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A small group of protesters walked into the iconic American Hotel’s restaurant in Sag Harbor this weekend to convey a message they filmed for the world to see: “Tax the rich.”
Sag Harbor is a village in East Hampton that has long been a premier destination for the wealthy. Labor Day weekend is one of the busiest times of year for the otherwise sleepy enclave.
“You’re all here in the Hamptons enjoying $200 caviar as though your money isn’t funding an actual fascist regime!” one protester bellowed into a crowd of diners, according to a video posted on X by Planet Over Profit, a climate advocacy group.
The action was part of the larger nationwide “Workers Over Billionaires” campaign, a series of Labor Day weekend demonstrations taking place from San Francisco to Chicago to New York. A group of protesters also targeted the Hamptons home of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman on Saturday.
“The Hamptons protest is meant to be both symbolic and strategic as it directly confronts the billionaires who summer in East Hampton while making visible the hidden flow of money fueling Cuomo, Adams, and Trump,” Planet Over Profit said in a press release, referring to Andrew Cuomo, the former New York governor now running for mayor, Eric Adams, the current New York mayor, and President Donald Trump. “At the same time, it forecasts a longer-term campaign to cut billionaires down to size and redirect resources to workers, families, and communities.”
The Hamptons have long been home to some of the country’s elite. The amount some Hamptons residents are paying to get a taste of a viral smoothie is just one small indication of the difference in lifestyle between the very wealthy and everyone else. And while most of the country frets over the economy, multimillion-dollar home sales in the Hamptons are booming.
The famous Meadow Lane in Southampton, dubbed “Billionaire Lane,” is the summer home of Ken Griffin, the billionaire CEO of the investment firm Citadel, fashion designer Calvin Klein, and hedge-fund founder Daniel Och.
As part of the nationwide campaign, organizers also established what they are calling the Department of Class Solidarity, a “national war room” that tracks the names, ages, and industries of billionaires in the United States. It also aims to show how billionaires’ wealth impacts poverty.
The Department of Class Solidarity is aligned with other nationwide protest movements, including the Tesla Takedown Protests, Purge Palantir, which objects to what organizers say is Palantir’s contribution to mass surveillance, and Stop Billionaires Summer, a protest movement in the Bay Area.
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