Gilded Age Capitalism?

[David Morris]

What with the brief Wall Street occupation and talk about the 1%ers, and
the ever growing reality of wealth disparity, I think some would like to
redefine Late Capitalism, or at least compare our present economic/wealth
situation in light of another disparaging term, first coined way back in
its real time by Mark Twain as “The Gilded Age.”  Some say we are now
living in a remaking of the Gilded Age.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age#The_Name_and_the_Era

“ The Gilded Age, the term for the period of economic boom which began
after the American Civil War
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War> and ended at the turn
of the century was applied to the era by historians in the 1920s, who took
the term from one of Mark Twain <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain>'s
lesser-known novels, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gilded_Age:_A_Tale_of_Today>(1873).
The book (co-written with Charles Dudley Warner
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dudley_Warner>) satirized the
promised "golden age <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_(metaphor)>"
after the Civil War, portrayed as an era of serious social problems masked
by a thin gold gilding <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilding> of
economic expansion.

In the 1920s and '30s the metaphor "Gilded Age" began to be applied to a
designated period <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodization> in
American history. The term was adopted by literary and cultural critics as
well as historians, including Van Wyck Brooks
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Wyck_Brooks>, Lewis Mumford
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford>, Charles Austin Beard
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Austin_Beard>, Mary Ritter Beard
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ritter_Beard>, Vernon Louis Parrington
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_Louis_Parrington>, and Matthew
Josephson <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Josephson>. For them, Gilded
Agewas a pejorative term for a time of materialistic excesses combined with
extreme poverty.”

David Morris