#COUNTRIES WITH PLUTOCRACY HOW TO#

So it is worrying to hear so consistently from colleagues around the world the extent to which the power of people is being curtailed by the people with power. We may be reaching a more dangerous point: peak plutocracy, where society and the environment can sustain no more concentration of power and resources.

#COUNTRIES WITH PLUTOCRACY HOW TO#

“Freedom” has been reconfigured to refer to consumer choice rather than the ability to determine how to order one’s life.Ī few years ago there was considerable debate about the concept of “peak oil” – the possibility we were reaching the beginning of the end of usable petroleum supplies. The denial of limits, the privileging of competition and profit over cooperation and public goods, and the capitulation of governments to the power of money has made the modern plutocracy a dominant reality, and one that must be reversed.Ĭommentators now routinely speak of how people can “contribute to the economy.” The economy no longer facilitates human society humans live to serve the economy. This ideology was charted deliberately by institutes lavishly funded by aspiring plutocrats.

We are living in an age of hyper-capitalism: we have gone beyond industrialisation and value-addition to a point where the rules are written by the financiers, and the finance industry, rather than a sector that actually makes something, has become arguably the most politically powerful industry in history.Ī brief period of relative equality in the richer countries after World War II gave way from the late 1970s to a powerful ideology of competition, unending growth, and unhindered profit. Today’s market economy has roots going back centuries, but only in this one has it become so monolithic, with virtually the entire world under its spell.

Through most of human history we have endured various unbalanced political and social systems. The logic that undergirds all of this – the greed for money, power, and control – is antithetical to preserving an environment in which living things can thrive. The economy no longer facilitates human society humans live to serve the economy. The rich have always been powerful some element of plutocracy has been present in all societies.īut the degree of control being exercised now the number of the ultra-rich essentially buying political power the nearly impossible persistence required to overcome the legal, public relations, and technical resources controlled by corporations and the richest individuals the much denser concentration of wealth in even the largest countries and the global nature of the resources, power, and connections being accumulated have combined to foreclose meaningful democratic options and space for a life independent of the materialistic values of the plutocracy. Plutocracy is a society or a system ruled and dominated by a small minority of the wealthiest. We see people frustrated by the surge in the power of the plutocrats. These are just a few of the reports I’ve heard from my colleagues in recent months. Workers paid so little by employers that they’re suffering malnutrition. Whole communities thrown off their land to make way for a foreign company…

Countries with plutocracy