Click here to access article by David Ruccio from Real-World Economics Review.
The fundamental nature of capitalism is for a small class of people ("owners", capitalists, investors, etc) to exploit both people and the environment as much as possible in order to acquire more wealth and its concomitant power. Other factors being equal, this dynamic functions much like compound interest in that the more wealth/power that is obtained, the increase of both accelerates over time. In this neoliberal stage of capitalism we are seeing and experiencing the results that are recorded in hard data provided in this article.