Nicole Gaudiano

USA TODAY

Bernie Sanders probably never expected to hear the words “I agree” from one of the Koch brothers.

Billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch are at the helm of a political organization that spends hundreds of millions of dollars pushing free-market ideas in elections — and Sanders has made no secret of his disdain for them.

Sanders, a Vermont independent senator and democratic socialist, consistently cites the Kochs as he warns against the country’s shift toward an "oligarchic society" where a handful of billionaires control the economic and political system as the gap between the rich and poor widens.

It turns out, Charles Koch thinks he’s right — at least, when it comes to a “rigged” political and economic system.

The chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries, in a Washington Post op-ed, wrote: “The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

“I agree with him,” he wrote.

No response from the Sanders campaign.

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Koch writes that Sanders often sounds as though he’s running as much against him as actual presidential candidates. He says he opposes Sanders’ desire to expand the federal government’s “control over people’s lives.”

But Koch writes policies that pick winners and losers have perpetuated a “cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty” in the U.S. That impedes progress and moves the country away from a “society of mutual benefit,” he wrote.

Koch also says he shares Sanders’ views on the need for criminal justice reform.

So is this an endorsement in the making?

“Hardly,” Koch writes.

And that’s probably OK with Sanders.