The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.

Interestingly, where the author sees despair here, I see hope. The financial revolution wasn't a revolution like the American revolution or the French. It was a bunch of rich people convincing politicians that they could make more people rich if only they could further enrich themselves ("Greed is good" and all that). Unfortunately, only the latter part came to pass.

The reason this makes me hopeful is that this "revolution" isn't the result of social pressure, but rather just a series of changes in the law that could be changes again if the political will were there. I've said before that I seem to be one of a very few people who think that are problems are eminently more solvable than they seem. The majority of our issues boil down to bad financial and economic policy (which the author, IMO, correctly points out), and those policies can therefore be replaced, since all laws are contrived by legislatures (which the author seems hopeless about).

We needn't throw out the baby with the bathwater. The upside of globalization is that literally billions of people have been brought out of extreme poverty in the last couple decades. It's close to miraculous, and we shouldn't forget about that when having these debates. However, in the global age what we need are not only good domestic laws, but enforceable treaties that ensure that we can stem the race to the bottom that's been happening internationally for thirty odd years (interestingly, a similar thing has been happening between states here in the US as well).

I was fairly bullish on TPP, because I actually thought that it was a step in a positive direction on international trade. Clearly I was in the minority on that (and in fairness I think there were very serious and well founded reservations about it).

The system of trade we have developed has created a huge amount of wealth in the world, and that's a good thing. It's up to us to demand that our politicians create better mechanisms for broad based economic buy in. Trump will not get us there, but the silver lining of his presidency may be that he creates an awakening that could.