Page 147 - Mike Ratner CC - WISR Complete Dissertation - v6

Oligarchy Theorists

Some contemporary authors have characterized current conditions in the United States as

oligarchic in nature. (Kroll, 2010; Starr, 2012) Simon Johnson wrote that "the reemergence of an

American financial oligarchy is quite recent", a structure which he delineated as being the "most

advanced" in the world. (Johnson, 2014) Jeffrey A. Winters wrote that "oligarchy and democracy

operate within a single system, and American politics is a daily display of their interplay."

(Winters, 2011 September 28) The top 1% of the U.S. population by wealth in 2007 had a larger

share of total income than at any time since 1928. (Shaw & Stone, 2011) In 2011, according

to PolitiFact and others, the top 400 wealthiest Americans "have more wealth than half of all

Americans combined." (Kertscher, 2011; Moore, 2011 March 5; Moore, 2011 March 7; Pepitone

2010)

In 1998 Bob Herbert of The New York Times referred to modern American plutocrats as

"The Donor Class" (Herbert, 1998; Confessore, Cohen, & Yourish, 2015) (list of top donors)

(Lichtblau & Confessore, 2015) and defined the class, for the first time, (McCutcheon, 2014) as

"a tiny group—just one-quarter of 1 percent of the population—and it is not representative of the

rest of the nation. But its money buys plenty of access." (Herbert, 1998)

French economist Thomas Piketty states in his 2013 book, Capital in the Twenty-First

Century, that "the risk of a drift towards oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism about

where the United States is headed." (Piketty, 2014)

A study conducted by political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton

University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University was released in April 2014 (Gilens &

Page, 2014, p. 564-581), which stated that their "analyses suggest that majorities of the American

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