The Issue of Our Time: Destruction of Middle Class

High-profile progressives Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and filmmaker Michael Moore will be joined by several other advocates for working Americans later this month at a live-streamed town hall focusing on inequality in the U.S.

Partnering with The Guardian, NowThis News, The Young Turks, and Act.tv, Sanders will host the discussion, titled “Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class,” on March 19 at 7:00pm EST.

“The issue of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time, yet it gets very little coverage from the corporate media,” Sanders said in a statement this week. “I am excited to build on the success of our Medicare for All town hall and go outside the traditional media to talk about who owns America, why the middle class is declining, extreme poverty, and how we create an economy that works for everybody, not just the one percent.”

The town hall comes on the heels of a similar event where Sanders discussed Medicare for All, which drew 1.6 million viewers, in January. In that discussion, Sanders also spoke at length about the lack of coverage universal healthcare gets in the corporate mainstream media, despite rising public support for a Medicare for All system.

The town hall comes as corporate interests’ hold on Washington and its adverse affects on working families becomes increasingly apparent.

In December, President Donald Trump signed into law a tax plan which offers immediate, permanent tax cuts for corporations and the wealthiest Americans—falsely asserting the public that middle-class Americans would see significant tax relief as a result. But companies’ shareholders have gained far more from the tax law than workers, according to several estimates.

“The political establishment has completely turned away from the middle class and abandoned the American blue collar workers in favor of the wealthy elite,” said Ana Kasparian of The Young Turks, which will stream the town hall on its social media accounts. “Tax cuts are only helping the top one percent and have become corporations’ best and most loyal friend…I applaud Sen. Sanders’ work in making this the issue of our time.”