President Joe Biden used his final speech to the American people to attack the oligarchy, paying particular attention to tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
In a farewell address delivered from the Oval Office on Wednesday, Biden warned that the “dangerous concentration of power” among the wealthy in the United States “threatens our entire democracy.”
“There are dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked,” Biden said. “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence… We see the consequences all across America and we’ve seen it before.”
Biden hearkened back to the era of trust-busting and hoped that future administrations would take up his fights against monopolies.
“The American people stood up to the robber barons back then,” he said. “They didn’t punish the wealthy, just made [them] play by the rules that everybody else had to… It helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class [and] the most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen.”
Later in the speech, Biden honed in on Silicon Valley. Speaking shortly after Meta announced the end of fact-checking and mere days before Musk will have the ear of a sitting president, Biden worried about the “concentration of technology, power and wealth” in the “tech-industrial complex.”
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling, editors are disappearing,” Biden said, before raising his voice and pointing toward the camera. “Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies, told for power and for profit.”
Elsewhere in the speech, Biden addressed corruption in the halls of power. He called for a term limit of 18 years for Supreme Court justices, a ban on stock trading among members of Congress and reforms to the tax code that would target the ultra-wealthy. Before closing with an idyllic vision of the United States and its supposed fairness, Biden took a direct shot at Donald Trump.
“We need to amend the Constitution to make it clear that no president… is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office,” he said. “The president’s power is not unlimited, it’s not immune and it shouldn’t be.”
Watch the entire address below:
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