contracts". (This "camouflaged" compensation need not become public knowledge as American business law does not require its reporting.) The top 0.1% Besides corporate executives and managers, the other occupation/industry with large numbers of top earners are professionals in the finance industry. The two groups make up almost 60% of the top 0.1%. (In contrast, entertainment celebrities and sports superstars combined form only 3% of this elite one-household-in-a-thousand.) While corporate management in America has benefited mightily from its 'capture' from stockholders of boards of directors, whose nomination, pay and perks management has strong influence over. The financial industry's success has come from pushing government to deregulate that industry and making risky investments from which it has privatized the gains and socialized the losses with government bailouts. The "political cause" of inequality Hacker and Pierson describe the political action that has "abandoned the middle class" in the US in favor of making "the rich richer" in the last 30+ years as being the work of "modern, efficient organizations operating in a much less modern efficient political system." Those organizations strove successfully to cut taxes (estate and capital gains taxes) and tax rates for the wealthy, and to eliminate or prevent any countervailing power or oversight of corporate managers—including private litigation, efforts to empower boards of directors and shareholders, the regulation of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and labor unions. The action in financial markets, corporate governance, industrial relations, and taxation, came from both changing policy and preventing it from being changed—"drift". Policy changes include tax cuts and legislation such as the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act that repealed the Depression-era Glass–Steagall Act and allowed the merger of consumer banks, investment banks, and insurance companies. Drift, or preventing policy changes to keep "pace with changing economic conditions", included not updating labor laws in response to new corporate anti-union tactics, not enacting stock option regulations in response to changing executive pay packages, and not updating securities regulations in response to the growth of dangerously risky but profitable Wall Street speculation. One example is an attempt in 1993 by Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to "moderate the explosion of CEO pay, not through burdensome interference but through the simple enforcement of honest, transparent accounting" by requiring the expensing of stock options by corporations. They were prevented by "legions of businesspeople" and intervention by congress, led by Senator Joe Lieberman. Another is the "carried-interest" loophole (costing tax