ABSTRACT
Major countries around the world, including in Asia and Oceania, have experienced increasing levels of income inequality over the last 30 years. The Economist (2012) has identified this as one of the biggest social, economic, and political challenges of our time. Various reasons have been identified for the growing income inequality, including capitalist globalization, technological change, regulatory reforms in labour and product markets, and changes in tax and benefit regulations (OECD, 2011b). Many of these changes have been presented in the mainstream literature and media as inevitable outcomes of progress and development and therefore are irreversible. In this paper it is argued that these are in fact not inevitable outcomes but rather have been presented as such through the mainstream rhetoric of globalization and nationalism used by high-income corporate figures. This rhetoric (and the ideology that undergirds it) in fact masks how dominant social forces are seeking through capitalist globalization to heighten the privatization of revenues and socialization of costs. The rise of transnationally oriented banks and financial firms, and the rhetoric surrounding the “too big to fail” phenomenon, is used as one specific case to illustrate this point.
