I thought I had become inured to regular reports about wealth inequality, but the latest analysis by Oxfam has me newly outraged (“Oxfam report cites sharp rise in wealth inequality,’’ Business, Jan. 19). Ponder this: 62 human beings now have as much combined wealth as fully half of the earth’s population — a whopping 3.5 billion people.

The report makes it clear that an unholy trinity of deregulation, privatization, and offshore tax dodging are the main reasons for such astronomically lopsided wealth creation.

This appalling result would not be tolerated for a moment if poor and working-class people were even a fraction as organized to fight for their economic interests as are the ultra-wealthy. The economic story of our lifetime is how super-rich, extremely class-conscious people, such as the Koch brothers, have successfully bent the entire political system to their will, buying influence everywhere with vast sums while inundating us with decades of self-serving propaganda extolling the virtues of our so-called free enterprise system.

Don’t look to centrist Democrats like the Clintons or Barack Obama as saviors. Thoroughly compromised on this issue, they represent lost hopes, having joined Republicans long ago in supplication before the altar of Wall Street greed.

Bryan L. Tucker

Jamaica Plain