Dylan Ratigan's
six sectors of the US economy needing fundamental restructuring, as laid out in
his new best seller, Greedy Bastards
and also at his book's web site :
1) banking and finance, which he defines as having become "extractionists" rather than the useful capitalists they were;
2) the military-industrial complex, now larger
and more costly than all other military forces in the world combined;
3) the health industry, including insurance,
pharmaceuticals, for-profit hospitals, fee-for-service doctors and other
providers;
4) global corporations pushing rigged trade agreements,
off-shoring US jobs and hiding their profits in offshore tax-havens (including
GE which owns NBC and MSNBC, Caterpillar, Wal-Mart, John Deere, automakers,
etc.);
5) the energy sector built on waste and
perpetuated by huge government subsidies to coal, oil, gas and nuclear and
profiting from externalizing its costs, from pollution, safety violations,
etc.;
6) transportation based on wasteful automobiles,
starving mass-transit and creating unsustainable suburban sprawl and unhealthy
cities.
Ratigan also
cites the communications, entertainment and mainstream media which dumb down
and misinform voters, which are driven by commercial advertising that distorts
issues, denies clear debate on vital issues and is now reaping huge profits
from the unlimited political advertising encouraged by the Supreme Court.
Lastly,
Ratigan examines the US education industry, rising tuition in the older
non-profit elite universities and the rise of for-profit colleges run by
companies traded on stock exchanges. Students
are enticed into debt traps, in which they are saddled with unmanageable debts,
and are then faced with an economy in which there are ever fewer jobs available
that actually provide the kind of income that can allow them to pay off said
loans.
What Ratigan
describes is simply the need for a kind of whole-system transition, as all
countries are now linked in a form of globalization driven by finance,
economics and technologies whose impacts have produced many unforeseen and
negative as well as positive consequences. Futurists have studied these trends for
decades and have come to many similar conclusions re: the need for whole-system
re-structuring. The reforms Ratigan
proposes are reasonable and widely discussed around the world -- even if not so much
in the USA. They are even on the agenda
at the G-20 and the upcoming summit Rio+20 in Brazil, June 20-22, 2012.
Reforms
still needed to downsize the global financial bubble include breaking up TBTF
banks, a global financial transactions tax of less than 1% to reduce
speculation and high-frequency trading, reinstating a new
"Glass-Steagall" law to separate and protect retail deposit banking, raising
capital requirements and trading margins while putting all derivatives on
exchanges.
Ratigan
discusses all this along with the need to prosecute those who precipitated the
financial mess. He might well have
included corporate agribusiness and the few companies -- Monsanto, Conagra,
Archer-Daniels Midland -- that control much of the world's food as well as those
who process and market it: Pepsi, Coca-cola, Unilever, Kraft, fast food
chains, etc. Then too there are the
implications as regards the unhealthy diets and personal eating habits that
stem from these companies and their billions of dollars of annual advertising
& marketing.
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