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Naming Oligarchy as Key Threat, Biden Channels Bernie Sanders in Farewell Address
Sanders responded that the outgoing president was "absolutely right," adding, "This is the defining issue of our time."
Jan 16, 2025
The farewell address that U.S. President Joe Biden delivered from the Oval Office late Wednesday featured a warning that's been central to progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders' messaging for decades—and particularly in the wake of the 2024 election.
"Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead," Biden said, pointing to the "dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultrawealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked."
"We see the consequences all across America," the president added.
Biden: "I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. That's the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra wealthy people and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked. Today, an oligarchy is taking shape" pic.twitter.com/3JFO40udS3
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 16, 2025
The crisis Biden belatedly identified predated his White House term and would have persisted even if his vice president, Kamala Harris, had defeated billionaire President-elect Donald Trump in November. In his Wednesday address, Biden made no reference to Sanders, who ran for president in 2016 and 2020 on a progressive platform challenging the power of entrenched wealth.
During Biden's four years in power, the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans saw their wealth grow by a staggering $6 trillion, and record federal lobbying by corporate interests—from Big Pharma to Big Tech to Big Oil—continued to derail or undermine even the most tepid reform efforts.
But Trump's victory, aided by more than a quarter of a billion dollars in campaign spending from the world's richest man—who also used his wealth to purchase one of the world's largest social media platforms—laid bare the decisive influence that present-day malefactors of great wealth have on American economic and political life.
"We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in an NBC Newsappearance exactly one month before Biden's farewell address. "Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, had so much wealth and so much power. Never before has there been so much concentration of ownership, sector after sector."
"Never before in American history—and we better talk about this—have the people on top had so much political power," the senator added. "In this last election, in both parties, billionaires spent huge amounts of money to elect their candidates."
Bernie Sanders: "We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few people had so much wealth and so much power."
"In Russia, Putin has an oligarchy. We have an oligarchy here, too." pic.twitter.com/zBjf4O7khv
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) December 15, 2024
In a social media post early Thursday, Sanders thanked Biden for acknowledging the crisis of oligarchy.
"You were absolutely right," Sanders wrote. "This is the defining issue of our time."
Since his election win, Trump has moved to pack his incoming administration with lobbyists and other corporate cronies who stand to benefit from the president-elect's promised tax cuts and deregulatory blitz. Elon Musk, whose wealth has surged since Trump's reelection, has been tasked with leading an advisory commission designed to slash government spending.
The commission, known as the Department of Government Efficiency, is expected to use office space in the White House complex, spotlighting the extent to which the federal government and outside corporate forces are becoming increasingly intertwined.
At Trump's inauguration, American oligarchy will be on open display: The three richest men on the planet—Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—will be present.
During his speech Wednesday, Biden focused on the growing dominance of a handful of powerful U.S. tech companies and executives, many of whom—including Bezos and Zuckerberg—have pumped money into Trump's inaugural fund and signaled a desire to ally with an incoming president who has said he would let corporations buy their way around federal regulations.
"In his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us... about, and I quote, 'The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,'" Biden said. "Six decades later, I'm equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well."
"The U.S. government is becoming an outright oligarchy, with billionaire business leaders gathering around the billionaire Trump."
The president's comments broadly echoed sentiments expressed by his antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, who said in his own farewell address in December that "plutocracy is its own kind of dictatorship" and sounded the alarm over corporate consolidation—something he and other Biden administration officials, including Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, worked to combat over the past four years.
But progressives weren't exactly eager to give Biden credit for using his going-out speech to zero in on a longstanding problem that continued to fester under his leadership, despite the efforts of Kanter, Khan, and others.
The term "oligarchy" was entirely absent from Biden's most prominent speeches over the past four years, including his much-touted remarks on the imperiled state of American democracy.
"One last, tired bid for relevance, as if the U.S. drift into oligarchy is some novel, profound observation he just made—not something he's ignored his whole meandering term's worth of mumbling about democracy or, indeed, the thing that explains his entire career and presidency," Jacobin's Branko Marcetic wrote in response to Biden's farewell speech.
David Moore, co-founder of the investigative outlet Sludge, noted that "when his presidential campaign was flagging in 2019, he embraced a super PAC led by fundraisers from private equity"—benefiting from the political power of corporate interests he decried at the tail-end of his White House term.
Nevertheless, as progressive commentator and radio host Thom Hartmann put it Wednesday, "Biden is right, we are facing a crisis of oligarchy."
In a column published just ahead of Biden's speech, Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan Robinson rejected the emerging narrative on the right that the Trump administration and its corporate allies are merely attempting to bring about "the liberation of the country from the shackles of woke oppression."
"The more important thing to pay attention to is the way that the U.S. government is becoming an outright oligarchy, with billionaire business leaders gathering around the billionaire Trump," Robinson wrote. "Linda McMahon will work to privatize the public school system. Vivek Ramaswamy will make sure his fellow fraudsters don't end up in prison. And you, the non-billionaire, will end up being screwed by those who present themselves as the champions of the people."
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Our Plan to Stop Trump and Musk From Destroying Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid
We are demanding that every member of Congress, starting with the members of the DOGE Caucus, pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
Jan 16, 2025
Donald Trump is about to return to the White House, but it's clear who's really running the show: Elon Musk, the wealthiest man in the world and the chair of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Musk will do anything to avoid paying his fair share of taxes. That's why he wants to use DOGE to cut $2 trillion in government spending—which is mathematically impossible without slashing Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Last month, Musk amplified a thread from Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) that used zombie lies about Social Security to call for cutting and privatizing it.
Nobody voted to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Despite his past history of supporting cuts to these programs, Trump blanketed millions of households in swing states with flyers promising to protect them.
Our job is to remind voters of that promise, and demand that Republicans keep it. Trump won't be on the ballot again, but every member of the House of Representatives (and one-third of the U.S. Senate) is up for reelection in less than two years. That's why they want to slash our benefits behind closed doors.
I went to the first meeting of the DOGE Caucus, and stood outside those closed doors to confront members as they entered and exited the room. I handed them copies of Trump's campaign flyers promising to protect Social Security and Medicare, and asked if DOGE intended to keep that promise.
One Republican told me that "there will be some cuts" to Social Security and Medicare. Another said that "everything is on the table." Most of the rest refused to answer—except for DOGE Caucus co-chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.). When I handed her Trump's flyers, she said, "We don't care" and tossed them to the ground.
That's what Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks of Trump's campaign promise to protect earned benefits—and we're going to make sure her constituents know it. My organization, Social Security Works, just sent a billboard truck to drive to every large senior center in her district, reading "Marjorie Taylor Greene is helping the richest man in the world cut YOUR Social Security" and urging voters to call her office.
We are also planning to send a billboard truck to the district of Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.). Van Orden is a member of the DOGE Caucus and refused to pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He is one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents, winning his most recent race by fewer than 11,256 votes.
These two billboard trucks are just the beginning. We are demanding that every member of Congress, starting with the members of the DOGE Caucus, pledge to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If they refuse, our trucks will be driving through their districts in the very near future.
Join our campaign to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid at https://socialsecurityworks.org/pledge.
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Hey Elon and Vivek! Here's What a Real 'Department of Government Efficiency' Would Do
A new report identifies what a DOGE "based on evidence, not ideology, would include—from slashing drug prices to ending privatized Medicare to reducing the wasteful Pentagon budget."
Jan 15, 2025
While the U.S. Senate on Wednesday held confirmation hearings for several of President-elect Donald Trump's Cabinet nominees, the watchdog Public Citizen sounded the alarm about a new commission and its billionaire leaders, who don't require congressional oversight but could significantly impact federal agencies, regulations, and spending.
Despite being called the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE is not a government department. It is a presidential advisory commission that Trump announced after his November win. He has asked billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to co-lead it.
Public Citizen co-presidents Lisa Gilbert and Robert Weissman on Monday wrote to Trump's transition team, asking to join DOGE. While their group has concerns about the commission's "structure and mission," including potential conflicts of interest regarding Musk and Ramaswamy's financials, the watchdog leaders made the case that they could serve "as voices for the interests of consumers and the public who are the beneficiaries of federal regulatory and spending programs."
"There is nothing 'efficient' about hitting a pre-determined target for spending cuts, least of all one that is infeasible."
The pair highlighted that their appointment "would be an important step towards compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act," and outlined some ideas they have "to slash drug prices, end privatized Medicare, reduce the wasteful Pentagon budget."
Weissman expanded on the group's recommendations in a Wednesday report titled DOGE Delusions: A Real-World Plan to Reject Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's Misguided Agenda, Crack Down on Corporate Handouts, Tax the Rich, and Invest for the Future.
"Every sign from DOGE suggests that it aims to use 'efficiency' as a cover to shrink government, benefit corporations by cutting regulations, and advance a predetermined ideological agenda," Weissman said in a Wednesday statement. "This report identifies what an efficiency agenda based on evidence, not ideology, would include—from slashing drug prices to ending privatized Medicare to reducing the wasteful Pentagon budget."
The report's introduction notes that Trump and Musk's suggestions that DOGE would cut $2 trillion in yearly spending, even though "many commentators have pointed out the effective impossibility of cutting $2 trillion annually from the federal budget, given that all federal discretionary spending—including the Pentagon budget and veterans' benefits—totals less than $2 trillion."
Musk even
admitted last week that $2 trillion is unlikely, after which experts said his lower target of $1 trillion is still "too large."
"Few would argue with the purported goal of 'government efficiency,' but there is nothing 'efficient' about hitting a pre-determined target for spending cuts, least of all one that is infeasible," Weissman wrote. "Nor is there anything 'efficient' about ideologically driven notions of shrinking government or corporate profit-driven plans to roll back regulatory protections."
"Additionally, 'efficiency' is not a primary value," he continued. "Whatever the government does, it should strive to do efficiently (mindful of other considerations), but the real question is what the government should be doing in the first place."
The 35-page report features sections on ending Big Pharma's price gouging, shutting down privatized Medicare, cutting Pentagon waste and curbing contractor greed, taxing the rich and corporations, taxing high earners and the wealthy, eliminating oil and gas subsidies, regulating efficiency, the costs of not regulating, investing in the care economy, and investing to avert a climate catastrophe.
Many of the proposals overtly conflict with the priorities of the incoming Trump administration and the new Republican-controlled Congress, which are expected to swiftly and aggressively pursue tax cuts for wealthy individuals and corporations, expansion of Medicare Advantage, and the Big Oil-backed president-elect's campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-heating fossil fuels.
The GOP has promoted additional fossil fuel extraction despite the costly and devastating impacts of the climate emergency, as seen with 27 U.S. disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion in 2024—the hottest year on record—and in Los Angeles, California, which is currently enduring what could be "the costliest wildfire disaster in American history."
The Public Citizen report points out that the monetary costs of climate inaction "will severely reduce the size of the global economy. Depending on how quickly we move and how severe we let climate chaos become, the insurance giant Swiss Re suggests the annual dollar costs could be 11% to 14% of total global economic output by 2050—amounting to around $23 trillion annually—and around 7% of North American economic output. These costs will compound and grow even worse over time."
The watchdog estimates that one of its related proposals—ending handouts to fossil fuel companies—would save about $20 billion annually. Ending privatized Medicare would save $100 billion each year, and modest cuts to the Pentagon budget would save $100 billion yearly. More serious defense cuts could save $200 billion, the same figure for measures to reduce prescription drug prices. The biggest savings from the group's recommendations would come from fair tax reforms, at $500 billion annually.
"If DOGE is interested in saving taxpayers and consumers money and making sound investments that will generate a positive return to the government and society," the report concludes, "there is a clear set of evidence-based measures for it to pursue."
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