“American” Plutocracy

By Randy Alonso Falcon on January 20, 2025 from Havana

“As you move up the wealth/income ladder, you get a little more influence on policy. When you get to the top, which is maybe a tenth of one percent, people essentially get what they want, which is to say they determine policy. So the proper term for that is not democracy; it’s plutocracy.”

Noam Chomsky in Bonn, Germany, at the DW Global Media Forum, August 15, 2013.

The United States has long been essentially a plutocracy .A government of, for and by the wealthiest class. But it has never been more chemically pure than with the government that will take office in Washington today.

The U.S. mega-rich have had enough of a political class mediating their interests and putting tepid obstacles in the way of their purposes of domination and wealth. They do not want others to operate power on their behalf, but have decided to exercise it unambiguously. The government that is beginning represents the most wealth accumulated among its members in the entire history of the United States.

Nothing like it has been seen since the time when J. Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Mellon, oil, finance, steel and railroad magnates, ran the U.S. government at will in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and, along with industrial expansion, drove colossal corruption. They were called the “robber barons”.

More money than the GDP of almost every country in the world.

Although Trump campaigned under the mantle of being “the voice” of the displaced and crisis-hit working class, his administration has nothing to do with his speech. To “Make America Great Again,” Trump has surrounded himself with tycoons, Floridians and stalwarts. At least 13 billionaires make up his cabinet, among them, the richest man in the world

“An oligarchy of extreme wealth, power and influence is taking shape in America today that truly threatens all of our democracy, our basic rights and our freedom,” said none other than Joe Biden, in his farewell speech from power a few days ago.

Biden claimed that a “dangerous concentration of power” was “in the hands of a very few ultra-wealthy people.”

To give you some dimension, the fortunes accumulated by the most acclaimed members of the Trump administration reach a total of 450 billion dollars, a figure higher than the Gross Domestic Product of more than 170 countries.

Trump’s wealth comes from the real estate sector, which includes residential and office buildings, hotels and golf courses around the world, including Mar-a-Lago in Florida and the Trump Tower in New York.

The re-elected president also has a $3.5 billion stake in his social network, Trump Media & Technology Group, although he has promised not to sell his shares.

Trump’s net worth is $6.2 billion, according to Forbes.

It is the best portrait of today’s America, never more unequal, with a greater concentration of wealth, where the most powerful 1% has more wealth than 90% of the population as a whole, with a difference in salaries between executives and workers at more than 300 times. It is the ultra expression of the process of contradiction and imperial degradation already glimpsed by Lenin at the beginning of the last century, when he warned of the purely capitalist contradiction between the social character of production and the concentration of private ownership of the means of production in the hands of a few, which becomes more acute under imperialism. This means that the monopolist yoke “on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times harder, more sensitive, more unbearable” and the main profits go to the “geniuses” of financial machinations”.

The techno-fascist paradigm

The most notorious figure in Trump’s cabinet is Elon Musk, the South African tycoon, whose profits have grown out of control since the electoral victory in November and today already exceed 400 billion dollars. No one has ever amassed such a fortune in history.

In 2024 alone, the rise of Musk’s fortune has been meteoric, with more than 218 billion dollars added in the year. Nothing like it has ever been seen before.

Musk is the combination of entrepreneurial opportunism and ideological fascism. His brazenness knows no bounds. He knows he is powerful and he exercises that status without any qualms. He took over the social network Twitter, which he renamed X after paying 44 billion dollars, to have a high caliber weapon with which to fire his fascist and hegemonic ideas without intermediaries, and at the same time, to serve Trump’s electoral campaign as a platform for his content.

Musk initially supported Florida Governor Ron de Santis, but after his withdrawal from the race, he turned fully to Donald Trump’s candidacy, to which he contributed more than 270 million dollars. No one had more prominence in the 2024 electoral race than he did.

Now, Musk will have Trump’s “chainsaw” in his hands. The re-elected president appointed him to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a commission to curb government spending, which will not only prune allegedly wasteful programs but also remove barriers that today limit these ultra-rich who have come to power (health, job security, environmental regulations, among others). There will be no brakes on the wealth ambitions of the new holders of power.

As foreseen in ancient Greece by Xenophon and Thucydides, plutocrats tend to ignore the interests of the state, social responsibility and political problems, using power for their own benefit.

Musk is the symbol of today’s “robber barons” along with Jeff Bezos, Peter Thile, Charles Koch, Jeff Yass, Ken Griffin and Rupert Murdoch, who have used their wealth to gain power and now entrench that power, Trump by way of Trump, to gain more wealth.

The Select

“We are rapidly going to an oligarchic society. Never before in the history of the United States have so few billionaires (fortunes of a billion dollars or more), so few people had so much wealth and so much power. Never before has there been so much concentration of ownership in all sectors, so much Wall Street. We should talk about it, never have those at the top had so much political power,” veteran senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders characterized the new US administration.

Trump has invited to his executive another select group of his golfing buddies or big donors to his electoral campaign, billionaire men and women who will mark the oligarchic, unbridled and deeply reactionary imprint of this administration.

These are some of the new faces of plutocratic power in the US:

– Linda McMahon, $3 billion. Trump picked McMahon, co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, to head the Department of Education, possibly in hopes that she would dismantle the department pro wrestling-style. McMahon shares a net worth of $3 billion with her husband, Vincent McMahon, according to Forbes

– Jared Isaacman, $1.7 billion. Trump nominated Isaacman, CEO and founder of a credit card processing company, to head NASA. Isaacman has collaborated with Musk since he bought a series of spaceflights from SpaceX, his subsidiary, and in September conducted the first private spacewalk, in which he departed his capsule in orbit from SpaceX. He also co-founded Draken International, a defense aerospace company.

– Howard Lutnick, $1.5 billion. Trump named Lutnick, head of investment bank and brokerage Cantor Fitzgerald, as his Commerce secretary. Lutnick, who currently serves as co-chairman of Trump’s transition team, would be in charge of promoting and developing U.S. industries.

– Doug Burgum, with an estimated net worth of $1.1 billion. Trump picked Burgum, the current Republican governor of North Dakota and a former Great Plains Software executive, to head the Interior Department. As secretary, he would be responsible for managing federal lands and natural resources. The Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service would fall under his leadership.

– Vivek Ramaswamy, $1 billion. Trump chose Ramaswamy to join Musk in jointly leading the Department of Government Efficiency. In an op-ed column they wrote together for the Wall Street Journal, the two said they see their role as “reducing the size of the federal government. ”Ramaswamy is a businessman and former pharmaceutical executive who rose to fame as one of the Republican presidential candidates and as a rival to Trump. He eventually withdrew and threw his support behind the former president.

– Steven Witkoff, $1 billion. Trump chose Witkoff, a Florida real estate investor and Trump’s golf partner, to be his special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff is chairman and CEO of Witkoff Group, a real estate firm with luxury condominiums, office space and hotels across the country. Witkoff is also co-chair of Trump’s inaugural committee along with Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler.

– Scott Bessent, undetermined. Trump picked fund manager Scott Bessent for the coveted Treasury secretary post, a decision that will likely please Wall Street . Bessent was an economic advisor to Trump during the election campaign and is the founder of hedge fund Key Square Capital Management. He also worked at Soros Fund Management, a hedge fund started by George Soros, a major Democratic donor. As Treasury secretary, Bessent would be responsible for advising Trump on domestic and international financial, economic and fiscal policy. Although it has been widely reported that Bessent is a billionaire, it is difficult to determine exactly how much wealth he has.

Trump’s ambassador picks also include several billionaires, including financier Warren Stephens ($3.4 billion fortune), who has been chosen to serve as ambassador to the United Kingdom, Conair executive Leandro Rizzuto Jr. chosen to serve as ambassador to the Organization of American States, Charles Kushner named ambassador to France, and Tom Barrack, ambassador to Turkey.

The Trumpian agenda

As U.S. election scholar Marty Jezer wrote, “Money is the biggest determinant of political influence and success. Money determines which candidates will be in a position to drive electoral campaigns and influence which candidates will win elective office. Money also determines the parameters of public debate: what issues will be on the table, in what framework they will appear, and how legislation will be designed. Money allows wealthy and powerful interest groups to influence elections and dominate the legislative process.” (See https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/ndjlepp/vol8/iss2/3/)

With the wealthiest cabinet in U.S. history, it is easy to understand that Trump’s agenda in his new term is aimed at satisfying the appetites and visions of the most reactionary of the wealthiest class in U.S. society.

Trump’s cabinet not only reinforces America’s already neoliberal policies, but introduces more extreme elements than his 2017 Administration. Between billionaires, climate deniers and xenophobic stances, the vision of his Administration points towards a consolidation of policies that may accentuate social and economic inequalities in the United States.

During the campaign, Trump attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, the controversial and detailed master plan for governance released by conservatives at the Heritage Foundation in anticipation of a second Trump term.

While Trump may not want to be associated with that plan, it was formulated by his allies: at least 140 people associated with Project 2025 worked in the previous Trump administration, according to an analysis by CNN’s Steve Contorno. Certainly, there is some overlap between much of what the 900-page Project 2025 proposes and what Trump has said he will do.

Among the measures already announced by the real estate mogul, adept at corporate corruption and communication, are:

– Mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants.

– Closing the southern border and ending birthright citizenship.

– Unprecedented tariffs on foreign goods from all countries, but especially China.

– Expansionary tax cuts to benefit corporations, tipped workers, seniors collecting Social Security, Northeastern homeowners and many others.

– Multi-billion dollar cuts in government spending with the help of Elon Musk.

– Reforming the nation’s health and food systems with help from vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

– Reverse regulations aimed at addressing climate change, to particularly benefit oil companies….

– Build a new missile shield with help from former NFL player Herschel Walker.

Today will be Trump’s inauguration in the same Capitol that his hosts stormed that ill-fated January 6, 2021. We will have to see his speech and the first executive orders he signs this afternoon to gauge how far his plutocrat government will take his intentions. Everything can be expected.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English