The Rotting Corpse of Capitalism: What the Fuck Actually Happened?

Well it was a 1-2-3 Punch.....

The Great Robbery We Never Saw

Do you ever feel like you're working harder than your parents did, yet somehow falling further behind? Like the American Dream has been reduced to just staying afloat while the ultra-wealthy float by on their goddamn yachts bought with YOUR productivity?

Well, buckle up, because I'm about to rip off the band-aid and expose the festering wound beneath American capitalism. A wound that started bleeding in 1971 when Richard Nixon severed our currency from gold, oozed pus through Carter's stagflation misery, and became gangrenous during Reagan's "trickle-down" fantasy.

You're not imagining things. You're not lazy. You're not entitled. You're being systematically fucked over by economic policies designed to siphon wealth upward for the past fifty years.

And it all started with what economists blandly call "the Nixon Shock" – though the real shock has been watching the middle class bleed out slowly for decades afterward.

Can you feel your pulse quickening? That tight sensation in your chest? That's economic anxiety, baby – and it's a feature, not a bug, of the system they built.

In this article, I'll walk you through how these three presidential administrations fundamentally broke American capitalism, transforming it from an economic system that lifted millions into a rigged game that trapped them in debt servitude.

The taste of this betrayal is bitter. The smell of corruption is rank. The sound of working families struggling is deafening. The sight of growing tent cities juxtaposed against gleaming skyscrapers is obscene. And if you reach out your hand, you can touch the cold hard reality that we've been sold out.

Nixon’s Golden Betrayal

On August 15, 1971, President Richard Nixon appeared on television and casually announced the economic equivalent of detonating a nuclear bomb. With a few words, he ended the international monetary system that had maintained global economic stability since World War II. That day, Nixon unilaterally canceled the direct convertibility of the United States dollar to gold.

Why should you give a flying fuck about some obscure monetary policy change from over fifty years ago?

Because that moment – that single decision – is when they untethered money from reality. That's when they gave themselves the power to create currency out of thin air, devaluing your labor while inflating their assets. That's when they removed the last constraint on government spending and banker excess. That's when the game was rigged for good.

The stench of Nixon's decision still permeates our economy today. Before the Nixon Shock, a dollar was worth something tangible. It represented a specific amount of gold held in reserve. After Nixon's announcement, a dollar became worth... whatever the fuck they decided it was worth. It became a promise with nothing backing it but faith in the same government that had just proven it would change the rules whenever it wanted.

Can you taste the irony? The party of "fiscal responsibility" created the ultimate system of fiscal irresponsibility.

Here's what happened to your economic reality after Nixon cut the dollar loose from gold:

1. Inflation exploded, eating away at workers' savings and wages

2. The financial sector metastasized from a service industry to a power center

3. Money became an abstraction, a tool for wealth extraction rather than wealth creation

4. Economic volatility increased, with recessions becoming more frequent and severe

When you break promises, there are consequences. When a nation breaks its fundamental economic promises, those consequences echo through generations. The vibrating aftermath of Nixon's decision still hums through your bank account today, resonating in your struggle to afford housing, education, and healthcare – all of which have inflated far beyond wages.

According to economist Robert Triffin, the Nixon Shock created a fundamental contradiction in the global monetary system. Without the discipline of gold convertibility, the United States could now run persistent trade deficits without immediate consequences, essentially exporting inflation to other countries while maintaining its economic dominance. This "exorbitant privilege" came at the cost of domestic manufacturing and employment.

The Nixon Shock wasn't just economic policy – it was economic violence. It was a violation. And it set the stage for the next act in America's economic tragedy.

StagFlation: The Carter Disease

If Nixon lit the fuse, Jimmy Carter presided over the explosion. The economic hellscape of the late 1970s wasn't just bad luck or poor management – it was the inevitable consequence of untethering our currency from reality while refusing to address the structural decay eating away at American industry.

Have you ever been trapped in quicksand? The more you struggle, the faster you sink. That's what the Carter years felt like for working Americans. Prices soaring while wages stagnated. Jobs disappearing. Interest rates climbing to absurd heights. The American Dream wasn't just deferred – it was fucking suffocating.

Stagflation – that ugly portmanteau combining stagnation and inflation – wasn't supposed to be possible according to the Keynesian economics dominating policy at the time. Yet there it was, wrapping its cold fingers around the throat of American prosperity, squeezing until the middle class turned blue.

The raw statistics tell part of the story:

• Inflation peaked at 14.8% in March 1980

• Unemployment hit 7.8% that same year

• Interest rates soared past 20%

• Economic growth crawled at anemic levels

But statistics don't capture the visceral reality of stagflation. They don't convey the humiliation of workers who couldn't afford to heat their homes. They don't communicate the desperation of families watching their savings evaporate. They don't express the rage of a generation realizing the social contract was being shredded before their eyes.

You could smell the despair in the air during the Carter years. It reeked of gasoline lines stretching around blocks, of factories closing their doors forever, of dreams deferred and dignity denied. The texture of daily life became coarse, abrasive, wearing down optimism until only anxiety remained.

Carter himself famously diagnosed a "crisis of confidence" in his infamous "malaise" speech. But the crisis wasn't in the American spirit – it was in American capitalism itself. The system was revealing its fundamental contradictions, and those contradictions wore a cardigan sweater and spoke with a Georgia drawl.

The Carter administration's economic policies were caught between contradictory imperatives - fighting inflation while attempting to reduce unemployment. As historian Kevin Mattson noted in his analysis of the era, "Carter's economic advisers were divided between those who prioritized fighting inflation through tight monetary policy and those who believed unemployment was the greater evil." This indecision led to policy paralysis that exacerbated both problems.

Carter's appointment of Paul Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman in 1979 set the stage for the brutal "Volcker Shock" – interest rates deliberately raised to levels that would induce a recession, crushing inflation by crushing workers first. It was economic chemotherapy – kill the healthy cells along with the cancer and hope the patient survives.

The stagflation crisis created the perfect conditions for a fundamental shift in economic thinking. Americans were desperate, afraid, and angry. They were primed for radical change – even if that change would ultimately accelerate their economic evisceration.

Reaganomics: Trickle-Down Because Shit Rolls Downhill

Enter Ronald Reagan, with his Hollywood smile and snake oil promises. "Government is not the solution to our problem," he declared in his inaugural address. "Government is the problem."

With those words, Reagan ushered in an era of economic pillage so brazen, so fucking audacious, that historians will one day rank it alongside the great wealth transfers of history – right next to the enclosure of the commons and colonial extraction.

The stagflation crisis created the perfect opportunity for Reagan and his cabal of Chicago School economic zealots to implement an agenda that would have been politically impossible just years earlier. Like vultures circling a wounded animal, they descended on America's economic distress with "solutions" that amounted to economic bloodletting.

The cornerstone of Reaganomics was a simple lie: that cutting taxes for the wealthy would create prosperity for all as benefits "trickled down" to workers. It was economic fan fiction, a fantasy with no basis in historical reality. But desperate people reach for fantasy when reality becomes unbearable.

Let me be crystal fucking clear: Trickle-down economics wasn't just wrong – it was a deliberate con job. A heist masked as economic theory. A way to justify the upward redistribution of wealth while claiming to help the very people being robbed.

The results speak for themselves:

• The top marginal tax rate was slashed from 70% to 28%

• Labor unions were systematically dismantled

• Financial regulations were gutted

• Public investments were starved of funding

• Income inequality exploded

• Manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas

• Wall Street was unleashed

Reagan didn't "revitalize" American capitalism – he mutated it. He transformed it from a system that, for all its flaws, had created the largest middle class in history into a mechanism for extracting wealth from workers and concentrating it in fewer and fewer hands.

You can taste the bitterness of this betrayal in the rust belt cities abandoned to decay. You can smell it in the toxic financial instruments that would eventually trigger the 2008 crisis. You can hear it in the hollow promises of prosperity that never materialized for most Americans. You can see it in the charts showing productivity rising while wages flatline. You can feel it in the insecurity that permeates working life.

Economic historian Robert Brenner has characterized the Reagan era as the beginning of "the long downturn" in American capitalism, noting that "between 1979 and 1990, while GDP increased by 36 percent, the average weekly wage fell by about 6 percent and the real minimum wage by 31 percent." This period marked the decisive break between productivity growth and wage growth that had previously moved in tandem.

The Reagan revolution didn't reinvigorate capitalism – it perverted it. It didn't create sustainable growth – it fueled an unsustainable debt binge that masked the underlying decay. It didn't restore American greatness – it accelerated American decline.

And it laid the groundwork for everything that followed: the financialization of the economy, the hollowing out of the middle class, the rise of economic insecurity as a permanent feature rather than a temporary condition.

Three Eras: One Giant Fuck Up

When examined individually, each of these three administrations damaged American capitalism. But it's their cumulative, compounding effect that truly gutted the working class and set us on the path to extreme inequality.

Nixon freed money from its golden constraints, creating the conditions for financial speculation to replace productive investment. Carter's stagflation crisis broke the public's faith in government's ability to manage the economy, setting the stage for radical change. Reagan leveraged that opening to restructure the economy for the benefit of capital at the expense of labor.

Together, they form an unholy trinity of economic destruction – a perfect storm that transformed American capitalism from a system that, however imperfectly, delivered shared prosperity into one that systematically concentrates wealth in fewer and fewer hands.

The timeline tells the story:

1971: Nixon ends gold convertibility, removing the last constraint on currency creation and government spending 1973-1980: Stagflation creates economic trauma and policy confusion 1981-1989: Reagan implements radical pro-capital, anti-labor policies that become the new economic orthodoxy

After these three consecutive body blows, American capitalism was fundamentally altered. The invisible hand of the market now wore brass knuckles, and it was beating the shit out of workers while picking their pockets.

Let's get visceral about what this transformation meant in real terms:

Your grandparents could support a family of four on one income, buy a home, own a car, take vacations, send kids to college, and retire with dignity – all on a high school education. Today, two college-educated adults working full-time often struggle to achieve the same standard of living.

The texture of economic life changed. Security gave way to precarity. Stability yielded to volatility. Community collapsed into atomized competition. The social fabric frayed and then tore.

The statistics tell part of the story:

• The share of national income going to the bottom 50% of Americans fell from 21% in 1970 to just 13% today

• The top 1%'s share rose from 9% to over 20% in the same period

• CEO-to-worker compensation ratios exploded from 20:1 to over 350:1

• Union membership declined from 27% to under 11%

• Financial sector profits grew from 10% of all corporate profits to over 30%

But the human cost transcends statistics. It's written in the defeated eyes of workers juggling multiple jobs just to stay afloat. It's etched in the stress lines of parents who can't afford both childcare and healthcare. It's carved into the despair of communities hollowed out by deindustrialization and desperation.

You can smell the rot in our economic system. It reeks of corruption, of captured regulators, of billionaires paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, of corporate subsidies alongside cuts to social services.

And it all began with that unholy trinity: Nixon's monetary manipulation, Carter's stagflation surrender, and Reagan's regressive revolution.

Wage Disparity: Economic Class Warfare

"A rising tide lifts all boats" – that was the promise. But they forgot to mention that most Americans would be swimming in the tide while the wealthy few lounged on luxury yachts.

The most visceral, undeniable legacy of Nixon-Carter-Reagan is the Grand Canyon of inequality that now defines American capitalism. It's not just unfair – it's fucking obscene.

When you adjust for inflation, the median male worker earned more in 1973 than in 2023. Let that sink in. Despite fifty years of technological advancement, productivity growth, and GDP expansion, the typical American man takes home less purchasing power than his father did.

Meanwhile, those at the top haven't just prospered – they've gorged themselves. The richest 0.1% have captured so much wealth that they might as well live on a different planet than the rest of us. Their wealth isn't just quantitatively different – it's qualitatively different. It represents not just luxury but raw power.

The America that emerged from Reagan's revolution isn't a middle-class nation with some rich and poor people at the extremes. It's a neo-feudal arrangement with a small ownership class, a precarious professional class desperate to cling to their status, and a vast sea of workers living paycheck to paycheck.

You can see this apartheid in our cities, where luxury condos tower over tent encampments. You can taste it in the organic, locally-sourced food available in wealthy neighborhoods versus the food deserts in poor ones. You can hear it in the different accents and vocabularies that instantly mark one's class position. You can smell it in the polluted air of fence-line communities versus the pristine environments of gated estates.

And you can feel it in your bones – the knowledge that the game is rigged, that merit matters less than connections, that hard work alone won't secure your future.

The post-Reagan economy systematically transfers wealth upward through multiple mechanisms:

• Tax policies that favor capital over labor

• Monetary policies that inflate asset values while suppressing wages

• Regulatory capture that allows monopolistic rent extraction

• Trade policies that pit workers against each other globally

• Labor laws that hamstring collective bargaining

• Education and healthcare systems that saddle ordinary people with debt

Every one of these mechanisms can be traced back to our unholy trinity – Nixon's floating currency, Carter's stagflation paralysis, and Reagan's counter-revolution against the New Deal consensus.

The result isn't just inequality – it's social dysfunction. Research consistently shows that highly unequal societies suffer more crime, worse health outcomes, lower social trust, and diminished upward mobility. Our economic apartheid is literally killing us.

And here's the real kick in the teeth: the defenders of this system have convinced millions of its victims to blame themselves for their struggles. They've peddled the toxic myth that poverty reflects personal failure rather than systemic design. They've sold the lie that billionaires earned their hoards through exceptional merit rather than exceptional extraction.

It's gaslighting on a societal scale.

Money For Money, Workers Get Shit

Perhaps the most insidious legacy of our unholy trinity is the financialization of everything – the process by which the manipulation of money became more profitable than making actual things or providing actual services.

Before Nixon cut the dollar loose from gold, before Carter presided over stagflation, before Reagan unleashed Wall Street, the financial sector was a relatively modest part of the economy. Banks existed to facilitate real economic activity – they helped companies raise capital for productive investments and helped individuals save for future needs.

Today? Finance is the tail that wags the economic dog. It's a bloated, parasitic industry that extracts wealth rather than creates it, that rewards manipulation over production, that turns necessities like housing into speculative assets.

The stench of financialization permeates everything. You can smell it in the sterile corridors of hospitals run by private equity firms that cut staff to boost quarterly returns. You can taste it in the lower quality of products designed for planned obsolescence to juice short-term profits. You can see it in the vacant luxury apartments bought as investment vehicles rather than homes. You can hear it in the jargon of MBAs discussing "human capital optimization" instead of treating workers like humans.

And most of all, you can feel it in the constant anxiety of living in an economy where nothing is secure, where everything – your home, your health, your education, your retirement – has been transformed into a profit center for financial predators.

The raw numbers tell part of the story:

• Financial sector profits as a percentage of GDP roughly tripled since the 1970s

• Over 25% of corporate profits now flow to the financial sector

• The finance industry's share of GDP has roughly doubled

• Household debt has exploded as a percentage of income

• The derivatives market has grown to hundreds of trillions of dollars – multiples of the entire global GDP

But the human cost transcends statistics. It's in the crushing student debt that wasn't a feature of your parents' generation. It's in the medical bankruptcies that remain uniquely American. It's in the retirement insecurity that followed the shift from pensions to 401(k)s. It's in the housing costs that consume ever-larger portions of income.

Elon PunyPhallus and his ilk love to present themselves as visionary builders, but the real money in late-stage capitalism isn't made by creating things – it's made by moving money around, by extracting economic rents, by financial engineering that creates nothing of tangible value.

This financialization traces directly back to Nixon's decision to untether the dollar from gold, which unleashed a global tsunami of fiat currency seeking returns. It was accelerated by the economic desperation of the Carter years, which made people more willing to take financial risks to maintain their standard of living. And it was institutionalized by Reagan's deregulation agenda, which dismantled the safeguards put in place after the Great Depression.

Democracy For Sale? Sure.

The economic transformations initiated by Nixon, Carter, and Reagan didn't just reshape capitalism – they corrupted American democracy itself. The concentration of wealth inevitably led to the concentration of political power, creating a feedback loop that continuously reinforces both.

Can you taste the bitter reality? Your vote matters less than the dollars flowing from corporate PACs and billionaire donors. Your voice carries less weight than the lobbyists whispering in legislators' ears. Your interests are secondary to those who fund campaigns and offer lucrative post-government employment.

This isn't conspiracy theory – it's documented fact. Study after study confirms that public policy aligns with the preferences of economic elites while showing little correlation with the desires of average citizens. We don't live in a functioning democracy – we live in what political scientists call an oligarchy, where money doesn't just talk, it fucking rules.

The stench of this corruption permeates Washington DC, state capitals, and city halls across America. It reeks in the revolving door between government and industry, in the no-bid contracts for campaign donors, in the tax loopholes crafted for specific corporations, in the bailouts for banks while homeowners are foreclosed upon.

You can hear it in the mealy-mouthed equivocations of politicians who won't commit to policies with overwhelming public support but tepid donor enthusiasm. You can see it in the byzantine regulations that protect established interests while strangling potential competitors. You can feel it in your growing sense that no matter who wins elections, the same economic interests maintain control.

This corruption didn't happen overnight. It was a gradual process that accelerated with each administration in our unholy trinity:

Nixon's untethering of the dollar created the conditions for financialization, which concentrated wealth in fewer hands and gave those hands greater political leverage.

Carter's stagflation crisis created the opening for corporate interests to reframe their agenda as the solution to economic malaise, funding think tanks and academic departments to provide intellectual cover.

Reagan's administration institutionalized the capture of government by private interests, explicitly inviting industry representatives to rewrite the regulations governing their own sectors.

The resulting system isn't just corrupt in the conventional sense of individual bad actors taking bribes. It's systemically corrupt – designed to convert economic power into political power and vice versa in a self-reinforcing cycle that excludes ordinary citizens from meaningful participation.

Where Do We Go From Here?

I've painted a bleak picture – because the reality is fucking bleak. The transformation of American capitalism initiated by Nixon, accelerated through Carter's stagflation, and cemented by Reagan's counter-revolution has created an economic system that fails most Americans.

But history isn't linear, and fatalism is just another form of surrender. The same democratic tools that were used to dismantle shared prosperity can be reclaimed to rebuild it.

First, we need to get visceral about what's at stake. This isn't just about economic statistics – it's about human dignity. It's about whether working people can live with security and purpose, whether children have genuine opportunities regardless of their parents' wealth, whether democracy can function when money translates directly into political power.

The taste of real freedom isn't just the absence of restraint – it's the presence of capability. And capability requires economic security as its foundation.

Any agenda to reclaim capitalism for the many must start by recognizing the specific ways our unholy trinity deformed the system:

1. Nixon's destruction of monetary discipline requires a new framework for stable, non-exploitative currency

2. The stagflation crisis under Carter demands policies that can deliver price stability without sacrificing workers' interests

3. Reagan's upward redistribution must be reversed through tax, labor, and regulatory reforms

These aren't technical problems – they're power problems. The solutions exist, but implementing them requires confronting entrenched interests that profit immensely from the status quo.

You can feel the resistance already, can't you? The dismissive sneers of those who benefit from the current system. The condescending explanations of why change is impossible or undesirable. The weaponization of complexity to discourage ordinary citizens from demanding reform.

But you can also feel something else stirring – a growing recognition across the political spectrum that the system is fundamentally broken. That the promises of capitalism have been betrayed. That the rules have been rigged against working people for too long.

This recognition transcends traditional left-right divisions. It shows up in different language and different proposed solutions, but the underlying diagnosis is increasingly shared: something went profoundly wrong with American capitalism in the latter decades of the 20th century, and we're still living with the consequences.

Conclusion

We stand at a crossroads. The economic system shaped by Nixon, Carter, and Reagan has delivered exactly what it was redesigned to deliver: concentrated wealth, precarious work, captured government, and diminished democracy.

The question isn't whether this system is failing – the evidence of failure surrounds us in declining life expectancy, eroding social trust, crumbling infrastructure, and growing despair. The question is whether we have the collective will to transform it.

The taste of possibility is in the air. You can savor it in the renewed labor organizing across industries. You can smell it in the growing skepticism toward financial capitalism's excesses. You can hear it in the voices of a new generation questioning the economic orthodoxies they inherited. You can see it in experiments with alternative business models and community ownership. You can feel it in the hunger for an economy that serves human flourishing rather than subordinating humanity to market metrics.

The path forward isn't about abandoning capitalism entirely – it's about reclaiming its best aspects while rejecting the distortions introduced through our unholy trinity. It's about rebuilding an economy where work is fairly rewarded, where prosperity is widely shared, where democracy isn't for sale to the highest bidder.

This transformation won't come from the top. It won't be gifted by the same interests that profit from the current arrangements. It will only come through sustained pressure from below – from workers organizing, from communities rebuilding, from citizens demanding that government serve the many rather than the few.

The journey began on August 15, 1971, when Nixon severed the last connection between our money and material reality. It accelerated through the stagflation crisis under Carter. It was institutionalized by Reagan's counter-revolution against the New Deal consensus.

But the story doesn't end there. The next chapter is ours to write – if we have the courage to confront the legacy of our unholy trinity and the imagination to envision something better.

Are you angry? Good. That's where meaningful change begins. Are you determined? Even better. That's how change sustains itself through inevitable resistance.

The great economic betrayal that began fifty years ago can be reversed. The question is whether we recognize it clearly enough to address its root causes rather than just its symptoms.

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Citations:

1. Triffin, Robert. "The Evolution of the International Monetary System: Historical Reappraisal and Future Perspectives." Princeton Studies in International Finance, No. 12 (1964).

2. Mattson, Kevin. "What the Heck Are You Up To, Mr. President?: Jimmy Carter, America's 'Malaise,' and the Speech That Should Have Changed the Country." Bloomsbury USA, 2009.

3. Fink, G. 1998 “The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era”

4. Niskanen, W. 1988 “Reaganomics: An Insider's Account of the Policies and the People”