plutocrats

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

Globalization and the technology revolution—and the worldwide economic growth they are creating—are fundamental drivers of the rise of the plutocrats. Even rent-seeking plutocrats—those who owe their fortunes chiefly to favorable government decisions—have also been enriched partly by this growing global economic pie. America still dominates the world economy, and Americans still dominate the super-elite. But this book also tries to put U.S. plutocrats into a global context. The rise of the 1 percent is a global phenomenon, and in a globalized world economy, the plutocrats are the most international of all, both in how they live their lives and in how they earn their fortunes

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But it also argues that outcomes matter, too, and that the pulling away of the plutocrats from everyone else is both an important consequence of the way that capitalism is working today and a new reality that will shape the future. Other accounts of the top 1 percent have tended to focus either on politics or on economics. The choice can have ideological implications. If you are a fan of the plutocrats, you tend to prefer economic arguments, because that makes their rise seem inevitable, or at least inevitable in a market economy. Critics of the plutocrats often lean toward political explanations, because those show the dominance of the 1 percent to be the work of the fallible Beltway, rather than of Adam Smith.

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But there is little debate about the aims—it is hard to find anyone who argues that U.S. schoolchildren need less education or that Africans deserve fewer doctors and less medicine. But some idea-driven plutocrats venture into more obviously contested terrain. The plutocrat-as-politician is becoming an important member of the world’s governing elite, ranging from pragmatic problem solvers with a yen for the public stage, such as Mike Bloomberg or Mitt Romney, to emerging market billionaires whose wealth emboldens them to challenge authoritarian rulers, like Russia’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky or Egypt’s Naguib Sawiris. The plutocratic politician can use his own money to bankroll his campaign directly, and also to build a network of civic support through the less explicitly political donations of his personal foundation.

Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better
by Rob Reich
Published 20 Nov 2018

Foundations appear at odds with democracy, for they represent, by definition and by law, the expression of plutocratic voices directed toward the public good. But why, in a democracy, should the size of one’s wallet give one a greater say in the public good and public policy? Why should this plutocratic voice be subsidized by the public? And why should democracy allow this voice to extend across generations in the form of tax-protected assets? It would seem that foundations are a misplaced plutocratic, and powerful, element in a democratic society. Several further arguments lay bare the tensions between philanthropy and democracy and call into doubt several of the institutional arrangements, and ultimately the very legitimacy, of private foundations.

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Indeed, there is empirical evidence to suggest that, at least in the United States, the very wealthy (both the top quarter and the top 1 percent of wealth holders, the latter of which account for the lion’s share of private foundations) have significantly more politically conservative preferences than average citizens.²⁵ Thus, the activity of foundations, even when it decentralizes the production of public goods, retains a plutocratic character. I see no way to avoid this conclusion, for while wealthy and poor people tend to give the same percentage of their incomes to charity, in absolute terms the wealthy have much more to give. Does this mean that we should eliminate foundations? I do not think so. What follows, I believe, tells not against foundations as such but against the tax-subsidized aspect of foundation activity. If foundations create a plutocratic pluralism, public subsidies that stimulate more such activity are harder to justify. Perhaps a plutocratic tempering of government orthodoxy is better than no tempering at all.

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Wealthier individuals donate more as an absolute amount (but not as a percentage of income) and receive a larger subsidy for giving (the upside-down effect) and claim, as a result, a staggeringly large share of the deduction. Those making $200,000 and above received 70 percent of all deductions for charitable contributions; those making $60,000 and above claim more than 98 percent of all such deductions.²⁷ The result is a decidedly plutocratic bias in the subsidy, where the favored beneficiaries of the wealthy receive the lion’s share of the subsidy. The plutocratic bias is troubling, for systematic overattention in the policy tool itself to the interests and preferences of the wealthy against those of the middle-class and poor seems a strange, indeed unjustifiable, basis for social policy. This trouble might be undercut if the product of charitable giving were pure public goods, in the economic sense, namely goods that are nonexcludable and nonrivalrous.

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine
by Peter Lunenfeld
Published 31 Mar 2011

—Alan Kay Doug Engelbart worked in the world that the Plutocrats ruled, but made the world in which we live. He drew inspiration from the visions of the Patriarchs, and they funded his campaign against the culture of the Plutocrats. As an army radio operator in the Philippines just after World War II, Engelbart read Bush’s seminal article, “As We May Think,” and its vision sustained him all the way through graduate school and into his first positions in California. Engelbart devoted his life to developing a new way to think about computers—not data processing machines 157 GENERATIONS as per the Plutocrats, but instead augmenters of the human intellect.14 He did his major work of this period at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), near Stanford University, where he was supported by funding from Licklider’s DARPA, because Licklider understood that Engelbart’s work took the modes of participation and linked them to the goal of augmentation.

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Like the sidebars, the historical narrative concentrates on personal stories, with two figures from each generation discussed at length, and a concentration on the ways in which the memes of simulation and participation developed and intertwined over the years. The first generation, the Patriarchs, established these foundational memes in the early years after World War II. They were followed by the Plutocrats, who turned computing into a business during the 1950s and 1960s. In opposition to the profit-minded Plutocrats, the 1960s and 1970s brought us the Aquarians, who proposed the visual, personalized, networked computers. In the 1980s and 1990s, the Hustlers took this vision and turned it into a commodity, getting it on to desktops worldwide. The next generation, that of the Hosts, connected these machines together into a truly World Wide Web, and pushed participation to the next level.

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I characterize the first generation as the patriarchs—here represented by the idiosyncratic visionary/bureaucrat/scientists 143 GENERATIONS Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider—who establish the founding memes in the early years after World War II through the early 1960s. They are followed in turn by the Plutocrats— Thomas Watson Sr. and Thomas Watson Jr. of IBM—who make a business out of computing, centralizing the operations into top-down bureaucracies during the 1950s and 1960s. In reaction to the buttoned-down, all-business attitudes of the Plutocrats, the Aquarians of the 1960s and 1970s—people like Douglas Englebart and Alan Kay—expand on the more openended ideas of the Patriarchs, and develop the paradigm of visual, personalized, networked computing.

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

Walker’s letter had squarely blamed the very elites who give back through philanthropy for ignoring their complicity in causing the problems they later seek to solve. Before writing the letter, Walker had been universally popular with the plutocrats, which isn’t to say that everyone disliked what he had written. Robert Rubin, late of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and the Treasury Department, told Walker he loved the letter, finding it “fresh and different.” He said he had “never read anything that did that.” But many plutocrats objected to Walker’s shining the spotlight on inequality, instead of the issues they were more comfortable talking about, like poverty or opportunity. They disliked that he framed the issue in a way that blamed them rather than inviting them to participate in a solution.

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Tech companies like Uber and Airbnb cast themselves as empowering the poor by allowing them to chauffeur people around or rent out spare rooms. Management consultants and Wall Street brains seek to convince the social sector that they should guide its pursuit of greater equality by assuming board seats and leadership positions. Conferences and idea festivals sponsored by plutocrats and big business host panels on injustice and promote “thought leaders” who are willing to confine their thinking to improving lives within the faulty system rather than tackling the faults. Profitable companies built in questionable ways and employing reckless means engage in corporate social responsibility, and some rich people make a splash by “giving back”—regardless of the fact that they may have caused serious societal problems as they built their fortunes.

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He became, like the elites he assailed, the establishment figure who falsely casts himself as a renegade. He became the rich, educated man who styles himself as the ablest protector of the poor and uneducated—and who insists, against all evidence, that his interests have nothing to do with the change he seeks. He became the chief salesman for the theory, rife among plutocratic change agents, that what is best for powerful him is best for the powerless, too. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of a culture that tasks elites with reforming the very systems that have made them and left others in the dust. One thing that unites those who voted for Trump and those who despaired at his being elected is a sense that the country requires transformational reform.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

He could not sleep, he said, because he saw inequality generating envy, hatred and social warfare. He was worried stiff by the prospect of revolt. Addressing his well-heeled audience, he concluded, ‘It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.’ One feels Johann’s pain. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Seattle, venture capitalist and fellow plutocrat Nick Hanauer, another who drew his first fat cheques from a dynastic family business, albeit one making feather bedding rather than cigarettes, was worrying about pitchforks aimed in his direction and his ‘fellow 0.01ers’. In his dreams, he feared the sans-culottes of the French Revolution, who sent the aristocrats to the guillotine.

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It and Southeast Asian countries such as Malaysia and Singapore have become rentier economies, with the means to invest in rich countries and buy up companies and other assets. They have accumulated large cash hoards by keeping labour costs low, which constrains consumption at home. Concentrated in the hands of a few plutocrats and a growing elite, this ‘savings glut’ has created a stock of funds to invest in assets all over the world, much of it in property. China has become a special rentier economy. State-owned enterprises spearheaded its export-led industrialisation, helped by subsidies and low wages. The resultant trade surpluses, alongside capital inflows, enabled China to accumulate vast foreign currency reserves.

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It is a Ponzi scheme, a sleight of hand that creates a vehicle for generating rental income, until the resultant bubble bursts, as similar bubbles have burst with impressive frequency since the 1980s.32 If nothing else, the rentier economy creates a rollercoaster ride, causing havoc and misery in its wake. THE GREAT GATSBY CURVE Adam Smith, father of mainstream economics, suggested that a man ‘must be rich or poor according to the quantity of labour which he can command’. On that basis, today’s plutocrats are the richest men (and women) in history, not just because they are wealthier, but because their money gives them unprecedented power. In the First Gilded Age, the world’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller, could have hired 116,000 US workers with the income from his wealth. In 2004, Carlos Slim, who rivals Bill Gates as the world’s richest man, could have hired 440,000 of his fellow Mexicans with his annual income, not wealth.33 By 2014, he could have hired 2 million Mexicans.34 Growing inequality is commonly attributed to the weakened bargaining position of workers vis-à-vis capital, due to globalisation and technological change.

The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
by David C. Korten
Published 1 Jan 2001

Calvinist belief in human depravity affirms the underlying dehumanizing premise of neoliberal economics that humans are by nature Inauspicious Beginning 165 capable only of selfish acts. This belief, combined with the belief in the superior righteousness of those blessed with wealth and power, provides a foundation for an easy alliance between contemporary religious theocrats and contemporary corporate plutocrats. The theocrats affirm the moral righteousness of the plutocrats, and the plutocrats provide media and funding support for politicians committed to the theocrats’ restrictive social agenda. GENOCIDE When Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island to “discover” America in 1492, a generous Native people greeted him warmly with food, water, and other gifts.

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Then a deeper cultural challenge began to emerge. 217 218 PART III: AMERIC A, THE UNFINISHED PROJECT CULTURAL AND ECONOMIC CHALLENGES TO EMPIRE The 1960s were a time of cultural ferment. A new generation told the corporate plutocrats, “We don’t buy into your consumerism and your wars.” It told the theocrats, “We have no use for your narrow interpretations of biblical authority and rigid standards of sexual morality.” African Americans and women of all races were telling both plutocrats and theocrats, “We reject your efforts to define us as something less than fully human; we demand recognition of our humanity.” Traditional lines of authority, including those of the traditional family, were eroding.

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In addition to the political and military threat of the Soviet Union, several nations of Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore, were developing strong export-oriented economies that were challenging U.S. corporations at home and abroad. Other nations were telling U.S. corporate plutocrats: “We can play the game of global competition better than you can, even on your home turf.” These developments threatened not only the hegemony of U.S. corporations but also the jobs of American workers. Elitist plutocrats and theocrats felt the foundations of their power and privilege eroding. Empire was at risk. The movement to choose a more democratic human future was in ascendance. Earth Community was in gestation.

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla
Published 21 Jan 2014

All other things being equal, it is probably normal that the number of certifications should be higher for countries with a large market and a higher than average purchasing power. This plutocratic bias leads to a major contradiction, however: the genuine ‘targets’ of Fair Trade tend to be sidestepped in favour of exotic clients entering the FT system simply because they are fortunate to live in a country with a larger than average market. Thus, dependent countries among the poorest on the planet tend to be excluded in favour of others such as India, Mexico and South Africa that have less of a need for Fair Trade a priori. Another way of illustrating this plutocratic bias is to look at the regional distribution of hired labour organisations (25 per cent of the total of organisations having received FT certification in 2009).

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Chapter 5 addresses the global impact of this movement. Indeed, there is often a major confusion between the local impact and the global impact of Fair Trade. This is unfortunate. It is by examining the functions of the movement on a global level that the main argument of this book is made, namely that Fair Trade is based on a plutocratic logic: speaking on behalf of the poor, but really being at the service of the less poor and the richer. In some way, Fair Trade needs the poor more than the poor need Fair Trade. 7 Sylla T02779 01 text 7 28/11/2013 13:04 1 On the Inequalities of the International Trade System It is a very common clever device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him.

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In fact, in the area of bilateral trade, empirical research has isolated two crucial determinants: the geographical distance between countries and their economic size. It seems in reality that international trade is all about ‘clubs’: all other things being equal, the rich trade more with other rich than with the poor. This is justified by their different levels of development.20 Evidence of this is that, outside of all plutocratic logic, it is difficult to identify a consistent pattern to the expansion of FT certification in some areas of the globe. In sub-Saharan Africa, the country with the richest economy (in GDP terms), South Africa, tops FT certification demand with 54 out of a total of 260 in 2009. Its two major FT products are ‘fresh fruit and vegetables’ and ‘wine grapes’, products that are not part of the country’s top ten exports.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

The Ivy League universities also continued to admit scholarship boys: in 1900, the year that Franklin Delano Roosevelt went up to Harvard, the position of top feeder school was occupied not by Groton or St Paul’s (eighteen students) but by Boston Latin (thirty-eight students).63 But they were also corrupted by the plutocratic times. The children of privilege increasingly set the tone. Francis Landey Patton, the president of Princeton, boasted that his university was ‘the finest country club in America’. The Yale Class of 1905 invented the following ditty. ‘Never since the Heavenly Host with all the Titans fought/Saw they a class whose scholarship/Approached so close to naught.’

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Too often the spirit of the Ivy League was defined by exclusive clubs where the children of the elite made friends for life: the Skull and Bones at Yale, the Hasty Pudding at Harvard and the ‘breathlessly aristocratic’ Ivy at Princeton, which took in only eleven men a year, one fewer than Jesus Christ. The threat from the 1 per cent was not confined to the plutocrats: the Jacksonians were right that old families were always in danger of turning into ruling dynasties. The Boston Brahmins were America’s version of Britain’s intellectual aristocracy: a group of about forty families who relied on the power of their intellects rather than their landholdings (the big difference was that America’s intellectual aristocracy was descended from successful businesspeople).

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Those working-class children who make it through school and university face a lengthening ladder, containing post-graduate degrees, internships and study periods abroad, which it is hard to climb without money, connections and somewhere to stay, rent free, in expensive global cities. The more social mobility depends on endurance rather than on being spotted early by the elite and given a scholarship, the bigger the advantage of people who have abundant resources.28 Powerful cultural forces are also pulling society in different directions: the merito-plutocratic elite has become more conservative when it comes to family values even as the working class has become more bohemian. The best evidence for this cultural division, and what it means for the next generation, can be found in the United States, in part because the problem is most advanced there, and in part because American social scientists, on both the left and the right, have treated the problem with the seriousness it deserves.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

FTE sector people do not experience many of the urban problems as they live separately and only visit cities when they want to. Many of them probably think that America’s urban troubles belong to a separate, less developed country. Some of the very rich, the plutocrats, are moving now into tall glass towers in center cities. These well-maintained apartment buildings are very different from the underfunded buildings containing subsidized urban housing. The plutocrats travel in their own cars or car services; they seldom take public transportation. They often are not raising children in the city, and they send their children to private schools if they are. They are in the city, but only partially engaged in urban activities.6 The disadvantages of black students extended into some new suburbs.

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This well-known graph comes from Thomas Piketty, author of Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, and his colleagues who have developed data for the richest 1 percent of the population for many countries as far back as the data allow. The top group in figure 1 contains 20 percent of the population, and the path of what is called the “one percent” shows the pattern. Chrystia Freeland calls this group “the plutocrats.” A graph of the next 19 percent looks like figure 3, albeit not quite as steep. And a graph of college graduates—representing something close to the top 30 percent of the population—shows that the educational premium has risen as well. The higher one goes in the income distribution, the more rapid the growth of incomes in recent decades, and the pattern of differential growth extends to the upper 20 percent of the income distribution.2 Figure 3 Top 1 percent income share in the United States Source: http://www.wid.world/ Graphs like figures 2 and 3 have become common since the global financial crisis of 2008, although the two curves often are discussed by different people.

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This study provides a window into the attitudes and preferences of the one-percent group, which wants to reduce government activities in order to reduce government deficits. They do not want their taxes raised to lower government deficits, and they favor tax cuts when they can get them.3 The one-percenters were introduced by Chrystia Freeland as follows in Plutocrats: “They are becoming a trans global community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.” And she concluded with the comment of a businessman: “the per capita consumption of the Western middle class would have to decline as the developed and developing worlds ‘meet somewhere in the middle.’”4 Moving upward in the income distribution—and downward in table 7.1—the 1 percent of the 1 percent are more intensely focused on lower taxes than the 1 percent group as a whole.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

Organisations like Oxfam, torn between doing so and legitimising the event and missing the chance to highlight the situation of the poor and powerless in the gaze of the world’s press, opt for attending. Forty heads of state attended Davos 2014. It’s now become a venue for side meetings to address major geopolitical issues – like the Syrian crisis. Evidently a global plutocrats’ forum is seen as an appropriate setting for them; at least business interests will be represented. (Well, plutocrat politicians are there anyway, so why not make global diplomacy come to them?) And business has major interests in wars, particularly resource wars, as was so clear in Halliburton’s, G4S’s and other companies’ involvement in the Iraq war.

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Boris Johnson looks to intelligence to explain equality gap’, 28 November, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/11/28/iq-intelligence-boris-johnson-_n_4355372.html. 8 Bourdieu, P. (1993) Sociology in question, London: Sage, p 14. 9 Chakrabortty, A. (2013) ‘Looking for a party funding scandal: try David Cameron’s Conservatives’, Guardian, 8 July, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/08/party-funding-scandal-david-cameron-conservatives. 10 Froud, J. et al. (2012) ‘Groundhog Day: elite power, democratic disconnects and the failure of financial reform in the UK’, CRESC Working Paper No 108, University of Manchester, p 16, http://www.cresc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Groundhog%20Day%20Elite%20power,%20democratic%20disconnects%20and%20the%20failure%20of%20financial%20reform%20in%20the%20UK%20CRESC%20WP108%20(Version%202).pdf. 11 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2011) ‘Tory Party funding from City doubles under Cameron’, 8 February, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/02/08/city-financing-of-the-conservative-party-doublesunder-cameron/. 12 The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (2011) ‘Hedge funds, financiers and private equity make up 27% of Tory funding’, 30 September, http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/09/30/hedgefunds-financiers-and-private-equity-tycoons-make-up-27-of-tory-funding/. 13 Hutton, W. (2010) Them and us, London: Little, Brown, p 179. 14 Powerbase (2001) ‘New Labour: donors’, http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/New_Labour:_Donors. 15 Peston, R. (2008) ‘Pointing fingers at the plutocrats’, Telegraph, 26 January, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/2783334/Pointing-fingers-at-the-plutocrats.html. 16 Wintour, P. (2013) ‘Labour backer says £1.65m donation was given in shares to avoid tax’, Guardian, 6 June, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/jun/06/labour-party-backer-donation-tax. Giving shares was also a smart way of making sure New Labour supported his business, as the value of the shares would have fallen if it didn’t. 17 Chakrabortty (2013). 18 However, according to Robert Reich, the identities of many of the donors are hidden: hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into political advertisements without a trace of where the money is coming from.

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Tax avoidance and evasion cost £260 million a day’, 13 September, http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2013/09/13/benefit-errors-cost-1-million-a-day-tax-avoidance-and-evasion-cost-260-million-a-day/. 20 Indiviglio, D. (2011) ‘In Norway everyone’s income is public – and so is tax paid’, The Atlantic, 23 July, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/in-norway-everyones-income-is-public-and-so-is-tax-paid/242386/; Tax Justice Network (2011) ‘Finland publishes all tax receipts in public’, 2 November, http://taxjustice.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/finland-publishes-all-personal-tax.html. 21 There are also smaller subsidies that benefit the rich, which could be cut, including subsidies to landowners of grouse moors (£56 per hectare); these actually damage the environment by damaging peat, by CO2 emissions from burning heather and by limiting biodiversity. See Monbiot, G. (2014) ‘This cash for grouse scandal shows how Britain became a plutocrats’ paradise’, Guardian, 29 April, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/28/britain-plutocrats-landed-gentry-shotgun-owners. 22 Smith, A. (1976) [1776] The wealth of nations, ed. E. Cannan, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, vol 1, bk I, ch IX, p 110. This fits Apple perfectly, for example. 23 In Britain, the Living Wage Foundation defined a living wage – geared to the cost of living – as £7.65 per hour (London £8.80) in January 2014, while the government’s minimum wage was set at £6.31: http://www.livingwage.org.uk/what-living-wage. 24 Richard Duncan argues that an increase in low hourly wages from $3 to $4 would boost demand by a third but would increase export prices much less – 2–3%, he estimates (in Blackburn, R. (2011) Age shock, London: Verso).

Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
by Jane Mayer
Published 19 Jan 2016

Obama’s inaugural address lived up to his worst dreams. The freshly sworn-in president all but declared war on the notion that markets work best when government regulates them least. “Without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control,” Obama warned. Then, sounding almost as if he were taking aim directly at corporate plutocrats like those gathered in Indian Wells, Obama declared that “the nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous.” It was against this threatening political backdrop that Charles Koch mustered what a fellow conservative, Craig Shirley, described as “the mercantile Right” to take back, and if possible take over, American politics.

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In 2000, he paid $37 million for the palatial triplex that had previously belonged to John D. Rockefeller Jr. at 740 Park Avenue, the same Manhattan co-op building in which David Koch bought an apartment three years later. By the time Obama was elected, Schwarzman had become something of a poster boy for Wall Street excess. As Chrystia Freeland writes in her book Plutocrats, the June 21, 2007, initial public offering of stock in Blackstone, his phenomenally successful private equity company, “marked the date when America’s plutocracy had its coming-out party.” By the end of the day, Schwarzman had made $677 million from selling shares, and he retained additional shares then valued at $7.8 billion.

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Today, they are commonplace, and rarely controversial, but Americans across the political spectrum once regarded the whole idea of private foundations with enormous suspicion. These aggregations of private wealth, intruding into the public arena, were seen as a form of unelected and unaccountable plutocratic power. The practice began in the Gilded Age with John D. Rockefeller, whose philanthropic adviser Rev. Frederick Gates warned him with alarm, “Your fortune is rolling up, rolling up like an avalanche! You must keep up with it! You must distribute it faster than it grows!” In response, in 1909 Rockefeller sought legal permission from Congress to obtain a federal charter to set up a general-purpose private foundation whose broad mission was to prevent and relieve suffering and promote knowledge and progress.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

It is spurred by the ideology of money-making, which is the ideology that underlies capitalist globalization, and it is made possible thanks to the mobility of capital. But in addition, both political capitalism and the trend toward plutocratic rule in liberal capitalism “normalize” it. I have argued in Chapter 3 that corruption is an intrinsic part of political capitalism. The time has come to normalize corruption: we need to see corruption, in both types of capitalism, as a return (analogous to a rent) to a special factor of production, political power, which some individuals possess and others do not. Corruption is bound to increase with globalization, political capitalism, and plutocratic rule. Economists, who are not moralists, should treat corruption like any other type of income.

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The objective is to reduce the ability of the rich to control the political process and form a durable upper class. Or convergence of liberal and political capitalisms? An altogether different evolution of liberal capitalism would be a movement toward a plutocratic and ultimately political capitalism. This scenario is also possible—and the stronger the plutocratic features in today’s liberal capitalism become, the more likely such an evolution is. It would be an evolution to a large extent compatible with the interests of the new elite that is being formed under liberal capitalism. It would enable the elite to be much more autonomous from the rest of society.

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In fact, as shown in Chapter 2, the preservation of the elite requires its control of the political domain, what I called “tying up the knot on wealth and power.” The more economic and political power in liberal capitalism become united, the more liberal capitalism becomes plutocratic and comes to resemble political capitalism. In the latter, political control is the way to acquire economic benefits; in plutocratic, formerly liberal, capitalism, economic power is used to conquer politics. The end point of the two systems becomes the same: unification and persistence of the elites. Elites may also believe that they are able to run society more effectively by using the technocratic toolkit of political capitalism.

Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of an American Aristocracy
by Michael Knox Beran
Published 2 Aug 2021

For there was “nothing mean or hard” in her: she was “lovely, and slim, and gracious,” a creature “without envy or guile.” * * * WHAT BABE HAD, BESIDES DECENCY, was the WASP desire to rise above the Yankee passion for utility, to overcome the antipathy to graces that make life bearable. In this Bill Paley, with his plutocrat-gangster manners, could not help her, and at all events he soon lost interest in her and “abandoned her sexually,” though she was scarcely forty. He went back to his first love, C.B.S., and to flings with sundry women; she was left to manage the houses and head the best-dressed list. Yet even as she was consigned to this ornamental role, she was conscious of its vapidity.

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Here his fellow Roosevelts could help him. He dined in the White House with Cousin Eleanor and Cousin Franklin and spent Christmas Day with them; he was impressed by their WASP good taste, a “style of life” that seemed to him “pretty close to the perfect style of an American President.” For there was no plutocratic gaucherie about the Roosevelts; they lived, Joe thought, “like a rather old-fashioned American gentleman’s family in ‘comfortable circumstances,’ ” and there was nothing in their manner of life “that could be said in the smallest degree to be glossy, or particularly conspicuous, or likely to meet with the approval of the new group known as the ‘beautiful people.’ ” The food in the Roosevelt White House was, Joe admitted, execrable, for Cousin Eleanor, in her “extreme puritanism,” thought it virtuous to eat badly.

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“In the reaction after the colossal struggle of the Civil War,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “our strongest and most capable men” threw their “whole energy into business, into moneymaking, into the development, and above all the exploitation and exhaustion at the most rapid rate possible, of our natural resources…” These industrialists and plutocrats were, Roosevelt said, “shortsighted and selfish,” but they were also masterful. Under their alien regime the descendants of the Brahmins—the New England statesmen and sages who had done so much to build the Republic—found themselves reduced in stature, smaller than their ancestors had been. They could no longer play the part, Edmund Wilson said, of a “trained and public-spirited caste,” for not only did the new society not “recognize them,” it forced them to make their way in “a world that broke” many of them.

The New Urban Crisis: How Our Cities Are Increasing Inequality, Deepening Segregation, and Failing the Middle Class?and What We Can Do About It
by Richard Florida
Published 9 May 2016

To take but one example: just six metro areas—the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Boston, Washington, DC, San Diego, and London—attract nearly half of all high-tech venture capital investment across the entire world.5 The rise of this winner-take-all urbanism creates a new kind of inequality between cities, with the economic gulf growing wider and wider between the winners and the much broader ranks of other cities that have lost their economic footing as a result of globalization, deindustrialization, and other factors. The second dimension is the crisis of success that vexes these same superstar cities. These winners face extraordinarily high and increasingly unaffordable housing prices and staggering levels of inequality. In these places, mere gentrification has escalated into what some have called “plutocratization.”6 Some of their most vibrant, innovative urban neighborhoods are turning into deadened trophy districts, where the global super-rich park their money in high-end housing investments as opposed to places in which to live. It’s not just musicians, artists, and creatives who are being pushed out: growing numbers of economically advantaged knowledge workers are seeing their money eaten up by high housing prices in these cities, and they have started to fear that their own children will never be able to afford the price of entry in them.

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In 2013 and 2014, for example, foreign buyers (including residents and nonresidents of the city) purchased almost half of the £1 million–plus residences sold in prime central London locations. The increasingly ferocious competition for space in London’s poshest districts means that what we used to think of as gentrification is morphing into a new phase of plutocratization or “oligarchification.” According to a 2016 London School of Economics study, it is no longer just the poor and the working class who are being pushed out of the city’s upscale neighborhoods, but long-established elites and old-money families who are losing out and in some cases being driven out by much wealthier foreign buyers.

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No one is going to feel sorry for rich people who are selling their homes to wealthy foreigners for astronomical sums and humongous profits, especially in cities where inequality is reaching record levels, where working people can’t afford to live, and the poor are packed into areas of concentrated disadvantage. Still, it highlights the extent to which certain highly prized areas of superstar cities are being turned into gilded enclaves for a global plutocracy of largely absentee owners.8 It’s not just wealthy plutocrats who are buying into superstar cities. Giant corporations, real estate investment trusts, hedge funds, and sovereign wealth funds are investing huge amounts in real estate there as well. Global cities expert Saskia Sassen estimated that by 2015 corporations had accumulated more than $1 trillion in urban real estate.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

CHAPTER TWO 1James Wallace and Jim Erickson, Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). 2See Simon Atkinson, ‘Hedge Fund Hippies Have Trip Out’, BBC, 8 June 2006, news.bbc.co.uk. 3Quoted in Freeland, Plutocrats, 58. 4Simon Johnson, ‘The Quiet Coup’, The Atlantic, May 2009. 5Quoted in Freeland, Plutocrats, 67. 6Zoe Williams, ‘Philanthro-Capitalism May Sound Ugly, But It Could Be the Future’, Guardian, 30 March 2012. 7John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 3. 8Ibid., 12. 9Barry Malone, ‘We Got This, Bob Geldof, so Back Off’, Al Jazeera, 18 November 2014, aljazeera.com. 10Jeffrey Skoll, ‘Preface’, in Alex Nicholls, ed., Social Entrepreneurship: New Models of Sustainable Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), vi. 11Quoted in Nicholls, Social Entrepreneurship, 45. 12Roger Martin and Sally Osberg, ‘Social Entrepreneurship: The Case For Definition’, Stanford Social Innovation Review (Spring 2007), 38. 13Ruth McCambridge, ‘Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation: Are They Potentially in Conflict?’

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Noted historian of US history Olivier Zunz suggests that Pew’s alliance with Graham was a canny political power play. It was a masterstroke enabling Pew ‘to advocate a political agenda as part of God’s design for America’.65 On the other side of the political spectrum, those on the left complained that foundations were elitist and plutocratic, serving mostly to rehabilitate the image of industrialists who earned their fortunes through predatory, often illegal actions. Large foundations such as the Carnegie, Ford, and today, the Gates Foundation, are often sole sources of income for smaller non-profit organizations. The power invested in foundations has led, as Dowie writes, to numerous complaints over the ‘secretive’, ‘rigid’, and ‘ideologically motivated’ nature of foundation funding processes.

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Instead, they act as lucrative gifts for established corporations that seek to dominate markets by keeping small players at bay.27 The system mostly benefits that strata of the international elite that Chrystia Freeland, a former Reuters executive and current Member of Parliament in Canada, terms ‘rent-seeking plutocrats – those who owe their fortunes chiefly to favourable political decisions’.28 The more stringent property rights become, the more serious a toll they take on the US economy, limiting the ability of smaller firms to compete against big guns such as Microsoft or IBM.29 Adam Smith once warned of this very problem.

Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible
by Stephen Braun and Douglas Farah
Published 1 Apr 2008

The idea of minority rights, whether they were investors or Russian voters, were pretty much being trampled.” By the late 1990s, Wolosky had become an outspoken critic of the Russian political scene, worried that the plutocrats were hijacking the nation’s struggling economy and co-opting its political leaders. He took a fellowship at the Council of Foreign Relations and began drafting an article for Foreign Affairs, the council’s influential journal. Researching through early 1999, Wolosky aimed directly at Russia’s new president. In “Putin’s Plutocrat Problem,” Wolosky predicted bleakly that Putin would do little to fight the culture of corruption long tolerated by his predecessor Boris Yeltsin.

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An expert on Russian organized crime and political corruption, Wolosky quickly seized on the Bout operation as the quintessential symbol of the unforeseen perils of the new age—stateless rogue organizations that offered material support to any armed camp willing to pay for their services. Wolosky had worked in Moscow at the dawn of Russia’s chaotic experiment with capitalism, and had grown alarmed at the emergence of its powerful new class of plutocrats and gangsters. But Bout, Wolosky felt keenly, had risen beyond them, posing a clear and present international danger—more for his ability to carry things than for the things he carried. “Viktor Bout was a bigger problem than just moving weapons,” Wolosky said. “He had a logistics network, the best in the world.”

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Wolosky returned to Harvard for two years of law school, then took up with a New York corporate law firm, handling mergers, acquisitions, and boardroom fights. He kept getting tugged back into Russian affairs, retained by big-money Western investors who had been burned in their dealings with Russia’s new generation of corporate plutocrats. In one case he represented American industrialist Kenneth Dart in a lawsuit against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire Russian banker who had taken over Yukos, the country’s largest oil company. Dart had complained that Khodorkovsky, the wealthiest man in Russia, had weakened his investments in Yukos subsidiaries by reorganizing the firm.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

In a capitalist economy, it is normal for a large proportion of the wealth to be inherited. It is normal for its distribution to be highly unequal. It is normal for a plutocratic elite, once formed, to use its political power to shape the economy to its own advantages. And it is normal for this to put a drag on economic growth. Rapid growth like that which occurred between 1945 and 1973, after all, requires creative destruction; and, because it is the plutocrats’ wealth that is being destroyed, they are unlikely to encourage it. Why, then, did the neoliberal era last? It had pointed out that social democracy was no longer delivering the rapid progress toward utopia that it had delivered in the first post–World War II generation.

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Far from lightening humanity’s daily toil, the era’s technology merely “enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.”26 One word of Mill’s stands out to me: “imprisonment.” Yes, Mill saw a world with more and richer plutocrats and a larger middle class. But he also saw the world of 1871 as not just a world of drudgery—a world in which humans had to work long and tiring hours. He saw it as not just a world in which most people were close to the edge of being desperately hungry, not just a world of low literacy—where most could only access the collective human store of knowledge, ideas, and entertainments partially and slowly.

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And not least of Winston’s excellences as a wartime prime minister was that he was half American, and so knew how to talk to America, and particularly how to talk to then American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Though the redwood forests of northern California contain shrines to the Boddhisatva Guan-Yin, migration from China to European-settled California and to the rest of the temperate-climate settler colonies and ex-colonies was quickly shut down. Plutocrats such as Leland Stanford (the railroad baron and governor of California who founded and endowed Stanford University in memory of his son) might have favored immigration, but the populists favored exclusion. For the most part, they were unable to staunch the flow of Europeans and Eastern Europeans, but they were largely able to enforce “Chinaman go home.”

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

It’s a contemporaneous show, she argues, because there is a “profound similarity between the vast economic, social, and political changes that drive the action in ‘Downton Abbey’ and our own time.”65 In our digital age of perpetual creative destruction, Freeland says, technology companies like Google, Uber, and Facebook are, on the one hand, enabling the vast personal fortunes of twenty-first-century Internet plutocrats like Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick; and, on the other, wrecking the lives of a woman like Pam Wetherington, the nonunionized worker at Amazon’s Kentucky warehouse who was fired after suffering stress fractures in both feet after walking for miles on the warehouse’s concrete floor. But there is one important difference between Downton Abbey and Silicon Valley, Freeland reminds us. “With their lavish lifestyles, the aristocrats of ‘Downton Abbey’ may seem like a 20th-century version of our own plutocrats, but they are not,” she says, because today’s “aristocracy of talent” have “all the perks and few of the traditional values” of the old Downton Abbey aristocracy.”66 And so, in the Silicon Valley of 2014, there are all the social and economic hierarchies of 1914 without any of what Freeland calls “the social constraints” of the old aristocracy.

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So much for those “decentralizing, globalizing, harmonizing and empowering” qualities that Nicholas Negroponte promised would be a “force of nature” of the digital age. Jeff Bezos would, of course, disagree, arguing, no doubt, that such a generalization is a narrative fallacy. But he’d be wrong. The real force of nature in the digital age is a winner-take-all economy that is creating increasingly monopolistic companies like Amazon and multibillionaire plutocrats like Bezos himself. The Code Is Cracked Despite the metaphysical promises of digital prophets like Nicholas Negroponte and Kevin Kelly, the early generation of Internet businesses in what is now called the “Web 1.0” age, such as Amazon, Netscape, Yahoo, and eBay, weren’t very innovative. Nobody has ever used terms like Amazonomics, Netscapenomics, or eBaynomics to compliment their business models; nobody has ever claimed that these companies had cracked the code on Internet profits.

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But, you see, Spiegel’s minuscule app company—which, six months after rejecting Facebook’s $3 billion deal, was negotiating a new round of financing with the Chinese Internet giant Alibaba at a rumored $10 billion valuation49—isn’t really as tiny as it seems. Its “workers” actually include around 25% of all cell phone users in the United Kingdom and 50% of all cell phone users in Norway, who, according to Spiegel, “actively” use the Snapchat app.50 Data factories are eating the world. But while this has created a coterie of boy plutocrats like Evan Spiegel, Kevin Systrom, and Tumblr’s twenty-seven-year-old CEO, David Karp, it certainly isn’t making the rest of us rich. You see, for the labor we invest in adding intelligence to Google, or content to Facebook, or photos to Snapchat, we are paid zero. Nothing at all, except the right to use the software for free.

The New Class Conflict
by Joel Kotkin
Published 31 Aug 2014

This takes our discussion beyond the conventional, often hackneyed analysis of the distribution of wealth and instead focuses on significant changes within the upper classes. For one thing, the tech Oligarchs’ relationship to the general population, as both consumers and workers, diverges from that of traditional plutocrats. In the last century, many old-line industries, particularly larger firms, were forced to deal with their employees and their demands, often in the form of union agreements. As a result, whether unionized or not, large American firms that developed in the early and mid-twentieth century tended to be “very broad at the base and uncomfortably pointed at the top,” as one commentator observed.

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They tend to push politics in a direction amenable to both their interests and their personal tastes. The railroad tycoons, who famously controlled most legislatures and much of the Senate during the post–Civil War expansion, believed they should control the direction of the country, adhering to what one lobbyist called “the politics of business.” As one plutocrat said with amazing candor: “We are the rich; we own America; we got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it.”37 The new Oligarchy, and their allies in the Clerisy, are more subtle in their pronouncements. Nor should their efforts be dismissed as largely conspiratorial, or even malicious in intent.

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The Bay Area, particularly the Silicon Valley–San Francisco corridor, has become one of the most solidly and reliably liberal regions in the country, with leading tech companies sending four-fifths of their contributions to Democratic candidates.101 Along with the public sector, they present California as “the spiritual inspiration” for modern “progressives”—that is, reliable backers of President Obama and the mainstream Democratic Party—across the country.102 Energy and the environment represent arguably the most critical part of the tech political agenda. In their embrace of a strong opposition to fossil fuels, the Oligarchs are facing off against some of the nation’s most powerful, long-established plutocratic interests and wealthiest individuals. This assault on traditional energy reflects in part the relative lack of sensitivity by many tech firms to high electricity prices. If California electricity is too unreliable or expensive, firms such as Google or Yahoo can shift their power-consuming server farms to places with cheap electricity, such as the Pacific Northwest, Utah, or the Great Plains.103 Some of this shift is also driven by legitimate concerns about climate change.

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
by Bertrand Russell
Published 1 Jan 1935

In a few cases, it was not individual monarchs but communities that were glorified: the Acropolis at Athens and the Capitol in Rome showed forth the imperial majesty of those proud cities for the edification of subjects and allies. Aesthetic merit was considered desirable in public buildings, and, later on, in the palaces of plutocrats and emperors, but was not aimed at in the hovels of peasants or the rickety tenements of the urban proletariat. In the mediaeval world, in spite of a greater complexity in the social structure, the artistic motive in architecture was similarly restricted, indeed even more so, for the castles of the great were designed for military strength, and if they had beauty it was by accident.

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It is a remarkable fact that, in spite of the importance of economics to every man, woman, and child, the subject is almost never taught in schools and even in universities is learnt by a minority. Moreover, that minority do not learn the subject as it would be learnt if no political interests were at stake. There are a few institutions which teach it without plutocratic bias, but they are very few; as a rule, the subject is so taught as to glorify the economic status quo. All this, I fancy, is connected with the fact that superstition and mystery are useful to the holders of financial power. Finance, like war, suffers from the fact that almost all those who have technical competence also have a bias which is contrary to the interest of the community.

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Unitary town-planning, such as Sir Christopher Wren projected for London after the Great Fire, might do away with the hideousness and squalor of slums and suburbs and make modern cities beautiful, healthy, and pleasant. This example illustrates another of the arguments against private enterprise in our highly mobile world. The areas to be considered as units are too large to be dealt with by even the greatest plutocrats. London, for example, must be considered as a whole, since a large percentage of its inhabitants sleep in one part and work in another. Some important questions, such as the St. Lawrence waterway, involve vast interests spread over different parts of two countries ; in such cases, even a single Government does not cover a sufficient area.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

Identifiers: LCCN 2015043601 Subjects: LCSH: Equality. | Income distribution. | Globalization—Social aspects. | Globalization—Economic aspects. Classification: LCC HM821 .M555 2016 | DDC 305—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015043601 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Rise of the Global Middle Class and Global Plutocrats 2. Inequality within Countries Introducing Kuznets Waves to Explain Long-Term Trends in Inequality 3. Inequality among Countries From Karl Marx to Frantz Fanon, and Then Back to Marx? 4. Global Inequality in This Century and the Next 5. What Next? Ten Short Reflections on the Future of Income Inequality and Globalization Notes References Index Acknowledgments This book is the product of years of work on income inequality in general and, more specifically, on global income inequality.

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Yet there is a long way to go before this “I” becomes a “we.” I offer now to the reader the duty—or the pleasure—of taking the first step on the road to the study of global inequality, and perhaps ultimately to global governance, and the world as one. 1 The Rise of the Global Middle Class and Global Plutocrats Intercourse between nations spans the whole globe to such an extent that one may almost say all the world is but a single city in which a permanent fair comprising all commodities is held, so that by means of money all the things produced by the land, animals and human industry can be acquired and enjoyed by any person in his own home.

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(This means that approximately 12 percent of Americans are part of the global top 1 percent.)6 The rest are almost entirely from Western Europe, Japan, and Oceania. Of the remainder, Brazil, South Africa, and Russia each contribute 1 percent of their populations. We can call those in group C the “global plutocrats.” Comparison of groups B and C allows us to address another important cleavage. We have seen that group B, with zero or negligible gains from globalization, consists mainly of the lower middle class and the poorer segments of the rich countries’ populations. In contrast, group C, the winners of globalization, consists of the richer classes from these same countries.

Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition: What Has Gone Wrong With Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It
by Robert B. Reich
Published 3 Sep 2012

Connect these dots and you understand why we’ve come to where we are. We’re in a vicious cycle. Our economy and our democracy depend on it being reversed. The well-being of your children and grandchildren requires it. In Part One, I describe how the game is becoming rigged against average working people and in favor of wealthy plutocrats and large corporations. In Part Two, I explain the rise of the regressive right, a movement designed not to conserve what we have but to take America backward toward the social Darwinist ideas that prevailed in the late nineteenth century. In Part Three, I suggest what you can do to reverse this perilous course.

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Government is doing fewer of the things most of us want it to do—providing good public schools and affordable access to college, improving our roads and bridges and water systems, maintaining safety nets to catch people who fall, and protecting the public from dangers—and more of the things big corporations, Wall Street, and wealthy plutocrats want it to do. Some conservatives argue, like my composite e-mail correspondent, that we wouldn’t have to worry about big money taking over government if we had a smaller government to begin with. They say the reason big money is swamping our democracy is that a large government attracts big money.

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Eccles, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, described in the 1920s, when people “with great economic power had an undue influence in making the rules of the economic game.” With hefty campaign contributions and platoons of lobbyists and public relations spinners, America’s executive class has secured lower tax rates while resisting reforms that would spread the gains from growth to more Americans. But it’s unlikely that the plutocrats can retain their political clout forever. So many people have been hit by job losses, sagging incomes, and declining home values that Americans will eventually become mobilized. The question is not whether but when. Perhaps the Occupier movement marks the beginning. Americans have summoned the political will to take back our economy before, in even bleaker times.

Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century
by Georgina Adam
Published 14 Jun 2014

‘Clients don’t have time to hit the ground as much as I do,’ says the New York advisor Lisa Schiff, adding: ‘If you have a good advisor, they will help you sift through the machinations of the art world!’113 Couple this with the changing profile of collectors: ‘The rich of today are . . . different from the rich of yesterday,’ points out Chrystia Freeland in her book Plutocrats.114 Their wealth is, she says, ‘to a notable degree’ first or second generation. These extremely wealthy people are so busy making money that they do not have time to run around a globalized art world. The sheer amount of art on offer, artists to see, shows to attend and fairs to trawl through means that they delegate the buying to a trusted advisor.

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Potter, New York, 1984. 66 Judd Tully, ‘The ascent of Gerhard Richter: Charting the German painter’s rise from cool outsider to auction rockstar’, Blouin Artinfo, 6 January 2012, http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/806758/the-ascent-of-gerhard-richter-charting-the-german-painters-rise-from-cool-outsider-to-auction-rockstar. 67 This was offered by White Cube in 2007 for a published price of $100 million and ‘bought’ by a consortium that included Hirst himself, his financial advisor Frank Dumphy and dealer Jay Jopling as well the Ukrainian collector Victor Pinchuk. The Art Newspaper, December 2010, p.9. 68 There have been multiple studies and books on the subject of the growing wealth divide. Two are: Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality, W.W. Norton, New York, 2012, and Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 2012. 69 The Art Newspaper, March 2013, p.3. 70 This and further quotes from Michael Short: interview with the author, April 2013. 71 Talking Galleries symposium, Barcelona, September 2012. Paul Maenz closed his Berlin gallery in 1990. 72 ‘The Forbes Five: Hip-hop’s wealthiest artists 2013’, Forbes, 27 March 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/03/27/the-forbes-five-hip-hops-wealthiest-artists-2013. 73 The Shadow of Death (begun 1869), Manchester City Art Gallery.

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pagewanted=all&src=pm. 108 Interview with the author, September 2013. 109 Interview with the author, October 2013. 110 Interview with the author, October 2013. 111 Anonymous, interview with the author, May 2013. 112 Thompson, The $12 million Stuffed Shark, p.53. 113 This and further quotations: conversation with the author, October 2013. 114 Freeland, Plutocrats, p.4. 115 Perrotin has denied to me on a number of occasions that he gave his pass, saying he was the ‘fall guy’ for other dealers who had done the same thing. 116 Anonymous, conversation with the author, 2011. 117 Conversation with the author, Art Basel, 2011. 118 Kenny Schachter, ‘Further adventures in the Wade Guyton Market’, Gallerist, 22 October 2013, http://galleristny.com/2013/10/further-adventures-in-the-wade-guyton-market. 119 Conversation with the author, September 2013. 120 Thomas Seydoux, interview with the author, March 2013. 121 Thompson, The $12m Stuffed Shark, p.186. 122 Isabelle Graw, High Price – Art Between the Art Market and Celebrity Culture, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2009, p.73. 123 Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis (eds.), Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2012, pp 118–19. 124 Skate’s Art Market Research, ‘2012 Annual Investment Report Part 2’, Skate’s, February 2013, http://skatesart.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/skates-annual-art-investment-report-2012-part-2.pdf, p.11. 125 Interview with the author, 2013. 126 Anonymous, interview with the author, February 2013. 127 Conversation with the author, March 2013. 128 ‘The Art Basel effect: How the fair has impacted Miami’s economy’, AFA News, 30 November 2011, http://www.afanews.com/home/item/1095-the-art-basel-effect-how-the-fair-has-impacted-miami per centE2 per cent80 per cent99s-economy#.UcLO8PmTjKA. 129 Interview with the author, February 2013. 130 Conversation with the author, December 2013. 131 Anonymous, conversation with the author, May 2013. 132 Adam Lindemann, ‘Occupy Art Basel Miami Beach now!’

Freedom
by Daniel Suarez
Published 17 Dec 2009

"Nat--" "Even if we stop their plan, they'll still seize control of the Daemon." The music in the background didn't match the grimness of their predicament. Ross gazed at the distant party. "The plutocrat's ball." She nodded. "Celebrating their victory." Philips turned to see Ross come up alongside her and put a hand on her shoulder. She shook her head. "I gave it to them, Jon. We cracked Sobol's code, and I gave it to the plutocrats. The same API they'll use as a weapon against the world. How many generations will be reduced to slavery because of me?" "You couldn't have known." "I'm supposed to be able to find the real message in the noise, Jon.

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Once Loki's army is gathered, this whole place will be a war zone." "The Loki?" She sat on the arm of a nearby sofa and shook her head. "I can't leave, Jon." "Why not? This isn't your--" "Look, you have no idea how happy I am to see you, and I can't tell you how much it touches me that you risked your life to rescue me. But I can't go. The plutocrats are planning to execute some sort of cyber warfare attack. Physically storming this ranch won't stop it. I need to figure out what they're really up to and stop them. Luckily, I have some clues." She brought him over to a huge stack of documents on a nearby desk. "They've given me tech documentation on Operation Exorcist--but something about it doesn't make sense."

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Loki appeared to be sensing the world through the eyes of his numberless minions, through their sensors, scouring every inch of this place, every culvert--searching for people in hiding. He seemed ready to tear down every brick of the place until he found The Major. And in the process was apparently going to kill every one of the plutocrats who cowered in the massive house--along with their trophy wives and their pampered offspring. Loki seemed ready to make them all pay. Sebeck watched a video feed even now when a group of bankers tried to escape to the airfield to board their private jet and resume their lives as if this never happened.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

Mobility into the top echelon of the new world order is reliant on acquisition of knowledge, not birthright, not property held for generations, and not, sadly for many, loyalty to one’s work institution. But these new elites are not simply members of an economic group tied to one another by their financial success. They are not plutocrats or necessarily on top of the economic pyramid. Many who have acquired education and prize knowledge are indeed affluent labor market elites, but plenty are not. For this new class of people, knowledge is prized independently of its economic function. For bankers, lawyers, or engineers in this group, their education and specialized knowledge have enabled them to attain upward mobility in the world economy.

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They reveal their social position through much more subtle behaviors and goods that are not necessarily expensive but imply a rich cultural and social capital relegated to aspirational class membership. The members of the aspirational class are not the villains of Wall Street, Russian oligarchs buying up London and Manhattan, they are not plutocrats on private jets. They are no leisure class. Not all of them make enormous amounts of money, but they are educated and they prize knowledge and engage in consumer practices that reflect these values and cultural capital. Yet, these positive attributes may make the aspirational class even more pernicious than the superrich who are vilified in the media or the leisure class of the nineteenth century.

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What is most concerning about today’s elites is that behaviors that appear to be moral or value-laden choices are deeply embedded in socioeconomic position and many of these decisions are quotidian, not grand material signifiers. In fact, the media’s obsession with financial elites, oligarchs, and plutocrats’ extravagant lifestyles distracts from some of our far more pressing issues of cultural, social, and economic stratification. The lives of the superrich may be interesting, but these people have always existed and they do not make a significant impact on most of our lives. But the aspirational class, many of whom exist in the top 1%, 5%, and 10% income brackets, are a much larger force.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

The massive Wall Street bailouts after the Global Recession and Donald Trump’s 2017 tax heist clearly demonstrate which of these two political systems we are living in. It might sound hyperbolic, but it’s not impossible that the United States could become a one-party state, ruled by the dark money of a shadow Plutocratic Party. But we are not there yet. For now, economic elites are still invested in maintaining the façade of democracy, and here is where young American women can make a huge difference. If young women don’t get wise and start going to the polls to vote in their own long-term economic and political interests, they will have little power to reverse the inevitable social upheavals the future has in store.

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With women responsible for a growing heap of care work in the private sphere, their autonomy will shrink, and they will find themselves economically dependent and helpless to leave unsatisfying, violent, or emotionally abusive relationships. Some people will argue that it’s already too late and that our political system is too broken to be fixed. Certainly, if the plutocrats are stuffing ballot boxes or tampering with voting machines, the game is over, and American citizens have lost. Then we really need to start thinking about what to do next. But until then, our democratic process still offers the possibility of radical political change or what Bernie Sanders called a “revolution from below.”

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Millennial women have the demographic power to have an impact on our collective future, especially if they can convince their baby boomer parents that they’re going to have to fend for themselves if the Republicans finally get their way and dismantle Social Security. If the young manage to elect political leaders who make the government more responsive to the needs of its citizens, then the plutocrats, if they want to maintain the status quo, will have to abandon the façade of democracy altogether. When that happens, we will no longer be living in the United States of America, but in some other country governed by a different set of rules. While the first step is definitely voting (and mobilizing others to get out and vote), casting a ballot is not enough.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

Rockefeller and Thomas Edison financed the publication of Herbert Spencer’s works in the late nineteenth century,2 which argued, among other propositions, that millionaires stand at the top of a scala natura established by natural selection, with which we would be foolish to interfere, and that profound economic inequalities are both natural and necessary, global oligarchs have invested heavily in the infrastructure of persuasion. The newspapers they own and the think tanks they fund seek the best minds money can buy to produce brilliant and persuasive arguments in defence of the elite. For every independent voice with a national platform, there are one hundred working on behalf of plutocratic power. Of course, this role is not specified in their contracts. I doubt that many people ask themselves before writing a column or a position paper, ‘How can I best serve the interests of my billionaire proprietor today?’ But it does not take long to discover which positions and arguments secure your advancement, and which compromise it.

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When captured by certain ideologies, most forms of productivity and genius, which could otherwise be harnessed for good, can be mobilised to harm. The social utility of the more obviously productive professions is dependent on the ideological framework in which they operate, a framework shaped by competing voices. Voices that are independent of plutocratic power, that are able to articulate interests and perspectives at variance with its demands, are among the few means by which its capture of productive activity might be impeded. This is not to suggest that essayists and pundits, journalists and commentators, however independent and persuasive they may be, can change the world by themselves.

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In the US Congress, for the first time, a majority of members are millionaires.4 As the representatives become richer, the laws they pass ensure that they exercise ever less power over the rich and ever more power over the poor. Yet, as the Center for Responsive Politics notes, ‘There’s been no change in our appetite to elect affluent politicians to represent our concerns in Washington.’5 We appear to possess an almost limitless ability to sit back and watch as political life is seized by plutocrats, as the biosphere is trashed, as public services are killed or given to corporations, as workers are dragooned into zero-hour contracts. Though there are a few wonderful exceptions, on the whole protest is muted and alternatives are shrugged away without examination. How did we acquire this superhuman passivity?

Londongrad: From Russia With Cash; The Inside Story of the Oligarchs
by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley
Published 22 Jul 2009

During the meeting, Putin insisted that Potanin pay the $140 million he was alleged to owe on the purchase of Norilsk Nickel. At times the meeting became heated and at one stage the President pointed at a well-known tycoon and accused him of being guilty of ‘oligophrenia’ (which means ‘mental retardation’). The plutocrats were stunned. It was not the script they had been expecting. The new confrontational President concluded the meeting - which lasted two hours and forty minutes - by setting up a permanent mechanism for consultations between businessmen and the state. The days of cliques and coteries were gone, he warned.

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Doronin was educated in St Petersburg, the home city of Russia’s former and current presidents, Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev. A close friend of the present Mayor of Moscow, Yury Luzhkov, and his wife Yelena Baturina (at the last count, Russia’s only female dollar billionaire), Doronin is another plutocrat who likes to ensure that he keeps in with the political in-crowd. He made his first money as a raw cotton distributor in the former Soviet republics of Tajikstan and Uzbekistan and in 1993 set up Capital Group, a Moscow-based property company specializing in ‘luxury design property projects’, among them grandiose 100-apartment high-risers, Yacht City (a development on the Moscow River), and elite housing at Barvikha Hills, which is close to the Kremlin.

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A startled Abramovich pulled away and put his hands in his pockets, allowing the envelope to fall to the ground.3 ‘I think that he’d been watching too much television, because he seemed to think that if he didn’t have physical contact with it then the writ would not be served,’ said a Berezovsky aide.4 This extraordinary showdown was captured on Hermès’ CCTV and was later used in court as evidence in the case. It was a clear illustration of how the raw business methods of many of the new plutocrats - built on litigation, distrust, and security - had spilt over into the heartland of Londongrad. The ‘writ’ stemmed from 2001 when Berezovsky claimed that he had been ‘induced’ into selling valuable shares in two companies they jointly owned - the oil and metal giant Sibneft and the aluminium combine Rusal - to Abramovich at knockdown prices.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

After I became a social entrepreneur, the guys in that club sometimes made jabs about how nonprofits like mine didn’t run as well as their esteemed private companies, but most of the time, I was treated with respect and welcomed. I relished the influence they had shared with me, which I’d imagined were enough to level the playing field. Since I started exploring the possibility of writing this book in 2016, a lot has happened. Yet plutocratic power still won’t yield. “Twenty million Americans lost their jobs in the pandemic,” President Joe Biden remarked in a 2021 address to Congress. “At the same time, roughly 650 billionaires in America saw their net worth increase by more than $1 trillion.”2 Nearly all of these billionaires are white men.

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When rich white men talk about benefiting from luck as if it is distributed randomly, we obscure the structural advantages that underpin our success. Across the hundreds of Giving Pledge letters, almost none mention privilege, unearned advantage, systems that favor some people over others, or government policies that make extreme wealth accumulation possible. I think that plutocratic talk about luck is an adaptation of how Old Europe’s aristocrats discussed their standing in society. Aristocrats typically said they were “blessed,” a reference to the divine right that they claimed underpinned their political legitimacy. The rich white men spearheading America’s settler colonialism also described themselves as blessed; such ostensible blessings legitimized manifest destiny, the nineteenth-century concept that claimed that the United States’ dominion over North America was ordained by God.

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Part of the reason why such a competitive culture permeates throughout the nonprofit sector is that nonprofit organizations fight for scraps thrown to them by rich white men. When rich white men bestow good luck, we often prioritize those whose activities preserve our monopoly on power and resources, make us money, advance our political agendas, and—often our absolute favorite—those who claim to do all three. While many of those bankrolled by white male plutocrats have some power and impact, we are also beholden to the agendas of the investors and benefactors who sustain us. And as long as I did not question rich white men’s power and led initiatives that aligned with their worldviews, resources flowed in. While fundraising is never easy, many elites shared my goal of expanding charitable education programs, so funding opportunities at least existed for CollegeSpring.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

By August 2019, OMB had to concede that the deficit would exceed $1 trillion in the fiscal year that would begin October 1, 2019. Deficits are taxes postponed. They will eventually be repaid one way or another. Repaid how? And by whom? The interoperation of an increasingly dysfunctional democracy with an increasingly plutocratic economy implies that taxes avoided in the present by those best able to pay will be repaid in the future by the least able. It’s a grim formula and one that should badly cost this administration at the polls. But every election asks the inescapable question: Compared to what? Chapter Seven How to Lose to Trump Heading into the election of 1980, Republicans faced a dangerous dilemma.

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The tightest rule is that several years of returns—three?—be published on the date that a person accepts a major-party nomination for president; and that annual publication by a president be compulsory. Financial disclosure rules also need to be revised for modern times. The present rules were drafted in a less plutocratic era, to cast light on the finances of affluent professionals and successful business executives. They are utterly defeated by the network of trusts and closely held corporations in which the modern rich stash their assets—and, maybe even more important when those rich enter politics, their debts.

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To defeat Trump and to prevent new Trumps, the United States (and other advanced societies, too) must control their borders and strengthen their nationality and their social-insurance systems to foster the sense of belonging that has ebbed away as our societies become more diverse, more interconnected, more plutocratic. I get the merits of the case for covering the ten million or so illegal residents of the United States. The majority of those people have resided in the United States for more than a decade.23 What is to happen when those people get sick? Even more awkwardly: What is to happen when they grow old?

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back
by Guy Shrubsole
Published 1 May 2019

Professor Chris Hamnett likens it to water pouring into a three-bowl fountain: the money gushes into the super-prime districts first, but it soon overflows, raising house prices in surrounding districts. ‘People are being sequentially displaced,’ he warns. Empty mansions are just one, particularly glaring symbol of the increasingly free market in land and property in England, and how the country is being transformed by successive waves of new money. So who are the new plutocrats investing in England’s land and property? And what do they own? My definition of ‘new money’ in this chapter refers to a group of individuals who have acquired wealth and land since the Industrial Revolution – whether through industry, finance, oil, the entertainment business, or other riches.

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With the collapse of the Soviet Union came a third wave: an invasion of Russian oligarchs, arriving to spend the wealth they had filleted from former state industries and, in some cases, to escape Vladimir Putin. Meanwhile, Thatcher and her followers unleashed a fourth wave of home-grown buccaneering businessmen, who went on to spend their earnings on lavish mansions and country estates. But it was the Edwardian plutocrats who got the whole ball rolling. Fin-de-siècle England was a playground for the rich, both old and new: a gilded age of imperial complacency and vast inequality. It was a world in which parvenu industrialists rubbed shoulders with the landed gentry; where loaded American heiresses married into old English families, swapping cash for coronets; and where society portrait artists like John Singer Sargent flattered the upper classes with their paintings, the oil on their canvases oozing opulence.

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We’re all tax dodgers, aren’t we?’ Few contemporaries of the Vesteys were as tenacious at avoiding the taxman, but other self-made men followed their lead in acquiring land and titles, and setting up trusts to manage their landed estates. The plush red benches of the House of Lords began to fill up with plutocratic peers who had made their money in shipping, chemical manufacturing and banking. The era also saw the creation of the first literal press barons, such as Baron Iliffe, part-owner of the Daily Telegraph in the inter-war years, whose 8,000-acre Yattendon estate in West Berkshire I traversed in an earlier chapter.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

Why buy property in a coastal city that is likely to be flooded by rising water levels? Why not just sit back and have faith that Elon Musk will save us? For the governments who are genuinely committed to starving off an environmental Armageddon, a saner assumption is that Elon will flee to Mars (along with every fellow plutocrat wealthy enough to afford the ride) and watch the world burn from afar. One can always take the middle ground and refuse to succumb to excessive optimism or pessimism. One can simply assume the world is as it is and not take a moral stance in either direction, something that is known as the Just World Hypothesis (usually shortened to BJW or Belief in a Just World) and which is an amalgamation of nearly all optimistic fallacies mentioned above.

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Few things symbolized this better than the Economist’s headline urging readers to “vote Conservative” in 2001… for Tony Blair.23 Figure 4.2: The institutionalization of corruption Notes: The link between inequality and corruption is not particularly strong within the OECD, but something can definitely be said about the fact that all Anglo-Saxon countries (shaded in black) tend to cluster above the trend line, and all the Nordics (shaded in gray) below it. The US certainly finds itself exactly in the place you would expect a rich plutocratic country to be: the top left quadrant where inequality and the rule of law coexist. OECD developing countries (Chile, Mexico, and Turkey) have been omitted. Sources: Transparency International, World Bank. Figure 4.3: Finance grabs a bigger share of the pie Notes: At some point in the early 2000s, the financial sector was gobbling as much as 40% of all corporate profits in the US, with the average during the current decade being over a quarter.

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There’s North Korea, there’s Venezuela, but we’re not locked tooth and nail in a proxy war and a cold war with the Soviet Union.52 That the above quote was spoken at the Heritage Foundation is further evidence of the overlap between the libertarian and New Right agendas — Peterson himself has insisted that he is a “classic British liberal” in terms of his ideological leanings.53 After all, opposition to socialism in any form has been the central rallying cry of libertarians for nearly a century, driven by an anti-statist urge that consistently glosses over the misdeeds of the corporate world solely because state coercion is by nature worse. One of the fathers of libertarianism, Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, went so far in The Road to Serfdom as to claim that the lowliest bureaucrat is somehow a greater threat than the biggest plutocrat: Who can seriously doubt that … the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbour and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work?

The Rich and the Rest of Us
by Tavis Smiley
Published 15 Feb 2012

It’s no accident that the loudest voices that profit so handsomely from attacking the poor by denying the severity of their circumstances tend to be politicians, pundits, and think tanks aligned with and funded by corporate plutocrats and Wall Street oligarchs. America’s elite understands that today’s poor are a potential powerhouse. They are multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational and come from a variety of backgrounds. There is no longer a one-size-fits-all poverty in America. If the 50 million poor ever reached consensus about the roots of their suffering, the plutocratic apple cart would be upended permanently. This is why ignoring, denying, and dismissing the poor has become a multimillion-dollar enterprise.

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“They went after them, they went after their homes. They moved their jobs overseas. They took their healthcare away. They made it so that their children would be the first generation in the history of this country who would be worse off than their parents’ generation.” America’s elite, like dictators and plutocrats in the Arab world, also fell victim to outdated 20th-century thinking. For decades, the rich and the powerful controlled how their countries and regimes were projected around the world. These regimes were unprepared for uprisings fueled by advancing technologies’ upstart and uncontrollable offspring—social media.

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

That’s why Dick Armey, a multimillionaire former House majority leader and erstwhile lobbyist at DLA Piper, one of Washington’s premier influence-peddling firms, can castigate “elites” and the “establishment” as if he were a scruffy newsie with his nose pressed up against the glass watching the plutocrats from outside. Through sheer overdeployment, conservatives have rendered the word “elite” nearly unusable. We now find ourselves in agreement that “the elite” have been discredited, but we can’t quite figure out exactly who they are. We’ve seen how the contagion of distrust spreads out to infect any and all institutions and people that are plausibly associated with the elite.

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I think the answer lies in a newly radicalized upper middle class. One of the most interesting features of our current political moment is that a significant gulf has opened up between, roughly, the top 40 percent and the top 1 percent, between the middle class, upper middle class, professionals, and the mass affluent and the genuine plutocrats. In fact, the two most energetic and important political movements of the aughts draw their popular constituency from the upper middle class: people with graduate school degrees, homes, second homes, kids in good colleges, and six-figure incomes. This frustrated, discontented class has spent a decade with their noses pressed against the glass, watching the winners grab more and more for themselves, seemingly at the upper middle class’s expense.

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As my father, a community organizer, once told me, the most difficult task an organizer faces when organizing the poor or working class is convincing people that they are entitled to something better, that they can assert their own claims and have them be taken seriously. America’s upper middle class needs no such provocation. The most militant and effective political mobilizations of our last decade were, for the most part, upper-middle-class uprisings (often partially bankrolled, it should be noted, by plutocrats), and while they were occasioned by a litany of specific triggers—the Iraq War, the deception of the Bush administration, the financial crisis, and the gently liberal agenda of the new Democratic president—they gained their momentum from their specific class origins. The resonance of their complaints is echoed by Tea Party activist Terri Hall: that the game is rigged.

American Foundations: An Investigative History
by Mark Dowie
Published 3 Oct 2009

Unless otherwise defined, in this book I use the word to mean the process of using money to create change, whether for the betterment of humanity or not, depending on the project in question. Plutocracy (the rule of wealth) In the course of an interview with a politically liberal and intellectually brilliant president of a major American foundation, I was advised to avoid using the word plutocrat or any of its forms. I would not be taken seriously if I did, he promised, "particularly by people in the foundation world." I should also, he added, avoid the use of oligarchy. "But how can one write a book about foundations that make a strategic decision to influence public policy," I asked, "and avoid discussing the power of wealth?"

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They are not evil institutions, as critics from both the right and the left have sometimes asserted. There is barely a scandal a year in the entire industry worthy of more than a few lines on page 14 of a local daily. Nor are all of them ineffectual, incompetent, or slow. But they are indisputably plutocratic. As great wealth will undoubtedly continue to be concentrated in the hands of a few fortunate Americansand as foundations will remain one of the best places offered by the tax code for squirreling away excess wealth-perhaps the best that we can hope for is that these enormous trusts will be gradually democratized.

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Perhaps, in fact, they will not move strongly toward fostering political democracy until they themselves have become genuinely democratic institutions. I take up that final issue in chapter 11. Ultimately, any treatise on private foundations must examine the terribly sensitive matter of plutocracy-the rule of wealth. As I mentioned in "A Note on Semantics," I was warned against using the p-word (plutocrat) or any of its derivatives in this book-lest I be written off as a Marxist crank. Yet any serious writer about philanthropy must risk such a fate, for private wealth creates foundations, and the leverage of private wealth is what organized philanthropy is all about. For a century the Left has argued that American foundations are not genuine expressions of philanthropy and human compassion but, rather, extensions of economic power and elite privilege.

Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Jan 2004

Once jobs and rewards began to be handed out on the basis of dispassionate interviews and examinations, it could no longer be argued that worldly position was wholly divorced from inner qualities, as many Christian thinkers had proposed, nor could it be claimed that the wealthy and powerful must a priori have attained their station through corrupt means, as Rousseau and Marx had suggested. Once the partridge shooters had been ejected from the Civil Service and replaced with the intelligent offspring of the working classes, once the SATs had emptied Ivy League universities of the witless sons and daughters of East Coast plutocrats and filled them instead with the hardworking children of shop owners, it became harder to maintain that status was the result entirely of a rigged system. Faith in an increasingly reliable connection between merit and worldly success in turn endowed money with a new moral quality. When riches were still being handed down the generations according to bloodlines and connections, it was natural to dismiss the notion that wealth was an indicator of any virtue besides that of having been born to the right parents.

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Under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members. If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well that they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” Such doctrines found a receptive audience among the self-made plutocrats who dominated American business and the American media. Social Darwinism provided them with an apparently unassailable scientific argument with which to rebut entities and isms that many of them were already suspicious of, not to mention threatened by on the economic level: trade unions, Marxism and socialism.

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Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in the spring of 1811 and published it three years later. The novel tells the story of Fanny Price, a shy, modest young girl from a penniless family in Portsmouth, who, in order to relieve her parents of some of their burden, agrees to go and live with her aunt and uncle, the plutocratic Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park, their stately home. Standing at the pinnacle of the English county hierarchy, the Bertrams are spoken of with awe and reverence by their neighbours. Their two daughters, Maria and Julia, are coquettish teenagers who enjoy a generous clothes allowance and have their own horses; their eldest son, Tom, is a bumptious and casually insensitive lout who spends most of his time in London clubs, lubricating his friendships with champagne while focusing his hopes for the future on his father’s death and the inheritance of the paternal estate and title.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

However, there are suggestions that the statement was not made by Monnet but by Adrian Hilton in his book The Principality and Power of Europe. 32 David Rennie, “Keep Up the Pressure for a No Vote, Left Warned,” Daily Telegraph (UK), 26 May 2005. 33 Peter Oborne, “Europe Is Slowly Strangling the Life Out of National Democracy,” Daily Telegraph (UK), 1 January 2014. 34 The quote is attributed to a variety of people but most often associated with financier Bernard Baruch. http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/12/04/those-who-mind/. 35 Slavoj Žižek, “The Reality of the Virtual.” www.izlese.org/slavoj-a-34-ia-34-ek-the-reality-of-the-virtual-1-7.html. 36 Tom Perkins, “Letter: Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?” Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2014. www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304549504579316913982034286. 37 Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…for Us Plutocrats,” Politico, July/August 2014. www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html#ixzz3IuF76580. 38 John Maynard Keynes, The Means to Prosperity, Macmillan, 1933, p. 37. www.gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-means/keynes-means-00-h.html. 39 This is actually a popular derivation of a quote from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 183: “Not that you lied to me but that I no longer believe you has shaken me.” 10.

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Self-consciously evoking Karl Marx, the 700-page book analyzed income and wealth distribution. Like Casablanca's Captain Renault, who was shocked to find that gambling was going on under his nose, the world appeared surprised that inequality was increasing and that capitalism concentrates wealth over time. Not everyone agreed with the conclusion. Two of the richest plutocrats on the planet, Bill and Melinda Gates, thought that conditions for the poor had improved, on the basis that they hardly saw any these days on their visits to big cities.1 Piketty's Capital traces historical changes in the distribution of income and wealth. It notes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Western European society was highly unequal, with private wealth concentrated in the hands of a few rich families within a rigid class structure.

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One financier referred to those working for the minimum wage as mentally retarded. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation host Kevin O’Leary thought that it was fantastic that the world's eighty-five richest people had more assets than the poorest 3.5 billion. He saw it as motivating people to work hard and get rich. Plutocrats defended their wealth by arguing that it financed philanthropy, supporting social and cultural projects. But the paradox of charity is that conspicuous generosity to the disadvantaged is financed at the expense of the same people it claims to help. Philanthropy is opaque about the source of the money.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

It owed a good deal to the policies long espoused by the Conservative Party.25 Indeed, it aspired to, and to some extent succeeded in, becoming a party much like the Conservative Party or the Liberal Democratic Party in both structure and policies. It was a party in which the parliamentary leadership dominated, was comfortable with plutocrats and had slight and wary connections to the working class. Millionaires, including Lord Sainsbury, funded New Labour. The plutocratic Murdoch press, which had vilified Neil Kinnock, and indeed John Major, supported New Labour, as no capitalist newspaper with the exception of the Mirror had. It was telling, too, that as they lost ministerial office the Labour high command took to going off to join boards of regulated companies, lobbying firms and aspiring private health providers.26 It was the party of the management consultants, the PR agencies, the outsourced public services and the aspiring public sector high-fliers.

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He was a politician of supreme talent; brought up speaking Welsh, he attended no university, but entered politics as a solicitor, the minor branch of the legal profession. He was known as an anti-imperialist, a radical liberal opposed to armaments, a scourge of the aristocracy and its powers, though a man close to plutocrats. He went into the war as chancellor of the exchequer, becoming minister of munitions in 1915, creating that vital ministry which took over supply responsibilities from the War Office, and then became secretary of state for war (that is, army minister). Lloyd George, the Welsh Wizard, transformed the capacity of the British government to wage war, leading the empire to victory in 1918.

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Great aristocrats might even go into industry directly. The Dukes of Devonshire (whose seat was in Derbyshire) created the Naval Construction and Armaments Co. of Barrow-in-Furness, which they sold to Vickers, in which they acquired a large shareholding, among many others. The British aristocrat had become a plutocrat, a rentier, an owner of capital in the abstract, a passive beneficiary of the labour of both workers and managers, on a grand scale. There was no more cosmopolitan capitalism than that of red-blooded British peers of ancient lineage.8 The income that came from investment was central to the income of the ruling classes.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

A well-compensated financial analyst might make $40,000 a year. See William Norby, “Profile and Compensation of the Financial Analyst,” Financial Analysts Journal 28, no. 2 (March–April 1972): 36. See also Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 226. Hereafter cited as Freeland, Plutocrats. Freeland reports that as recently as 1980, top regulators earned one-tenth of the salaries of leaders of the businesses that they regulated. By 2005, they earned one-sixtieth. the military or the clergy: See Zouheir Jamoussi, Primogeniture and Entail in England: A Survey of Their History and Representation in Literature (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 61.

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In 2018, thirteen of the fifty richest Americans in 2013 were financiers, asset managers, or investors. See Kroll and Dolan, “Forbes 400.” About a fifth of all billionaires now work in finance: In 2012, of the 1,226 people on Forbes’s billionaires list, 77 were financiers and 143 were investors. Cited in Freeland, Plutocrats. investable assets of more than $30 million: Many of the numbers in this paragraph come from Freeland, Plutocrats, 120. might reach $425,000: Ho, Liquidated, 262–63, citing Erica Copulsky, “Ka-Ching!,” New York Post, December 11, 2006, which lists ranges of $600,000 to $1,300,000 for directors, $500,000 to $925,000 for vice presidents, $325,000 to $525,000 for third-year associates

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See JPMorgan Chase & Co., Schedule 14A: Preliminary Proxy Statement (filed April 4, 2018), accessed July 23, 2018, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/19617/000001961718000067/jpmc2018preliminaryproxy.htm; the Goldman Sachs Group, Form 8-K (filed February 15, 2018), accessed July 23, 2018, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/886982/000119312518047491/d518947d8k.htm; and Morgan Stanley, Schedule 14A: Definitive Proxy Statement (filed April 6, 2018), accessed July 23, 2018, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/895421/000119312518109962/d492849ddef14a.htm. See also Freeland, Plutocrats, 226, who reports that as recently as 1980, top regulators earned one-tenth of the salaries of leaders of the businesses that they regulated. By 2005, they earned one-sixtieth. daughter of Pakistani immigrants: See, e.g., Seth Stern, “The Dealmaker: Top M&A Attorney Faiza Saeed is Cravath’s Presiding Partner,” Harvard Law Bulletin, May 18, 2017, accessed July 23, 2018, https://today.law.harvard.edu/the-dealmaker/.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

In 2003, the University of Chicago economist Robert Lucas claimed in his presidential address to the American Economic Association, “[The] central problem of depression prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades.”4 Lucas has also argued that questions about wealth inequality must be excluded from economics: “Of the tendencies that are harmful to sound economics, the most seductive, and in my opinion the most poisonous, is to focus on questions of distribution.”5 For some economists, the “bigger picture” has not been “lost sight of.” It has been thrust from view. This type of tunnel vision is not inherent to the discipline. Rather, it is a strategic choice that benefits entrenched plutocratic powers. The Canadian economist Jacob Viner once observed that “men are not narrow in their intellectual interests by nature; it takes special and rigorous training to accomplish that end.”6 The confusion of economics with natural science has been very politically useful: it lets economists claim scientific certainty while advancing inherently political and moral arguments.

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He wanted the guardians of the purity of textbooks to be “eminent scholars who believe in the American system.”36 Powell was endorsing precisely the sort of intervention that confronted the administration of MIT in the 1940s, and he wanted it replicated at scale across America. In many ways, Powell’s vision has been realized. From the Hoover Institution at Stanford to the Mercatus Center at George Mason, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for the Study of American Business, corporate- and plutocrat-backed think tanks now wage the polemical campaign that Powell advocated. Powell would have agreed with Samuelson about the importance of economic textbooks. Unlike Samuelson, he helped galvanize the class interests of America’s wealthy in a coordinated effort to define cultural common sense. Samuelson’s book was attacked as subversive and leftist during the heyday of the Red Scare and McCarthyism.

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They dubbed the project CORE: Curriculum Open-Access Resources in Economics. The acronym was an index of their ambition to reconfigure the very heart of the curriculum. How this new academic curriculum played out in the real world could be seen more than seven thousand miles from London: a battle against the plutocratic interests enabled by the nostrums of economics was already underway. Struggle in Santiago In 2011, a University of Chile undergraduate named Camila Cea joined the popular student protests unfolding in Santiago. She was one of tens of thousands of Chileans participating in the largest protests since the end of the American-backed Pinochet dictatorship in 1990.40 Cea was finishing her degree in economics, or commercial engineering, as it’s known there.

Inequality and the 1%
by Danny Dorling
Published 6 Oct 2014

Respondents were asked whether they agreed with the statement ‘The rich have too much influence over where this country is headed.’ Figure 3.4 Attitudes to inequalities in wealth and power in six countries, 2014 Low and Falling Pay To keep our wages coming in, we have at all times to be polite and welcoming to the very rich, hiding our disgust behind our hand as we open the door to plutocrat X or prince Y and say: ‘Ah, sir, how very good it is to see you again. I have prepared a warm bath and a hot concubine just as you like them. Pay no attention to the talk of revolution in the kitchen.’ Ian Jack, 201379 In 2010 and 2011, to keep their jobs, millions of workers accepted pay cuts or took shorter hours.

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Their great-grandparents are usually no longer around to tell them how such a world was won. Many books are now being written to explain that there are areas of our lives where crude markets are inefficient, and where competition causes harm. Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy is a good example. Other current titles, such as Chystia Freeland’s Plutocrats, explain what it is like to be superrich; or how it is to live life more precariously, as Guy Standing’s The Precariat makes clear; or what it feels like to be at the bottom, as Owen Jones describes in Chavs; or the top as Jones describes in The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It. In the US the growing precariat majority – those whose lives are economically precarious – has come to be called the ‘task rabbit economy’.

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The City of London is home to the Livery company, the Worshipful Company of International Bankers. P. Latham, The State and Local Government: Towards a New Basis for ‘Local Democracy’ and the Defeat of Big Business Control (Croydon: Manifesto Press, 2011), p. 87. 18. K. Roose, ‘One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society’, New York, 18 February 2014. 19. J. Nye, ‘Inside Wall Street’s Most Secret Society: The Billionaire Banker Fraternity where Cross-Dressing New Members Make Jokes about Hillary Clinton and Drunkenly Mock the Financial Crisis’, Daily Mail, 18 February 2014. 20.

War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures, and Debt
by Kwasi Kwarteng
Published 12 May 2014

Christabel Meredith, London, 1909, p. 363. 14Juan-Huitzi Flores, Lending Booms, Underwriting and Competition: The Barings Crisis Revisited, Working Papers in Economic History, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, January 2007, p. 1. 15Andreades, History, p. 367. 16DNB, ‘William Lidderdale’. 17David Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years, 1890–1914, London, 1995, p. 40. 18Andreades, History, p. 369. 19Dudley Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, Hull, 1993, p. 128, entry for Monday 17 November 1890. 20Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, Money Talks: Fifty Years of International Finance, London, 1968, p. 21. 21Jamie Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats: Wealth and Power in Edwardian England, London, 1978, p. 63. 22Youssef Cassis, City Bankers, 1890–1914, trans. Margaret Rocques, Cambridge, 1994, p. 4. 23Youssef Cassis, ‘Merchant Bankers and City Aristocracy’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 39, no. 1 (March 1988), pp. 114–20, at pp. 117–18. 24Nicholas A. H. Stacey, English Accountancy: A Study in Social and Economic History, 1800–1954, London, 1954, p. 37. 25Kynaston, The City of London: Golden Years, p. 21. 26Ibid., p. 319. 27Ibid., p. 26. 28Camplin, The Rise of the Plutocrats, p. 60. 29Saemy Japhet, Recollections from my Business Life, London, 1931, p. 114. 30DNB, ‘Ernest Cassel’. 31Cassis, City Bankers, p. 7. 32Niall Ferguson, ‘Political Risk and the International Bond Market between the 1848 Revolution and the Outbreak of the First World War’, Economic History Review, vol. 59, no. 1 (2006), pp. 70–112, at pp. 72, 91, 98. 33Alexander D.

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This, of course, was one of the risks of a partnership, which involved unlimited liability, in which capitalists could lose all, and more than all, of their stake in a business, since they were liable for any debts.34 Walter Bagehot, who had compared the actions of the partners of Overend, Gurney unfavourably to those of a child, was perhaps the most articulate writer on the subject of mid-Victorian finance. His book Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market, published in 1873 and presenting a clear account of how the City worked, has justly been considered a classic. Unlike Sir Robert Peel and Lord Overstone, Bagehot was not from the plutocratic upper-middle classes. He was born in Somerset in 1826, the son of a provincial banker. Like the wealthy Overstone, Bagehot had Unitarian parents, but, unlike the more socially ambitious peer, he remained affiliated to his religion throughout his life. He was educated at the new, secular University College London, rather than at Oxford or Cambridge, which were still closed to those who did not adhere to the Church of England.

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After half an hour or so, smoking and reading newspapers, Murray would resume work at 1.45 p.m. and work till 6 p.m., after which he left the office and went to his club, where, it was said, he ‘did himself very well at dinner’.20 Both cities had a social structure dominated by a thin crust of plutocrats who, perhaps more in London than in New York, were by the early twentieth century very much in a class of their own. London had always welcomed talented foreign immigrants into the City. The City editor of The Times would complain in 1910 of the City being full of ‘Hebrew millionaires and plodding Germans’, but overwhelmingly the City stockbroker and banker was now of a certain type.21 Between 1890 and 1914, the City was dominated by an ‘aristocracy composed of the most prominent merchants, merchant bankers and private bankers’.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

Business is always political, which is why so many of the billionaires in Forbes’ annual list have amassed their fortunes through their political as much as their entrepreneurial talents. They comprise a ragbag of monopolists, oligarchs who have been gifted assets and profits by the state, mega-financial engineers and plain old family plutocrats. Sixty-two of 1011 billionaires in 2010 were Russian oligarchs. Twenty-eight were Turkish oligarchs. Even Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, made his fortune from being the monopolist who controls 90 per cent of Mexico’s telephone landlines and supplies 80 per cent of its mobile phone subscribers.

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The fortunes in the Sunday Times ‘Rich List’ are overwhelmingly made in finance, private equity, hedge funds, investment banking and property, courtesy of leverage and one-way bets made with other people’s money. They dwarf in both numbers and scale of wealth the United States’ robber barons, English imperial adventurers, French tax-farmers, Spanish conquistadors and even corrupt Roman senators. And at least those earlier plutocrats left behind empires, monuments, cultures and great industries. Today’s bankers have left nothing but trillions of pounds of permanently lost output throughout the world, while having had their jobs and businesses saved by the taxpayers they deride. Professor Wilhelm Buiter (now the chief economist at Citigroup) describes the situation today as nothing less than communism for the rich.

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Similarly, if the British government had not bailed out RBS and Lloyds, Barclays would surely have fallen too; and the government guarantees in the interbank markets, along with £200 billion of quantitative easing, have been central to its ongoing viability. Yet the bankers don’t get it. They really believe that they deserve their astonishing pay packages. It is part of their DNA, the culmination of decades in which big finance has made the rules, created its own mores and bent regulation and politics to its will. The financial plutocrats take over the state Big finance had – and still has – the politicians in its pockets. The degree to which bankers have penetrated government and convinced it to share its view of the world has been extraordinary, beyond any reasonable justification that some industry–government dialogue is helpful.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

Think and Grow Rich was the title of an early classic of the self-help genre, and its basic message has been propagated by various hucksters in a lineage that stretches all the way down to the Oprah Winfrey–promoted bestseller The Secret.10 Unfortunately, positive thinking doesn’t bring about utopia any more than negative thinking brings about the apocalypse. Another version of this creed is the phony utopianism of Silicon Valley plutocrats. From Facebook to Uber, these new-school robber barons shimmer with self-satisfaction as they insist that the market will solve all our problems and deliver prosperity to all, if we would only get out of the way and stop insisting on our petty labor standards and market regulations. The whole charade is an evasion of politics, whether undertaken in the guise of the utopian right or the nihilistic Left.

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All this for people who, although rich, are largely anonymous and hardly prominent targets for would-be attackers. Paranoid though they may seem, large numbers of the economic elite appear to regard themselves as a set-upon minority, at war with the rest of society. Silicon Valley is a hotbed of such sentiments, plutocrats talking openly about “secession.” In one widely disseminated speech, Balaji Srinivasan, the cofounder of a San Francisco genetics company, told an audience of start-up entrepreneurs that “we need to build opt-in society, outside the US, run by technology.”12 For now, that reflects hubris and ignorance of the myriad ways someone like him is supported by the workers who make his life possible.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

The producer and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld had popularized the triumphal entry, with huzzahs and bravos and trumpet flourishes and bowing and scraping. Here the man about town with the actress of the day on his arm, or the budding plutocrat and his wife, could make just such an entrance, usually accompanied by the house orchestra. Here every man could be the star of his own drama. This was an era of epic eating, when the plutocrat, like the Hawaiian prince, demonstrated his wealth by the dimensions of his belly. Diamond Jim Brady became one of the great celebrities of the age simply by out-eating everyone around him. Brady once explained his philosophy of dining by saying that he started each meal with his stomach four inches from the table and ate until the two made contact.

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And Kaufman wrote about what he knew; Broadway gave him his setting, his characters, and his language. The characters in The Butter and Egg Man, for example, speak an almost impenetrable vaudeville slang—“I done six clubs for the wow at the finish, and done it for years!” “Butter and egg man” was the Broadway pejorative for one of the freshly minted midwestern plutocrats who could be counted on to back stage productions; the play’s main character is a starstruck rube from Chillicothe, Ohio, whom a scheming producer separates from his inheritance. (The play-within-the-play features a trial scene, a brothel scene, and a dialogue in Heaven between a rabbi and a priest who “talk about how everybody’s the same underneath, and it don’t matter none what religion they got.”)

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(No dice.) She once contemplated asking her father if she could broadcast a clandestine radio station from an antenna on top of the Condé Nast Building. Anita, herself such a wounded creature, had no wish to wound anyone, least of all her own family. She was horrified at the suggestion that her plutocratic father might in any sense be the target of Chashama’s radically anticorporate posture. “As a businessman,” she said earnestly, “he’s known for being very generous and very kind.” In fact, Anita saw Chashama as a fulfillment of Seymour’s crotchety worldview. “My grandfather hated Disney,” she said.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

The fact that the United States could statistically exit the crisis in the summer of 2009 and that stock markets almost everywhere could recover their losses has had everything to do with the policies of the Federal Reserve. Does this portend a global capitalism managed under the dictatorship of the world’s central bankers whose foremost charge is to protect the power of the banks and the plutocrats? If so, then that seems to offer very little prospect for a solution to current problems of stagnant economies and falling living standards for the mass of the world’s population. There is also much chatter about the prospects for a technological fix to the current economic malaise. While the bundling of new technologies and organisational forms has always played an important role in facilitating an exit from crises, it has never played a determinate one.

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This left, which strangely echoes a libertarian and even neoliberal ethic of anti-statism, is nurtured intellectually by thinkers such as Michel Foucault and all those who have reassembled postmodern fragmentations under the banner of a largely incomprehensible post-structuralism that favours identity politics and eschews class analysis. Autonomist, anarchist and localist perspectives and actions are everywhere in evidence. But to the degree that this left seeks to change the world without taking power, so an increasingly consolidated plutocratic capitalist class remains unchallenged in its ability to dominate the world without constraint. This new ruling class is aided by a security and surveillance state that is by no means loath to use its police powers to quell all forms of dissent in the name of anti-terrorism. It is in this context that I have written this book.

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Contradiction 8 Technology, Work and Human Disposability The central contradiction that the traditional Marxist conception of socialism/communism is supposed to resolve is that between the incredible increase in the productive forces (broadly understood as technological capacities and powers) and capital’s incapacity to utilise that productivity for the common welfare because of its commitment to the prevailing class relations and their associated mechanisms of class reproduction, class domination and class rule. Left to itself, the argument goes, capital is bound to produce an increasingly vulnerable oligarchic and plutocratic class structure under which the mass of the world’s population is left to hustle a living or starve to death. Frustrated by this ever-increasing inequality in the midst of plenty, a self-consciously organised anti-capitalist revolutionary movement (led, in Leninist accounts, by a vanguard party) will arise among the masses to dismantle class rule before going on to reorganise the global economy to deliver the benefits promised by capital’s amazing productivity to everyone on planet earth.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The annual meeting each January is a favorite target of antiglobalization protesters who think that inside the security ring, Davos Man (as Samuel Huntington christened its attendees) is busy taking all sorts of self-seeking plutocratic decisions. Whether or not as a direct response to these protests, and the creation of the rival World Social Forum, in recent years the agenda at Davos has broadened from economic growth and trade to address the big social challenges facing the world, such as development, poverty, and climate change. Whilst Kent attacks philanthropic plutocrats from the political right, there are also plenty of left-wing critiques of the growing political power of the rich. Starting in the 1980s, there has been a “fusion of money and government” in America, writes Kevin Phillips in his 2003 book, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich.

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One man’s media baron is another man’s champion of freedom, regardless of whether he is making a commercial investment or a philanthropic gift. It remains to be seen if ProPublica will produce investigative stories about the Democratic Party, to which the Sandlers have been substantial donors. Will it be a case of “up to a point, Mr. and Mrs. Sandler”? Kent’s concerns pale besides some of the plutocratic conspiracy theories that have spread over the years. One popular target is the Bilderberg Group, a gathering of CEOs and politicians who are supposedly conspiring to enforce global capitalism—or so it was believed by, among others, Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Another is the summer gathering at Bohemian Grove in a redwood forest north of San Francisco, attended by Warren Buffett, among other tycoons.

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Bloomberg gives the first argument short shrift: “You don’t get a lot of votes giving to a small museum in Harlem,” he says, noting that he has covered himself on the latter charge at least by putting his business into a blind trust while mayor. One reason why these charges have not stuck in the way that similar claims leveled at media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi have during his stints as prime minister of Italy is the system that America has put in place over the years to protect itself against plutocratic abuses. When the rich get involved in politics, they must do so transparently and are subject to intense scrutiny. There are clear rules governing conflicts of interest, such as favoring a personal business. The legal system is tough on those found to abuse their position. There are tough limits on media ownership.

Toast
by Stross, Charles
Published 1 Jan 2002

They guard the dark gray horizon against the day when the leaden sea turns to gold beneath a nuclear sunrise and the Eurasian assault hovercraft come storming across the English Channel. I shiver, and it’s not just the autumn breeze coming in off the bloated Wash. Too many people are buried beneath the still waters of the flooded Norfolk farmlands: peasants and plutocrats alike from the Years of Terror, then Little Sister’s followers (purged at the end of the ‘eighties, when the Party turned back towards pragmatism). Ingsoc eats its mistakes. I don’t want to become one of them. “Why did you join the resistance?” I ask softly. (Even now, a kilometre from the other nearest human beings, I feel the need to whisper.)

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I smile weakly. He has a great big axe of a nose, dark eyes and pale hair slicked straight back from his forehead in an oily wave. He wears a grey suit, of exquisite but antique tailoring, like something out of a pre-revolution drama: only the party pin on his lapel distinguishes him from some prehistoric plutocrat, an enemy of the people. “Have a seat,” invites SubMinister Manson. “This won’t take long.” I sit where he indicates, in another people’s treasure that creaks alarmingly beneath me. The drawing room is a state heirloom, waxed floor to silver candlesticks, except for the rack of telephones and a modern online terminal in the corner.

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“Not yours—” “Inner party, Jim, the outer party doesn’t know what the inner party does. Why do you think it would be any different in the resistance?” “Because the doctrine is so different—” “Doctrine may differ, but methods converge under similar circumstances. Just as the party had to chew away like starved rats at the belly of the plutocratic society that preceded it, so the resistance must gnaw at the party’s guts. I may find it expedient to go around behaving like a deranged thug, but please credit me with some method in my madness. Just like the samizdata buried in the terminals; we mask it on top of the legitimate traffic, you know.

A Pelican Introduction: Basic Income
by Guy Standing
Published 3 May 2017

In addition, selective tax breaks and the very extensive range of regressive subsidies given out by governments and supra-national bodies are vast and mostly unjustifiable, morally or economically. At the same time, the existing welfare system is complex, inefficient, morally dubious and very expensive. In many countries poverty is increasing. And inequality is rising rapidly, with an extraordinary growth in the rental income going to elites, plutocrats and plutocratic corporations.39 A large part, or even all, of the funds for a basic income could come from obtaining for society enough of this huge rental income that comes simply from ownership of income-yielding property of all kinds. Those who claim that a basic income could only be afforded by slashing social services or sharply raising income tax rates are misleading, deliberately or naively.

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Yet with the introduction of protectionist measures, production costs will rise, automation will accelerate, and the next scapegoat will be the robots ‘taking American jobs from American workers’. Then perhaps something like a basic income will creep back onto the policy table. While there are reasons to be sceptical about the predicted technological dystopia that has prompted many high-tech plutocrats to come out in support of basic income, this may nevertheless be a strong factor in mobilizing public pressure and political action. Whether jobs are going to dry up or not, the march of the robots is undoubtedly accentuating insecurity and inequality. A basic income or social dividend system would provide at least a partial antidote to that, as more commentators now recognize.6 For example, Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum and author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution, has described basic income as a ‘plausible’ response to labour market disruption.7 President Barack Obama said in an interview shortly before the end of his presidency that universal basic income would be ‘a debate that we’ll be having over the next 10 or 20 years’, noting: ‘What is indisputable … is that as AI [Artificial Intelligence] gets further incorporated, and the society potentially gets wealthier, the link between production and distribution, how much you work and how much you make, gets further and further attenuated.’8 The ethical and philosophical justifications for basic income – social justice, freedom and economic security – have been well established.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

“More than 8,000 Store Closures Were Announced in 2017—Here’s the Full List.” Business Insider, December 17, 2017. http://www.businessinsider.com/list-stores-that-closed-this-year-2017-12. Hanauer, Nick. “The Pitchforks Are Coming…for Us Plutocrats.” PoliticoMagazine, July/August 2014. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014. Hernández, Gabrielle Orum. “The New Short-Term Solution: Inside the Growing Legal Gig Economy.” Corporate Counsel, May 23, 2017. https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/almID/1202787084603. Kelly, Kevin. “The Roaring Zeros.” Wired, September 1, 1999. https://www.wired.com/1999/09/zeros.

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That was only fair, since they had created it. Hanauer started writing books and essays, giving speeches, and lobbying politicians to enact policies—like raising the minimum wage—that could reverse the widening gap between haves and have-nots. In a blistering 2014 essay, titled “The Pitchforks Are Coming for Us Plutocrats,” Hanauer warned that if we continued on the same path, eventually millions of people in the precariat would launch a revolution. “You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples,” he wrote. What’s more, Hanauer believes the people rising up would be completely justified, for they have been the victims of one of the greatest swindles of all time.

The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
by Thomas Frank
Published 5 Aug 2008

Every tax cut, every cleverly engineered regulatory snafu saved industry millions and perhaps even billions of dollars, and so naturally securing those tax cuts and engineering those snafus became a booming business here in Washington. Conservative rule made the capital region rich, a showplace of the plutocratic order. But this greed cannot be dismissed as some personal failing of lobbyist or congressman, some badness-of-apple that could easily have been contained. Conservatism, as we have seen it, is a movement that is about greed, about the “virtue of selfishness” when it acts in the marketplace. In rightwing Washington, you could be a man of principle and a boodler at the same time.

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To fill the main supporting role in this great freedom-fest, meanwhile, the organizers turned to apartheid South Africa, a place where only a small, correctly complexioned percentage of the population possessed the most basic democratic rights. But there was also a certain cynical brilliance to it. Jamba was officially sponsored by a long-forgotten Washington group called Citizens for America whose leading members were typical conservative plutocrats: oil barons, Wall Street kings, and agribusiness lords. The group’s founder, Jack Hume, was one of the California millionaires who had funded Ronald Reagan’s political career from the beginning. (“He made a substantial investment and has backed Reagan ever since” is one apt description.)46 To represent its conservatism to the world, though, this 24-karat group did not choose a contented white yachtsman snoozing in an easy chair, but a black African fond of camouflage and handguns; a ferocious warrior who single-handedly kept a real rebellion burning against the government of his country year after year.

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What this meant in practical terms was that the pay of government workers stagnated at the same time that Washington rose to the wealthiest tier of cities, making the carrots of private-sector success that dangled in every inhabitant’s face seem that much juicier. It wasn’t planned that way, of course, but by bidding the price of home and (private) college so high, plutocratization had the effect of making bureaucrats more and more anxious about their declining status, and ever more desperate to please those who might someday offer them a berth in the class that was going up instead of down. It was a self-reinforcing cycle. In fact, the chasm between public and private employees was so vast by the end of the conservative era that even members of Congress routinely hit the revolving door, anxious to get started lobbying their former colleagues.

Berlin: Life and Death in the City at the Center of the World
by Sinclair McKay
Published 22 Aug 2022

Yet, returning to his radio fireside chats, his tone remained one of implacable justification. In 1944 he had declared that it was not ‘a system of government, not a young nationalism, not a new and well-applied socialism that brought about this war’.11 ‘The guilty ones,’ he said, ‘are exclusively the Jews and the Plutocrats … This clique of Jews and Plutocrats have invested their money in armaments and they had to see to it that they would get their interest and sinking funds. Hence they unleashed this war.’12 He also went on to say that he welcomed future discussions on this subject. With the suicide of his boss and protector Dr Goebbels, Fritzsche – who had been in the Reich bunker throughout those dying days – finally understood that there were to be no further discussions.

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In an age of extraordinary art, Grosz was an exception from a very early age; having studied in Dresden and at the Berlin school of arts and crafts, his nascent career – delayed by the Great War – began when he was temporarily invalided out of that conflict, rejoined it in 1917 and was invalided out once more with what would now be recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. Even before the Wilhelmine era imploded, Grosz – through the medium of jarring-angled expressionism – was portraying Berlin as a conflation of bare breasts and buttocks, luxurious interiors, balloon-headed plutocrats, poverty-stricken streets and suicides. With the German Revolution came the awakening of Grosz’s political consciousness. He joined the Spartacist League and was a spirited proselytizer for communism. He was a pioneer in montage, creating savagely satirical art through the juxtaposition of pictures and headlines found in ordinary newspapers.

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It was only after some weeks of this that these children – a cohort of around 700 from inner-city Berlin – came to understand that they were actually evacuees, and that this was to be their home indefinitely. Their parents had no say in the matter. There was an official letter from the Iselsberg youth leader telling families that ‘while in England, the authorities only care for the children of plutocrats [a strikingly inventive untruth] all of German youth in areas endangered by bombing has been offered the opportunity to spend a healthy and untroubled time in other parts of their beautiful Greater German homeland’.34 For these boys, Hitler had become both parent and teacher, his image and speeches their syllabus.

Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education
by Liza Picard
Published 1 Jan 2000

Looking through a gap in the houses on the bridge, you can see the merchant ships and lighters packed together waiting to unload at the Custom House [still there, on the north bank of the river]. Upstream of the bridge the river is covered by small passenger craft, with the occasional royal or plutocratic private barge, like a Rolls-Royce among minis. Near the south bank are two more hospitals, St Thomas’s [it has moved since 1750], and a new one founded by a millionaire [Guy’s Hospital is still there, just off the Borough High Street]. Then we go to the nearest ‘stairs’ down to the river again, and take a boat back to the Strand.

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So I have drawn arbitrary lines across Massie’s table, producing three kinds of Londoner. I shall start with the poor, who left no diaries and wrote no letters and are rarely seen in pictures. Then the focus moves to the middling sort, from small tradesmen to prosperous merchants, including the professions. That leaves the gilded plutocrats and royalty for last. CHAPTER 8 The Welfare System What happened to the very poor? There was a system of welfare, administered by parishes. People were not left to starve in the streets, at least not often. But a constable looked into an empty house in St Bride’s one day and found five women.

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I concede that the gilding was real gold leaf, and as elegant as it could be, but unlike Spencer House it looks overwhelming and – dare one say it? – vulgar. The most splendid feature of the house was the marble staircase, which Lord Chesterfield picked up in 1747 at the demolition sale of another plutocratic house, Lord Chandos’s Cannons, out near Stanmore. His library was comfortably panelled and had direct access to that rarity, a water closet, which inevitably calls to mind his advice to his son: I knew a gentleman [himself?] who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to spend in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments.

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India's New Gilded Age
by James Crabtree
Published 2 Jul 2018

In Britain the onset of the Industrial Revolution kicked off such a moment in the mid-nineteenth century, commemorated in the novels of Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. But the more obvious parallel is with America, and the era that ran from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the turn of the twentieth century: the Gilded Age, or the era of “the great corporation, the crass plutocrat [and] the calculating political boss,” as one historian put it.24 Mid-nineteenth-century America viewed itself as a rural, egalitarian idyll: a nation of yeoman farmers governed by gentleman politicians. It was a vision that would have been shared by Mohandas Gandhi, the monastic civil rights leader whose philosophy of nonviolence helped India win its independence, and who believed firmly in the spiritual superiority of village life.

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Yet just two generations later the United States stood transformed, after a whipsawing period of booms and busts in which its economy grew faster than at any point before or since.25 Industrial centers like Chicago and Pittsburgh absorbed millions who left their land, and millions more immigrating from Europe. What had been a nation of isolated farmers turned into a giant continental economy and the world’s leading industrial power. Just as in India, this growth gave birth to a new generation of plutocrats, from oil magnate John Rockefeller and banker John Pierpont Morgan to railroad tycoons Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt. These men sat atop a new “millionaire class” known for its extravagant houses and vulgar displays of wealth. Then they acquired another name: the “robber barons,” for the speed at which they built their fortunes and the lack of conscience they displayed while doing so.

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So deep-rooted did these problems become that Rajan eventually coined a new term to describe them: the “Resource Raj,” rather than the License Raj, meaning a Russian-style system in which politicians, bureaucrats and industrialists colluded to carve up access to valuable natural resources and shared the proceeds among themselves.25 Around the time those scandals were emerging, Michael Walton, an academic at Harvard, decided to tease out more precisely the link between cronyism and the super-rich. British by birth and a political scientist by training, Walton moved to New Delhi in 2007, where his wife worked for the World Bank. Both lived in Mexico beforehand, a country known for the momentous wealth of its plutocrats and the cronyism of its political leaders, many of whom made fortunes during the privatization of formerly state-owned industries in areas like telecoms and banking. Walton fretted that India was now falling into the same trap. “I got interested in the striking fact that India had such high levels of billionaire wealth,” he told me.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

Both men went through incredibly nasty, expensive, and public divorces. In happier times, Griffin’s 2003 wedding was held at Versailles, where Donna Summer entertained the guests. He had made headlines just months before the hearing for building up several trophy properties worth an estimated $1 billion, drawing comparisons with the estates built by plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller more than a century earlier.[12] He didn’t just have the most money and toys—Griffin was also the most influential person to testify. He made more than $60 million in personal political donations in 2020, including to several Republican members of the committee questioning him that day,[13] and his firm paid Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen about $800,000 for a series of speeches after she stepped down as the head of the Federal Reserve.

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It seemed like an utter disaster for Robinhood when it should have been enjoying its best month ever. A company that had named itself after a folk hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor was being accused of doing the opposite and short-circuiting America’s capital markets to help the most despised group of plutocrats—hedge fund managers. A little more than a decade after the global financial crisis that was such a formative event for its young customers and whose ripples were still being felt in widening income inequality, Robinhood had supposedly stabbed them in the back. Millions of New Customers Many users claimed on social media that they were done with Robinhood after it restricted trading of the meme stocks on January 28.

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“If you cater to those gambling chips when people have money in their pocket for the first time and you tell them they can make 30 or 40 or 50 trades a day and you’re not charging them any commission but you’re selling their order flow or whatever . . . I hope we don’t have more of it.”[11] His even older business partner, ninety-seven-year-old Charlie Munger, called the no-fee business model “a dirty way of making money,” comparing it to state lotteries. A Robinhood spokeswoman responded, painting Buffett and Munger as plutocrats and her employer as the one working to level the playing field. It is clear that the elites benefited from a stock market that kept many families sidelined from participating while they amassed huge wealth from decades of investing—driving a deep wedge between the haves and have-nots. Suddenly, Robinhood and other online trading platforms have opened the doors of financial markets to everyday people, deeply unsettling the old guard who will fight to keep things the same.[12] There really is a “deep wedge between the haves and have-nots,” and a good way to narrow it is to get younger, less wealthy people to save and invest.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

Louis convention, Donnelly’s platform was enthusiastically endorsed by Georgia’s Tom Watson, who had been elected to Congress in 1890 as a Democrat backing the alliance platform. “Never before in the history of the world was there arrayed at the ballot box the contending forces of Democracy and Plutocracy,” Watson declared. “Will you stand with the people . . . by the side of the other wealth producers of the nation . . . or will you stand facing them, and from the plutocratic ranks fire a ballot in support of the old parties and their policies of disorganization, despotism, and death?” There was always a more conservative strain within the populist movement. In the South, some alliance members cooperated with the parallel Colored Farmers’ Alliance, but others did not, and racial issues often divided populists from the Plains and the South.

…

That was understandable, but their support for exclusion was often colored by racist rhetoric. Kansas populist leader Mary E. Lease warned of a “tide of Mongols.” And Watson’s People’s Party Paper denounced the Chinese as “moral and social lepers.” But in the 1880s and early 1890s, populist politics was primarily directed upward at the plutocrats. As historian Robert McMath recounts, they were repeatedly accused of being “Molly Maguires, Anarchists, and Communists.” In the 1892 election, the People’s Party did remarkably well. Their woefully underfunded presidential candidate received 8 percent of the vote and carried five states. Then in 1893, as Cleveland was taking office, an economic depression took hold, leaving a quarter of Americans unemployed and thousands of farmers bankrupt.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline
by Andreas Malm
Published 4 Jan 2021

But in the kind of struggle the climate movement is waging – against a set of productive forces flourishing in mature democracies – this argument loses some of its applicability. It loses the rest when we consider only the type of violence reserved for property, as another philosopher has elucidated: ‘seizing and destroying the goldencrusted jet of a plutocrat is an eminently striking and symbolic form of protest’, and ‘given that the plutocrat himself is not threatened’, no anti-democratic ostracism takes place. The second part of McKibben’s response advanced the objection from popular support. As soon as violence is thrown into the mix, it evaporates. The movement can win sympathy by clasping hands around the White House, or blocking a gas terminal with a fleet of canoes, or staging a die-in in a natural history museum, but it can only repel the public by burning things or clashing with cops.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

So what is there in Trump’s track record, in his treatment of his own workers, in the appointments he has made, in the pro-corporate policies he has already pushed through, that should cause anyone to believe that the way he will renegotiate trade deals, or “bring back the jobs,” will in any way be in the interests of workers or the environment? Rather than hope that Trump is going to magically transform into Bernie Sanders, and choose this one arena in which to be a genuine advocate for anyone who isn’t related to him, we would do far better to ask some tough questions about how it’s been possible for a gang of unapologetic plutocrats, with open disdain for democratic norms, to hijack an issue like corporate free trade in the first place. The Race to the Bottom Trump has made trade deals a signature issue for two reasons. The first, on full display that day at the White House, is that it’s a great way to steal votes from the Democrats.

…

A 2017 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research found that Mexico’s poverty rate has risen since the 1994 implementation of NAFTA, with 20 million additional people now living in poverty—a major factor pushing Mexican migration to the United States. Meanwhile, in North America and Europe, white workers grew progressively more pissed off at having their voices ignored. This opened the space for demagogues like Trump to step in and direct workers’ rage away from plutocrats like him, who had profited so lavishly from the outsourcing opportunities enabled by these deals, and at Mexican migrants instead, victims of the same policies that were hollowing out their communities, the very same bad deals. This is the space the Brexit campaign usurped, under its slogan “Take back control!”

…

And that the economic precariousness that the union representative was speaking about, and the attacks on Indigenous land rights and on the earth itself that were referenced by Arthur Manuel (who died suddenly at the start of 2017), also flow from the same place: a corrosive values system that places profit above the well-being of people and the planet. The same system has allowed the pursuit of money to so corrode the political process in the United States that a gang of scandal-plagued plutocrats could seize control of the White House. The connections between so many of the emergencies that compete for our time and care are clear. Glaring, even. And yet, for so many reasons—pressure from funders, a desire for “clickable” campaigns, a fear of seeming too radical and therefore doomed—many of us have learned to sever those natural connections, and work in terms of walled-off “issues” or silos.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Protesters have rallied at the San Francisco International Airport and outside Twitter's offices to protest gentrification and inequality. These foreshocks are easy to ignore, but the elite is starting to feel them. Last year Nick Hanauer, one of the early investors in Amazon and part of the 0.01%, wrote an open memo to “My Fellow Zillionaires.” The piece was appropriately titled, “The Pitchforks Are Coming … for Us Plutocrats”: If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out.

…

Equality of Opportunity Project, http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/. 21. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class-is-losing-ground/. 22. https://qz.com/711854/the-inequality-happening-now-in-san-francisco-will-impact-america-for-generations-to-come/. 23. http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/10/20/san-jose-san-francisco-oakland-job-losses-hammer-bay-area-employers-slash-thousands-of-jobs/. 24. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/25/google-bus-protest-swells-to-revolt-san-francisco. 25. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014. Conclusion: Economic and Political Freedom 1. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (New York: George Routledge & Sons, 1944), p. 204. 2. http://bcw-project.org/church-and-state/second-civil-war/agreement-of-the-people. 3. Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Wrong Turnings: How the Left Got Lost (University of Chicago Press, January 3, 2018). 4.

…

Paul, 158 McKesson, price-fixing allegations, 131 McLaughlin, Patrick A., 179 McNamee, Rogert, 113 Measure of America report, 114 Meat industry, oligopolies, 132–133 Meat processing firms, ownership timeline (changes), 134f Media, oligopolies, 133, 135 Medical care, oligopolies, 129 Mega merger waves, 163f Mellon, Carnegie, 139 Mergers changes, 9f enforcement, death, 163 impact, 43–44 mega waves, 163f merger-induced price increases, evidence, 42 prices, increase, 44 rejection, standard/basis, 243 reversal, 243 solutions/remedies, 242–245 studies, 60 waves, 145f, 154 Mergers and acquisitions (M&As) impact, 12 proportion, 164f Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies, (Kwoka), 42 Metcalfe's Law, 98 Michaely, Roni, 8, 13 Microprocessors, monopolies/local monopolies, 121 Microsoft monopoly, 93 operating system market share, 117 “Middle America,” revolt, 58 Miliband, Ed, 215 Milk, monopolies/local monopolies, 118–119 MillerCoors, creation, 123 Mill, John Stuart, 22 Minimax theory, 27 Mnuchin, Steven, 189 Moeran, Shivaun, 87–88 Mogridge, Martin, 18–19 Molson Coors beer market dominance, 188 SABMiller, duopoly, 123 Money, spending, 247 Monocultures, danger, 59 Monopolies, 15 competition, impact, 179 condemnation (Truman), 146 defining, 37–38 factors, 16 impact, 116–122 King Kong, comparison, 35 Monopolists, barrier entry, 245 Monopoly Machine, 15–16 usage, 51 Monopoly Rules, 5–6 Monopsonies, 37–38, 71 meaning, 74 power, 85 ranking, 73f Monsanto Bayer purchase, proposal, 119, 121 federal government, revolving door, 193f lobbying spending, 192 Moody's, return on invested capital (ROIC), 183 Moore, Gordon E., 66 Morganizing (Morganization), 195, 196, 209, 240 Morgan, John Pierpont, 143, 195 Buffett, comparison, 198 failing company finance, 196 inheritance, 208 Mueller, Holger M., 39 Mukherjee, Siddhartha, 167 Munger, Charlie, 2 Murdoch, Rupert, 133 “My Fellow Zillionaires” (Hanauer), 231–232 N Nakaji, Peter, 35–36 Nash, John, 26 National Dairy Holdings, price fixing, 119 Nationally Recognized Statistcal Rating Organization (NRSRO), 183–184 Navalny, Alexei, 92 Nazis, trusts (commonality), 137 NBCUniversal, Comcast purchase, 6–7 NBC Universal, market dominance, 133 Net investment (nonfinancial businesses), 205f Netscape, Microsoft (impact), 93 Net wealth shares (United States), 230f Network Effects, 15, 98 self-reinforcement, 103–104 Nevins, Allan, 156 New Deal, 78 “New Poor,” 230–231 News Corporation, market dominance, 133 News Feed (Facebook), impact, 99–100 Nixon, Richard, 157 Noesser, Gary, 28 Noncompete agreements (noncompetes) spread, 84 state enforcement, absence, 70f worker percentage, 69f Nonfinancial businesses, net investment, 205f Northern Rock, panic, 17–18 Northern Securities Company, formation, 196 Noyce, Robert, 66–67 NSC, antitrust case, 196 O Obama, Barack, 95–96, 161, 165, 190 reverse revolvers, 191–192 Occupational licensing, excess (impact), 83 Occupy Wall Street movement, 211–212 Ogden, Aaron, 137 Ohlhausen, Maureen K., 83 Old Republic, market dominance, 135 Oligopolies, 15, 125–136 Buffett perspective, 201 court decision, 30 ownership, 201 reputation, problem, 5 Olney, Richard, 191 “On Being the Right Size” (Haldane), 49 Online advertising, duopolies, 123–124 Operating systems, Microsoft market share, 117 Optimism, essence, 229 OptumRx, market dominance, 130 Ordoliberalism, 153, 238 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), study, 23 Organisms, growth phases, 52f Orphan Drug Act (1983), 175 Orwell, George, 113 Ownership, concentration, 199 P Page, Larry, 68 Panic of 1907, 195–196, 208–209 Pasquale, Frank, 123 Passive investing, 201 Passive investments, contest, 203 Passively managed assets, share, 202f Patents, 171–172, 246 annual issuance (US), 173f problems, 172–173 protection, congressional removal, 246 Walt Disney, impact, 173–174 Paulson, Henry, 190 Payment systems, duopolies, 122 PayPal eBay release, 56 founding, 4 value, 118 Pearson, Michael, 168–169 Peltzman, Sam, 224 Perfect markets, belief, 155 Perkins, Charles E., 191 Personal information, Facebook control, 117 Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, drug lobbying, 187 Pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) market, 115–116 oligopolies, 130–131 Philippon, Thomas, 56 Phone companies, oligopolies, 126–127 Phone operating systems, duopolies, 123 Pierce, Justin, 40–41 Pike, Chris, 226 Piketty, Thomas, 214–217 diagnosis, 228 income chart, 224 Pipes, basis, 122 “Pitchforks Are Coming…for Us Plutocrats” (Hanauer), 232 Planck, Max, 165 “Planning Outline for the Construction of a Social Credit System” (China), 111–112 Platform companies, 97–98 Political activity, 248 Political freedom, 143–144, 233 Porter, Michael, 14 Posner, Richard, 156 Potsdam Treaty, 150–151 Poultry industry, oligopolies, 132–133 Power balance, 217 concentration, 141 imbalance, 74 Predatory pricing, punishment (laws), 244 Premier, market dominance, 130 Price-fixing, allegations, 131 Price leadership, 43–44 Prices, increase, 40–45 mergers, impact, 44 Prisoner's Dilemma, The, 27–28 Privacy, importance, 247–248 Productivity companies, impact, 54 growth, reduction, 53f low level, impact, 48–49 reduction, 47–56 wages, contrast, 222 Profitability increase, 51 investment, contrast, 57f Profits, lobbying/regulation (relationship), 188 ProPublica study, 104 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The, (Weber), 76 Q Queen, Edward, 14 R Raff, Adam, 87–88, 94 Railroads control, farmer resentment, 140 mergers, 120f monopolies/local monopolies, 119 Randall, James, 21 RCA, innovation, 55 Reagan, Nancy, 159 Reagan, Ronald, 46, 158–161 antitrust revolution, 224–225 Reback, Gary, 94 Reed's Law, 98 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 239 RegData, usage, 180, 188 Regulation lobbying/profits, correlation, 188 profits, correlation, 181 usage, 167, 245–246 Regulatory capture, avoidance, 245 Reich, Robert, 197 Republic Services Group, 3 Return-free filing system, IRS implementation, 126 Returns, company lobbying (comparison), 187f Reverse revolvers, 191–192 Revolt of the Elites, The, (Lasch), 58 Revolutions, appearance, 230–231 Revolving door, 190f, 193f avoidance, 245 Reynolds, Glenn, 183 Rhodes, Cecil, 24 Ricardo, David, 58 Richards, Tyler, 179 Robber barons impact, 111 term, usage, 139 Rock, Edward, 209 Rockefeller, John D., 111, 126, 139–143, 208, 240 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 146, 224 New Deal, 78 Roosevelt, Theodore, 141–143, 193, 234 trust fighting, 239–240 Royal Bank of Scotland, rate rigging, 25 Rural areas, lag, 72f S Salop, Steven, 39, 225 Sandberg, Sheryl, 114 Sanders, Bernie, 212, 231 Sarnoff's Law, 98 Saving Capitalism (Reich), 197 Saxenian, AnnaLee, 67 Scale (West), 51 Schäuble, Wolfgang, 17 Schiantarelli, Fabio, 181 Schmalensee, Richard, 106 Schmalz, Marin, 199 Schmidt, Eric, 68, 96, 114 Schumpeter, Joseph, 4–5 Schweitzer, Arthur, 148 Search engine, building, 118 Searches, monopolies/local monopolies, 118 Secular stagnation, 56 Seeds, monopolies/local monopolies, 119, 121 Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 4 Service Corporation International (SCI), market dominance, 121–122 Share buybacks, 206 limitation, 247 Shareholders, 246–247 manager representation, 79 Sherman Act of 1890, 7, 140–144, 157, 160, 237 Sherman, John, 140, 195 Shockley, William, 65–67 Signaling, 30 Silicon Valley, disparagement, 87 Simon, Hermann, 29–30 Singer, Paul, 203–204 Skilling, Jeffrey, 14 SkyChefs, wage laws fines, 78 Small banks, disappearance, 181–182 Small firms, disappearance, 47 Small-scale businesses, job creation, 50 Smith, Adam, 7, 22, 35, 38, 63, 191 invisible hand, 38 Smith, Brad, 94 Smith, William French, 158 Snap, Initial Public Offerings, 107 Snowden, Edward, 112 Social networks, monopolies/local monopolies, 117–118 Society, regulations (service), 245 Soros, George, 113 Sprint, phone market dominance, 126–127 Square-cube law, 49–50 Staggers Rail Act (1980), 119 Staltz, André, 102 Standard Oil market control, 90–91 Supreme Court dissolution, 142 Standard & Poor's 500(S&P500), Big 3 ownership, 203f Startups advertising, 107 dynamics, 106–107 reduction, 45–47 Stationers Company, The, 235 Statute of Monopolies (England), 172 Steele, Helena, 102 Steinbaum, Marshall, 38, 72 Sterling Jewelers, claims (filing), 80 Stewart, market dominance, 135 Stigler, George, 155 Stiles, T.J., 138–139 Stock markets, success, 218 Stock ownership income, impact, 197 US percentage, 201 Stocks company retirement, 207 options, manager purchase, 247 Stoppelman, Jeremy, 108 Strikes, wage growth (association), 80f Strouse, Jean, 208 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The, (Kuhn), 165 Summers, Larry, 56 Superstar firms, rise, 40 Suslow, Valerie Y., 25 Sustainable prosperity, 208 Sweetland, Kyle, 83 Swipe fees, dispute, 122 Switching costs (reduction), rules (creation), 246 T Tabakovic, Haris, 192 Taibbi, Matt, 102 Takedown notices, filing, 99 Tap Dancing to Work (Buffett), 1 Tax preparation, oligopolies, 125–126 Technology companies market capitalization, 90–91 monopolies, profits, 114 Tecu, Isabel, 199 Teles, Steven M., 174, 188 Temporary work, empowerment, 75 Temporary workers, poverty l ine, 75 Tesla, Nikola, 67, 195 TEVA Pharmaceuticals, generic drug release, 176 Thiel, Peter, 4–5 Third-party services, sale, 245 Thomas, Diana, 180 Time Warner Cable, Comcast purchase (FTC prevention), 165 Time Warner, market dominance, 133 Tit for Tat, 28–29 Title insurance, oligopolies, 135–136 T-Mobile, phone market dominance, 126–127 “Tobacco Trust,” 142 Toll roads, impact, 111 Trademarks, theft, 102 Trade, restraints, 68 “Traitorous Eight,” 66, 84 TransDigm, company acquisition/price increases, 184–186 Trickle-down monetary policies, 219 Trotsky, Leon (rehabilitation), 212 True Believer (Hoffer), 230 Truman, Harry (monopoly condemnation), 146 Trump, Donald (election), 212 Trusts antitrust enforcement budget, 160f challenges, 141 creation, 142 Nazis, commonality, 137 Turf wars, 21 U Unionization, collapse, 83 Unions decrease, 84f membership, income distribution (contrast), 79f restrengthening, 78 United States banking mergers, 128f banks, owners (ranking), 200f economy, entrepreneurialship (reduction), 46f federal government, relationship/revolving door, 190f, 193f grocery market, competitiveness, 32 healthcare, monopolies/oligopolies (prevalence), 131–132 income inequality, 214f, 225f job markets, examination, 38 markets, passively managed assets (share), 202f Morganizing, 195 net wealth shares, 230f optimism, essence, 229 patents, annual issuance, 173f public companies, collapse (number), 10f wages leading indicator, perception (variation), 64f United States v.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

They’re not as blustering as Donald Trump, and they’re uninterested in his flashiest hatreds and crusades, but they’re both the most important architects, and among the biggest beneficiaries, of his rule. On everything from tax cuts to environmental regulation, the Trump years, for the Kochs, have been what their biographer Jane Mayer calls “their dream come true.”4 The Koch brothers have become such a shorthand for plutocratic excess that it’s important to remind ourselves that they are real men with real stories, also rooted in the twentieth century (and told most ably by Mayer in her book Dark Money). Not unlike some Ayn Rand hero, their father, Fred Koch, had invented an improved process for refining crude oil into gasoline.

…

Those twin existential threats, to cash and to worldview, meant that there was never any shortage of resources for the task of denying climate change. We’ve already seen how it began in the late 1980s, with Exxon-funded groups such as the Global Climate Coalition, but by the new century, it had morphed into a massive web of plutocrats and their functionaries. Koch-funded professors at four hundred colleges across America were busy teaching the new gospel. “Only idiocy would conclude that mankind’s capacity to change the climate is more powerful than the forces of nature,” one explained to his charges in Maryland. In Colorado, another produced and starred in the slyly titled film An Inconvenient Truth … or Convenient Fiction?

…

Google spelled out its corporate logo in mirrors at the giant solar station in the Mojave Desert on the day it announced that it would power every last watt of its global business with renewable energy; it’s the world’s biggest corporate purchaser of green power.2 But there is exactly one human being who bridges that cultural gulf between these different species of plutocrat. Vanity Fair, in 2016, declared that Ayn Rand was “perhaps the most influential figure in the tech industry.” Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple) said that Steve Jobs (deity) considered Atlas Shrugged one of his guides in life.3 Elon Musk (also a deity, and straight out of a Rand novel, with his rockets and hyperloops and wild cars) says Rand “has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.”4 That’s as faint as the praise gets.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society
by Thomas Frank
Published 18 Jun 2018

Vestiges of the Carnegie attitude survive to this day. A 2009 study of high-net-worth individuals by Barclays Wealth (“a leading global wealth manager”) confirmed that American philanthropists tend to understand their giving in a context in which the state is either absent or irrelevant. And, of course, there are plenty of nice plutocrats who don’t fidget or doodle when talking to strangers, and who have no problem endowing a ward or a wing in return for a commemorative plaque. The business headlines even occasionally tell of billionaires coming together under the leadership of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates to donate their fortunes to worthy causes.

…

And so the novelist inveighed against philanthropic donations to universities, where altruists twisted the minds of the young. “It is a moral crime to give money to support your own destroyers,” she scolded. In her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand also proposed a famous antidote to all this mawkish nonsense: a union of class-conscious plutocrats that would go on strike and bring the world to its knees. Atlas Shrugged is celebrated as a prophetic book, and in certain ways Ms. Rand’s imagined future has come to pass. After all, what is the phrase “too big to fail” but a standing threat to shut down the system unless the firm in question gets its way?

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

The United States has numerous centers of excellence: New York for finance, San Francisco for technology, Houston for energy, and Los Angeles for films. American capitalism is also the world’s most democratic. The United States was the birthplace of the engines of popular capitalism, from mass production to franchising to mutual funds. In many countries capitalism has always been associated with a plutocratic elite. In America, it has been associated with openness and opportunity: making it possible for people who were born in obscurity to rise to the top of society and for ordinary people to enjoy goods and services that were once confined to the elites. R. H. Macy, a former whaling skipper with a tattoo on one of his hands, sold “goods suitable for the millionaire at prices in reach of the millions.”

…

They were the first aeronautical pioneers to realize that the key to producing flying machines was not producing ever more powerful engines, but developing a control system that allowed the pilot to steer the plane and maintain its equilibrium. In their first patent they didn’t claim that they had invented a flying machine, but rather a system of aerodynamic control. They were also much more business-minded than their rivals: relying on their own resources rather than on the patronage of governments or plutocrats, they had to turn flying into a business as quickly as possible. In 1909, the brothers formed a company that, as well as manufacturing airplanes, ran a flight school, put on exhibitions of aeronautical daredevilry, and pioneered air freight. Turning a hobby into a business proved difficult.

…

In 1907, as the stock market collapsed and banks imploded, he locked his fellow capitalists in a room in his house at 219 Madison Avenue and told them to come up with a plan to prevent a market meltdown. Banker-imposed order could do more to promote higher productivity than unrestrained competition. The serious question about these titans is not whether they were greedy or selfish. Greed and selfishness are common human emotions that afflict paupers as well as plutocrats. It is not even whether they cut commercial corners. America had not yet encountered many of the great challenges of a sophisticated capitalist economy, let alone formulated rules to deal with them. The serious question is whether they made themselves rich at the expense of the rest of the population.

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

In this new totality, Afghan deserts and caves could immediately connect with and short-circuit New York, America’s financial centre, obliterating old distinctions maintained even during the nuclear standoff of the Cold War between internal and external spaces, war and peace, and the West and its enemies. The 9/11 terrorists had been trained by Islamists once sponsored by the CIA and Middle-Eastern plutocrats, and they were armed with America’s own box-cutters and civilian aeroplanes. These ‘barbarians’ who struck at the heart of empire hinted that the ‘global village’ would manifest its contradictions through a state of permanent and uncontrolled crisis. But the shock to naive minds only further entrenched in them the intellectual habits of the Cold War – thinking through binary oppositions of ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ worlds, liberalism and totalitarianism – while reviving nineteenth-century Western clichés about the non-West.

…

Germans seemed less united, and more disconnected from their glorious traditions, than before as they laid railways, built up cities and made money. The gap between organic German Kultur and mechanistic Western Zivilisation seemed to shrink. Many modernizing Germans seemed to resemble too much the unbridled plutocrats and profit-seekers of England, France and the United States. Self-distrust led to more boosting of the Volk, and the fantasy that the people rooted in blood and soil would eventually triumph over rootless cosmopolitans, confirming Germany’s moral and cultural superiority over its neighbours. Thus, Germany generated a phenomenon now visible all over Europe and America: a conservative variant of populism that posits a state of primal wholeness, or unity of the people, against transnational elites, while being itself deeply embedded in a globalized modern world

…

Wagner left Paris in 1842 after Rienzi, his early Romantic opera about a failed revolutionary, became a pan-European hit (one enraptured teenage viewer would be Adolf Hitler in 1906). But his exalted duties as a court Kapellmeister in Dresden left him deeply dissatisfied. As an artist with a high sense of his calling, he found himself humiliatingly beholden to bourgeois plutocrats. Identifying the comfortable opera-going philistines of the bourgeoisie as the cause of all evil, Wagner deprecated parliaments and hoped that revolution would bring forth a leader capable of lifting the masses to power, to unscaled aesthetic heights, while creating a new German national spirit.

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale
by Simon Clark and Will Louch
Published 14 Jul 2021

Philanthropists and the representatives of billionaires arrived by boat and by car at the villa in the town of Bellagio. The beautiful lakeside residence belonged to the Rockefeller Foundation, which was started by one of the richest men to ever walk the earth. In the early days of the twentieth century, the oil baron John D. Rockefeller was inspired by a fellow American plutocrat, the steelmaker Andrew Carnegie, to create a foundation to use part of his fortune for good deeds. Carnegie had distilled his philosophy of how to make and spend money in an 1889 article known as “The Gospel of Wealth.” Carnegie preached that the capitalist system that had enriched him was the best possible economic arrangement for all mankind but there was one deeply troubling side effect: inequality.

…

David Bonderman, founder of the private equity giant TPG, partnered with Arif on a deal that same year. TPG and Abraaj bought a Saudi restaurant chain called Kudu. The deal proved Arif’s growing ability to draw Western capitalists into the Middle East. But as Arif moved ever closer to the orbit of plutocrats, he found he needed even greater quantities of cash to fuel his lifestyle, and by May 2015 the hole in Abraaj’s finances had widened to $219 million. To conceal the deficit, Arif and his team started to systematically sweep all the available cash from Abraaj’s funds, companies, and bank loans into a secret set of bank accounts that investigators later named the Abraajery.

…

The poor people of the world who Arif said he wanted to help didn’t stand a chance of benefiting because they weren’t the true priority and they didn’t have a say in how the firm was run or what it chose to do. And Arif misused money raised in the name of the poor to benefit himself and his colleagues. Sure, Arif drew public attention in his speeches to the vast wealth inequality in the world—something other Davos plutocrats and private equity tycoons are reluctant to do. And he was a visionary in pointing out the genuine investment opportunities to be found in developing countries. But since his fine words only served as cover for devious deeds, it would have been better if he’d never mentioned the plight of the poor, because the loss of trust and sense of betrayal he left as his legacy have damaged the cause he championed.

Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy
by Adam Jentleson
Published 12 Jan 2021

One factor in the discrepancy between the large nonwhite populations in these states and their predominantly white, conservative representation in the Senate is that states represented by Senate Republicans tend to rank high on measures of voter suppression: Tennessee, Texas, Wyoming, Kansas, and Georgia make up five of the six worst offenders in a 2018 study of voter-suppression efforts, with Florida and Alabama also high on the list.49 In his 2018 book The Turnout Gap, political scientist Bernard Fraga found that if turnout rates had been the same across racial and ethnic groups, “the Democratic Party would have held the presidency and Senate from 2008 through at least 2018.”50 Wealthy interests. Senate Republicans represent plutocratic interests, and many of them are plutocrats themselves. With the country facing levels of income inequality not seen since the Great Depression, senators are growing richer than ever before. In 2018, the total wealth of all members of Congress was $2.43 billion, a 20 percent increase from the previous Congress. Republican senators are the wealthiest of the wealthy, averaging a personal net worth of $1.4 million, 48 percent more than their Democratic colleagues.51 Recent studies have shown that politicians of both parties are more responsive to the concerns of the rich than to those of poor or middle-class Americans, but Republicans are far more likely than Democrats to represent the interests of the wealthy.52 Their voters are wealthier, too.

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If you want to understand the Senate’s descent, its potential path back to relevance, and how vital that path is to restoring a government ‘of, by, and for the people,’ then this book is essential reading.” —U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley “The Senate is the epicenter of American political dysfunction: the place where ideas with broad support are sent to die while those backed by plutocrats and extremists are set into law. In this analytically rich yet highly readable insider account, Adam Jentleson shows why today’s undemocratic Senate is an affront to the Framers’ vision—and how we can fix it.” —Jacob Hacker, best-selling coauthor of Let Them Eat Tweets and Winner-Take-All Politics Copyright © 2021 by Adam Jentleson All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

The pair bankrolled countless conservative think tanks and politicians. Trump’s biggest backers included hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, whose data firm Cambridge Analytica also worked on Trump’s presidential campaign. In America, elections involving hundreds of millions of voters have become contests decided, in key constituencies, by a handful of plutocrats. In Britain, money has long played a determining role in politics. The ‘rotten boroughs’ of the 18th and 19th centuries were notoriously crooked, and their tiny electorates could be bought by influential patrons. The Reform Act of 1832 did not end corruption. Bribery was so endemic in an 1880 by-election in Sandwich that the constituency was subsequently abolished.

…

The third part of Fink’s strategy was subsidising citizens’ groups that would pressure politicians to adopt particular policies, and funding fringe political movements to lobby inside the established parties. These political outriders pulled the Republican party base and their political representatives further and further to the libertarian right. Guided by Fink’s insights, a tiny group of American plutocrats invested billions in think tanks, universities and election campaigns over the last four decades. Before this methodical and precisely targeted spending spree, libertarians had been largely thought of as cranks.8 Afterwards, the limited space within which policies are created and publicly discussed was filled with proposals that they wanted.

…

The latter group, which praised Vladimir Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda”, is particularly well connected to the Trump White House – its chief counsel Jay Sekulow was on Trump’s legal team during the high-profile Mueller inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. As in the US, much of the funding for the Christian right’s outreach comes from plutocrats and corporations. The Alliance Defending Freedom has received money from the billionaire Prince family of Betsy DeVos, appointed as Trump’s education secretary, and her brother Erik Prince, founder of the huge Blackwater security firm.24 Prince is yet another convert to a defiantly traditionalist version of Catholicism, which he combines with a notably uncharitable vision of the state’s social obligations.

Jerusalem: The Biography
by Simon Sebag-Montefiore
Published 27 Jan 2011

Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone. In the last months of the Crimean War, Sir Moses Montefiore had bought the trains and rails of the Balaclava Railway, built specially for British troops in the Crimea, to create a line between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Now, endowed with all the prestige and power of a British plutocrat after the Crimean victory, he returned to the city, the harbinger of her future.14 THE NEW CITY 1855-60 MOSES MONTEFIORE: 'THIS CROESUS' On 18 July 1855, Montefiore ritually ripped his clothes when he saw the lost Temple and then set up his camp outside the Jaffa Gate where he was mobbed by thousands of Jerusalemites firing off guns in the air and cheering.

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In Hebrew they were called Mishkenot Shaanim - the Dwellings of Delight - but initially they were preyed on by bandits and their inhabitants were so undelighted they used to creepback into the city to sleep. The windmill did at first produce cheap bread but it soon broke down due to the lack of Judaean wind and Kentish maintenance. Christian evangelists and Jewish rabbis alike dreamed of the Jewish return - and this was Montefiore's contribution. The colossal wealth of the new Jewish plutocrats, especially the Rothschilds, encouraged the idea that, as Disraeli put it at just this time, the 'Hebrew capitalists' would buy Palestine. The Rothschilds, arbiters of international politics and finance at the height of their power, as influential in Paris and Vienna as they were in London, were unconvinced but they were happy to contribute money and helpto Montefiore whose 'constant dream' was that 'Jerusalem is destined to become the seat of a Jewish empire.' * In 1859, after a suggestion from the Ottoman ambassador in London, Montefiore discussed the idea of buying Palestine but he was sceptical, knowing that the rising Anglo-Jewish elite were busy buying country estates to live the English dream and had no interest in such a scheme.

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Herzl became a new species of politician and publicist, riding the new railways of Europe to canvass kings, ministers and press barons. His relentless energy aggravated, and defied, a weak heart, liable to kill him at any moment. Herzl believed in a Zionism, not built from the bottom by settlers, but granted by emperors and financed by plutocrats. The Rothschilds and Montefiores initially disdained Zionism but the earliest Zionist Congresses were ornamented by Sir Francis Montefiore, Moses' nephew, 'a rather footling English gentleman' who 'wore white gloves in the heat of the Swiss summer because he had to shake so many hands'. However, Herzl needed a potentate to intervene with the sultan.

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth
by Margaret Atwood
Published 15 Mar 2007

They took the form of golden calves, of which we didn’t have many in Toronto at that time, and also the form of money, the love of which was the root of all evil. But on the other hand stood the comic-book character Scrooge McDuck — much read about by me — who was a hot-tempered, tight-fisted, and often devious billionaire named after Charles Dickens’s famous redeemed miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. The plutocratic McDuck had a large money bin full of gold coins, in which he and his three adopted nephews splashed around as if in a swimming pool. Money, for Uncle Scrooge and the young duck triplets, was not the root of all evil but a pleasurable plaything. Which of these views was correct? We kids of the 1940s did usually have some pocket money, and although we weren’t supposed to talk about it or have an undue love of it, we were expected to learn to manage it at an early age.

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But between Marlowe and Dickens fell the full triumph of the Protestant reformation in England — a movement that had begun earlier, that had taken an English form with Henry the Eighth’s break with the Pope and his subsequent disbanding of the monasteries, and that by Marlowe’s era was incarnate in Elizabeth the First as head of the Church in England. The Protestants continued to gain ground over the next two centuries, and by the nineteenth century, although the landbased English aristocracy still had much power, the merchants and industrialists were replacing them as the biggest plutocrats. How was wealth to be viewed? Was it a sign of God’s blessing, as it had been in the days of Job, or was it, on the other hand, a precious bane — a sign of worldliness and corruption, as in the days of the ascetics and hermits? This was a debate that had been going on within and among various branches of the Christian faith for a long time.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

The Democratic Party’s move to the left has not been lost on the public. According to polls, more Americans now view the party as “very liberal” than at any time since the 1960s.8 It is an easy game to zing Democratic leaders for selling out on this or that issue, or to charge that the two parties are indistinguishable tools of a plutocratic overclass. But congressional voting data show that the gap on economic policy between Republican and Democratic members of Congress is greater than at any time in memory. And the gap seems to be widening: not a single Republican supported Obama’s first budget or his stimulus plan or the financial regulatory bill approved by the House in December 2009.

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Battles over tax policy are often imagined to be a pure form of class warfare, with the wealthy unified in a ceaseless quest to keep W 123 c06.indd 123 5/11/10 6:19:56 AM 124 fortunes of change their taxes low, chisel new holes in the tax code, and push the burden of funding government onto the rest of us. Former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston has painted a disturbing picture of a plutocratic cabal working to rig the tax system to benefit a tiny slice of America’s wealthiest households and “cheat everybody else.” His books have been best-sellers in part because they resonate instinctually with what so many Americans believe. Polls have consistently found that a large majority of the public thinks that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes and that tax laws favor the upper class.

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Another major study by the political scientist Martin Gilens eachoed this point: “Influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.”5 The influx of wealthy liberals into politics may serve to mitigate the downsides of such quasi-plutocratic rule by helping to elect Democrats who care about those at the bottom of the economic both.indd 278 5/11/10 6:27:57 AM conclusion 279 ladder, and that’s already apparent in policies enacted by Obama and the Democratic Congress. This is not the same as granting a political voice to the lower classes, however.

The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
by Sasha Abramsky
Published 15 Mar 2013

HC110.P6A54 2013 362.50973—dc23 2013018771 10987654321 This book is dedicated to my darling children, Sofia and Leo. May you always keep your exquisitely fine-tuned sense of fairness. Contents Acknowledgments PROLOGUEA Scandal in the Making PART ONE: THE VOICES OF POVERTY CHAPTER ONEPoverty in the Land of the Plutocrats CHAPTER TWOBlame Games CHAPTER THREEAn American Dilemma CHAPTER FOURThe Fragile Safety Net CHAPTER FIVEThe Wrong Side of the Tracks CHAPTER SIXStuck in Reverse PART TWO: BUILDING A NEW AND BETTER HOUSE INTRODUCTIONWhy Now? CHAPTER ONEShoring Up the Safety Net CHAPTER TWOBreaking the Cycle of Poverty CHAPTER THREEBoosting Economic Security for the Working Poor CODAAttention Must Be Paid Note on Sources and Book Structure Notes Index Acknowledgments The American Way of Poverty is a book with many benefactors and champions.

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For unfortunately, Harrington’s prophecy has come true: conditions are again getting worse for a vast number of Americans, yet for millions of others, it is all too easy to downplay, or to simply ignore, these dire straits. PART ONE The Voices of Poverty CHAPTER ONE POVERTY IN THE LAND OF THE PLUTOCRATS Food pantry manager Ginny Wallace opens up an empty freezer in her Appalachian Pennsylvania pantry. Demand is up; donations down. In the fall of 2011, with hunger rearing up across America, the large freezer bins at the Port Carbon Food Pantry (PCFP), in the small, gritty, Appalachian town of Pottsville, Pennsylvania, were empty.

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Increasingly, however, large numbers of Americans do seem to be troubled by the political elite’s acceptance of wholesale poverty as a normal part of contemporary life. Members of the overwhelming majority—the much-touted 99 percent—who haven’t benefited from this epic economic change are realizing the plutocratic implications of this shift. “We’re all out here and we all get it,” said 26-year-old Thomas Reges, one of the Occupy D.C. protesters camped out in the capital’s MacPherson Square, in October 2011. “We’re all angry. We all know something is wrong, and we’re trying to make it better.” That month, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 37 percent of Americans supported the protests, and only 18 percent opposed them, with the remaining 45 percent presumably neutral.

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of
by Mick Hume
Published 23 Feb 2017

Now, says Kotkin, what we have in both the US and Europe is a New Clerisy of middle-class professionals who dominate politics, culture, education and the media, ‘serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth’.27 Kotkin observed in the run-up to the 2012 US presidential election that: ‘Many of [the Clerisy’s] leading lights appear openly hostile to democracy … They believe that power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats, but with credentialed “experts” whether operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.’ That hostility to democracy has only intensified over the past few years. The Brexit vote marked a breakthrough revolt of ‘the common man’ and woman against the ‘enforced conformity’ preached by the New Clerisy.

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Together they make up a class which American writer Joel Kotkin calls ‘the New Clerisy’ – an educated elite self-appointed to play a priestly role in society, ‘serving as the key organs of enforced conformity, distilling truth for the masses, seeking to regulate speech and indoctrinate youth’. The Clerisy are anti-democrats who ‘believe that power should rest not with the will of the common man or that of the plutocrats, but with credentialed “experts” whether operating in Washington, Brussels or the United Nations.’1 These are the new enemies of democracy. They are not goose-stepping about in uniforms but speaking softly and carrying a big intellectual stick to beat us into ‘enforced conformity’. The New Clerisy are more dangerous to Western democracy than any old-fashioned fascist today.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

But it could be China by 2020. It is the scenario contained in China’s ambitious plans to develop a far-reaching social credit system, a plan that the Communist Party hopes will build a culture of “sincerity” and a “harmonious socialist society” where “keeping trust is glorious.” 5. When tech plutocrats invoke the concept of freedom, what do they mean? Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It’s obvious now that the freedom brought to us by the libertarian elite will not come with jobs. The fact that Facebook is on track to generate annual revenues of $20 billion with fewer than fifteen thousand employees speaks volumes.

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I have no illusion that the existing business structures of cultural marketing will go away, but my hope is that we can build a parallel structure that will benefit all creators. The only way this will happen is that in Peter Thiel’s “deadly race between politics and technology,” the people’s voice (politics) will have to win. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may seem like benevolent plutocrats, but the time for plutocracy is over. Acknowledgments This book grew out of a speech I gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival in the summer of 2015. Thanks to Walter Isaacson, Charlie Firestone, Kitty Boone, and John Seely Brown for making that possible. My agent, Simon Lipskar, encouraged me to make it into a book and introduced me to my editor, Vanessa Mobley at Little, Brown and Company.

The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality
by Brink Lindsey
Published 12 Oct 2017

Thomas Piketty caused a sensation with his book Capital in the Twenty-First Century by arguing at magisterial length that this tendency reflects the workings of a basic law of economics.12 Because the rate of return on capital (allegedly) outstrips the rate of economic growth, increasing inequality is written into the DNA of capitalism, which means that only massive taxes and transfers are capable of reversing hyper-inequality. In Piketty’s story, government matters only as the answer to inequality, never as a cause. It is also an article of faith among many progressives and liberals that, especially because of the role of money in politics, plutocracy exerts a strong and baleful influence over public policy. If plutocrats are indeed that powerful, does it really make sense that they would only use their power to produce neutral rules that in practice happen to favor the rich? Would it really not occur to them to push for rules that actively redistribute upward? It is this bipartisan blind spot that helps explain the market for a huckster like Donald Trump.

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In the United States (as well as elsewhere), recent decades have indeed seen a rise in capital’s share of national income. When Rognlie broke down the aggregate figure of capital income into its component elements, he found that only one component was responsible for the overall rise: housing wealth.28 While the dark sorcery of hedge fund managers and other plutocrats plays a role in the spike in income inequality, it is runaway home prices that have fueled the rising returns to capital. III THE BIG PICTURE OF REGRESSIVE REGULATION So what conclusions can we draw from these four case studies? One clear observation is that regressive rent-seeking is a real and growing problem.

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It
by Owen Jones
Published 3 Sep 2014

In fact, he is an unapologetic outrider for the wealthiest elements of society. Or, as Staines describes it, he is ‘standing up for the plutocrats of the world: “Haven’t the plutocrats suffered enough?” is my view.’ And this uncompromising support for the interests of the wealthiest lies at the heart of his contempt for democracy. ‘Undermining politicians delegitimizes what politicians can do,’ he says. ‘Fundamentally, it suits my ideological game plan.’ For this mouthpiece for the ‘plutocrats’, democracy is a potentially mortal threat. ‘It doesn’t get me the result I want, and the have-nots vote to take away from the haves, and I don’t think that’s a fair way of doing things … So democracy always leads to – if you have universal franchise – those who don’t have are going to take from those who do have.’

What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way
by Nick Cohen
Published 15 Jul 2015

(Even liberal literary editors censor, but they usually dress it up more tactfully than that.) Leftish intellectuals said the attacks were really about Palestine, although none of the hijackers was Palestinian, or an inchoate protest against global capitalism, even though al-Qaeda received the petro-dollars of Saudi plutocrats. All shared an instant reaction to the 9/11 atrocities that they must have been the fault of the United States or the West. Sexist judges used to say that women who went out in miniskirts were ‘asking for it’. Their provocative dress was the ‘root cause’ of their rape. So it was with the intellectual left after 9/11.

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Financiers and industrialists accrued fantastic wealth and political status, while the liberal middle classes lingered in jobs their rulers despised for their failure to be market-orientated. Modern democracy was a system which produced results that no longer pleased them. They were less likely than they once would have been to oppose clerical fascist movements and stand up for the best values of their societies, not dodgy dossiers or privileges for plutocrats but the freedoms the liberal-left once died for, and may have to die for again. 4. Fear In 1968 at the start of the narrative of this book, no one – not Kanan Makiya and the revolutionary students, nor the politicians, spies and academics who specialized in international affairs – predicted the wars that would follow the Baathist seizure of power or the extraordinary scope and violence of the Islamist explosion that began with the Iranian revolution.

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You Can't Read This Book argues that this view is dangerously naive. From the revolution in Iran that wasn't, to the Great Firewall of China and the imposition of super-injunctions from the filthy rich protecting their privacy, the traditional opponents of freedom of speech - religious fanaticism, plutocratic power and dictatorial states - are thriving, and in many respects finding the world a more comfortable place in the early 21st century than they did in the late 20th. This is not an account of interesting but trivial disputes about freedom of speech: the rights and wrongs of shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre, of playing heavy metal at 3 am in a built-up area or articulating extremist ideas in a school or university.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
by Dr. Jim Taylor
Published 9 Sep 2008

But the rhetoric of a wealthy elite living dramatically different lives simply didn’t resonate with the American public, even though there is considerable objective truth to it. Indeed, today, we even struggle to find the words to articulate anger over income inequality. During the industrial era, words such as plutomania (an obsessive lust for wealth), plutolatry (the worship of wealth), and plutocrat (someone who exercises power by virtue of wealth) were commonly and angrily used. They all derive from the Greek ploutos, meaning ‘‘wealth,’’ but they are so obscure today that few know their meanings. America’s plutonomy is not on the verge of a revolution, or even a ‘‘throw the bums out’’ vitriol at the ballot box, in part because it culturally ‘‘isn’t us.’’

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Astor’s 400’’ list, 24 muckrakers, 29 multinational business, 162–164 mutual funds, 8 myths of wealth, 70–71 National Public Radio, 194 nation-state, 155–156 neighbors’ lifestyle, 128, 129–133 Neiman Marcus, 78, 179 net worth, to define wealth, 5 new companies, financing, 113–114 New Deal, 30 New York Times, 64, 66 New Yorker, The, 152 Newsweek, 66 nonprofit organizations, creating, 195 Nordstrom, 78 Northwestern Mutual Life, 148 1–800-FLOWERS, 116–118 optimism, 48 organized politics, mavericks and, 144 Ortega, Amancio, 160 ostracism, 70 Oswald, Andrew, 67 Packard, David, 38–39 Packard, Vance, The Hidden Persuaders, 33 Page, Larry, 196 ‘‘Palm Beach brands,’’ 111 parents desire to please, 171 of wealthy, economic status, 43 passion, 49, 187–188, 192 passion shoppers, 88–89, 91 Pasteur, Louis, 53 patrons’ lifestyle, 128, 148–153 People, 64, 66, 142 perceptual map, of lifestyle segments, 129 Perot, Ross, 210–211 persistence, 48 personal legacies, 188–190 philanthrobusiness, 194–197 philanthropy, 149, 190 children’s involvement in, 182–183 and purchasing decisions, 110–111 transformational giving, 190–194 Phillips, Kevin, Wealth and Democracy, 25, 202, 206 philosophical perspective on money, 128 planning purchases, 80, 173 family team approach to, 179–182 Plato, The Republic, 205 Plum TV, 216–217, 219–220 plutocrat, 208 plutolatry, 208 plutomania, 208 plutonomy, 200 future in U.S., 201–205 and politics, 209–213 and two economies, 214–216 Poetry magazine, 193–194 politicians, entrepreneurs as, 210–211 Index poverty in 1920s, 30 power of wealthy, in early 20th century, 28 prenuptial agreement, 54 presidency, 29 prices, 79 problem-solving approach, 48 Procter & Gamble, 33 productivity, 38 products, retail and online prices, 85 professional advice, lack of reliance on, 74 profit margins, 103 property for services, 22 psychological perceptions, 33 psychological research, 48 public perceptions of wealthy, 17–18 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), 26 Putnam, Robert, 199 quality and brands, 109 of life, 173 symbols of, 165 rags-to-riches, 24 Ralph Lauren, 111 Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged, 21 Rauch, Jonathan, 212 Reagan, Ronald, 202, 207 ‘‘Reagan Revolution,’’ 36–37 real estate investments, 42 Reich, Robert, Supercapitalism, 31 ‘‘reinventment,’’ 186 relationships, 75 of globizens, 161 of patrons, 151 of wrestlers, 135 religious services, 64 Republic, The (Plato), 205 Republicans, 151, 209–210 research-driven shopping by teens, 179 responsibility, money and, 128 retail stores, 78, 79 high-end designers in mass market, 94 retirement, 185 ‘‘retirement age,’’ 187 239 revolutions, 209 Richemont, 95 Roaring Twenties, 29 Robb Report, 64, 143, 146 robber baron, 25 Rockefeller, John D., 26, 27, 28 Rockefeller family, 35 Rodriguez Group, 215 Rome, 205 Romney, George, 212–213 Romney, Mitt, 212–213 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 29, 30 Roosevelt, Theodore, 29 Royal Delft, 101 rugged individualism, 206 Russell, George, 147–148 Russell 2000 Index, 148 St.

A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Jan 2009

Fuel hoses were attached to its wings and the tanks replenished with Jet A-1 that would steadily be burned over the African savannah. In the already vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair, cleaners scrambled to pick up the financial weeklies, half-eaten chocolates and distorted foam earplugs left behind by the flight’s complement of plutocrats and actors. Passengers disembarked for whom this ordinary English morning would have a supernatural tinge. 4 Meanwhile, at the drop-off point in front of the terminal, cars were pulling up in increasing numbers, rusty minicabs with tensely negotiated fares alongside muscular limousines from whose armoured doors men emerged crossly and swiftly into the executive channels.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right
by George R. Tyler
Published 15 Jul 2013

He rejected the pessimism of I Am a Fugitive crafted early in the New Deal to present a message of optimism in One Night. Capra’s antagonist was a plutocrat who selfishly resists reforms initially, but its message was uplifting in the end, when Claudette Colbert’s wealthy father abandons his narcissism. As the Great Depression persisted with despair deepening, Capra revised his narrative again in his best work, the nuanced Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).4 The plutocrat businessman Edward Arnold remains corrupt to the end, bending government to his bidding and forcing the hero James Stewart and moviegoers alike to confront the enormous challenge and complexities in bestowing economic sovereignty on families.

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There was a pitched uprising in Berlin, bloody insurrections featuring a homegrown Red army occupying the Ruhr in 1920, Saxony, and Thuringia under Bolshevik governments in 1923, and an attempted Communist revolution in conservative Bavaria.50 The westward march of the Red Army itself stalled at the Vistula, thanks to Józef Pilsudski, and southward at the Caucasus, thanks to Kemal Atatürk.51 The weapons were bullets and social reforms, including laws like the eight-hour workday (France 1919) and mandated corporate work councils in 1920, along with unemployment insurance, health, and welfare subsidies. Professor François Furstenburg of the Université de Montréal explains: “The Gilded Age plutocrats who first acceded to a social welfare system and state regulations did not do so from the goodness of their hearts. They did so because the alternatives seemed so much more terrifying.”52 Europe was the battleground against collectivist ideology. Among others, Englishmen John Maynard Keynes and the journalist George Orwell, who authored Animal Farm, were passionate critics of collectivism.

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Political scientists such as Larry Bartels writing in Unequal Democracy have concluded that electoral choices and economic consequences are rendered opaque for many voters buffeted by extravagant half-truths.20 And “half-truths” is a kind interpretation of the unprecedented intensity of outright fabrications by the wealthy conservative fringe, such as swift-boaters in 2004 or birthers in 2012, tarring Presidential candidates. Democrats agree, of course, arguing that pecuniary politics enables plutocrats to obfuscate economic options, large donations empowering their hired politicians to exploit social and value issues to bamboozle voters. You may disagree, but some conservatives do agree, including David Brooks, who wrote of this charade and Machiavellian manipulation in January 2012: “The Republican Party is the party of the white working class.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

They and other junior relatives were automatically entitled to enter officialdom and benefited disproportionately from the recommendation system employed to fill governmental positions. We hear of officials among whose brothers and sons six or seven—in one case, no fewer than thirteen sons—also came to serve as imperial administrators. On the other hand, the same predatory and capricious exercise of political power that turned civil servants into plutocrats also undermined their success. Guan Fu, a highly placed government official, had accumulated a large fortune and owned so much land in his native region that widespread loathing of this preeminence inspired a local children’s song: While the Ying River is clear the Guan family will be secure; when the Ying River is muddy the Guan family will be exterminated!

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They differed mostly in terms of their durability, which was critically mediated by state rulers’ ability and willingness to engage in despotic intervention. Intense resource concentration at the very top and high inequality were a given, and although wealth mobility varied, this was of little concern to those outside plutocratic circles. Sketched out in the opening chapter, the structural properties of almost all premodern states strongly favored a particular coercion-rich mode of income and wealth concentration that tended to maximize inequality over time. As a result, these entities were often about as unequal as they could be.

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The first of these, which we may term the “pessimistic” scenario, is a continuation of the pattern that already characterized the nineteenth century and that dated, in Europe, back to the fading of the Black Death near the end of the Middle Ages and, in the United States, at least to independence—a sequence of successive phases of rising and stabilizing concentration of income and wealth. In that world, Western (and Japanese) inequality would have been high but relatively stable, a never-ending Gilded Age dominated by firmly entrenched plutocrats. In some Western societies as well as across Latin America, inequality would have risen even further, flattening out in others where it was already as high as it could be—most notably, in Britain. This outcome, although perfectly realistic for prolonged periods of stability in premodern history, would seem unduly conservative when it comes to the twentieth century.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

Because Wall Street disdained it, ARD would be worth more to its owners if liquidated or merged into another company. And so, in 1972, it was. Such was the inhospitable financial landscape in June 1957, when Shockley’s young researchers plotted their revolt. ARD had not yet financed Digital Equipment; the San Francisco lunch group was just getting started; a pair of philanthropic plutocrats financed odd projects in exotic overseas locations or on the East Coast. It was hardly surprising that the Shockley rebels could not imagine raising money to start their own enterprise. Instead, Eugene Kleiner’s letter to his father’s broker laid out a different aspiration: the team of disaffected Shockley scientists hoped to be hired by “a company which can supply good management.”[69] Kleiner’s wife, Rose, typed up the letter, dated June 14, 1957.

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“The accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it.”[77] At that restaurant in San Francisco in late June 1957, Rock was pushing him firmly. Rock himself remembered something different. Thinking back on that same dinner, he recalled that his mention of company ownership had changed the researchers’ bearing. “They seemed to perk up a bit,” he said later.[78] Unburdened by Doriot’s sense of patriotic mission, untroubled by a plutocrat’s vibrating conscience, Rock celebrated silently. The way he saw things, the fact that the scientists responded to financial incentives was all to the good.[79] The discussion moved to practicalities. The researchers said they needed $750,000 to get their business started. Rock and Coyle countered that they should have at least $1 million.

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Holmes apparently believed that her blood-testing equipment would do everything she claimed for it—one day. She was not so much lying as telling a “premature truth,” as the Valley parlance had it. In the popular imagination, Holmes’s fall from grace fed into a broader critique of the new Florence. Hitherto, the usual resentment of plutocrats had stopped short of the friendly geeks who created search engines and iPhones. But precisely because Silicon Valley was booming, its excesses were bound to cause umbrage. The region seemed full of absurdly young people who lucked into equally absurd fortunes, meanwhile showing scant concern for the citizens whom they might harm: those whose privacy might be violated, now that digital information was the new oil; those whose wages might suffer, now that software could do their jobs; those who had relied on Theranos to diagnose their illnesses.

What's the Matter with White People
by Joan Walsh
Published 19 Jul 2012

Mitt Romney, the presumptive nominee, looked like the poster child for the top 1 percent, a cross between Richie Rich and Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. When Romney released 2010 tax returns showing that while he made $21 million off investments, he only paid a 13.9 percent tax rate—a lower rate than middle-class workers—he offered the nation a crash course in our plutocratic tax policy. Unfortunately, some of the politicians who’d worked hardest to protect Romney’s low investment tax rate were Democrats, a complication that hinders the party’s attempt to channel the interests of the 99 percent. Even some of the white working class, the group Ronald Reagan had turned into Reagan Democrats by railing against “welfare queens” everyone knew were black, seemed to be waking up.

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The outsized, outraged reaction against the first black president, the guns and the bull’s-eyes, and the threat to use “Second Amendment remedies” to “take our country back” seemed intended to perform the same kind of intimidation, and it cemented Obama’s ties to his African American base. Yet racial politics got really mixed up when black progressives started openly criticizing the president. In June 2011, longtime lefty gadfly and Princeton professor Cornel West attacked Obama as a “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” West derided Obama in tawdry racial terms, claiming he was afraid of “free black men” due to his white ancestry and years in the Ivy League. “He feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy, and very effective in getting what they want,” West charged.

Fatal System Error: The Hunt for the New Crime Lords Who Are Bringing Down the Internet
by Joseph Menn
Published 26 Jan 2010

Just as the powerful English nobility during the long-ago Wars of the Roses picked figurehead contenders for the throne who suited their needs, the richest mobs in Russia championed candidates for federal office. The big difference between the Russian Federation’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, and his successor, Vladimir Putin, is that the outside plutocrats were in charge of Yeltsin, while Putin is in charge of the plutocrats, centralizing corruption. Preoccupied with terrorism, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Georgia, and Russian oil production, the West has done very little to press Russia for action on cybercrime. As a result, the government faces few consequences for its sordid alliances.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

Britain and the US in particular came to resemble what Ajay Kapur, head of global strategy at Citigroup in New York, called a ‘plutonomy’—a society in which wealth and economic decision-making is heavily concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority.252 This was what Britain was in Victorian times before the development of full democratic institutions and the emergence of a powerful middle class. It equally applied to the United States during the 1920s. From the 1980s, suddenly able to exercise this plutocratic power, bank bosses effectively came to write their own financial rules in a way which, hardly surprisingly, made them and their executives even richer. In the United States, this process began under President Reagan but accelerated under all subsequent Presidents from Bill Clinton onwards. As Richard N Goodwin, former speechwriter to JF Kennedy put it as early as 1997, ‘The principal power in Washington is no longer the government or the people it represents.

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Money establishes priorities of action, holds down federal revenues, revises federal legislation, shifts income from the middle class to the very rich’.253 Joseph Stiglitz, an adviser to President Clinton, claimed that even under Clinton, ‘finance reigned supreme’ and the President ‘buckled to pressure from big financial interests’ time and again. 254 Clinton may well have wanted to check the plutocratic power wielded by US businessmen but the key influences in the framing of his economic policy came not from within the Democratic Party but from Wall Street. Commentators have likened the power trend to a return to the last decades of the nineteenth century when money power was at its height. Asked in 2002 if the wealthy had captured more political power than in the gilded age and the 1920s, the political scientist Kevin Phillips replied, ‘It is a pretty close run thing between now and then.

A Swamp Full of Dollars: Pipelines and Paramilitaries at Nigeria's Oil Frontier
by Michael Peel
Published 1 Jan 2009

Viewed in this light – and that of the more recent cycle of Wall Street profiteering and subsequent chaos – the grand corruption of Abacha and his venal predecessors is not so far removed from the Western capitalist tradition as it might appear. The difference is that, whereas the nineteenth-century US plutocrats left behind productive companies – some of which now export Nigeria’s oil – the Abacha organization presided over the mass impoverishment of one of the world’s most populous nations. The oil money simply disappeared from the country, with the willing assistance of some of the world’s leading banks.

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The sense of political drift was captured by a dark popular joke about the renaming of the notoriously unreliable National Electric Power Authority as the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PLC). As the initials were switched, so did what they were said to stand for: ‘Never Expect Power Anytime’ became ‘Problem Has Changed Name (Please Light Candle)’. Home-grown plutocrats like the billionaire Aliko Dangote flourished, along with other merely well-off members of the sizeable business class, but there were scant signs of relief for the masses. A little over a year into the new administration, a lawyer friend of mine not given to histrionics wrote me a desperate e-mail begging the Western media to draw attention to a country that was ‘fast slipping under the firm control of elements intent on ensuring that the people remain mired in poverty and decay’.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

Indeed, author and filmmaker Michael Moore has become a wealthy man by making outrageous and unsupportable claims about supposedly evil capitalists and by promoting socialism, and he is just one of many people spreading myths about capitalism. These myths are inflicting great costs on the American economy and society. The more Americans feel that capitalism needs to be reined in, or that the public has no say in an economy that is largely in the hands of “plutocrats,” the more the government is called on to regulate the economy. Congressman Ron Paul, Republican of Texas, is exactly right: Because of a widespread misunderstanding of what capitalism is, our leaders—and also much of the general public—incorrectly blame capitalism for any economic problems we face.

…

CONSUMER SOVEREIGNTY We all observe corporate executives, bankers, and businesspeople in general managing the day-to-day affairs of business, from the smallest dry cleaner to the largest multinational corporation. This has led many to believe that they—the public—have no say in their economy, which is largely in the hands of these “plutocrats.” But this is a myth, for as Mises pointed out: Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt. . . .

The Trouble With Billionaires
by Linda McQuaig
Published 1 May 2013

‌1 ‌Return of the Plutocrats Imagine this: you are paid a pound every second. After one minute, you would have £60. After one hour, you would have £3,600. If this spectacular rate of pay continued day and night, it would take twelve days for you to become a millionaire – something beyond most people’s wildest dreams. But how long would it take to become a billionaire? Well, at that rate, it would take almost thirty-two years. This little game helps illustrate that being a billionaire isn’t just beyond most people’s wildest dreams; it’s likely beyond their comprehension. It also highlights how odd it is for society to regard the accumulation and retention of such vast material wealth by one individual as an appropriate aspiration.

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Equality of opportunity – a concept that is almost universally admired and celebrated – has sadly become more myth than reality in recent years. As it risks fading further into mythology, educational trust funds could put real heft behind the notion that society is a community and that all in the community should have a chance to live their dreams. ‌ ‌Notes 1 Return of the Plutocrats ‌1 This was noted by Michael Meacher, Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton. ‌2 Heather Stewart, ‘George Osborne’s austerity is costing UK an extra £76 billion, says IMF’, The Observer, 13 October 2012. See also Aditya Chakrabortty, ‘The graph that shows how far David Cameron wants to shrink the state,’ The Guardian, 15 October 2012. ‌3 http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/jan/19/super-rich-fight-poverty-oxfam. ‌4 Richard Murphy, ‘In wooing French tax exiles, Cameron makes a mockery of democracy’, guardian.co.uk., 19 June 2012. ‌5 C.

Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits
by Kevin Roose
Published 18 Feb 2014

To her, the great tragedy of Wall Street wasn’t that it was evil and greedy, but that it was fundamentally boring, a place populated by the kinds of uncurious corporate drones who had no lives outside of work, who watched CNBC out of personal interest and considered Berkshire Hathaway’s annual investor letter the ne plus ultra of high literature. It was those people—and not insider-trading felons, book-cooking CEOs, or sneering plutocrats—who made her want to run screaming from the finance world. Whenever Chelsea contemplated building a career at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, she thought about Wendy, a vice president in her group. Wendy was a notorious workhorse, and she routinely pulled hundred-hour weeks, which was typical for a first-year analyst but unheard-of for someone who, like her, was in her mid-thirties, with a husband and a toddler, and who commuted from the New Jersey suburbs every day.

…

There are, in fact, members of the financial elite who want nothing to do with mockery and light-heartedness—who take their responsibilities as employers and guardians of investor capital quite seriously. And many of the analysts I spoke to about the event afterward simply laughed. To them, the idea of a bunch of out-of-touch plutocrats gathering to carry out the rites of a secret fraternity seemed absurd and antiquated. “It sounds like something Occupy Wall Street would invent if they wanted people to hate bankers even more,” one told me. But I am continually scared by the idea that some of the thoughtful, socially conscious young analysts I know will end up succeeding beyond their wildest dreams on Wall Street and will in the process be changed, to the point that the idea of belonging to such a powerful, exclusive group of executives becomes seductive rather than funny.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

The age of stagnation, in this theory, is the fruit of what Brink Lindsey of the Niskanen Institute and Steven Teles of Johns Hopkins University describe as a “captured economy,” in which everything from land-use rules, to exclusionary zoning, to occupational licensing, to ever-expanding intellectual-property protections, to corporate subsidies and tax breaks all converge to create an system that’s basically the worst of socialism and the worst of capitalism conjoined—plutocratic and sclerotic, overregulated and undertaxed, with an upper class enriching itself off rents rather than innovation and a service class that can’t advance beyond its station. The overlap between this more libertarian argument and the left-wing critique of neoliberalism is apparent in one of the urtexts of the post–financial crisis left: French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 tome Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which mined centuries’ worth of statistics to argue that capitalism inherently makes the rich richer (because returns on capital will always be higher than simple economic growth) unless some powerful force intervenes.

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The most feared “barbarians” in the Western world today aren’t invaders from the distant steppes; they’re the Rust Belt deplorables voting for Trump, the gilets-jaunes burning shops on the Champs-Élysées, the little Englanders forcing their country into an unexpected Brexit. A great deal of anxious elite commentary about our decadent order assumes that these internal rebels might pull down the system from within, that populists “inside the gates” (assisted by Russian bots and selfish, short-sighted plutocrats) are the existential threat that Western institutions last faced when the Soviet Union was still in business; that the European Union and NATO and America’s Pacific alliances could all be pulled apart by nationalism, and the jungle world of the 1930s could suddenly return. But as we saw in chapter 3, there is very little to suggest that the populist movements are prepared to wield power in any effective way.

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

Unless your startup has a plan for cornering and using market power, you can forget about interest from venture capital.25 Tolerating such practices has had obvious consequences, both in our everyday economic lives—where citizens face unchallengeable economic power everywhere from beer to bookselling—and in terms of the gradual plutocratization of society. Unrestrained corporate power has naturally yielded unrestrained wealth for corporate leaders and their Wall Street backers. Barack Obama could have changed this, and by extension, changed the political climate of the country merely by deciding to enforce the nation’s laws in the same way that administrations before Reagan did.

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They knew which things were necessary to make up a liberal movement, and all of the ingredients were present: well-meaning billionaires; grant makers and grant recipients; Hollywood stars who talked about social media; female entrepreneurs from the third world; and, of course, a trucked-in audience of hundreds who clapped and cheered enthusiastically every time one of their well-graduated leaders wandered across the screen of the Jumbotron. The performance of liberalism was so realistic one could almost believe it lived. CONCLUSION Trampling Out the Vineyard Were you to draw a Venn diagram of the three groups whose interaction I have tried to describe in this book—Democrats, meritocrats, and plutocrats—the space where they intersect would be an island seven miles off the coast of Massachusetts called Martha’s Vineyard. A little bit smaller in area than Staten Island but many times greater in stately magnificence, Martha’s Vineyard is a resort whose population swells each summer as the wealthy return to their vacation villas.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

Some who had been paying close attention to the techno-utopian scene were less than astonished to see Anissimov, long praised as a rising star, go the Nazi way. After reading one of Anissimov’s neoreactionary rants in 2014, the academic blogger Dale Carrico published the following told-you-so: Now, for years and years before what you call Anissimov’s “jolt to the right” I have accused him of advocating a reactionary politics of plutocratic corporatism, fetishistic militarism, and anti-democratic eugenic and technocratic elitism … Of course, he whined and denied this as name calling but never responded to the substance of what I was saying. Now he lets his fascist freak flag fly, I can’t say that I am at all surprised. Anissimov took to posting paranoid white supremacist rants on Twitter.

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Any technology that reduces the need for human labor and increases economic productivity, moreover, must be good; even if it means that more workers starve for want of employment, the superior technological society benefits from this “advance” because the productivity gains that are captured and hoarded as profits may be reinvested in still more new technologies that reduce the social need for human labor while increasing profits. Does the perpetuation of unjust class structures by technological means count as “progress” in any meaningful sense? Clearly not. But Thiel, like so many techno-utopian plutocrats, assumes that since gadgets had made him rich, gadgets must save the world. “The only way forward for the developed countries is rapid innovation and progress in the advanced technologies,” he said at the 2009 Singularity Summit, held at the 92nd Street Y in New York and organized by Mike Anissimov.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

Nowhere is this more true than in the United States, where in the face of the greatest levels of inequality in the industrialized world, Congress passed trillions of dollars’ worth of tax cuts in 2001, 2003, and 2017, the benefits of which have gone disproportionately to the top 10% of the country. Donald Trump, elected in part as an economic populist who railed against Wall Street, still implemented these regressive policies. The political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson call this two-faced ideology “plutocratic populism.” There must be a better way. With structural pressures pushing inequality up and up, we need to be more creative and ambitious in tackling it. We need, for example, policies for training and retraining of workers on a scale like the GI Bill, which educated millions of veterans after World War II.

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,” VI Inequality, May 1, 2020, https://www.ifs.org.uk/inequality/chapter/are-some-ethnic-groups-more-vulnerable-to-covid-19-than-others/. 161 one third of African Americans: Amy Goldstein and Emily Guskin, “Almost One-Third of Black Americans Know Someone Who Died of Covid-19, Survey Shows,” Washington Post, June 26, 2020. 162 seventy-seven times more likely: Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan, “Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, no. 3 (August 2020): 1567–633, https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa005. 163 “plutocratic populism”: Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (New York: Liveright, 2020). 164 passports from certain Caribbean islands go for $100,000: See, for example, Antigua and Barbuda (https://cbiu.gov.dm/investment-options/), or Dominica (http://www.antiguabarbuda-citizenship.com/). 164 $900,000 to $1.8 million: US Department of State, “Immigrant Investor Visas,” https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/immigrate/immigrant-investor-visas.html. 164 $2.5 million: “Investor visa (Tier 1),” UK Government, https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor. 164 Cyprus, Malta, and Bulgaria: Francesco Guarascio, “EU Sees Crime Risks from Malta, Cyprus Passport-for-Sale Schemes: Report,” Reuters, January 21, 2019. 165 “most people can be trusted”: “Can People Be Trusted,” General Social Survey, 2018, https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/441/vshow. 165 many reasons for high levels of trust: Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser, “Trust,” 2016, https://ourworldindata.org/trust; see also Paul R.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

So what about the ethics of Big Tech’s other multibillionaires—the Cooks, Zuckerbergs, Benioffs, Bezoses, Pages, and Brins? None, of course, are as immature as Travis Kalanick. Nor are they as Kantian as Reid Hoffman. Their morality is, instead, a complicated question. Sometimes we can trust these plutocrats, sometimes we can’t. Some, like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who at the time of writing has a net worth of $83 billion, making him the second-richest person on earth after Bill Gates, are simultaneously cutthroat businessmen and selfless philanthropists. On the one hand, Bezos is the much-feared leader of a semi-monopolistic e-commerce company that has highly questionable labor practices and a well-documented history of bullying publishers;9 on the other, he’s the public-spirited owner of the venerable Washington Post and—under a Trump regime that has castigated journalists as “enemies of the people”—among America’s most powerful defenders of both a free press and democracy.

…

Particularly a failure of the almost exclusively white male executives to take responsibility for the “unintended consequences” of the tech boom—especially the income disparity, the homelessness, and the economic dislocation of a predominantly minority population that is transforming the San Francisco Peninsula into a nineteenth-century tableau of shockingly explicit inequality. I ask her what distinguishes her and Mitch from the other plutocrats of Silicon Valley. They’ve obviously invested tens of millions of dollars in the Kapor Center. But it’s more than the money. After all, Mark Zuckerberg had, in theory at least, given $45 billion of his personal wealth to “charity.” And every Silicon Valley tech notable—even Travis Kalanick, the Randian former CEO of Uber—talks a good game when it comes to respecting the rights of minorities and women.

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
by Evan Osnos
Published 12 May 2014

China is the world’s largest consumer of energy, movies, beer, and platinum; it is building more high-speed railroads and airports than the rest of the world combined. For some of its citizens, China’s boom has created stupendous fortune: China is the world’s fastest-growing source of new billionaires. Several of the new plutocrats have been among the world’s most dedicated thieves; others have been holders of high public office. Some have been both. For most of the Chinese people, however, the boom has not produced vast wealth; it has permitted the first halting steps out of poverty. The rewards created by China’s rise have been wildly inconsistent but fundamentally profound: it is one of the broadest gains in human well-being in the modern age.

…

When people stood up on Xu’s behalf, they, too, were arrested; an investor named Wang Gongquan, who had made billions in venture capital, organized a petition for Xu’s release but was arrested on charges of disturbing public order. Wang’s bare-handed fortune and outspoken comments had attracted a large following online, but the authorities were especially uneasy when plutocrats linked up with activists or took an interest in politics. In September the government adopted a novel approach to taming the unruly power of the Web: the Supreme People’s Court issued a rule stating that any “false defamatory” comment viewed five thousand times, or forwarded five hundred times, could result in a prison sentence of up to three years.

…

In the short term, the Party could succeed at silencing its critics, but in the long term, that was less clear, especially if segments within the Party recalculated their own risks and rewards for loyalty and decided that they had more to gain by siding with the people. China, once known for its conformity, was home to fiercely opposing forces: Western-style liberals against nationalist conservatives; incumbent apparatchiks against restless plutocrats; Ant Tribes against Bobos; propagandists against cyber-utopians. The question was whether the tensions would be channeled outward, at the West, or inward, at the state. For the moment, it was difficult to envision a coherent challenge to the Party: though the Chinese middle class was galvanized by many of the issues that had animated its peers at the advent of democracy in Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea (consumer rights, the environment, labor rights, housing prices, free speech), in China there were very few formal organizations in which people could assemble and produce a coordinated alternative to Party rule.

Daemon
by Daniel Suarez
Published 1 Dec 2006

There were two occupants. Gragg scanned the target car’s license plate and retrieved its DMV records. Federal Fleet Vehicle—no data Gragg smiled to himself. The Daemon Task Force, eh? He was closing in on them. He was mapping the topology of the plutocrats’ elusive network—The Money Power. They were up to something. This man would help Gragg find out what. These plutocrats were men of limited vision who needed to be swept aside. Men from a previous age. An age of oil and heavy industry. But the distributed technocracy would soon rise, and Gragg would be there at Sobol’s side for the dawn of a new age. An age of immortals.

…

Sebeck shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “But what if we corrected civilization’s weakness—as painful as that correction might be?” Sobol changed expression, looking more relaxed. “But you’re probably confused. Why did I frame you? It’s simple: you were bait—bait that they took. The weak hide their weakness. By now, the plutocrats have put their money in safer havens, and I have closely watched this transfer. Now they are more vulnerable than ever.” Sobol grinned humorlessly. “You were my Trojan horse, Sergeant.” Sebeck’s fingernails nearly tore through the chair leather. “Fuck you! You destroyed my life!” Sobol’s spectre flickered almost imperceptibly.

Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
by Sarah Chayes
Published 19 Jan 2015

Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), bk. 6, chap. 24, p. 133. 4. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. (into French) Marie Gaille-Nikodimov (Paris: Librairie générale française, 2000), p. 131. 5. By 2014, the pattern was even visible to the mainstream Economist Magazine. See “Our Crony Capitalism Index: Planet Plutocrat,” March 15, 2014. Chapter Seven: Variation 1 1. Shana Marshall and Joshua Stacher, “Egypt’s Generals and Transnational Capital,” Middle East Research and Information Project 262: Spring 2012. 2. Robert Springborg, Naval Postgraduate School professor, quoted in Cam Simpson and Mariam Fan, “Egypt’s Army Marches, Fights, Sells Chickens,” Bloomberg Businessweek, February 17, 2011, http://buswk.co/1mh6qaN. 3.

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The trusty John of Salisbury advised against appointing “those who cannot, or indeed disdain to, be content with a little,” for they will commit the worst extortions. John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), bk. 5, chap 10, p. 87. See also Crystia Freedland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: Penguin, 2012). For a powerful description of money addiction from someone who suffered it, see Sam Polk, “For the Love of Money,” New York Times, January 19, 2014. 5. On the African Peer Review Mechanism, see: http://aprm-au.org/ 6.

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History
by Stephen D. King
Published 22 May 2017

Lower borrowing costs enable governments more easily to meet their fiscal ambitions without having to make painful political decisions regarding spending programmes or tax rates. Other winners include those who have large holdings of financial wealth in the form of equities, government bonds or corporate debt. Quantitative easing is designed to increase the value of such assets, making the world’s financial plutocrats even more plutocratic. Then there are the providers of high-yield products who are likely to do well selling (or perhaps mis-selling) their products to a public too often unwilling or unable to recognize the risks involved. Companies and households with mortgages should also benefit, but if debts are very high and growth prospects appear not very good, the ability to generate a significant recovery in either investment or consumption may be unusually low – as, indeed, it has proved.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

TO THOSE WHO HAVE, MORE SHALL BE GIVEN The sixth sin is the fact that government is no longer “progressive.” Far from being focused on those who need it most, such as the poor and the young, government spending cascades toward the old and the relatively well off. In California both the plutocrats and the poor do badly out of ­government. The former pay for a big chunk of it, especially through capital-gains taxes. The poor may not pay much income tax, but they don’t attract much public spending either. That goes mainly to middle-­income Californians. They attend better schools than poor Californians.

…

Dismantling the web of handouts for the rich and powerful should be at the very top of progressive America’s agenda—in the same way that royal patronage was the great enemy for John Stuart Mill. So far the Left has concentrated on trying to raise taxes in the name of redistribution. It would be much better to focus on dismantling the welfare state for America’s plutocrats. There are two rich targets. The first is crony capitalism: all those subsidies for well-connected industries. The second is the personal tax system, which, as we have seen, is massively distorted by aid to the rich. Fixing these things would simultaneously slim Leviathan and help it focus its energies on people who actually need its help.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America
by Sarah Kendzior
Published 6 Apr 2020

We see the same old men, again and again, vampires feeding on a nation and draining the lifeblood from words like “treason” and “trauma” and “tragedy.” They are buffered by backers who prefer to operate in silence, free from the consequences of scrutiny. There is a reason they call it a criminal underground: you walk over it every day, unaware it exists until the earth shakes below your feet. In the eyes of autocrats and plutocrats, the future is not a right but a commodity. As climate change brings unparalleled crises, the future becomes a rare asset, meant to be hoarded like diamonds or gold. To millionaire elites, many of whom already had an apocalyptic bent, a depopulated world is not a tragedy but an opportunity—and certainly easier to manage as they insulate themselves from the ravages of a literally scorched earth.

…

Oligarchs are extraordinarily wealthy businessmen who both buffer and are protected by the Kremlin and other dictatorships in the former USSR. (The word “oligarch” is usually used in reference to Russia, but oligarchs are transnational operators.) Oligarchs and government officials have a synergistic relationship aimed at streamlining state corruption and facilitating white-collar crime. Their American analogs are plutocrats: the millionaires and billionaires who wield undue influence over the American political system, making it less democratic in the process. To see what unchecked corporate power looks like without even the pretense of law, you need look no further than Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Trump views Russia’s brutal hypercapitalism with envy.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

I argue that ignorance is not simply useful as an analytical device in academic thought experiments, but also that it can be a useful moral device – indeed perhaps the most powerful device – for asserting the fundamentality of human equality. Where the philosophers of the enlightenment pointed to their own mental faculties to emancipate themselves from feudal rule, I suggest we can point to the limits of those faculties to reclaim democratic rights in today’s increasingly plutocratic age. Today, 240 years after Immanuel Kant’s essay ‘What Is Enlightenment’ proclaimed that we must ‘dare to know,’ another task is upon us: to interrogate ‘truths’ wrongly seen by many people today as irrefutable, like the assumption that Adam Smith venerated unrestrained self-interest and profiteering, or that Edmund Burke, the great 18th-century statesman, would object if he was alive today to contemporary colonial and anti-slavery reparations movements.

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Enlightenment radicals over a century before him saw this problem too, and today, their ideas matter in an age when the ‘wealth of nations’ is not being shared; when more eyes are opening to the way that old patterns of wealth concentration and economic exploitation have long been with us and may be getting worse, not better. Today, there is a growing assault on enlightenment principles of economic fairness, egalitarianism and democracy hailing from both the strongs and the smarts. From the political right, there is white supremacy married to plutocratic law-making, forging a fresh vision of legal protections for the rich and the gifting of new entitlements to corporations while the rights of individuals are curbed. I introduce examples of the problem of tiered justice systems in Chapter 9. But equally, among epistocrats from the technocratic centre and also from many on the political left, there’s a rise in anti-democratic proposals to restrict voting rights.

Pandora's Star
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 2 Mar 2004

Even now, with all his other priorities, the greater human cause still fueled him. “That’s why I joined this Party, to end that kind of monstrous injustice. That’s why I’ve committed my life to this Party. And that’s why I’ll die, a total death, a member of this Party. Because I believe the human race deserves better than those bastard plutocrats running us like some private fiefdom. How about you, sonny? What do you believe in?” “Thanks for clearing that up,” Nigel Murphy said hurriedly. He stood between Adam and Sabbah. “All of us here are good members of the Party, Huw. We might have joined for different reasons, but we have the same aims.”

…

That was what attracted him to the Socialists in the first place, the way they were working to change things so that people like him would get a chance to live decently in an inclusive world. All of which only made this worse. The comrade was actively working to bring down the companies and the plutocratic state that supported them. Which was a lot more than Sabbah ever seemed to do. All the seventh chapter did was hold endless meetings where they argued among themselves for what seemed like hours. Then there was the canvassing, days spent being abused, insulted, and treated with utter contempt by the very people they were trying to help.

…

Two centuries ago, Orchiston had moved to Felicity, the women-only planet. Since then she’d been enthusiastically giving birth to daughters at the rate of almost one every three years. All in all, he reflected, it wasn’t an outstanding record for a crew that was supposed to represent the best of humanity at that time. Three known survivors out of thirty-eight; one plutocrat, one bureaucrat, and one earth-mother. The second half of the meeting was scheduled as a unisphere conference with James Timothy Halgarth, the director of the Research Institute on Far Away. “I’ll be interested in your opinion on what he has to say about the Marie Celeste and its crew,” Wilson told Oscar.

Bernie Madoff, the Wizard of Lies: Inside the Infamous $65 Billion Swindle
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 1 Aug 2011

Within a day of Lehman’s bankruptcy, the nation’s oldest money market fund was swept away by a tsunami of panicky withdrawals. Before that day ended, regulators were scrambling to rescue the insurance giant AIG, fearing that another titanic failure would shatter whatever trust continued to hold the fragile financial system together. People are already furious, shaking their fists at the arrogant plutocrats who led them into this mess. Then, in a camera flash, Bernie Madoff is transformed from someone whom no one but Wall Street insiders and friends would recognize into a man who is headline news around the world. Longtime clients, comfortable people who have lived carefully and who entrusted all their liquid assets to Madoff, will wake up tomorrow nearly destitute.

…

Today, The Reserve fund, the nation’s oldest money market fund, “breaks the buck” by reporting a net asset value of less than a dollar a share. The news feeds the growing panic. If this financial crisis can infect even supposedly secure money funds, for decades the middle-class substitute for a bank account, there is no safe haven. At Fairfield Greenwich Group, whose wealthy investors have long thought of Madoff as a sort of plutocratic money market fund, clients are seeking clarity and comfort. Today the group sends out a reassuring “Dear Investor” letter from Amit Vijayvergiya, the chief risk officer. He quickly mentions that the Sentry fund has no exposure to Lehman, Bank of America, or Merrill Lynch. “Currently,” he continues, the Sentry portfolio “is fully invested in short dated US Treasury bills.”

…

The Jewish Journal’s online news site featured a new blog about the unfolding Madoff case and called it “Swindler’s List”. The crucial puzzle of those early days—the one that would shape public reaction for months—was this: Who were Madoff’s victims? Aside from some worthy charitable and cultural institutions, were they just a few movie stars, plutocrats, and hedge funds, each mourning a $100 million loss? Or had tens of thousands of ordinary middle-income families also lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement savings? Unfortunately, the second scenario was closer to the truth. For every household name like Steven Spielberg, there were a host of dentists and small-time lawyers and retired teachers and plumbers and small business owners.

From Bauhaus to Our House
by Tom Wolfe
Published 2 Jan 1981

Not to be outdone, Alva Vanderbilt hired the most famous American architect of the day, Richard Morris Hunt, to design her a replica of the Petit Trianon as a summer house in Newport, and he did it, with relish. He was quite ready to satisfy that or any other fantasy of the Vanderbilts. “If they want a house with a chimney on the bottom,” he said, “I’ll give them one.” But after 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners, and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class
by Jeff Faux
Published 16 May 2012

Just when the nation needed its leaders to take more responsibility for the future, the governing class took less, abandoning itself to an increasingly reactionary politics. The nation’s economic future would no longer be a matter for democratic debate. Its fate would be left to a “free market” manipulated—ineptly, as it turned out—by plutocrats. Americans were slow to see the deceleration of the material progress that they had come to assume was their birthright. This was partly because the decline occurred slowly. As the old story goes, if you place a frog in boiling water, it will jump out, but if you place a frog in room-temperature water and gradually bring the water to a boil, the frog will remain oblivious to its fate.

…

Once they finished the rescue of Wall Street, they began to move back to New York to resume their own moneymaking among grateful colleagues. In the next crisis and/or the next Democratic administration, they will return as seasoned, trusted, well-established people appointed to the critical cabinet jobs, and they will bring with them the aides who will be the next generation of the governing class. At the base of this plutocratic political pyramid is the spiraling cost of electoral campaigns and the importance for politicians of both parties of raising the money from big business in general and Wall Street in particular. In the past, direct corporate support for election campaigns was prohibited by law, and individual contributions to a candidate were capped at two thousand dollars.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

Meadows, Thinking in Systems: A Primer (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing), 3, Kindle edition. 10. Joseph E. Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 121, Kindle edition. 11. Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming... For Us Plutocrats,” Politico, July/August 2014, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.xhtml. 12. Julia La Roche, “Paul Tudor Jones: Income Inequality Will End in Revolution, Taxes, or War,” Business Insider, March 19, 2015, http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-tudor-jones-on-inequality-2015-3. 13. Alec Hogg, “As Inequality Soars, the Nervous Super Rich Are Already Planning Their Escapes,” The Guardian, January 23, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2015/jan/23/nervous-super-rich-planning-escapes-davos-2015.

Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class
by Owen Jones
Published 14 Jul 2011

The 'beautiful game' has been transformed beyond recognition. Although major clubs shifted away from their origins long ago---for example, Manchester United was founded by railwaymen-they remained deeply rooted in working-class communities. Footballers were generally boys plucked from the club's local area. Unlike the spoiled plutocrats that some Premier League players have become, for much of the twentieth century 'footballers were often worse off than the crowds watching them from the terraces on a Saturday,' as footballer Stuart Imlach's son has written." Back in the early 1950s, there was a maximum salary for players of just £14 a week during the season-not very much over the average manual wage--and only one in five players were lucky enough to earn that.

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At its heart, the demonization of the working class is the flagrant triumphal ism of the rich who, no longer challenged by those below them, instead point and laugh at them. As this Conservative-led government pushes ahead with a programme of cuts that makes the working class pay for the crimes of the elite, they have much to laugh at. But it does not have to be this way. The folly of a society organized around the interests of plutocrats has been exposed by an economic crisis spar ked by the greed of the bankers. The new class politics would be a start, to at least build a counterweight to the hegemonic, unchallenged class politics of the wealthy. Perhaps then a new society based around people's needs, rather than private profit, would be feasible once again.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

I suspect people will be much more up in arms if they realize that the federal government provides $750 million in corporate welfare to the refining industry, rather than providing a tax deduction of $750 million. In some ways, this should strike us as surprising, since, as we have said, they are exactly equivalent in terms of revenue. All that changes is perception. And issuing a check with “Corporate Welfare” in the title better shines a light onto Washington where the interests of the plutocrats pull so many strings. The total tax deduction works out to 1.025 trillion, and all of these will be eliminated on the present proposal. Our proposed budget takes only 80 percent of this revenue resulting in 820 billion in savings, meaning that there will be 205 billion that can be used to offset the increased tax rate for the most deserving.

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Thus, overall, middle and low income couples will still benefit financially even when these tax loopholes are eliminated. Uniform Payroll and Income Tax An additional $220 billion will be raised if the 12.4 percent payroll tax is applied uniformly. Presently, it magically disappears for incomes above $106,800. If you wonder why it suddenly disappears at this level, ask your favorite plutocrat. Hiking the capital gains tax from 15 percent to 35 percent will raise another $88 billion per year. The fact that capital gains are taxed at such a low rate is one of the more bizarre tax decisions, at least from the perspective of fairness. After all, as Warren Buffett points out, it seems bizarre that those performing mental and physical labor PAYING FOR BASIC INCOME GUARANTEE 33 Table 2.2 Additional revenues by bringing changes to US tax policy Item Debit (in billions) Eliminate 80% of 169 tax loopholes Standard and personal deductions Elimination of joint filing Uniform Payroll Tax Capital Gains Tax raised to labor rate 20% Surcharge on income over $1,000,000 Total revenue increase 820 300 60 220 88 129 1,617 should be taxed at a higher rate than capital gains; capital does not toil or sweat.

Thinking About It Only Makes It Worse: And Other Lessons From Modern Life
by David Mitchell
Published 4 Nov 2014

These are statistics I don’t understand and can’t affect, but have nevertheless come to care about and follow obsessively, like a gloomy but weirdly addictive soap opera in a foreign language. In a time of want, we all become interested in where the remaining money is going, and who’s doing well amid the ruins. This wealth-fixated chapter explores anger at a highly paid teacher, the justification for stratospherically paid executives, how a little cash goes a long way in politics, a plutocrat banker’s embarrassment at conspicuous consumption, and some unhealthy ideas for having fun on a budget. Save thinking about those less fortune than yourself for Christmas. The rest of the year is devoted to the livid contemplation of the arseholes who’ve got the cream (to quote the caption from an anal sex video screengrab)

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So the problem, according to Howe, is a lack of understanding. Well, the first thing to clear up is the distinction between the “man on the street” and the “man in the street”. It’s quite important. I don’t think many people are complaining that bankers earn more than the homeless. This “society problem” can only be exacerbated by the fact that, from the plutocrat banker’s vantage point, it seems, the income of someone begging on the street and that of the average passer-by are indistinguishably negligible. But I don’t think that’s the lack of understanding Geoffrey Howe was referring to. It was deft of him to liken Nationwide’s highly paid executives to pop stars and footballers.

The Lessons of History
by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Published 1 Jan 1968

Despotism may for a time retard the concentration; democracy, allowing the most liberty, accelerates it. The relative equality of Americans before 1776 has been overwhelmed by a thousand forms of physical, mental, and economic differentiation, so that the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest is now greater than at any time since Imperial plutocratic Rome. In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of number in the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.

Free Speech And Why It Matters
by Andrew Doyle
Published 24 Feb 2021

While this is essential, it means that it is ill-equipped to tackle many of the free speech battles of the digital age. Historically, censorship has been enacted by the state, but with the rise of social media as the de facto public square, big tech corporations now have dominion over the acceptable limits of popular discourse. We are rapidly moving into an age in which unelected plutocrats hold more collective power and influence than any national government, only without any of the democratic accountability. This is why the argument that private companies should be free to discriminate at will is no longer persuasive or viable. They claim to be platforms committed to the principle of free speech, and yet at the same time behave like publishers who seek to enforce limitations on the opinions that may be expressed.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?
by Thomas Geoghegan
Published 20 Sep 2011

Of course risk-taking type A’s, alpha males and alpha females, are attracted to the high risk here. But that, too, is a reason why Isabel is better off. The U.S. siphons off the abrasive, hard-charging types who would make her life unpleasant over there. Or let’s say the U.S. is a safety valve. We take in more of the plutocrats as well as those who arrive in sealed boxcars to park the plutocrats’ BMWs. That is, in America, we take in the world’s predators as well as the people they like to prey on. So long as France and Germany can dump their predators over here, those countries are kinder and gentler to people at home. Isabel is safer and better off. 2.

Licence to be Bad
by Jonathan Aldred
Published 5 Jun 2019

It has become a large international umbrella organization, a network which has grown over the years and now numbers more than 500 organizations in over 90 countries. As well as advocating free-market economics, the network includes specialist groups ranging from climate-change denialists to pro-tobacco-industry lobbyists. A common theme across the network is the reliance on funding from big corporations and plutocrats. At this point, the conspiracy theories emerge. Beginning with the Mont Pèlerin Society, and culminating in the Atlas Foundation, the conspiracy theorists see the lofty philosophical ambitions of these organizations as mere cover for a secret, long-run plan to protect and then enhance the wealth and influence of rich and powerful business elites.

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In 1960 RAND strategist Herman Kahn adopted Chicken as a game to describe the nuclear stand-off in his influential and bestselling 652-page tome, On Thermonuclear War. Russell questioned why playing Chicken for nuclear high stakes seemed morally acceptable in RAND circles, while teenagers playing Chicken for much lower stakes were criticized: As played by youthful plutocrats, the [Chicken] game is considered decadent and immoral, though only the lives of the players are risked. But when the game is played by eminent statesmen … it is thought that the statesmen on one side are displaying a high degree of wisdom and courage, and only the statesmen on the other side are reprehensible.14 In any case, Chicken was not a helpful bit of game-theoretic analysis, because it has two Nash equilibria, the first being ‘your opponent does not swerve, you do’ and the second being ‘you do not swerve, your opponent does’.

Arabs: A 3,000 Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires
by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Published 2 Mar 2019

All glory be to Him who gave you power And taught you how to sit upon a throne! MANY BOOKS INTO ONE If the equitable ideals of ancient Arabia and recent Islam were victims of the new fashions, their greatest victim would be the unity Muhammad had brought about. The wheel of fire would roll on, and it would be given a good hard shove by that first plutocrat of the Islamic half of recorded Arab history, Uthman. Umar was killed in murky circumstances by a slave. With more foresight than his predecessors, the murdered caliph had appointed a committee to nominate a successor. Their choice, Uthman, was a descendant of Umayyah, the sixth-century ancestor of the clan that had run Mecca in the last decades of the ‘Ignorance’.

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And there was your dear departed, commemorated indelibly in Arabic script, that vigorous growth that had already spread across Central Asia and over the passes into northern India, and was now putting down roots all around the Indian Ocean’s tropical shoreline. Ordering such a monument was a way of declaring membership of a wealthy and cosmopolitan culture. Today, Chinese plutocrats order Aston Martins; then, oceanic sultans and merchant princes ordered Cambay tombstones. And it was all less bothersome than being sent to Arabia for reburial, as Saladin had done with his father and uncle: with a Cambay stone, Arabia came to you in Qur’anic verses of your choice, executed by the most painstaking Indian craftsmen.

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On occasion, Muhammad Shah sent fleets of ships to the Gulf to recruit Arabs. They gathered round Muhammad Shah, a contemporary wrote, ‘like moths around a candle’. Arab courtiers adorning the royal audience chamber, the Hall of a Thousand Columns, could amass stupendous wealth: in his Delhi palazzo, Ghiyath al-Din had the ultimate plutocrat’s bauble, a gold bath; the buttons of his coat – just one of which would have got his son in Baghdad out of hock – were pearls as big as hazelnuts. Ghiyath al-Din, scion of caliphs, was specially favoured; but Muhammad Shah was besotted with Arabs of whatever background, addressed them all as ‘my lord’, and showered them with gifts.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1970

Early in the history of the United States, Jefferson‟s crusade against primogeniture eliminated the possibility of a caste of hereditary land barons. The great landholders, such as the Carrolls, Livingstons and Schuylers, were soon upstaged by the federal bankers, such as the Biddles and Lenoxes. There followed wave after wave of new plutocrats with new sources of wealth: the international bankers, the realestate speculators, the Civil War profiteers, railroad magnates, Wall Street operators, oil and steel trust manipulators, and so on. By the end of the Civil War, social life in New York was already The Great Barbecue, to borrow a term from Vernon L.

How the World Works
by Noam Chomsky , Arthur Naiman and David Barsamian
Published 13 Sep 2011

Are jobs what Congressmen are worried about, not profits and public subsidies for firms? In a lead story, the New York Times Week in Review made an amazing discovery: the new kind of “populism”—as practiced by Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan and the like—is different from the old kind of populism. The old kind opposes big corporations and plutocrats; the new kind is big corporations and plutocrats. That you can have a character like Steve Forbes on the national scene without people cracking up with laughter shows how intense the propaganda is. The narcissism of small differences In his book The Twilight of Common Dreams, Todd Gitlin says the left is polarized by identity politics, which he calls the “narcissism of small differences.”

Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence
by Rachel Sherman
Published 21 Aug 2017

It is nearly always used as a dirty word, describing people with an illegitimate belief that they should get whatever they want because of who they are and/or that they can treat other people badly because they have money.22 Finally, representations of both lifestyle choices and personalities cast the rich and famous as completely other, echoing F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “the rich are different from you and me.” By the same token, rich people are often represented as exotic, as if they live in another country or on another planet from “regular” people. Even relatively serious nonfiction books such as Richistan and Plutocrats reinforce this idea, even in their titles.23 Positive images of wealthy people do exist—especially of male entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Steve Jobs. Yet these positive representations make the same point as negative ones: they reiterate the moral importance of hard work and the moral transgressiveness of elitism and excessive consumption (which has become, a century after Veblen, increasingly associated with wealthy women).

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Three Rivers, CA: Penguin Random House. Frankenberg, Ruth. 1993. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraser, Nancy. 2014. “Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” New Left Review 86: 1–17. Freeland, Chrystia. 2012. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. New York: Penguin. Fry, Richard, and Paul Taylor. 2012. “The Rise of Residential Segregation by Income.” Pew Research Center report, August 1. Available at http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/08/01/the-rise-of-residential-segregation-by-income/.

The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 20 Mar 2014

Broadway on a Rainy Day by Edward & Henry T. Anthony, c. 1865. FIVE It had been thirteen years since Mark Twain last saw New York. When he stepped off the pier onto the city’s icy, congested streets on January 12, 1867, he hardly recognized the place. Here was the nerve center of the new economy, full of buyers and sellers, plutocrats and paupers. The Civil War had unleashed Northern industry. Manufacturers who got rich making Union munitions now made consumer goods, and shipped them by rail to ever-expanding urban markets. In Manhattan, Twain detected a new tempo to everyday life. People didn’t have time to be friendly: they were always in a rush.

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Grant’s sleazy administration in Washington to the thuggery of Boss Tweed’s Tammany machine in New York. Private greed and public crookedness conspired to create “an era of incredible rottenness,” in Twain’s phrase. Politicians bought elections, stole taxpayer dollars, and cut backroom deals with plutocrats. The country was becoming one big boomtown, an economic frontier of fast, ungovernable prosperity, and everyone wanted in on the bonanza. Twain’s relationship to this dynamic was complex. From living in the Far West, he knew what rapid growth did to a community, how certain moral considerations got lost in the general rush for riches.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

The question of how that challenge is unfolding, and how the dominant players inherited from the twentieth century are responding to it, will occupy the rest of this book. By no means is big power dead: the big, established players are fighting back, and in many cases they are still prevailing. Dictators, plutocrats, corporate behemoths, and the leaders of the great religions will continue to be an important feature of the global landscape and the defining factor in the lives of billions of people. But these megaplayers are more constrained in what they can do than they used to be in the past, and their hold on power is increasingly less secure.

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See also ExxonMobil Okolloh, Ory, 100 Oligarchies/oligopolies, 49, 50, 218, 221 Olson, Mancur, 226 Omega, 102 One Foundation, 207 One Million Voices Against FARC, 100 OPEC, 29 Oracle, 167 Orange Revolution, 103 Oren, Amir, 121 Ornstein, Norman, 67 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 88, 183, 185, 201, 249, 254 Orszag, Peter, 223 Orwell, George, 48 Outsourcing, 44, 69, 133, 177, 181, 182, 202 Oxfam, 206, 207, 211 Pakistan, 80, 100, 115, 123, 131, 148 Palestine, 149 Pan Am, 169 Pandora, 212 Paraguay, 155, 209 Pape, Robert, 140 Park, Jay, 149 Parliamentary systems, 30, 78, 89, 91 Partido Popular, 96 Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol, 96 Patrick, Stewart, 138 Patronage, 41, 45 Paulson, John, 101, 161, 190 Pax Americana, 141, 143 Peace, 121, 133, 135, 136, 137, 224 Peace of Westphalia, 35 Peet’s Coffee, 175 Pei, Minxin, 77–78 Pennsylvania State University, 87 Pentagon, 46, 123 Pepsi, 27, 36, 169 Perception, 24, 27 Pereira, Rinaldo, 196 Personal care and hygiene sector, 31 Persuasion, 11, 16, 26, 73 Perth, 181 Pet-food recall, 165 Pew surveys, 68, 147–148, 195, 196 Pharmaceutical companies, 181, 182 Pharr, Susan, 67 Philanthropy, 8, 16, 29, 42, 134, 193, 194, 205–211, 217 venture philanthropy, 208–-209, 210 Philippines, 9, 83, 84, 103, 113, 115, 195 Phillipon, Thomas, 164 Phillips, Tom, 196 Physical assets, 174–175 Pinkovskiy, Maxim, 55 Pinochet, Augusto, 99 Pirates, 12, 29, 107, 110, 118, 126, 226 Pitt, Brad, 207 Pius XII (Pope), 108 Plattner, Marc, 103 Plischke, Elmer, 152–153 Plutocrats, 75 Poland, 12, 82, 84, 92, 151, 152, 172 Polga-Hecimovich, John, 94 Police, 10, 23, 51, 115, 126 Political science, 38 Politics, 4, 10, 13, 16, 29, 31, 61, 63, 102, 219 fragmentation of, 78, 80, 82, 90, 94, 103, 224 geopolitics, 5, 12, 13, 149–150, 157, 235 and gridlock, 77, 80, 223, 242 legal rulings in, 99–100 mandates in, 88, 91, 238 national, 76–106 paralysis of, 222–224 political bosses, 6, 91 political competition, 85, 123, 252–254, 253–254(figs.)

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City
by Ben Judah
Published 28 Jan 2016

But now the Union Jack flutters over the most expensive hotel in London, where every guest has at his disposal a personal, perfectly trained butler. I stand in dim light and imagine the valets in tails throwing open towering old doors – once for wheelchairs, patients and nurses – to sheikhs, oligarchs and plutocrats. But there is no change in the limestone pudding over the road impersonating a Corinthian temple. This is the old palace of the Duke of Wellington. And his aristocratic progeny still use the upper floors above a fusty museum. I am running along the pavement now. I lose them at the mouth of a dingy underpass.

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I record their contemptuous voices: ‘The beggars they sleep here like mice. We have to keep the thieves away. This water means they can’t sleep until it dries.’ There is only one [X] I still have to cross. I need to know what it feels like to be invisible. I need to know what it means to become unseen on plutocratic boulevards. I need to know what it is like to be glared at like a mangy half-man. This is why I am wearing beggar’s clothes: worn out, third-hand brogues, thin joggers, a torn puffa jacket and a tight woolly hat. The couples flinch and avoid me in the flow. I hover in the shadow of a lamp and flick through the pages of my notebook.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, in 1955 the real incomes of the top 0.01 percent of Americans were less than half what they had been in the late 1920s, and their share of total income was down by three-quarters. Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants, and yachts are back, bigger than ever—and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.” Indeed, the whole Romney campaign was based on the premise that President Obama’s threat to modestly raise taxes on top incomes, plus his temerity in suggesting that some bankers had behaved badly, were crippling the economy. Surely, then, the far less plutocrat-friendly environment of the 1950s must have been an economic disaster, right? Actually, some people thought so at the time. Paul Ryan and many other modern conservatives are devotees of Ayn Rand.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

We move from ‘public intellectuals’ to ‘thought leaders’; from critics and sceptics to evangelists; from open to closed minds; from expertise towards personal experience, however shallowly constituted; from lecture series to ten-minute TED talks; from books to blog posts; from scholarship to the consultancy gig; from disinterestedness to the impact agenda; from thoughtful correspondence to Twitter; from research for research's sake to research for plutocrats and autocrats. Discussion is moving away from a commitment to academic, critical, inquisitive values towards the more deliberately provocative and point-scoring.92 It has business analogues in a commercial system primed to offer pointless services and quickly discarded gadgets; cultural analogues in the endless production of same-same eyeball-sucking pabula.

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, accessed 9 October 2018, available at https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/why-was-the-20th-century-not-a-chinese-century-an-outtake-from-slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-long.html Di Pasquale, Giovanni (ed.) (2018), Archimedes In Syracuse, Milan: Giunti Editore Diamond, Jared (2005), Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, London: Penguin Dorling, Danny (2020), Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration – And Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy and Our Lives, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Douglas, Mary (1986), How Institutions Think, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press Douthat, Ross (2020), The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, New York: Avid Reader Press Dowey, James (2017), Mind Over Matter: Access to Knowledge and the British Industrial Revolution, London School of Economics dissertation Drexler, K. Eric (2013), Radical Abundance: How A Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization, New York: Public Affairs Drezner, Daniel W. (2017), The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas, New York: Oxford University Press Dyson, Freeman (2006), The Scientist as Rebel, New York: New Review of Books Press Eagleton, Terry (2003), After Theory, London: Allen Lane Edgerton, David (2019), The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (revised edition), London: Profile Books Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1979), The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Epstein, David (2019), Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, London: Macmillan Erixon, Frederik, and Björn Weigel (2016), The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created By So Many Working So Hard, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press Evans, Benedict, and Lambert, Oliver (2020), ‘Europe, Unicorns and Global Tech Diffusion – The End of the American Internet’, Mosaic Ventures, accessed 9 January 2021, available at https://www.mosaicventures.com/patterns/europe-unicorns-and-global-tech-diffusion-the-end-of-the-american-internet Faulkender, Michael W., Hankins, Kristine W., and Petersen, Mitchell A. (2019), ‘Understanding the Rise in Corporate Cash: Precautionary Savings or Foreign Taxes’, The Review of Financial Studies, Vol. 32 No. 9, pp. 3299–3334 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe (2019), Out of our Minds: What We Think and How We Came to Think It, London: Oneworld Fishman, Charles (2019), One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission that Flew Us to the Moon, New York: Simon & Schuster Fleming, L., Greene, H., Li, G., Marx, M., and Yao, D. (2019), ‘Government-funded research increasingly fuels innovation’, Science, 364, pp. 1139–41 Fortunato, Sandro et al. (2018), ‘Science of science’, Science, Vol. 359 No. 6379 Foster, Jacob G., Rzhetsky, Andrey, and Evans, James A. (2015), ‘Tradition and Innovation in Scientists’ Research Strategies’, American Sociological Review, Vol. 80 No. 5 Franklin, Daniel (ed.) (2017), Megatech: Technology in 2050, London: Economist Books Franklin, Daniel, with John Andrews (eds) (2012), Megachange: The World in 2050, London: Economist Books Frase, Peter (2016), Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, London: Verso Freedman, Lawrence (2018), The Future of War: A History, London: Penguin Freeman, Charles (2003), The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason, London: Pimlico Fukuyama, Francis (1992), The End of History and The Last Man, London: Hamish Hamilton Funk, Russell, and Owens-Smith, Jason (2017), ‘A Dynamic Network Measure of Technological Change’, Management Science, Vol. 63 No. 3, pp. 791–817 Furman, Jeffrey L., and Stern, Scott (2011), ‘Climbing atop the Shoulders of Giants: The Impact of Institutions on Cumulative Research’, American Economic Review, Vol. 101 No. 5, pp. 1933–63 Garde, Damian, and Saltzman, Jonathan (2020), ‘The story of mRNA: How a once-dismissed idea became a leading technology in the Covid vaccine race’, Stat, accessed 23 December 2020, available at https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-once-dismissed-idea-became-a-leading-technology-in-the-covid-vaccine-race/ Gastfriend, Eric (2015), ‘90% of all the scientists that ever lived are alive today’, Future of Life Institute, accessed 27 July 2019, available at https://futureoflife.org/2015/11/05/90-of-all-the-scientists-that-ever-lived-are-alive-today/ Gay, Peter (2009), Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond, London: Vintage Gertner, Jon (2012), The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, New York: Penguin Ginsberg, Benjamin (2013), The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters, New York: Oxford University Press Gladwell, Malcolm (2008), ‘In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?’

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

For a brilliant analysis, see Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). Other favorites include Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do about It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Richard L. Hasen, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, the Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles, The Captured Economy: How the Powerful Enrich Themselves, Slow Down Growth, and Increase Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018); Jacob S.

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—Tim Wu, bestselling author of The Curse of Bigness “A love letter to the American people and a down-to-earth blueprint of an evolving future in which we work together to fulfill the promise of humanity’s most important idea: We the people are endowed with the inalienable right to rule ourselves, free from the tyranny of kings, dictators, plutocrats, or computers.” —Shoshana Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism “Lessig has long been the leading voice on how corruption undermines American democracy. In this book, he trains his trademark wit and incisiveness on an even bigger problem: Our political institutions, he shows, are deeply unrepresentative.

New York 2140
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 14 Mar 2017

They’re under huge pressure to sell as low as they can, because every buyer buys the cheapest version of whatever it is. So they shove some of their production costs off their books.” “Can’t they just pay their labor less?” “They already did that! That was easy. That’s why we’re all broke except the plutocrats.” “I always see the Disney dog when you say that.” “They’ve squeezed us till we’re bleeding from the eyes. I can’t stand it anymore.” “Blood from a stone. Sir Plutocrat, chewing on a bone.” “Chewing on my head! But now we’re chewed up. We’re squoze dry. We’ve been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.”

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She hated them as architectural fashion models, skinny, blank, featureless, owned by finance, nothing to do with real life. One giant apartment per floor. People living in glass houses and yet throwing stones. She had heard that most of the owners of these apartments only occupied them a week or two per year. Oligarchs, plutocrats, flitting around the world like vampire capital itself. And of course it was even worse uptown, in the new graphene superscrapers. The men ducked out of the hotello and sat back down around her, all except for the old man, who stood at the railing, elbows on the rail, looking down. The boys sat at his feet, Vlade on the chair next to Charlotte, Franklin and Jojo on the chairs beyond them.

740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building
by Michael Gross
Published 18 Dec 2007

Architectural rendering of Candela and Harmon’s 740 Park Avenue (Drawing courtesy Steven Candela) INTRODUCTION SOMETHING DRAWS THE EYE TO THE COUPLE WALKING INTO AN ITALIAN restaurant on the fringe of Manhattan’s Gold Coast—the Upper East Side rectangle formed by Fifth and Park avenues between Fifty-ninth and Ninety-sixth streets—the man is hunched, halting, and stout, and the woman, stately and sylphic-thin. “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall,” says the Book of Proverbs. The former plutocrat Saul Philip Steinberg and his third wife, Gayfryd, seem to embody that adage. It is clear as they maneuver their way to their table at Sette Mezzo that Saul Steinberg still suffers from the effects of a devastating stroke he had a decade earlier. So Gayfryd gently guides him, holding one of his arms, the left one, the one that seems partly paralyzed.

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So Ronald Jeançon, a past board president, once had to let Barbra Streisand’s broker know that the board would not even consider her because she was an actress and, worse than that, a singer. And Streisand is in good company. Others who have not made it into 740 include Joan Crawford, the late agent Ted Ashley, Neil Sedaka, the Daimler-Benz heir Friedrich Christian “Mick” Flick, the junk-bond tycoon Nelson Peltz, and, most recently, a Russian plutocrat, Leonard Blavatnik. For every rejection, there is a shareholder who wants . . . needs . . . to cash out and leave, but is held hostage by a difficult co-op board. And even when an applicant has passed the board, there are still more hurdles to get over. Cooperative ownership, clearly, has its drawbacks.

…

And 740 didn’t keep him out permanently after all; early in 2005, he went there to sell some Rothkos to a resident. Edgar Bronfman married his last wife, the artist Jan Aronson, in 1993, and they still live at 960 Fifth. His secretary says that recalling his years at 740 “isn’t really something he wants to do.” 27 THE PLUTOCRAT PALACE, WHERE WIDOWS AND DIVORCÉES HAD ALWAYS seemed to outnumber out-of-sight children, was turning into a building full of young families. Jan Cowles remembers sharing the elevator with Ann Bronfman, both of them pushing baby carriages. The Gimbels and Epsteins also had small children, as did many of those who bought apartments in the 1960s.

A History of Western Philosophy
by Aaron Finkel
Published 21 Mar 1945

In connection with a football match, modern-minded men think the players grander than the mere spectators. Similarly as regards the State: they admire more the politicians who are the contestants in the game than those who are only onlookers. This change of values is connected with a change in the social system—the warrior, the gentleman, the plutocrat, and the dictator, each has his own standard of the good and the true. The gentleman has had a long innings in philosophical theory, because he is associated with the Greek genius, because the virtue of contemplation acquired theological endorsement, and because the ideal of disinterested truth dignified the academic life.

…

Until 1378, Genoa rivalled Venice in commerce and naval power, but after that year Genoa became subject to Milanese suzerainty. Milan, which led the resistance to feudalism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, fell, after the final defeat of the Hohenstaufen, under the dominion of the Visconti, an able family whose power was plutocratic, not feudal. They ruled for 170 years, from 1277 to 1447; then, after three years of restored republican government, a new family, that of the Sforza, connected with the Visconti, acquired the government, and took the title of Dukes of Milan. From 1494 to 1535, Milan was a battle-ground between the French and the Spaniards; the Sforza allied themselves sometimes with one side, sometimes with the other.

…

Then followed the four years of Savonarola’s influence, when a kind of Puritan revival turned men against gaiety and luxury, away from free-thought and towards the piety supposed to have characterized a simpler age. In the end, however, mainly for political reasons, Savonarola’s enemies triumphed, he was executed and his body was burnt (1498). The Republic, democratic in intention but plutocratic in fact, survived till 1512, when the Medici were restored. A son of Lorenzo, who had become a cardinal at the age of fourteen, was elected Pope in 1513, and took the title of Leo X. The Medici family, under the title of Grand Dukes of Tuscany, governed Florence until 1737; but Florence meanwhile, like the rest of Italy, had become poor and unimportant.

Great North Road
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 26 Sep 2012

Saul wondered how the expedition would affect the desirability of owning a place in Abellia. Not that the truly rich lived here permanently; it was just another house spread around the circuit of their eternal migration. Most of the big houses went unused for a year or eighteen months at a time before their plutocrat owners visited in the forlorn hope of witnessing some new spectacle or experience that might momentarily enrich their jaded got-it-all lifestyle. Maybe the chance of being shredded by a nonhuman monster would actually appeal to their type. Although knowing them there would be an influx of armed hunters, relishing the thrill of stalking their lethal prey through uncharted jungle.

…

“Of course.” He and the other agents went into a huddle with the team from the Regulatory Board office, leaving her alone with Marlak. “They really will track it all down,” Marlak said quietly. “Your father and I never thought to hide anything away. New Monaco was supposed to be the one place where a plutocrat’s wealth was safe.” “I know.” She narrowed her eyes. “What about you? They can’t take anything of yours, can they?” “Nothing that’s already been paid to me, no. I haven’t had this month’s salary, so theoretically that makes me one of your creditors.” “Sorry.” “Don’t be. I’m rich in my own right—by normal standards, anyway.

…

“What’s happening, Saul? It’s not the Zanth, is it?” He knew that apprehension only too well. If it was Zanth, they’d never make it to the Highcastle gateway. His eyes closed against a dark fear stirring, one he never thought he’d feel again. As if to emphasize the worry, he heard a distant sonic boom as some plutocrat’s private jet streaked south to safety. “This isn’t the Zanth,” he said with as much confidence he could gather. “The plants here have clearly evolved to cope with the sunspot outbreaks. This is what they do when it redshifts. They survive. And we will, too.” He eyed the silent majestic rivers of light cavorting across the sky, disturbed by their size and intensity.

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction
by Andrew Ballantyne
Published 19 Dec 2002

The person or committee that commissions a building will always want to be assured that its money is being spent wisely, in order to bring about what is intended. If a school commissions a swimming pool then it will be disappointed, and will undoubtedly sue, if the building that results from the commission cannot in fact be used as for swimming. If a plutocrat commissions a frivolous eye-catcher for a hill in his garden, then the architect will have failed if the building is solemnly monumental. How does the architect persuade the client that the design fits the bill? Usually by explaining what it is going to be like, by using illustrations or models, so that the building can be imagined in its setting.

Pocket Milan & the Lakes
by Lonely Planet and Paula Hardy
Published 2 Jan 2013

Costs were covered by the sale of palchi (private boxes) of which there are six gilt bedecked tiers with plush crimson lining. When rehearsals are not in session you can stand in boxes 13, 15 and 18 for a glimpse of the jewel-like interior. The Loggione Above the private boxes, two loggione (galleries) allow the less well-off to peek over the heads of Milanese plutocrats at one of the largest stages in Italy. Occupants of these seats, the loggionisti, are the opera’s fiercest critics, famously booing tenor Roberto Alagna off stage in 2006, who was hurriedly replaced by understudy Antonello Palombi in his jeans and T-shirt to quieten them. Museo Teatrale alla Scala In the theatre’s museum ( 02 8879 7473; Largo Ghiringhelli 1, Piazza della Scala; admission €6; 9am-12.30pm, 1.30-5.30pm) , portraits, harlequin costumes and a spinet inscribed with the command ‘Inexpert hand, touch me not!’

The Clockwork Rocket
by Greg Egan
Published 30 Jun 2011

But he had more important things to think about than the flaws in Yalda’s domestic life. “Beyond spreading the news to the citizenry of Red Towers,” he said, “I’m hoping your colleague Nereo can arrange a meeting for me with his patron.” “You can’t get an introduction to Paolo yourself?” Yalda was amused. “Whatever happened to the plutocrats’ network?” “Networks, plural. They’re not all joined together.” “Why do you want to meet Paolo?” “Money,” Eusebio replied bluntly. “My father’s set a ceiling on my investment in the rocket. If I’m going to have to build the whole structure myself—mining and transporting all the sunstone, incorporating it into an artificial shell… if I tried to match the scale of Mount Peerless the costs would be greater by a factor of several gross, but even the smallest viable alternative is far beyond what I can afford on my own.”

…

If the Peerless really did come back after an age in the void—with the kind of technology that could defeat the Hurtlers and everything that threatened to follow them—they’d trade with whomever they liked, on whatever terms they wished. A certain amount of compassion for their distant cousins was the most she was hoping for; any prospect of scrupulous adherence to contracts signed by their long-dead ancestors was just a fantasy Eusebio had encouraged so the plutocrats could part with vast sums of money without having to confront the horrifying reality that it was actually being spent for the common good. Frido was waiting by the bunker. “How was she?” he asked anxiously. “Calm,” Yalda said. “She was joking with me.” Frido stared back across the plain. Yalda decided that they were the ones who were getting the real taste of cosmic determinism; Benedetta could still decide either to launch the rocket or back out, but nothing her two friends did now could influence her choice.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

Today, there are fewer short-sighted owners like those who sold to the Canadians creating Canary Wharf. A more sophisticated model of development has therefore come to the fore. This is ‘core investing’. A plutocrat in Kuala Lumpur may have no way of knowing if a new building in Delhi is a tipping point or not; Kuala Lumpur knows little about the building’s relationship to surrounding buildings, to the local community, or to the city at large. And the plutocrat need not care. (I have nothing against Kuala Lumpur, I’m only giving an example.) Essentially, core investing puts money into a set of parameters, a set of specifications.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

As I travel the world, I see that people everywhere pay tremendous attention to events in the United States. When they observe a bigoted plutocrat succeeding here, this gives cheer to the world’s dictators.” Diamond is no street-theater agitator. His office is at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a mostly conservative public-policy study center that is the right’s answer to the mostly liberal Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. And he finds the winner of the 2016 American presidential election a “bigoted plutocrat.” Defenders of democracy must accept that Trump was chosen—there’s no assurance that free elections will produce good leaders.

The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 15 Mar 2015

As the evening’s early chitchat burbled on, I overheard one billionaire—who had gotten his start in life by inheriting a fortune—discuss with another the problem of lazy Americans who were trying to free ride on the rest. Soon thereafter, they seamlessly transitioned into a discussion of tax shelters, apparently unaware of the irony. Several times in the evening, Marie Antoinette and the guillotine were invoked as the gathered plutocrats reminded each other of the risks of allowing inequality to grow to excess: “Remember the guillotine” set the tone for the evening. And in that refrain they confessed a central message of this book: the level of inequality in America is not inevitable; it is not the result of inexorable laws of economics.

…

From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It’s not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment. Put sentiment aside. There are good reasons why plutocrats should care about inequality anyway—even if they’re thinking only about themselves. The rich do not exist in a vacuum. They need a functioning society around them to sustain their position. Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency
by Vicky Spratt
Published 18 May 2022

But even if Section 21 is overturned, organisations such as Safer Renting, which works across ten London boroughs supporting people at risk of illegal eviction, warn that rogue landlords will still find a way to pull the plug on tenancies which become ‘hard work’. What is a rent hike beyond what the tenant can pay if not an eviction by proxy? Tony’s landlord was no reprobate, and nor was it one of those faceless international plutocrats who own huge blocks of flats or, in some places, entire streets that we often like to imagine are responsible for our crisis in housing. It was a local charity. Tony felt as if he was going mad, being gaslit. After the eviction notice was served, he found piles of rubbish at the end of his garden – broken fridges, waste food and leftover cooking oil from the estate’s wedding venue.

…

And who is to blame? We might turn up obvious answers. To the first question: those on low incomes, women, Black people, Asian people, other minority ethnic groups and queer people. To the second: Tories, landlords, developers who hoard land, local councils which sell it off and the international plutocrats who buy it. But the obvious answers are not the right answers. Just as the story of the injustice imposed upon Generation Rent wages a commodious intergenerational warfare, resisting faceless villains risks becoming a convenient distraction from the political conditions that continue to engender a housing emergency.

Hunger: The Oldest Problem
by Martin Caparros
Published 14 Jan 2020

To begin to be afraid of it was one of the most radical cultural changes in recent times. For centuries, in almost all societies, being overweight was a luxury; being able to eat excessively, waste resources in one’s own body, and show that off, was a form of power. Even a few decades ago being fat was a sure sign of prosperity. Kings, big hotshots, cardinals, plutocrats with bellies inflating their vests from which hung gold watch chains, those grand dames with grand hats, and opera stars, all carried their fat like trophies. At a time when working hard made you thin, a fat body was a body that announced its idleness; at a time when eating was a privilege, a body that could prove that it ate everything it wanted—and more than it needed—was a body that one wanted to show off.

…

In a recent report the Asian Development Bank argued that if emerging Asia’s income distribution had not worsened over the past twenty years, the region’s rapid growth would have lifted an extra 240 million people out of extreme poverty. More controversial studies purport to link widening income gaps with all manner of ills, from obesity to suicide. The widening gaps within many countries are beginning to worry even the plutocrats. A survey for the World Economic Forum meeting at Davos pointed to inequality as the most pressing problem of the coming decade (alongside fiscal imbalances). In all sections of society, there is growing agreement that the world is becoming more unequal, and that today’s disparities and their likely trajectory are dangerous. […] The unstable history of Latin America, long the continent with the biggest income gaps, suggests that countries run by entrenched wealthy elites do not do very well.

…

Seems they have recently decided that they can hand over a few billion dollars, the product of their domination of world markets, their speculations, to alleviate the poverty that market creates. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the rich were portrayed as caricatures, target practice, tremble oh plutocrats tremble, the greedy monster who gobbles up everything, the dirty old man who spends his money getting Lulu drunk on his champagne today and refuses to raise the wages of a poor worker who asked him for an extra piece of bread. Now they are magicians and kings who donate, save the world. As for their own assets, they still say: I screw over everybody and keep the money of millions; I throw them a bone, here and there, because I care, because I’m worried about them.

The Downfall of Money: Germany's Hyperinflation and the Destruction of the Middle Class
by Frederick Taylor
Published 16 Sep 2013

In an inflationary situation, someone like Stinnes could borrow almost unlimited amounts at favourable rates, courtesy of the Reichsbank’s policy of automatic loans to German industry, and, moreover, by the time he began to pay back the loan it would be worth less in real terms – as time went by, a very, very great deal less. Hated by millions as a personification of capitalism’s ugly excesses, the curious thing was that Stinnes bore little resemblance to the stereotype of the plutocrat. Photographs of him at the height of his wealth and power show him as a slight, undistinguished figure. Often, when photographed in the street or some other public place, he would seem to be glancing at the camera with wary unease. Even in family photographs, he seems tense. When out and about – and he travelled a great deal – he wore a slightly shabby, old-fashioned dark suit and a bowler hat.

…

The French actions there were an outrage, but then the French were . . . simply being French. The real guilty parties in this affair remained, as ever, the democratic parties of Weimar and their politicians. Not forgetting their alleged Jewish backers, who were, of course, also behind the French plutocrats who had engineered the Ruhr occupation. The notion of the Jews being to blame for everything fitted even better into the framework of the post-war inflation. Jews represented, for the German far right, internationalism, mobile finance capital, the rendering to mere unreliable (and stealable) paper of the honest, tangible wealth that came from making and growing things.

Ada BlackJack: A True Story of Survival in the Arctic
by Jennifer Niven
Published 1 Jan 1990

Every now and then, a stray white form was glimpsed in the distance, hulking away from camp, but when the men gave chase they usually came back with nothing. By December 1921, the weather was rotten and kept them confined to their house for weeks on end. Ada woke first to start the fire and make breakfast, while the men lay around “like plutocrats,” according to Knight. They got up when they felt like it and went to bed when they were sleepy, and they spent their days chopping wood, hauling ice, and feeding the dogs. Galle wrote in his journals, invented humorous lyrics about the others, and plucked away happily at a pair of deerskin pants he was making; Maurer stretched out in a corner and read; Crawford, ever the diligent student, added to his scientific notes; and Knight, who liked to think himself in charge, tackled whatever task needed to be done, like making a sled-raft covering with the sewing machine.

…

New York Times, September 28,1921 93 “Of what use...” New York Times, March 22,1922 93 “The Government...” Le Bourdais, Stefansson: Ambassador of the North, p. 166 94 “Wrangel Island...” Washington Times, The National Daily, “Wrangel Isle Land of Russia, U.S. Concludes,” Tuesday, May 23, 1922 94 “like plutocrats” “Summary of Wrangel Island Expedition,”August 21, 1922, NAC 96 “What should I...” Lorne Knight’s diary, December 17, 1921, KL 99 “Now I will...” “Summary of Wrangel Island Expedition,” August 21, 1922, NAC 100 “I wonder what...” “Summary of Wrangel Island Expedition,” August 21, 1922, NAC 102 “I’ll put C. up...”

Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America
by Alec MacGillis
Published 16 Mar 2021

The number of tech jobs overall in the city had surged by 80 percent over the past decade, to more than 140,000. The city was becoming a parody of the plutocratic metropolis, the sort of place where a family could leave its five-story Upper East Side townhouse for the weekend and not realize until its return that its house cleaner had gotten stuck in the home’s elevator for three days, as happened in early 2019. And so when word emerged of yet more towers to accommodate the company led by the greatest plutocrat of them all—subsidized by nearly $3 billion in taxpayer incentives!—a newly energized minority, led by tribunes like newly elected U.S. representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, age twenty-nine, rose up and said no.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire
by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson
Published 14 Apr 2020

The Secret Order of Power and Profit Or if one is looking for something a bit more familiar – the New World Order… One of the signs of an Empire that is due for destruction is government corruption. And who is ultimately the Masters of All Beings everywhere in the world? They typically operate under the guise of your friendly neighborhood Senate or Parliament, but in reality, the true Ruling Party is a combination of oligarchs, plutocrats, and kleptocrats taking control of the government. In plain language – the Illuminated old Elite and new Billionaires, who control and operate the united nations of the world, the central banks, the military, and the corporations – and have been doing so for hundreds of years. People need to get really honest with themselves about who is running the show in America, and virtually every other country in the world: It is not the federal government, or parliament, or House of Whatever (although they all have a role to play).

…

The biggest advantage of a democratic republic over monarchy/aristocracy is that the rulers would resemble the public and thus make decisions appropriate for the populace. The solution? Build in the two-party system which is designed to perpetuate a status quo benefiting a small plutocracy. No matter who the voters choose, the elitists win, because the election system has only two “states”, both of which are constructed by and acceptable to the plutocrats. The 5 principles of today’s democracy could be considered the consent of the governed, representative government, individual rights, the rule of law, and a system of checks and balances. If a person believes these principles can all be checked, they should stop reading immediately! Their mind has already been altered, and their brain has been eaten.

A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day in Wall Street History
by Diana B. Henriques
Published 18 Sep 2017

Confidence in America’s banks was as fragile as blown glass, and the last thing Volcker needed was a “bolt from the blue” like this. Yet, here was the head of Wall Street’s number-two firm warning him that some big banks were financing what sounded like wildly speculative silver trading by a couple of Texas plutocrats. Within minutes, Volcker had reached out to Harold Williams, the urbane and seasoned chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the primary U.S. government regulator of Bache and its fellow brokerage firms. Williams was at a conference in Colonial Williamsburg; he ducked into a side room, spoke with Volcker about Bache, and then phoned to tell his staffers to check immediately on the rest of Wall Street’s exposure to the silver speculators.

…

Bank regulators worried about banks financing risky takeover deals and savings and loans buying deal-linked “junk bonds,” but failed to challenge closely the bank mergers producing a breed of financial giants. Regulators across the board neglected the unregulated swaps that were flooding the markets and linking giant players together in new and invisible ways. Congress shifted its focus to headline-grabbing criminal cases against Wall Street plutocrats and largely abandoned any serious effort to address these profound market changes. In short, amid the distractions and demands of takeover battles and criminal investigations, Washington mostly ignored the real hazards that were developing in the financial landscape. Titan investors got exponentially bigger, their investment strategies grew dangerously more similar, and their effect on daily market trading grew more pronounced.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

They’re not spending at the dry cleaners, the grocers and all of that, so it deprives New York of all that local multiplier effect.” The superrich typically interact with cities in a very limited, controlled way, moving through the urban environment in the protection of what urbanist Rowland Atkinson calls a “plutocratic cloud.” As for the towers that the billionaires helped build, they stand empty and dark, vertical ghost towns in the sky. Did I mention that the Bloomberg administration trademarked the slogan “The World’s Second Home” for marketing the city to tourists and investors? I guess “The World’s Pied-à-Terre” was too obvious.

…

On the joke book, see Michael Wolff, “Full Bloom,” New York, November 5, 2001, and Elizabeth Kolbert, “The Mogul Mayor,” The New Yorker, April 22, 2002; Michael Saul, “Bloomy Defends Bid to Gag Aide,” Daily News, September 10, 2001; “Campaigning for Mayor: Confronting the Economy’s Future and Media Rumors,” excerpts from mayoral debate, New York Times, September 10, 2001. 155“He seems not quite able to articulate . . ” from Nick Paumgarten, “Bloomberg Courts Makor,” The New Yorker, August 6, 2001. 156“No turn of events,” from Michael Wolff, “Bloomberg News,” New York, August 27, 2001. 162–163On newsstands, see Glenn Collins, “Newsstands of Tomorrow Get Mixed Reviews Today,” New York Times, August, 29, 2008, and Winnie Hu, “Newsstands to Give Way to New Kiosks with Ads,” New York Times, October 10, 2003. 13 HIGH LINE 1: THE MEATPACKING DISTRICT 185Matt Pincus, “The Wild West,” New York, March 3, 1997. 193–193Diane von Furstenberg perfume rumor from New York Post, Page Six, “Designer Scent ’Em Running,” July 2, 2009. 14 THE NEW GILDED AGE AND THE ENRON SOCIETY 200On the potential cooling benefit of supertall luxury towers, see “The Science of Supertalls,” presented by Jesse M. Keenan, research director, Center for Urban Real Estate, and Luc Wilson, Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, at the 2015 Municipal Art Society Summit for New York City, October 22, 2015. 201“Plutocratic cloud,” from Rowland Atkinson, “Limited Exposure: Social Concealment, Mobility, and Engagement with Public Space by the Super-rich in London,” Environment and Planning A (2015). 203A 2015 city-sponsored study . . NYC Center for Economic Opportunity and Abt Associates, “The Effects of Neighborhood Change on New York City Housing Authority Residents,” May 21, 2015. 203–204“We won’t have any sun,” from Greg Smith, “High and Mighty NYCHA: Luxury Towers on Leased Land Would ‘Look Down’ on Projects,” Daily News, June 11, 2013. 204Ian Frazier, “Hidden City,” The New Yorker, October 28, 2013. 208Paul Piff et al., “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, March 13, 2012; Paul Piff, “Wealth and the Inflated Self: Class, Entitlement, and Narcissism,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, August 20, 2013. 209E.

The Accidental Theorist: And Other Dispatches From the Dismal Science
by Paul Krugman
Published 18 Feb 2010

A particularly striking statistic in Wolff’s book should put an end to the still-widespread tendency to discuss the growth of inequality in America by tracking the fortunes of the top 20 percent, or of college-educated workers. Between 1983 and 1989, while the wealth share of the top 20 percent of families rose substantially, the share of percentiles 80 to 99 actually fell. In other words, when we say that America’s rich have gotten richer, by the “rich” we do not mean garden variety yuppies—we mean true plutocrats. Many conservatives have probably stopped reading by now, or at least stopped being able to respond to this article with anything other than blind anger, but for those who are still with me let me make a crucial point about these statistics: They say nothing about who, if anyone, is to blame. To say that America was a far more unequal society in 1989 than it was in 1973 is a simple statement of fact, not an attack on Ronald Reagan.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion
by Alain de Botton
Published 6 Mar 2012

The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert – all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome’s army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings. (illustration credit 2.6) 4. If we have managed to remain awake to (and for) the lessons of the Mass, it should by its close have succeeded in shifting us at least fractionally off our accustomed egocentric axes.

Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America
by Linda Tirado
Published 1 Oct 2014

So let’s break this down: You’re poor, so you desperately need whatever crappy job you can find, and the nature of that crappy job is that you can be fired at any time. Meanwhile, your hours can be cut with no notice, and there’s no obligation on the part of your employer to provide severance regardless of why, how, or when they let you go. And we wonder why the poor get poorer? Of course not every firing is part of an intricate plot by the plutocrats. I’ve also been fired for calling off work too much (“calling off work,” for those unfamiliar with the vernacular, just means that you call your boss to say you’re not coming in). Usually I’ve called off because I was legitimately sick, because I rarely miss work more than I can help. But sometimes it was because my car wouldn’t start or because I just couldn’t face it.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think
by Luke Johnson
Published 31 Aug 2011

It always takes a while for the pain to be felt in the luxury goods business. Initially, all those selling yachts or sports cars or operating casinos think that the dependable rich Russians and Arabs will bail them out, and for a while that’s true. But then the price of oil usually collapses in a downturn, just like everything else, and so plutocrats from resource-rich countries must rein in their spending too. Meanwhile, businesses everywhere savagely reduce expense accounts and corporate hospitality, hitting all sorts of suppliers reliant on that spending. Businesses in the mid-market can prosper in a downturn, but must discount to survive.

Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune
by Kristin Ross
Published 6 Apr 2015

But surely it belongs to neither fiction exactly and instead to some other kind of history—one that Arlette Farge, in another context, has described as “untimely, ironic, irregular, disruptive.”58 It is important to recall the vehemence with which many Commune survivors combated the view that they had acted to “save the Republic.” “The republic of our dreams was surely not the one we have. We wanted it democratic, social and universal and not plutocratic.”59 As for Lefrançais, he is characteristically blunt: “The proletariat will never be truly emancipated unless it gets rid of the Republic—the last form, and not the least malevolent—of authoritarian governments.”60 _______________ 1M. Chauvière, cited in La Revue blanche, 1871: Enquête sur la Commune, p. 51. 2Louise Michel, La Commune: Histoire et souvenirs [1898] (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), p. 170. 3Adolphe Thiers speaking before the Assemblée Nationale, cited in La Revue blanche, 1871: Enquête sur la Commune, p. 43. 4A police official of the Government of National Defense in 1872, cited in Robert Wolfe, “The Origins of the Paris Commune: The Popular Organizations of 1868–71,” PhD diss., Harvard University, July 1965, p. 162. 5Chevalier d’Alix, Dictionnaire de la Commune et des communeux (La Rochelle: A.

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1990

But the similarities were more striking. Both were six foot two, broad shouldered, and burly—cartoonists scarcely had to alter their sketches of the pear-shaped, top-hatted tycoon. Jack even wore Pierpont’s bloodstone on his watch chain—a favorite touch of the radical caricaturists, who had added it to the iconography of paunchy plutocrats. The strong Morgan nose remained, though without Pierpont’s skin disease. Contemporaries said the two J. P. Morgans even walked and talked alike. Occasionally, one sees a snapshot of “J. P. Morgan” threatening a reporter with his stick and momentarily cannot tell which Morgan it is. Both were high-strung, thin-skinned, moody, and prone to melancholic self-pity.

…

For the first time, he enabled passengers to travel from New York to Boston without switching lines. The problem was that Mellen was a thorough rascal. Here was William Allen White’s verdict: “Mellen, in the eyes of economic liberals, was the head devil of the plutocracy in Massachusetts and New England. . . . In politics, Mellen walked to his ends directly, justified by the conscience of a plutocrat, which held in contempt the scruples of democracy.”20 Congressional investigators later revealed that Mellen handed out about a million dollars in bribes on one suburban line alone. Beyond shame, he even suborned a Harvard professor to deliver lectures favoring lenient regulatory treatment for trains and trolleys.

…

Corliss would view his own politics not as a negation of his parents’ views but as an extension of their liberalism. Always proud of his work for Woodrow Wilson, Lamont seemed to stand out as the great exception, refuting, in Corliss’s words, the “stereotype of rich people and Republicans as conservative or reactionary plutocrats opposed to all forms of progress and liberalism.”18 Nor was this just a loving son’s bias; such accolades tumbled in upon Lamont. To poet John Masefield, the Lamonts were an exemplary couple, representing everything civilized: “Their political views, national and international, were ever generous and liberal.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
by Ron Chernow
Published 1 Jan 1997

Yet when photographed in leisure hours in the sanctuary of Forest Hill, he looked trim and whimsical, surprisingly boyish for such a powerful man. Gone were the old side-whiskers, but he still had a full red mustache and sandy brown hair. In a period when moguls prided themselves on their embonpoint, Rockefeller was as lean as a grey-hound. And at a time when top hats and watch chains were de rigueur for any self-respecting plutocrat, Rockefeller generally conformed to the requisite style, but his family constantly had to remind him to buy a new suit when his current one got too shiny. If Rockefeller generally enjoyed excellent health, there were early warning symptoms of the toll taken by the excruciating pressures of Standard Oil.

…

By that point, Gates had assembled a team of advisers tutored in Rockefeller’s principles, trained in his methods, and fired with his evangelical zeal. For the remainder of his life, Rockefeller’s medical status provoked so much fantasy, gossip, and speculation that we should try to define it here with some precision. Rockefeller had been fit and youthful well into his fifties. He never adopted the sleek, portly look of his fellow plutocrats and seemed ten years younger than his age. What, then, ailed him in the early 1890s? Broadly speaking, the answer was overwork, brought on by the combined stress of work and charity. As his inseparable companion and homeopathic physician, Dr. Hamilton Biggar, said, “A little more of that would have killed him.

…

When Junior, defying custom, gave him a fur coat and cap for Christmas in 1908, it elicited the following humorous reply: “I thank you a thousand times for the fur coat and cap and mittens. I did not feel I could afford such luxuries, and am grateful for a son who is able to buy them for me.”9 As his son should have known, Rockefeller would never strut around in this plutocrat’s costume, and he returned it to Junior, who wore it instead. Breathtakingly generous in his philanthropy, Rockefeller could also be stingy—appallingly so. Whereas most other tycoons hired subordinates to oversee personal expenditures, Rockefeller supervised every detail, and in small matters he tended to be an incorrigible skinflint.

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It
by Richard V. Reeves
Published 22 May 2017

In fact, there has been no increase in inequality below the eightieth percentile. All the inequality action is above that line. Income growth has not been uniform within the top fifth, of course: a third of the income rise went to the top 1 percent alone. But that still left $2.7 trillion for the 19 percent just beneath them. Failing to join the ranks of the plutocrats does not mean life as a pauper. It is not just the “upper class” that has been flourishing. A much broader swath of American society is doing well—and detaching themselves. These facts can cause some discomfort. Few of us want to be associated with the hated super-rich. Very often it seems to be those quite near the top of the distribution who are most angry with those at the very top: more than a third of the demonstrators on the May Day “Occupy” march in 2011 had annual earnings of more than $100,000.8 But, rather than looking up in envy and resentment, the upper middle class would do well to look at their own position compared to those falling further and further behind.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

I fear that the people who have figured out how to attain superhuman powers through the application of meetings, memos, and bureaucracies will aggressively acquire technology and use it to disrupt any upstart who threatens to accomplish the same effect with less drudgery. After all, when you’re in the business of solving problems for a living, your job becomes making sure that the problems never go away, or you’ll be out of business. So I fear that totalitarians, spooks, bullies, and plutocrats will use information technology to spy on us, to sow discord among us—and, at the extreme, to kidnap and torture and murder us. That’s what happened in the Arab Spring, when repressive governments under threat of a popular uprising realized that they could mine Facebook and Gmail to figure out who knew whom in the activist world, making it easier to round them all up when the time came.

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

Thus the fighting working class, basing itself upon Marxism, will find Lenin’s philosophical work a stumbling-block in its way, as the theory of a class that tries to perpetuate its serfdom.27 And in the postwar Western welfare state, the technically trained intelligentsia also aspire to positions of control in the emerging state-capitalist societies in which a powerful state is linked in complex ways to a network of corporations that are on their way to becoming international institutions. They look forward to “a well-ordered production for use under the direction of technical scientific experts” in what they describe as the “post-industrial technetronic society” in which “plutocratic pre-eminence comes under a sustained challenge from the political leadership which itself is increasingly permeated by individuals possessing special skills and intellectual talents,” a society in which “knowledge becomes a tool of power, and the effective mobilization of talent an important way for acquiring power.”28 Bourne’s critical words on the treachery of the intellectuals thus fall within a broader analytic framework.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

Noting that “Communists will call this a reactionary position,” Chamberlain argued that on the contrary the New Deal sought to balance corporate power: “For the labor union and the co-operative still lag far behind the business institute and syndicate in power; they must be built up.”24 In addition, according to Chamberlain, the New Deal “was designed primarily to even things up between the plutocratic city and the impoverished country, between metropolitan East and plundered West and South.” In this vision of democratic pluralism as an alternative to both dictatorship and plutocracy, leadership was exerted by those whom Chamberlain called “broker-politicians” like FDR who presided over compromises among “bosses” representing various important economic and social groups: “Indeed, the pressure group, far from being the loathsome thing that it is commonly accounted by the philosophical idealist, is absolutely necessary to the functioning of an industrial democracy. . . .

How to Be Right: In a World Gone Wrong
by James O'Brien
Published 2 Nov 2018

If a government spends money encouraging our notional mum to give her child tap water instead of a sweetened successor to Sunny Delight, nobody makes a buck. If a government seeks to limit the amount of advertising promoting such products, the ability to make a buck might be compromised, so the newspapers owned by plutocrats with fingers in countless commercial pies line up to decry the ‘nanny state’. If fast food joints are prevented from opening up within a 400 metre radius of a school, then it is an unconscionable assault on business and free choice. In other words, companies should be free to employ every tactic under the sun to get us to do ourselves harm if there’s money it for them; but if a politician, a celebrity chef or a journalist suggests that tax revenues should be spent or decisions taken to alleviate some of that harm, then it is KILLJOY DO-GOODERS USHERING IN THE NANNY STATE BECAUSE POLITICAL CORRECTNESS HAS GONE MAD!

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

Robert Byrd put the political situation facing Roosevelt into perspective: How much of Roosevelt’s reform program shaped by his dealings and compromises with the conservative leaders of the Senate; how far was he willing to go; and how soon was he willing to retreat on an issue. Roosevelt saw himself as a man of the political center, fending off, on one side, the plutocrats who controlled the great wealth and power of American industry and, on the other side, the masses with their radical and destabilizing demands . . . We think of Roosevelt as a reform president, but he was really a consensus president, cautiously waiting to act until he had public opinion and support in his corner, willing to accept half a loaf rather than none.

…

Conveniently enough, the crisis forced the heavily indebted Tennessee Iron & Coal company, a competitor of the great Pennsylvania Steel Trust controlled by the Morgan and Rockefeller groups, to sell itself to Morgan for $30 million, less than 5 percent of its actual worth.20 In the fictional work The Money Changers, published in 1908 by Upton Sinclair, “a plutocrat very much resembling Morgan provoked a financial panic and turned the people’s misery to his own sordid gain,” wrote James Grant in Money on the Mind.21 It should also be that the government of President Roosevelt did not attempt to block the purchase of Tennessee Iron & Coal by U.S. Steel even though it was clearly a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Wall Street: How It Works And for Whom
by Doug Henwood
Published 30 Aug 1998

A study of the 1995 and 1996 editions by the Boston-based group United for a Fair Economy (1996) showed that 43% were born with enough wealth to make it onto the elite list; another 7% had inherited $50 million or more — not enough to make it onto the list, but nothing to sneeze at; 6% had inherited at least $1 million or a family business; and 14% were born into the upper middle class. Just 30% of the 400 plutocrats were "self-made" — but they controlled only 25% of the list's total wealth, making them the elite's poor relations. Putting all the evidence together, a cautious guess is that about half of all personal wealth can be traced to inheritance (Gale and Scholz 1994), though one is perfectly justified at believing three-quarters.

…

WALL STREET Even though FOMC members would no doubt invent all sorts of clever euphemisms to express the dangers of excessively low unemployment, televising the FOMC's proceedings on C-SPAN would still provide an enlightening glimpse into the mentality of power. Wall Street ideology Since this section is about the state, some words about Wall Street's politics. As do most plutocrats, financiers take their own, usually crude, thoughts quite seriously, and are also rich enough to pay lots of other people to think for them. Their opinions range from establishment liberal (especially on social issues) to ravingly right wing; the rightwingers, all fans of laissez-faire, can be subdivided into those whose libertarianism extends to social tolerance, and those who are fulminant bigots.

Schismatrix Plus
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Jan 1995

Even the alien Investors, those star-traveling reptiles of enormous wealth, found T-K useful, and favored it with their patronage. And as T-K’s citizens, the Regals, increased their power, smaller factions faltered and fell under their sway. Mars was dotted with bankrupt factions, financially captured and transported to the Martian surface by the T-K plutocrats. Having failed in space, the refugees took Regal charity as ecologists of the sunken gardens. Dozens of factions were quarantined in cheerless redemption camps, isolated from one another, their lives pared to a grim frugality. And the visionary Regals made good use of their power. The factions found themselves trapped in the arcane bioaesthetics of Posthumanist philosophy, subverted constantly by Regal broadcasts, Regal teaching, Regal culture.

…

Patternist industries went into decline, outpaced by industrial rivals. Competition had grown much fiercer. The Shaper and Mechanist cartels had turned commercial action into a kind of endemic warfare. The Patternist gamble had failed, and the day came when their entire habitat was bought out from around them by Regal plutocrats. In a way it was a kindness. The Regals were suave and proud of their ability to assimilate refugees and failures. The Regals themselves had started as dissidents and defectors. Their Posthumanist philosophy had given them the moral power and the bland assurance to dominate and absorb factions from the fringes of humanity.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

In the first century, the anonymous author of The Periplus of the Erythrean Sea described the navigation and trade of the Indian Ocean; Strabo wrote that ‘now great fleets are sent as far as India’; and the emperor Tiberius complained of Indian luxuries draining the empire of its wealth. Peacocks from India became a favourite possession of Roman plutocrats. Indian ports like Barigaza (modern Bharuch in Gujarat) seem to have blossomed through exporting cotton cloth and other manufactures to the West. Soon, even within India, there were enclaves of Roman traders, whose hoards of amphorae and coins still sometimes come to light. Arikamedu, for example, on the east coast near modern Pondicherry, was exporting to China glass imported from Roman Syria (glass blowing was a new Roman invention and glass was suddenly much better and cheaper throughout the empire).

…

California is not the birthplace of entrepreneurs; it is the place they go to do their enterprising; fully one-third of successful start-ups in California between 1980 and 2000 had Indian- or Chinese-born founders. In imperial Rome, no doubt scores of unknown slaves knew how to make better olive presses, better watermills and better wool looms, while scores of plutocrats knew how to save, invest and consume. But the two lived miles apart, separated by venal middlemen who had no desire to bring them together. A telling anecdote about glass repeated by several Roman authors rather drives home the point. A man demonstrates to the emperor Tiberius his invention of an unbreakable form of glass, hoping for a reward.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

Sloanes were in their prime, and the jeunesse dorée drank themselves insensible as their elders paraded at Ascot and Henley. My memories of encounters with the Hooray Henries of 1987 are stirred whenever I see a picture of the young royals staggering from the Boujis nightclub. Those troubled by the impact of the fast-widening wealth gap were open-mouthed at the audacity of the young plutocrats of 1987. Like the poor, they remain with us. A stone’s throw from where these people partied, thousands lived in deprivation and fear, warehoused in south London’s grim estates. What might be described as ‘the NCO class’ – those who, through running youth groups and being prepared to stand up to troublemakers, gave stability to such communities – had despaired and departed, leaving behind the predators and the preyed-upon.

…

Aberdeen today, Britain tomorrow. Articles in the London press appeared to confirm this simple storyline. ‘Bubbles’ were bursting all over the headlines; oil rigs were ‘idle and forlorn’; Aberdeen’s house market was a ‘nightmare’; ‘Lean times ahead’, said the Guardian, ‘for oil capital’. Stories told of divers, once plutocrats earning £35,000 a year, driven destitute, selling their homes, their BMWs, taking their children out of private schools. Americans were leaving with the speed they had once evacuated Saigon – some, unable to sell their homes, simply threw the keys back at their building societies. City-centre pubs were said to be going bust; ten thousand jobs had been wiped out in a few months; and many of the unemployed had headed back to the depressed regions they came from – like gastarbeiter, surplus to requirements.

The Forgotten Man
by Amity Shlaes
Published 25 Jun 2007

He thought Morgan retained some support from the president on a cooperative concept: the TVA and others, including Commonwealth and Southern, might create “power pools” and sell and buy electricity together. Willkie told reporters he wished he had the $150 back that he had given to the original Roosevelt campaign. Taking him up on his challenge, Akron Democrats wired an offer to pay up, writing: “Before you became a plutocrat you were a good Democrat.” Willkie also exhorted other “disgruntled Democrats” to speak out. Yet later in the year, in December, Willkie had been found rallying members of the Bond Club of New York to recognize the new Roosevelt campaigns for what they were, hate campaigns: “Surely,” he said, “the haters have occupied the stage long enough.”

…

“I should like to have it said of my first administration,” he told the crowds, “that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second administration that in it these forces met their master.” Now Wall Streeters had indeed become like the plutocrats featured in New Yorker cartoons—a few small men, isolated in an outsize ballroom. They knew that their fewness worked against them, especially as Roosevelt courted great swaths of society. Roosevelt had not pushed the antilynching legislation that Father Divine hoped for—it was the sort that southern lawmakers would filibuster.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

It is discretionary capital that finances most of what is original and idiosyncratic in our culture and economy, that launches the apparently hopeless cause in business and politics, that supports the unusual invention, art, or private school, that founds the institutions of the future. Yet it is this kind of spending that is considered waste or recklessness by the mathematical economist and denounced as plutocratic by the leftist politician (as he petitions his banker friends for cash). It is this kind of discretionary wealth that the rationalistic reformer wishes, above all, to wring out of the American system, to replace in politics by “public interest committees” and merit panels; in philanthropy by ever more thoroughly regulated and routinized foundations; in culture by councils on the arts or humanities and their nonprofit clients and satellites—all the clones and cousins of government agencies that in the end are indistinguishable from the State.

…

In more recent times the fashion has turned decisively against ethnic prejudice, which remains socially acceptable chiefly among the poor. But hatred of producers of wealth still flourishes and has become, in fact, the racism of the intelligentsia. Replacing the ethnic conspiracy theories, therefore, have been fantasies that envisage a whole predatory system of oppressors—plutocrats, robber barons, bankers, speculators, bourbons, oil monopolists, establishments, nabobs, exploiters, imperialists, with, as an occasional fillip, a family of Rockefellers so potent as to seem an entire ruling class in itself. From this general animus and in this essential idiom arises much of the dense scholarship and obsessive polemics of Marxism.

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities
by Benjamin R. Barber
Published 5 Nov 2013

The Muscovite who called him a well-known thief qualified his indictment: “but there are thieves who just take everything for themselves, and then there are thieves who put their ill-gotten gains to use.” Whether building a cathedral from corporate contributions more garnished from than contributed by developers, or drawing investors into city development projects with paybacks, Luzhkov did manage to put the gains he won to the uses of Moscow. Russians suspicious of the new post-Soviet plutocrats, so many of whom got rich on wealth in effect stolen from the disintegrating Soviet Union, were glad to see Luzhkov get a fair share for Moscow. One of them allows that “a lot of ordinary people think these new rich, these new Russians should share their wealth with the city, and this is a way to cut, a little bit, their super-profits.”

…

Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft), the late Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are pop celebrities and media heroes. As such, though they regularly swallow up their rivals (critics talk about “Facebookistan”), they are rarely subjected to the harsh spotlight once shone on earlier tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie.25 The term plutocrat is widely used today to disparage Wall Street and big finance, and is occasionally employed to batter traditional media bosses like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi. But it is hardly ever applied to new media moguls, who are treated more like the angels of a prospective media heaven—the true cloud?

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 10 Oct 2018

Veblen’s best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, is a vicious exposé of a world where productive workers toiled long hours, and parasitic elites fed off the fruits of their labours. The wealthy also engaged in ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘conspicuous leisure’ – wasteful activities to show others they were so rich they didn’t need to work. Plutocrats always wanted more wealth and power, he noted, and worse, their petulance and excesses generally provoked not anger but reverence! The oppressed masses didn’t try to overthrow their social betters; they wanted to copy them. (The popularity of shows like Made in Chelsea and Keeping up with the Kardashians might be the modern equivalents.)

…

Don McDougall, a Cayman Department of Tourism official, is quoted as saying ‘followers of the series present exactly the right profile and demographic of visitors to the islands’. Also see ‘DoT remains active in UK’, Cayman Compass, 24 November 2008; and an interview with Ferguson in Daniel W. Dresner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas, Oxford University Press, 2017, in which he describes his lucrative journey from Oxford professor to public pundit, saying, ‘I did it all for the money.’ 1. Devereux told me in a phone interview in 2015 that about half the centre’s funding still comes from corporate donations.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

THE LOGIC OF MONEY IN THE DECADENT ROMAN REPUBLIC The Roman Republic had become a society of inheritors.22 It was also a political society, because only politics allowed access to social recognition. In order to become a senator, it was necessary to inherit a substantial estate. Whoever lost this estate was excluded from the élite. There was a confrontation, then, between a plutocratic logic based only on money and an aristocratic principle founded on heredity. Such a society made upward mobility impossible, and it inevitably slid towards sclerosis. There were two logics governing access to money: money was gained or lost in private business, or it was guaranteed by the state in exchange for services rendered by a patrician family over the generations.

…

The increasing concentration of wealth that resulted from military conquest had created enormous inequalities between the people (the plebs) and the landowning and political aristocracy. There were also intergenerational inequalities among the patricians, because access to the higher public functions (including Senate elections) was extremely expensive. Finally, this plutocratic society was divided over the question of the legitimacy of different forms of enrichment – between the parvenus, who had been able to buy their lofty social positions because of their business success, and the heirs, who considered that their forebears’ past services to the state entitled them to perpetual annuities.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939
by Virginia Nicholson
Published 27 Nov 2003

Now with great daring they trespassed on such unladylike territories as foreign restaurants in Soho, public houses, or the cabmen’s shelters where you could get coffee and saveloys at three in the morning. They drank wine at the café Royal or champagne at the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street, whose free-and-easy proprietress Rosa Lewis (‘Ma Lewis’) insisted on charging their consumption of Veuve Clicquot to some unknown plutocrat’s bill. Iris Tree and Nancy Cunard enjoyed the best of both worlds. Iris makes it clear in her memoir of Nancy that they did not fully make the break from their establishment backgrounds. The Bohemian studio was a refuge from the tedium and empty inanity of the London season, and calls, and house-parties, but it was part of a titillating game these debutantes were playing.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

Because the future that frightens me isn’t so much a too-Hispanic U.S. caused by unchecked Mexican immigration, but a Latin Americanized society with a…callous oligarchy gated off from a growing mass of screwed-over peons.” We needed to take seriously the rising anger and disgust about an American economic system that seems more and more rigged in favor of the extremely fortunate. Populism has gotten a bad odor, and not just among plutocrats—for most of the political chattering class, it is at least faintly pejorative. But I think that’s about to change: When economic hope shrivels and the rich become cartoons of swinish privilege, why shouldn’t the middle class become populists? I remember thinking, This was why my professors in college had used the terms political economics and the political economy as distinct from simply economics and the economy.

…

Rather, when we were promised in 1980 the wonderful old-fashioned life of Bedford Falls, we didn’t pay close enough attention to the fine print and possible downsides, and forty years later here we are in Pottersville instead, living in the world actually realized by Reaganism, our political economy remade by big business and the wealthy to maximize the wealth and power of big business and the well-to-do at the expense of everyone else. We were hoodwinked, and we hoodwinked ourselves. Our wholesale national plunge into nostalgia in the 1970s and afterward was an important part of how we got on the road toward extreme insecurity and inequality, to American economic life more like the era of plutocrats and robber barons of the 1870s. All our clocks got turned back—the political and economic ones by design, the cultural ones more or less spontaneously. Economic progress ended, and cultural innovation stagnated except in information technology, where unchecked new industrial giants arose—resembling those of that first Gilded Age.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

“My father says that America has the best healthcare system in the world. What can I say to prove him wrong?,” Quora, https://www.quora.com/My-father-says-that-America-has-the-best-healthcare-system-in-the-world-What-can-I-say-to-prove-him-wrong. 24. N. Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming . . . For Us Plutocrats,” Politico, July/August 2014, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014. 25. See International Journal of Astrobiology, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-astrobiology. 26. P. Dayal, C. Cockell, K. Rice, and A. Mazumdar, “The Quest for Cradles of Life: Using the Fundamental Metallicity Relation to Hunt for the Most Habitable Type of Galaxy,” Astrophysical Journal Letters, July 15, 2015, https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.04346. 27.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

It can go in many directions depending on the situation. America’s populist surge in the late nineteenth century produced both the Ku Klux Klan and the progressive income tax. The latter’s champion, William Jennings Bryan, fought for the little guy who was being ‘crucified on the cross of gold’. His followers hated ‘the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats’.41 Bryan ended his career arguing against the theory of evolution as a prosecutor in the famous Scopes Monkey trial. Eribon could also have been talking about the left-behinds in any Western democracy. Following Trump’s victory, an Ancient Greek term suddenly re-entered English usage: demophobia – literally, fear of the mob.

The Second Curve: Thoughts on Reinventing Society
by Charles Handy
Published 12 Mar 2015

One consequence of the new rich has been an increase in these domestic services – childcare, cleaning, chauffeuring, gardening, dog-walking, shopping, cooking and secretarial, to name but a few of the services that the rich now want. It is no accident that the majority of the new jobs created in Britain in recent years have been in these flea-type microbusinesses. Perhaps we need the plutocrats after all to give them the work. Even so, there will still be too little for many of the less educated to do. That is the real injustice, undeserved and unprepared for. To remedy it we need a massive injection of funds to provide better education and training, including the encouragement of self-employment and apprenticeships.

Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down
by Tom Standage
Published 27 Nov 2018

When the researchers looked at Harvard’s most recently admitted class, they found that 27% had a relative who also went to that “college near Boston”. This suggests that the simplest way to become extremely rich is by being born to rich parents. The second-easiest way is to find a rich spouse. If neither approach works, you could try to get into a top college – but remember that not all Princetonians become plutocrats. Why women still earn much less than men Payroll clerks across Britain have been busier than usual. New rules mean that, as of April 2018, all large employers are required to publish annual data on the gap in pay between their male and female workers. In America, by contrast, President Donald Trump halted a similar rule that would have taken effect the same year.

City Squares: Eighteen Writers on the Spirit and Significance of Squares Around the World
by Catie Marron
Published 11 Apr 2016

CHRYSTIA FREELAND Canadian minister for international trade, Freeland is also a journalist and author. She was a stringer in Ukraine, deputy editor of the Globe and Mail, and has held positions at the Financial Times ranging from Moscow bureau chief to U.S. managing editor. As an activist Ukrainian-Canadian, she is the author of Sale of the Century and the award-winning book Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Since 2013, Freeland has been a member of Canada’s Parliament. ADAM GOPNIK A staff writer for the New Yorker, Gopnik has won the National Magazine Award for Essays and for Criticism three times, as well as the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Arts Writing.

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation
by Kevin Roose
Published 9 Mar 2021

I got my first glimpse of this other automation conversation during the World Economic Forum, an annual conference held in Davos, Switzerland. Davos bills itself as a high-minded confab where global elites gather to discuss the world’s most pressing problems, but in reality it’s more like the Coachella of capitalism—a beyond-satire boondoggle where plutocrats, politicians, and do-gooder celebrities come to see and be seen. It’s the only place in the world where it wouldn’t be at all unusual for the CEO of Goldman Sachs, the Japanese prime minister, and will.i.am to sit around chatting about income inequality while eating $37 sandwiches. My bosses at the Times had invited me to cover that year’s forum, which was focused on “Globalization 4.0”—the essentially meaningless term Davos types had concocted for the emerging economic era defined by this new, transformative wave of AI and automation technology.

The Passenger: Greece
by The Passenger
Published 11 Aug 2020

Four years earlier half of Flisvos Marina near Athens, Greece’s largest marina, was sold off to Ferit Şahenk, at the time Turkey’s richest man, who, in 2016, picked up the Athens Hilton – his fortune aggrandised in the interim by the tightening of his allegiance to President Erdoğan following the failed 2016 coup in Turkey. The crisis has also ushered in a different species of plutocrat, a new crop of moneyed elites. Call them vulture oligarchs. Many were not even born in Greece but have swooped down on the country in the last decade to pick off swathes of property and industrial businesses for pittances. The provenance of most of their capital is at best suspect, at worst blatantly illegal.

Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion: Rhetoric in the Peer-To-Peer Debates
by John Logie
Published 29 Dec 2006

Valenti was inviting readers of a newspaper serving the city hardest hit by these attacks to understand the film industry as having endured a parallel trauma. By contrast, Valenti’s description of the industry as temporarily protected by a “great moat” positions the MPAA 105 Pa r l orPr e s s 106 wwwww. p a r l or p r e s s . c om Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion as, at best, a medieval protectorate, and at worst, the sort of plutocratic castle-keep regularly targeted by Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Valenti’s remarks are especially striking given the remarkable success the film industry was experiencing at roughly the same time he was speaking. For the U.S. motion picture industry, the 2002 Memorial Day holiday weekend was among the most lucrative in history.

How to Be Black
by Baratunde Thurston
Published 31 Jan 2012

Most valuable to me was West’s warning not to see in Barack something he is not: a reincarnation of some great black hope from days gone by: “We don’t expect Alicia Keys to be Sarah Vaughn, and we should not expect Barack Obama to be Frederick Douglass. He is his momma’s son and his daddy’s son,” and, West continued, he is who we need in this country today. Yet now that Obama is in office, West, too, has had a change of heart, referring to President Obama in 2011 as a “black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” The man who embraced and praised candidate Obama’s biracial identity in 2007 attempted to undermine the authenticity of his American blackness in 2011 by implying that Obama’s white mother and lack of slave blood made him afraid of “free black men,” and bitterly complained that Obama dissed him at inauguration and spent too much time in the company of Jews.

Sabotage: The Financial System's Nasty Business
by Anastasia Nesvetailova and Ronen Palan
Published 28 Jan 2020

Nordea, another respected European bank, is currently facing similar allegations. According to one of our interviewees who works in a senior position in a leading bank in the US, the expanding wealth management sector and the growth of private banking divisions in the main banks increasingly mean that today a large part of the financial system is ‘banking for plutocrats’. 6. Financial houses use investment funds, holding companies and the like to achieve great leverage, conceal ownership and create accounting opacity. It takes longer, therefore, for the regulator to appreciate the faltering state of finance. Not to go too far, let us take Ireland as an example.

Why Liberalism Failed
by Patrick J. Deneen
Published 9 Jan 2018

This can be effected only through the practice of citizens simultaneously ruling and being ruled by themselves: democracy “is not the laws’ creation, but the people learn to achieve it by making the laws.”27 Today’s liberal critics of democracy—especially the emaciated forms of spectator politics that we call democracy—in effect condemn the deformed and truncated demotic actions of a degraded citizenry that liberalism itself has created. Leading liberals offer such degradation as evidence for the need to further sequester popular energies, offering instead the satisfactions of the private realm which will be further secured by the distant operation of elected plutocrats and bureaucratic functionaries of the liberal state.28 Today’s liberals who call for encouraging democratic participation through more extensive forms of civic education focused on national politics neglect the extent to which their cure is the source of the ills they would redress. It remains unthinkable that redress of civic indifference would require efforts to severely limit the power of the central state in favor of real opportunities for local self-rule.

The Power Elite
by C. Wright Mills and Alan Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1956

Effective moral indignation is not evoked by the corrupt public life of our time; the old middle-class moralities have been replaced in America by the higher immorality. The exploiting plutocrat and the corrupted machine of the ’nineties were replaced in public imagery by the uncultivated philistine and provincial of the ’twenties, who, in turn, were replaced by the economic royalists and their cohorts of the ’thirties. All these were negative images; the first of urban greed as seen through an indignant and rural moral optic; the second of mindless Babbitry as seen by urban strata for whom moral principles have been replaced by big-city ways; and the third, somewhat less clearly, of the old plutocrat turned more systematic and impersonal.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?
by David G. Blanchflower
Published 12 Apr 2021

A taxi driver in Edinburgh, where Goodwin lives in retirement, once told me that it was a common, coordinated practice in restaurants in Edinburgh whenever Fred the Shred, as he was known, ordered food for the kitchen and waitstaff to spit in it. Waiters can always spit in your soup. Ugh. 46. Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming … For Us Plutocrats,” http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-,are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014, July/August 2014. 47. Diane Roback and Nasha Gilmore, “Facts & Figures 2015: For Children’s Books, Popular Franchises Dominate,” Publishers Weekly, March 22, 2016. 48. Zack O’Malley Greenburg, “The Top-Earning Dead Celebrities of 2017,” Forbes, October 30, 2017. 49.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

They liked the idea of less government as the best government could do.28 Heller also sweetened his sales pitch by predicting the stimulus would be so effective that it would pay for itself. As the economy grew, he said, tax revenues would increase even at lower tax rates. In effect, the government would be getting a smaller share of a larger economic pie. There was a precedent. During the 1920s, the plutocratic Treasury secretary Andrew W. Mellon had engineered a series of cuts in income tax rates; as growth had boomed, federal tax revenue had increased.29 Kennedy initially resisted. He had inaugurated his presidency by calling on Americans to sacrifice for the collective good and a tax cut seemed to strike a dissonant chord.

…

There is no alternate version of history in which American politicians embraced different policies and thousands of Americans are still making refrigerators in Galesburg, or steel in Pittsburgh, or cotton sheets in the mills of the Carolina Piedmont.26 But it didn’t have to be so painful. The transformation of policy during the Economists’ Hour hastened the evolution of the American economy, and funneled the benefits into the pockets of a plutocratic minority. The high price of the dollar and a single-minded commitment to low inflation accelerated the decline of manufacturing and made it harder to find new jobs. The growing pool of nonworking workers held down wages. One obvious counterweight, the power of unions, was eroded by the antipathy of elites and by the government’s tolerance for corporate concentration, which shifted bargaining power to employers.

The Greatest Capitalist Who Ever Lived: Tom Watson Jr. And the Epic Story of How IBM Created the Digital Age
by Ralph Watson McElvenny and Marc Wortman
Published 14 Oct 2023

In his last years, he gave away many millions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; various universities, in particular to Columbia where the business executive who had never gone to college remained vice chair of the board until his death; numerous charitable foundations; and social organizations.31 His remaining fortune went to Jeannette and their four children, sharing primarily in $80 million worth of IBM stock. A man who once did not have enough money to buy a second suit of clothes or afford a place to sleep left his family with wealth to rival some of the potentates and plutocrats whom he entertained so often in his Manhattan mansion. While her husband spent without restraint, Jeannette never lost her midwestern churchwoman’s sense of frugality and modesty. She had never felt comfortable within the ostentatiously palatial townhouse and swiftly sold it. After traveling and setting her life in order following the loss of her husband, she eventually moved into a house Dick built for her on his New Canaan property.

…

In his angry speech, he called on listeners “to confront the illusion of softheadedness—that anyone who favors an end to the arms race must be soft on US defense or even soft on Communism. The illusion of softheadedness is thermonuclear McCarthyism.” The widely reported speech brought him numerous requests to speak on nuclear disarmament. He talked to many groups, including some bound to perceive him, he said, as “a bit kooked on nuclear weapons”—“tough audiences” including the plutocrats gathered at the annual Bohemian Grove, an exclusive summer retreat in California, where he was a member; midshipmen at the Naval Academy; and military officers at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Along with speeches, he published more opinion pieces. In the Christian Science Monitor, he asked, “What can individual Americans do to produce saner policies for dealing with the threat of nuclear war?”

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

Personally, as a historian, I tend to be much more sympathetic to the Left because I think that the amount of wealth a few people accumulated was just obscene. I suspect that a hell of a lot of suffering could have been averted if all of that wealth had been spread around early on, when the money was worth something. But to hear some of the leftist leaders talk, you’d think that once all the corporations had been reined in, once the billionaire plutocrats had been relieved of their riches, everything would be fine. Well, everything wasn’t going to be fine, no way. So here were these two political factions fighting to the death, blaming each other, while everybody around them was starving or going crazy. What the people really needed was just some basic commonsense information and advice, somebody to tell them the truth — their way of life was coming to an end — and to offer them some sensible collective survival strategies.

The Payoff
by Jeff Connaughton

During my twenty-three years in Washington, I saw government attract thousands of idealistic, energetic young people from across the country and lead many of them to make compromises that drew them deeper into a corrupt system. The initial magnetism of politics is far different from its day-to-day reality; for most people, careerism and the weight of years inevitably crushes idealism. Those years changed me, as well. I came to DC a Democrat and left a plutocrat. With his term nearly over, Senator Kaufman suggested we start a not-for-profit to keep fighting the Washington-Wall Street nexus on behalf of the rule of law and the average investor. For me, it was a Pogo moment. I said: “Ted, we’ve met the enemy, and the enemy is us.” I didn’t want to stay in DC and keep losing in hand-to-hand combat against Wall Street (or worse, rejoin the Permanent Class).

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

A lot of wealth came from the administration and plunder of provinces; in a metaphor by the famous English economist Alfred Marshall, “it was dug by the sword, not the spade.”8 We have already seen (in Vignette 1.3) that probably the richest man in the history of the Roman Empire was not an emperor. Rome was a plutocratic society where class segmentation was based on a combination of holding a hereditary title and having huge current wealth. To make sure that both conditions were fulfilled, there were explicit censuses (wealth qualifications) for the top three classes: senators, the equestrian order (the knights), and decurions (or municipal senators).

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
by Andrew J. Bacevich
Published 7 Jan 2020

For Wallace, the issue was a fear of Communism that he deemed inordinate and that was diverting the attention of the Democratic Party from more pressing concerns such as poverty and racism. For Sanders, the issue was the growth of extreme economic inequality, attributable in his view to the excesses of corporate capitalism—tolerated, if not actively abetted, by political elites, including Democrats who were in the pocket of Wall Street and the plutocrats. Wallace’s critique of obsessive anti-Communism proved ill-timed. His challenge to the status quo quickly fizzled out. In contrast, the critique of corporate capitalism fashioned by Sanders in 2016 resonated with a considerable segment of the disenchanted. Rather than fizzling out, it proved to be improbably durable.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

Himself, like Card, an immigrant—from Cuba no less—and also a well-regarded empirical labor economist, ensconced at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. But while Card shies away from political fights, Borjas relishes them, memorably dismissing donors to the immigration-friendly Center for Global Development as “open borders plutocrats” and casting himself and his immigration-skeptical worldview colleagues as the true champions of American workers. Similarly, while Card tends to skip somewhat casually from one topic to another and disengage after publishing a few papers, Borjas is all in on research documenting the downsides of immigration.

Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything
by Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Published 9 Nov 2016

Breaking it down further, they explained how “in the post-war era, racism helped create the white middle class. Since the Reagan era, racism has helped destroy it.” In the postwar era, as incomes for whites skyrocketed, elites had a compelling argument to sell white people on maintaining a racist status quo. But since the Reagan era, maintaining the status quo has meant shoring up the plutocratic class even as the white middle and working class see their standards of living eroding. Elites are now using racism and white supremacy to keep struggling whites in line with the elites, no matter that it is not in their economic interest. In this new economic reality, there are openings to organize whites—as Garza also calls us to do—to join a multiracial movement with a vision for an economy that truly works for everybody.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk
by Satyajit Das
Published 14 Oct 2011

Writer Robert Frank observed that the wealthy inhabited a different country—Richistan.3 Gains from recent economic growth flowed disproportionately to the wealthy, who benefited from market-friendly governments, favorable tax regimes, protection of property rights, globalization, and technological change, and financial innovation and deregulation. The top 10 percent of earners received the majority of the benefits of the productivity miracle of 1996–2005.4 Wealthy plutocrats both powered and benefited from economic growth. The Forbes 400 richest people in 2006 controlled $1,250 billion, up $92 billion from 1982. To make it on to the list in 2006 you had to have a billion, compared to $75 million in 1982. This money was invested, making more money to fund consumption or simply to attest to wealth.

…

This brought new wealth to emerging nations but depressed wages and living standards in developed countries. Immigration, both legal and illegal, affected incomes, especially in lower-skilled jobs. The changing labor market and erosion of safety nets meant that individuals and families, other than the plutocrats, lived a precarious existence. Some borrowed to finance consumption or resorted to financial speculation to offset declining income and safeguard their future, increasingly with borrowed money. Home equity—the difference between the current value of the family home and the amount owed on it—provided the initial financial stake.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz
by Erik Larson
Published 14 Jun 2020

“On the other hand, there can be no doubt that Britain will receive the same sentence as France if she persists in closing her mind to sensible considerations”—meaning a peace agreement. With Britain now casting itself as the last guardian of European liberty, Goebbels said, Germany must stress in reply that “we are now the leaders in the clash between continental Europe and the plutocratic British island people.” Germany’s foreign-language transmitters must henceforth “deliberately and systematically operate with slogans on the lines of ‘Nations of Europe: Britain is organizing your starvation!’ etc.” In a remark not recorded in the minutes but later quoted by a member of the Reich press office, Goebbels told the group, “Well, this week will bring the great swing in Britain”—meaning that with France fallen, the English public would now, surely, clamor for peace.

…

“We shall not stop fighting,” he said, “until freedom, for ourselves and others, is secure.” Propaganda Minister Goebbels instructed the German press to describe Halifax’s official rejection as a “war crime.” At his morning meeting on Wednesday, July 24, Goebbels outlined how Germany’s propaganda apparatus would now proceed: “Mistrust must be sown of the plutocratic ruling caste, and fear must be instilled of what is about to befall. All this must be laid on as thick as possible.” The ministry’s array of “secret transmitters,” masquerading as English radio stations but based in Germany, were now to be deployed, “to arouse alarm and fear among the British people.”

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

‘Main Street,’ wrote PIMCO’s ‘Bond King’ Bill Gross, ‘has failed to keep up with Wall Street and corporate America in the race to see who can benefit more from lower yields.’122 Ray Dalio, the hedge fund manager whose own fortune in 2018 was estimated at nearly $17 billion, noted that ‘Disparity in wealth, especially when accompanied by disparity in values, leads to increasing conflict and … revolutions of one sort or another.’123 Tech billionaire Nick Hanauer, an early investor in Amazon, penned an alarmist article for Politico entitled ‘The Pitchforks are Coming … for Us Plutocrats’. Hanauer warned that the United States was becoming less capitalist and more feudal, ‘and so I have a message for my fellow filthy rich, for all of us who live in our gated bubble worlds: Wake up, people. It won’t last.’124 Piketty’s Error Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an overnight publishing sensation when it appeared in English translation in the spring of 2014 – more bought than read, but much discussed.125 Piketty rejected conventional explanations for inequality based on education and technology.126 Instead, he proposed a fundamental law: inequality rises whenever the return on capital (comprising profits, interest, dividends and rents) exceeds the growth rate of an economy.

…

Christopher Cole, ‘Volatility and the Allegory of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: False Peace, Moral Hazard, and Shadow Convexity’, Artemis Capital, October 2015, p. 4. 121. Scheidel, The Great Leveler, p. 425. 122. Bill Gross, PIMCO Newsletter, March 2012. 123. Mark Niquette, ‘Dalio Says Capitalism’s Income Inequality is a National Emergency’, Bloomberg, 8 April 2019. 124. Nick Hanauer, ‘The Pitchforks are Coming … for Us Plutocrats’, Politico, July/August 2014. See also, Niquette, ‘Dalio Says Capitalism’s Income Inequality is National Emergency’. 125. Jordan Ellenberg, ‘The Summer’s Most Unread Book is …’, Wall Street Journal, 3 July 2014. Ellenberg reported that most readers of Piketty’s book in the Kindle e-book version never made it past the introduction. 126.

Flight of the WASP
by Michael Gross

Though a Democrat like the patrician Thomas Jefferson and his three successors, two from Virginia and one from Massachusetts, the Scots-Irish Jackson, who lived in Tennessee, was the first frontier president, elected by, and primarily representing the interests of, the poor but rising conservative WASP population of the young nation’s agrarian interior. As America developed, entry to the WASP patriciate grew easier. Merchants and professionals, soldiers, and other public officials were able to edge into the elite, and even industrial plutocrats, initially disdained as crass new-money arrivistes, would eventually be absorbed and accepted into the American aristocracy, though sometimes a conversion was deemed advisable. The financier J. P. Morgan, for instance, would convert from Congregationalist (now called the United Church of Christ) to Episcopalian in 1861.

…

According to the 1860 census, 32 percent of Americans who belonged to religious congregations worshipped as Methodist then, 19 percent as Baptists, and only 14 percent as members of mainstream Protestant churches. After the Civil War, Episcopal churches experienced a minor surge thanks in part to the example set by the new plutocrats. One statistical study estimates that the 172,000 practicing Episcopalians in 1850 more than tripled by 1890, when the industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Jay Cooke followed Belmont and J. P. Morgan’s lead and joined that tasteful, simple, liberal religion.52 William A. Rockefeller and many others followed.

Rainbow Six
by Tom Clancy
Published 2 Jan 1998

God, what a house was her first thought. Like a king's palace, a huge waste of resources for one man, or even one large family, to use as a private residence. What was it Winston had said of the owner? Good people? Sure. All good people lived like wastrels, glomming up precious resources like that. Another goddamned plutocrat, stock trader, currency speculator, however he earned the money to buy a place like that-and then terrorists had invaded his privacy. Well, gee, she thought, I wonder why they picked him. No sense attacking a sheep farmer or truck driver. Terrorists went after the moneyed people, or the supposedly important ones, because going for ordinary folks had little in the way of a political point, and these were, after all, political acts.

…

They'd taken just two votes-actually, mere polls of the cabinet members, since the President had the only real vote, as he'd made clear a few times, Carol reminded herself. The meeting broke up, and people headed out of the building. "Hi, George," Dr. Brightling greeted the Secretary of the Treasury. "Hey, Carol, the trees hugging back yet?" he asked with a smile. "Always," she laughed in reply to this ignorant plutocrat. "Catch the TV this morning?" "What about?" "The thing in Spain-' "Oh, yeah, Worldpark. What about it?" "Who were those masked men?" "Carol, if you have to ask, then you're not cleared into it." "I don't want their phone number, George," she replied, allowing him to hold open the door for her.

…

He recognized the account number, knew that Sean had written it down, and was reasonably certain that this cop wasn't lying to him about what had happened with it. "He flew into Shannon on a private business jet. I do not know where from." "Really?" "Probably because of the drugs he brought in with him. They don't search plutocrats, do they? Bloody nobility, they act like." "What kind of aircraft, do you know?" O'Neil shook his head. "It had two engines and the tail was shaped like a T, but no, I do not know the name of the bloody thing." "And how did he get to the meeting?" "We had a car meet him." "Who drove the car?"

Financial Market Meltdown: Everything You Need to Know to Understand and Survive the Global Credit Crisis
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 30 Sep 2009

How did this happen? Three decisive changes explain a lot. First, economic power in America became radically concentrated by the rise of giant corporations like U.S. Steel and Standard Oil. This power was widely abused through monopoly and financial manipulation, producing an unlovable class of super-rich, vulgar plutocrats the press labeled as ‘‘robber barons,’’ though to their credit most robber barons actually founded their companies, indeed whole industries, and many started life poor. Second, the United States became an urban, industrial society where most people for the first time depended on formal employment in big companies for a living.

Foundation and Empire
by Isaac Asimov
Published 31 May 2004

In effect, they deserted to the enemy. “The Foundation underground, upon which most people here seem to rely so heavily, has thus far done nothing of consequence. The Mule has been politic enough to promise to safeguard the property and profits of the great Traders and they have gone over to him.” Ebling Mis said stubbornly, “The plutocrats have always been against us.” “They always held the power, too. Listen, Ebling. We have reason to believe that the Mule or his tools have already been in contact with powerful men among the Independent Traders. At least ten of the twenty-seven Trading Worlds are known to have gone over to the Mule.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt
by Louis Hyman
Published 24 Jan 2012

It was the interplay of public and private—Freddie Mac, S&Ls, mortgage-backed securities—that made these new sources of capital possible. The newest source of capital, however, proved to be an old one. S&Ls battled for savers’ deposits, but that money, by the 1970s and ’80s, was going increasingly to pensions, IRAs, and 401(k)s. A huge fraction of CMO bondholders were not plutocrats but working stiffs. In 1981, the Labor Department expanded the limits on mortgage investments by pension funds. In the first offering of S&L mortgage-backed securities, Fannie Mae sold 43 percent of the bonds to pension funds.87 Pensions wanted long-term investments to match their long-term needs.

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America
by Tamara Draut
Published 4 Apr 2016

Eileen Fumagalli and Gaia Narciso, “Political Institutions, Voter Turnout, and Policy Outcomes,” European Journal of Political Economy 28 (2012): 162–73, available at http://www.​tcd.​ie/​Economics/​staff/​narcisog/​docs/​FN2012.​pdf. 9. Thomas Lopez, “Shelby County: One Year Later,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 24, 2014, at http://www.​brennan​center.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​analysis/​Shelby_​County_​One_​Year_​Later.​pdf. 10. Chrystia Freeland, Plutocrats: The Rise of the Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (New York: Penguin, 2014); Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: Norton, 2013). 11. Blair Bowie and Adam Lioz, “Billion-Dollar Democracy: The Unprecedented Role of Money in the 2012 Elections,” Demos, January 17, 2013, at http://www.​demos.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​publications/​billion.​pdf. 12.

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
by Craig Lambert
Published 30 Apr 2015

Consider the frequent murderous rampages in schools; the barbarities perpetrated by terrorists; the epidemic of bullying by teenagers, which social media only intensifies; the vast wealth appropriated by a tiny fraction of the populace while wages stagnate for all others, with no action taken to redress the balance; the plutocratic domination of national governments in industrialized democracies. Ironically, in such a scenario of social breakdown, the only well-behaved participants may be the robots. THE TWILIGHT OF LEISURE The vanishing of leisure is a mystery of twenty-first century life. It flies in the face of the commonsense view that wealth should mean more leisure.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

Figure 23: Impact of moving from one person, one vote to a wealth-based system in the UK Source: ONS24 If the UK were to move to a system in which political power was proportional to wealth, then the bottom 50 per cent of the UK population would have less than 10 per cent of the influence – even collectively they would be negligible. The bottom 80 per cent of the population could be comfortably outgunned by the richest 20 per cent. The UK does not yet have a wealth-based system: it is still closer to a democracy than to a plutocracy, but it is moving perceptibly in the plutocratic direction. In the US, wealth concentration is greater, so the effect would be even more pronounced as Figure 24 below illustrates. Figure 24: Impact of moving from one person, one vote to a wealth-based system in the US Source: Wolff25 In the United States, the bottom 80 per cent of the population has only about 11 per cent of the wealth, so on a one dollar, one unit of influence basis they would be collectively negligible.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

Brooks insisted that Republican presidential candidates were merely puppets of the monopolists and plutocrats, and as early as 1884 he tried to swing liberal and independent Republican colleagues like Henry Cabot Lodge, E.L. Godkin, and President Eliot to the Democratic Party. In 1892 Brooks and Henry actively campaigned for Democratic presidential candidate Grover Cleveland as the people’s champion against Wall Street and its international banking allies. Brooks delivered a speech to the Tariff Reform League entitled “The Plutocratic Revolution,” a stinging attack on what his friend and fellow patrician Theodore Roosevelt would later term “the malefactors of great wealth.”

The Rough Guide to Florence & the Best of Tuscany
by Tim Jepson , Jonathan Buckley and Rough Guides
Published 2 Mar 2009

In the 1470s he set about acquiring properties in this locality, with a view to demolishing them and raising a new house on the land; in the end, a dozen town houses were razed to make space for the mighty palazzo, which was built between 1489 and 1536 to a design by Giuliano da Sangallo. Not until the 1930s did the Strozzi family relinquish ownership of the building, which is now state property. The interior is open only for special exhibitions. The Palazzo Rucellai 96 Some of Florence’s other plutocrats made an impression with a touch more subtlety than the Strozzi. In the 1440s Giovanni Rucellai, one of the richest businessmen in the city (and an esteemed scholar too), decided to commission a new house from Leon Battista Alberti, whose accomplishments as architect, mathematician, linguist and theorist of the arts prompted a contemporary to exclaim, “Where shall I put Battista Alberti: in what category of learned men shall I place him?”

…

After his death, this radical stance was quickly abandoned by many of his followers, with the backing of a papacy anxious to institutionalize a potentially troublesome mass movement. Ironically, it was Florence’s richest families who funded the construction of Santa Croce, to atone for the sin of usury on which their fortunes were based. Plutocrats such as the Bardi, Peruzzi and Baroncelli sponsored the extraordinary fresco cycles that were lavished on the chapels over the years, particularly during the fourteenth century, when artists of the stature of Giotto and the Gaddi family worked here. In further contradiction of the Franciscan ideal 
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Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto
by Mark Helprin
Published 19 Apr 2009

To the objection that this provision strikes malefactors of great wealth, one might ask, first, where the inheritors of Sylvia Plath berth their 200-foot yachts. And, second, why, when such a stiff penalty is not applied to the owners of Rockefeller Center or Wal-Mart, it is brought to bear against legions of harmless drudges who other than a handful of literary plutocrats (manufacturers, really) are destined by the nature of things to be no more financially secure than a seal in the Central Park Zoo.” This was not, however, merely a rhetorical question: “The answer is that the Constitution states unambiguously that Congress shall have the power ‘To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Published 1 Jan 2009

Before proceeding, in the following chapters, to look at how the scale of income differences may be related to other problems, we should say a few words about what we think income differences tell us about a society. Human beings have lived in every kind of society, from the most egalitarian prehistoric hunting and gathering societies, to the most plutocratic dictatorships. Although modern market democracies fall into neither of those extremes, it is reasonable to assume that there are differences in how hierarchical they are. We believe that this is what income inequality is measuring. Where income differences are bigger, social distances are bigger and social stratification more important.

Meltdown: How Greed and Corruption Shattered Our Financial System and How We Can Recover
by Katrina Vanden Heuvel and William Greider
Published 9 Jan 2009

New Century has given Dodd $15,000 since 2003, and Frank ranked ninth on the list of mortgage banking contributions, with $54,550 in 2006. Congress now has a decision to make: Should those thousands of dollars be in their pockets, or in those of the millions losing their homes? Hedging Bets J O R D A N S TA N C I L June 14, 2007 Hedge fundsseem to have been designed as the ideal plu-tocratic villain for some novel of financial intrigue. These highly secretive investment groups control more than $1 trillion in assets but are so heavily leveraged that their total positions are thought to equal more than $3 trillion. The essence of their business is speculation, which they engage in on the basis of proprietary mathematical models that are guarded more closely than state secrets.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

It allows us to feel optimistic about the future while relieving us of responsibility for that future. It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: recent job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.”

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

From there, it is a short move towards the politics of economics, maybe beginning with Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, a highly effective account of the arguments and evidence against neoliberal free-market orthodoxies. A number of very good recent books look at the effect of these policies in terms of their impact at the top end of the income distribution, and the consequences of that inequality for everyone else: Chrystia Freedland’s Plutocrats, Robert Frank’s Richistan, Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future?, and George Packer’s The Unwinding. Spring 2014 saw the publication of Thomas Piketty’s masterpiece Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an important, powerful, and densly argued study of the shift in the balance of power between capital and labor.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

Many of amateurism’s loudest advocates are also business apologists, claiming to promote cultural democracy while actually advising corporations on how to seize “collaboration and self-organization as powerful new levers to cut costs” in order to “discover the true dividends of collective capability and genius and usher their organizations into the twenty-first century.34 The grassroots rhetoric of networked amateurism has been harnessed to corporate strategy, continuing a nefarious tradition. Since the 1970s populist outrage has been yoked to free-market ideology by those who exploit cultural grievances to shore up their power and influence, directing public animus away from economic elites and toward cultural ones, away from plutocrats and toward professionals. But it doesn’t follow that criticizing “professionals” or “experts” or “cultural elites” means that we are striking a blow against the real powers; and when we uphold amateur creativity, we are not necessarily resolving the deeper problems of entrenched privilege or the irresistible imperative of profit.

Miss Wyoming
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Mar 2000

Marilyn pursed her lips and looked at her daughter, swaddledin track pants and a gray kangaroo sweater. "Well then. Comealong." Marilyn brought two pairs of gardening gloves, a boxof trash bags and two flashlights. They drove out into windingresidential streets of a repetitive stockbroker Tudor design, the type that, when she was younger, Susan associated with thewalrus-mustached plutocrat from the Monopoly board. Nowshe more realistically associated this sort of neighborhood with car dealers, cute amoral boys, sweater sets, regularly scheduledmeals containing the four food groups, Christmas tree lightsthat didn't blink, the occasional hand on the knee, cheerful pets,driveways without oil stains, women named Barbara and, ap-parently, weathermen for regional NBC affiliates.

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China
by Desmond Shum
Published 6 Sep 2021

I also believed that China’s central government was being manipulated when it came to handling Hong Kong. I decided to do what I could to assist the Party to better rule Hong Kong. Following my participation in the counterdemonstrations, I returned to Beijing and wrote a report, which a friend handed to the office of Xi Jinping. In the document, I took aim at what I called Hong Kong’s “plutocrats,” the rich families that had used their connections to leading Communist officials to turn Hong Kong into their personal piggy banks to the detriment of the territory’s people. Hong Kong was, I wrote, controlled by “crony capitalists.” The rich were getting richer while the wages of normal college graduates hadn’t risen in a generation.

The New Rules of War: Victory in the Age of Durable Disorder
by Sean McFate
Published 22 Jan 2019

Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan—bankrolled the Republican nominee, William McKinley, to defeat Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, and threatened their workers with lost jobs and closed down factories if Bryan won. McKinley was elected, but was assassinated five years later. The plutocrats met their match with the new president, Theodore Roosevelt, who was the first White House occupant to say it aloud: “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government, owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.”16 The secret marriage of corporate and political agendas birthing an American deep state may shock some, but it shouldn’t.

Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval
by Jason Cowley
Published 15 Nov 2018

Eton mess: a sweet and sickly pudding, but also a metaphor for unrest in the Cameron government and for the larger failure of intergenerational social mobility in Britain in 2013. Eton style: pupils’ amusing spoof of the South Korean pop hit and YouTube sensation ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy, but also a sense of the boarding school as one of the ultimate luxury British ‘brands’, and especially desirable to international plutocrats. Old Etonian: David Cameron is of course one such, and the nineteenth British prime minister to have attended the school. Ferdinand Mount, a cousin of Cameron’s mother, Mary, and a writer and journalist (and, inevitably, an Etonian), recalls the young Cameron ‘abounding in self-confidence’ when as a student he visited Mount while he was working for Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

Voting power in the City of London council is allocated not only to residents, but also to businesses: and the bigger the business, the more votes it gets, with the largest firms getting 79 votes each. In Parliament, the House of Lords is filled not by election but by appointment, with ninety-two seats inherited by aristocratic families, twenty-six set aside for the Church of England, and many others ‘sold’ to rich individuals in return for large campaign donations.59 We can see similar plutocratic tendencies when it comes to finance. A significant chunk of shareholder votes is controlled by massive mutual funds like BlackRock and Vanguard that have no democratic legitimacy. A small number of people decide how to use everyone else’s money, and exert extraordinary influence over companies’ practices, pushing them to prioritise profits above social and ecological concerns.60 Then there’s the media.

When Money Dies
by Adam Fergusson
Published 25 Aug 2011

For all their different worlds, of the Army, of industry, of finance and of politics, these four grotesque figures stalking the German stage may equally be represented as the villains of the play: Ludendorff, the soulless, humourless, ex-Quartermaster-General, worshipper of Thor and Odin, rallying point and dupe of the forces of reaction; Stinnes, the plutocratic profiteer who owed allegiance only to Mammon; Havenstein, the mad banker whose one object was to swamp the country with banknotes; Hitler, the power-hungry demagogue whose every speech and action even then called forth all that was evil in human nature. In i respect of Havenstein alone the description is of course unjust; but the fact that this highly-respected financial authority was sound in mind made no difference to the wreckage he wrought.

Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives
by Stefan Al
Published 11 Apr 2022

The tower also reflects light more subtly than Midtown’s many boxes of glass and steel, thanks to its glazed terra-cotta tiles, a nod to the city’s early skyscrapers. 53W53, New York City, Jean Nouvel, 2019 While the Steinway Tower shows the potential of the New York “accidental” skyscraper, it also highlights its pitfalls. 111 West 57th Street incorporates the Steinway Hall, the piano showroom that once hosted duo performances of Vladimir Horowitz and Sergei Rachmaninoff—now turned into a luxury health club. One critic described the super slender phenomenon as the “plutocratization of the midtown skyline.”31 The towers are the playgrounds of ultra-high-net-worth individuals, who make up only 0.003 percent of the world population, yet hold 13 percent of the world’s wealth.32 The super slender penthouse gives them a tangible asset as an ultimate status symbol. In the process, they are making an indelible mark on the Manhattan skyline. 111 West 57th Street, New York City, SHoP Architects, 2021 Extreme wealth is not just pushing New York’s skyscrapers upward.

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care About Inequality
by Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell
Published 23 May 2023

Giridharadas, A. (2019) Winners take all: The elite charade of changing the world. London: Allen Lane. Glennerster, H. (2014) Richard Titmuss: Forty years on. CASE paper no. 180. London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. https://sticerd.lse.ac.uk/dps/case/cp/casepaper180.pdf Glucksberg, L. and Russell-Prywata, L. (2020) Elites and inequality: A case study of plutocratic philanthropy in the UK. UNRISD Occasional Paper – Overcoming Inequalities in a Fractured World: Between Elite Power and Social Mobilization, No. 9. 978-92-9085-112-7, United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Geneva. Goldman Sachs (2022) UK social mobility – a tough climb. 24 February. www.gspublishing.com/content/research/en/ reports/2022/02/24/c9116edf-3ff1-4ec3-a459-bf9889763b0b. html González Hernando, M. (2019) British think tanks after the 2008 global financial crisis.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

Bernays has had a bad press since he died in 1995 at the age of 103. This is partly because of his treatment by the documentary-maker Adam Curtis.55 But he also received criticism in his lifetime. He was described by one academic as a ‘Pluto-gogue’ – defined as ‘“the voice of the wealthy when they can no longer speak for themselves,” the successor of the plutocrat of other days …’56 Bernays was also horrified to find out that Goebbels was using his 1923 book Crystallizing Public Opinion as a basis for his genocidal campaign against Jewish people in Germany.57 In fact, he was concerned about democracy, as he said in his 1940 book Speak out for Democracy.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

Bagehot repeatedly emphasized how much this committee resembled a ‘board of directors’ – its greatest virtue, in his eyes – with the royal family there to smooth out its one comparative shortcoming: the fact that cabinet members could be removed suddenly based on shifts in public opinion. Since most people, he said, ‘really believe that the Queen governs’, the real rulers came and went ‘without heedless people knowing it’, avoiding the unrest or uncertainty such reshuffles might otherwise provoke. The upshot was as cynical as it sounds. A vindication of the ‘plutocratic’ upper and lower houses and a strong executive shrouded in secrecy were the wonders of political science in England.60 Yet Bagehot’s classic work – revered by jurist Albert Dicey as the first to explain ‘in accordance with actual fact the true nature of the Cabinet and its real relation to the Crown and Parliament’ – must be considered in the context of the Economist.61 For over five years before the serialization of the English Constitution, Bagehot had been writing on politics, evaluating constitutional structures in terms of their tendency to help or hinder different states on their paths of capitalist development.

…

‘The Political Fog’, 9 February 1909. 64.A National Liberal Club send-off included representatives from the Liverpool Post, Yorkshire Observer, Sheffield Independent, Darlington Echo, South Wales Daily News, Aberdeen Free Press, Dundee Advertiser – with Hirst hoping to sign up the Western Daily Mercury, Eastern Morning News, Manchester Guardian, Daily News and Daily Chronicle. Hirst to Brunner, 5 December 1911 in Koss, Sir John Brunner, Radical Plutocrat, London 1970, p. 247. 65.Murray, People’s Budget, pp. 129–30. Churchill outdid them after being made First Lord of the Admiralty. At a meeting of the Committee for the Reduction of Expenditure on Armaments on 16 January 1914, Hirst compared him to Dryden’s Zimri: ‘A man so various that he seem’d to be; Not one, but all mankind’s epitome:/ Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong;/ Was everything by starts and nothing long.’

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941
by Alan Allport
Published 2 Sep 2020

To Nicolson, also a staunch anti-appeaser, ‘historians of our decline will say that we were done the moment we gave women the vote.’51 Much of the support for Appeasement was driven by a fear of democracy too. The National Government’s middle-class base could not rest easy even after the victory of 1935. Middle-class Tories imagined their world to be under siege from an ever-growing band of enemies: sinister plutocrats (inevitably foreign and Jewish), grasping trade unionists, Bolshevik-minded socialists and insolent, overpaid manual workers.52 According to Charles Masterman, the ‘standard[s] of civilisation’ and ‘agreeable manners and ways’ of suburban London were threatened by ‘those great masses of humanity’, swinish and destructive, lurking just on the other side of the privet hedges, ‘always prepared seemingly to engulf it’.53 Middle-class propriety in the 1930s was performative.

…

The ship’s boilers exploded, and she began to flood. Soon she was listing heavily to port. The tugs slipped their lines, and the RMS Empress of Britain went down in nine minutes. She would be, as it turned out, the largest British ship sunk by a U-boat in the Second World War. The German press gloried at the destruction of what it called ‘the plutocrats’ liner’. The Condor captain received a Knight’s Cross for his efforts. The skipper of U-32 got rather less. His submarine was captured two days after the Empress of Britain sank, and he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.3 The Empress of Britain was just one of fifty-six British and Allied merchant ships sunk in the North Atlantic in October 1940, one of 349 sunk that year and one of 2,223 sunk throughout the whole of the Second World War.4 The Battle of the Atlantic, as it became known, had begun on the day war broke out with the torpedoing of the passenger liner SS Athenia.

The Eternal City: A History of Rome
by Ferdinand Addis
Published 6 Nov 2018

Another toga-clad aristocrat has clambered up at the back of the crowd and is gesturing something at Tiberius Gracchus on the stage. The noise is deafening now. The word is passed back. The newcomer is ushered through the crowd, burrowing his way between plebeian elbows. He has been with the senate, he says, and the situation is bad. The plutocrats have armed their supporters to stop the people voting. They will surely soon be here. Some among the plebeians look for weapons. But the warning has come too late. The hostile senators are here now, ready to fight, togas wrapped around their left arms to fend off blows. Hard years have taught Tiberius’s peasants not to punch their betters.

…

And similar racist ideas had long been dormant in Mussolini, ready to be called forth whenever the occasion arose. Way back when he first met Sarfatti he had commented on her ‘stinginess’, her ‘cunning’, her ‘sly and greedy’ nature. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that one is a Jew.’ And in 1919, he had held forth in Il Popolo d’Italia about the menace of international Jewry, both the plutocrats of London and Paris and the Bolsheviks of Moscow. ‘Is not Bolshevism, by chance, the revenge of Judaism on Christianity? This argument demands thought… Race does not betray race.’ Fascism had elevated above all the idea of the nation – a nation that was coming to be defined more and more in terms of heritage and blood.

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Published 12 Apr 2021

But, more important, Marietta thought, the notion of assembling a collection of ancient masterpieces, a collection that would bear his name and be so significant that it would live on, past his lifetime, offered Arthur something else: “the possibility of immortality.” * * * With this notion in mind, perhaps, Arthur was insistent that he was not merely some plutocrat collecting baubles: he was creating a durable public good. This was a scholarly enterprise, he maintained, so the works he was collecting should not just adorn his home or sit in storage. They should be displayed and studied by art historians and debated in public symposia. In the late 1950s, Arthur started dabbling in a new realm, one that mingled nicely with his passion for collecting: philanthropy.

…

In a meeting, they made a presentation, “A New Narrative: Appropriate Use.” That it would represent a sharp departure from precedent for Purdue Pharma to begin advocating the “appropriate” use of opioids might have been an indication of just how out of touch the Sacklers had become. In any case, they rejected the proposal. One unadvertised hazard in the life of a plutocrat is that the people around you can be prone to yes-man sycophancy. In theory, you should be able to avail yourself of state-of-the-art counsel. But instead, you often get lousy advice, because your courtiers are careful to tell you only what they think you want to hear. The danger, whether you are a billionaire executive or the president of the United States, is that you end up compounding this problem yourself, by marginalizing any dissenting voices and creating a bubble in which loyalty is rewarded above all else.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jan 2008

A CEO who captained a firm to profit growth of 20 percent a year would earn just 1 percent more than one who managed only 10 percent growth a year. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if CEOs neglected the key job of making the company more successful and retreated into covering their backs and ticking the right boxes. That was then. Times have changed, and CEOs are no longer paid like bureaucrats but rather like plutocrats—or, arguably, like kleptocrats. In 2005, incentive-based pay schemes—variable bonuses, perks, and long-term incentives—were the chief source of CEO pay in the United States and almost every other rich country. Starting in the 1980s, CEO pay started to become much more responsive to how well the company actually did.

A Fine Mess
by T. R. Reid
Published 13 Mar 2017

One advanced democracy, Great Britain, actually tried this pure form of flat taxation in 1990, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher instituted her “Community Charge.” This system, generally known as the “poll tax,” required that everybody in a given community pay the same amount annually for local government services. A tenant in a tiny studio apartment with a bathroom down the hall was expected to pay £250 per year to the city government, and a plutocrat living in a twenty-five-room mansion paid the same £250. Naturally, this system was a big hit with mansion dwellers, but lower-bracket taxpayers responded with outrage. They refused to pay; they threw bricks through the windows of the tax office; they rioted in the streets. Facing this furious backlash, Thatcher’s flat-tax plan was quickly abolished, and the Iron Lady herself lost her job as head of government after a mutiny by members of her own party.

Underground, Overground
by Andrew Martin
Published 13 Nov 2012

The Chelsea Monster, as it became known, was built on a bend of the river that the romantic, but stroppy, artist James McNeill Whistler had often depicted in his ‘Nocturnes’, and he is said to have remarked that the builders ‘ought to be drawn and quartered’. So here were two Americans appropriating a bank of the Thames: Yerkes for industry, Whistler for art. Lots Road Power Station in Fulham or, as estate agents say, Chelsea. It opened in 1904, and powered the underground railways of the American plutocrat, Charles Yerkes. Today, the Underground is powered from the National Grid. Lots Road was de-commissioned in 2002, and only two of the four towers remain. The silent film Underground (1928), directed by Anthony Asquith, features a genuinely gripping chase sequence across its roof. Yerkes provocatively offered to supply the Metropolitan from Lots Road.

The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement
by David Graeber
Published 13 Aug 2012

Beyond students, the constituencies that rallied the most quickly were, above all, working class. This might not seem that surprising considering the movement’s own emphasis on economic inequality; but in fact it is. Historically, those who have successfully appealed to class populism in the United States have done so largely from the right, and have focused on professors more than plutocrats. In the weeks just before the occupation, the blogosphere had been full of contemptuous dismissals of appeals for educational debt relief as the whining of pampered elitists.7 And it’s certainly true that historically the plight of the indebted college graduate would hardly be the sort of issue that would speak directly to the hearts of, say, members of New York City’s Transit Workers Union.

The Narcissist Next Door
by Jeffrey Kluger
Published 25 Aug 2014

That kind of naked racial hatred cloaked as self-defense has long since been unwelcome in the more mainstream political community, but even there, the demonizing-the-other game goes on unabated. The radical right sees the left not simply as advocating for a different set of policies and ideas, but as scheming to establish a one-world government ruled by the UN or the socialists or who-knows-who. The radical left ripostes with its own particular lunacies, fancying a world of plutocrats dressed up like the millionaire on a Monopoly card, conniving with Wall Street and the international banks to hoard the world’s wealth. In fairness to the left, the wing nuts have not gotten inside the Democratic Party the way their opposite number on the right has co-opted a significant portion of the GOP.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

Perhaps the Latina wheelchair-bound factory owner was barely able to keep her business afloat and employed fifty hard-working, churchgoing, nondrinking, salt-ofthe-earth employees, each the sole support of a wife and two kids and a dog and a cat. And perhaps the single playboy dermatologist had an incredibly lucrative practice polishing up the complexions of the idle wives of plutocrats and played golf three afternoons a week. In the absence of any such countervailing considerations, we must consider the possibility that the traditional perpetrators-and-victims moral framework was simply misguided or question-begging. That is, we must consider the possibility that the most sensible way to define rights in situations like these is, as Coase suggested, to mimic as closely as possible the solutions people would have negotiated on their own if negotiations had been practical.

The Full Catastrophe: Travels Among the New Greek Ruins
by James Angelos
Published 1 Jun 2015

When the train reached the station nearest to ERT, the protesters spilled out onto a suburban boulevard lined with furniture and electronics stores. Outside the broadcaster’s headquarters were assembled a dizzying array of far-left parties and organizations, divided by internecine squabbles yet united in their opposition to the plutocratic government. They all gathered, amid the many banners depicting the hammer and sickle, to chant slogans of support for ERT’s ergazomenoi (“the workers”), a word that has sacred connotation for the Greek left. The workers, in the left’s dualist worldview, were always on the righteous side in the class struggle against the bosses.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Yet Aristotle’s argument in Book Five of his Politics that great economic inequality encourages the rich to seek a share of power matching their share of economic resources is an accurate description of what has been happening in much of the developed world – not least in the US, where the Supreme Court doctrine enunciated in the Citizens United case that money in politics deserves the protections accorded to speech has given carte blanche to business plutocrats to spend limitless billions in pursuit of their own political ends. There are big risks inherent in a system where increasingly powerful elites grab an ever larger share of the national pie. One is that when disadvantaged people with low incomes observe that the political agenda has been corralled by the higher-income elite, they conclude that there is little point engaging with the game of politics and feel that taxes are an unfair imposition.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America
by Jamie Bronstein
Published 29 Oct 2016

“Our plutocracy, based on the trust’s position in industry and the trust magnate’s position within the trust, is composed, to a great extent, of strong, unscrupulous, far-seeing and ultra-individualistic persons, who secured hold of our national monopolized business while we as a nation were dreaming of competitive beatitudes,” Weyl chaffed.85 Weyl’s plutocrats sought to shrink government and argued that taxation was theft. “The plutocracy preaches individual liberty, the glorious fruits of free contract, the doctrine of the influence of good men, the survival of the fittest in business, an untrammeled individualism … It believes that while government is wise enough to put us in jail, it is not honest enough to be intrusted with our money or our business.”86 Moreover, the wealthy were able to dominate newspapers with their message, with only the upstart medium of the reformist magazine hammering against their party line.87 Weyl called for a revolution: harnessing government and the economy to allow for the freedom and development of all individuals.

Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces, 2011–2016
by Stewart Lee
Published 1 Aug 2016

The gem-encrusted empress’s entry to the airtight decision chamber was announced by an emissary in pantyhose, who banged his rod upon an opera-house toilet cubicle door, an aroused and aggressive transvestite drunk, home late from the support group, his keys mislaid. Sat upon Demeter’s golden throne of indifference, Madam Allotrope Hat droningly intoned a speech dictated to her by her captors, the sexless plutocrats on the right of the house. This impregnable dynastic cabal’s ancestral wealth was built on Norman bequests, received for betraying the ancient Britons, establishing ongoing precedents. The pedigree bloods sat opposite the people’s other representatives, powerless straw men strategically placed to enact impotently the now empty ritual of imagined opposition; deflating beachball heads with Art Attack googly eyes, tied at the neck to the collars of dead men’s charity cast-offs, stuffed with shredded manifestos in an illusion of substance, awaiting the oncoming bonfire of their values.

Who Is Rich?
by Matthew Klam
Published 3 Jul 2017

Every day at five o’clock some nutjob out in the harbor fired a cannon off a sailboat to signal the beginning of happy hour. I walked to the flagpole and called home, twice, then gave up and headed to the Barn. The broken arm. The bracelet disaster. Then my wife tried to kill my kids, and I fucked a plutocrat. Things were definitely out of whack. In the parking lot, two guys were painting stage sets. Past the windmill I fell in behind some people with beach towels around their necks, barefoot, singing, “I Could Have Danced All Night.” A woman had some kind of flower in her hair. She’d been the lead in last night’s Chekhov mash-up.

The Alps: A Human History From Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond
by Stephen O'Shea
Published 21 Feb 2017

The clouds in the title refer to the Maloja Snake, a meteorological phenomenon observed in the autumn, when warm air from the neighboring Italian lake district crests the low Maloja Pass (which is alongside Nietzsche’s “pyramidal block of stone”), turns into mist at the higher elevation, then descends into the Engadine and its lakes to follow their serpentine contours to well beyond St. Moritz. Back in the car, Ed and I marvel at the multiple stories of this week, legendary and lived, in these mountains. Pagan, Christian, fairylike, plutocratic, tragic—they all seem connected to the unearthly landscape. These are the human stories of the Alps, each one trying in its own way to make sense of what, until recently, could not be explained. But the communities living in the Alps are not geologists, they are observers of their surroundings and creators of their languages and of their worlds.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

Perhaps, increasingly, each dimension would be fully integrated—and all three pointed toward the regeneration of our economies, societies, and biosphere? It turned out that I had dodged a bullet with the recall, even if that was no part of my intention. A few months later, Anand Giridharadas published his provocative book, Winners Take All.27 With a reputation for skewering plutocrats, Giridharadas argues that the wealthy are using philanthropy to pretend they are changing the world, while maintaining the status quo. He gave the example of the Sackler family, whose fortune derives from the same drugs that have caused the US opioid crisis. An estimated two million Americans suffer from what is called opioid use disorder, based on addiction to these powerful painkillers.28 Obsessed with their financial bottom lines, opioid drug makers flooded America with seventy-six billion pills between 2006 and 2012 alone.29 Enough to supply every adult and child in the country with thirty-six opioid pills a year—when a ten-day supply can hook one in five people.

Private Equity: A Memoir
by Carrie Sun
Published 13 Feb 2024

The venue felt like a deserted schoolyard. No kids, barely any adults. The paint on the tugboat and crop-duster planes looked dull and faded and the gardens had a revolting quality to it, a place where clowns, balloon twisters, popcorn scoopers, and other low-wage workers readied themselves and forced smiles to entertain absent plutocrats. I looked up at the gray sky and felt hope. Clouds spread the light and softened the rays so that no one on the ground today would have to walk in the shadows of Billionaires’ Row. * * * — AT 6:59 A.M. I texted Val: This is all I am thinking about. Twenty minutes later she replied: Same!!

Steampunk Prime: A Vintage Steampunk Reader
by Mike Ashley and Paul Di Filippo
Published 1 Jul 2010

Blavatsky settled in London in 1887 and spent her final years there, dying in 1891. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society with many theosophists amongst its members, was founded in 1888. In Caesar’s Column (1890), Ignatius Donnelly suggested that in the future (the book is set at the end of the twentieth century) a small group of wealthy but ruthless plutocrats are the real rulers of Earth, operating either through governments or by manipulating the press. The idea was further implanted in popular fiction through the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle run in The Strand Magazine, starting in 1891. Holmes often finds himself pitted against evil masterminds or secret organisations.

The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
by Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson
Published 7 Mar 2006

The size of price changes varied in the same way. A great many small price movements are found in the same cotton market with a few enormous jumps; a great many rare words are in the dictionary with a small number of common words; vast legions of poor people coexist in the world with a privileged few plutocrats. Uneven. Unfair, perhaps. But still indisputable. That was part of my hypothesis. How to test it? Well, if I was right, then I should be able to find a particular value of alpha that governs the cotton price curve—just as Pareto thought he had found an alpha of 3/2 for income. So I followed Pareto’s lead and drew a diagram for cotton prices on log-log paper.

Dreaming in Public: Building the Occupy Movement
by Amy Lang and Daniel Lang/levitsky
Published 11 Jun 2012

He knew that the spectacle of nonviolent white youth being viciously attacked would drive media coverage and public sympathy for the Freedom Movement in a way that the murder and jailing of black activists would not. Things do change, but some things change less than we’d like. The second thing the wave of occupations has done is inject a note of reality into the nation’s political discourse. The plain truth is that Democrats don’t rule. Republicans don’t rule. Corporations reign. Plutocrats decide. Finance capital rules. Capitalism works for the 1% and against the other 99%, and is therefore fundamentally illegitimate. Discredited are the nonsense phrases about how ‘government has to live within its means’, and ‘the rich are the job-creators’. ‘We are the 99%’ may not be deep analysis of political economy, but it’s a promising start, an open door, an invitation to investigate and explain how inequality and injustice are not bugs in the system, but have always been its basic features.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
by Matthew B. Crawford
Published 29 Mar 2015

Wilfred McClay, “The Family that Shoulds Together,” The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2013, 25–26. 13. Let us pause to consider how the inequalities that are rife in American society relate to the kind of differentiation that Kierkegaard defends. One problem with our big disparities of wealth is that (as Aristotle said in the Politics) plutocrats always think that superiority in this one dimension (wealth) is an indication of superiority in every dimension, and therefore a title to rule. In our time, we call this assumption “meritocracy.” (Mitt Romney was certain he was “the smartest guy in the room” because he was the richest guy in the room.)

Better, Stronger, Faster: The Myth of American Decline . . . And the Rise of a New Economy
by Daniel Gross
Published 7 May 2012

That year, 1985, there were 343,777 foreign students at colleges and universities in the United States, about 2.8 percent of the total student body. Universities historically brought in international students for two reasons: graduate students to work as cheap teaching assistants, and rich undergrads as development prospects. Bring in the children of foreign plutocrats and aristocrats, the theory went, and they’ll become big contributors after they take their place in the family conglomerates. And the theory has worked. In 2008 Ranan Tata, the Indian industrialist, a 1962 graduate of Cornell University, donated $50 million to his alma mater, half of which went to fund scholarships for Indian students.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

By the beginning of 2010, the basic rate of American unemployment stood at around 10 percent—but it rose to 17 percent once “discouraged” workers and part-timers who would prefer full-time work were included. At the Davos meeting in January 2010, Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, told the assembled plutocrats that one in five American male workers between ages twenty-five and fifty-five was now unemployed. In the 1960s, 95 percent of the same group had been in work. Summers strongly implied that Chinese trade policies were partly to blame—and he was not alone in his diagnosis.9 Even mainstream American economists were beginning to blame Chinese “mercantilism” for financial instability and job losses in America.

Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism
by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2009

The public also fears—surely rightly so—that highly compensated bankers will somehow appropriate the funds from the bailout to increase their own bonuses. The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson reflects such a political reaction when she describes how an “irreverent friend” thought TARP referred to “The Act Rewarding Plutocrats.”16 It may also be difficult to make injections of the necessary magnitude. The public may believe that injections of capital into the banks are necessary to make them solvent. But this fails to perceive the Humpty Dumpty problem. To relieve the credit crunch it is necessary to make the banks so super-solvent that they will replace those parts of the credit system that have failed.

The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
Published 3 Sep 2012

asks the second orc, deceptively calmly. “That is a very good question,” Giuliani says. “I believe certain parties in Glory City—while we were there attending to unpleasant but unavoidable businesses—suborned him. There are rumors about the depraved and perverted practices of the pulchritudinous protestant puritan plutocratic penis-people priesthood, of shadowy bacchanalian polyamorous practices. ... I suspect, to be blunt, someone was blackmailing him.” “You suspect? You did not investigate—?” “Hell, no!” says Giuliani, “I exterminate! All enemies of the—” The chair clears her throat. “This is rather disturbing,” she says.

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It
by Brian Dumaine
Published 11 May 2020

The bottom line, according to many in the company, is that Bezos’s relentless search for the truth has more often than not helped improve their thinking. A deep addiction to data does have its downside. The kind of fact-driven, relentlessly focused mind that Bezos possesses can be an Achilles’ heel, making him appear in the public eye as less than empathic, as sometimes blind to the grayer areas of life. His critics view him as a plutocrat who, in the name of enriching his shareholders, is so obsessed with his customers that he neglects his employees and his community. They point, for example, to the tough working conditions at Amazon, which seem driven by a devotion to the customer, and to Bezos’s unwillingness to soothe the fears of local politicians and residents when Amazon announced its Long Island City second headquarters, presumably because working out those problems would have taken valuable time and resources away from serving customers.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China
by Jonathan Kaufman
Published 14 Sep 2020

In China, Inuzuka believed, the linchpin of Jewish power was Victor Sassoon, the richest man in Shanghai, financial backer of the Nationalist government, and a close friend of Chiang Kai-shek’s top aides H. H. Kung and T. V. Soong. The Jews are the “true rulers of China, both its economy and its leaders,” Inuzuka wrote. “Chiang is considered a mere puppet of his masters, the Jewish plutocrats, especially Sir Victor Sassoon.” The goal: to turn Victor Sassoon into Jacob Schiff. “It will be important to study in detail and find to what extent we can make use of the Jewish people,” Inuzuka wrote. “It is emphatically advised, therefore, that our intelligence agencies should be strengthened and investigations on the spot intensified.”

My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
by Guy Branum
Published 29 Jul 2018

Fresh from law school, Ranse rode into the territory on a stagecoach that was held up by the infamous Liberty Valance, played with gleeful masochism by Lee Marvin. Valance is a general-services villain who robs, vandalizes, and batters for personal joy, and to promote the general interests of the plutocratic cattle barons who influence our plot but whom we never see in human form. Valance steals Ranse’s pocket watch (a gift from his father) and soils his law books, but it’s when Valance challenges the inviolable status of a widow-woman by stealing her brooch that Ranse tries to stop him. Ranse is beaten and left for dead, but a few days later, he is brought into town on the back of Tom Doniphon’s wagon.

Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society
by Eric Posner and E. Weyl
Published 14 May 2018

This problem is most acute for goods and services usually provided by governments, like policing, public parks, roads, social insurance, and national defense: what is needed is a market for political influence. A market for political influence? That sounds preposterous. If money were allowed to purchase political influence, wouldn’t politics be controlled by a few plutocrats? The history of political corruption in the late nineteenth-century United States bears this out. Local politicians were commonly bought off by political machines, railroad men, and oil barons. Yet the alternative model, that every citizen should have an equal voice and thus that every issue is determined by majority rule, has its own severe weaknesses.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

Conceivably, given sufficient funding, a small enclosed colony could be built there, or on another planet; but the costs would be so much higher than for an equivalent artificial ecosystem on Earth, and therefore the scale so much more limited, that anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion. To imagine such a colony could offer material prosperity as abundant as tech plutocrats enjoy in Atherton is to live even more deeply in the narcissism of that delusion—as though it were only as difficult to smuggle luxury to Mars as to Burning Man. The faith takes a different form among the laity, unable to afford that ticket into space. But articles of faith are offered, considerately, at different price points: smartphones, streaming services, rideshares, and the internet itself, more or less free.

The Moon: A History for the Future
by Oliver Morton
Published 1 May 2019

MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan. As a provider of practical services to industry and government, SpaceX has succeeded beyond almost all expectation. In the ten years since September 2008, when, at its fourth attempt, SpaceX finally launched its first satellite, the company has gone from triumph to triumph.

The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions Into the Lost Delights of Britain's Railways
by Michael Williams
Published 6 May 2015

He continues in an almost orgasmic tone: She scintillates with silverplate and gilding, her handsome bronze kerosene lamps in a coloured clerestory, shedding a warm radiance over rich panels and sleek plush. There in a little while, stately gentlemen will be cautiously extracting themselves from broadcloth and starch, fine ladies and lovely girls will be shedding stiff linen and whalebone as delicately as possible within the uneasy privacy of their green-curtained berths – save for the plutocrats who have booked the single private compartment at the end. Here, under the vast dim parabola of the roof, we see only the dignity, the elegance, the last word in travelling comfort. At the head, superbly in tandem, are two of Matthew Kirtley’s latest and finest express engines, deep emerald green and so clean that they reflect the station and signal lamps as if theirs were a vitreous rather than a ferrous quality.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

In certain sectors, including ecommerce and mobile payments, China has already established a powerful lead.27 Much of China’s technology boom results from massive investments by both state-sponsored and private firms in leading-edge technologies. In 2016 this investment was greater than that of Japan, Germany, and South Korea combined, and it produced ten times as many new graduates in engineering, technology, science, and medicine as the United States.28 China has spawned its own plutocratic elite, too: the number of Chinese billionaires in 2017 was just behind the number of billionaires in the United States, and growing much faster.29 Since 2000, many billionaires from tech and other sectors have entered the Communist Party in a seamless manner that Mao Tse-tung would never have countenanced.30 China thus has two intertwined elites—one political, the other economic.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

She had won the votes of the winners of globalization, while Trump had won among the losers. 10 The Democratic Party had once stood for farmers and working people against the privileged. Now, in a meritocratic age, its defeated standard bearer boasted that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country had voted for her. Donald Trump was keenly alive to the politics of humiliation. From the standpoint of economic fairness, his populism was fake, a kind of plutocratic populism. He proposed a health plan that would have cut health care for many of his working-class supporters and enacted a tax bill that heaped tax cuts on the wealthy. But to focus solely on the hypocrisy misses the point. When he withdrew the United States from the Paris climate change agreement, Trump argued, implausibly, that he was doing so to protect American jobs.

The City
by Tony Norfield

No machine guns, bombs or even bribes are necessary, although substantial legal fees are due to our learned friends in the legal profession. More loosely related to the UK’s position as a welcoming centre for international finance are the purchases of UK commercial and residential property, football teams, newspapers and other trophy items by Russian and East European oligarchs, Middle Eastern plutocrats and others.10 Economic analysts might find it interesting to work out the ‘value’ of the personal/political security enjoyed by the owner of a prominent UK football team, as well as the opportunities such ownership might give for money laundering. Notably, in the wake of Russia’s incursion into Crimea at the end of February 2014, a UK government policy briefing made it clear that it would seek to exempt the City of London from any EU or US sanctions against Russia: Britain should not ‘close London’s financial centre to Russians’.11 The value of the economic, political and social connections between the UK and foreign financiers was also indicated by the £7bn-plus crisis-related injection of capital into Barclays Bank from Abu Dhabi and Qatar’s sovereign wealth funds in October 2008.12 Economics and domestic politics Apart from possible taxes or similar curbs on financial activity, there are other economic and political developments that could undermine the economics of British imperialism.

Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid
by Meredith. Angwin
Published 18 Oct 2020

POLICY, MARKETS, AND FUEL SECURITY CHAPTER 11 BREAKING UP MONOPOLIES Regulated monopolies WE HAVE SEEN THAT RTOs make a mountain of a small hill: they are unable to take simple steps to ensure winter reliability. Later, we will see that, in the RTO areas, insider deliberations are quiet and closed. You need to be kind of a plutocrat to have your voice heard by organizations that run the RTO grid. How did this happen? What problems were RTOs going to solve? Before RTOs, electricity utilities were “regulated monopolies.” You were in the territory of one vertically integrated utility, and that was that. You were a ratepayer, with no choices.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

It allows us to feel optimistic about the future while relieving us of responsibility for that future. It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: Recent job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.”

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

In 1998, the Gingrich Congress passed the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, which limited the ways that the IRS could pursue tax cheats. Although the law curbed some actual abuses, the real agenda of House Republicans was to weaken the IRS. Money from corporations and wealthy individuals funded a "grassroots" campaign to help pass the law. In a rare public unmasking of the right's tendency to disguise plutocratic goals in populist clothing, many of the "average people" who testified before Congress about IRS abuses were found to be phonies. According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, most of the IRS sob stories turned out to be patently false.32 The Taxpayer Bill of Rights was a huge victory for all tax cheats, but its main beneficiaries are taxpayers wealthy enough to afford accountants or lawyers who know the ins and outs of the law, and can exploit its provisions to make the IRS back off.

The Road to Ruin: The Global Elites' Secret Plan for the Next Financial Crisis
by James Rickards
Published 15 Nov 2016

New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2000. Fleming, Ian. Thunderball. Las Vegas: Thomas & Mercer, 2012. Fletcher, Ian. Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace It and Why. Sheffield, MA: Coalition for a Prosperous America, 2011. Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Friedman, Allan, and P. W. Singer. Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

Good Times, Bad Times: The Welfare Myth of Them and Us
by John Hills
Published 6 Nov 2014

The different ways of doing this depend on what kind of inequality people are most worried about – between those at the bottom and those in the middle, between those near the top and those near the bottom, or between the very poorest and the very richest, for instance. One index number that is often used is the ‘Gini coefficient’. This index would be zero in a completely equal society, where everyone had the same income. It would be 100 (when measured as a percentage) if one plutocrat had all the money and everyone else nothing.26 The international comparison shown in Figure 2.6 puts the UK in 2013 as having the seventh most unequal income distribution (after allowing for benefits and income taxes) out of the 35 countries shown. It was behind only Estonia of the European countries included, and behind only the US out of the richer ones.

The Verdict: Did Labour Change Britain?
by Polly Toynbee and David Walker
Published 6 Oct 2011

Still, foreign cash had perked up attendance: during the 2008–9 season 37 million attended football matches in England and Wales, up from 29 million in 2003–4, figures last seen when Hey Jude topped the charts. Few would turn the clock back even though parochial fans habitually exaggerated the quality of the Premiership over the Bundesliga or Serie A. Yet in Germany, clubs were obliged by law and custom to maintain local and mutual structures, and to keep gate prices down; in Italy, the plutocrats were at least home-grown and, in the case of the president of AC Milan, Silvio Berlusconi, Italians could even vote against him. What English club football exchanged for money, new stadiums and foreign players was fairness, stoicism and localism. A similar story unfolded in the gents’ games of cricket and rugby union.

The Hacker Crackdown
by Bruce Sterling
Published 15 Mar 1992

Anyone motivated by greed for mere money (as opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off as a narrow-minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt and contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption, where everyone from the President down is for sale and whoever has the gold makes the rules. Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on the other side of the conflict. The police are also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in American society, motivated not by mere money but by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course, their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.

Paper Promises
by Philip Coggan
Published 1 Dec 2011

It is no coincidence that hedge funds and private equity companies, two industries that profit from easy credit and rising asset prices, have flourished in the last few decades. Whereas the new billionaires in the developing world still earn their fortunes from industry and natural resources, the developed world’s plutocrats increasingly come from the world of finance. Luck and leverage can turn a trader into a genius. Asset prices could not go up for ever. The crisis of 2007 – 08 overwhelmed the banks and governments felt obliged to step in for fear of widespread economic collapse. This has happened many times in the past.

Money: The Unauthorized Biography
by Felix Martin
Published 5 Jun 2013

Undeterred, the newly minted millionaire Bender heads for the local airfield, where he has spotted a plane about to leave. This, too, is not available, however: it is a “special flight” reserved for use according to the Plan. In the end, a group of passing Kazakh nomads are the only ones who will take their roubles, and the two plutocrats are reduced to travelling back by camel. They have no more luck with lodgings. In one town, they are told that all hotel beds are already allocated to a congress of visiting soil scientists; in another, to the construction workers building a new power station. Eventually, Bender is forced to resort to “what he used to do while the possessor of empty pockets.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

In other words, we would see a return to something like the feudal system that prevailed during the Middle Ages. There would be one very important difference, however: medieval serfs were essential to the system since they provided the agricultural labor. In a futuristic world governed by automated feudalism, the peasants would be largely superfluous. The 2013 movie Elysium, in which the plutocrats migrate to an Eden-like artificial world in Earth orbit, does a pretty good job of bringing this dystopian vision of the future to life. Even some economists have started to worry about this scenario. Noah Smith, a popular economics blogger, warned in a 2014 post of a possible future in which “a teeming, ragged mass of lumpen humanity teeters on the edge of starvation” outside the gates that protect the elite, and that “unlike the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao, robot-enforced tyranny will be robust to shifts in popular opinion.

The Meritocracy Myth
by Stephen J. McNamee
Published 17 Jul 2013

Old Money America: Aristocracy in the Age of Obama. New York: iUniverse. Frank, Robert H. 1999. Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess. New York: Free Press. ———. 2007. Richistan: A Journey through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. New York: Crown. Freeland, Chrystia. 2012. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. New York: Penguin. Frey, Bruno S., and Alois Stutzer. 2002. Happiness and Economics: How the Economy and Institutions Affect Well-Being. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1958. The Affluent Society.

The Nanny State Made Me: A Story of Britain and How to Save It
by Stuart Maconie
Published 5 Mar 2020

She fell back on it whenever it was suggested that there was another way to run a country except wholescale deregulation, savage spending cuts, a dismantling of the welfare state and enslavement to the markets. It was codswallop, of course. There were and still are any amount of alternatives, from full-scale command-state Maoism and Soviet Communism to mixed-economy social democracy to anarcho-syndicalism to plutocracy to absolute rule by plutocratic budgerigar (never yet tried but worth a go). There was an alternative. There still is, though we have left it late and lost much. For a lesson in how we could live happier, healthier, safer, be more sane and more productive, let’s revitalise one of George Osborne’s fatuous old slogans. Let’s visit a real northern powerhouse.

The Dealmaker: Lessons From a Life in Private Equity
by Guy Hands
Published 4 Nov 2021

For a while it proved very difficult to tell who our ‘real friends’ were – which people wanted to know us for who we were rather than for what we might be able to do for them. In time we discovered that just as the poorest in society tend to be those who give the largest share of their income to charity, so those people with the least asked us for the least. Our true friends, we realised, were not City moguls or plutocrats but came from such professions as teaching or nursing. The sudden influx of wealth didn’t lead to a similar transformation in our lifestyle. Julia still shopped for the cheapest offers in the supermarket and I saved the soaps, ketchup sachets, tea bags and shampoo bottles in the hotels I stayed in.

The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions
by Jason Hickel
Published 3 May 2017

The City of London is able to function as a tax haven because it is immune from many of the nation’s laws, is free of all parliamentary oversight and – most importantly – is exempt from Freedom of Information rules. It even has its own private police force. As a result of this special status, the City has maintained a number of quaint plutocratic traditions dating back to medieval times, when it was founded. Take its electoral process, for instance. Unlike in normal councils, the franchise in the City of London is not restricted to human beings. Businesses registered within the council’s borders are allowed to vote alongside residents. More than 70 per cent of the votes cast during council elections are cast not by humans, but by businesses – mostly corporate banks and financial firms.

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House, 1918-1939
by Adrian Tinniswood
Published 2 May 2016

Little wonder that other new owners of old country houses would try and achieve the same effect. THE GREAT MAYFAIR DECORATORS WERE such accomplished self-publicists that it seems as if they completely dominated the 1920s and 1930s, as they vied with each other for the lucrative privilege of creating a new drawing room for David and Wallis, a new bedroom suite for this earl or that plutocrat. They didn’t. Look around an English country house today, and you will see how pervasive was the taste of discerning amateurs Ronald and Nancy Tree. But what about the legions of new brides and new chatelaines ordering willow-green silk damask from Waring & Gillow, finding fine old furniture in the corners of a saloon or long gallery?

The Bonfire of the Vanities
by Tom Wolfe
Published 4 Mar 2008

…You think Sherman McCoy stands alone? You think he is by himself? He is one a the most powerful men at Pierce & Pierce, and Pierce & Pierce is one a the most powerful forces in Wall Street. I know Pierce & Pierce…see…I know what they can do. You heard a capitalists. You heard a plutocrats. You take a look at Sherman McCoy and you’re looking at a capitalist, you’re looking at a plutocrat.” Reverend Bacon eviscerated the offending newspaper article. The Daily News was a notorious toady of the corporate interests. The reporter who wrote the pack of lies, Neil Flannagan, was a lackey so shameless as to lend his name to such a disgusting campaign.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

Rather than restoring the protective limits to commodification that were rendered obsolete by globalization, ever new ways will be sought to exploit nature, extend and intensify working time, and encourage what the jargon calls creative finance, in a desperate effort to keep profits up and capital accumulation going. The scenario of ‘stagnation with a chance of bubbles’ may most plausibly be imagined as a battle of all against all, punctured by occasional panics and with the playing of endgames becoming a popular pastime. PLUTOCRATS AND PLUNDER Turning to the second disorder, there is no indication that the long-term trend towards greater economic inequality will be broken any time soon, or indeed ever. Inequality depresses growth, for Keynesian and other reasons. But the easy money currently provided by central banks to restore growth – easy for capital but not, of course, for labour – further adds to inequality, by blowing up the financial sector and inviting speculative rather than productive investment.

I Can't Breathe
by Matt Taibbi
Published 23 Oct 2017

New York under its famed previous mayor, Rudy Giuliani, had dropped income taxes to their lowest levels in thirty years, to an average of about 8 percent. This was well below the 10 percent average seen under Mayors Ed Koch and David Dinkins. But the destruction of 9/11 created a massive hole in the budget, and the city needed money. Term limits forced Giuliani to leave office after 9/11, and the incoming mayor, the billionaire media plutocrat Michael Bloomberg, had promised not to raise taxes. “We cannot raise taxes. We will find another way,” he said. It took less than a month for Bloomberg to go back on his word. The city’s upper-crust financial sector had required huge amounts of state and federal aid to get back on its feet. The cleanup cost about $1 billion.

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
Published 31 Mar 2008

Meanwhile, the Fed jumped with both feet into a new role of lending to previously ineligible investment banks and setting up three new financial lending mechanisms at the New York Fed—most notably the Term Securities Lending Facility (to which the fearful could turn in weak securities for treasuries, as long as the second-rate paper had the pretense of a triple-A rating). On March 27, the Wall Street Journal ponderously described the period since March 18 as “Ten Days That Changed Capitalism”—or at least its American variety. Alas, many more such days would follow as the deleveraging of America continued to outpace the belated comprehension of plutocrats, professors, and pundits alike. Among the handful of journalistic exceptions, the most conspicuous was columnist Gretchen Morgenson of the New York Times, herself at one time a stockbroker, who mocked the Fed’s “trash for cash” program by noting that “in early April, for instance, the Fed had to turn away many of the nation’s largest brokerage firms when they showed up, trash bags a-bulging.

The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford
Published 1 Jan 2006

For devotees of patrician sports, the Scarsdale Golf Club and Fox Meadow Tennis Club offered exclusive links and courts. The Woman’s Club served female Scarsdale. According to its constitution, this organization sought “to bring together all women interested in the welfare of the village … and to foster a general public and democratic spirit” among the affluent few who could afford life in this plutocratic democracy. There were various sections in the club, each catering to some interest of the female population. For example, the American Home Section sought “to bring to its members new and stimulating ideas in the field of home decoration, gracious entertaining and personal grooming.”87 The pride of both males and females in Scarsdale was the school system.

Saturn's Children
by Charles Stross
Published 30 Jun 2008

(I feel skeletal struts breaking between my fingers, triggers pulled, knives stabbed.) “You can pass for an aristo, and nobody will ever know any better. You can kill an aristo and take her identity and fortune and be an aristo, if you’re tough enough.” (I see myself standing over the crumpled wreckage of a slave-owning plutocrat, staring down at her body with fascinated surmise.) “What is the Block Three template?” I ask. She doesn’t reply directly. Instead a liquid like night seems to wash over my soul, and I’m Rhea again. We all start out as Rhea, until they shine a light in our eyes and tell us we’re not, we’re some other name, and we’re on our own in the world now.

Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
by Tom Clark and Anthony Heath
Published 23 Jun 2014

To the extent that Obama could do anything more for the poor in the rest of his first term – and he did achieve some extension of the stimulus – he was forced by the Republicans to trade his efforts for an extension of Bush-era tax cuts for the rich.25 Not only were these tax cuts the epitome of the very plutocratic politics that had shredded the social safety net in the first place, but they also compromised an important revenue stream that might otherwise have been used to repair it for the future. Worse was to come, after a faltering recovery picked up and attention turned from the stagnation of the economy as a whole to battered public finances.

Planet Ponzi
by Mitch Feierstein
Published 2 Feb 2012

Wall Streeters always had fancy jobs that paid more money than people earned elsewhere and which were imperfectly understood by those outside the financial world, but those disparities weren’t utterly out of line with other inequalities. Lawyers also had abstruse jobs with big pay packets. So did ad execs and heart surgeons. It’s only recently that the lawyers and the admen and the surgeons came to look like poor country cousins compared with the plutocrats of Wall Street. So change is necessary; and change is possible. The question we’re left with is: what change? We start with government. Change in government The first thing government needs‌—‌the main thing, the central issue‌—‌is honesty. The US government likes to draw attention to its ‘debt held by the public’ figure, which stands at around $10 trillion.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Published 31 May 1993

The naked brutality of industry was the most difficult thing to rec­ oncile with any new theory of the utopian future. No matter how you rationalized it, factory work was mind-numbing, if not back-breaking. And if the worker was a new kind of slave, then the industrial method of production itself was the new master, whether the system was run by an archduke with a monocle, or a cigar-chomping plutocrat, or a soviet committee. The avant-garde's solution to this dilemma was a bit of intellectual jujitsu, the old if you can't beat ' em, join ' em gambit : They romanticized the machine and embraced the growing mechanization of life as a wonderful development. Henceforward, all art would be machine-made, proclaimed the Dutchman Theo Van Doesburg.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

There is a lot of make-believe in Silicon Valley’s espousal of renewable energy, which crosses the line into outright dishonesty when claims are made that its data centers rely 100 percent on intermittent wind and solar energy. There’s also more than a dash of hypocrisy. Google’s fleet of private jets based at San Jose airport burned the equivalent of 59 million gallons of oil between 2007 and 2013. “Of course, the wealthy of the past, and more traditional plutocrats today, also consume at a high level,” Kotkin comments on Google’s Gulfstreams and Boeings, “but they at least do so without lecturing everyone else to cut their consumption.”21 Green billionaire philanthropy upends traditional notions of charitable giving to help those most in need. For sure, there is a certain amount of going through the philanthropic motions of looking after the neediest.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation
by Brendan Simms
Published 27 Apr 2016

Britain seriously considered action against Stalin, but thought better of it.61 The USSR was expelled from the League of Nations in November 1939, yet no declaration of war followed. Virtually the entire continent was now in hostile hands. A Nazi–Soviet totalitarian bloc stood in self-conscious opposition to the western plutocratic democracies,62 of which Britain was the last man standing on the near side of the Atlantic. It was the darkest prospect she had faced since the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps even bleaker. The outbreak of war fundamentally changed British politics and society. It nearly destroyed Chamberlain’s government, which was widely believed to have failed to contain Hitler, right away.

Moneyland: Why Thieves and Crooks Now Rule the World and How to Take It Back
by Oliver Bullough
Published 5 Sep 2018

His report traced the prices of the shares of the companies in the basket back to 1985, and showed they cumulatively yielded an annual rate of return of 17.8 per cent, far higher than the stock market as a whole. That outsized return had only accelerated with time, particularly since 1994, when wealthy Russians and others began to develop their taste for Western luxuries. ‘The emerging market entrepreneur/plutocrats (Russian oligarchs, Chinese real estate/manufacturing tycoons, Indian software moguls, Latin American oil/agriculture barons), benefiting disproportionately from globalisation are logically diversifying into the asset markets of the developed plutonomies,’ he wrote. ‘Just as misery loves company, we posit that the “plutos” like to hang out together … the emerging markets’ elites often do their spending and investment in developed plutonomies rather than at home.’

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens
by Nicholas Shaxson
Published 11 Apr 2011

In considering how the offshore system contributed to the financial and economic crisis, it’s useful to look at the issue of debt. Why has so much debt built up in the world’s richest economies? An article in the Financial Times in June 2009 (“Debt Is Capitalism’s Dirty Little Secret”) provides one answer. “The benefits of economic growth have gone into the pockets of plutocrats rather than the bulk of the population,” the article reads. “So why has there been no revolution? Because there was a solution: debt. If you couldn’t earn it, you could borrow it.” As we have seen, the infrastructure was put in place to make this change happen. The tax havens were a big part of it.

The Theory of the Leisure Class
by Thorstein Veblen
Published 10 Oct 2007

Published in the American Journal of Sociology between September 1898 and January 1899, this material appeared as separate chapters in the work completed in draft form by 1898 but which had been set aside out of dissatisfaction. By the final decades of the nineteenth century others had begun to question the ethics of ‘plutocrats’ such as John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Collis Huntington. On the heels of the publication in 1873 of The Gilded Age, the satiric novel centred on financial corruption co-authored by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, ‘muckraking’ exposés of the Big Money men began to be featured in newspapers and magazines, even as President Theodore Roosevelt vigorously moved to regulate the Trusts and curtail the Monopolies.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump
by James Naughtie
Published 1 Apr 2020

This was one of the tasks for Democrats in the early years of Trump – to realise how far the country had moved. Without that, what could they do to reverse it? We spoke about the Reagan years, and how the Republican coalition had finally embraced both the evangelicals and the moneyed conservatives. They came together because the religious right was not sufficient alone. The plutocrats on the right who were basically manipulating politics for their own personal greed were not enough either. But marrying them had a powerful, exaggerated impact. And I remember voting in the 1980 election and literally the people who were lined up where I voted at that time were really motivated by the religious arguments they saw.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, had headed the Defense Innovation Advisory Board for years. Once famous for the motto “Don’t be evil,” Google has shed even that modest ethical standard.81 Other critics claimed that Google had not done nearly enough for the nation of its birth. There is an AI arms race, and if the United States can’t tap its top tech companies, nations with pliant plutocrats will pull ahead. Sandro Gaycken, a senior adviser to NATO, commented, “These naive hippy developers from Silicon Valley don’t understand—the CIA should force them.”82 Uncooperative firms risk America’s falling behind China and even Russia in an AI arms race. Data integration at the scale of China’s would likelier enable more rapid advances in monitoring and targeting individuals—capacities of great use in policing, epidemics, and war.

The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid
by Lawrence Wright
Published 7 Jun 2021

And yet, women voted for him at about the same rate as they did for Mitt Romney in the election prior to that—actually voting against the first woman presidential nominee in favor of a sexual predator in the #MeToo era. We thought that blue-collar workers and those without college degrees would be repelled by a plutocrat who didn’t pay his contractors and left lenders holding his bankrupt properties, and yet he carried non-college graduates by the widest margin in thirty-six years. We thought religious people would be outraged by his impiety and agnosticism, not to mention his divorces and habitual lying, but Trump carried Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons by significant margins, and evangelicals by 80 percent.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT No less than 85 percent of Americans “Bipartisan Dissatisfaction with the Direction of the Country and the Economy,” AP NORC, June 29, 2022, apnorc.org/​projects/​bipartisan-dissatisfaction-with-the-direction-of-the-country-and-the-economy. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Distrust extends to nongovernment See, for example, Daniel Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), and the Edelman Trust Barometer: “2022 Edelman Trust Barometer,” Edelman, www.edelman.com/​trust/​2022-trust-barometer. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A Democracy Perception Index poll Richard Wike et al., “Many Across the Globe Are Dissatisfied with How Democracy Is Working,” Pew Research Center, April 29, 2019, www.pewresearch.org/​global/​2019/​04/​29/​many-across-the-globe-are-dissatisfied-with-how-democracy-is-working/; Dalia Research et al., “Democracy Perception Index 2018,” Alliance of Democracies, June 2018, www.allianceofdemocracies.org/​wp-content/​uploads/​2018/​06/​Democracy-Perception-Index-2018-1.pdf.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Indeed, Buffett was the first to say that the tax on investments was unfairly low. In fact, this was another of his causes. He liked to compare his tax rate to his secretary’s, pointing out how unjust it was that she paid a higher tax rate on her income than he did, just because most of his income came from investing. Having already angered all the plutocrats and would-be plutocrats, but with his credibility at a peak in other quarters, Buffett vowed to carry on the fight against repeal of the estate tax, and would spin on this subject for years. He spoke again on another subject to the Democratic Policy Committee just days before the first shots were fired in the Iraq War in 2003.

…

He let himself be photographed lounging on the “Warren,” part of the “Berkshire Collection,” sold by the Omaha Bedding Co., as seen on posters of “Buffett and His Bed.” Now when he went down to the Nebraska Furniture Mart during the shareholder meeting weekend, he could lie on his own bed while selling his own mattresses. “I finally landed the only job I really wanted in life—a mattress tester,” he said.42 The Sage of Omaha, at whom plutocrats railed and tax-cutters shook their fists, before whom accountants quivered and stock-option abusers fled, whom autograph-seekers followed and television lights illuminated, was at heart nothing more than a starstruck little kid, endearingly clueless in many ways about his place in the pantheon.

The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways
by Earl Swift
Published 8 Jun 2011

Turner had been making decisions without citizen interference for four decades, had sought consensus only with fellow engineers and small groups of community leaders—who, in his view (and it was by no means unique to him), "knew best"—and, it seems, simply didn't want or didn't know how to respond to someone outside the fold. It was one thing to encourage inclusion in the abstract, another to actually practice it. Such treatment only fueled RAM's impression that its members had no hand in their fate. That summer, while busy denouncing "pavement plutocrats" and "concrete conquistadors," Wechsler decided the time was ripe to unite Baltimore's various anti-expressway forces under a single banner. At an all-day summit in early August, east-siders and west created a new umbrella organization incorporating some two dozen factions—RAM, neighborhood improvement groups, small anti-road cells, civil rights outfits, the League of Women Voters.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Ron Hayduk, Democracy for All: Restoring Immigrant Voting Rights in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3. 99. See Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 11, 15. 100. John Adams is reputed to have made the same statement. In fairness, Adams was no plutocrat. Although he was no democrat in the modern sense, he was also deeply concerned about the powerful having unchecked power. His correspondence with Jefferson at the end of their lives is illuminating in this regard. See Michael Perelman, The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 272. 101.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson
Published 26 Jun 2017

To see why not, imagine that the iPhone has tons of great free apps available, but they’re all games. The device would be highly attractive to gamers, but other consumers wouldn’t be too interested in it. Now imagine that there are lots of apps of all kinds available, but each one costs $100 or more. Such an iPhone would be the must-have gadget for plutocrats, but the rest of us wouldn’t have much use for it. These two hypotheticals highlight the intuition that there’s something about the variety of apps, combined with a range of prices, that help make the iPhone popular. To sharpen this intuition, and to get a deeper understanding of the power of platforms, we need to introduce two topics covered in every intro to microeconomics course: supply and demand curves, and the idea of complements.

The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. le Guin
Published 30 Apr 1974

After a pause Shevek said, “I think I do.” “You are aware, then, that you’ve been bought?” “Bought?” “Call it co-opted, if you like. Listen. No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see. How can you understand your situation, here, in a capitalist economy, a plutocratic-oligarchic State? How can you see it, coming from your little commune of starving idealists up there in the sky?” “Chifoilisk, there aren’t many idealists left on Anarres, I assure you. The Settlers were idealists, yes, to leave this world for our deserts. But that was seven generations ago! Our society is practical.

The Big Book of Words You Should Know: Over 3,000 Words Every Person Should Be Able to Use (And a Few That You Probably Shouldn't)
by David Olsen , Michelle Bevilacqua and Justin Cord Hayes
Published 28 Jan 2009

The annexation was voted down in a PLEBISCITE. plutocracy (ploo-TOK-ruh-see), noun Rule by the rich. Plutocracy can also refer to the overall influence of the wealthy in social affairs. “If PLUTOCRACY were likely to improve the nation’s standard of living,” Gerald said haughtily, “then I would be a plutocrat.” polemics (puh-LEM-ik), noun The art of argument. Someone who is strong in the field of polemics is gifted in making points by means of controversial discourse with others. The talk show host’s great asset was his skill in POLEMICS—not his personality. politick (POL-ih-tik), verb To talk about or engage in politics.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

My guess is that this won’t happen in the United States first. Russian oligarchs6 or Gulf sheiks might step up initially. If there’s a clock ticking to get a monetized information economy started, this is it. Will there be middle-class wealth and clout to balance the potential of masters of Siren Servers to become near-immortal plutocrats? This is the scenario H. G. Wells foresaw in The Time Machine. If the middle classes are strong when the time comes, some sort of compromise will be sorted out; some new social contract about how medicine is applied once the idea of a “natural” lifetime becomes as anachronistic as the idea of a “natural” climate.

The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
by Yascha Mounk
Published 15 Feb 2018

Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20, no. 2 (2017): 186–206; Christopher Bickerton, “Europe’s Neo-Madisonians: Rethinking the Legitimacy of Limited Power in a Multi-level Polity,” Political Studies 59, no. 3 (2011): 659–673. 127. See Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). 128. See “Mehrheit der Deutschen gegen neue Griechen-Milliarden,” Spiegel Online, February 2, 2012. 129. See Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: Norton, 2007); and Parag Khanna, Technocracy in America (Parag Khanna, self-published, 2017). 130.

From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 3 Sep 2012

The vociferous hecklers had to be physically restrained lest they assaulted him. But it was in Beijing, the centre of youthful Chinese radicalism, that Tagore faced organized hostility in the form of primed questioners and boos and heckles. At one of his meetings, where he attacked modern democracy itself, which he claimed benefited ‘only plutocrats in various disguises’, leaflets denouncing him were handed out.37 ‘We have had enough of the ancient Chinese civilization.’ They went on to attack Tagore’s hosts, Liang Qichao and Zhang Junmai, who used ‘his talent to instill in Young China their conservative and reactionary tendencies’.38 The communist poet Qu Quibai summed up the general tone of Tagore’s reception in China when he wrote, ‘Thank you, Mr.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain
by Robert Verkaik
Published 14 Apr 2018

Gove wrote in The Times on 25 February 2017: ‘There is one group of highly successful enterprises that is pretty much insulated from the present row about business rates. Our private schools. Because charities get an 80 per cent exemption from the levy. And, to my continuing surprise, we still consider the education of the children of plutocrats and oligarchs to be a charitable activity.’ He argued that VAT exemption on school fees ‘allows the wealthiest in this country, indeed the very wealthiest in the globe, to buy a prestige service that secures their children a permanent positional edge in society at an effective twenty per cent discount’.

Billionaires' Row: Tycoons, High Rollers, and the Epic Race to Build the World's Most Exclusive Skyscrapers
by Katherine Clarke
Published 13 Jun 2023

Kim and a friend were sent to London to pose as prospective buyers at the building, which was financed in part by Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani, the prime minister and minister of foreign affairs of Qatar. There, Kim found high design meets high security, with features like panic rooms, bulletproof glass, and guards trained by the British Special Forces, perhaps geared to appeal to Russian plutocrats and security-conscious buyers from the Middle East. The parking spaces in the underground garage were designed to be large enough to accommodate a 375,000-pound Maybach. In some ways, London was the harbinger of what was about to happen in New York. Foreign investors had been streaming into the British capital since the fall of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, with Russians drawn to London’s glamour and fancy private schools, not to mention its favorable tax laws.

Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
by Charles Emmerson
Published 14 Oct 2019

In Turin, students tear down the street signs on the recently renamed Corso Wilson and replace them with ones daubed Corso Fiume. Mussolini dips his pen in their fury. He wonders if Italy should now support the Irish guerrilla campaign to overthrow the British, ‘the fattest and most bourgeois nation in the world’. The Americans have revealed themselves as mere plutocrats, he says, not at all the idealists he took them for. What a change from a few months ago. In St Mark’s Square in Venice, D’Annunzio pops up again. ‘A tragic gargoyle’, one observer notes. D’Annunzio suggests Venetians form a militia to march into Dalmatia and save it from the Slavs. In a series of speeches in Rome, he turns his poetic invective against Woodrow, accusing him of being a mask rather than a man, a ‘Croatified Quaker’.

…

Reading a description of the parcels on his way home, a postal clerk recalls a series of others he handled, all with the same return address. An alert is sent out. Over thirty packages are recovered. It would appear that the intention was for the bombs to go off on the first of May, International Labour Day. The list of addressees reads like a card index of America’s high officials, anti-Bolshevik crusaders and capitalist plutocrats: the new Attorney General, Mitchell Palmer; John D. Rockefeller; J. P. Morgan Jr.; Lee Overman, the Senator who led the subcommittee on Bolshevik propaganda. Someone is running a terrorist campaign. Is America infected with the same revolutionary bug as Europe? A malicious rumour is spread that some of the bombs were posted from the offices of Marcus Garvey’s newspaper, the Negro World.

Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Mar 2009

Since he was denied the chance to go to Harvard because he could only afford to live at home; since he was blacklisted from Whittier College’s one social club because he was too poor; since he was reduced to sharing that one-room shack without heat or indoor plumbing with four fellow students while working his way through Duke Law and finished third in his class; since he begged Los Angeles’s plutocrats, Navy cap in hand, for their sufferance of his first congressional bid; since he trundled across California in his wood-paneled station wagon to bring his Senate campaign “into every county, city, town, precinct, and home in the state of California”; since he was forced to plead cloth-coated poverty on television to keep his spot as vice-presidential candidate in 1952; since his vice-presidential career was interrupted every off year when he hit the road to campaign for other Republicans, pounding whiskey in the back rooms when his companions pounded whiskey, drinking juice in church basements when his companions drank juice.

…

Thanks to Kitchel’s incompetence, the campaign needed to save all the money it could. When Goldwater’s campaign leaders purged the RNC’s finance chair, the job was offered to Goldwater’s friend Ralph Cordiner, the former CEO of General Electric. This was a bad enough move: Cordiner, a stony man who was widely unpopular among the very plutocrats the campaign counted on for support, was associated in the public’s mind with G.E.’s recent conviction for price fixing. Even worse, Cordiner had set a condition for taking the job: that the campaign run on a balanced budget. That sounded fine to Kitchel; conservatives didn’t like deficit spending when Congress did it, so why should they accept it in their campaign?

The Rough Guide to Amsterdam
by Martin Dunford , Phil Lee and Karoline Thomas
Published 4 Jan 2010

The oddest items are the fake bedroom doors; the eighteenth-century owners were so keen to avoid any lack of symmetry that they camouflaged the real doors and created imitation, decorative replacements in the “correct” position instead. The other oddity is at the bottom of the garden, where the old coach house has trompe l’oeil windows; again, symmetry dictated that the building must have windows, but no self-respecting plutocrat wanted to be watched by his servants – hence the illusion. The Grachtengordel | Grachtengordel south | Thorbeckeplein, Rembrandtplein and Reguliersbreestraat Short and stumpy Thorbeckeplein hosts an assortment of unexciting bars and restaurants, flanking a statue of Rudolf Thorbecke (1798–1872), a far-sighted liberal politician and three-times Dutch premier whose reforms served to democratize the country in the aftermath of the European-wide turmoil of 1848.

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce
Published 23 Aug 2006

“Those who could not afford to pay found themselves at the bottom of the list in the allocation of access to ‘public goods.’ ”10 An internal Congress Party report compiled in 1963 in the aftermath of a series of by-election defeats could equally have been written in 2006. It said: “The pivot around which Congress activity revolves is the personality through whom preferment can be obtained and not the aims and purposes of the party.”11 In rhetoric, Congress was democratic and radical. In practice, it was plutocratic and conservative. The electoral symbol of the Congress Party is the hand.* “The hand of Congress is always with the poor,” says the slogan. But as the party’s tenure in office wore on, the poor began to realize that the hand of the Congress Party was as often to be found in the till, taking what supposedly belonged to them.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

Nearly complete disenfranchisement of the general populace has been achieved via social, political, economic and environmental means. We gather here in defense of our treasured rights. We know that these rights are natural and god given, and we will not allow them to be subject to the will and whim of a shadow government or kleptocratic cadre. We will defend them to our death rather than live under the yoke of plutocratic despotism. Yet, we still believe that reparation can be achieved through means political and civil. Though the string of trespasses which we protest is long, we wish to voice our grievances with the ruling regime in no uncertain terms. In the name of the American people, we beseech those who supposedly serve our interests to oppose the passage of HR.326 and S.968.

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class
by Kees Van der Pijl
Published 2 Jun 2014

Unlike most reformist labour leaders, Gramsci certainly was not blinded by this. Rejecting any democratic pretensions of the Fascist or corporatist state, he wrote that ‘the result of these phenomena is that in theory the State appears to have its socio-political base among the ordinary folk and the intellectuals, while in reality its structure remains plutocratic and it is impossible for it to break its links with big finance capital.’41 Therefore, we shall speak of a state-monopoly tendency to denote the class form of the hegemony of productive capital in its antinomy with money capital, in order to avoid the suggestion that capitalism actually has overcome its liberal basis: a full state monopoly would be equivalent to a planned economy of the Russian type.

The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System
by James Rickards
Published 7 Apr 2014

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report on the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States. New York: Public Affairs, 2011. Fleming, Ian. Goldfinger. New York: Avenel Books, 1988. Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. New York: Penguin Press, 2012. Friedman, Milton. Studies in the Quantity Theory of Money. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. Friedman, Milton, and Anna Jacobson Schwartz. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960.

The Difference Engine
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Published 31 Aug 1990

"Kill us then, and stop your damned blather!" Fraser shouted suddenly, stung beyond endurance. "Special Branch will see you kicking at a rope's end if it takes a hundred years." "The voice of authority!" Swing taunted. "The almighty British Government! You're fine at mowing down poor wretches in the street, but let us see your bloated plutocrats take this warehouse, when we hold merchandise worth millions hostage here." "You must be completely mad," Mallory said. "Why do you suppose I chose this place as my headquarters? You are governed by shopkeepers, who value their precious goods more than any number of human lives! They will never fire on their own warehouses, their own shipping.

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

“It was with the help of...powerful politicians and crafty financiers who operated in the grand arenas of national and international government—as well as in the backrooms of Pittsburgh’s businesses and city hall—that Carnegie was able to construct his immense industrial fiefdom,” Krause writes: the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, US Steel. Meanwhile, the new imperial navy was “defending” the US off the coasts of Brazil and Chile and across the Pacific.17 The press gave overwhelming support to the Company, as usual. The British press presented a different picture. The London Times ridiculed “this Scotch-Yankee plutocrat meandering through Scotland in a four-in-hand opening public libraries, while the wretched workmen who supply him with ways and means for his self-glorification are starving in Pittsburgh.” The far-right British press ridiculed Carnegie’s preachings on “the rights and duties of wealth,” describing his self-congratulatory book Triumphant Democracy as “a wholesome piece of satire” in the light of his brutal methods of strike-breaking, which should be neither “permitted nor required in a civilized community,” the London Times added.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

The absent towers before them, interred in an ‘afterlife’ in the green ground below their feet, emerge as one ultimate symbol, perhaps, of the ways in which all vertical structures erected against the force of gravity must eventually be remade into manufactured ground.69 12. Basement/Cellar: Urban Undergrounds Wander the streets of central London and it can seem that everyone aspires to live like hobbits. – Charlie Ellingworth, ‘In a Hole? It’s Time to Stop Digging’ Like the clichéd arch-villains of a James Bond movie, the super-rich moguls, oligarchs, plutocrats and sheikhs who occasionally inhabit London’s Kensington and Chelsea now crave their own solipsistic subterranean lairs. Beneath the pristine stucco of the lines of Regency terraces burrows an unknowable labyrinth of deeply excavated super-luxury cocoons. In the years between 2008 and 2012, permission was granted for over 800 such subterranean excavations in Kensington and Chelsea – the epicentre of the elite burrowing phenomenon that is connected to the London’s remarkable ‘plutocratisation’.

Lustrum
by Robert Harris
Published 6 Sep 2010

In an agony I heard Clodius's counsel announce that they did not wish to challenge these witnesses, as their testimony was not relevant to the case, and the maids were ordered to leave the platform. I watched Agathe turn with the others and descend out of sight. Lucullus resumed giving evidence and I felt a great hatred well up in me at the sight of this decaying plutocrat who unthinkingly possessed a treasure for which, at that moment, I would have given my life. I was so preoccupied that I briefly lost track of what he was saying, and it was only when I realised that the crowd had started to gasp and laugh with delight that I took notice of his evidence. He was describing how he had concealed himself in his wife's bedchamber and observed her and her brother in the act of fornication: 'dog on bitch', as he put it.

The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World
by Randall E. Stross
Published 13 Mar 2007

He gave generously to many charities and used his clout to press Chicago’s wealthiest to join him, even if they did not share his color-blind enthusiasm for some causes, including the Chinese YMCA and the education of African doctors. He paid to send a young African American singer on a study tour of Africa and an African American Pullman conductor on a European trip. Tweaking his fellow plutocrats, he built a new opera house in Chicago that by design lacked boxes: All patrons would be seated shoulder to shoulder on the same plane. Even as Insull became famous—officially so when his portrait was placed on the cover of Time magazine in 1926—he continued to make himself available to whoever wished to call him at home, and he insisted that his phone number remain publicly available.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

For three days, a series of speakers—including South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and the actor-director Clint Eastwood accompanied by an empty chair—tried to establish that Obama’s presidency had failed to live up to its promises and that the perception of Romney as a plutocratic businessman was flawed. The wrestler Hulk Hogan, one of Tampa’s most famous celebrities, and a recent Romney convert, pitched in on Fox News, talking up his business ventures and his excitement about the election. “America’s getting a chance to reinvent itself, kind of like I have,” he said. “It’s just a fresh start.”

AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future
by Kai-Fu Lee and Qiufan Chen
Published 13 Sep 2021

Many of the free market’s self-correcting mechanisms espoused by Adam Smith (for example, the notion that high unemployment will drive down wages and in turn reduce prices to a point that eventually increases consumption and gets the economy back on track) will break down in an AI economy. Left unchecked, AI in the twenty-first century may bring about a new caste system, with a plutocratic AI elite at the top, followed by a relatively small subset of workers with complex jobs that involve wide-ranging skill sets and large amounts of strategy and planning, creatives (many of them low paid), and the largest contingent: the powerless struggling masses. Even more problematic than the loss of jobs will be the loss of meaning.

Money Free and Unfree
by George A. Selgin
Published 14 Jun 2017

Parker Willis, writing at the end of 1903, [W]hen the question of bond security has come up in Congress, the influence of small banks has been thrown forcibly against any change, and the general apathy of members, coupled perhaps with a feeling that the matter was a good one for use as the basis in political huckstering, has tended to keep things in status quo. (Willis 1903: 137–38) Small bankers’ tendency to assume that “complicated reforms . . . always originated with the ‘sinners’ and ‘plutocratic combinations’ in Wall Street,” was only part of the problem (Wiebe 1962: 62). “Strangely enough,” Louis Ehrich (a prominent Colorado businessmen and asset currency proponent) remarked at a 1903 dinner at New York’s Reform Club, “the primal hindrance to a reform of the currency has been the indifference, and even opposition, of this very banking class, this so-called Money Power” (Ehrich 1903: 13).

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

A Threat Emerges From their inception, Internet companies banked heavily on the utopian promise of a networked world. Even as they pursued contracts with the military and their founders joined the ranks of the richest people on the planet, they wanted the world to see them not just as the same old plutocrats out to maximize shareholder value and their own power but also as progressive agents leading the way into a bright techno-utopia. For a long time, they succeeded. Despite the slow dribble of news stories about Silicon Valley inking deals with the CIA and NSA, the industry was somehow able to convince the world that it was different, that it somehow stood in opposition to traditional power.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

When Branson said, in 2009, ‘if we could come up with a geoengineering answer … then Copenhagen wouldn’t be necessary. We could carry on flying our planes and driving our cars’ you could all but hear green hackles rise at such get-out-of-jail-free sentiments from an owner of airlines. But if it is all a plutocrats’ plot, it is a very poorly contrived one. The Calgary meeting had been arranged by Keith to discuss the cost of the schemes in question. A report by a panel of the American Physical Society, chaired by Socolow, who has a long background in energy and climate studies, had derived costs for capturing carbon dioxide from the air of around $600 a tonne, possibly much more.

Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 14 Oct 2019

In his 1895 book The American Plutocracy, Milford Wriarson Howard wrote of America divided into two classes, the plutocracy and the “toilers of the nation”: “The greatest struggle of all the ages is the one now going on between these two classes.”19 He saw the moral value attached to the gold standard as a canard promulgated by a conspiracy of established leaders to justify simple robbery of working people: “This is modern brigandage, upheld by the law and made respectable by society and the plutocratic churches.”20 That side of the story was contagious in certain quarters, producing a constellation of stories that fed on that contagion, stories of arrogant and grasping business managers who tricked and manipulated innocent people. But it wasn’t the only story. On the other side was a story about the stupid masses swept into a dangerous “populist” movement, a movement associated at the time with the Democratic Party but running contrary to that party’s traditional values.

The Hour of Fate
by Susan Berfield

“The decision speaks”: “It Speaks for Itself,” Star Tribune, March 15, 1904, 1. 51. “The decision marks”: “President Will War on Combines,” Minneapolis Journal, March 15, 1904, 1–2. 52. “protective supporting orders”: “Finance and Trade,” Evening Star, March 14, 1904, 2. 53. “hireling of the plutocrat”: Brooklyn Eagle, April 16, 1904, in Philander C. Knox Papers, Library of Congress. 54. “does not mean”: “Government Will Not Run Amuck, says Knox,” New York Times, March 15, 1904, 2. 55. “Would not it be”: Roosevelt to Knox, March 26, 1904, Theodore Roosevelt Papers, Library of Congress. 56. a Gridiron dinner: Arthur Wallace Dunn, Gridiron Nights: Humorous and Satirical Views of Politics and Statesmen as Presented by the Famous Dining Club, 149. 57.

The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand
Published 1 Jan 1943

He had picked these twelve. The prosecutor had agreed, telling himself that this was what happened when an amateur undertook to handle his own defense; a lawyer would have chosen the gentlest types, those most likely to respond to an appeal for mercy; Roark had chosen the hardest faces. “... Had it been some plutocrat’s mansion, but a housing project, gentlemen of the jury, a housing project!” The judge sat erect on the tall bench. He had gray hair and the stern face of an army officer. “... a man trained to serve society, a builder who became a destroyer ...” The voice went on, practiced and confident. The faces filling the room listened with the response they granted to a good weekday dinner: satisfying and to be forgotten within an hour.

New York
by Edward Rutherfurd
Published 10 Nov 2009

The great residential mansions were still only five stories high; indeed, the largest commercial structures, using cast-iron beams, were seldom more than ten. Moreover, even the most lavish of the newer palaces, whose opulent decorations might have seemed overdone, vulgar, in fact, to the Federal generation, even these plutocratic treasure houses still relied upon the basic motifs of the classical world, as did their cast-iron counterparts. There was tradition, and craftsmanship, and humanity in them, every one. The city might be vast, but it still retained its grace. And perhaps because she was getting older herself, this was important to her.

…

Gorham wondered. At least a quarter-million dollars. He’d been to parties that cost more. Over the top, in his opinion. Nothing like the old guard, that was for sure. Or was it? As he gazed at the splendid scene, it suddenly struck Gorham that he was completely wrong. When the grand old New York plutocrats of the gilded age gave their magnificent parties, like the fellow who had about twenty gentlemen all dine on horseback, were they actually doing anything different? He knew a little history. What about the great parties of Edwardian England, or Versailles, or Elizabethan England, or medieval France, or the Roman Empire?

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

“Encryption is to the Information Revolution what the Atlantic Ocean was to the American Revolution,” commented one enthusiast. “It will render tax authorities as impotent in projecting their power as the ocean crossing did to King George.” Are some advocates of strong privacy selling out? Or are they really unaware that dangerous evil can fester and grow outside government? If they are unworried about drug kings and plutocrat tax cheats, what will they say when kidnappers begin using unbreakable codes to make untraceable demands, taking ransom payments in perfect, encrypted security? (See “The Problem of Extortion,” after chapter 7.) True, the greatest villains of the twentieth century, such as Hitler and Stalin, used state agencies as their chief tools for committing terror across the globe.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

In her eyes, the tensions it reveals are vitally important to the future of the region and the world, which is one reason that this fledgling meeting and its emerging competitors elsewhere in Asia are drawing increasing interest. In the same way that Boao illustrates tensions between economic and political forces within China, Latin America’s Fathers and Sons meeting is emblematic of the superclass dynamic in that region. The fact that the Latin American version of such an event is attended by the kind of plutocratic families that have dominated Latin societies for two centuries reveals why Latin America is falling behind. Few countries in the region have shown much appetite for the kind of reforms that will produce upheaval, growth, the birth of a middle class, and competitors to the elites who comfortably rule the roost.

Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales From the World of Wall Street
by John Brooks
Published 6 Jul 2014

By a recent count some eighty thousand persons, most of them lawyers, accountants, and former I.R.S. employees, held cards, granted by the Treasury Department, that officially entitle them to practice the trade of tax adviser and to appear as such before the I.R.S.; in addition, there is an uncounted host of unlicensed, and often unqualified, persons who prepare tax returns for a fee—a service that anyone may legally perform. As for lawyers, the undisputed plutocrats, if not the undisputed aristocrats, of the tax-advice industry, there is scarcely a lawyer in the country who is not concerned with taxes at one time or another during a year’s practice, and every year there are more lawyers who are concerned with nothing else. The American Bar Association’s taxation section, composed mostly of nothing-but-tax lawyers, has some nine thousand members; in the typical large New York law firm one out of five lawyers devotes all of his time to tax matters; and the New York University Law School’s tax department, an enormous brood hen for the hatching of tax lawyers, is larger than the whole of an average law school.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

Socialism supplied the critique, if not the technique, for much Progressive reform; and though not always recognized, its effect was felt in all social sciences. 25 Such an intellectual atmosphere suffocated the defenders of the old order. Increasingly exposed and ridiculed as reactionary sycophants of capitalist exploiters and plutocrats, the proponents of the free market and limited government were almost everywhere in retreat. END AND BEGINNING: THE RAILROAD LABOR TROUBLES, 1916-1917 The government's response to the railroad labor troubles of 1916-191 7 may be seen both as the culmination of Progressivism and as a dress rehearsal for the garrison economy that would be created after the declaration of war.

War Without Mercy: PACIFIC WAR
by John Dower
Published 11 Apr 1986

All the “Western” values which Japanese ideologues and militarists had been condemning since the 1930s, after all, were attacked because they were said to sap the nation’s strength and collective will. More concretely, it was assumed that Great Britain would fall to the Germans, and the U.S. war effort would be undercut by any number of debilitating forces endemic to contemporary America: isolationist sentiment, labor agitation, racial strife, political factionalism, capitalistic or “plutocratic” profiteering, and so on. Such simplistic impressions of the “national character” of the projected enemy had disastrous consequences at the most practical levels. To give but one striking example, Japanese naval strategists assumed that Americans were too soft to endure the mental and physical strains of extended submarine duty, and thus never developed an effective antisubmarine capability–a failure of monumental significance given the decisive role submarines later played in the war of attrition against Japan.45 For a half year or more after Pearl Harbor, this impression of a soft enemy appeared to be true.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible
by Simon Winchester
Published 14 Oct 2013

In one golden instant, lower Manhattan came ablaze with a soft, uninterrupted light, all coming from vacuum bulbs that neither polluted nor glared nor gave headaches to those who read, dined, walked, or dozed beneath them. The promises of illumination made across the Hudson River in Menlo Park, New Jersey, had now been made good in New York City, and the success of the trial took hold with a speed that astonished even the city itself. Scores of plutocrats became early adopters; mansions lit up from Central Park to Chambers Street. The Stock Exchange installed electroliers, as they were known, massive chandeliers with sixty-six bulbs each, to throw light across the trading floor. Industry of all kinds suddenly sprouted in the city, with machines that sewed clothing, spun sugar, carved pianos, and printed books and newspapers, all of them suddenly illuminated in a way that no longer carried, as previously, the terrible risk of fire.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Frank, Malcolm, Paul Roehrig, and Ben Pring. Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations Are Changing the Rules of Business. Wiley, 2014. Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. Bloomsbury, 2015. Freedman, Lawrence. Strategy: A History. Oxford University Press, 2013. Freeland, Chrystia. Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-rich and the Fall of Everyone Else. Penguin Books, 2013. French, Howard W. China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. Knopf, 2014. Friedman, Thomas L. The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

Bright and Cobden spoke at the Free Trade Hall many times, and they flattered Manchester, but their main audience was in Parliament. When Cobden became MP for Stockport in 1841 and Bright MP for Durham in 1843 they were able to speak directly to Prime Minister Robert Peel, a man from just down the road in Bury. In his speech ‘You Are the Gentry of England’ in March 1845 Cobden spoke for the consumer exploited by the plutocratic merchants. Cobden and Bright complemented one another ideally. Cobden provided the calm reasoning of the philosopher and Bright brought the passion and emotion of the great speaker. He was universally recognised as the chief orator of the free trade movement. Bright sat in the House of Commons between 1843 and 1889 as the MP for Durham, then Manchester and then Birmingham, where he gave some of the greatest parliamentary speeches ever heard.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

While Kan and others hunted down materials—polycarbonate panels, LED lighting, welding tools—Huffman troubleshot the vehicle’s engine. The physical engineering challenge was a welcome respite from his typical days managing Hipmunk programmers. By 2014, Burning Man had become a weeklong creative outlet for outsider artisans everywhere, but for Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats it had become an almost mandatory annual social event, an opportunity to rub sunburned, sand-specked elbows with millionaire and billionaire attendees such as Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. Kan’s friends, Huffman included, spent the end of August camping in Black Rock City and roaming it in their massive iceberg on wheels, which had been dubbed “Titanic’s End.”

Politics on the Edge: The Instant #1 Sunday Times Bestseller From the Host of Hit Podcast the Rest Is Politics
by Rory Stewart
Published 13 Sep 2023

I spent the next few weeks exploring Parliament and learning about my new colleagues. I met them most often either in the glass atrium of Portcullis House, which looked like a Norwegian airport terminal, or in the tea room, by the chamber, which like much of Parliament looked like the billiard room of a Victorian plutocrat. Initially, I noticed four different groups of MPs among our 2010 intake. The most unexpected group were the authors, who settled on the desks in the House of Commons library, beneath Victorian histories of our parishes or 1970s academic essays on the potential for Scottish devolution. They were mostly historians: Ben Gummer, Chris Skidmore, Damian Collins, Kwasi Kwarteng, Jesse Norman: the writers who specialised in grim medieval narratives were easier to talk to than those who grappled with empire and the eighteenth-century Parliament.

Animal Spirits: The American Pursuit of Vitality From Camp Meeting to Wall Street
by Jackson Lears

We can but praise the high courage of the road breakers, admitting as we infallibly must in Gertrude Stein’s own words, and with true Bergsonian faith—‘Something is certainly coming out of them.’” The “Bergsonian faith” reflected the characteristic progressive belief that breakage and difficulty are mere products of the transition to Something Better. Technophiles and plutocrats would one day appropriate this strategy for their own purposes, and the economist Joseph Schumpeter would summarize it in his own influential phrase, “creative destruction.” Meanwhile Luhan summed up the Armory Show with characteristic self-dramatization, striking a revolutionary pose that was sharply at odds with her motto “Let it happen”: I felt as though the exhibition were mine.

Crash of the Titans: Greed, Hubris, the Fall of Merrill Lynch, and the Near-Collapse of Bank of America
by Greg Farrell
Published 2 Nov 2010

The backbone of Merrill Lynch had always been its nationwide network of financial advisors—the 16,000 men and women spread across the U.S. who managed not only the investments of the wealthiest people in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other large cities, but the slender portfolios of the hardworking citizens in second-tier towns like Cincinnati, Wichita, Lansing, Spokane. Most Wall Street banks and brokerage firms catered to huge institutional investors—pension funds with billions of dollars in assets—and plutocrats sitting atop massive fortunes. It was the genius of Charlie Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, to look beyond the super-wealthy and build an investment advisory business at the grassroots level, by courting “the modest sums of the thrifty,” as he wrote early in his career. Starting in the 1940s, when most Americans still had searing memories of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, Merrill pursued his vision.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

They acted according to an inchoate mixture of anti-imperialist sentiment and woolly conspiracy theories. The hostages who attempted to question their captors about their motivations usually found it a frustrating experience. The young revolutionaries believed not only that the United States was controlled by Jewish plutocrats who were conducting warfare on Muslims around the world, but also that the Americans were responsible for natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes, all of them conjured up by diabolical scientists. One of the hostages was told by a captor that Iran and America had been enemies for four hundred years.

Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
Published 1 Jan 2007

‘The Universal Abundance of Products’, read Galich. He took out a pair of reading glasses he preferred not to put on in public, and leafed forward through the papers. ‘Food’, he read, ‘should be tasty, varied and healthy, and have nothing in common with the primitive gluttony of curs or the perverted gourmandism of plutocrats … Each member of society’, he read, ‘will obtain a sufficient amount of comfortable, practical and handsome clothing, undergarments, footwear, etc., but this in no way presupposes superfluousness or extravagance.’ He began to laugh quietly, and went on laughing as the author explained how, in 1980, everyone’s need for ‘cultural goods’ would be fully satisfied, but it would be sufficient to be able to borrow a musical instrument ‘from the public store room’.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

There’s the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and the Billionaire Census, while others track a specific range of the superwealthy, like the Hurun Report out of China and the Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse Research. Several of these sources including Forbes and Bloomberg now update their rankings in real time, using live market data. There are books spinning off the data, too, including Plutocrats by Chrystia Freeland and Billionaires by Darrell M. West. The mushrooming of the billionaire-watchers reflects our conflicted times since they appeal both to voyeurs of the upper crust and to critics of wealth inequality. Some of this information caters to luxury goods marketers or to those keeping score for their own tribe: The University of Pennsylvania, it turns out, produces more billionaires than Yale, Harvard, Princeton, or any other school, and so on.

A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America
by Bruce Cannon Gibney
Published 7 Mar 2017

.* The true power of the Boomers has been partly disguised by the nominal political divisions within the Boomers and also by the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, which provided colorful headlines but rarely distracted the Boomers from pursuing the many economic policies on which they agreed, and, given their strength, achieved. Appreciating the vast scope and influence of Boomer power is essential to understanding that the events of the past few decades have not been an accident, the product of grand consensus across many groups, or the anti-democratic perversions of a plutocratic cabal, but rather the generally democratic expression of a uniquely influential generation and its self-serving priorities. Colorful as Freemasonry, the Trilateral Commission, and Bilderberg may be, we can doff the tinfoil hats in favor of straightforward explanations: the awesome size of Boomer voting power and the generation’s demonstrable interest in using that power to promote its own agenda at everyone else’s expense.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
by John Darwin
Published 12 Feb 2013

The attack upon nabobs in the late eighteenth century grew out of the fear that those returning from India with huge ill-gotten gains and an oriental morality (by definition unchristian) would buy their way into the landed aristocracy and become the new ruling class. So-called ‘West Indians’ – absentee planters and merchants grown fat on the profits of sugar and slavery – evoked similar antipathy. J. A. Hobson’s polemic (and those of other radical writers) exploited contemporary fears that a class of cosmopolitan plutocrats was now pulling the strings. The extraordinary wealth of Johannesburg’s gold mines (and the profits to be made by speculation in gold shares) was the visible proof. It was easy to claim that South African ‘Randlords’ (Rhodes chief among them) and their friends in the City were behind the attack on the Boers, and the costly, humiliating and over-long war it provoked.

The World's Banker: A Story of Failed States, Financial Crises, and the Wealth and Poverty of Nations
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 24 Apr 2006

He had a swashbuckling energy that took the World Bank by storm, lifting it out of a dark time when it was surrounded by critics of both left and right who called for its abolition. But the Bank is a proud institution, and its formidable technocrats did not always take kindly to Wolfensohn’s high-voltage style. And so there followed a titanic clash: in one corner, a plutocratic financier who always got his way; in the other, a phalanx of superqualified experts with years of development experience. It was unstoppable force versus immovable object, and both sides finished up in unexpected places. There could scarcely be a better time to tell this story, for however excellent the Bank’s professionals, and however vital their mission, the World Bank shares the fragility common to most multilateral institutions.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East
by Gershom Gorenberg
Published 19 Jan 2021

Next to the monument a wide avenue had been ripped through the city to the ancient Colosseum, so that Mussolini could see it from his balcony. The palace itself had once been the embassy of the proud republic of Venice, which for centuries had dominated the Mediterranean. “We go into the field against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West, who have repeatedly blocked the march, and even threatened the existence of the Italian people,” he proclaimed. The war, he said, “is the struggle of a poor people against those who wish to starve us with their retention of all the riches and gold of the earth.

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
by Adam Winkler
Published 27 Feb 2018

Jackson Jr., “Shining Light on Corporate Political Spending,” 101 Georgetown Law Journal 923 (2013); Ilya Shapiro and Caitlyn W. McCarthy, “So What if Corporations Aren’t People?,” 44 John Marshall Law Review 701 (2011); Sonja R. West, “The Media Exemption Puzzle of Campaign Finance Laws,” 164 University of Pennsylvania Law Review Online 253 (2016); Richard L. Hasen, Plutocrats United: Campaign Money, The Supreme Court, and the Distortion of American Elections (2016); Michael W. McConnell, “Reconsidering Citizens United as a Press Clause Case,” 123 Yale Law Journal 412 (2013); Kent Greenfield, “In Defense of Corporate Persons,” 30 Constitutional Commentary 309 (2015); Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, Corporate Citizen?

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

A young, prolific artist might turn out scores of artworks each year, with decades of productivity ahead of him. He might also produce a glut or find himself a flash in the pan, but a wealthy collector might not really care. Buying art of the moment made him a collector of the moment, hobnobbing with other like-minded plutocrats. If his favorite artist plummeted, there were always new artists to try. Meanwhile, new museums were being built: scores each year in the United States alone, along with private museums, the ultimate collector’s play. Those empty walls needed art—which almost always meant contemporary art. And so for dealers, it was the best of times and the most nerve-racking, as the market took off, taking them with it on its wild ride.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again
by Robert D. Putnam
Published 12 Oct 2020

See David Callahan, The Givers: Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017); Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018); Joanne Barkan, “Plutocrats at Work: How Big Philanthropy Undermines Democracy,” Social Research 80, no. 2 (2013): 635–52; and Nick Tabor, “Why Philanthropy Is Bad for Democracy,” New York magazine, August 26, 2018. 93 Ralph Chaplin, Wobbly: The Rough-and-Tumble Story of an American Radical (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). 94 James T.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
by Rick Perlstein
Published 1 Jan 2008

From the time he was a boy in the Southern California citrus groves, staying up half the night to man the creepy little potbellied orchard heaters that kept the frost from the trees but not the black smudge from the boy tending them, to stain his clothes for school the next day; from the time his father built a combination grocery and gas station and made it his second son’s duty to begin each day in the dark, at 4 a.m., driving to the Los Angeles market to select the day’s produce; from the time he was denied a chance to go to Harvard because he could only afford to live at home; from the time he was blacklisted from his little local college’s single social club because he was too unpolished; from the time he was reduced to sharing a one-room shack without heat or indoor plumbing while working his way through Duke Law School; from the time, finishing third in his class, he trudged frantically from white-shoe Wall Street law firm to white-shoe Wall Street law firm and was shown the door at each one (he ended up practicing law back home, where, forced to handle divorce cases, he would stare at his shoes, crimson-red in embarrassment, as women related to him the problems they suffered at the marital bed). To the time, back from the war, he begged Southern California’s penny-ante plutocrats, navy cap in hand, for their sufferance of his first congressional bid; to the time he trundled across California in his wood-paneled station wagon, bringing his Senate campaign into every godforsaken little burg in that state with so many scores of godforsaken little burgs. The town he was born in, Yorba Linda, was just that sort of godforsaken burg.

…

Reagan killed the rumor with a quip—“Even if they tied and gagged me, I would find a way to signal no by wiggling my ears”—and Dent died a little inside: he felt the slippage from Nixon minute by minute. But Nixon was about to fulfill a promise to Thurmond that would reverse his slippage. Nixon had agreed to face every Southern delegate, answer every question they asked—groveling like the callow navy vet in 1946 who wanted to run for Congress, begging South Californian petty plutocrats, navy hat in hand; begging Southern Republicans, again, for what he thought he had already won: their sufferance for him as their nominee. First he spoke to delegates from six states; then he spoke to a meeting of the other six. Only those present know what he said at the first one. At the second, the Miami Herald slipped in a tape recorder and published the transcript in that evening’s early edition of the next day’s paper.

The Making of Modern Britain
by Andrew Marr
Published 16 May 2007

Going into alliance with the Tory leader Lord Salisbury (whom he had once denounced as a useless excrescence), he became a leading statesman in the days of the rush for African colonies, the confrontations with China and the growing rivalry with Germany. Joe’s populism left behind the beliefs of many traditional Liberals while distancing him from the plutocrats and aristocrats of old Tory England. He was routinely called a turncoat, which he was, and seemed to enjoy the blood-sport side of politics just a little too much, revelling in one famous Irish Commons debate when the arguments degenerated into fist fights, leaving torn clothing and broken teeth on the floor.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)
by Jan Morris
Published 22 Dec 2010

Other agreeable examples are ‘Sam Collinson’, which is what the soldiers called the Chinese general San-ko-linsin in the China war of 1860—a predecessor of the well-known Soviet general Tim O’Shenko—and ‘Mr Radish and Mr Gooseberry’, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s eponyms for the French explorers Radisson and Groseilliers. When a Bombay plutocrat named Radah Moonee erected a public drinking fountain in Regent’s Park, London, the grateful British public neatly christened him Mr Ready Money. 2 But the Chinese in particular sometimes answered in kind. ‘The dispatch written on this occasion,’ declared the Chinese authorities in answer to a British ultimatum in 1860, ‘is in most of its language too insubordinate and extravagent for the Council to discuss its propositions more than superficially.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989
by Frederick Taylor
Published 26 May 2008

And the new American President, at forty-three, still lacked experience at the highest level—he was, as Khrushchev pointed out, ‘younger than my own son’.7 But would this enable the shrewd, aggressive Soviet leader to bully Kennedy into making significant concessions? Or might it mean, on the contrary, that the younger leader, with his plutocratic background, would prove an obedient tool of the Wall Street capitalists, who were sworn to destroy the USSR at any price? Khrushchev wobbled between these two possible scenarios, even confiding to US Ambassador Thompson before the elections that he wished Nixon would win ‘because I’d know how to cope with him.

Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West--One Meal at a Time
by Stephen Fried
Published 23 Mar 2010

“Wet clothes”: Quote from “Recalls Incident on Fred Harvey Ranch,” Emporia Gazette, Feb. 1, 1946; other information on farm is from Emporia Gazette, April 5, 1946. “fewer white shirts and brains”: “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Emporia Gazette, April 15, 1896. “The more one sees”: “In the Land of the Plutocrat,” Emporia Gazette, July 6, 1897. “no smirking, tip-seeking negro”: El Paso Herald, reprinted later in SFMag, Sept. 1910, p. 76. “We’ll guarantee you”: Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, p. 100. When a new girl cleared: “‘Harvey Girls’ Long a Part of Kansas City Scene,” KCStar, Feb. 17, 1946, p. 1-C.

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis
by Clifton Hood
Published 1 Nov 2016

Their emphasis on status and exclusivity also meant excluding nouveaux riches who had made fortunes in the booming Gilded Age economy. Having come out of nowhere, without family antecedents, close relationships with others in the upper class, or social graces, the income men had only their wealth. An etiquette manual said scornfully of “our newer millionaires and plutocrats” that “it is undeniable that many of these captains of industry—however strong and virile their natures—become utterly helpless and panic-stricken at the mere sight of a gold finger bowl, an alabaster bath, a pronged oyster fork, or the business end of an asparagus.”1 But the Union Club had to abruptly change its policy in 1891, when J.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
by Nancy Isenberg
Published 20 Jun 2016

He took up Odum’s cautionary advice, insisting that all planning for southern revival had to start at the bottom if it was to effect anything approaching real change. “Maybe still one Reb can beat ten Yankees,” wrote Daniels. But “it is irrelevant.” Rebel pride had blinded all classes. “The tyrants and the plutocrats and the poor all need teaching. One of them no more than the others.” Odum, Agee, and Daniels all wanted to see the South rescued from its ideological trap. They were not cynical; they were hopeful. They recognized that simple solutions—a smattering of prettified homesteads—were no cure. Something grander, on the scale of the TVA, represented the only chance to shake up the existing consensus and rearrange class structure.65 In the 1930s, the forgotten man and woman became a powerful symbol of economic struggle all across America.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

Yet at the very moment when economists were in broad agreement that government or corporate planning of the markets was the only way to solve the crisis of capitalism, another, more acceptable solution began to emerge. It depended critically upon the new, hybrid way of owning the earth. The solution was half-apparent in the phrase “conspicuous consumption” used by Thorstein Veblen in his Theory of the Leisure Class published in 1899. Veblen coined the term as a jibe against the bloated plutocrats who flaunted their wealth by their “unremitting demonstration of the ability to pay.” But even at that date, the availability of credit was enabling white-collared, half-propertied wage slaves to do much the same, albeit on a reduced scale. As early as the 1880s, Boston furniture stores had allowed customers to buy expensive items, from beds to dining room tables, by paying in instalments.

1491
by Charles C. Mann
Published 8 Aug 2005

These researchers had thus become unwitting “accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.” Centuries after the conquistadors, she lamented, “the myth of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists.” Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although—as some of her sparring partners observed—it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws.” But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 5 Oct 2020

In this same period, the Gini index figures for the world at large had flattened considerably. Every continent was showing improvement. The pay justice movements, the wage ratio movements, and the central banks’ recommended tax plans, plus political movements everywhere supporting job guarantees and progressive taxation, sometimes under the rubric of “an end to the kleptocracy of the plutocrats,” as one poster put it, had had powerful effects everywhere. Setting a generous definition of a universal necessary income, guaranteeing jobs to all, and capping personal annual income at ten times that minimum amount, as they had done in many countries, had immediately crushed Gini figures down.

The Big Score
by Michael S. Malone
Published 20 Jul 2021

That HP had never built a weapon was irrelevant; after all, Packard also sat on the board of General Dynamics, which most certainly had. For that matter, Packard also was on the boards of Crocker Bank, National Airlines, U.S. Steel, and Equitable Life, and on the international advisory committee of Chase Manhattan Bank. An all-American tycoon if ever there was one. The idea of putting this pinstripe plutocrat second in command of the Armed Forces brought visions to Congress of Carnegie, Fisk, and Gould. In the Washington Post, Adam Yarnowinski wrote: “Men who have made a career in the defense industry are likely to be less sensitive to controlling the expansionist tendencies of the establishment.” At this point, no sensible person would have blamed Packard for withdrawing the nomination.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On the Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 9 Sep 2008

We were headed southeast in a region of rock temples and deep, elaborate caves, dating from the first and second centuries BC, near the station at Lonavale and Malavli – a little under a hundred miles from Mumbai but a world apart, with a narrow muddy river further on, trailing through the small villages and offering a chance for women to do laundry in its opaque water. Fifty to eighty women at a time were thrashing clothes against rocks while their husbands laboured in the wheat fields, and their kneeling children formed cow shit into Frisbee-sized disks and dried them for fuel. This was not the Indian miracle. Less than three hours from Mumbai and its plutocrats and boasters, this was the India of the hut, the cow-dung fire, the bean field, the buffalo, the ox cart and the bicycle – of debt and drought and death. Past Pune, in the early afternoon we came to Daund Junction, where a gathering of aged but highly ornamented women – ‘tribals’ – were waiting for a later train.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
by Liaquat Ahamed
Published 22 Jan 2009

In early 1926, the government, its finances now restored but its currency still inexorably and inexplicably falling, tried to persuade the Banque that now was the time to redeem its pledge by supporting the franc with foreign currencies borrowed against the security of the gold. The Banque refused. Its behavior during the whole crisis—its reluctance to help and its lack of cooperation with the government—would later give rise to the accusation that the plutocrats at the apex of the French banking system had been determined from the very start to bring the left-wing coalition to its knees. Le mur d’argent—the wall of money—it was called, joining les deux cents familles as the twin rallying cries of the left in France. In May 1926, the government, spurned by its own central bank, sought frantically to obtain credit abroad.

City: Urbanism and Its End
by Douglas W. Rae
Published 15 Jan 2003

The Ullman brothers—Isaac and Louis—were German Jews who worked for the corset-maker Strouse-Adler and ran the local Republican Party. Names like McCarthy, Sullivan, Callihan, Kelly, and McHugh suggested anything but an Italian heritage. Names like Kannegiesser, Moegling, Goetz, and Konold confirmed an impression of democracy across nationality lines. Only the old-line Yankees are missing. Neither was this a snobbish or plutocratic occasion. Frank Lorenzi was a bartender. Frank Strong was a carpenter. Ed Bean ran a garage. Charlie McFeeters was a carpenter and builder. Mark Ryder sold insurance. Tommy Sullivan and George White managed hotels. Mario Petrucelli was a clerk. And it was not in any conventional sense a socially exclusive evening: not a single family belonging to the all-WASP New Haven Lawn Club appears to have made the guest list— not the Sargents, not the Whitneys, not the Dana clan, not the English family, not the DeForests, not the Farnams, the Hotchkiss tribe, not the Watrouses or the Welches.10 Some of these families might have seen fit to join the Polis for their anniversary if asked; some were perhaps unwilling to rub shoulders with these relative newcomers.

Migrant City: A New History of London
by Panikos Panayi
Published 4 Feb 2020

Between 1934 and 1936 groupings emerged in Bow, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Limehouse and Hackney.26 Between 1935 and 1939 the organization may have had a London-wide membership reaching a peak of 11,250 (but probably less) which, if we accept this total, included as many as 7,200 in the East End.27 The members and supporters here came from a variety of working-class occupations, but especially the unskilled, as the semi-skilled and skilled would more likely have gravitated towards the Labour Party through union membership, but they also included some people from other social groups as well as Roman Catholics.28 Whatever the nature and level of support in the area, and despite attempting to secure local power, the BUF did not even gain one local council seat in the East End.29 Its major impact in this area, however, came from the antisemitic campaign it launched, which had a variety of manifestations including the spreading of propaganda about the consequences of Jewish immigration for living standards, as well as suggesting a racial unity with Jews higher up on the social scale.30 Reflecting the antisemitic discourse which had characterized London life since readmission, Jews ‘were accused of clannishness and filthy habits; of swindling the innocent gentiles and depriving them of their jobs; of being, simultaneously, capitalist plutocrats and communist agitators’. Full-time troublemakers lived throughout the East End.31 This spread of propaganda partly occurred through street meetings which could exceed 200 in a single month. More seriously, ‘Jew-baiting’ became a part of everyday life in the East End, including attacks upon individuals and their shops, as well as defacing Jewish property with fascist slogans.

The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant
Published 23 Jul 2012

A mercantile bourgeoisie arises, whose members seek social position through wealth and conspicuous consumption: “they will spend large sums of money on their wives” (548). These changes in the distribution of wealth produce political changes: as the wealth of the merchant over-reaches that of the land-owner, aristocracy gives way to a plutocratic oligarchy—wealthy traders and bankers rule the state. Then statesmanship, which is the coordination of social forces and the adjustment of policy to growth, is replaced by politics, which is the strategy of party and the lust for the spoils of office. Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.

Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Published 2 Jan 1996

Ryan's major Cabinet appointments had shaken things up, but then the officials had all started doing the right things. Adler was another insider who'd worked his way to the top; as a junior official he'd briefed in too many foreign-affairs correspondents over the years for them to turn on him-and he never lost a chance to extol Ryan's expertise on foreign policy. George Winston, outsider and plutocrat though he was, had initiated a “quiet” reexamination of his entire department, and Winston had on his Rolodex the number of every financial editor from Berlin to Tokyo, and was seeking out their views and counsel on his internal study. Most surprising of all was Tony Bretano in the Pentagon. A vociferous outsider for the last ten years, he'd promised the defense-reporting community that he'd clean out the temple or die in the attempt, that the Pentagon was wasteful now as they'd always proclaimed, but that he, with the President's approval, was going to do his damnedest to de-corrupt the acquisition process once and for all.

…

The American people probably deserve somebody better than me to stand up and do what's right but I'm all there is, and I can't-I can't break faith with the people who sent me to this town, no matter what it costs. Ryan is not the President of the United States. He knows that. Why else is he trying to change so many things so fast? Why is he trying to bully the senior people at State into lying? Why is he playing with abortion rights? Why is he playing with the tax code through this plutocrat Winston? He's trying to buy it. He's going to continue to bully Congress until the fat cats try to have him elected king or something. I mean, who represents the people right now?” “I just don't see him that way, Ed,” the Globe responded, after a few seconds. “His politics are pretty far to the right, but he comes across as sincere as hell.” “What's the first rule of politics?

The Evolutionary Void
by Peter F. Hamilton
Published 18 Aug 2010

For a long moment Inigo hesitated; then he slowly sank back into the tall-backed chair at the kitchen table. “Damnit,” he grunted. “So that was it, huh?” Ozzie said. “Bummer.” Inigo shot him a thoroughly disgusted look. “I don’t get it,” Aaron said. “They achieved something approaching the classical heaven on Earth.” “Fatal, man,” Ozzie said. “I’ve been there myself. Trust me: plutocrat with a decent brain and the finest rep available during the first-era Commonwealth. Wine, women, and song all the way; I had it so totally better than those guys. Well … except for the flying bit. I gotta admit that was way cool. I always wondered why Edeard couldn’t do that. Man, if I ever got into the Void, I’d be trying from dusk till dawn.

Real World Haskell
by Bryan O'Sullivan , John Goerzen , Donald Stewart and Donald Bruce Stewart
Published 2 Dec 2008

Given a customer’s name, we want to find the billing address of her mobile phone carrier: -- file: ch14/Carrier.hs import qualified Data.Map as M type PersonName = String type PhoneNumber = String type BillingAddress = String data MobileCarrier = Honest_Bobs_Phone_Network | Morrisas_Marvelous_Mobiles | Petes_Plutocratic_Phones deriving (Eq, Ord) findCarrierBillingAddress :: PersonName -> M.Map PersonName PhoneNumber -> M.Map PhoneNumber MobileCarrier -> M.Map MobileCarrier BillingAddress -> Maybe BillingAddress Our first version is the dreaded ladder of code marching off the right of the screen, with many boilerplate case expressions: -- file: ch14/Carrier.hs variation1 person phoneMap carrierMap addressMap = case M.lookup person phoneMap of Nothing -> Nothing Just number -> case M.lookup number carrierMap of Nothing -> Nothing Just carrier -> M.lookup carrier addressMap The Data.Map module’s lookup function has a monadic return type: ghci> :module +Data.Map ghci> :type Data.Map.lookup Data.Map.lookup :: (Ord k, Monad m) => k -> Map k a -> m a In other words, if the given key is present in the map, lookup injects it into the monad using return.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

People who call themselves “classical liberals” are likely to be called “conservatives” by adherents of the version of leftism known as political correctness. Nor can most contemporary liberals and conservatives articulate the cores of their belief systems. Liberals think that conservatives are just amoral plutocrats, and conservatives think that if you are not a liberal before you are twenty you have no heart but if you are a liberal after you are twenty you have no brain (attributed variously to Georges Clemenceau, Dean Inge, Benjamin Disraeli, and Maurice Maeterlinck). Strategic alliances—such as the religious fundamentalists and free-market technocrats on the right, or the identity politicians and civil libertarians on the left—may frustrate the search for any intellectual common denominator.

Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
by Max Blumenthal
Published 27 Nov 2012

With his “Academic Bill of Rights” campaign, which would have allowed conservative students to sue their professors, and the Muslim annual extravaganza he organized on campuses around the country, “Islamofascism Awareness Week,” the neoconservative, former Communist Horowitz had become the conservative movement’s campus point man, reaping millions in donations from right-wing American plutocrats like the Koch brothers in the process. He seemed like a natural role model for Im Tirtzu’s activists. One of the Im Tirtzu members we met by the bar was Tamir Kafri, a bespectacled, chipper Ben Gurion University student with a long ponytail and newly budding facial hair. I asked him about the inspiration Im Tirtzu took from the American conservative movement.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel
Published 14 Oct 2019

Yet this contrast, while noteworthy, must not be overrated. Roman city officials and Han provincial agents hailed from comparable socioeconomic backgrounds, and the formally bureaucratic features of Han administration barely masked rampant patronage and simony, which were similarly common in the Roman empire. Roman self-governing plutocrats and Han salaried state agents were equally adept at siphoning off resources claimed by the center, and landlords shielded their own assets and those of their clients, slowly but surely eroding the foundations of the imperial edifice. Whatever differences remained in terms of the relative weight of the military and civilian spheres, of center and periphery, and of bureaucracy and local self-rule, they were very much a matter of degree.

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

There were, of course, dissenting opinions, such as that ventured by literary critic John Jay Chapman, who used an invitation to speak at a 1924 Harvard Business Review dinner to ridicule the School to its face: Do you gentlemen seriously believe that you can accept Wall Street’s money and be clear of Wall Street’s influence? You are idealists, indeed! It used to be thought an abuse for the plutocrat to subsidize a chair in a college and put a bit in the mouth of learning. But since business is now discovered to be a profession, such practices are perfectly all right. My friends, the truth is that business is not a profession; and no amount of rhetoric and no expenditure in circulars can make it into a profession.

How the Mind Works
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 1997

When the mimics become too plentiful, the colors no longer conveyed information and no longer deterred the predators. The distasteful butterflies evolved new colors, which were then mimicked by the palatable ones, and so on. Wealth is not the only asset that people flaunt and covet. In a complicated society, people compete in many leagues, not all of them dominated by plutocrats. Bell added a fourth canon to Veblen’s list: conspicuous outrage. Most of us depend on the approval of others. We need the favor of bosses, teachers, parents, clients, customers, or prospective in-laws, and that requires a certain measure of respect and unobtrusiveness. Aggressive nonconformity is an advertisement that one is so confident in one’s station or abilities that one can jeopardize the good will of others without ending up ostracized and destitute.

A History of Zionism
by Walter Laqueur
Published 1 Jan 1972

The Jewish question could be solved only if the Jews were transferred to a country where they constituted the majority, where they would no longer be strangers but able to lead a normal life. Such a possibility did not exist in Spain‡ nor in Latin America nor even in the United States, but only in Palestine. It was pointless to wait for an initiative on the part of the Jewish plutocrats; the impetus could come only from the ranks of the people.* The question whether to emigrate and where to turn agitated Russian Jewry for many years. Smolenskin became a Zionist after the riots of 1881 and in his writings listed the advantages of Palestine over the countries of North and South America.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won
by Victor Davis Hanson
Published 16 Oct 2017

Mussolini soon rebelled against familial efforts at (a largely free) in-depth Christian education, although, again like the autocrats Hitler and Stalin, he seriously considered a pathway to the priesthood. Mussolini also similarly manifested his sense of social and cultural inferiority in harangues against the capitalists and elites, while erratically dabbling among various socialist movements and rubbing shoulders with the industrialists and plutocrats. His genius at domestic politics, again comparable to that of Hitler and Stalin, was in appreciating the power of propaganda, especially ideologically driven journalism, and the opportunities for mass manipulation, given the general social chaos unleashed by the aftermath of World War I and the economic downturn of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

A People's History of the United States
by Howard Zinn
Published 2 Jan 1977

Capitalist courts never have done, and never will do, anything for the working class. . . . A special revolutionary convention of the proletariat . . . would be in order, and, if extreme measures are required, a general strike could be ordered and industry paralyzed as a preliminary to a general uprising. If the plutocrats begin the program, we will end it. Theodore Roosevelt, after reading this, sent a copy to his Attorney General, W. H. Moody, with a note: “Is it possible to proceed against Debs and the proprietor of this paper criminally?” As the Socialists became more successful at the polls (Debs got 900,000 votes in 1912, double what he had in 1908), and more concerned with increasing that appeal, they became more critical of IWW tactics of “sabotage” and “violence,” and in 1913 removed Bill Haywood from the Socialist Party Executive Committee, claiming he advocated violence (although some of Debs’s writings were far more inflammatory).

The Wars of Afghanistan
by Peter Tomsen
Published 30 May 2011

The Soviet Union’s ideology focused on the horizontally layered class makeup of European countries and China, which Karl Marx and many noncommunist writers had analyzed. Class conflict between small wealthy elites at the top and poverty-stricken masses below had driven the French Revolution. In Russia, the Bolsheviks—and later Stalin—had exploited class-warfare stratagems to mobilize large numbers of have-nots against haves, poor urban workers against plutocrats, and peasants against Kulaks. In China, Mao Tsetung had mobilized the rural poor against the wealthy in both city and the countryside. But base broadening along class lines did not fit the vertical patterns in Afghanistan’s tribal society. Afghanistan’s tribal population is not divided horizontally; instead, loyalties move upward and downward within thousands of tribal and ethnic clusters.

A Man in Full: A Novel
by Tom Wolfe
Published 31 Mar 2010

"I did lose some white support No question about it. But two things softened the blow. First, it brought me so much more black support And Croker's performance was so crazy—all that talk about the Manager and the two elements and how it's better to be a tranquil beggar by the side of the road than a perturbed plutocrat in Buckhead—Godalmighty!—he was so crazy that day. Then he announces he's giving away everything he has—I mean, he sounded so crazy, a lot of white voters ended up discounting everything he said, including his vilification of Fareek. Tens of thousands of people watched that press conference on television, because the subject was race and sex."

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

In northwestern Europe the strange idea grew up that aristocracy (the rule of the best by descent) and theocracy (the rule of priests) and even plutocracy (the rule of the present rich) were all nasty. What replaced them in people’s ideology, slowly, was the rule of the better technique, allowing free entry to compete with the monopolies that the aristocrats or the plutocrats had arranged under the aegis of a captured government. The new ideology in places like Britain and Belgium around 1800 favored a “betterocracy,” or, if you want the pure Greek, a “kaluterocracy.” The profit going to the betterers was promptly undermined, unless governmental monopolies and governmental protectionism intervened.

Gravity's Rainbow
by Thomas Pynchon
Published 15 Jan 2000

But Leni left at last. Pokier might not have had the will. He thought of himself as a practical man. At the rocket field they talked continents, encirclements—seeing years before the General Staff the need for a weapon to break ententes, to leap like a chess knight over Panzers, infantry, even the Luftwaffe. Plutocratic nations to the west, communists to the east. Spaces, models, game-strategies. Not much passion or ideology. Practical men. While the military wallowed in victories not yet won, the rocket engineers had to think non-fanatically, about German reverses, German defeat—the attrition of the Luftwaffe and its decline in power, the withdrawals of fronts, the need for weapons with longer ranges. . . .

The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 10 Oct 2016

After the outsized Lehman paycheck, there was a clucking chorus of complaint. Greenspan had delivered his talk with the inside knowledge of his last FOMC meeting still fresh in his mind, and before the minutes of the proceedings had been released to the public; his comments had moved markets, and presumably Lehman’s plutocratic clients had profited.10 Meanwhile, the institution that Greenspan had dominated was starting to move on. Beginning with his very first FOMC meeting, Ben Bernanke set about changing the tone of the debates, and the implied criticism of Greenspan was obvious. Under Bernanke’s leadership, committee members would be permitted to interrupt their colleagues with two-handed interventions; the goal was to encourage a meaningful exchange, not a series of canned speeches.

The Rough Guide to Ireland
by Clements, Paul
Published 2 Jun 2015

Well Go maith Please Más é do thoil é Thank you (very much) Go raibh (míle) maithagat I don’t understand Ní thuigim Goodbye (to the person staying) Slán leat Goodbye (to the person leaving) Slán agat Bye (more informal) Slán SIGNS AND PLACE NAMES: SOME COMMON IRISH TERMS an lár city centre árd height áth ford baile town – often anglicized as “bally” beag small – “beg” bóthar road bun base caiseal stone ring fort – “cashel” caisleán castle carn cairn carraig rock – “carrick” cathair fort – “caher” ceann head, headland – “can” or “ken” cill church – “kill” or “keel” cnoc hill – “knock” doire oak wood – “derry” or “derreen” dún fort eaglais church fir men geill slí give way gleann valley – “glen” go mall slow down gort field inis island – “inish” leithreas toilet leitir hillside – “letter” lios ring fort – “lis” loch lake–“lough” mná women mór big – “more” mullach summit – “mullagh” oileán island – “illaun” páirc field – “park” ráth ring fort rinn point – “reen” ros headland – “ross” sliabh mountain – “slieve” sráid street teach, tí house, cottage teampall church tír country – “tyr” tobar well trá beach < Back to Contexts GLOSSARY Ascendancy The Protestant aristocracy, whether descended from Anglo-Normans granted land in Ireland or plutocrat planters subsequently installed in the country from the late sixteenth century onwards. Often prefixed by the term “Anglo-Irish”. bawn Fortification around a castle enclosure or cattlefold. big house Mansion built by the Ascendancy. bodhrán (pronounced “bore-run” or “bough-ron” depending on the region of Ireland).

Ashes to Ashes: America's Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris
by Richard Kluger
Published 1 Jan 1996

He had an instinctive hatred of unfair, undercover, and otherwise unscrupulous dealings. Here was an honorable man who devoted most of his life to unselfish public service. None of this could have been—or was—said of his fellow New York Republican James B. Duke, no admirer of the twenty-sixth President. In truth, Duke was among those party plutocrats who worked to deny Roosevelt the Republican renomination to his high office in 1904, the year that may be said to have launched his reputation as The Trustbuster. Teddy Roosevelt’s beliefs about the evils of economic combination were far more nuanced, though, than history’s facile labeling would suggest.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

He also believed that absolute equality is not desirable: people should enjoy the results of their superiority of muscle or brain. But while retaining private property and admiring certain aspects of laissez-faire capitalism, he was critical of the ‘system of violence, robbery, and fraud that the plutocrats call “law and order”’.28 Although Emma Goldman complained that his attitude to the communist anarchists was ‘charged with insulting rancor’, he remained a left- rather than a right-wing libertarian.29 Like Godwin, Tucker looked to the gradual spread of enlightenment to bring about change. He made a plea for non-resistance to become a universal rule.

The Rough Guide to England
by Rough Guides
Published 29 Mar 2018

In 1903, having fallen into disrepair, the castle was bought by William Waldorf Astor, American millionaire-owner of The Observer, who had it assiduously restored in mock-Tudor style. Today, Hever has an intimate feel, and though it does display some intriguing Elizabethan and Jacobite artefacts it tells you more about the aspirations of American plutocrats than the lifestyle of Tudor nobles. Anne Boleyn’s room is the most affecting; small and bare, dominated by a wooden chest carved with the words “Anne Bullen”. You can also see the book of prayers she carried to the executioner’s block, inscribed in her own writing and with references to the pope crossed out.