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Oligarchy is in place, the sooner it is defeated, the better for everyone [1]

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Date: 2025-09-12

If it comes to full fruition, the fascist takeover of America will have been prepared and financed by the oligarchs. As it is today, an oligarchy is in place controlling governmental centers of power. Whether or not it leads to something worse, it is bad enough in itself. Steven Miller may be the architect of the Gestapo state, but the oligarchs have been in the field corrupting democracy for some time.

The Economics of Oligarchy

“Oligarchy” is rule by the rich. The similar looking word “oligopoly” describes something else, a market run by a few large firms, none of which dominates completely (think autos), so there is a measure of competition, call it a form of market discipline if you must. The incentive to collude is balanced by the rewards to cheating. Industry groups – Big Oil, Big Money (banks and hedge funds), the military industrial complex, all act as abettors and incubators for oligarchs and are often de facto oligarchs themselves.

Oligarchies always suck economically – the Gilded Age in the US, Marcos’ Phillippines, Yeltsin’s Russia, Ukraine to 2020. The reasons are not hard to understand. Efficient markets are manipulated and corrupted, competition is crushed, unions are repressed, political institutions are converted to profit centers, consumers are brutalized, and the weak are abandoned, etc., etc..

The example of the recent tax cut for billionaires is a demonstration of two things. One, how oligarchs operate through pliant politicians. The US Senate is the seat of oligarch power. John Thune, Tim Sheehey, heck the entire roll of senators from the Midwest and Prairie states is a list of stooges of the oligarchs. Small state senators are cheap, and every one is owned. Big Oil has more than a few, adding to its team from Texas. The House is now in similar hands. Trump himself is as much about the complicity of the oligarchs as it is about the MAGA cult. He could not have won either election without their support. We would be remiss not to mention the Supreme court, where individual oligarchs have the seats of, say, Thomas and Alito, or the Fed’s being captive to Wall Street tycoons.

Two, the tax cut for billionaires illustrates how they wreck the economy. The tax cut (along with the evisceration of the IRS) will blow up the federal deficit. It will actually produce negative growth and job losses. The economy is led by demand. Unlike the poor and middle class, the rich do not spend out of current income, such as provided by a tax benefit, but out of accumulated wealth. They certainly don’t invest when prospective demand is tanking. Since the tax cut is bought by cuts in services and jobs that produce demand, and the rich will reduce spending as demand falls, there will be a net reduction in the economy in that amount plus the attendant multiplier for jobs induced, or in this case reduced.

Had the same dollars been distributed to the middle class, they would have grown the economy. The middle class spends its tax breaks, business is stimulated by the spending, jobs increase, and the prospect for investment improves. Money giveaways to those who will spend is the prime ingredient in every recipe for successful recovery from a downturn. Keynesian stimulus, it is called, and it has been understood for over seventy years, although employed only when a serious crash is in hand.

Case Study: The Gilded Age

Oligarchs are not new to the United States. The Gilded Age is a famous example. Named after a satyrical novel by Mark Twain, the Gilded Age featured Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Jay Gould among others. Their names have been sanitized for today’s ears by the legacy of their wealth. These were rapacious criminals. Today it’s Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Big Oil, Wall Street Big Tech.

Not coincidentally the Gilded Age corresponded to the Long Depression, from 1873 to the mid 1890s. The Long Depression lost its original title “Great Depression” to the 1930s version). The political corruption, garish style and grotesque excess of oligarchy go hand in hand with widespread poverty. The Gilded Age was a catastrophe for farmers, who then comprised half the population, and for workers. Although the crimes of the oligarchs are hidden behind walls of lawyers and political consultants, similar suffering for the many is in the offing today.

Also not a coincidence was that the start of the Gilded Age coincided with the enactment of gold standard and demonetization of silver. In 1873, by the Coinage Act of 1873, a.k.a. “The Crime of 1873", the money supply was cut and effectively weaponized for the benefit of Northeast bankers. A reduced money supply created deflation; debts owed became heavier. Those in control of gold reaped windfall profits.

The Gilded Age also gave rise to the Progressive Movement. The “Cross of Gold” speech by William Jennings Bryan (think Jerry Brown, Bernie Sanders) was the single most important political speech in US history. It was an hour-long explanation of the Crime of 1873 delivered at the Democratic National Convention, followed by thunderous acclamation. Bryan was swept from oddball Nebraska congressman to Democratic presidential nominee. Bryan received two more democratic nominations for president and was Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. (He resigned that post in opposition to US entry into WWI.

But Gilded Age aside, oligarchs have never been very good for the US economy. A more recent example came when under the domination of the barons of finance, with the help of a compliant Fed, oligarchy produced the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. The subsequent bailout of Big Money and stagnation of he economy is a political crimes as obscene as that of 1873, and it proved rule by the rich is the political reality in the 21st Century.

oligarchy produced the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. Their bailout is a political payoff as obscene as the Crime of 1873, and proved rule by the rich in the 21st Century.

The Putin path

Trump’s preeminent mentor, it is not unfair to say, is Vladimir Putin. Putin’s mob boss style was already in Trump’s repertoire. The mixing of Mafia and government likely appealed to Trump’s instincts and upbringing. Nor is it unreasonable to suspect the man who never laughs will try to emulate Putin’s path to fascist dictatorship. The steeping stones on that path are the oligarchs.

It may now be forgotten, but the US won the Cold War. The defeat of the Soviet Union was actually achieved by disciplined application of the “policy of containment,” a strategy devised in the Truman administration by a diplomat named George Kennan (also a major author of the Marshall Plan). A system like the Soviet system, Kennan proposed, needs constant expansion to survive. By preventing expansion, the internal contradictions of the system itself would eventually hollow it out. History proved the accuracy of this analysis. The Soviets effectively annexed and looted Eastern Europe in the 1950s, but then were stopped. The quasi-fascist bureaucratic dictatorship was bankrupt long before Gorbachev raised the white flag with Glasnost in 1985.

Although the policy of containment was understood and followed by Democrats and Republicans for over thirty years, the final victory was claimed by Ronald Reagan in the name of his “supply side” corporate capitalism and market fundamentalism, ideas completely contrary to the thinking of the originator of the strategy.

Full market fundamentalism was the price extracted from Russia for its bailout. “Shock therapy,” it was called: an immediate privatization of industry and unwinding of the nanny state Russians had learned to need. It was indeed a “shock” for a population schooled in government control, whose main skill for survival was standing in line, and only tool for getting ahead was to maximize the vigorish that came with a government job. A few years of gangland violence and more massive corruption, a period even more chaotic than the Gilded Age, followed.

When the dust cleared, Russian industry emerged in the hands of a few warlords – the oligarchs. A poor country already, the poverty became even more cruel. Life expectancy fell, the population dwindled, the government defaulted on its debt. Had it not been for a resurgence in the price of oil at the end of the 1990s, the state would have failed. Long story short, Vladimir Putin rode in on the power of the oligarchs, then coopted them, and finally eliminated them in favor of his loyalists. Putin emerged (sorry, Elon) as the world’s richest man. A great many Russians still do not have indoor plumbing. A large portion rely on wood heat. The population is lower today than it was in 1990. (Under Putin, Russia has engaged in systematic kidnaping and “reeducation” of Ukrainian children, the war crime option of repopulating the country.)

The United States in 2025

Big Money, Big Oil, Big Tech are not content with massive wealth. It has never been about luxury, it has always been about power. They are in competition to be the most obscene version of themselves. As such, they are ripe for a Putin-style internecine war of elimination.

But the contest is not lost. The US is not Russia and has no tradition of peonage. Functional democracy and free speech are US traditions, not tsars and serfs. A reasonable standard of living has long been accessible to most, especially since WW2. Can Trumpist fascism repress these expectations? It seems unlikely.

Oligarchy and fascism sow the seeds of their own destruction. Will that happen before or after the wholesale ruination of the country (or the planet)? We cannot see that from here. The US may still be the richest country on the top line, but because wealth and income is so concentrated among the few. Much of the population currently exists in desperate insecurity and a large fraction has been scraped off the edge. The impending climate collapse will land hard on whoever is in charge, but harder on those with no means to weather it.

Joe Biden’s farewell

Joe Biden used his farewell address to warn of “the dangerous concentration of power in the hands of very few ultra-wealthy people, and the dangerous consequences if their abuse of power is left unchecked.”

Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead. We see the consequences all across America. And we’ve seen it before, more than a century ago. But the American people stood up to the robber barons back then and busted the trusts. They didn’t punish the wealthy. They just made the wealthy play by the rules everybody else had to. Workers won rights to earn their fair share. They were dealt into the deal, and it helped put us on the path to building the largest middle class and the most prosperous century any nation the world has ever seen, and we’ve got to do that again. ... In his farewell address, President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power,” end of quote. Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power. ... In the years ahead, it will help to be — it’s going to be up to the president, the presidency, the Congress, the courts, the free press, and the American people to confront these powerful forces. We must reform the tax code — not by giving the biggest tax cuts to billionaires, but by making them begin to pay their fair share. We need to get dark money — that’s that hidden funding behind too many campaigns’ contributions — we need to get it out of our politics. We need to enact an 18-year term limit and the strongest ethics reforms for our Supreme Court. We need to ban members of Congress from trading stock while they’re in the Congress. We need to amend the Constitution to make clear that no president — no president — is immune from crimes that he or she commits while in office. The president’s power is not absolute, and it shouldn’t be. And in a democracy, there’s another danger to the concentration of power and wealth. It erodes a sense of unity and common purpose. It causes distrust and division. Participating in our democracy becomes exhausting and even disillusioning, and people don’t feel like they have a fair shot.

The election of 2020 demonstrates the immense power of the oligarchy over the common interest. A convicted criminal and sexual predator, a tax cheat and several times adjudicated fraudster was elected president. The American electorate turned its back on an economy that was the envy of the world, on the most serious climate change legislation in history, on integrity and fair play. It elected the aforementioned criminal and gave pliant Republicans control of both houses of Congress, to go with the most right wing Supreme Court since 1930.Nor is the base of the oligarchs, by any means, limited to the GOP.

Chuck Schumer is majority leader of the Senate not by virtue of leadership capabilities or popular support, but because Wall Street, maybe Jamie Dimon himself, told Schumer not to resign when he should have, and enough senators were persuaded to accept the decision. Oligarchs and their money follow incumbents and coopt them as much as possible, which turns out to be quite a considerable measure.

The concentration of political influence in a small elite is well advanced. Some have argued – economist Simon Johnson among them – as I have here, that the American financial oligarchy was supercharged after the 2009 bailout. It may be fair to say that crime was the incubator for our current woes, political and economic.

“Dialing for dollars,” the several hours per day each Congress member devotes to making calls to wealthy donors, is a self-apparent if long-standing corruption of democracy. Lucky is the Congressman who has an oligarch take his call, however unlucky for his constituents.

Oligarchy itself is not illegal, but the means by which it established and maintained usually are. Not so in the US. Old-school political bribery has been legalized through Citizens United, as is the newer science of propaganda. The oligarchy uses its control of government to expand its wealth and uses its wealth to expand its power of government.

Oligarchy comes from the Greek “oligarkhia”, “rule by few.” The meaning “rule by the rich” was attached soon after its coinage by Aristotle, who contrasted it with aristocracy, “rule by the best.” (Of course, that word, too, means something else today.)

The “Make Billionaires Pay” Mass Action

“Make Billionaires Pay” is potentially the third in the series of mass mobilizations to counter Trump’s push into fascism. The flagship march is set for NYC to coincide with the UN General Assembly. It follows “Hands Off” on April 5, which drove Elon Musk off the field (yelling “Trump’s in the Epstein files” on the way), and “No Kings Day” on May 14 (where it was demonstrated Trump will have to pay his brown shirts; MAGA didn’t show up). Another “No Kings Day”day is on the table for Friday, October 18. September 20 is a Saturday.

Organizers of these events deserve all the credit we can give them. They have seized the high ground in their commitment to nonviolent mass action, which is the only proven route to defeating fascism and oligarchy. They have focused on a few big events and crafted messages only the intentionally uninformed can dispute. You may even see a few more red hats on September 20. [All that said, Indivisible, which I follow, is not promoting this event at the highest level. Not sure what, if anything, should be made of that.]

The lead in the announcement for “Make Billionaires Pay” reads.

reads:

The upcoming Make Billionaires Pay marches, scheduled to occur nationwide on September 20, link together multiple crises – ranging from authoritarianism to the climate emergency to US President Donald Trump’s mass deportations – by pointing the finger at the ultra-wealthy oligarchs who have been supporting them all.

It continues:

Candice Fortin, US campaign manager for climate action organization 350org said that billionaires are the connective tissue that links together the major problems currently facing the United States and the world. “This isn’t a new story – billionaires have always prioritized profit over people,” Fortin said. “This is a system working exactly as it was designed, but now without even the pretense of justice. As the US braces for more extreme heat, wildfires and hurricanes, the Trump administration has been systematically de-funding our communities to give handouts to billionaires....

“Billionaire” is not an exact synonym for “oligarch.” Both have more money than a person could spend, but some billionaires want the good life. Oligarchs want power, even if it costs the occasional million or two. But the press uses “billionaire” for Elon Musk, Big Oil magnates and Wall Street titans, so the word may translate better to a wider audience. The lede ties the two.

Tamika Middleton, managing director for Women’s March, also emphasized that today’s crises are closely linked.

“Women, migrans, queer and trans people, and communities of color have long been at the center of overlapping crises, from climate disaster to economic injustice to gender-based violence and forced displacement. These are not separate struggles, they stem from a global system designed by billionaires who exploit our struggles to maintain power.”

Renata Pumarol with Climate Defenders says: “Billionaires caused the climate chaos, spearheaded the rise of authoritarianism and they continue to profit from our suffering. But they forgot one thing: there are more of us than there are of them. On September 20th, we will send a strong message – it’s time for billionaires to pay.”

It may be more accurate, or at least more complete, to say that fascism exploits racism and hate to manage its own base, the cult, which it needs for the patina of legitimacy. Other-ing is effective. The cult is led to hate libs, minorities and marginalized people who are nowhere near the cause of the problem, and even seems willing to follow Trump from being a champion of the little guy to the head of the spear for the super-rich (never mind being a morally degenerate psychotic and criminal).

Bottom Line

Oligarchy cannot work and inevitably leads to widespread misery and perhaps to outright fascist dictatorship. Of course, the oligarchs will resist. They will not be satisfied with keeping their money, for it is the power they need. It is an existential dilemma for them. Cleanse yourself from the notion that it CAN work in some form, and confront the fact that delay is only enabling. Its defeat is essential for the planet to survive, and requires the return of functional democracy.

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