Santino Regilme in Public Seminar: 'Naked Oligarchy: How Billionaires Captured Power and Hollowed Out Democracy'
In a recent article for the magazine Public Seminar, Santino Regilme argues that democracy across continents is being quietly usurped by a transnational billionaire class.
He shows how 'oligarchic capture' operates not through overt corruption alone but via legal and quasi-legal mechanisms—golden visas, offshore trusts, media empires, political influence, and regulatory loopholes—that hollow out democratic substance while preserving its formal trappings.
Drawing on case studies from Elon Musk’s tech–political nexus in the United States to dynastic business families in the Philippines, Kremlin-aligned magnates in Russia, and corporate–populist alliances in India and Brazil, Regilme maps the shared infrastructure enabling extreme wealth to dictate policy and public discourse. He introduces the concept of ‘necrostratification’ to describe how proximity to capital now determines access to safety, dignity, and even life itself.
The article offers a clear roadmap for reclaiming democracy: progressive wealth and inheritance taxes; abolition of investor-visa schemes; public control of essential services; and revitalised labour unions and economic democracy. Regilme concludes that preserving democratic promise demands confronting and dismantling the systemic insulation of elite wealth from public accountability.
The Public Seminar is a magazine focusing on ideas, politics, and culture published by the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School for Social Research in New York City.
Want to know more?
Read the full article in Public Seminar.