In his short but poignant final address to the nation from Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, Joe Bidan spoke of his four years as president working to rebuild and transform the nation he cherishes. Referring to the Statue of Liberty as a symbol of freedom and beacon to the world, Biden delivered a love letter of sorts by talking about the dreams and ideas on which the United States was founded.
He did not spend much time simply recounting his accomplishments as president, vice president, or as a senator from his home state of Delaware. Instead, he dedicated the majority of his speech to a final warning of where he sees the nation heading and where he perceives an erosion of the institutions he has worked tirelessly to protect and strengthen over his nearly five decades of public service.
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Where do I even begin?
“I want to warn the country of some things that give me great concern. And this is a dangerous concern. And that’s the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people,” Biden said.
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“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.”
Though he did not mention any specific names, it seemed clear he was referring to ultra-rich power brokers like Elon Musk, the planet’s richest person, who has clear lines of influence over the Trump administration.
Biden harkened back over a century ago to the gilded age of the “robber barons,” which was finally mitigated by antitrust laws and the power of labor unions: a constant priority during his administration.
“They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers wanted rights to earn their fair share,” Biden said. “They were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on a path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation in the world has ever seen. We’ve got to do that again.”
Reminiscent of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s final address to the nation in January 1961 warning of the inordinate and increasing power of what he referred to as “the military industrial complex,” Biden said, “I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country, as well.”
“Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling, editors are disappearing.”
“Social media is giving up on fact checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families and our very democracy from the abuse of power,” he urged.
Biden’s concern for the degradation of our democratic institutions is justified. In its November 2021 report, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, placed the U.S. on a list of “backsliding democracies.” The report stated that the United States, therefore, no longer technically qualified as a democracy.
“The United States, the bastion of global democracy, fell victim to authoritarian tendencies itself,” the report said.
Citing the Center for Systemic Peace’s “Polity” data set – the one the CIA task force has found to be most reliable in predicting instability and violence – Barbara F. Walter, author of How Civil Wars Start, wrote that the United States had become an “anocracy,” somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state.
U.S. democracy had received the Polity Index’s top score of 10, or close to it, for much of its history. But in the first years of the Trump era, it tumbled precipitously into the anocracy zone.
By the end of Trump’s first term, the U.S. score had fallen to a 5, making the country a partial democracy for the first time since 1800.
“We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy,” Walter said. “That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated a +10 on the Polity index.”
Dropping five points in five years greatly increases the risk of civil war. “A partial democracy is three times as likely to experience civil war as a full democracy,” Walter states.
“A country standing on this threshold – as America is now, at +5 – can easily be pushed toward conflict through a combination of bad governance and increasingly undemocratic measures that further weaken its institutions.” Right now after Biden’s term, the score is back up to an 8.
What we can do
If we think about it, the solutions to most of the problems in the United States, in the best of all possible political and social environments, are quite simple. But when placed in the context of the sharp divisions and deep gaps in power between the socioeconomic and social classes, serious problems become very difficult to solve.
Let us, for a few moments, envision solutions to our most intractable problems and the answers to our most difficult questions as if we lived in a world where anything was possible.
How do we live up to the inspiring inscription written by Emma Lazarus on our beautiful Statue of Liberty? How can we embody a country that accepts the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, embracing people from other lands, and making dreams come true for all of our people?
We can pass bipartisan legislation for an equitable and humane immigration policy that protects people fleeing life-threatening conditions in their home countries and brings families together while helping to fill needed jobs in our own country. This will involve increasing resources for processing and placement of incoming immigrants.
We can pass legislation for a fair and equitable graduated income tax code with no loopholes where those who earn over a certain amount each year, say $750,000, pay at a rate of at least 24% (as would corporations on their profits), with significantly less for those who earn less.
We can pass legislation that codifies a reversal of at least three Supreme Court Cases:
1. Citizens United v. FEC: This case, based on the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment, prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including for-profits, nonprofits, labor unions, and other kinds of associations. This has resulted in corporations and other special interest groups having inordinate power and control over elections as opposed to the limited resources individual voters provide.
2. Trump v. United States: This case makes presidents presumptively immune from criminal liability for official acts while in office. It gives presidents the right to remain above the law, and it creates the further entrenchment of a two-tier system of justice.
3. Roe v. Wade: We can overwrite the Supreme Court’s decision by codifying in law the protections once afforded by Roe v. Wade where people of all sexes and genders have and maintain the unrestricted and unquestionable right to control their own bodies and are guaranteed their bodily reproductive autonomy.
We can also codify protections for transgender people through legislation to maintain the unrestricted and unquestionable right to control their own bodies, guaranteeing their bodily autonomy and access to the public accommodations of their choice.
We can guarantee everyone living in the United States access to universal single payer healthcare at least equivalent to our other peer nations without the profit motive within the private health insurance industry.
We can guarantee everyone a living minimum annual income, a safe and affordable place to live, and affordable healthy food to meet their nutritional needs.
We can establish fair and equitable priorities to close the wage and wealth gaps while meeting the urgent needs of the many.
We can guarantee everyone free public education, including people with special needs, through graduate division higher education or technical training for those with the desire, need, and skills.
We can guarantee everyone a comfortable retirement free from financial worries during their senior years.
We can honestly and thoroughly tackle our nation’s deeply entrenched racist past and present to live in a country as expressed by the great Rev. Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. where all people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
We must, therefore, legislate the elimination of censorship, halting the banning of books and other curricular materials in our schools and libraries so that the free exchange and discussion of ideas are uninhibited in all subject areas.
We can work for a country that ranks lowest in the world for incarcerations, where justice is doled out equally, equitably, and humanely regardless of background and social identities.
We can increase our nation’s ability to aid our allies and other countries when their borders and sovereignty are threatened and when more powerful nations invade, subjugate, and create humanitarian crises.
We must value science while supporting medical research, cleaning our environment, reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, and investing at significantly higher levels in renewable clean and sustainable energy sources and in agricultural methods that eliminate greenhouse gases. We can grant subsidies to homes and businesses to install solar panels and/or wind turbines, continue and increase subsidies on electric powered vehicles, invest more in hydroelectric plants, and end the use of all fossil fuels no later than 2035.
We can set aside even more acreage to public lands and subsidize the planting of significantly more trees and shrubs to increase the earth’s lung capacity to filter pollutants from the air and water. We can research ways to prevent large-scale fires that ravage forests and urban areas alike.
We can reconstruct an insurmountable wall separating religion from the government where no religious doctrine or tenet can ever be used as the basis for creating laws and standards for how one lives. We can tax religious institutions that engage in political lobbying and advocacy.
We can impose regulations on all forms of media, valuing our “free press” as “the fourth estate” and as one of the many defenders of our democratic principles and institutions by ensuring accuracy of reporting through fact checking in the dissemination of information.
We can pass a constitutional amendment limiting the terms of federal judges, including those on the Supreme Court, to 18 years as President Biden suggested in his closing speech.
We can restore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to their original contours before the Supreme Court chipped away their effectiveness.
We can rescind the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution if we wish to live in a country that values safety and security within our national community. We must eliminate the possibility of legally selling and distributing firearms as if they were toys. For guidance, we can look to some of our peer countries, like Australia, which allows firearms sales with considerable regulations on a need only basis.
Maybe, just maybe ours will become a nation where we join together to work and vote to steer our country on a path toward freedom and justice for all, to work in solving the problems that have gotten us to this point of rupture, and to turn the tide in a spirit of dialogue and goodwill.
Yes, it will take a redistribution of wealth and resources; it will take a restructuring of our nation to get on the path of truly forming a more perfect union. These are just some suggested solutions and there are many more to be tried.
If we remain on our current course, though, we will continue backsliding, which will result in either a second civil war; an autocratic oligarchy like Russia, Hungary, and Turkey; or a theocratic dictatorship like Iran. This will give Donald Trump permission to fulfill his dream of invading and taking Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada and Mexico.
But we need not continue in that direction. We can become a nation even better than the democratic republic our founders had envisioned and prevent the deterioration of our democracy.
Simple, yes. Easy, certainly not.
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