How People Got Poor Since 1971

There are a lot of documentaries on YouTube explaining how neoliberalism/financialization or whatever you want to call it made everyone poor (except the 1%). It's actually extremely simple.

Money comes from banks and other financial activity like "selling stock".

The bankers have the first cut of the newly minted money. They lend it into existence. They pocket a reliable amount of no-risk money and have done that for a long time. It accelerated in 1971, but they've been doing that for hundreds of years.

Currently, corporations have the second cut of the newly minted money. The executives pocket a reliable amount of no-risk money and have done that really only in recent decades. A really great example of this is provided by the corporate lawyer at twitter who makes $17M a year--for what? Shrug. She's there with a bucket to get a scoop of the funny money cash and the rest of the scumbags in the twitter hierarchy are probably doing the same. Corporations really have a symbiotic relationship with the banks.

Corporate employees get the third cut. A lot of the money flowing through a corporation is from financial activity rather than sales revenue. Some companies lose money perpetually but always have funds.

The government is just another corporation, and generally speaking its employees have a better deal overall than corporate employees in terms of compensation and benefits.

Everyone else in the economy gets the scraps and leftovers. They have third or fourth or fifth hand access to the wall street funny money.