As usual, take any propaganda with a grain of salt, but IMHO, from the info I have gathered thus far, Goldman Sachs and our government are almost the same entity, separated only by who reaps the benefits. Private gains, public losses.
I've seen bits and pieces of that, but they always strike me as kind of superficial and conspiranoid-tinged, leaving me still skeptical. I accept the central thesis -- there is obviously a nobility here in the classical "feudal" sense -- but I'm not convinced people like Matt Taibbi have more than a tabloid-ish understanding of it. People like him are also clearly selling something, and that makes them play favorites in their own ways.
Such an understanding would be helpful if we are to have any hope of charting an exit path from this condition. It could inform the authoring of meaningful reforms instead of vapid and ultimately impotent populist trash.
But it's more complex than, say the french nobility in the 18th century since there is no central authority and access to the peerage is explicitly obscured ( there is no nobility in America ) and although it is certainly possible for individuals to lose favor and fall out of the elite ( Bill Cosby this week ). It's worth remembering that the prime threat to Aristocrats has always been other Aristocrats aside from the occasional epic convulsion like the french revolution or the english reformation.
Given the current state of affairs, America looks most closely parallel to pre-renaissance Italy. Although if Jeff Koontz is our Michelangelo; perhaps we don't deserve our empire.
The purpose of the government is to be a place you can go, when you need to obtain someone else's money to spend on someone other than yourself (and if you're doing it right, keep a bit for yourself).
The purpose of finance, is to be a place you can go, when you've been given someone else's money, and need to find something to spend it on (and if you're doing it right, keep a bit for yourself).
The interests are so perfectly aligned no external coordination or policing is needed -- the system just works.
Naturally everyone involved is buddies with each other, and taking care of your buddies so that they can stay in a position to take care of you is just human nature. Even less sleazily, if you actually want to get something done inside the system, the only source of actual competence is the insiders -- it's not like there's some priesthood of uninvolved experts that have the slightest clue how to manage things. Financial regulatory capture isn't so much a tragedy as the only way anything could possibly get done.
The essence of your post is "the only source of actual competence is insiders." It's a difficulty that emerges around any attempt to create an alternative anything. But it has been done. I do wonder if we are seeing the very earliest embryonic steps toward a new kind of financial system with stuff like bitcoin. It's not even close to baked, but there is there there.
It could more accurately be described as a parasitic takeover of the host.
Whether you consider that tragic I guess depends upon whether you are part of the parasite (the financial system) or the host (society).
If you cannot be bothered to examine today's situation in its particulars, you won't come up with workable solutions.
For my own position: definancialization of the broader economy would go a long way to breaking banks from the state.
I'm not sure I agree that it's really nobility or call it feudal, but I would love to see some serious research.
One interesting pattern: Many of the wealthy, such as the Koch brothers, push hard against government power and expenditure. That leaves society more dependent on those same wealthy people, giving them more influence both absolutely and also relative to government.
As a simple example I read an article advising people seeking grants for scientific research to network with the wealthy because government research spending has been cut. The same applies to the arts, education, social welfare, etc.
https://twitter.com/alexia/status/522517041983393793
> I've seen bits and pieces of that, but they always strike me as kind of superficial and conspiranoid-tinged
The main left-wing, non-superficial analysis of the 2008 financial crisis that I know of is this -
http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-...
It has plenty of data, as well as an analysis of the data from their viewpoint.
Eleven years after Marx died, Engels published the third volume of Capital from Marx's draft and notes. In it he lays out the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in capitalism ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit_... ), and other such things.
The Monthly Review article links to the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis of US GDP growth. In the 1960s it was 4.4% a year, in the "stagnant" 1970s it was 3.3% a year, in the 1980s it was 3.1% a year, in the 1990s it was also 3.1% a year, and from 2000-2007 it was 2.6% a year (if it has been extended to 2008 and 2009 it would have been lower).
The real successor to capitalism is a socioeconomic system that has yet to be invented.