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The Heist explores how American capitalism produces significant insecurities and large income and wealth inequalities for 90 percent of the population. It looks back over the past 50 years to see how the rich and corporations, in league with the American conservative political movement in both the Republican and Democratic parties, have transformed American life. The most obvious indicator is that labor productivity ($s of output per hour of labor) increased by over 60% during this period, while average wages only rose by 14%.

For example, if the income trends that characterized the period from the end of WWII to 1975 had continued through the past 50 years, a worker at the middle of the population would have earned $92,000 in 2018 instead of the $50,000 actually earned.1

This decoupling of wages and productivity produced a transfer of over $47 trillion from the bottom 90% of the population to the top 10%, with the vast majority of that income ending up in the hands of the top 1%. The book seeks to explain how this happened.

$47 trillion from 2018 updated to $79 trillion at the end of 20232

Building on economic ideas calling for free markets, low or no regulation, and small government, American conservatives mobilized the racist, nativist, anti-immigrant, and Protestant fundamentalist religious tendencies embedded in American culture to push this economic agenda forward.

The book explores the surge in ownership concentration in virtually every market, resulting in a handful of large corporations dominating. This occurred because the new conservative politics ended longstanding government policies of anti-trust enforcement that dated back to the turn of the 20th century. This new wave of monopolization crushed competition, stifled unions, and lowered wages for workers and payments to suppliers while suppressing competitors and innovation. The globalization of the world economy accompanied these changes. This produced a mass export of US jobs by American corporations, mainly to China and Mexico, in search of the lowest-wage workers possible.

The Heist Playbook

  • Mobilize divisive American issues in the political sphere – race, religion, nativism, individualism
  • Energetic, well-funded participation in educational, institutional, and media  processes – popular press, think tanks, universities, etc.
  • Rich & corporations control the government 
    • buy politicians in both major parties – dark money 
    • army of lobbyists in Washington and rotating seats
    • regulatory capture
    • target
      • low/no tax rates
      • tax subsidies
      • reduced tax enforcement
      • reduced anti-trust actions & finance regulations
      • little enforcement of labor laws – hostility to unions
      • reduce enforcement of environmental laws
  • Secret, anonymous corporations, banks, & individuals 
  • Small government – deregulation
  • Free markets – ending in much greater market concentration, monopolization
  • Privatization of government functions
  • Globalization – free trade and free movement of money
  • Intensification of insecurities for the bottom 90% – low pay, poor benefits, high housing costs, student loans, poor healthcare, and more. Invoke “personal responsibility” 
  • Financialization – 
    • extracting money instead of creating new products & services
    • speculation and rent-seeking

Accompanying these changes was the deregulation of the finance industry and a shift in corporate objectives from producing goods and services to extracting as much money as possible in the shortest amount of time. These changes have swelled the bank accounts of top corporate managers so that the ratio between CEO to worker pay has risen from 25 to 1 in the 1960s to over 350 to 1 today. In addition, regulation changes created a whole new method of extracting money from corporations: stock buybacks. This created a multi-trillion-dollar transfer of corporate profits into the hands of shareholders and top management.

This has created a landscape of intensified insecurities for the bottom 90% of Americans. Jobs, housing, healthcare, food, education, family life, mental health, transportation, the environment, retirement, and more have become significantly more troubled than at the beginning of this 50-year period. This brief review examines each of these insecurities.

Beyond this story of the $79 trillion heist, the book explores many other features of American capitalism and capitalism in general. Particular attention is paid to the finance sector and its rampant speculation and instabilities.

The book closes with a progressive agenda to reverse the changes made in the economy over the past fifty years and build a significantly more equitable and sustainable society.

Footnotes

  1. Carter C. Price and Kathryn A. Edwards, “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018” (RAND Corporation, September 14, 2020), https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html.
  2. Price, Carter C. “Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023: Extending Previous Work.” RAND Corporation, February 17, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-2.html.