ROBERT REICH:

Unfortunately, the game is rigged.

Just over a year ago, two political scientists, one from Princeton, one from Northwestern, Gilens and Page, did a study looking very carefully at about over 2,000 policy issues. And their conclusion was that the wealthy and big corporations and Wall Street were the only ones that had any influence.

The average American had literally no influence at all.

According to an investigation by The New York Times, half of all the money contributed so far to Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, $176 million, has come from just 158 families, along with the companies they own or control.

I used to think — and I used to write about it — inequality as being the result of globalization, technological change. But what has happened, particularly over the last 20 years, is that there is a third factor, political power. It is this vicious cycle of the wealthy and big corporations and Wall Street getting rule changes, legal changes that advantage them and really disadvantage most other people.