It's a big club, and you ain't in it

[Hortensis]

84. Read this and pep way up. You're very wrong, you know.

But that's good! This article below does not address the fact that we dumped the 1% before, proving it's not at all impossible. It just takes being...well, on average a lot less passive and accepting, the entire effort required of the people in that era being GO VOTE, CHECK THE DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATE. The difference is that a somewhat higher percentage than usual did just that.

"Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong."

But the researchers critiquing the paper found that middle-income Americans and rich Americans actually agree on an overwhelming majority of topics. Out of the 1,779 bills in the Gilens/Page data set, majorities of the rich and middle class agree on 1,594; there are 616 bills both groups oppose and 978 bills both groups favor. That means the groups agree on 89.6 percent of bills.

That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree, and even there the disagreements are small. On average, the groups' opinion gaps on the 185 bills is 10.9 percentage points; so, say, 45 percent of the middle class might support a bill while 55.9 percent of the rich support it.

Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant. And there are some funny examples in the list of middle-class victories. For instance, the middle class got what they wanted on public financing of elections: in all three 1990s surveys included in the Gilens data, they opposed it, while the rich favor it. That matches up with more recent research showing that wealthy people are more supportive of public election funding.

So it's hard to say definitively, based on this data, that the rich are getting what they want more than the middle class. And it's hard to claim, as Gilens and Page do, that "ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots." Even when they disagree with elites, ordinary citizens get what they want about half the time.

Just imagine what we'd get if we bothered to demand it. Oh, yes, we've done that and look at what we did get for our bother!

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study