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Warren Buffet speaking to the US Senate Finance Committee (14 November 2007).

A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy. Equality of opportunity has been on the decline.

Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise.It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size-and it’s still the way we measure poverty today. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship.

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It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer-even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness-that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior. Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the financial system, paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods.

William Barber II, The Real Epidemic is Poverty (March 30, 2020), The Progressive.

To redeem the soul of America-and survive a pandemic-we must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America’s deep injustices. And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households.

Almost half of America’s workers-whether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolina- work for less than a living wage. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they can’t get unleaded water in their homes.

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones’ medical bills.

Unlike democracy, capitalism, socialism or anarchism, plutocracy is not necessarily rooted in any definite political philosophy, and the concepts or strategies of plutocracy may be advocated or used by wealthy or powerful classes of a society in an indirect or surreptitious fashion, though the term itself is almost always used in a pejorative sense. Plutocracy (from Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, meaning ' wealth', and κράτος, kratos, meaning ' power, dominion, rule') or plutarchy, refers to a society or a system ruled and dominated by a small minority of the wealthiest or most powerful citizens.

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The whole notion of the free market, laissez-faire capitalism, globalization is a very thin rationale for unmitigated greed by a tiny oligarchic elite.

Plutocracy quotes