In the US the term "informed electorate" is a joke. Big elections are advertising competitions. Or in the most recent case voting machine hacking.

"mainly selfmade wealth"

That doesn't exist, let's stop fucking pretending it does.

And this article is 10 years old. It has gotten so much worse.

Whenever I see the 1% or 99% numbers when discussing wealth inequality, this fact is the first thing that comes to mind. We need to use decimal points to get to the real ones in power. 1% contains a lot of people who have money, but are still out of the loop as the rest of us, or as Carlin said, "not in the Club". They are millionaires, but like they say, the difference between a million and a billion is about a billion.

And that's US - many Americans are in the 1% in worldwide numbers, with rough income numbers being around half a million income. Again, they may or may not be comfortable depending on their expenses, but having money doesn't mean you have power. It's the .1 that is the beginning of that, and the .01 is moving the pieces for everyone.

(The numbers are just estimates, there's gray areas everywhere, the point is the top people want us to be yelling at the top middle and ignore what they do.)

If my math is correct 158 families would be around .00005%. They have no clue what life is like for the average person yet they have so much influence. Gross.

Citizens United was the final straw in the downfall of America democracy.

It's been inevitable since.

Unless it's overturned it's over, and I don't think they can overturn it.

An oligarchy is what America has been for over a decade now officially. Every politician is bought and sold, told to vote on every bill by the companies lobbyists that line their pockets. Every vote is controlled by mass propaganda on every network and every corporate social media.

But we're a democracy, right?

wasn’t there some billionaire that ran for president, spent hundreds of millions and got like <1% of the vote?

The way to return democracy to the people is to limit the involvement of money. First step is to repeal "Citizens" United, the law that officially sold the US government to corporations and the wealthy under the guise of Freedom (as usual). Second, organizations (including but not limited to corporations) should be outright banned from political compaign contributions. Organizations aren't citizens. They can't vote. They shouldn't be allowed to pour money into elections.

In the end, when Trump is certified as the modern day hitler, these families need to be held accountable…. Like the soldiers of the concentration camps.

158 families isn't much to feed 300 million starving people. We need rules on who gets to eat the 0.01%

And they all have addresses.

if the people went after the wealthy first, they could use the spoils to fund the revolution

Gotten worse since 2015.

They visit each others mansions so they can make sure they are still keeping up with the other billionaires.

Tax them bitches