Yves here. I’m old enough to regard the idea of Sanders being called an “insurgent” for his political views to be hard to fathom. They are middle of the road circa 1980. And polls consistently show ideas the press has chosen to label as “progressive” like preserving or better yet strengthening Social Security, taxing the rich, more butter and less guns, to have had and continue to have majority support. So Sanders’ continuing to take ground is proof of how cloistered and self-interested our elites have become.

By Les Leopold, the director of the Labor Institute in New York. His latest book is Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice (Chelsea Green, 2015). Originally published at Alternet

Why are so many drawn to the Sanders message? It’s not because he’s a political outsider. (He’s a Senator who has spent his entire adult life in politics.) It’s not because he’s a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn. (Jews make up only about 2% of the American population.) And it’s not because he’s a self-declared socialist. (Few of us have any idea what that means in today’s global economy.)

Rather, it’s because so many of us want to stop our entire society from crumbling beneath the destructive power of runaway inequality.

Here are 10 crucial economic facts that provide the glue for the Sanders message. (The charts are taken from Runaway Inequality: An Activist’s Guide to Economic Justice.)

1. The Rich are Getting Richer, The Rest of Us are Not.

There always has been a significant gap between the top 1 percent and the rest of America. But that gap was kept under control largely through governmental tax, banking and labor policies.

You could make a lot of money in this country, but after the New Deal, unions made sure you paid a decent wage to your workers, and government made sure the wealthy provided ample tax revenues. This allowed working people also to enjoy a rising standard of living.

But as the chart below shows the bond has been broken. After 1980, the incomes of the top 1% exploded while the wages of the bottom 90% stagnated….and not by accident.

2. Wall Street/CEO Greed

Most of us haven’t had a real raise (after inflation) for more than a decade. Meanwhile we see our CEOs and their Wall Street partners rake in astronomical sums. The data backs up what we see and sense. As this chart shows, the gap between the pay of the top CEOs and the average worker has jumped from 45 to 1 in 1970 to an astounding 829 to one today.

The game is rigged and Sanders is calling them on it.