Cash Rules Everything – Why do we always vote to keep oligarchs rich?

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

News, Society & Culture, Politics, Government

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2026

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Democratic rights and freedoms have expanded for a century or more, yet the super-rich have never been richer and wealth has never been shared less fairly. And we keep on voting to prop up systems that make a bad situation worse. Why? Political scientist and author Jeffrey Winters has a theory – that oligarchic power isn’t an unforeseen product of democracies, it’s designed into the system. So how do we fix it? He talks to Andrew Harrison about how to make democracies more… democratic. • Buy Jeffrey’s book The Blind Spot: How Oligarchs Dominate Our Democracies from our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund the podcast by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Back us on Patreon – www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and presented by Andrew Harrison. Producer: James Liddell. Audio production: Tom Taylor. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Music by Kenny Dickinson. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. www.podmasters.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:31.2	Some follow the noise.
0:33.6	Bloomberg follows the money.
0:37.4	Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling
0:39.4	AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. And when you see
0:46.0	the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at
0:53.0	Bloomberg.com.
0:57.0	Attention all passengers. The Uber ride for Jeff's rugby team will depart in five minutes from Platform 15. Your ride
1:07.0	comes with six toilets and a refreshments carriage that you'll empty within five minutes.
1:13.2	Thank you for booking your tickets on Uber.
1:16.9	Trains on Uber.
1:26.7	Hello and welcome back to the bunker. The original home of News Without the Nonsense, never mind the imitators. I'm Andrew Harrison. Today, we live, we think, in an unprecedented age of global oligarchs. The rich don't just get richer. They grab a greater and greater share of global wealth, with the richest 10% of people owning almost 90% of it, while everyday incomes around the world stagnate.
1:50.0	New technologies have produced new billionaires and new forms of power. Mark Zuckerberg,
1:54.6	Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and their ilk have amassed colossal fortunes and political influence
1:59.2	through their ownership of information technologies,
2:01.8	so much so that Trump took many of them on his trip to China. And the real surprise is that while
2:06.4	we tell ourselves we live in free and open democracies, we don't seem to be able to do very much
	...

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