The Guardian View on Donald Trump’s Plutocrats: Money for Something

THE GUARDIAN — EDITORIAL: The Republicans were always the party of big business, but Mr Trump is turning them into a playpen for oligarchs

One person turns up surprisingly often at Donald Trump’s side. Not his No 2, JD Vance, nor his wife, Melania, but another man a quarter-century younger and about $300bn heavier: Elon Musk. The two hunkered down in Mar-a-Lago on the night of the election, celebrating the results. This week they were in Texas, watching Mr Musk’s staff test-launch a spacecraft. During the campaign, Mr Musk personally chipped in $130m, made speeches at rallies and organised campaigns to “get out the vote”. Last week, the world’s richest man was picked by the president-elect to run a new “department of government efficiency”. So close are the pair that Mr Musk dubs himself “First Buddy”.

American politics has always been coiled around money, tight as a vine around a trunk. Nearly 25 years ago, George W Bush joked at a swanky white-tie dinner: “Some people call you the elites; I call you my base.” Nor is it confined to the right wing. Of the two main candidates in this month’s election, more billionaires backed Kamala Harris. One result is a highly warped politics that works against the very people it urges to go out and vote. » | Editorial | Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Democracy is DYING before our very eyes; in fact, one could argue that it is already DEAD. But plutocracy LIVES; in fact, it is THRIVING. — © Mark Alexander

The Rise of the Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else | ENDEVR Documentary

Nov 6, 2022 | This documentary travels through a world of joblessness, debt, and economic uncertainty to the sovereign nation of the plutocrats, where each crisis seems to offer a new business opportunity. In America, where the 2008 financial meltdown cost $4 trillion in economic output, fortunes were made by the very people who precipitated the disaster while millions lost their homes and their savings.

Austerity in Europe, economic stagnation in Asia, a "lost generation" of the young and unemployed - signs we are living through a fundamental global reorganization, the result of which no-one can predict. The world of the 1% has arrived, and the wealth gap is now greater in many countries than during the Gilded Age, the era of the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Vanderbilts. Can our stressed democracies deal with the fallout? Or have governments simply become instruments of the new elite?

Rishi Sunak: The First Ever Oligarch Prime Minister | George Monbiot

Oct 31, 2022 | A historic moment for diversity: Britain's FIRST EVER oligarch Prime Minister!