Please cite this "ever-widening chasm". How big is it? Did it exist in the 90's? Earlier? And whatever gulf there may be (ever-widening or not) it's my responsibility to provide for my family to the best of my ability--so actually I am where I am because of choices I have made---not because someone in Bentonville, Arkansas is trying to keep me down.
A visit to a typical old American manufacturing city will provide the visitor with an educational view of the relationship, then enjoyed, between the workers and the managers and owners of the mills. As one journeys from the factories towards the outskirts one passes first the homes of the workers themselves, then the more impressive homes of the managers, and finally the homes of the owners, usually found on streets with names like "Overlook", or "...heights". Yet, all lived in the same city and shared in its prosperity or decline. A manager or owner who treated his employees with respect and compassion was honored while those who didn't felt their ire, and lost their respect.
Today the owners are far removed from their employees and thus are not burdened by guilty consciences which they otherwise might be afflicted with upon seeing the conditions in which the latter must labor and live.
Systems like Walmart's help make that possible.
When I was a boy my mother took me along when she shopped in stores named Macy's, and Gertz. We were a middle class family with one bread winner, my father, a man who earned a good living despite having little formal education. The stores were kept after the fashion of those times, which is to say, they were very impressive displays of the art of marketing, and were quite beautiful in comparison to today's unadorned warehouses. At the Christmas season, they pulled out all the stops and made a visit a wonderful and memorable occasion. There were cheaper stores, like Woolworth's and more expensive ones, but the stores we visited were aimed at the middle class and they sold good quality merchandise, mostly made in America, by workers who were earning enough to live in much the same style that we lived. In that sense America itself was very much like the small mill towns from which its affluence had sprung.
Things have changed, today's stores cater to those who want nothing but the cheapest goods or to those who want nothing but that which is guaranteed to display wealth. The bridge between those two has vanished, a manifestation of the widening chasm of which I previously wrote.