Before she was fired, Pam Bondi was at a Congressional hearing being hammered over her handling of the Epstein files. Apparently frustrated by questions that deflected from the administration’s unqualified successes, she blurted out something intended to immediately silence her detractors.
“The Dow is over 50,000 right now.” She went on to say the S&P 500 is also up and the Nasdaq is “smashing records,” while Americans’ retirement accounts are “booming.”
She parroted a sentiment expressed by other cabinet officials, as well as Donald Trump. The statement betrays a belief: economic success and prosperity are defined by how well the elite among us are doing, reflected in the stock market. As it is doing so well, things cannot be better. Not long ago, the Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessett, said he was tired of hearing about the “K economy,” shorthand for an economy where some are doing very well, but for most, things are getting worse. Bessett can make such a statement with a straight face because he believes inequality that rewards the elite is both the cause, and the natural outcome, of a good economy. As stated off-handedly by our nation’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice, “Those who own the country, should run it.” Welcome to our new Plutocracy.
The word is derived from the Greek, just like Democracy, where Demos is the people, and Kratos is power. But with Plutocracy, Pluto is wealth, and Kratos – well, it still means power. So, in a plutocracy, those with wealth have power. In this form of economy, economic health is dependent upon the whims of the rich, and the subservience of everyone else.
In the September issue of Dollars & Sense Magazine (online edition), in an article written by Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randal Wray, they described how the hallmark of a plutocracy is inequality. “In a plutocracy, the spending habits, consumer confidence, and balance sheets of most households become largely irrelevant. Instead, the performance of the economy depends on the fortunes of the rich.”
They go on to make the case that this trend has been ongoing for decades:
- Labor’s share of national income in the early seventies was about 2/3, now is under 53%
- Representative of trends overall, in the second quarter of 2025, the “richest 10% of households accounted for nearly half (49.2%) of consumer spending.”
- “Since the mid-1970s low, U.S. inequality has worsened. By 2024 the income share of the richest 1% of households had reached 20.2%, more than double their mid-70s share…”
- Since 1989, the share of wealth in this country for the top .1% (that’s one-tenth of 1%) has gone from 7.1 to 13% of national wealth. “At the same time, the wealth share of the bottom 90% has shrunk from 55.3% to $36.1%…”
In case the scale of this theft is not obvious, since 1975 nearly $80 trillion has gone from the bottom 90% to the top 1%, this according to a recent report from the RAND corporation. To put that in perspective, if that amount of money was distributed evenly to every single American, each of us would receive about $265,000. If distributed to every single household, each household would get over $670,000. That is a lot of money, money that at one time was captured by working class people in this country.
Now, one may ask how such a small fraction of the population can create enough economic activity to support a consumer-based economy. Below is an example of how the nation’s gross national product (GNP), the traditional indicator of economic health, can actually do well is mostly geared towards luxury goods.
To understand and accept this, two things are necessary: We must (1) be blind to and uncaring of our fellow citizens, and (2) see economic prosperity as limited to Goss National Product and its impact on the value of stocks. Imagine how in a highly automated car manufacturing plant, one employee’s worth of annual labor is responsible for the manufacturing of about 5 cars. If those 5 cars are Lamborghini Veneno’s, and they were manufactured in the United States, their ultimate sale would add $22.5 million dollars to our country’s GDP. How many Nissan Sentra’s would have to be manufactured to add the same amount to the GDP? The answer is 937. Manufacturing 937 cars with a labor force of 187, versus manufacturing 5 cars with a labor force of 1, with the latter having no negative impact on GNP. Seems like a scenario ready-made for a vulture capitalist.
Under this scenario, we can close down the Nissan plant, fire the employees, and the “economy” will continue as before, at least on paper. As long as there are enough multi-millionaires and billionaires willing to buy those Lamborghinis, Donald Trump, his rich cabinet members, tech and other billionaires are all happy and thriving, while most of us are struggling, or worse. This is because the economy has been transformed from a middle/working-class economy to a plutocratic economy, which favors the rich and screws everyone else.
If successful, it is likely a new class structure will evolve. Those at the top will own most of the wealth, and welcome new entrants from among the few who demonstrate an ability to advocate for, advance, and enhance a system of techno-feudalism. Then there are those who will be paid to protect the system, manage the system, and service the needs of the wealthy. Below them will be those who Gil Duran refers to as feudal pols who will work all the menial service jobs. Below them will be those Yuval Harari refers to as: “a massive new unworking class: people devoid of any economic, political or even artistic value, who contribute nothing to prosperity, power, and glory in society. The ‘useless class’ will not merely be unemployed – it will be unemployable…” That class of people will be left with homelessness, criminality, gang affiliation, suicide, masser incarceration (we already have mass incarceration!), and some form of renewed neo-slavery (of the incarcerated).
And this is why I refer to this new form of economy as the Natalie Harp economy. It will not be the economy most of us benefit from, but those who thrive will either be exceptional and easily compromised, or they will be young, beautiful (mostly White), and adept at stroking the egos of the supreme beings coming to power in the age of Homo Deus (to again cite Harari).
Of course, this only happens over time, and the process is still underway, but it is well underway. The U.S. Treasury is being raided (not only by Trump). Our environmental future is being undermined with publicly owned natural resources being targeted for reckless private exploitation. Cryptocurrencies are being amassed in anticipation of the devaluation and eventual destruction of the dollar, whose value those in power are working every day to destroy. And AI will soon manage most every aspect of our lives.
And yet, all this is reversible. But it would take a variety of things happening, and happening now. For starters, those elected Republican officials who are willing to go along with, support, or simply accept treason once the 2026 votes are counted (or seized prior to), need to be convinced that starting a civil war is not in their best interest. Getting beyond the real potential for a coup, there are many in and outside of government who have proposals to make our lives better. For example, some have suggested we socialize AI, at least enough to oversee it, prevent its abuse, and pass along pilfered wealth to all of us whose content is constantly stolen and monetized through the internet. There are social democratic proposals for how to provide universal health care, housing, and minimum income support. There are even some in the tech industry who have come to realize that accelerating the pace of technological determinism in order to stop the fatal consequences of what using that technology portends, is not only illogical but oxymoronic. But mass consciousness needs to be raised. It is critical to see what is happening, not only about how inequitable life has become, but how there is now the enhanced technical capacity, with the functional integration of government and private power, to surveil, predict, prompt, guide, deceive, intercept, and disappear any and every one of us who are branded enemies of the state. This is the America we will likely have if we sleepwalk our way through the next four months.