Economic Elite Quotes

The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

Three hundred men, all of whom know one another, direct the economic destiny of Europe and choose their successors from among themselves.

Democracy is not compatible with financial oligarchy.

Three hundred men, who all know each other direct the economic destinies of the Continent and they look for successors among their friends and relations. This is not the place to examine the strange causes of this strange state of affairs which throws a ray of light on the obscurity of our social future.

Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street.

The hometown economic elite - rich local families or individuals whom people used to praise or revile, read about in the society pages, and gossip about incessantly - disappeared from most American cities decades ago.

This is what oligarchy looks like: Today, the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. The top one-hundredth of 1 percent makes more than 40 percent of all campaign contributions. The billionaire class owns the political system and reaps the benefits from it.

The aristocracy of feudal parchment has passed away with a mighty rushing, and now, by a natural course, we arrive at aristocracy of the money-bag.

It's this mingling of the economic and political elite which is really destroying our democracy.

The ruling class is the rich. . . . And those people are so able to manipulate our democracy that they really control the democracy.

It means that, in fact, it's - whether fascist is the right word I don't know - more of a plutocracy than anything resembling a democracy; it has become a nation controlled by a very small, very wealthy elite.

In the words of Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, we have a choice between a democracy or vast concentrations of wealth. We have vast concentrations of wealth which has bought its way into our democracy with its political leaders who exemplify the merger of that economic and political elite.

I have long since thrown in the towel on the Democratic and Republican parties because they are really a front group for the 1%, for predatory banks, fossil fuel giants, and war profiteers.

Most people consider themselves above the gritty and relentless details of life that allow the creation of great wealth. They leave it to the experts. But in general you join the one percent of the one percent not by leaving it to the experts but by creating new expertise, not by knowing what the experts know but by learning what they think is beneath them.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

Roughly speaking, I think it's accurate to say that a corporate elite of managers and owners governs the economy and the political system as well, at least in very large measure.

Neoliberalization has not been very effective in revitalizing global capital accumulation, but it has succeeded remarkably well in restoring, or in some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite. The theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has, I conclude, primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve this goal.

That's not to say they [Bill and Hillary Clinton] intend to be corrupt, but I think they're way too cozy with the economic elite, and we know that our political system exemplifies the power of the economic elite.

The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice's oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

This is sort of the epitome of the economic elite that is converging with a political elite. It's not only the banks and insurance companies. It's the war industry and private prisons. Certainly the fossil fuel agencies. It's not only that they're supporting this campaign, they're supporters of the Clinton Foundation. And where the Clinton Foundation ends and Hillary's [Clinton] political actions begin, that too is quite troubling.

I think we need to be a superpower of human rights, of support for true grassroots democracy, not corporatist economic development, which suits our economic elite but has not been helpful to the cause of democracies around the world.

There is no better example of social and economic policy discussion as an idle pastime for the rich than the World Economic Forum at Davos. These guys make the millionaire schmoozers at the Aspen Ideas Festival look like short-order cooks.

In America, we are living in a society which is moving more and more toward an oligarchic form of society where government is dominated heavily by big-money interests.

The American oligarchy spares no pains in promoting the belief that it does not exist, but the success of its disappearing act depends on equally strenuous efforts on the part of an American public anxious to believe in egalitarian fictions and unwilling to see what is hidden in plain sight.

European and American companies companies do create jobs for some people but what they're mainly going to do is make an already wealthy elite wealthier, and increase its greed and strong desire to hang on to power. So immediately and in the long run, these companies - harm the democratic process a great deal.