Plutocracy
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A plutocracy (from
Usage
The term plutocracy is generally used as a
Examples
Historic examples of plutocracies include the Roman Empire; some city-states in Ancient Greece; the civilization of Carthage; the Italian merchant city-states of Venice, Florence and Genoa; the Dutch Republic; and the pre-World War II Empire of Japan (the zaibatsu). According to Noam Chomsky and Jimmy Carter, the modern United States resembles a plutocracy though with democratic forms.[7][8] Paul Volcker, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, also believed the U.S. to be developing into a plutocracy.[9]
One modern, formal example of a plutocracy, according to some critics,[10] is the City of London.[11] The City (also called the Square Mile of ancient London, corresponding to the modern financial district, an area of about 2.5 km2) has a unique electoral system for its local administration, separate from the rest of London. More than two-thirds of voters are not residents, but rather representatives of businesses and other bodies that occupy premises in the City, with votes distributed according to their numbers of employees. The principal justification for this arrangement is that most of the services provided by the City of London Corporation are used by the businesses in the City. Around 450,000 non-residents constitute the city's day-time population, far outnumbering the City's 7,000 residents.[12]
In the political jargon and
United States
Some modern historians, politicians, and economists argue that the U.S. was effectively plutocratic for at least part of the
...we had come to the stage where for our people what was needed was a real democracy; and of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of a plutocracy.[25]
The
In "The Politics of Plutocracy" section of his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, economist Paul Krugman says plutocracy took hold because of three factors: at that time, the poorest quarter of American residents (African-Americans and non-naturalized immigrants) were ineligible to vote, the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying was "feasible, easy and widespread", as were other forms of electoral fraud such as ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.[27]
The U.S. instituted
In 1998, Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as "The Donor Class"[29][30] (list of top donors)[31] and defined the class, for the first time,[32] as "a tiny group – just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population – and it is not representative of the rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access."[29]
Post-World War II
In modern times, the term is sometimes used pejoratively to refer to societies rooted in state-corporate capitalism or which prioritize the accumulation of wealth over other interests.[33][34][35][36] According to Kevin Phillips, author and political strategist to Richard Nixon, the United States is a plutocracy in which there is a "fusion of money and government."[37]
Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats,[38] says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society:[39][40]
You don't do this in a kind of chortling, smoking your cigar, conspiratorial thinking way. You do it by persuading yourself that what is in your own personal self-interest is in the interests of everybody else. So you persuade yourself that, actually, government services, things like spending on education, which is what created that social mobility in the first place, need to be cut so that the deficit will shrink, so that your tax bill doesn't go up. And what I really worry about is, there is so much money and so much power at the very top, and the gap between those people at the very top and everybody else is so great, that we are going to see social mobility choked off and society transformed.
When the Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote the 2011 Vanity Fair magazine article entitled "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%", the title and content supported Stiglitz's claim that the U.S. is increasingly ruled by the wealthiest 1%.[41] Some researchers have said the U.S. may be drifting towards a form of oligarchy, as individual citizens have less impact than economic elites and organized interest groups upon public policy.[42] A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, which was released in April 2014,[43] stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts". Gilens and Page do not characterize the U.S. as an "oligarchy" or "plutocracy" per se; however, they do apply the concept of "civil oligarchy" as used by Jeffrey A. Winters[44] with respect to the U.S.
The investor,
Causation
Reasons why a plutocracy develops are complex. In a nation that is experiencing rapid economic growth,
Other nations may become plutocratic through kleptocracy or rent-seeking.[citation needed]
See also
References
- ^ "Plutocracy". Merriam Webster. Retrieved 2 June 2017.
- ^ "Plutocratic Populism - ECPS". Retrieved 21 February 2024.
- ISBN 978-1402218408.
- ISBN 978-1550025866.
- ISBN 978-1412805261.
- ISBN 978-0520057517.
- ^ Chomsky, Noam (6 October 2015). "America is a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy". Salon. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
- ^ Carter, Jimmy (15 October 2015). "Jimmy Carter on Whether He Could Be President Today: "Absolutely Not"". supersoul.tv. Retrieved 13 February 2015.
- ^ Sorkin, Andrew (23 October 2018). "Paul Volcker, at 91, Sees 'a Hell of a Mess in Every Direction'". New York Times. Retrieved 28 October 2018.
- ISSN 0263-2764.
- ^ Monbiot, George (31 October 2011). "The medieval, unaccountable Corporation of London is ripe for protest". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 November 2011.
- ^ René Lavanchy (12 February 2009). "Labour runs in City of London poll against 'get-rich' bankers". Tribune. Archived from the original on 15 January 2015. Retrieved 17 January 2015.
- ^ "The Editors: American Labor and the War (February 1941)". marxists.org. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-57607-940-9.
- ISBN 978-0-674-02175-4.
- ^ As quoted in Boelcke, Willi A. The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels: October 1939-March 1943, edited by Willi A. Boelcke; trans. Ewald Osers. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.
- ISBN 978-1146542746.
- ISBN 978-1120909152.
- ISBN 978-0807133835.
- ISBN 978-0300118940.
- ISBN 978-0765603319.
- ISBN 978-1412805261.
- AMACOMDiv American Mgmt Assn.
- ISBN 9780838637272. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
- ^ "Roosevelt, Theodore. 1913. An Autobiography: XII. The Big Stick and the Square Deal". bartleby.com. Retrieved 28 August 2015.
- ISBN 978-0271014739.
- ISBN 978-0393333138.
- ^ Kahn, Shamus (18 September 2012) "The Rich Haven't Always Hated Taxes" Time Magazine
- ^ a b Herbert, Bob (19 July 1998). "The Donor Class". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
- ^ Confessore, Nicholas; Cohen, Sarah; Yourish, Karen (10 October 2015). "The Families Funding the 2016 Presidential Election". The New York Times. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
- ^ Lichtblau, Eric; Confessore, Nicholas (10 October 2015). "From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash - Top Donors List". The New York Times. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
- ^ McCutcheon, Chuck (26 December 2014). "Why the 'donor class' matters, especially in the GOP presidential scrum". "The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 10 March 2016.
- S2CID 145063601.
- S2CID 155071383.
- ^ Westbrook, David (2011). "If Not a Commercial Republic - Political Economy in the United States after Citizens United" (PDF). Louisville Law Review. 50 (1): 35–86. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 May 2014. Retrieved 30 April 2014.
- ^ Full Show: The Long, Dark Shadows of Plutocracy. Moyers & Company, 28 November 2014.
- NOW with Bill Moyers4.09.04 | PBS
- OCLC 780480424.
- National Public Radio. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
- ^ See also the Chrystia Freeland interview for the Moyers Book Club (12 October 2012) Moyers & Company Full Show: Plutocracy Rising
- ^ Stiglitz Joseph E. "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%". Vanity Fair, May 2011; see also the Democracy Now! interview with Joseph Stiglitz: "Assault on Social Spending, Pro-Rich Tax Cuts Turning U.S. into Nation 'Of the 1 Percent, by the 1 Percent, for the 1 Percent'", Democracy Now! Archive, Thursday, 7 April 2011
- ISBN 067443000Xp. 514: "the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about where the United States is headed."
- .
- ^ Winters, Jeffrey A. "Oligarchy" Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 208-254
- ^ "The World's Billionaires". forbes.com. Archived from the original on 3 April 2013. Retrieved 1 May 2018.
- ^ Buffett: 'There are lots of loose nukes around the world' Archived 30 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine CNN.com
- ^ Buffett, Warren (26 November 2006). "In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class is Winning". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 3 January 2017.
- ISBN 9781491534649.
Further reading
- Howard, Milford Wriarson (1895). The American plutocracy. New York: Holland Publishing.
- Norwood, Thomas Manson (1888). Plutocracy: or, American white slavery; a politico-social novel. New York: The American News Company.
- Pettigrew, Richard Franklin (1921). Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920. New York: The Academy Press.
- Reed, John Calvin (1903). The New Plutocracy. New York: Abbey Press.
- Winters, Jeffrey A. (2011). Oligarchy. Cambridge University Press
External links
- Documentary: Plutocracy Political repression in the U.S.A. part 1, by Metanoia Films
- Documentary: Plutocracy II: Solidarity Forever Political repression in the U.S.A. part 2, by Metanoia Films