You got that feeling that the larger the financial corporations grow, the harder it will be to reign them in, and the harder they'll squeeze the rest of us? Well ladies and gentlemen, they've already saved you the trouble of guessing and have written it all down for you!
Today's vocab word is "plutonomy" boys and girls. Read on...
Simply put, a plutocracy is government by/of/for the wealthy. So guess what a plutonomy is? Well guess no more, as CitiGroup has written a paper regarding this very concept. It includes such gems like:
...Despite being in great shape, we think that global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years, as capitalists benefit disproportionately from globalization and the productivity boom, at the relative expense of labor.
and...
...the recently released US Survey of Consumer Finances, confirms that the rich continue to get wealthier and account for a disproportionate share of income and wealth in the US. It confirms that the dynamics of plutonomy are still intact.
Look, I'm a small business owner myself, so I've got nothing against making an extra buck, but I'm also an environmentalist. What those hyper-rich robber barons are doing is failing to see that the economy is an ecosystem, and that you can't just take all from one end of the system without giving back on the other, else the wheel of life breaks down and stops. Of course, if these f&%kers could comprehend ecosystems, we wouldn't be dealing with a huge oil slick in the Gulf and a global warming crisis right now.
Never before have we had corporations that have gathered so much power that they threaten to overshadow the government's. This scares me more than al-quaeda. Recall when the super-wealthy tried to at least disguise the aggregation of wealth with terms like "trickle-down economics" and "compassionate conservatism". Haven't heard these terms thrown around for a long time, haven't we? That's because they're not even trying to hide it any more.
Download the paper here.
Bill Moyers made this the topic of his last broadcast.
C&L has the clip and more on this story here.