Truest statement of the week

San Francisco City College political scientist Rick Baum’s analysis  of Federal Reserve Board data shows that the top one percent of the population has increased its share of the national wealth from 23.3% in 1989 to 31.1% in the first quarter of 2019 – a boost of over 33 percent in just a generation and a half. Meanwhile, beginning in 2014 under President Obama, the share of wealth held by the bottom 90 percent dwindled to less than that amassed by the One Percent for the first time since 1989.
The neoliberal policies imposed by both halves of the corporate electoral duopoly over the last 30 years have been highly profitable to the top 1%, and especially to the billionaire class, whose ranks have increased from 55 in 1989  to 412 in 2012,the mid-point of Barack Obama’s presidency, to 609 in 2018 . Baum’s stats show the “average person in the top 1% holds net wealth that is worth 1,200 times the net wealth of an average person among the poorest 50% of the U.S. population.” 
Possibly even more disturbing, is that the top one-tenth of one percent (.1%) of the population --  households making $2.757 million a year  -- now number almost 200,000 families, a cohort big enough to create and inhabit a large and coherent social world of its own. From their rich enclaves in every state of the country, this formidable “base” of truly wealthy folks effectively dictate the politics of their regions for the benefit of themselves and the oligarchs at the top of the pyramid. 

-- Glen Ford, "Why the rich want to bury Bernie, the not-really-Socialist" (BLACK AGENDA REPORT).