Terrible writing.

I'll sum it up: hard working people in the bottom half of the "top 1%" are not evil power-brokers but the most successful professionals. You have to look at the top 0.5 or top 0.1% (I'd argue that even 0.1% is generous) before engaging "the corridors of power", which consists of financial and real estate elites as well as contractors exploiting corrupt government officials. Is this news?

A more interesting exposition might be the ruse that exists because Americans conflate these two classes of rich. It has all sorts of pernicious cultural effects. American conservatism is founded on the false belief that the $5m/year bankers are merely scaled-up versions of the $400k/year neurosurgeon who has been working hard since he was 6... when in fact, they're totally different.

This is fairly important if one looks at where revolutions begin. They usually start from the high end from the middle class, among people who are "rich" but not especially powerful. The American colonists were very wealthy, but had no clout because they were 3000 miles away from those making the decisions. The French revolutionary thought leaders were wealthy salon denizens, although far from the court at Versailles, and therefore increasingly out-of-power as the clouds darkened over France. History describes such revolutionaries, radicals, and agitators as "middle class" in hindsight (they're our heroes, and the U.S. associates "middle class" reflexively with virtue) but these people did, in fact, come overwhelmingly from the richest ~5 percent. The American "Founding Fathers" were downright rich. Revolutionary agitation usually comes when hard-working, intelligent, and previously fortunate people become out of power and hit a ceiling, either because society is deeply stagnant or because they're actively being deprived of autonomy. Eventually, conflict between the small, closed, social-network-based "upper" elite and the larger, fluid, merit-based "upper-middle" elite reaches a boiling point. It was this way at the end of the 18th century in America and France, and it will very likely be this way in the major conflict of the first third of the 21st century. The danger is that the conservative American has been misled into believing that the more noble elite ("elitist liberal intellectuals") is the oppressor while the truly damaging elite is held up as the good one, as if there were any similarity between a $20m/year, fifth-generation-wealthy banker and "Joe the Plumber". There's not. But conservative Americans have been led to believe that bankers are hard-working people just like them while "intellectuals" are an elitist enemy oppressor. Culture is, in the U.S., slowly replacing race as the elite's favorite divide-and-conquer mechanism. American conservatism is a machine for driving a wedge between the people who are trying to save this society ("liberal intellectuals", although neither word should be pejorative) and the common people of the country they are trying to save.

No news in the OP. The world is run by a morally debased and increasingly incompetent oligarchy, heavily intertwined with the banking system and with about 40% of its membership in the U.S. upper class. That was only news in 2008 to people who weren't paying attention.