essay on plutocracy

Reviewed: Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, The Unheavenly Chorus, Unequal Political voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012. Martin Gilens, in Affluence and Influence. Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics, How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, Simon and Schuster, 2011. Alexis de Tocqueville famously warned that democracy in America could become a tyranny of the poor majority. Less famously, he also warned that it could become a despotism of the rich minority. The promise of democracy in America was that politicians could ascend to office without inheriting wealth or title. But precisely because rulers were not independently wealthy, they could be suborned by other people who were. “While the rulers of aristocracies sometimes seek to corrupt,” he wrote, “those of democracies prove corruptible.” What Tocqueville meant by “corruption” was not just bribery. It was creeping rot. Once ordinary citizens perceive that politicians are for sale to the highest bidder, he thought, they may gradually withdraw from public affairs, until they have left the government entirely in control of the plutocrats. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America described a democracy caught between Scylla and Charybdis. If it were to endure, it would have to steer between the rocks of tyranny by the poor and the whirlpool of corruption by the rich. Later Populist and Progressive critics of American democracy echoed Tocqueville and elaborated on his critique of plutocracy. The clamor of criticism reached a high point in the years around the First World War, when inequalities of income and wealth had reached unprecedented heights. In books with titles like The New Plutocracy.
BILL MOYERS: You've no doubt figured out my bias by now. I've hardly kept it a secret. In this regard, I take my cue from the late Edward R. Murrow, the Moses of broadcast news.Ed Murrow told his generation of journalists bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. So here, one more time, is mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. Plutocracy, the rule of the rich, political power controlled by the wealthy.Plutocracy is not an American word but it's become an American phenomenon. Back in the fall of 2005, the Wall Street giant Citigroup even coined a variation on it, plutonomy, an economic system where the privileged few make sure the rich get richer with government on their side. By the next spring, Citigroup decided the time had come to publicly bang the drum on plutonomy. And bang they did, with an equity strategy for their investors, entitled, Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer. Here are some excerpts: Asset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper.[and] take an increasing share of income and wealth over the last 20 years.the top 10%, particularly the top 1% of the US-- the plutonomists in our parlance-- have benefited disproportionately from the recent productivity surge in the US.[and] from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.[and they] are likely to get even wealthier in the coming years. [Because] the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact. And so they were, before the great collapse of 2008. And so they are, today, after the fall. While millions of people have lost their jobs, their homes, and their savings, the plutonomists are doing just fine. In some cases, even better, thanks to our bailout of the big banks which meant record profits and record bonuses for Wall Street.Now why is this? Because over the past 30 years the.
1913 essays In this piece, collected in Sumner argues that democracy is especially vulnerable to plutocratic influence. Originally published in The Independent. Not every rich man is a plutocrat. In the classical nations it was held that the pursuits of commerce and industry were degrading to the free man; and as for commerce, it was believed that every merchant was necessarily a cheat, that he must practise tricks from the necessity of the case, and that a certain ever-active craftiness and petty deceit were the traits of character in which his occupation educated him. As for the handicrafts, it was argued that they distorted a man’s body and absorbed his mind and time, so that he was broken in spirit, ignorant, and sordid. The same ideas as to commerce and, in part, as to handicrafts, prevailed through the Middle Ages.The classical civilization was built upon human slave power. For that reason it exhausted itself — consumed itself. It reached a climax of organization and development, and then began to waste capital and use up its materials and processes. It is, however, clear that any high civilization must be produced and sustained by an adequate force. In the case just mentioned it was human nerve and muscle. Now, modern civilization is based on capital, that is, on tools and machines, which subjugate natural forces and make them do the drudgery. It is this fact which has emancipated slaves and serfs, set the mass of mankind free from the drudgery which distorts the body and wears out the mind, at the same time producing a high civilization and avoiding the wear and tear on men.The “dignity of labor” and the “power of capital” are therefore both products of the same modern movement. They go together; it is the power of capital which has made labor cease to be servile; it is the power of capital which has set women free from the drudgery of the grain-mill and the.
Demonstrators rallied at the Boston courthouse in protest of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. (AP Photo/Steven Senne) Ad Policy Writing Contest Finalist We’re delighted to announce the winners of The Nation’s eighth annual Student Writing Contest. This year we asked students to answer this question in 800 words: It’s clear that the political system in the US isn’t working for many. If you had to pick one root cause underlying our broken politics, what would it be and why? We received close to 700 submissions from high school and college students in forty-two states. We chose one college and one high school winner and ten finalists total. The winners are Jim Nichols (no relation to The Nation’s John Nichols), an undergraduate at Georgia State University; and Julia Di, a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Darnestown, Maryland, and Bryn Grunwald, a recent graduate of the Peak to Peak Charter in Boulder, Colorado, who were co-winners in the high school category. The three winners receive cash awards of ,000 and the finalists 0 each. All receive Nation subscriptions. Read all the winning essays here.   —The Editor For decades, corporations have wreaked havoc on our democracy from impoverishing the working class, profiting off military conflicts, poisoning the environment and food supply and taking over public schools. Perhaps, their most destructive target is America’s broken political system. Corporations have played a role in elections since the early part of the twentieth century. It was during the presidency of Ronald Reagan that we saw an increase in their hegemony in politics. But it wasn’t until the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United ruling, which gave corporations the same free speech rights as individuals, that the corporate sector comprehensively put its stamp of influence on America’s elections. Shortly after the decision, Super PACs.
Socialist newspapers and magazines flourished in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and Art Young's cartoons appeared in all of them.  In mass circulation papers like the Appeal to Reason or the New York Call, Young's images spread the message of Socialism to the American masses.  These Cartoons for Socialism enabled Young to depict the ravages of unemployment and the violence of the state, the arrogance of the powerful and the absurdity of the superrich, and all the while, he drew pictures of his dreams of a better world to come.  Young's Socialist cartoons are both entertaining and didactic, often representing the entire capitalist system in a single frame, or establishing an allegorical melodrama populated by bloated plutocrats and corrupt politicos, shriveled preacher, subservient editors, and, on occasion, the forthright and robust young socialist.