Corporate Media and 'Moderate' Democrats Are Defending the Oligarchy Against Bernie Sanders

By Norman Solomon, Reader Supported News

24 December 19

or the United States, oligarchy is the elephant � and donkey � in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it.

Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word �oligarchy� was heard once. �We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,� Bernie Sanders said, �where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.�

Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy � defined as �a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes� � can�t really be a democracy.

The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don�t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.

Over the weekend, The Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren �probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.� The editorial went on to praise �the relative moderates in the race� � Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar � for �offering a more positive future.�

But �a more positive future� for whom? Those �moderates� are certainly offering a more positive future for the newspaper�s owner, Jeff Bezos, who usually ranks as the richest person in the world. He wants to acquire even more extreme personal wealth beyond his current $108 billion.

The Washington Post�s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign � from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and �public� outlets like the �PBS NewsHour� and NPR�s �All Things Considered� and �Morning Edition.�

The essence of a propaganda system is repetition. To be effective, it doesn�t require complete uniformity � only dominant messaging, worldviews and assumptions.

Prevailing in news media�s political content is the central, tacit assumption that oligarchy isn�t a reality in the United States. So, there�s scant interest in the fact that the richest three people in the USA �now have as much wealth as the bottom half of the U.S. population combined.� As for the damaging impacts on democracy, they get less attention than Melania Trump�s wardrobe.

Now, as Sanders surges in Iowa and elsewhere, there�s a renewed pattern of mass-media outlets notably ignoring or denigrating his campaign�s progress. Like many other Sanders supporters, I find that disgusting yet not surprising.

In fortresses of high finance and vast opulence � with no ceiling on the often-pathological quests for ever-greater wealth � defenders of oligarchy see democratic potential as an ominous weapon in the hands of advancing hordes. Media outlets provide a wide (and shallow) moat.

For mass media owned by oligarchs and their corporate entities, affinity with the �moderate� orientations of Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar is clear. Any one of them would be welcomed by corporate elites as protection against what they see as a hazardous upsurge of progressive populism.

While Buttigieg has emerged as a sharp corporate tool for the maintenance of oligarchy, Joe Biden is an old hand at such tasks. Meanwhile, ready to preempt the politician-intermediaries for plutocracy, Michael Bloomberg is offering a blunt instrument for direct wealthy rule. Estimated to be the eighth-richest person in the United States, he was urged to run for president this year by Bezos.

During the next few months, Bloomberg will continue to use his massive class-war chest to fund an advertising onslaught of unprecedented size. In just weeks, he has spent upwards of $80 million on TV ads, dwarfing all such spending by his opponents combined. And, with little fanfare, he has already hired upwards of 200 paid staffers, who�ll be deployed in 21 states.

If Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar or Bloomberg won the Democratic presidential nomination, that would be a triumph for oligarchy in the midst of rising grassroots opposition.

Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, �Almost every problem facing our country � from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis � can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden�s campaigns for president.�

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations �pay their fair share,� you won�t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word �oligarchy.� That�s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn�t exist.

Norman Solomon is co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 Democratic National Convention and is currently a coordinator of the relaunched independent Bernie Delegates Network. Solomon is the author of a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.