I would propose that our collective apathy is a constant which individuals and corporations take advantage of, but not necessarily something that they work to maintain.
When a wee lad I used to sit at the knees of my papa and grandpa and I learned a lot about how things used to be in the stone age, when they were young. Believe it or not, people used to care about the working man.
If people want to engage in fun conspiracy thinking, I'm down with that, but how about we make it plausible and make it fit with the evidence. The most parsimonious conspiracy is that our rich elites have encouraged a focus on sexual freedom and this has taken the heat off of economic reform. Look at this board - the sex wars consume people's thinking, they consume their revolutionary fervor. When the lumpenproletariat is consumed with wanting free birth control, cheering on abortions, wanting easier divorce laws, trying to normalize poly-marriages, floating on cloud 9 about how enlightened they are for supporting homosexual marriage, manning the ramparts on behalf of transsexuals, extolling the virtues of hooking up for one night stands, when sex on the brain consumes most of their revolutionary energy, then guess who's safe from economic revolution and guess who doesn't buy into the bilge being sold to the lumpenproletariat, and guess who still has the highest marriage rate, the lowest divorce rate?
Same applies with multiculturalism. Smart thinkers in society have known the maxim "Divide and Conquer" for like, forever, and what idea gets sold to the lumpenproletariat as being a badge of enlightenment, why importing multiple cultures into one land and letting those cultures compete with each other. Then reinforce that idiocy with a slogan "Diversity is our Strength" and let the cultural zealots focus their energy on enforcing this idiocy against dissenters, meanwhile look at the racial diversity of the married couples who constitute the elite, look at the racial diversity of where they live, look at the racial diversity of where they send their kids to be schooled.
Destabilize the schools and neighborhoods of the lumpenproletariat with multiculturalism, get them to focus on sexual revolutions, each more insane than the one that preceded it, and watch how this destabilizes strong families and cohesive neighborhoods and the national culture and then exploit all this division and distraction by concentrating the wealth in the non-diverse and non-sexually permissive elite and be safe from reforms designed to achieve economic leveling because the more fractured the country, the less unanimity there will be for an economic leveling because there will be so many diverse players who can't unite due to the fact that some will be winners and some would be losers from any such reform.
Now that's a good conspiracy which aligns with the facts. There is no shadowy They who are micromanaging everything, this conspiracy simply requires that crazy ideologies be unleashed and encouraged to flourish and then allow the stupidity to spread. It's on auto-pilot. Genius.