I keep hearing this rhetoric around social media… Do people not realize that there is a cost to our retirement funds always having to increase in value?
A disproportionate amount of equity growth goes to the wealthy but the middle class has also hitched their futures to the stock market through 401ks. This means that "well, grandma's retirement also depends on record corporate profits" is a nearly invincible tactic against anything that diminishes corporate profits. The folks that own a disproportionate amount of equities get to untouchably balloon their wealth and there is nothing to stop them because stopping them would mean blowing up a generation's retirement plan.
I do agree that now it is an organized effort by capital and that efforts to move social security to a system similar to private 401k accounts (which has been pushed by the right since before W Bush) would absolutely do what you say - seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. I just think that this was an opportunity seized by capital rather than a change planned from the beginning.
Only 60 million Americans have a 401k.
Also, the idea that an American owning a portfolio of stocks in a 401k means that they are responsible for all the immoral actions taken by each company is absolutely and totally ridiculous.