Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief.

This is FP Live.

So we dropped our new print issue this week.

It is called billionaire rule, and it explores a simple question.

Data increasingly shows that America is becoming more corrupt.

But what exactly does that mean? Is it becoming an oligarchy? A kleptocracy? And can we make

sense of America's trajectory by looking at how other countries treat their billionaires?

Let's say China or India.

There are five terrific essays in the magazine, and we've linked to each of them in the show

notes with gift links. The reasons we focused on this topic are obvious. The world's richest

man, Elon Musk, is now also the most powerful, unelected official in the world

as he slashes the American bureaucracy with relatively few checks and balances.

And yes, Musk is in a category of his own these days, but billionaires in general are empowered

by a particularly transactional era in the United States, with Donald

Trump offering tax cuts and deregulation as reasons for the ultra-rich to back him. All of this

raises lots of questions. What should the average American do? What should the country's

beleaguered opposition do? And I say all of this

with the caveat that most Americans blame both parties for corruption and inequality that have been on the

rise for decades now. Well, my guess this week is among a handful of Democrats who's been thinking a lot about inequality

and corruption.

He talks about it on social media every day and believes the Democratic Party needs a degree

of economic populism to appeal to a majority of Americans.

...