Courtesy of Pam Martens.
(This article has been updated from one that originally ran at CounterPunch.org. We plan to continue to update it and run it periodically here at Wall Street On Parade. Please consider emailing it to friends and family members who have given up hope on creating change.)
A study conducted by Edward N. Wolff for the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in March 2010 made the following findings:
The richest 1 percent received over one-third of the total gain in marketable wealth over the period from 1983 to 2007. The next 4 percent also received about a third of the total gain and the next 15 percent about a fifth, so that the top quintile collectively accounted for 89 percent of the total growth in wealth, while the bottom 80 percent accounted for 11 percent.
Debt was the most evenly distributed component of household wealth, with the bottom 90 percent of households responsible for 73 percent of total indebtedness.
Wealth concentration in too few hands while the general populace is saddled with too much debt to buy the goods and services produced by the corporations, is a replay of the conditions leading to the crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression.
Writing in his book, “The Worldly Philosophers,” Robert Heilbroner explained the situation leading up to the depression of the 1930s:
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