Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson rails against corporate greed in Oldham stop

Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson told an Oldham County gathering on Wednesday evening that she knows President Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election.

So, she wasn't asking for people's votes at 314 Exchange in Pewee Valley during the conversation she hosted on making a "spiritual and economic transformation" for the nation.

Instead, she wanted to get one of her campaign messages across to Kentuckians: The nation needs economic reform.

More: The Kentucky primary election is coming up. What you need to know

"Defense contractors should not have such undue influence on our foreign policy, big oil should not have such undue influence on our energy policies, and insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies should not have so much to do with our health," Williamson told the gathering of about two-dozen people.

Williamson announced her bid for the 2024 Democratic nominee for president in March 2023. She first entered the political world in 2014 when she ran as an independent candidate running for California's 33rd Congressional District. Besides her political experience, Williamson is also an author who's written multiple self-help books and was previously a spiritual leader.

She lost the early Democratic primary tallies in New Hampshire and South Carolina, where she won just 4% and 2% the vote, respectively. Williamson also previously ran as a presidential candidate in 2020, but was unsuccessful in gaining the Democratic nomination.

She suspended her presidential campaign in February after losing the Nevada primary, but relaunched her campaign three weeks later with an announcement on X, formerly known as Twitter.

"I had suspended it because I was losing the horse race, but something so much more important than the horse race is at stake here, and we must respond," Williamson said in the video announcement.

Her platform consists of advocating for reproductive justice, fighting against corporate greed and supporting government-funded health care.

Williamson touched on all those themes during her conversation on Wednesday night, with a clear message that corporate greed has destroyed the U.S. government.

She said "we've been trained to expect too little" and that institutionalized greed of entities like insurance and pharmaceutical companies is why America doesn't have universal health care and the reason many Americans are in medical debt.

Additionally, she said this greed has resulted in a struggling middle class compared to the 1970s.

"The average American couple could afford a house," Williamson said. "The average American couple could afford a car. The average American couple could afford a yearly vacation ... and (for) the average American couple, one salary could support a family of four."

According to a Pew Research Study, the percent of adults who live in a middle-class household shrank from 61% in 1971 to 50% in 2021.

Williamson said one president can't fix all the problems caused by corporate greed.

"But a president who talked about this for real would be a real service to the United States. Even though in this particular conference that will not be me, that doesn't matter," Williamson said. "Everything we do that gets us closer, is creating more and more of a space that we will get there. We are planting seeds."

Williamson also noted the Louisville area is her last stop in her public talks for her campaign. The Kentucky primary election is on May 21, and the early voting period is from May 16-18. Races included in the May primary are the U.S. President, the U.S. House, the state Senate and House of Representatives, and commonwealth's attorney in some districts.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Marianne Williamson visits Louisville area in last stop for campaign