Tonight at 7 p.m. eastern, Senator Elizabeth Warren, filmmaker Michael Moore, Professor Darrick Hamilton, Senator Bernie Sanders, and others will hold a town hall in the auditorium of the US Capitol about the growing economic inequality in this nation. The title of the town hall is “Inequality in America: The Rise of Oligarchy and Collapse of the Middle Class.” The town hall will be live streamed n Facebook, Twitter and YouTube by Sanders, Warren, Moore, The Guardian, NowThis, The Young Turks and Act.tv. The last live streamed town hall (on Medicare for All) by Senator Sanders reached over a million people. This one could reach 10,000,000 or more.
Links to live streams can be found here
There is a video on facebook about the town hall:
U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren — US Senator for Massachusetts
The United States is the richest country in the history of the world. And yet that wealth is controlled by a tiny fraction at the top while millions of Americans are scraping to get by. Bernie and I will discuss the issues of income inequality and poverty in America on Facebook live on Monday evening. Will you join us?
Link to Facebook video
The Nation had an interview with Senator Bernie Sanders about tonight’s live streamed town hall. Here’s a small part of that interview:
The Nation: You say there are two fundamental issues with inequality. What’s the first?
Sanders: The first one is that this country is moving into oligarchy. The three wealthiest people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. The top one-tenth of one percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom ninety percent. And then, politically, what we have seen since the Citizens United decision (by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010) is billionaires like the Koch brothers and a few of their friends pouring hundreds and millions of dollars into the political process to elect candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful. That is an issue of huge consequence to the future of America – in terms of the economic life of this country and the collapse of the middle class, and a political system which is being corrupted by big money and Citizens United.
And the second issue has to do with how the first is covered?
The second issue deals with the fact that we have a corporate media, which is not as Donald Trump defines it “fake news.” That’s not the issue. It’s not that you have people on CNN, or writing for The New York Times, who are deliberately lying or trying to destroy politicians – that’s not the case. Everyday there are very good and important articles that appear in The Washington Post and The New York Times, on CBS News and everywhere else.
The problem is that, to a very significant degree, corporate media ignores, or pays very little attention, to the most important issues facing working people. That is the problem with corporate media today.
snip
And you think you can do something about that.
What we are trying to do now is pretty revolutionary… We have co-sponsorship on this town meeting that includes, obviously our Facebook, which has 7.5 million followers, Elizabeth Warren with close to 3.5 million, Michael Moore with 2.2 million, the Guardian with 7.9 million, Young Turks with 4 or 5 million, and many more pages that will be sharing the live stream. There probably is duplication, but its absolutely fair to say tens of millions.
The Nation: Bernie Sanders Wants to Tell the Story That Corporate Media Fails To Tell
You can read the entire interview at the link.
The live stream is tonight at 7 p.m. eastern, 6 p.m. central, 5 p.m. mountain and 4 p.m. pacific time.