Those crafty little boogers have proven to the world that they can do what even they said could not be done.

Oxfam recently reported that just 80 people possess the same quantity of wealth as 3.5 billion others.

How is that possible when capitalism is supposed to be the great equalizer – the engine for prosperity and opportunity for all?

It was not supposed to be this way.

On RT’s Crosstalk (above), economist Michael Hudson discusses how according to the rules of economics (that they teach us), this astonishing concentration of wealth should be impossible:

“According to every economics textbook and all the Nobel prizes for the last 40 years, this can’t be happening. According to the economics textbooks, the wealthy get rich by adding to production. You earn what you make and they’re wealth creators. But in fact what they’re producing isn’t wealth, it’s poverty. And they do this largely because—I think you can think of them as being creditors. They’re creditors to the bottom 99 percent that are debtors and renters. If you look at these wealthiest families, there are a number of common denominators: They didn’t earn their income[.]”

That’s because the 1% don’t “work.”

They create money from thin air and collect rent on it, otherwise known as interest. They then buy everything in sight, causing massive inflation in everything from land to commodities to utilities, and charge rent on those too.

And that’s just the front end. On the back end, the 1% don’t pay taxes, that’s for everyone else.

Only poor people pay taxes. That’s why so much money is spent on accountants . . . in addition to accountants, of course, the 1% buy politicians. They buy control of government. You have to be in control of government in order to be too big to jail. Under the old rules, the 1% would all be in jail today and the rest of us would be on the outside [of course, it’s the opposite instead] . . .

In short, the 1% got all this wealth by buying our government, which they couldn’t have done without controlling the money supply and charging interest on every dollar that’s spent:

By buying government you buy the right to privatize the public domain and almost all of this wealth that’s been concentrated has been a privatization of natural resources, of land and really buying what used to be called the public domain, so the rich now are really replacing government. So while they talk about being anti-government , meaning anti-taxes, they’re all for government as a vehicle to give them control over natural resources [oil & gas] and the natural monopolies [money, roads & bridges] to turn the rest of the [people] into rent payers.

And this boys and girls is how only 80 people control as much wealth as 3.5 billion of the rest of us. And it’s getting worse every day, since in this economy money doesn’t trickle down. It gets sucked up.