The greed and selfishness that the free market capitalist economy inspires impacts just about every area of social and commercial interaction in consenting societies, it seems. It's not just Wall Street and government leaders caught in the trap. It's the entire system in terms of the way that it's set to run, which moves the money ever more to the top economic tier by siphoning it from the bottom and middle ones.
Since there is a relatively fixed supply of money, it stands to reason that the more that one sector of society gets of it (often through economic disaster schemes in the patterns that Naomi Klein describes) -- the less that exists for other sections. So in the end, the country increasingly becomes a banana republic with a huge lower class, a greatly affluent upper class and not much in between.
Years ago, the founder of central MA's food bank told me of the obscenely high salaries that the directors of a major, well-known Massachusetts charity providing funds for hungry Americans received every year, an amount that was purposely not readily made public. The reason is that all of the volunteers for this charity, that raise millions of dollars each year, would be greatly dismayed to learn that around a fourth of them were, actually, working to enrich upper management.
In other words, approximately a quarter of the money raised went to salaries and much of the rest went into advertising so that, in the final reckoning, only a modest amount, actually helped to provide food security. What a seamy racket! The unwary public, eager to work hard to uplift starving Americans, was (is), obviously, duped in the process.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Charity-CEO-s-Get-Rich-by-by-Emily-Spence-100314-805.html