Over three score years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower had a warning for America.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” Eisenhower exhorted in his 1961 farewell address as president. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
“We must never let the weight of this combination,” Ike continued, “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.”
Eisenhower’s warning would, sadly, go almost totally unheeded. In the years since Ike’s farewell, the “military-industrial complex” he so feared has morphed into an even more worrisome concentration of wealth and power.
Earlier this week, in his own farewell address, President Joe Biden gave that concentration a grim label.
An “oligarchy” of “extreme wealth, power, and influence,” Biden intoned, now “literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”
We now face, Biden added, a “dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people,” a top-heavy distribution of our nation’s treasure that’s eroding our “unity and common purpose” and fomenting “distrust and division.”
The end result? We stand today unable to adequately confront the challenges that face us.
America’s oligarchs, Biden explained, are wielding “their unchecked influence to eliminate the steps we’ve taken to tackle the climate crisis.” By resisting safeguards over artificial intelligence — “the most consequential technology of our time” — they’re also opening the door to “new threats to our rights, our way of life, to our privacy, how we work, and how we protect our nation.”
Perhaps most ominously of all, these oligarchs are burying Americans “under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation.”
”Participating in our democracy,” the departing president lamented, has become “exhausting and even disillusioning” for average Americans. They no longer “feel like they have a fair shot.”
But Biden also stressed that average Americans can, by working together, shear our new oligarchy — and its “tech-industrial complex” core — down to democratic size. We can get the “dark money” of billionaires out of our politics. We can ban members of Congress from making stock trades while they’re legislating. We can tax the richest among us and make sure they’re paying their fair tax share.
In the days right after Biden’s farewell address, progressives would add more specifics to Biden’s list of antidotes to oligarchy. We could and should, as former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich pointed out, either bust up giant, billionaire-owned tech media platforms like X and Facebook or start treating these platforms as public utilities.
We could even ban our wealthiest from owning critical media properties.
But realizing any of these reforms won’t be easy. Our wealthiest have never enjoyed a greater direct presence at our government’s highest levels.
Nothing will symbolize the reality of this oligarchic power than Monday’s upcoming inauguration of Donald Trump. The inaugural ceremony will have America’s three richest men — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg — seated prominently in attendance as Trump addresses the nation and begins his second term.
“Everybody,” a satisfied president-elect Trump mused last month at a Mar-a-Lago news conference, “wants to be my friend.”
Well, no, not everybody. Just everybody with a grand fortune that our new president — and his Republican controlled Congress — can zealously safeguard and grow.
So what can the rest of us do? With Trumpism locked in federally, we can challenge our oligarchs at the state and local level.
Just this past week, for instance, the governor of the state of Maryland proposed a series of tax changes that would raise the combined state and local income tax rate on most Marylanders making over $1 million a year to 10.7 percent. But Maryland, one of the nation’s richest states, could do better. Rich Californians are already payingtaxes at a 12 percent rate.
But that sort of better, in Maryland or any other state, won’t happen unless average Americans organize — and confront our oligarchs at every opportunity.
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