Summary
In his farewell speech, President Joe Biden warned of a growing “oligarchy” in the U.S., where extreme wealth and power threaten democracy.
Comparing modern elites to 19th-century robber barons, he called for reforms to hold the wealthy accountable, as done in the past.
Biden also criticized a “tech-industrial complex” concentrating power and spreading disinformation, weakening democracy.
His remarks sparked a surge in Google searches for “oligarchy.”
The speech comes amid rising concerns about policies favoring billionaires, like Trump’s tax cuts and potential cuts to social safety programs.
Microsoft is pissed, because they are not binging it instead.
God, why would I want to binge oligarchy?! /s
Bing….annnd you’re done
Biden became a good president… in his last month in office.
Or to be blunt: He’s being performative now when it doesn’t matter
Biden was a good president. And then he enabled Israel to go on a spree of war crimes, and also allowed Trump to, uh, live.
The Supreme Court: Nothing the President does is illegal
Everyone: Even ordering Seal Team Six to Mar-A-Lago
Biden: Cool, goes for ice cream and does nothing with this information
I don’t count any of them as “good president” with a 800B annual military budget. Or the rest of the totalitarian federal budget they rubber stamp without fail. There’s a lot of shit baked into the federal government that they never, ever veto in the budget, dark as all fucking hell, that Americans just ignore.
I would say, the genocide revealed who he already was, in a very clear way, but the signs and the evil deeds were already there.
“Look at all those slave masters posing on your dollars.”
Probably the same people who were googling why Biden wasn’t on the ticket on election day 🙄
I was overwhelmed,so I just stayed home.
Checks instance name
Story checks out.
Also, sorry the crap from our political cesspool keeps splashing across the border. :(
Becoming…? The country founded on the principle that only landowners and capitalists should be represented democratically is becoming an oligarchy?
Yes, because the early USA did not resemble an modern oligarchy but rather a plutocracy which despite its problems still has greater room for a merit based system than a modern oligarchy provides. We are intentionally concentrating a tremendous amount of wealth in the hands of very few people.
Plutocracy = rule by the wealthy.
Oligarchy = rule by the few.
The wealthy are the few. And with increasing wealth disparity, they are comparatively even fewer than ever before.
Not really any meaningful difference.
Maybe if we keep going with the concentration of wealth we can boil it all down to just one guy and then drown that guy in the bathtub like Republicans wanted to do with the federal government.
Ps: As far as your oligarchy vs plutocracy thing goes, we’re just both.
I mean give capitalism long enough we might be left with just one guy standing. I do mean guy. An immortal white shriveled dude, alone in a utopia of bots serving him.
And I just meant this whole “ah we’re not an oligarchy! We’re a plutocracy” thing is just dumb. What is even the difference in these peoples heads? It’s practically the same thing. And it IS the same thing under capitalism. The few who rule are the wealthy.
That’s the whole point of the system… capitalISM? The owners of CAPITAL rule?
I mean give capitalism long enough we might be left with just one guy standing. I do mean guy. An immortal white shriveled dude, alone in a utopia of bots serving him.
Nah, they’re not immortal and all tech has problems. I get this is like the wet dream of the tech bros to be self-sufficient masters of robot armies, and I hate to kink shame, but it won’t ever happen.
The one directly inspired by Rome, an oligarchy with strict class systems and slavery?
Yeah, I read that and was like… “Ya know, you’re only about 260 years late…”
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it’s been made abundantly clear that a lot of americans have no fucking idea what anyone is talking about
I genuinely can’t believe that there is any overlap at all with the maybe 500 people who actually listened to his speech or even read an article summarizing it and those who don’t know what the meaning of “oligarchy” is.
How does anyone get engaged enough in the political process to watch a speech from Biden and not recall Bernie Sanders saying this every day of his life for the last 30 years?
I follow these things closely on my own time, as I assume is common for nearly everyone on lemmy.
But I saw coverage of Biden’s farewell address randomly at the gym. And also at a local restaurant. The media now is putting that word “oligarchy” in front of people’s eyes, as a summary of his speech. I would guess most people googling it are checking if “the oligarchy” is a country in the middle east or something
It’s scary how much old tv media sways public conversation…and how incompetent they are
Lol, that’s fair. Maybe I should really feel surprised that people paid attention enough to Google it.
“Who the fuck is Ollie Garky?”
“Klepto crazy? Never heard of the guy, must be Greek or something”
Probably depends on your life style and what you do for work. I work in front of a computer so I browse on the side and see stuff, but take a teacher who is focused on kids all day doesn’t have much of a chance to get caught up on stuff
My friend is an HVAC guy and spends a lot of his days in the basement of high rises with no service. He gets home and has 2 kids to take care of and by the time he’s done, physical labor has taken its toll and he’s too sleepy to do much besides watch a comedy special before bed.
I have WFH computer job so I get to stay informed but it feels like the average American just doesn’t have time to keep up with the insanity of modern politics.
The best my brain ever felt was when I worked in a corner of a building that was a dead zone. No distractions unless I sought them out and physically went to them.
I often get confused between oligarchy, kleptocracy and plutocracy, that’s why I would look it up. I do understand how we can all be a little ignorant. We should do better.
Well, to be fair, a kleptocracy is a poverty mindset applied to wannabe plutarchs or oligarchs. Oligarchy is the DEI version of Plutocracy because it’s not just wealth based. Edit:/s
There is nothing diverse, equitable or inclusive about oligarchs, quite the opposite, but I see your point.
Sarcasm tag added
Anyone who had any other understanding has failed to communicate with the American public.
communication requires participation by both the sender and the receiver in order to take place. are you saying that if everything you tell someone is dismissed as “fake news” and ignored, then it’s your fault that nothing was communicated?
participation by both the sender and the receiver in order to take place. are you saying that if everything you tell someone is dismissed as “fake news” and ignored, then it’s your fa
How in the hell did you get that as a take away from what I said?
has failed to communicate with the American public.
what did you mean by that, if not exactly what you said?
I think user rumba meant in regards to the OP post…
“it’s been made abundantly clear that a lot of americans have no fucking idea what anyone is talking about”
…that anybody who thought otherwise about the american public has never really talked to its representants.
Whereas I think you understood rumbas’ comment as like he wrote about the people who knew better about the threat of the coming administration failed to communicate it to the average ignorant us citizen. With you replying that those trying to enlighten didn’t have a chance to succeed with that anyway.
Now shake hands and unblock. You’re on the same side.
Blocking a troll. got one less problem without ya…
Blocking a troll. got one less problem without ya…
lol if i was blocked i wouldn’t see that…
but yea. bye.
Not the brightest bunch
Americans have been so fat and happy that they’re literally sick. They need a few more LA fires and pandemics to wake up from the intellectual coma they’re in.
Sadly, they bought all the lies about Covid and now believe they are safe from it and that it magically disappeared. They believe the CDC’s “comprehensive guidelines” are enough to keep us all “safe”, when the actual guidelines are just base ideas, not anything of real value. They actually recommend people sneeze and cough into their elbows as if that’s going to stop an airborne virus. Yet they believe it all.
What else is new?
Defunding schools doing it’s job
Love Carlin. Hate this quote.
- “Half of them are smarter than that” is just as true but doesn’t have the same zing.
- The zing is that the regurgitation makes everyone feel as though they are on the right side of the distribution and thus superior.
Truth is, we are all closer to chimps than Einstein. And Einstein still left some lingering questions for us to solve.
That’s the distribution. Not “Everyone is stupid except me and you, dear reader.”
everyone feel as though they are on the right side of the distribution and thus superior.
Yes, I certainly am.
Until it comes to fixing something with my hands. Run a new cable through the wall? How the hell do I do that? You can just… make a new wall? Help, my car no go.
Ya, everyone has their “until” moments.
Getting bugged that that’s the median and not the average/mean
True. However both should sit on the same spot on top of the bell curve for IQ distribution. Also the majority of people is not aware of the difference between the two. You’d have to explain to more than half of your audience what a median is (essentially killing the joke this way).
Average can also refer to median. It’s a better measure of central tendency than mean in this case.
Pretty soon it will just say “See America”
This is click baity. People don’t exclusively look up things they have no idea about. I’m constantly searching terms to reaffirm my understanding or to get a more precise definition of them. Oligarchy in particular doesn’t have a measurable identification which of course people are going to want to dig a little into it. Hell there’s a comment on here that made me dig into it since they’re stretching it’s definition way past it’s meaning
This can be said about almost any article that claims people type a specific word into a search engine after someone says it. There were a lot of articles about people looking up jury nullification after Luigi was arrested. Or people looking up the word tariff after trump said it. It’s just a quick way to find more information about the specific instance the word was used in. I didn’t search the term tariff because I didn’t know what it was, i searched it because I wanted to know what trump and his supporters thought it was.
Hell, I looked this up just now fully knowing what an oligarchy was because a) I was curious about the formal definition and b) I wanted to learn more about the history
Additionally, any mention of a word in a speech like that will result in an uptick in search usage – but that doesn’t let anyone quantify anything.
You’d see an uptick if only a single person over baseline average looked it up as a result of the speech, and everyone else understood it.
“X is trending in search because people don’t know it” is always a fallacy. See also: reporting on increased search for “who are the presidential candidates” a few days before the election.
Oligo + Archy … I’m not surprised most Americans can’t figure it out themselves, just disappointed.
You really think that many Americans speak Greek? Most don’t even make high school level literacy in their native language.
Bro you couldve just heard the words… Monarchy and idk… Oligosaccharide and couldve put two and two together, but yes I agree it’s far beyond the capabilities of most Americans.
Is an Archy a small version of an Archer?
You might as well search for kakistocracy as well.
kakistocracy /kăk″ĭ-stŏk′rə-sē, kä″kĭ-/ noun
- Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens.
- Government by the worst men.
- Government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
While we’re at it, lets throw in gerontocracy
I read Ken Klippenstein and he was heralding 2024 as the year of the gerontocracy starting to fail and be left behind and I’m like dude, we just elected a fucking 78 year old Hitler wannabe as president. The gerontocracy only gets worse.
Yeah, one of the major reasons the Soviet leadership failed too
Ah, so that’s where “Heritage Foundation” comes from.
Fun fact: the Greek word kakistos (meaning “worst”), from which the first part of kakistocracy derives, comes from the Proto-Indo European root *kakka- which means “to defecate.” Source: Etymonline
In other words, kakistocracy can be considered: Being governed by shit.
ETA another related fact.: the word cacophony (meaning “harsh or unpleasant discordance of sound”) also shares this root. It came to English via Latin, so the spelling is different, but the origin remains the same. Which is to say, a “cacophony” is a shitty sound.
Top kek, I mean kak.
kakistocracy - see South Africa. Lol
He’s just as complacent in the oligarchical society we currently have as anyone.
Hey now - he was perfectly fine with the plutocracy that has ruled for hundreds of years. It’s Republican legislation that led to this – think Dodd-Frank.
Democrat leadership is happy to skim some off the top. Republicans will strip it to the bone.
I was going to disagree, but I realized you said “complacent” and not “guilty”. Yeah. He was certainly complacent as far as I know.
Bernie’s been saying this for a long time. I’m glad Biden understands that it’s true and actually said it out loud to people. If someone asked me if Biden would say it some point, I would have said no fucking way.
It’s not the worst thing that people are trying to educate themselves even if it’s too late.
Remember when a Bernie campaigner called Bloomberg an oligarch in 2020 and all the mainstream Dems clutched their pearls so hard?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
I think we have definitive proof that the American public, in general, are idiots.
At least they’re trying to learn.
Want definitive proof?
There are 244m eligible voters in the United States.
77m voted for Trump. Idiots.
2.6m voted 3rd party. Idiots.
90m didn’t vote. Idiots.
90+77+2.6 = 169.6
That means 170m of 244m eligible voters are braindead stupid. That’s 69.7%. So we essentially have a 70% failure rate amongst eligible voters for maintaining our democracy.
Yeah, Americans, in general, are STUUUUUUUUUPID.
Yeah, we’re in a declining nation and it’s probably not going to get better anytime soon.
I don’t think your math quite works out. Voters who voted third party or didn’t vote and live in solidly blue states had no bearing on Trump’s election.
If you don’t vote or vote 3rd party in a presidential election, you are an idiot whether you end up being responsible for the outcome or not.
If you don’t exercise your right to vote, especially in an election like this, you are an idiot.
If you vote 3rd party when a 3rd party has absolutely no shot at winning, you are an idiot.
It doesn’t matter whether you live in a blue state or not. If for no other reason than contributing to the popular vote.
In 2016 we could at least say Trump lost the popular vote. Before this election Republicans had only won the popular vote once since 1988 and not since Bush Jr. The more the will of the people clearly gets ignored and the loser of the popular vote becomes president anyway, the more pissed off Americans are going to get about that, and the more support we get from Americans to pressure our representatives to fix this shit electoral process.
Not to mention these idiots could live in a state that’s blue but not solidly blue and that state could possibly flip red because they assumed blue was safe in their state. Do you think non-voters and 3rd party presidential voters are smart enough to keep an eye on that kind of thing?
Being in a solidly blue or red state does not absolve non-voters and 3rd party voters from being idiots.
Not to mention these idiots could live in a state that’s blue but not solidly blue and that state could possibly flip red because they assumed blue was safe in their state.
That’s why I used the word “solidly.”
Do you think non-voters and 3rd party presidential voters are smart enough to keep an eye on that kind of thing?
Some of them? Sure. Maybe not all of them. But it doesn’t matter for purposes of this discussion. I was just making the claim that your math was including some voters that had no possible effect on Trump getting elected. And I still think that’s the case whether or not a number of people in purple states decided not to vote because Harris didn’t really speak to the economic realities they face everyday. Now we’re just quibbling over how wrong your math is.
To your broader point about the popular vote: I agree that people not voting or voting 3rd party impacts the popular vote, and the popular vote is indeed often used as a proxy for a national mandate. But Trump didn’t even break 50% on the popular vote—hardly a Reagan-style sweeping mandate despite initial reports to the contrary. So in this particular election, your point doesn’t even come into play. You’re calling people idiots for how they voted because of a theoretical outcome that didn’t occur.
Yes, voting in the U.S. is basically harm reduction. But what’s the point of voting to reduce harm if it doesn’t actually have much chance of doing that in your state? To be clear, I’m not advocating not voting. I’m advocating giving people a little grace if, via their vote, they didn’t materially contribute to the rise of fascism or whatever. In fact, you could say that someone voting third party in a solidly blue state has just as much impact on the election as someone voting blue in a solidly red one. It’s just numbers.
That’s why I used the word “solidly.”
Cool. That still doesn’t absolve them from being idiots for not voting or voting for a candidate that literally, as in literally, cannot win.
your math was including some voters that had no possible effect on Trump getting elected.
I didn’t say they did. I said they were idiots. My math was calculating how many idiots there are in America to determine how fucked we are. And I stand by my math.
But Trump didn’t even break 50% on the popular vote
But he still won the popular vote. The first Republican to do so in 20 years. Which alters the discussion about the will of the people not wanting Republican leadership. And non-voters and 3rd party voters helped to make that happen.
You’re calling people idiots for how they voted because of a theoretical outcome that didn’t occur.
Lol. No I’m not. I’m calling non-voters idiots for not exercising their right to vote, which people throughout history have killed and died for. I’m calling 3rd party presidential voters idiots for voting for a candidate that LITERALLY CANNOT WIN. Those are both decidedly idiotic things to do. And again, my math is calculating how many idiots are in America, using this election as a litmus test. And I’m stating those idiots affected the popular vote, which they did. And I’m stating that, for all they knew when they made their idiotic decision, they were making the difference between who won.
I’m advocating giving people a little grace if, via their vote, they didn’t materially contribute to the rise of fascism or whatever.
Your logic is like saying “well, the boy threw the kitchen knife at his sister, but it didn’t end up eviscerating her, so let’s just drop the subject and let the boy off scott free”. Again, they went into the election, making their stupid decisions, not knowing if they were going to make that difference or not. That is some idiot shit.
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree here. We’re not even on the same page in terms of first principles. A voter voting blue in a red state is voting for a candidate who literally cannot win, and by your logic they’d be an idiot too. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. People should be able to vote how they want—especially if their vote isn’t likely to sway the election.
You might be downvoted but you’re absolutely correct.
Username checks out along with the math.
We had that in November
Twice in November.
We knew that since Dexter Manly went to college illiterate
I actually consider this really positive on a few fronts.
Firstly, people are trying to learn. That’s great.
Oligarchy is not a common word if your English level isn’t great and that’s true for lots of people. Even if you read books a decent amount it’s not something I think you’d come across frequently.
Also, for folks who don’t know what an oligarchy is, for them to find out they’re possibly living in one may change their world view.
I’m sure there are more.
Honestly, I am one of those idiots. I had to look up oligarchy myself, although I looked it up because it was being thrown around a bit on Lemmy, not because Biden said it.
I do not consider you an idiot one bit for what it’s worth. I definitely did not know that word for a significant portion of my life.
It’s not something that appears in books or something you come across in school.
Right? I’ve known the word for a long time but I was definitely well into adulthood and definitely looked it up. It’s a “college word” y’all people have to look up simple words all the time.
That’s a very… generous interpretation, but I’ll “allow it”, because it gives me some hope.
Gotta keep that hope up!
YOU’RE LIVING IN ONE MS. TURNER
