Is our current system "benefiting the few instead of the many"?

A Reuters column by Peter Apps (here) identifies the widening wealth gap as central to growing discontentment and possible increased political instability.  He quotes U.S. counterinsurgency specialist Patricia DeGennaro, a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and professor at New York University, as seeing a wider "global uprising" or "worldwide insurgency," with the rising wealth gap as key:

"That is at the root of the insurgency.  In essence, people are tired of how the system is benefiting the few instead of the many ….”

William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is also quoted:

“[W]hen you have a large middle class that is shrinking and where you have alarm and despondency over the future, that is where politics can become very volatile and even dangerous. That's what we saw in Europe in the 1930s.”

Apps cites the rise of the right-wing Tea Party as being “widely seen as part of a trend toward extremes and volatility.”

As I've noted recently (here), whatever rising tide there is left--it appears to no longer be lifting all boats.  And, as I've also noted previously (here), it has been written that: "REVOLUTIONS arise from inequalities . . . ." 

SJP