by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds
That this level of incendiary outrage has seeped into the mainstream media tells us that the bill for America’s gluttony of inequality is long overdue.
Two primary trends may be reversing: wage earners–labor–may be finally starting to regain some of the share of Gross Domestic Income (GDI) lost to capital over the past 54 years, and economic class identity that collapsed in favor of individual identity–enabling the siphoning of $149 trillion in GDI from labor to capital since 1970–may be reviving.
The two trends are intertwined: the cultural dominance of identity politics came at the expense of economic class identity, which effectively blinded us as a nation to the multi-decade transfer of wealth from wage earners to owners / managers of capital.
If we are wondering how the bottom 90% have lost ground, we can start with the social-cultural blindness to the collapse of class identity which enabled the dominance of capital politically, economically and socially, as manifested in the rise of globalization and financialization, the tools used to transfer income from labor to capital.