An easily captured mainstream media, unable to concentrate on stories that matter, focuses on Biden. Let’s keep our eyes on the massacre of Trump’s effect on the working class!
The mainstream media distraction again.
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Summary
In this urgent and passionate broadcast, progressive media host Egberto Willies critiques the mainstream media’s obsession with President Biden’s age and health, arguing it serves as a distraction from destructive economic policies being advanced by the Trump-aligned GOP. He calls out the “Big Beautiful Bill” for redistributing wealth upward, highlights the dangers of Medicaid and SNAP cuts, and urges grassroots action. Willies stresses that only civic engagement and sustained public pressure, not partisan saviors, will safeguard democracy and economic justice.
- Media Distraction: The corporate media focuses on Biden’s forgetfulness and prostate cancer diagnosis, diverting attention from policies harming working-class Americans.
- Regressive Economic Policy: The Trump-aligned GOP’s proposed “Big Beautiful Bill” uses tariffs to fund tax breaks for the rich, effectively taxing the working class to subsidize the wealthy.
- Healthcare Cuts: Cuts to Medicaid will devastate rural hospitals and nursing homes, putting vulnerable populations at serious risk.
- Attacks on DEI and the Estate Tax: The GOP is undermining Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives while moving to eliminate the estate tax, entrenching wealth inequality.
- Call to Action: Willies urges listeners to contact their congressional representatives and support independent media, emphasizing that change depends on grassroots mobilization.
Willies offers a searing critique of a political and media establishment that enables economic exploitation while manipulating public focus with sensationalism. He doesn’t shy away from acknowledging Biden’s limitations but centers the conversation where it belongs—on policy. In a time when billionaires receive handouts and the poor face cuts to food and healthcare, he insists that the real fight is not between left and right, but between oligarchy and democracy. Only an informed, mobilized public can shift the balance toward justice.
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The stakes could not be higher. The corporate media has once again chosen to focus the national spotlight on a distraction—this time on President Joe Biden’s medical status and a selectively interpreted set of audio tapes. While these stories dominate headlines, a full-blown class war is unfolding just beneath the surface, fueled by policies that benefit the wealthy at the direct expense of the working class and poor. Progressive voices like those at Politics Done Right continue to warn: stay focused. Distractions—especially emotional or sensational—are key tools of the oligarchic status quo.
Let’s begin with the core of the distraction. President Biden, who has been diagnosed with a treatable form of prostate cancer, remains the subject of media coverage that implies incapacity, failure, or even hidden conspiracies. This mirrors the right-wing tactic of “flooding the zone with s***,” a phrase famously associated with Steve Bannon, which aims to overwhelm the public with noise so real issues get buried. Much of the media, either through laziness or complicity, participates in this cycle. Despite his age and verbal slips, Biden remains intellectually capable and far more coherent on policy than his successor, Donald Trump, whose mental lapses and open authoritarianism receive far less scrutiny from the same outlets.
Even Biden’s detractors must concede that his administration passed more substantial progressive reforms than many expected. The Inflation Reduction Act, while not perfect, made historic investments in clean energy. The American Rescue Plan helped stave off a pandemic recession. The CHIPS Act invested in domestic manufacturing. And yet, Biden remains a centrist, not a progressive—an institutionalist who governs with compromise. That’s not an indictment of him but a reflection of a political system captured by corporate interests.
The problem isn’t Biden’s age; it’s how political and media elites manipulate his vulnerabilities to shield even more egregious economic policies from scrutiny. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill”—a Trump-era proposal now revived with a name dripping in vanity and absurdity—is a Trojan horse for accelerating wealth transfer from the many to the few. The bill’s framework leans heavily on tariffs to fund tax cuts for the rich and cuts social programs like Medicaid and SNAP. This is regressive taxation in action.
Tariffs aren’t inherently bad, but when designed to offset tax cuts for billionaires, they become just another form of trickle-down economics—a failed ideology that refuses to die. Tariffs disproportionately impact small businesses and consumers who don’t have the bulk-buying power of multinational corporations like Walmart or Amazon. According to Brookings, these policies raise prices on everyday goods, pushing more Americans toward financial precarity. And when the rich loan that saved tax money back to the government in the form of bond purchases, they profit again—this time through interest, effectively collecting rent on their privilege.
Meanwhile, the GOP’s coordinated gutting of social services—like Medicaid, SNAP, and public education—is accelerating. These cuts particularly devastate rural communities, many of which ironically vote Republican. A large portion of rural hospitals depend on Medicaid reimbursement. Without it, as CEOs have testified, entire hospital systems will shut down, turning rural “red” America into medical deserts. According to a 2023 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), over 60% of Medicaid recipients live in working families. The idea that these are “freeloaders” is not just wrong; it’s deliberately misleading.
And then there’s the assault on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). The media is too distracted to cover how Trump’s hand-picked bureaucrats seek to hollow out equity-focused programs, replacing competent, qualified leaders with loyalists unqualified for their roles. This anti-DEI crusade, under the false flag of “meritocracy,” is itself deeply unmeritorious. Real DEI fosters a richer, broader talent pool—not quotas or identity tokens, but fair access and systemic reform.
The estate tax, a mechanism designed to prevent the perpetuation of hereditary oligarchy, is also on the chopping block. Despite conservative rhetoric about the “death tax,” only the wealthiest 0.2% of estates even pay it. Eliminating it solidified dynastic wealth and ensured a future where America’s economic hierarchy was determined not by effort but by inheritance.
All these policy moves are part of what economist Richard Wolff calls “end-stage capitalism”—a system that, left unchecked, eats itself alive through consolidation, privatization, and financialization. The mainstream media rarely makes this connection because they are, in fact, part of the problem. Corporate media outlets like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News rely on advertising from the same pharmaceutical, defense, and finance companies that benefit from these policies. As Noam Chomsky noted in Manufacturing Consent, the media’s function in this context is not to inform but to manage perception.
That’s why progressive, independent media matters. Outlets like Politics Done Right, Democracy Now!, The Lever, and Jacobin exist to tell the truth about how the economy actually works—for whom and against whom. Progressives must talk directly and repeatedly to friends, neighbors, and even MAGA relatives about how they’re being robbed in broad daylight.
No savior is coming from the DNC or the RNC. Mass mobilization, sustained pressure, and civic literacy are the only salvation. Call your congressperson. Support independent media. Fund grassroots campaigns. And remember, distractions only work when the public loses focus. Let the mainstream press gossip about Biden’s speech patterns. Progressives have a democracy to defend.
