There's a Planet Money episode where they talk about an airline that made more money selling oil futures than flying planes.[1] Maybe any sufficiently outsourced company becomes indistinguishable from a finance company.
1. Fools enough people to think the government has their shit together and is protecting people.
2. Surveillance.
3. Make work jobs program.
The whole shoe thing is because of Richard Reid, the shoe bomber. There was a later foiled "underwear bomber," I'm glad the government didn't have the same reaction to him as they did Richard Reid. Actually now that I think about it, they have full body scanners. I haven't been on a plane since probably 2006.
It’s an excellent read, albeit repetitive at times.
[1] https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674066199
In that sense, finance is but one of the problem, which might have a central position in the current run of crisis in technical terms but only insofar as that it is the the most powerfull tool the capitalist has to extend its reach. Even if the financial system were to be sanitized overnight, it would not imply the end of crisis for Capitalism.
for capitalism to work, we need to put all of our regulatory energies into creating fair and transparent markets incentivized toward productive activity and against rent-seeking (these are among the most important of those first-order instability guards for capitalism).
for instance, look at many of the markets of the 70's, just before trickle-down ushered in decades of greed-driven regulatory disembowlment. markets work best when there are 7-9+, if not dozens of, mostly mid-sized competitors. outsized profit conditions are meant to be fleeting, as a temporary reward to encourage constant exploration, risk-taking, and creation (and creative destruction).