The last few days I've been reading Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. It's available here as a pdf:
I focused mainly on the recent past, WWII to the present. What was interesting about it was the increasing frequency of discussing the 1 percent concentration of wealth against the 99 percent. The book ends in 1999 before the disasters of the Bush Obama years.
So I speculate that 1 v. 99 came from Zinn's book. The pdf version is full of typos, some of which are unintelligible. This means it was quickly scanned and gone through very quickly to get it up on the web.
Many of the rhetorical passages near the end from the Bush-Clinton years are so familiar that they match much of the current speechs and discussion. Oddly it makes current rhetoric seem redundant. Have we really been saying the same thing for twelve years over and over? If we have, then it is testimony to the resistance of the US media, publishing channels, economic and political elites. It works something like the inverse of the big lie. If the big lie isn't working, maybe the big refusal works.
Happy birthday Guantanamo.
CG