Chris Hedges lays it out. A very powerful essay:

[moondust]

2. My hunch

is that a lot of that rich white money was captured not by performing well in the marketplace or by knowing how to do anything particularly useful but by knowing the right people on the inside of Wall Street/hedge funds, corporate management, and/or Congress. In other words, some variation on insider trading/"networking." It could be so common and refined by now that the SEC could never keep up even if they wanted to.

I, too, am sick of the degradation and hate heaped on those less corrupt/fortunate.