Corporate America Took the Money. Then They Called Giving It Back Socialism.

By Tony Pentimalli

Americans keep getting told there is something confusing about why everybody is so pissed off. The economy is growing, the stock market is booming, corporations are making money, so supposedly we should all be walking around grateful. Meanwhile, corporate profits from current production hit an annualized $4.827 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, nearly 18 percent of national income, while the share going to workers through wages and benefits has fallen toward levels we have not seen since the 1950s. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells the same story from another angle: labor’s share of nonfarm business output fell to 52.9 percent, the lowest level since the government started keeping that series in 1947. Those are different measurements, but they are telling us the same damn thing. Corporate America is taking a bigger piece of the pie, and working people are getting a smaller one.

And nobody gets to tell me workers somehow stopped earning their share. Since 1979, productivity has increased about 93 percent, while hourly compensation for typical workers increased only about 34 percent. Workers became dramatically more productive, companies produced more wealth, and the economy got much bigger, but the people doing the work did not get anything close to their fair share of those gains. For decades after World War II, when workers produced more, their pay generally rose with it. Then that relationship broke. The wealth kept growing, but more and more of it started flowing somewhere else.

Where did it go? Look at who owns the assets. S&P 500 companies spent nearly $1 trillion buying back their own stock in the twelve months ending June 2025. Federal Reserve data show that the richest 10 percent of American households own roughly 87 percent of corporate equities and mutual-fund shares, while the entire bottom half owns about 1 percent. So spare me the speeches about how a booming stock market proves everybody is doing great. A booming stock market is fantastic when you own most of the damn stock. For everybody else, watching rich people’s portfolios explode does not pay the rent, buy the groceries or cover the insurance bill.

This did not happen because capitalism came down from the mountain with these numbers carved into stone. We changed the rules. We stripped workers of power and handed more of it to capital. In 1983, more than 20 percent of wage and salary workers belonged to unions. Today it is about 10 percent, and in the private sector it is just 5.9 percent. The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 an hour, exactly where it has been since 2009, even as prices, productivity, executive pay and corporate profits kept climbing. Corporate consolidation gave giant employers more leverage while workers lost the power to bargain back. And no, I am not talking about your neighborhood plumber or the family restaurant down the street. I am talking about concentrated corporate and financial power. America does not have a wealth-creation problem. America has a wealth-distribution problem.

Republicans spent decades pushing the hardest version of this bullshit, attacking unions, cutting taxes at the top, weakening regulation and promising that if corporations and wealthy investors got rich enough, some of it would eventually trickle down to everybody else. But Democrats do not get to show up now pretending they had nothing to do with it. Too many Democratic leaders accepted huge parts of the same system, chased Wall Street money, tolerated corporate consolidation and watched organized labor get weaker year after year. For forty years, Republicans kept dragging the economic playing field toward corporations and the wealthy while too many Democrats spent their time proving they were reasonable enough to keep playing on it.

Then came the scam that protects the whole arrangement. Every time somebody proposes shifting meaningful economic power back toward working people, somebody screams socialism. Raise wages, strengthen unions or ask billionaires to pay more and suddenly we are told America is lurching toward some dangerous ideology. A corporation can spend a billion dollars buying back its own stock and we call it smart financial management. A billionaire gets another tax break and we call it encouraging investment. But give a cashier healthcare she cannot lose when she loses her job and suddenly somebody wants to drag Karl Marx onto cable news. The great political trick of the last forty years was convincing Americans that transferring wealth upward is economics while transferring power back to workers is socialism.

Mainstream political media has been far too willing to help sell that lie, not because every reporter is secretly working for corporate America, but because the language itself is rigged. Corporate tax cuts are called incentives. Deregulation is called competitiveness. Stock buybacks are called shareholder returns. But policies aimed at shifting economic security back toward ordinary people are treated as ideological departures from some supposedly neutral system. Imagine if they covered the other side the same way. Imagine a Sunday morning host asking whether allowing the richest 10 percent to own almost nine-tenths of corporate stock is economic extremism. Imagine reporters demanding that CEOs explain how they plan to pay for another trillion dollars in stock buybacks. We almost never hear those questions because the system we already have gets treated like nature instead of what it really is: a political and economic choice that overwhelmingly benefits the people at the top.

That is also how justified economic anger gets pointed in the wrong direction. Take people who know damn well they are falling behind and make sure they never look upward long enough to ask who is actually walking away with the money. Tell them the immigrant took their job. Tell them the person on SNAP took their taxes. Tell them somebody on Medicaid is bankrupting the country. Tell them the student whose debt was forgiven cheated them. Tell them the public employee has too good a pension. Tell them some poor mother bought something at the grocery store she did not deserve. Keep working people fighting over the scraps and nobody asks who took the meal. The people making out like bandits have convinced the people getting squeezed to turn around and kick somebody who has even less.

Fixing this does not require abolishing capitalism. It requires making capitalism work for more than the people who already own everything. Workers need bargaining power again. Unions need room to organize without companies crushing them. The federal minimum wage needs to rise and stay tied to economic reality. Antitrust laws need real teeth. Healthcare should not be a chain tying workers to employers because they are terrified of losing coverage. Tax policy should stop treating wealth made by owning assets as more sacred than money earned by actually working for a living. And when workers become more productive and create more wealth, they should get a meaningful share of what they created. That is not socialism. That is a middle class.

They spent forty years taking more of the wealth and calling every attempt to give working people their share socialism.

The anger isn’t the mystery. The mystery is why anyone expected working people not to notice.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky @tonywriteshere.bsky.social.

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