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The New Plutocracy

David Schultz

The United States is not a democracy. It is a plutocracy. It is not simply a plutocracy because of Donald Trump’s presidency and the likes of Elon Musk and other billionaires who are running the government. The most recent Forbes listing of the richest Americans points to a concentration of wealth never seen in US history.

Plutocracy is defined as government by the wealthy. It is not just when the wealthy rule directly, but it is also about who governs. Yet to ask the question “Who governs America?” one needs to look to who benefits from its public policies and the economic system. To answer that, let’s look at the distribution of wealth in America.

Yearly Forbes releases its list of the wealthiest individuals in the world. The 2025 ranking is dominated yet again by Americans, with Elon Musk topping the chart at $394 billion. He is closely followed by Mark Zuckerburg at $254 billion, Jeff Bezos at $242, billion, Larry Ellison at $216 billion, and Larry Page at $153 billion. The five richest Americans alone are worth $1.259 trillion. Put into perspective, in 2023 the ten richest Americans according to the Forbes ranking were worth one-trillion dollars. Now if we looked at the ten richest Americans, they are collectively worth $1.9 trillion. In barely two years the richest have nearly doubled their wealth.

But how do our richest stack up compared to the rest of us? Estimates are that the net wealth of Americans is $124 trillion. This includes $269 trillion in assets, $146 trillion in debts. Who holds the wealth?

According to Statista the bottom 50% of the wage earners holds approximately 2.5% of all wealth in the US. This means that the bottom half of this population has a net wealth of about $3.1 trillion. The five richest Americans own approximately one-third of that amount. The ten richest Americans own about two-thirds of that amount. The richest thirty Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 50%. Given that wage earners only include adults and many times they are the sole earners in their household, in a nation of 335 million individuals with nearly seventy-five million children, easily the thirty wealthiest are worth more than 200 million plus individuals.

Other studies corroborate this wealth concentration. The Federal Reserve has been calculating household incomes since 1989. Back then the richest 0.1% of the US households held 1.76% of all the wealth compared to the bottom 50% holding 0.71%. The wealth distribution was already concentrated. In the third quarter of 2024, the former held 22% of the wealth, the latter 3.9%. Yes, the bottom did make some gains in their share of the wealth, but the richest saw more than a twelvefold increase in their share.

For many these statistics and numbers do not come as a surprise. It has been clear to many what is happening in America. What is new now is how clear and obvious the class warfare is under Trump, and how his voters are willing to support this assault even as it will hurt them.

For at least forty years the wealth distribution in America has been skewed in favor of a plutocratic few, while increasingly concentrating at the top. What we have seen in the last two years is an acceleration of the centralization of wealth in the US. Trump’s America will only make it worse with a probable combination of tax cuts for the wealthy and social service cuts for everyone else. What the Trump administration is finally stripping bare is the mirage that the US is a democracy. For decades only a few have benefited. Such a plutocratic system can only endure so long before the public withdraws support from it. The question then becomes whether plutocracy leads to democratic revival or other more repressive means to maintain free market capitalism that benefits only a few.

(David Schultz is a professor of political science at Hamline University. He is the author of Presidential Swing States: Why Only Ten Matter. Courtesy: CounterPunch, an online magazine based in the United States that covers politics in a manner its editors describe as “muckraking with a radical attitude”. It is edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank.)

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What the Oligarchs Really Want

Bernie Sanders

[Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) remarks on the floor of the Senate regarding how Elon Musk and his fellow oligarchs are waging a war on the working class of America. He delivered these remarks on 11 February 2025.]

We are living in an extremely dangerous time. Future generations will look back at this moment—what we do right now—and remember whether we had the courage to defend our democracy against the growing threats of oligarchy and authoritarianism. They will remember whether we stood with President Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg who in 1863, looking out at a battlefield where thousands died in the struggle against slavery and stated that; “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Do we stand with Lincoln’s vision of America or do we allow this country to move to a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires and for the billionaires?

But it’s not just oligarchy that we should be concerned about, and the reality that the three richest people in America now own more wealth than the bottom half of our society—170 million people. It’s not just that the gap between the very rich and everyone else is growing wider, and that we have more income and wealth inequality today than we’ve ever had.

It is also that we are looking at a rapid movement, under President Trump, toward authoritarianism. More and more power resting in fewer and fewer hands.

Right now, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, is attempting to dismantle major agencies of the federal government which are designed to protect the needs of working families and the disadvantaged. These agencies were created by the U.S. Congress and it is Congress’ responsibility to maintain them, reform them or end them. It is not Mr. Musk’s responsibility. What Mr. Musk is doing is patently illegal and unconstitutional—and must be stopped.

Two weeks ago, President Trump attempted to suspend all federal grants and loans—an outrageous and clearly unconstitutional act. As I hope every 6th grader in America knows, under the Constitution and our form of government the president can recommend legislation, he can support legislation, he can veto legislation, but he does not have the power to unilaterally terminate funding passed by Congress. It is Congress, the House and the Senate, who control the purse strings.

But it’s not just Congress that’s under attack. It’s our judiciary.

This weekend, the Vice President, a graduate of Yale Law School, who clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, said that: “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Really? I thought that one of the major functions of the federal courts is to interpret our Constitution and, when appropriate, serve as a check on unconstitutional executive power.

Mr. Musk, meanwhile, has proposed that “the worst 1% of appointed judges be fired every year,” and demanded the impeachment of judges that have blocked him from accessing sensitive Treasury Department files. No doubt, under Mr. Musk’s rule, it will be him and his billionaire friends who determine who the “worst” judges are. And no, Mr. Musk, you don’t impeach judges who rule against you. You may or may not know this, but under the U.S. Constitution, we have a separation of powers, brilliantly crafted by the founding fathers of this country in the 1770s.

So, we are seeing an organized attack on Congress and the courts.

But Trump and his friends aren’t just trying to undermine two of the three pillars of our constitutional government—Congress and the courts. They are also going after the media in a way that we have never seen in the modern history of this country.

Every member of Congress will tell you that people in the media, and media organizations, are not perfect. They, like everyone else, make mistakes every day. But I hope that every member of Congress understands that you cannot have a functioning democracy without an independent press—non-intimidated journalists who can write it and say it the way they see it. And in that regard, I want to remind my colleagues what this president has done in recent months.

President Trump has sued ABC and received a $15 million settlement. He has sued Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and received a $25 million settlement. He has sued CBS, and its parent company Paramount, is apparently in negotiations over a settlement. He has sued the Des Moines Register, and his FCC is now threatening to investigate PBS and NPR.

In other words, we have a President of the United States who is using his power to go after media in this country who are saying and doing things he doesn’t like. How are we going to have an independent media if journalists are looking over their shoulders, fearful that their reporting will trigger a lawsuit from the most powerful man in the world?

Now is the time to ask a very simple question. What do Mr. Musk, Mr. Trump and their fellow billionaires really want? What is their endgame?

And in my view, the answer is not complicated. It is not novel. It is not new. It is what ruling classes throughout history have always wanted and have always believed is theirs by right: more power, more control and more wealth. And they are determined to not allow democracy and the rule of law to get in their way.

For Mr. Musk and his fellow oligarchs, the needs, the concerns, the ideas, the dreams of ordinary people are simply an impediment to what they, the oligarchs, are entitled to. That is what they really believe.

This is not the first time we’ve seen this in our country’s history.

In pre-revolutionary America, before the 1770s, the ruling class of that time governed through a doctrine called the “divine right of kings,” the belief that the King of England was an agent of God, God appointed him, and he was not to be questioned by mere mortals.

In modern times we no longer have the “divine right of kings.” What we NOW have is an ideology being pushed by the oligarchs which says that as very, very wealthy people—often self-made, often the masters of revolutionary new technology and as “high-IQ individuals,” it is THEIR absolute right to rule. In other words, the oligarchs of today are our modern-day kings.

And it is not just power that they want. Despite the incredible wealth they have they want more, and more and more. Their greed has no end. Today, Mr. Musk is worth $402 billion, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth $252 billion and Mr. Bezos is worth $249 billion. With combined wealth of $903 billion, these 3 people own more wealth than the bottom half of American society–170 million people.

Not surprisingly, since Trump was elected, their wealth has soared. Elon Musk has become $138 billion richer, Zuckerberg has become $49 billion richer and Bezos has become $28 billion richer—since Election Day.

Meanwhile, while the very rich become much richer, 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, 85 million are uninsured or under-insured, 25% of seniors are trying to survive on $15,000 or less, 800,000 are homeless and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major country on earth. And real, inflation adjusted wages for the average American worker have been stagnant for 50 years.

Do you think the oligarchs give a damn about these people? Trust me, they don’t. Musk’s decision to dismember U.S. AID means that tens of thousands of the poorest people around the world will go hungry or die of preventable diseases.

But it’s not just abroad. Here in the United States they’ll soon be going after the healthcare, nutrition, housing, and educational programs that protect the most vulnerable people in our country—all so that Congress can provide huge tax breaks for them and their fellow billionaires. As modern-day kings, who believe they have the absolute right to rule, they will sacrifice, without hesitation, the well-being of working people to protect their privilege.

Further, they will use the enormous media operations they own to deflect attention away from the impact of their policies while they “entertain us to death.” Mr. Musk owns twitter. Mr. Zuckerberg owns Meta—which includes Facebook and Instagram—and Mr. Bezos owns the Washington Post. Further, they and their fellow oligarchs, will continue to spend huge amounts of money to buy politicians in both major political parties.

Bottom line: The oligarchs, with their enormous resources, are waging a war on the working class of this country, and it is a war they are intent on winning.

Now, I am not going to kid you–the problems this country faces right now are serious and they are not easy to solve. The economy is rigged, our campaign finance system is corrupt and we are struggling to control climate change–among many other important issues.

But this is what I do know:

The worst fear that the ruling class in this country has is that Americans–Black, White, Latino, urban and rural, gay and straight, young and old–come together to demand a government that represents all of us, not just the wealthy few.

Their oligarch’s nightmare is that we will not allow ourselves to be divided up by race, religion, sexual orientation or country of origin and will, together, have the courage to take them on.

Will this struggle be easy? Absolutely not.

And one of the reasons that it will not be easy is that the ruling class of this country will constantly remind you that THEY have all the power. They control the government, they own the media.

But our job right now, in these difficult times, is to not forget the great struggles and sacrifices that millions of people have waged over the several centuries to create a more democratic, just and humane society. Think about what people THEN were saying.

• Overthrowing the King of England to create a new nation and self-rule. Impossible.
• Establishing universal suffrage. Impossible.
• Ending slavery and segregation. Impossible.
• Granting workers the right to form unions and ending child labor. Impossible.
• Giving women control over their own bodies. Impossible.
• Passing legislation to establish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, a minimum wage, clean air and water standards. Impossible.

In other word, as Nelson Mandela told us, everything is impossible until it is done.

[Bernard Sanders is an American politician and activist who is the senior United States senator from Vermont. Courtesy: Prepared Remarks: Sanders on the Senate Floor, Bernie Sanders newsletter, https://www.sanders.senate.gov.]

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Corporate Media Bosses Bow to Trump Demands

Patrick Martin

The first month of the Trump administration has seen a full-scale cave-in by the corporate media, in which major newspapers and television and cable networks have bowed to the demands of the fascist president, muzzling or firing journalists viewed as his critics and backing away from any serious defense of freedom of the press.

In Hitler’s Germany, this process of bringing the media into line with government dictates was part of what the Nazis called gleichschaltung: the systematic coordination of all social institutions with the policies of the ruling party and the will of its führer. It was accomplished with considerable violence, as storm troopers attacked and destroyed the offices and presses of the trade unions and the Social Democratic and Communist parties.

In Trump’s America, the first stage of the disciplining of the media to the requirements of the new administration has been accomplished without open violence, although the billionaires who control the corporate media have used plenty of economic coercion to suppress criticism of Trump’s policies, let alone open dissent.

There has been a series of high-profile departures of media personalities, some of them identified with a critical attitude to Trump, others apparently declining to stay on board as the MAGA flag is run up the mast by their corporate bosses. These include Paul Krugman and Charles Blow at the New York Times, Jim Acosta at CNN, and Chuck Todd at NBC/MSNBC.

The departures began even before the election, when several editorial writers quit the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times after their billionaire owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, intervened to block planned endorsements of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris over Trump. Hundreds of staff members signed letters of protest over these actions.

Following the election, Disney, the corporate owner of ABC News, settled a lawsuit by Trump over a broadcast in which “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos incorrectly stated that Trump had been found “liable for rape” by a Manhattan civil jury. The actual charge on which the jury found Trump liable was sexual abuse, awarding a civil judgement of $83 million to former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll.

Disney agreed to pay $15 million to an online fund for establishing a Trump presidential library, to pay $1 million in legal fees to Trump’s attorneys in the suit, and to issue a statement apologizing for the mistake. Stephanopoulos declined to read the statement, which was nonetheless issued in his name, and he is reportedly under pressure to leave the network.

A similar, but even more craven, cave-in is in preparation at CBS News, whose corporate owner, Paramount, is considering a settlement in Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Harris that was broadcast during the election campaign. Trump himself declined to be interviewed by “60 Minutes,” fearing questions that might expose his fascist policies.

The editing of the Harris interview was routine, with nearly an hour of questions by journalist Bill Whitaker and responses by Harris cut down to 20 minutes of actual running time on the news program. Trump claimed that meandering answers from Harris had been trimmed and even falsified to make her seem more coherent, but release of the entire transcript showed that these assertions were bogus.

Nonetheless, Paramount boss Shari Redstone, the billionaire heiress of her father Sumner Redstone, is reportedly considering a settlement along the lines of Disney-ABC, with a hefty contribution to the as-yet-nonexistent Trump library. Her concern is said to be the impending $8 billion merger of Paramount with Skydance Media, owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison, the fourth-richest man in the world, with a fortune of $215 billion, and a fervent Trump backer. The sale would net Redstone $1.75 billion, according to press reports, but it must be reviewed and approved by the Federal Communications Commission, now under the control of Trump appointee Brendan Carr.

Trump’s attorneys chose to file the suit against CBS in an Amarillo, Texas federal district court where there is only one judge, Matthew Kacsmaryk. A Trump appointee and Christian fundamentalist , Kacsmaryk has served as a conduit for dozens of right-wing lawsuits promoting anti-immigrant, anti-abortion and anti-transgender provocations. Seeking to avoid the blanket protection for CBS under the First Amendment, the suit invoked the state of Texas’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, normally used against retail fraud, with the claim that the “60 Minutes” interview caused “billions” of dollars in damage to Trump’s election fundraising.

In another legal capitulation, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it had agreed to a $25 million settlement with Trump of the lawsuit he brought against the company after it blocked his accounts following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Trump instigated the attack using his extensive social media presence, both on Twitter—now controlled by Elon Musk—as well as Facebook. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, the second-richest man in America, after Musk, and just ahead of Amazon/Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago in an effort to patch up relations with the would-be dictator, who now wields extensive power over the tech industries.

At CNN, CEO Mark Thompson read the riot act to more than 100 network reporters and on-air staff on Sunday, January 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration, telling them not to express “outrage” during their coverage of Trump’s January 20 inauguration, no matter what the scale of Trump’s lies and right-wing provocations. He told them to avoid focusing coverage or commentary on Trump’s legal difficulties, including both his felony convictions in New York City and his central role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. Those addressed included Jake Tapper, Anderson Cooper and others hauling in multi-million-dollar salaries.

The pro-Trump New York Post, owned by ultra-right billionaire Rupert Murdoch, gloated that “CNN’s corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, has made it clear it wants the network to adopt a more neutral tone in its dealings with Trump.”

CNN followed up the warning with hundreds of layoffs, announced two days after Trump took the oath of office. The network also reorganized its line-up of programs, demoting Jim Acosta from his daytime hour to a midnight to 2 a.m. slot, with a much smaller audience.

Acosta was CNN’s White House correspondent during the first Trump administration and his press pass was briefly suspended after a confrontation with Trump during a press conference in which a White House aide tried to seize his microphone. The suspension was reversed by a federal judge after unedited footage of the incident was made public. Acosta was later promoted to principal national news correspondent and weekend anchor, before being given the weekday 10 a.m. slot to host an hour of news reporting.

A Cuban-American who declared that the high point of his career had been challenging Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez at a press conference in Havana, Acosta is hardly a left-wing figure. But he was unable to stomach Trump’s systematic falsifications and attacks on democratic rights.

In his final broadcast on CNN, he urged his viewers, “Don’t give in to the lies. Don’t give in to the fear,” clearly referring to the filth spewing out of the second Trump administration and its media enablers, including his own network. He said he would be starting his own program on Substack.

Equally revealing and even more politically important is the ongoing realignment of the editorial pages of the New York Times. Liberal columnist Paul Krugman left the newspaper at the end of December, while Charles Blow, another vocal critic of Trump, said goodbye to readers earlier this month.

A lengthy article published last month in the Columbia Journalism Review included an interview with Krugman in which he detailed the internal tensions within the newspaper that sets the agenda for the bulk of the American corporate media. He claimed that in the course of 2024, his editors began to intrude into his ability to express himself in his twice-weekly print column and online newsletter.

“I’ve always been very, very lightly edited on the column,” he told the CJR. “And that stopped being the case. The editing became extremely intrusive. It was very much toning down of my voice, toning down of the feel, and a lot of pressure for what I considered false equivalence.” There were also efforts “to dictate the subject.”

“I approached Mondays and Thursdays with dread,” he told the magazine, during which he would be rewriting the rewrites of his column. He said,

I was putting more work—certainly more emotional energy—into repairing the damage from [the] editing than I put into writing the original draft. It’s true that nothing was published without my approval; but the back-and-forth, to my eye, both made my life hell and left the columns flat and colorless.

Krugman is a prominent academic economist, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2008, but his political commentary has long been little more than political propaganda for the Democratic Party, particularly for the Biden-Harris administration. He opposed the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, but fervently backed the U.S.-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, publishing apologetics for the fascist militias which dominate the regime in Kiev. That such a figure has been effectively driven out of the Times, and now accuses the newspaper of “sanewashing” the Trump administration—that is, normalizing its unconstitutional and illegal conduct—is a demonstration of the abject prostration of the corporate media before the threat of fascism in America.

The cowering of the corporate media and its billionaire owners has only encouraged the Trump administration to proceed more aggressively. Trump himself has taken to demanding the firing of journalists, such as op-ed columnist Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, and the shutdown of entire programs, such as “60 Minutes,” which he said should be “immediately terminated.”

The Pentagon, under newly confirmed secretary Pete Hegseth, the fascist former Fox News host, has sought to promote fascist publications at the expense of the “mainstream” corporate media. On January 31, the Pentagon’s press office told reporters that NBC News, NPR, Politico and the New York Times would give up their permanent office space in the building to be replaced by the New York Post, Breitbart News and One America News (all pro-Trump and fascist or ultra-right), as well as Huffington Post.

The shift, which took effect February 14, was described as an “Annual Media Rotation Program.” It does not deny these media outlets access to the Pentagon, but makes it more difficult to function, and in the case of the television network, amounts to a major obstacle, since CNN, Fox and ABC all have dedicated areas for live broadcasts.

In a further attack on the media, Trump has barred Associated Press reporters from the White House briefing room and from accompanying the president on Air Force One because the AP Style Guide continues to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by that name, rather than embrace Trump’s supposed renaming of this body of water—after four centuries!—as the Gulf of America.

While this might appear ludicrous, the renaming is part of a broader program of U.S. expansionism. Trump has threatened to “take back” the Panama Canal, force Denmark to sell Greenland, absorb Canada as the “51st state,” and target Mexico, Venezuela and most of Central America for U.S. military intervention by declaring local drug-smuggling gangs to be foreign terrorist entities.

(Courtesy: World Socialist Web Site, the online publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International.)