Exploring Wealth Inequality

Edwards, Chris; Bourne, Ryan

doi:10.36009/pa.881

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…Interestingly, “not one CEO in the Fortune 100 donated to Trump's election campaign by September 2016. His victory did not stem from influence by the wealthy but more from grassroots opposition to wealthy coastal elites” (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 22).…”

Section: The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Republican Steve Forbes spent $69.2 million on his bids for the 1996 and 2000 nominations, but won only a handful of delegates; in 2020, billionaire hedge fund manager Tom Steyer put up $200 million of his own fortune and ended up without a single delegate (Kamarck, 2020). In the 2008 Republican primaries, Mitt Romney spent more than twice as much as John McCain – much of which was his own money – but dropped out of the race in February leaving McCain to go on to secure the Republican nomination (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 25).…”

Section: The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the United States, which is always held up as a particularly stark example of glaring and rising inequality, social spending as a share of GDP rose from 9.6 to 14.3 per cent between 1980 and 2018, a 50 per cent increase (Edwards & Bourne, 2019, p. 24).…”

Section: Lobbying and Policy Influencementioning

confidence: 99%

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There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

Zitelmann¹

2023

Economic Affairs

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According to the Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler (2018, p. 45), the true rulers of the world are the super-rich, who are a tiny group of men and women of different nationalities, religions, origins, but all similar to each other in their energy, greed, contempt for the weak, indifference to the common good, blindness to the fate of the planet and the fate of the people who live on it. 1 They are, Ziegler says, "cold monsters" (2018, p. 56), "oligarchs of globalised financial capital" that have become "the real world government" (p. 119). But people don't realise this shocking truth because "a handful of billionaires control most of the media … They make sure that no overly shocking information about the victims of their cannibalistic world order enters the collective consciousness" (pp. 97-8).Every day, the media run articles and news reports about powerful lobby groups that influence politics and perhaps even dictate which legislation governments should pass. The battle between mavericks (the good guys), who uncover sinister conspiracies initiated by powerful corporations (the bad guys, frequently the capitalist puppet masters of corrupt politicians), is a common Hollywood trope. In American election campaigns it is widely accepted that if you want to become President, you can only succeed if you are able to raise billions of dollars in donationsfrom Wall Street, from powerful pharmaceutical and defence companies, from the weapons lobby, from very large unions and other special interest groups. In the minds of right-wing conspiracy theorists, politics is controlled by left-wing billionaires such as George Soros, while from the point of view of leftwing conspiracy theorists, the strings are pulled by libertarian billionaires such as the Koch brothers. Even the media are in the pockets of a handful of plutocrats. The Washington Post, for

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Section: The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The United Statesmentioning

confidence: 99%