A couple of items..
A more comprehensive try than I can manage, but nicely free of the 'velocity of money' and the other Econ math abstractions via which a lot of this groundwork was laid, emphasizing only ONE variable to be maximized: Max dollars/second gotten (one could never call it earned).
I'd disagree with your placing Walmart - a place I boycott permanently for a litany of reasons, many documentable - next to the older once, maybe still? respectable JC Penney's. It's 'cheapness' is maybe relative to more honestly-produced goods in other stores here, but the Lion's share goes to the 5% Corp Rulers, not much to employees -- and obscenely little to the exploited permanently 3rd-world places it runs - as surely as if elected despot (it owns the local despots via its power to enforce starvation wages on the despots' subjects - or move to a nearby equivalent).
IMhO - every day that a Sam Walton retains the power to corrupt, which his $ represents: his wilfulness alone creates millions more people in nearby countries who - despise us and every place our actions trump our Sentimentality. Ditto other Billionaires = that is power to corrupt thousands. But I can't think of one as toxic as Walton, offfhand.
Dunno how one might plot an escape from an entire bizness culture predicated upon the root idea: Persistent lying / marketing is OK. And that greed is Good (that is - personal aggrandizement with no thought to there being other people: a 'society' too).
YAN list of areas merely patched together today, needing massive rethinking and new models:
Corporate hegemony - growing; buying all the representatives, making votes irrelevant after Corp-selection of candidates. Ergo, accelerating concentration of the wealth among fewer. Recursive.
More monopolies rather than fewer. Mergers to that end.
Information: Corp-ownership by fewer and fewer, of most media - newspapers down to One in most *Big* cities. Web? - for how long un-locked?
Infrastructure (water supplies, bridges, school buildings, medicine (across all scales) HMO even as a concept: Corporate again! Your money or your life - now literal.
Prisons = 'Drug Wars' = Prohibition deja vu; now being 'privatized' = Corporate again. 3-strikes: computers, not Judges.
Language has indeed become corrupted by the daily barrage, the incessant lies of commerce selling.. selling.. and the consequences appear very like that which Confucious warned about, in his little homily concluding -
IF (language becomes corrupted)... then Justice will go astray. If this happens the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence it matters above all else, that language be correct.
How does a culture on a 24/7 treadmill merely to push papers and do imaginary 'projects' - learn how to do actual work, reform its corrupt Politico-Economic scam, return dignity to its working majority -- all At Once! ??
And that would be necessary just to begin our rehabilitation. That's a good word rehabilitation: restoring the entire country (including cities!) as places a sane person would actually want to inhabit! (given an actual choice).
I have no idea how we might begin; or if many will even try. I wish luck to the sane or wannabe-sane folk; death to the forces opposing sanity and thinking only of new means for ripping-off the labor and lives of the many. We know where that trend always peaks.
Hercules' task was merely, cleaning the Augean Stables. He accomplished that by diverting a river! Ours is a much larger variety of stables to be cleaned and rebuilt. Have we left - enough people with the guts, (also historical knowledge) the will and tenacity - even to begin?
Ashton
