Video: America is a Caste System & Black America is at the Bottom Explained
Let’s talk first about money-even if money is only one part of what makes the new aristocrats special.
There is a familiar story about rising inequality in the United States, and its stock characters are well known. The villains are the fossil-fueled plutocrat, the Wall Street fat cat, the callow tech bro, and the rest of the so-called top 1 percent. The good guys are the 99 percent, otherwise known as “the people” or “the middle class.” The arc of the narrative is simple: Once we were equal, but now we are divided. The story has a grain of truth to it. But it gets the characters and the plot wrong in basic ways. It is in fact the top 0.1 percent who have been the big winners in the growing concentration of wealth over the past half century.
According to the UC Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the 160,000 or so households in that group held 22 percent of America’s wealth in 2012, up from 10 percent in 1963. If you’re looking for the kind of money that can buy elections, you’ll find it inside the top 0.1 percent alone.
Related: The birth of a new american aristocracy
By Attorney Antonio Moore