I'm having somewhat of a hard time wrapping my head around this. You see all the time about how the financial sector and the government are conspiring for personal gain and how the middle class is being gutted, but is this in line with the globalization agenda and the growth agenda?
Who is responsible for growth? I see time and time again from c-span and various youtube channels (like council on foreign relations and world economic forums) that lack of education is being blamed for lack of growth, and the general consensus is that growth needs capital accumulation in the middle, not less capital accumulation at the top, and this also reflects the free market ideology. If you take from the rich and give to others, you don't really get a bigger economic pie, you just get a reshaping of the pie. At some point, the rich will have exhausted their investment abilities and their capital will have nowhere to flow, since they need a constant inflow of new talent to innovate etc. The general consensus is that most of the capital accumulation at the top was earned in a legal fashion, and thus the lack of capital in the middle is a result of adaptation and growth in the middle.
There are several other problems as well. For example we as consumers want high tech stuff, and we use it a lot. This is part of the reason the economy is moving towards a creative need rather than less intellectual labor. As consumers, we shape what the job market is like by what we purchase and what we want, yet I don't see anyone blaming themselves, they only blame the rich and the government. How much power do you think lies with the general population to change the government and the market? For example congress and government in general is supposed to get voted in by the people. The lawmakers STILL have the ability to rewrite anything, but they need the power of the people behind it. Could then democracy be about talking with the general society, and not the government, to get things through? The government and the economy is a reflection of the people, and they have very little control in shaping that society. The media is also shaped by the people, and all of the above will become liars or manipulative if they know the people won't tolerate being talked to in a frank or honest fashion.
Even though I think division of labor is important, and thus the general population shouldn't need to know all the innards of capitalism and the government, for times like these, that are highly stressed and dysfunctional, I do think the general population needs more information. We can bring out things like Occupy or other protests as a symbol of an engaged public, but you need to realize that the police have to follow the law, and huge disruptions like this cannot go on forever. The real change has to come in Congress and then the president, and the same is true for any modern democratic country.
So then what to do? How to fix what is broken? The first thing is to get a general public that is more in consensus, and then use the laws and system as it was designed to get the right people to write laws by voting them in. Same is true for media, we have to give exposure and support to those who empower and give truthful information.
Maybe it's too late for most countries, and technology doesn't really help I feel since it results in way more complexity that is hard to wrap ones head around. But again, this was a choice by consumers as a whole, to financially support and thus make popular. I'm not trying to put the blame on anyone whos not rich or in government, I think they do despicable things as well, but the main point here is that it is about the general public as a WHOLE, it's not just the rich, etc. This notion that all of this was controlled by some big master plan is really bad and confuses people and makes them feel like it's already over.
One last thing. You may have heard of this federal reserve conspiracy of centralized money etc. It is not true. The real source of all the debt is congress, who wrote the laws that demand government spending. and since the Fed has certain mandates, all they can do is mediate problems during a private sector collapse. The problem is that congress has a huge set of laws, and the private sector is not able to carry all those costs. So who gets to take the cut? The people should decide... Economic growth of a certain percentage is built into the system, and so the fed is waiting, hoping that the private sector will resume jobs. But we are stuck in a bad spiral. The rich want to invest since it's a better return in the longer run than interest, but right now there aren't enough emerging companies that actually go big, and you can't just reallocate capital from the rich and hope it ends in growth, to get an actual bigger pie you need qualitative innovation and new markets, when the old markets are so saturated, automated and generally a done deal.
So these are my general observations, but I'm interested in any comments or other views. I'm trying to get a grasp of the more official story