Hightower Lowdown

For the super-rich hoity-toities of our land, the democratic populism arising among the hoi polloi is a no-no. Instead of populism, the upper-crusters want a different "ism"--plutonomism.

This word was derived from "plutocracy" in 2005 by a team of "global investment strategists" at Citigroup, the Wall Street financial giant. While populism is based on the egalitarian principle of the common good, plutonomism unabashedly espouses the virtue of "the rich getting richer."

In a 2006 memo to Citigroup's wealthy clients, lead "strategist" Ajay Kapur declared, "Our thesis is that the rich are the dominant drivers of demand" in the U.S. and other "plutonomies." How does a country become a plutonomy? One essential factor, he wrote, is "favorable treatment by market-friendly governments [to allow] the rich to prosper." Another is to have corporate CEOs who "lead the charge" on globalization and automation to transfer more of the nation's wealth into corporate profits "at the expense of labor."

Kapur noted that the wealthiest one percent of Americans--whom he called "the plutonomists"--had benefited disproportionately from recent increases in worker productivity, and he happily forecast that "global capitalists are going to be getting an even greater share of the wealth pie over the next few years."

Any bad news for the rich? Hmm, said Kapur, the widening rich-poor wealth gap could be trouble because even in the United Plutonomy of America, the "one person-one vote" system still exists.