I think a story about an ultra wealthy ruling class that stands behind the public political class is not going to get published in mainstream outlets. I mean it will if it's about Russia or China or historical periods like "the Gilded Age", but I guess you don't see it talked about for modern day West.
Well, I think there are some good reasons for that. It's traditionally been an antisemetic trope, and often smoothly blends into antisemitism (Rothschilds, etc). It's also one of those things where the evidence is by necessity weak, and you really can't write weakly-evidenced critical articles about rich people without getting sued.
Personally, I'm very glad that this isn't a mainstream way of understanding problems. Rich people are kind of fungible, in that they usually don't want to pay taxes, but other than that usually have about the same range of politics as everybody else. Focusing on individual malfeasance tends to protect dysfunctional systems.
> about the same range of politics as everybody else
We're not talking about "rich people", that's fine and well. We're talking about classes with .5B+ levels of wealth, where it's not about subscribing to politics, it's about literally having the ability to influence politics, should they wish to. Fyi every country and civilization, ever, has had powerful interest groups that seek to control politics to further secure their position and interests. This is not surprising to anyone that this exists. Maybe the main difference today is that in this era of shell companies and the anonymity that comes with mass, global societies, it's able to be less public than before, e.g. way less public than when societies actually had open aristocracies not that long ago.
