be used to help fund Bernie’s next ride in a private jet.
Under the slogan “Not Me, Us”, the Fighting Oligarchy Tour is raising money for ‘me’ which then goes to pay for Bernie’s private jets and to subsidize members of his family.
The Bernie and AOC tour isn’t actually fighting oligarchy. It’s funding oligarchy.
Is it just me or does Bernout seem like Like Larry David? What a twat.
Oligarchs pretending to fight Oligarchs.
The Oligarchs advising Trump are ruining his Presidency by attacking the voters financially. Example is student loans, which I thought was bad economics from the beginning, and promoted mainly by the Democrats. Now the Oligarchs are advising Trump to squeeze pennies out of broke student loan borrowers, who were too stupid to realize it was a scam. The government should get out of the student loan racket altogether,. If the government wants to give money to students, do it through vouchers which don’t have to be paid back.
I got a Stafford loan and Pell grant back in the day. I didn’t spend them on the college I dropped out of that time, though. Three times total although who am I going to brag to about that?
I spent them all on…..you guessed it…..chicks and booze. Even when I was young I was a degenerate. Not Commodus bad and definitely not insane but definitely not a good guy. Eh. We all have our peccadillos.
The system is wide open to abuse. I’m surprised I don’t still abuse it. A Hell of a thing to develop morality late in life. I guess I can die poor and with a clear conscience. Yay.
I figured it out finally. The way rich Oligarchs get rich is by squeezing pennies from the masses. When they get into government, they see things the same way, solve government financial problems by squeezing pennies from the masses. Clawing back Social Security, Student Loans, Food stamps, etc. That is why Trump’s poll numbers are falling. The voters applaud Trump for going after foreigners, but not for stealing the pennies from their pockets.
In Rome they had the Corn Dole. That gave the masses enough to eat and they figured out how to squeeze by on that. The Rich Oligarchs tried for 800 years to get rid of the Corn Dole, but failed, and finally Rome fell.
We all did foolish things in youth. Some more than ever. This is from lack of mentoring.
I wanted to be an x-ray tech when I got out of high school to fund a comfortable life style while I went to college for advanced degrees. This did not happen as hard as I tried. A few decades later, I was run over by a hit-and-run as a pedestrian in a suburban cross walk in daylight.
That did something to me. In the 3 years of recovery I focused my mind and used Victims of Violent Crime in California from an article in the LA Times I read well over 10 years before that. That program is dissolved because there are way too many victims of violent crime in California. I went to the state department of rehab and told them they’re going to send me to x-ray school.
While doing studies in the x-ray course I encountered Rodney Dangerfield. I had a choice, go off with Rodney and a life thereof or stick to my goals, I stuck to my goals, I became an x-ray tech and medical surgical assistant and then went into computers before it was called IT.
Today I am a self made millionaire in retirement earning more of an income than any year working overtime.
It is the focus and the drive. The same focus and drive that legal immigrants of the past and still today have when they get to USA to take advantage of the opportunities in this awesome and unique nation.
People born here become too soft. Subsequent generations as we see are so fucking soft they have no compass in life.
Hard times will make you or break you.
Hard times made me.
Heaven forbid student borrowers should repay their student loans. /s
Many of us figured out when Biden defied Supreme Court rulings and tried repeatedly to cancel student loan debt for millions of people, a college education is not only overrated, it’s often a waste of society’s resources. The government loans big bucks – our $ – to 18 year-olds for college, and they waste 4-5 years of their lives getting a gender/ethnic/LGBTQ studies degree that won’t enable them to earn enough to repay the loan.
How does that make sense for society?
Sanders and his ilk he is one of those we have been warned about him and his leftists scum should be avoided at all costs
🎵 They’re so spaced out, and weird no doubt ~
🎵 No self awareness, they just frown and pout ~
🎵 Bernie and the jets ~
🎵 B B B B B Bernie and the jets ~
Good one Daniel.
Bernie Sanders is a phony, pretend-self righteous grifter through and through. A big mouthed fraudster of his supporters’ money. A con man of the lowest order pulling a political scam based on lies about who he is / what he “believes” — all for the ill-gained financial benefit of his family and himself. A liar and piece of scum is he.
He’s despicable.
That shows you how wrong this so-called “Green New Deal” is.