Good morning, class, good morning, class, class? Class!? Shut up, thank you!*

"History repeats itself – the robber barons of the
 Middle Ages and the robber barons of today."

We can learn something from Russia, something that Trump has learned and it is not a good thing!

What Americans can learn from the story of Russia's oligarchs

NPR Heard on Morning Edition

By Steve Inskeep

February 4, 2025

We had a talk on Morning Edition about oligarchy.

People across the political spectrum have been using the term as President Trump appointed billionaires to his Cabinet, invited tech leaders to sit on his inauguration stage and gave Tesla CEO Elon Musk control of DOGE ("Department of Government Efficiency"), an entity tasked with reducing spending and bureaucracy in the federal government.

Business and wealth are always connected to politics. But the link is rarely so explicitly on display. So we contacted David Hoffman, an expert on another country where very wealthy men grew very close to the state: Russia.

Oligarchy means rule by the few, and the word "oligarchs" entered Russia's popular discourse beginning in the 1990s. Hoffman lived in Moscow as a journalist then and later wrote a book called The Oligarchs. He described a Russian oligarchy that developed in stages:

Russia's oligarchs became wealthy thanks to the weakness of the state

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left state-owned industries open to privatization. Hoffman says a few men captured companies dealing in natural resources. "Timber, diamonds, oil, you name it," Hoffman said. He added that the entrepreneurs were "these young hustlers, kids who had not been part of the Communist Party. And seven of them became prominent businessmen by glomming on to these big valuable assets."

The oligarchs became involved in politics

In 1996, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin stood for reelection, the oligarchs feared victory by a Communist candidate who might have undermined their position. "So they rallied behind Yeltsin and they used their media, one of their most powerful tools. They all had television and they had newspapers to support Yeltsin, and he was reelected," Hoffman said. As a reward, "they collected a whole new round of factories and assets."

Does any of this sound familiar?

America's superwealthy are different — but some of the hazards are the same

Hoffman credits U.S. business leaders with more entrepreneurial spirit. They generally created their own companies rather than plucking them from the state — although some, like Musk's SpaceX, have depended heavily on federal contracts.

What bothers Hoffman is the union of money and political power. "Capitalism needs the ability to get rich. What changed, though, is when they get involved as unelected power brokers, when they pull the levers from behind the scenes, then they become unaccountable," Hoffman said. "And this is the danger, not that they are sitting at the inaugural or at a ball or even visiting the White House. Remember, Ronald Reagan had a kitchen cabinet of wealthy guys that he liked to pal around with. … That's not the problem. But when they begin to make decisions, that's a merger of wealth and power that warps our democracy."

The LA Times wrote an article about Trump creating an imperial presidency...

Cartoon from Puck, August 9, 1899, by J. S. Pughe. Angry
Uncle Sam sees hyphenated voters
(including an Irish-American, a German-American,
a French-American, an Italian-American,
and a Hungarian-American) and demands,
 "Why should I let these freaks cast whole votes
 when they are only half Americans?"

• President Trump is trying to rule by decree.
• He is trying to seize more direct power over federal programs and spending than any president in recent history.
• “This is fundamentally an attempt to redefine the president’s powers under the Constitution,” said one policy scholar. “It’s seismic.”

Donald Trump has been back in the White House for only two weeks, but he’s already remaking the federal government. He’s trying to create an imperial presidency — and he’s ruling by decree.

In a blizzard of executive orders, Trump has halted federal spending on clean energy, infrastructure, foreign aid and anything connected with “diversity, equity and inclusion”; frozen most federal hiring; stripped thousands of civil servants of job protections and proposed subjecting them to political loyalty tests; summarily fired prosecutors and targeted FBI agents involved in prosecuting him; and attempted to end birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented migrants.

Some of those actions may not stand. The White House canceled a poorly drafted order halting federal payments after it touched off nationwide chaos. A federal judge blocked enforcement of Trump’s birthright citizenship decree, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

The thing is will anyone do anything about it if he ignores the courts? Will Congress step in and say "enough is enough"? Will they impeachment him? I doubt it very much,

Here in the U.S. the billionaires got Trump wrapped around their little fingers. Is Musk president or Trump? Are we going the way of other oligarchies?

* From Sister Mary Elephant by Cheech Marin