(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".
Plutocrat
Definition:
(n.) One whose wealth gives him power or influence; one of the plutocracy.
Example Sentences:
(1) My rule of thumb is that if you see a commentator or politician praising a dictatorship, plutocrat or corporation, the best course is to assume that they have been got at unless they can prove otherwise.
(2) There is no need – as Sir James Goldsmith, John Aspinall, Lord Lucan and others did in the 1970s – to discuss the possibility of launching a military coup against the British government: the plutocrats have other means of turning it.
(3) The result is that we have states effectively captured by finance that threaten the very essence of democracy as they serve plutocratic goals.
(4) Because it permits plutocratic power to override democracy.
(5) Brazil, the host of this year's World Cup, has not only seen mass demonstrations in connection with the plutocratic festivities but has a history of killing both spectators and participants – last year, a referee was reportedly stoned, beheaded and quartered on the field after he stabbed a player to death.
(6) David Cameron's big promise was that in the almost unprecedented fiscal austerity that would define his time in office, plutocrats and politicians would not enjoy any favouritism.
(7) Presented with a Keynesian, interventionist, assertively progressive "never mind the plutocrats" Labor government in Canberra, the right in Australia has found a genuine rallying point.
(8) Since the pyramids, Xanadu is the costliest monument a man has built to himself.” So trumpets a voiceover in the opening scenes of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane , the story of a plutocratic newspaper baron and empire-builder: “America’s Kubla Khan”.
(9) If there is a conspiracy to run Britain, or rather the media part of it, it is not to be found with the obscure former FT chairman Sir David Bell, but here in the nexus of relations between Black, Michael Howard's one-time spin doctor (who used to holiday with Rebekah Brooks); Dacre, Britain's most powerful tabloid editor; the Telegraph owners the Barclays, a secretive family of plutocrats who can happily text prime ministers advice; and the publicity-shy Mail proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, who politely dines with them.
(10) All of this is true, and all the parties share responsibility for failing to reform campaign finance in a way which could clip plutocratic wings.
(11) When this billionaire plutocrat charlatan – who poses as a man of the people as he enriches himself at their expense – implements a $5.5tn cut that shamelessly shovels money into the pockets of affluent and wealthy Americans, he should be resisted.
(12) That prospect has a good deal to do with privileged access to big money thwarting equality of opportunity, and the Clinton campaign’s reported ambitions to spend an extraordinary $2bn persuading the people to embrace their woman only underlines the plutocratic threat to the world’s proudest democracy.
(13) The band’s banjoist, Winston Marshall, claimed the big-name celebrities endorsing the service, and who took part in Tidal’s launch , were the “new-school fucking plutocrats”, while frontman Marcus Mumford suggested his group would never align themselves with any specific service.
(14) To see Obama backtracking on the commitments made by Bush the elder 20 years ago is to see the extent to which a tiny group of plutocrats has asserted its grip on policy.
(15) Within six years he was working on his own, managing the portfolios of an exclusive – and secret – club of plutocrats said to only include billionaires.
(16) It was a one-sided special relationship, with most of the benefit flowing in the direction of the plutocrats.
(17) Men who have made billions out of meltdown and financial crisis, such as Wilbur Ross, the “king of bankruptcy” who is now secretary of commerce, or the various crash-plutocrats recruited from Goldman Sachs and elsewhere.
(18) The people are then construed as a "middle" whose sovereignty has been abused by bureaucrats, tax-avoiding plutocrats, criminals, protesters and clamourous minorities alike.
(19) Within six years Epstein had risen through the ranks, working as a trader, before striking out on his own and convincing some of America’s wealthiest plutocrats to let him manage their portfolios.
(20) Robert Harris wrote his novel The Ghost before Tony Blair left office, yet his depiction of a perma-tanned, transatlantic former PM living in a twilight world of private jets and plutocrat hospitality has proved eerily prescient.