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Oligarchy (from Greek ὀλιγαρχία (oligarkhía); from ὀλίγος (olígos), meaning "a few", and ἄρχω (archo), meaning "to rule or to command")^[1][2][3] is a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people. These people could be distinguished by royalty, wealth, family ties, education, corporate, or military control. Such states are often controlled by a few prominent families who pass their influence from one generation to the next.

Throughout history, some oligarchies have been tyrannical, relying on public servitude to exist, although others have been relatively benign. Aristotle pioneered the use of the term as a synonym for rule by the rich,^[4] for which the exact term is plutocracy, but oligarchy is not always a rule by wealth, as oligarchs can simply be a privileged group, and do not have to be connected by bloodlines as in a monarchy. Some city-states from ancient Greece were oligarchies.

Examples[link]

Some other examples include the former Soviet Union where only members of the Communist Party were allowed to vote or hold office; the French First Republic government under the Directory; and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (only the nobility could vote). In the time of the ancient Greeks, Sparta was an oligarchy that clashed with the democratic city-state of Athens, (these two nations eventually clashed in the Peloponnesian war in which Sparta defeated Athens causing the city state to rule much of Greece for some time).^{[citation needed]}

A modern example of oligarchy could be seen in South Africa during the twentieth century. Here, the basic characteristics of oligarchy are particularly easy to observe, since the South African form of oligarchy was based on race. After the Second Boer War, a tacit agreement or understanding was reached between English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites. Together, they made up about twenty percent of the population, but this small percentage ruled the vast non-white and mixed-race population. Whites had access to virtually all the educational and trade opportunities, and they proceeded to deny this to the black majority even further than before.^{[citation needed]}

Although this process had been going on since the mid-17th- 18th century, after 1948 it became official government policy and became known worldwide as apartheid. This lasted until the arrival of democracy in South Africa in 1994, punctuated by the transition to a democratically-elected government dominated by the black majority.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union on 31 December 1991, privately owned Russia-based multinational corporations, including producers of petroleum, natural gas, and metal have become oligarchs. Privatization allowed executives to amass phenomenal wealth and power almost overnight. In May 2004, the Russian edition of Forbes identified 36 of these oligarchs as being worth at least $1 billion.^[5]

A well-known fictional oligarchy is represented by the Party in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Modern democracy[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Robert Michels believed that any political system eventually evolves into an oligarchy. He called this the iron law of oligarchy. According to this school of thought, modern democracies should be considered as oligarchies. In these systems, actual differences between viable political rivals are small, the oligarchic elite impose strict limits on what constitutes an acceptable and respectable political position, and politicians' careers depend heavily on unelected economic and media elites. Thus the popular phrase: there is only one political party, the incumbent party.

Corporatocracy[link]

Corporate oligarchy (Corporatocracy) is a form of power, governmental or operational, where such power effectively rests with a small, elite group of inside individuals, sometimes from a small group of educational institutions, or influential economic entities or devices, such as banks, commercial entities, lobbyists that act in complicity with, or at the whim of the oligarchy, often with little or no regard for constitutionally protected prerogative. Monopolies are sometimes granted to state-controlled entities, such as the Royal Charter granted to the East India Company, or privileged bargaining rights to unions (labor monopolies) with very partisan political interests.

Athenian techniques to prevent the rise of oligarchy[link]

Especially during the Fourth Century BC, after the restoration of democracy from oligarchical coups, the Athenians used the drawing of lots for selecting government officers in order to counteract what the Athenians acutely saw as a tendency toward oligarchy in government if a professional governing class were allowed to use their skills for their own benefit.^[6] They drew lots from large groups of adult volunteers as a selection technique for civil servants performing judicial, executive, and administrative functions (archai, boulē, and hēliastai).^[7] They even used lots for very important posts, such as judges and jurors in the political courts (nomothetai), which had the power to overrule the Assembly.^[8]

See also[link]

• Aristocracy
• Elitism
• Crony capitalism
• Democracy
• Dictatorship
• Form of government
• Kleptocracy
• Meritocracy
• Netocracy
• Oligopoly
• Plutocracy
• Political family
• Theocracy
• Timocracy
• Power behind the throne
• Russian oligarchs
• Fascism
• Anarchism

Authors[link]

• Vilfredo Pareto
• Gaetano Mosca
• Thomas R. Dye
• Robert Michels
• Plato
• Webster Tarpley

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• J. M. Moore, ed. (1986). Aristotle and Xenophon on democracy and oligarchy. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-02909-7. 
• Winters, Jeffrey A. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

External links[link]

• Online Text: Leonard Whibley, Greek Oligarchies: Their Character and Organisation (1869), still the only full-scale treatment of oligarchy in Classical Greece.
• M Hollingsworth and S Lansley, Londongrad, From Russia With Cash, 2009, 4th Estate
• Oligarchy USA, [1]

Mark Ames (born 3 October 1965) is a writer known for his work as a Moscow-based expatriate American journalist and editor. He is the founding editor of the satirical biweekly the eXile in Moscow, to which he regularly contributed before he returned to America. Ames has also written for the New York Press, The Nation, Playboy, The San Jose Mercury News, Alternet, Птюч Connection, GQ (Russian edition), and is the author of three books.

Biography[link]

Ames was raised in Saratoga, California, a newly urbanized town in the San Francisco Bay Area's Silicon Valley, where he attended an Episcopalian private school. He graduated from Saratoga High School in 1983.

After leaving Saratoga, Ames attended the University of California, Berkeley, while living with his father (his parents had divorced when Ames was eight years old). He later described how his college years shaped his later political views in a section of the book The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia:

I was a student at Berkeley in the late Reagan years. We had a lot of ideas back then, big dreams about getting famous and destroying the "Beigeocracy" that we thought stifled and controlled American Letters. Everything seemed possible then: world war, literary fame ... Anyway, something Really Big, with us at the center of it all. We'd ridicule the boring lefties, our enemies. We'd drop all sorts of drugs and go to the underground shows: Scratch Acid, Husker Du, Sonic Youth. It felt like something might happen, and soon.^[1]

After college, Ames lived in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Prague, and played briefly in a punk band.

In August 1991 he visited Europe, spending two weeks in St. Petersburg (at that time called Leningrad). Though he returned to live in Foster City, California, he continued thinking of Russia, and delved into Russian literature. After spending mid '92 to early '93 in Prague, Ames moved to Moscow. In 1995 he published "The Rise and Fall of Moscow's Expat 'Royalty'" in the English-language Moscow newspaper The Moscow Times, and was shortly thereafter hired by its competitor Living Here.^[2] In 1997 he left to establish the eXile, where he served as writer and editor.

In The eXile, Ames wrote on such topics as politics, organized crime in Russia, prostitution, and drug use. The paper played practical jokes on Pravda staffers and public figures including Mikhail Gorbachev. Chicago Reader contributor Martha Bayne wrote that, "Most notably, the Exile nurtures a peculiarly vicious and schizoid attitude toward women". Bayne notes a segment in his 2000 book where Ames describes becoming aroused when he heard a Russian girl was 15 instead of 16: "Right then my pervometer needle hit the red. I had to have her, even if she was homely... Her cunt was as tight as a cat's ass....I'd slept with mothers before--they're a lot wider."^[3]

In June 2008, the paper's website was closed down and Ames moved back to the U.S.^[4] Ames continues to edit the eXile in an online-only format: eXiledonline.^[5]

Married to a russian journalist Anastasia Ames since 2008

In February, 2010, Vanity Fair profiled Ames and The eXile.^[4]

Bibliography[link]

• The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia (ISBN 0-8021-3652-4). Co-authored with Matt Taibbi, and published in 2000 with a foreword by Edward Limonov.
• В Россию с любовью (Записки американского изгоя), Мама Пресс, 2002. (ISBN 5-902382-02-5) available in Russia. The title can be translated as To Russia with Love (Notes from an American Outcast).
• Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond, 2005 (ISBN 1-932360-82-4).

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Mark Ames

• The Exile - an English language, Moscow-based, semi-weekly alternative paper
• Exile Online - the new site of the Exile
• Democracy Now interview with Amy Goodman, Greg Palast, and Dan Briody 8 December 2003
• AlterNet, 3 October 2005, "A Brief History of Rage, Murder and Rebellion" - interview with Ames

Janet Tavakoli is an American author and structured finance expert based in Chicago. She has had three books published on credit derivatives, structured finance, and the 2008 global financial crisis.

Education and background[link]

Tavakoli grew up in the south side of Chicago, received a B.S. in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1975, and an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business in 1981.^[1]

After marrying an Iranian Ph.D. student in college, Tavakoli lived in Iran for over a year during the time the Shah was overthrown, leaving in 1979, three months after Ayatollah Khomeini returned.^[2][3]

Career[link]

Tavakoli has worked in finance since completing her M.B.A. in 1981. She has traded, structured, and sold derivatives and structured products in both New York and London. In addition, she has held senior positions in the global financial markets division at Westdeutsche Landesbank in London, the capital markets group for Bank One in Chicago, the Swap (finance) trading desk and mortgage-backed securities marketing for Merrill Lynch in New York, and MBS marketing to Japanese clients for PaineWebber (now UBS) in New York. She has also worked for Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Salomon Brothers and Bank of America.^[4]

She taught "Derivatives: Futures, Forwards, Options and Swaps" at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business as adjunct associate professor of finance.^[5]

Writing[link]

Tavakoli's book Dear Mr. Buffett: What an Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street (2009) uses her discussions with Warren Buffett on credit derivatives and structured finance as context for analyzing the global financial meltdown of 2008. The discussions began after Buffett invited her to lunch after receiving a copy of her book Credit Derivatives and Synthetic Structures (1998, 2001).^[6] This book, along with her Collateralized Debt Obligations and Structured Finance: New Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization (2003, re-published as Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization in 2008), outlines flaws in the methodology for rating structured financial products.

She has also written articles for The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Business Week, and other financial publications.^[5]

Criticism of TARP[link]

Tavakoli is an outspoken critic of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) for financial institutions.^[7] She points out that many decisions made appear to favour companies with connections to government officials making the decisions. In particular, she criticizes the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, headed by Timothy Geithner at the time, for deciding to pay Goldman Sachs and other financial firms 100 cents on the dollar for billions of dollars of troubled AIG credit default swaps,^[8] while other bond insurers have settled similar contracts for as little as ten cents on the dollar.^[9] AIG had been trying to persuade the banks to settle for a discount of 40 cents on the dollar.^[10]

Henry Paulson, the prime architect of the bailout, was CEO of Goldman Sachs at the time those CDS agreements were entered into. Geithner was later appointed Treasury Secretary by the Obama administration.^[11]

Works[link]

• Credit derivatives: a guide to instruments and applications, Wiley, 1998, ISBN 978-0-471-24656-5
• Credit derivatives & synthetic structures: a guide to instruments and applications, John Wiley and Sons, 2001, ISBN 978-0-471-41266-3
• Collateralized debt obligations and structured finance: new developments in cash and synthetic securitization, John Wiley and Sons, 2003, ISBN 978-0-471-46220-0
• Dear Mr. Buffett: what an investor learns 1,269 miles from Wall Street, John Wiley and Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-40678-6
• Structured Finance and Collateralized Debt Obligations: New Developments in Cash and Synthetic Securitization, John Wiley & Sons, 2008, ISBN 978-0-470-28894-8

Notes[link]

External links[link]

• Official website
• BusinessWeek Article
• University of Chicago Magazine Article
• C-SPAN Q&A interview with Tavakoli, April 19, 2009