(n.) A form of government in which the supreme power is placed in the hands of a few persons; also, those who form the ruling few.
Example Sentences:
(1) Once neither painfully elitist nor patronisingly populist, Edinburgh in August now threatens to become an oligarchy, a Chipping Norton of the arts, its sluices greased by Foster's lager, rather than by country suppers and police horses.
(2) Coleridge, denouncing “a contemptible democratical oligarchy of glib economists”, asked: “Is the increasing number of wealthy individuals that which ought to be understood by the wealth of the nation?” Dickens did much with Carlyle’s despairing insight into cash payment as the “sole nexus” between human beings.
(3) Nor is the Vermont senator only attracting the usual leftwing suspects, such as those attendees who wore “Oligarchy Response Team” T-shirts.
(4) He promised to raise the minimum wage, rehire fired workers and to fight a Greek oligarchy well-known for its corruption and tax evasion.
(5) "Those who are responsible should pay for the crisis: the bankers, industrialists, ship-owners, big merchants, the oligarchy of this country."
(6) Hence the real question that Scots have to decide: will independence shift the balance of power away from oligarchy and towards democracy?
(7) If there is a “generational struggle to defend the principles of the free market”, it’s a struggle against the corporations, which have replaced the market with a state-endorsed oligarchy .
(8) Voting for the oligarchy is not how you get rid of the oligarchy,” said Carlos Martinez, 40, an activist from Texas who creates social media content .
(9) And that way is that today in America, we are living in a country that is moving quite rapidly toward an economic oligarchy and a political oligarchy.
(10) Thus politics in Russia , the one common denominator in the Litvinenko enigma, may have nothing to do with evolving democracy or our old friend market forces, but rather is a murderous clash of oligarchies over wealth, like Machiavelli's Borgias, or a Hollywood Godfather IV view of events.
(11) Jakarta’s politics – and Indonesia’s – is entrenched in an elitist oligarchy, in which party bosses or their corporate backers are the main financiers.
(12) Liberating individualism was transformed into exploitable atomisation, creative self-expression replaced by a depoliticised, desocialising consumerism that enabled the rise of a new oligarchy.
(13) That is called an oligarchy.” Sanders congratulated the crowd for “making history” by taking part in what the campaign believes is the largest online organizing event of the 2016 campaign so far.
(14) If they still come down we will need to take some sort of action.” “I’m still looking at legal action from the supreme court to stop them coming anyway.” The Party for Freedom posted on its website: “Today we face a battle against a corrupt political oligarchy that wants to restrict freedom of speech, and deny patriotic Australians the right to mark the 10nth Cronulla Riots anniversary in Cronulla.
(15) But in other cases, it has come with serious problems such as powerful oligarchies that wipe out competition, prevent local innovation, fuel corruption and seek rents.
(16) In the 1990s we encountered both anarchy and oligarchy.
(17) They desired, rather, that it be lived on a higher level than that of a serf, treated as an inconvenience by a moribund oligarchy.
(18) Jeremy Clarkson: big mouth strikes again BBC seeks to limit damage over Clarkson rant Jeremy Clarkson's One Show strike outburst - full text The Jeremy Clarkson moment: populism or oligarchy?
(19) And when they say competition, what you're actually left with is four or five – sometimes only three – companies, who barely compete with one another at all but instead operate as an unelected oligarchy.
(20) "If management and an existing board take on this power to hire and fire this ceases to be a co-operative and instead becomes little more than a self perpetuating, management-led, oligarchy," said Eyre.
Plutocracy
Definition:
(n.) A form of government in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of the wealthy classes; government by the rich; also, a controlling or influential class of rich men.
Example Sentences:
(1) On the other hand, the expectation that authority will be bestowed by market forces following a miraculous ‘‘transfer of wealth’’ does suggest an alternative route to normal democratic processes: theocracy via plutocracy.
(2) At the top, the barristers other lawyers most admire have escaped the constraints of the nation state and chase multimillion pound briefs from the global plutocracy.
(3) They would see that their sacrifice has, paradoxically, contributed to their economic insecurity by allowing for a glut of money in trade surpluses to be built up in a banking system that has developed innovative techniques of financial engineering which only reward the plutocracy in corporate boardrooms and banks, and contribute to the instability of the economic edifice that delivers jobs and prosperity to the masses.
(4) The pampered plutocracy Last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies looked at an ever-worsening financial crisis, which will see the amount of public debt owed per person rise from its 2010 level of £15,000 to £23,000 in 2017.
(5) Serbia is a plutocracy and humour is the best way to fight this.
(6) The plutocracy that governs us is simply throwing more and more red meat into a shark pool, populated by public school buddies and party donors.
(7) Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it."
(8) One of the outstanding features of the new plutocracy is that they are working rich: corporate bosses, talented traders, hedge-funders.
(9) It is a threat of the loss of grip on the narrative of the financial crisis, that the crisis is caused by the profligacy of the poor, in the hands of the plutocracy of global finance.
(10) Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests.
(11) Can you hear him saying he wants higher inheritance taxes because he believes Britain should be a meritocracy rather than a plutocracy?
(12) "There should be no sacrifice for the plutocracy," said Vasiillis Stamoulis, one union leader as he took to the podium erected in front of Athens' sandstone parliament.
(13) They place all the burden on the have-nots to pay the price of this crisis and not the plutocracy," said Yannis Papangopoulos who heads the Confederation of Greek Workers.
(14) I am not ashamed to admit I am one of those hem-touchers, fascinated to meet the man who changed the face of modern opera with his centenary Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976, when he infuriated traditionalists by replacing Wagnerian horns and bearskins with the trappings of 19th-century plutocracy.
(15) The electoral reality, however, suggests a narrow plutocracy in which the privilege of birth outranks ideology, charisma or achievement.
(16) If Syriza is allowed to retain the euro on its own terms, people elsewhere might begin to question the benefit of continuing with the particular programme of poor-bashing austerity, even if they accept the need for austerity, preached by the union leaders, the troika, of this governing plutocracy.
(17) "It is the responsibility and duty of workers and the poor to reject the lies of the government, the EU, the plutocracy and to rise up against these measures," it said.
(18) It’s refreshing to see two prominent billionaires even paying lip service to upending plutocracy.
(19) According to The West End Front , a book by Matthew Sweet about the role of the hotels during the war, men such as César Ritz, who opened the Ritz in 1906, played a central role in persuading “the plutocracy and the aristocracy to do something to which they were unaccustomed – eat, drink, smoke and dance in public”.
(20) What had started as a general strike called by unions to protest against deeply unpopular austerity measures turned into a tidal wave of fury as an estimated 100,000 private and public sector workers took to the streets screaming "let the plutocracy pay".