Biden’s Presidency Will Surely Gain Growing Appreciation Over Time!

By Donald A. Collins | 17 January 2025
Church and State

President Joe Biden’s farewell address. (Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

As Donald Trump’s inauguration date approaches, there have been several articles about Joe Biden, and his legacy which he himself summarized in his farewell address to the nation on the evening of January 15. But his 50 years of service should be acknowledged with accolades.

Simon Rosenberg offered a complete text of Biden’s speech which you can read here.

His thoughts were important as they tie today to the past times of stress. If we don’t learn from our history of mistakes we will fail miserably in our future!

I can immodestly say, in earlier OP ED pieces I compared, as Biden did in his final address, today’s oligarchy takeover of our government to the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries!

It was then in this first Gilded Age which allowed wealthy, powerful business leaders such as John Rockefeller to put undue omonopolistic burdens on the rest of our citizens only to be attacked and partly corrected by the reform minded so called Trust buster President Theodore Roosevelt, only elected by the fact that as Vice President, he succeeded to the Presidency when President McKinley was assassinated.

The imbalance of power then was also exposed and made politically actionable to voters by continuous writings of a group called the muckrakers which included women such as Ida Tarbell in the influential McClure’s Magazine.

Suffragette women were increasingly aware that they had occupied an inferior position politically in the United States, which was not fully realized, even when women obtained the right to vote in 1921 after seeking those rights since the original feminist meeting in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.

The Wall Street Journal’s January 16 front page “What’s News” column briefly summarized Biden’s address as follows: “Biden, in a farewell, address to the nation, said that an oligarchy and a tech industrial complex were taking hold in America, warning of the risks of unchecked power”.

This echoed Dwight Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address in which he warned of the dangers of the military industrial complex, which subsequently did assume a great influence on our future.

Biden’s final address was mostly not an ego trip, although his sustained efforts in trying to get a Gaza peace were greatly aided by Trump’s support. That Trump and Biden cooperated on gaining a Gaza ceasefire was a rare example such an event. But it still could fall apart, and Trump will have that burden to bear.

Voters will soon see if President Trump can govern.

He may temporarily get a political boost if he decides to save TikTok and maybe save the sound deal for US Steel’s purchase by Nippon Steel.

However, his continual calling climate change a hoax and calling for a “drill, Baby, drill” agenda when we are now the world’s leading fossil fuel producers flaunts reason! Immigration reform has always been difficult and cutting spending was not a feature of his first term when he added $8 trillion to our national debt while cutting corporate taxes from 37% to 21%!!!

Money buys power. No one has ever before given $277 million to a Presidential candidate!

Several of his Cabinet nominees are serious threats to our democracy but I await the end of the nominating process to name the worst.

A recent Gallop poll shows Biden deeply unpopular (42% positive) which reminds us of Jimmy Carter’s unpopularity at the end of his term in 1981.

Jake Sullivan, Biden’s Director of Policy Planning who was a central player in fashioning the Gaza accord, noted that many of the accomplishments which Biden achieved on a bipartisan basis will not be recognized for some years because improving infrastructure and other basic initiatives will take time to evolve.

Let us hope that our justifiable fear of what Trump will do to this country over the next four years does not come to fruition! Because of this oligarch power, it appears they offer the most dangerous threat to our democracy since the civil war or the initial Gilded Age.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

President Joe Biden’s farewell address (FULL)

Maddow: What Biden said for the ‘first time’ in his farewell address

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