EXPLAINING OUR RACE TO THE BOTTOM ... AMERICA'S COMING POLITICAL STORM

Want to know what's behind the coming financial and political storm in America? Here are a couple of the under the radar factors contributing to the gradual collapse of the United States ...

Click here for really big graphic that even people with poor eyesight should be able to read.

The point here is to understand how our current focus on wealth extraction over wealth creation (which I discus here and here) is undermining the moral justification of capitalism in America.

Specifically, we now have:

1. WEALTH EXTRACTION / FINANCIALIZATION: A financial sector that focuses on wealth extraction instead of wealth creation because of how it feeds off of the commodification of debt and the buffet of fees associated with debt instruments (which I discuss here). 

2. PRISON ECONOMICS: A punitive culture focused more on building prisons that increasingly are becoming profit centers rather than corrective institutions (which I discuss here and here).

3. OUR GROWING NATIONAL SECURITY STATE: A militarized national security state that's more concerned with bending the rules of law, and guaranteeing their institutional survival, than they are with protecting the American idea (discussed here and here).

Then we have an America whose citizens are no longer talking to each other as much as they are yelling at and condemning one another. Throw in the fact that an ideologue labeled as a "moderate" can become the Majority Leader in the House of Representatives and we can begin to understand that some thing is askew in America.

There's more, but you get the point. This wave of developments cannot be sustained. Worse, America's race to the bottom is real, and our political elites don't seem to care.

Tomorrow: Explaining Our Race to the Bottom ... Why Our Public Treasuries Are Drained.

- Mark