Bernie Sanders on What Corporate Media Does Not Want Discussed: The Oligarchy

“Let’s talk,” says the Vermont senator, “about the reality which the corporately-controlled media and the corporately-controlled political system don’t talk about very much.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont penned a new op-ed published Wednesday in which he attempts to redirect the American electorate away from what most media outlets seem fixated upon to a subject he argues they would rather not acknowledge, discuss, or promote—let alone challenge: the existence and power of the nation’s oligarchy, which day by day continues to hollow out democracy while keeping the working class mired in relative poverty with families scraping to meet basic material needs.

“Let’s take a deep breath and, for one moment, forget about Donald Trump, Jimmy Kimmel, the UN, Charlie Kirk, Gaza, a government shutdown, and the other crises that we face,” writes Sanders, an Independent, in The Guardian.

Instead, he says, “Let’s talk instead about the reality which the corporately-controlled media and the corporately-controlled political system don’t talk about very much,” which is a two-tiered nation in which extremely wealthy billionaires—including mega-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, and Mark Zuckerberg—live in “a world completely removed from ordinary Americans” that struggle to have affordable healthcare, housing, and education while earning wages that are lower, on average, than they were half a century ago despite huge increases in worker productivity.

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After listing the litany of economic injustices faced by the nation’s working class, Sanders says, “Enough is enough. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1933: ‘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.’ That warning is even more relevant today.”

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https://www.commondreams.org/news/corporate-media-oligarchy