‘We Are Witnessing The Rise Of Two Americas,’ Says Bernie Sanders. ‘One For The Billionaire Class And One For Everyone Else’ – Carrier Global (NYSE:CARR), Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN)
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is calling attention to the growing economic inequality in the U.S., arguing that the system is not just broken but collapsing for most working people.
Gap Between Billionaires And Workers Widens
“What we are witnessing right now is the rise of two Americas. One for the billionaire class. And one for everybody else,” Sanders wrote in a recent opinion piece for The Guardian. He criticized what he sees as a corporate-controlled political and media landscape that ignores the worsening financial hardship facing ordinary Americans.
In one America, billionaires like the CEO of Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) Elon Musk, founder and executive chair of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Jeff Bezos, Meta (NASDAQ: META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and chief technical officer and co-founder of Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) Larry Ellison are seeing historic wealth gains. According to Sanders, Musk alone has become over $180 billion richer since presidential election day, thanks in part to a $290 million contribution to Donald Trump‘s election campaign last year. Musk’s wealth now exceeds that of the bottom 52% of American households.
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Meanwhile, Sanders said, most people are struggling to afford essentials like rent, health care, food and child care. “In this America, despite a massive increase in worker productivity, real weekly wages for the average American worker are lower today than they were more than 52 years ago,” he added.
CEOs Make Hundreds Of Times More Than Workers
An Institute for Policy Studies recent report found that CEOs at the 100 largest low-wage corporations made an average of 632 times more than their median employee in 2024. At Starbucks (NASDAQ: SBUX), the ratio hit 6,666 to 1, with CEO Brian Niccol getting $95.8 million while the median worker made just $14,674.
Carrier Global (NYSE: CARR) CEO David Gitlin earned $65.7 million, while the average worker there made $51,001. At Coca-Cola (NYSE: KO), the gap was even more stark: $28 million for CEO James Quincey and $14,144 for the median employee.
“This is what I mean when I say the system is BROKEN,” Sanders wrote, sharing an IPS graph showing the contrast between CEO compensation and worker pay.
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$644 Billion On Stock Buybacks, Little For Workers
The IPS report also found that these 100 companies spent $644 billion on stock buybacks from 2019 to 2024—money that inflated executive compensation and shareholder value but did little for workers. In fact, 56 of the companies spent more on buybacks than on capital investments.
“At a time when many American workers are struggling with high costs for groceries and housing, the nation’s largest low-wage employers are fixated on making their overpaid CEOs even richer,” the report highlighted.
Lowe’s (NYSE: LOW) alone spent $46.6 billion on buybacks during that time. According to IPS, that money could have funded a $28,456 annual bonus for each of its 273,000 employees. Instead, Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison made $20.2 million last year, 659 times more than the company’s median worker.
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Policy Proposals To Address Inequality
The IPS proposes several policy changes, including increasing the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%, taxing extreme CEO-worker pay gaps, and restricting federal contracts for companies with outsized executive pay.
Citing former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Sanders warned in The Guardian: “We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both.”
Sanders urged Americans to resist division and unite for systemic reform. “If we do not allow ourselves to be divided up by Trump and his oligarch allies, we can change the path we are on,” he said.
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