PORTLAND, Maine — Embattled US Senate hopeful Graham Platner on Sunday swiped a page from New York City fellow lefties Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to rant about how billionaires shouldn’t even exist.
The Democratic leading candidate jokingly added to the jam-packed crowd at a local Elks Club that the country’s 1 percenters should even be jailed if they try to bankroll campaigns.
“If I had my way, elections would last two months, they would be publicly funded, and if a billionaire looked at a TV ad the wrong way, we’d put them in jail,” Platner said.
The pol even questioned the mere existence of billionaires, echoing previous controversial comments from far-left Big Apple Mayor Mamdani and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez.
“The fact that Jeff Bezos exists, and the fact that I know someone in Sullivan [in Maine] who works three jobs and pays 60% of her monthly income in rent — those two things are directly connected,” Platner told his faithful.
“There is no metric of hard work that justifies a billionaire when people in eastern Maine worked three jobs just to put food on the table.
“What’s important to remember is that billionaires don’t exist today because they worked hard,” Platner said. “Corporations don’t have the consolidated wealth and power they have just because they make good investments.
“They got it because they cheated.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos himself made waves last month for suggesting that raising his taxes wouldn’t do anything to help a teacher in Queens, contending that government excels at wasting money.
Platner jumped on the left-wing anti-wealth bandwagon while dodging any mention of the growing scandals he is facing, such as over his past treatment of women, a Nazi-linked tattoo, alleged extramarital sexting and urinating on dead Taliban fighters.
He was taking cues from Mamdani, who kicked off a firestorm last year when he said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires because, frankly, it is so much money in a moment of such inequality, and ultimately, what we need more of is equality across our city and across our state and across our country.”
AOC also has said America’s system of capitalism is “immoral” because it allows people to become billionaires.
Platner on Sunday also railed against the power of money in politics.
“We need to get money out of politics. We need to get rid of Citizens United,” he declared while calling for the overturning of the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. FEC decision, which allowed companies and plutocrats to independently bankroll political ads that are independent from campaigns.
Citizens United, which has long been maligned by the left, is a conservative nonprofit that had argued before the nation’s top court that its right to free speech allowed it to advertise its anti-Hillary Clinton documentary.
Platner dangled the possibility of impeaching the Supreme Court justices or threatening to pack the court to keep it in line, praising President Franklin D. Roosevelt for trying a similar tactic in the 1930s.
And ironically, despite calling for election cycles to take place within two months, Platner had launched his campaign last summer and held 83 town halls across the state of Maine to catapult himself from political irrelevance to national progressive hero.
