The billionaire class isn’t just a group of people who happen to be superrich. It’s a dynastic oligarchy with a single overriding objective: contr

You Can Have Billionaires or You Can Have Democracy

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2024-11-27 03:00:07

The billionaire class isn’t just a group of people who happen to be superrich. It’s a dynastic oligarchy with a single overriding objective: controlling the government to protect its inherited wealth.

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With so much public attention fixated on the tycoons of big tech, it can be easy to forget that a historically more typical kind of extreme wealth — old money — is still alive and well. As a new report published by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) makes clear, in fact, it’s actually stronger than ever: America’s gilded dynasties having exponentially increased their fortunes since the early 1980s — and leveraged them so they can continue to grow in perpetuity.

Inequality expert Chuck Collins is a lead author of the new IPS study “Silver Spoon Oligarchs: How America’s 50 Largest Inherited-Wealth Dynasties Accelerate Inequality.” Collins spoke to Jacobin’s Luke Savage about his team’s findings and the breathtaking extent that current laws and regulatory frameworks allow extreme wealth to perpetuate itself across generations.

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