The real issue here, if you look at the Koch Brothers' agenda, is: look at what many of the extreme right-wing people believe. Obamacare is just the … - Bernie Sanders

As someone who has held hundreds of town meetings throughout the country, I have learned about another ugly and destructive aspect of our current health care system. Many workers stay at the job they have not because they like them, not because they are happy in their work, but because they have to stay in order to maintain decent health care coverage for their families. This reality has a significant impact upon our economy. How many great entrepreneurs, innovative businesspeople, and artists are unable to go out on their own because they will lose the health insurance they need? How many people become embittered, frustrated, and hateful because they are trapped in jobs they want to leave? Americans should not be chained to a job because of health insurance.

This is not a radical idea. Vermont and Maine allow inmates to vote and more than 30 nations — including Israel, South Africa, and Canada — also understand that voting rights for all citizens is a basic principle of democracy. When we look at the history of why our country has banned incarcerated people from voting, we must understand that the efforts to rob citizens of their voting rights was a legacy of slavery and continuing racist attitudes post-Jim Crow. After the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which extended civil and legal protections to formerly enslaved people, many state governments rushed to create new felonies to put black people in jail and then institute lifetime disenfranchisement as a way to protect their own privilege and power.

As more and more newspapers go out of existence and vast stretches of the country become news deserts, we need to rethink how local media is maintained in order to guarantee that Americans can access the information they need to cultivate a vibrant democracy. In my view, there has to be significant public funding for diverse, competitive media at the national, regional, and local levels. That's not a radical idea. At the founding of the United States, the first Congresses provided massive postal subsidies to printers so that they could distribute newspapers. The subsidies went to all sides in the great debates of the early United States, and they fostered media diversity and discussion so intense that the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville determined, after touring the young country in the 1830s, that newspapers were an essential underpinning for "Democracy in America." Even now, almost two hundred years later, our largest media outlets enjoy massive subsidies. The public owns the airwaves of this country, yet media conglomerates claim exclusive use of those airwaves for their own economic benefit. Once they have obtained a license, they can bank whatever profits come to them from owning television and radio stations, and with the loosening of standards and regulations initiated by the w:Telecommunications Act of 1996 and industry-aligned members of the w:Federal Communications Commission, they have generally done so with little to no accountability.