Robert Reich pointed to this particular statistic recently in his essay posted at Alternet, Don't Bank on All of Bernie's Supporters Making an Easy Switch to Hillary: Over forty percent (40%) of all political contributions in 2012 "came from the richest 0.01 percent of American households." Almost 42% (41.8% to be precise) actually.

That's up from 30.8% in 2004, the previous high water mark in any election year, 29.2% in 2008 and 30.1% in 2010. It represents roughly a 36% increase in campaign funding coming from as few as 25,000 people since 2004, and a 43% increase over 2008, the last Presidential election year before 2012 for which we have numbers.

Perhaps more astounding, is the fact that twenty-six years ago, the percentage contributed by the wealthiest of the wealthy was only 15.5%, and actually fell below 10% in 1982. So, using 1980 as our baseline, the overall percentage of political campaign contributions by the .01 percent rose a remarkable One Hundred and Seventy percent (170%) over a 22 year period. Here's a chart from CrowdPac that shows the rise in contributions by the elite of the elites on the income scale during that period.

No one knows how high the number will be this election cycle, but it's safe to say that campaign contributions by the richest people in America, a thin sliver of all registered voters, will likely exceed the 40% figure, again. One estimate suggests that over $5 Billion will be spent this year on the Presidential race alone, nearly double the spending in 2012. I think it is safe to assume most of that money will not come from $27 contributions by Bernie Sanders' supporters.

In private conversations, allies to [Hillary Clinton] the former secretary of State are predicting that the campaign totals on their end alone might surpass $1.5 billion and go as high as $2 billion.

Don Peebles, the real estate mogul and top political fundraiser who served on President Obama’s national finance committee, predicted that Clinton would see “significant fundraising …[and] record-breaking financial reports.”

Obviously, we aren't just talking about contributions to Republicans. For a very long time now, donations from the .01 percent has exceeded any other source of financial support to the Democratic Party.

Democrats first earned more contributions from corporations than labor in the mid 1980s. Business political action committees alone contributed $159 million to Democrats during the 2010 cycle. Union PACs contributed $67 million to Democrats by comparison, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). That comparison also underestimates the weight of business through soft money and private donations. "On the whole, business has a substantial advantage in campaign finance over labor," said Doug Weber, a senior researcher at CRP.

As Thomas Franks has noted, this reversal in who dominates the donor lists for Democrats was not an accident. It happened by design. Franks specifically calls out the actions of Bill Clinton during his eight years in the Oval Office as the one person most responsible for setting the table for the takeover of the Democratic party by the moneyed elites.

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Bill Clinton's critical support for the passage of NAFTA (a treaty his Republican predecessor in office, George Bush Sr. negotiated but failed to win approval from Congress), continued the decimation of the American Middle Class.

[Twenty] years after NAFTA took effect, it has failed to deliver on many of the promises Clinton and others made. Thousands of U.S. jobs have vanished as companies sought lower-wage workers in Mexico. Meanwhile, NAFTA has generated more poverty in Mexico, forcing millions of citizens to migrate to the United States in search of work. [...]

[N]ot only haven’t the promises made by its proponents come true, but in most instances the actual opposite occurred. For instance, listening to President Clinton made my blood boil, because in no year of NAFTA were 200,000 jobs created. Rather, now 20 years out, one million net U.S. jobs have been lost to the growing trade deficit with Mexico and Canada under NAFTA, and there’s a list of an explicit 400,000 with Canada, 845,000 total jobs lost to NAFTA, specific workers certified under just one narrow program called Trade Adjustment Assistance that’s very hard to qualify for.

In a similar vein, the massive consolidation of both the financial and telecommunications sectors occurred on his watch, in large part due to Clinton's own efforts to dismantle federal regulatory schemes that governed those industries and protected the public. Indeed, arguably Clinton's success at financial deregulation helped set the table for the derivatives bubble that imploded the economy in 2008.

Yet, only a few years later, after the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury bailed out these "too big to fail" banks, financial monstrosities such as Goldman Sachs are larger and more profitable than they were before the crisis. And practically no one among these large firms that actively defrauded investors and crashed the world's economies has been prosecuted for their crimes under the administration of a Democratic President.

Here are the promises President Obama made to the American public to hold big banks accountable for the financial crisis that plunged the country into the Great recession.

In 2009:

On May 20, 2009, at the signing into law of both the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act and the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act, President Obama said:

“This bill nearly doubles the FBI’s mortgage and financial fraud program, allowing it to better target fraud in hard-hit areas. That’s why it provides the resources necessary for other law enforcement and federal agencies, from the Department of Justice to the SEC to the Secret Service, to pursue these criminals, bring them to justice, and protect hardworking Americans affected most by these crimes. It’s also why it expands DOJ’s authority to prosecute fraud that takes place in many of the private institutions not covered under current federal bank fraud criminal statutes — institutions where more than half of all subprime mortgages came from as recently as four years ago.”

Then, again, in 2012, at his State of the Union address:

“Tonight, I’m asking my Attorney General to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and leading state attorneys general to expand our investigations into the abusive lending and packaging of risky mortgages that led to the housing crisis. (Applause.) This new unit will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners, and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans. Now, a return to the American values of fair play and shared responsibility will help protect our people and our economy.”

In private, however, he was telling the CEO's of these Big Banks that "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." And he kept his word. Other than a mere handful of fines meted out, Wall Street has been let off the hook by the Obama administration for its reckless and fraudulent activities.

The Justice Department reached agreements with [JPMorgan Chase and] other Wall Street banks, among them Citigroup and Bank of America, using a similar playbook: Threaten public disclosure of behavior that looks criminal and then, in exchange for keeping it sealed, extract a huge financial settlement. No one individual, or group of individuals, is held accountable. No predawn raids of Park Avenue apartments are made. No one gets arrested. No one gets publicly shamed.

It's well established that many people who voted for President Obama remain extremely disappointed that he failed to follow through on his promise to crack down on the financial industry. A 2014 audit report issued by the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Inspector General openly castigated the outright failure of the DOJ to enforce the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009, and exposed the misleading statements and outright falsehoods that the DOJ publicized as successes in its alleged crack down against the big banks:

“The Attorney General announced that the initiative resulted in 530 criminal defendants being charged, including 172 executives, in 285 criminal indictments or informations filed in federal courts throughout the United States during the previous 12 months. The Attorney General also announced that 110 federal civil cases were filed against over 150 defendants for losses totaling at least $37 million, and involving more than 15,000 victims. According to statements made at the press conference, these cases involved more than 73,000 homeowner victims and total losses estimated at more than $1 billion.

“Shortly after this press conference, we requested documentation that supported the statistics presented. … Over the following months, we repeatedly asked the Department about its efforts to correct the statistics. … Specifically, the number of criminal defendants charged as part of the initiative was 107, not 530 as originally reported; and the total estimated losses associated with true Distressed Homeowners cases were $95 million, 91 percent less than the $1 billion reported at the October 2012 press conference. …

“Despite being aware of the serious flaws in these statistics since at least November 2012, we found that the Department continued to cite them in mortgage fraud press releases. … According to DOJ officials, the data collected and publicly announced for an earlier FFETF mortgage fraud initiative – Operation Stolen Dreams – also may have contained similar errors.”

However, when one considers that in 2008, the financial industry accounted for 20% of all the donations the Obama campaign received, his administration's lax enforcement of the laws regarding Wall Street excesses do not appear, in retrospect, to be all that shocking. Even in n 2012, when Wall Street poured money into the campaign of the President's Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, one of their own, Obama still managed to rake in over $30 million in contributions from the financial sector. Wall Street apparently continued to benefit from their largess to the President, even after they failed to support him as strongly as they did in 2008. The clear implication one can draw is that Obama held off going after the Big Banks in large part because they represent a significant source of campaign funding for the Democratic party.

Meanwhile, what did Labor, one of the Democratic Party's traditional supporters receive for their support? More trade deals. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, opposed by the AFL-CIO, as well as by many other unions. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), for which President Obama is actively lobbying during his current European trip. Another deal that most major American labor unions oppose. Labor's support on election day is taken for granted by the Democrats, because, where else do they have to go?

This year, Hillary Clinton is making many of the same promises that President Obama once made. She now opposes the TPP, unless it can be made better. She has promised to get tough and crack down on Wall Street in language eerily similar to that President Obama once voiced:

Clinton's plan includes tax on high-frequency trading, closing the hedge-fund loophole of the Volcker Rule under Dodd-Frank, and making individual actors and banks more accountable when they break the law.

In going after individuals responsible for financial calamity, Clinton would require that "would require that large financial institutions pay for a portion of major civil or criminal fines from the incentive-based pay of culpable employees, their supervisors, and the relevant senior executives of the firm—anyone who was responsible for or should have caught the problem."

"Moreover, she would empower regulators to require that senior executives leave their jobs when particularly egregious misconduct takes place under their supervision. Her bottom line is simple: supervisors and senior executives should be held accountable when wrongdoing happens on their watch," the text goes on to say.

"Clinton believes that the best way to deter corporate wrongdoing is to hold individuals accountable for their misconduct. She would enforce our laws against the individuals who break them—plain and simple. That includes holding corporate officers and supervisors accountable when they knew about misconduct by their subordinates and failed to prevent it or stop it," the text provided to POLITICO says. "When people commit crimes on Wall Street, they will be prosecuted and imprisoned."

It sounds good. The problem for Clinton, however, is the same one President Obama faced. The Big Banks own the Democratic party. The securities and investment industry is the largest contributor to her campaign. Many of the biggest donors to her largest Super Pac, Priorities USA Action, have deep ties to Wall Street, hedge funds and other financial institutions.

As for her positions on those trade agreements, the TPP and the TTIP, that labor opposes, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce clearly believes she will support them after she's elected, despite what she is saying now.

The Chamber president said he expected Hillary Clinton would ultimately support the TPP if she becomes the Democratic nominee for president and is elected. He argued that she has publicly opposed the deal chiefly because her main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has also done so. “If she were to get nominated, if she were to be elected, I have a hunch that what runs in the family is you get a little practical if you ever get the job,” he said.

And that's the problem, isn't it? When any candidate, or party, depends so heavily on the top .01 percent, the wealthiest 25,000 people in America, to fund their political campaigns, it becomes awfully hard to say no when they come calling for favors. And if the past is prologue, that is exactly what will happen, regardless of whatever Candidate Clinton, and many, many other Democrats running for political office are saying now to appease the voters they are sure will turn out to vote for them come this November.