The concept of plutocracy may be advocated by the wealthy classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense.
The term plutocracy is generally used as a pejorative to describe or warn against an undesirable condition.
Throughout history, political thinkers such as Winston Churchill, 19th-century French sociologist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville, 19th-century Spanish monarchist Juan Donoso Cortés and Noam Chomsky have condemned plutocrats for ignoring their social responsibilities, using their power to serve their own purposes and thereby increasing poverty and nurturing class conflict, corrupting societies with greed and hedonism
Plutocracy takes hold when "We The People" ignore the wealthy funded the campaigns of politicians they preferred, and vote buying became "feasible, easy and widespread", as other forms of electoral fraud such as ballot-box stuffing and intimidation of the other party's voters.
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.
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."
Chrystia Freeland, author of Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, says that the present trend towards plutocracy occurs because the rich feel that their interests are shared by society.
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. - Chrystia Freeland, NPR
Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Washington are most often the three highest rated Presidents among historians.
The remaining places in the top 10 are often rounded out by Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman, Woodrow Wilson, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andrew Jackson and John F. Kennedy.
More recent Presidents such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton are often rated among the greatest in public opinion polls, but do not always rank as highly among presidential scholars and historians.
The bottom 10 often include James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor, and George W. Bush.
The Republican Party is looking to benefit from two fundamental changes in American society. First, voters who personally experienced the Great Depression of the 1930’s were becoming a much smaller part of the electorate. Second, in all probability, there were more voters than ever before who knew little to nothing about American history. Ever since the Soviets launched Sputnik into space in 1957, our public schools had de-emphasized the teaching of history and good citizenship in favor of math and science. If you combine that with the longtime and continuing practice of many school systems using their coaching staffs as history teachers, you can see the problem.
The result was that we had begun to live in what Gore Vidal accurately described as “the United States of Amnesiacs.” If you have amnesia, you don’t remember anything about yourself before the present. Unless you know where you came from, you don’t know where you are, and you can’t wisely plan for the future. As George Santayana warned, “He who does not learn from history is condemned to repeat it.”
Virtually all Republican candidates support the policies of Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush, they just don’t mention their names.
The name Hoover is synonymous with Great Depression as Bush is to Great Recession. Instead, they invoke the mythological memory of Ronald Reagan, who most voters have forgotten presided over the biggest stock market crash in between those two bigger ones. Republicans are hoping that voters are unaware that the economic policies of Reagan, Hoover, and Bush are virtually the same.
Ronald Reagan promised “a return to normalcy.” He borrowed that expression from Warren G. Harding, the Republican winner of the Election of 1920. What Harding wanted to return to was the “Gilded Age” (1869-1900) – the time before the Progressive Era (1901-1920). Harding and Reagan wanted to return the country to control by the Plutocracy, the few who were rich. They each wanted to return to a time when there was no income tax, no regulation of business practices, and no protection for labor, the consumer, the unemployed, the elderly, or the environment.
Throughout the 1920's three Republican presidents (Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover) practiced trickle-down economics: help the rich instead of the common people. If the rich get richer, their investments supposedly will lead businesses to expand, and some of that money will trickle down to the people in the form of jobs and salaries. In October 1929, seven months after Hoover took office, the stock market crashed. The Great Depression that followed lasted over ten years. Surprisingly, Hoover has been defended by some because he was not solely responsible for the massive unemployment, hunger, foreclosures, and homelessness. Any president who followed the irresponsible and incompetent Harding and Coolidge had to walk into a national disaster.
However, Mr. Hoover should receive the full credit he deserves. Coolidge allegedly complained that even though Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, he thought he was undersecretary of everything else. But that was the deal. Hoover agreed to be Harding and Coolidge’s commerce secretary only if everything involving the economy went through him!
Hoover was the architect of trickle-down economics and deserves to be held fully accountable for the tragic results.
Even though by 1980 most voters knew nothing of Hoover or the Great Depression, Mr. Reagan knew better than to refer to his own economic policy by its old name. Instead, it was called “supply-side economics.” When David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, was asked about the difference between “supply-side” and “trickle-down,” he admitted they were identical. Stockman even warned Reagan and his advisors that cutting taxes on the very wealthy while drastically increasing spending on the military would lead to huge deficits and social insecurity. Nobody cared. Within four years, Reagan had tripled the federal debt that had been accumulated by all 39 previous presidents combined!
The real rationale behind “trickle-down Reaganomics” was that even if helping the rich get richer probably wouldn’t benefit the rest of society, it would increase the federal debt. That would make it impossible for the government to spend money regulating Big Business and providing services to the people. Less money would go to highway infrastructure, national parks, and safety-net programs like food stamps, unemployment compensation, Medicaid, and Medicare. Sadly, decreasing revenues and shifting money from domestic programs to the military created one of the largest spending programs in the government – paying the interest on borrowed money! Reagan exchanged pay-as-you-go (which he dubbed “tax-and-spend”) for borrow-and-spend.
Not surprisingly, there was an “epidemic” of homelessness, and much of the country was in a serious recession throughout the eighties.
Amazingly, the Reagan stock market crash of October 1987 – the worst since ’29 – didn’t come until his second term. Ironically, what saved us were those Republican-hated safety-net programs set up by Democratic presidents and/or Democratic Congresses between 1933 and 1980.
He wanted to cut the taxes on the “haves and have mores,” and even Alan Greenspan endorsed the disastrous plan.
Incredibly, the guru of the Federal Reserve said that he was afraid that if Clinton’s policies were continued, the entire federal debt might be paid off within six years!
Not surprisingly, the Reagan debt and the interest paid on it were needed to prevent universal health care for all Americans.
Now, future presidents will be saddled with the results of Bush’s expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and all the issues connected to his exorbitant debt – which doubled that of all 42 previous presidents combined – and the long-lasting effects of the Great Recession, which President Barack Obama inherited.
Those who are Politically Powerful usually do not possess much in the way of spiritual power,
but many do reflection of Lord Acton's famous maxim: "Power tends to 'Corrupt'
and "Absolute" power corrupts absolutely.
God is, in a sense, in the background.
We have the duty to bring Him to the forefront
and give Him the acknowledgement He deserves.
Where Republicans deeply underestimate the time they spend excusing Trump’s tweets and White House scandals, Lawmakers appear to have seemingly
thrown up their hands over the future.
