The financialization and neoliberalization is partially driven by ideologues, yes, but it is also largely driven by larger social forces, such as dwindling competition and survivability in financial "kill zones" and destroyed industrial regions. As the economy advances towards cannibalization, it makes more sense for the surviving organized economic units to conglomerate, abandon long term health, gaslight and propagandize, and engage in outright predation and psychological and economic warfare. Conditions worsen generally and universally until they are dire enough to threaten the entire system, say through the collapse and/or transformation of the political economy, or through the crushing and total pressures of an unstable ecological reality.
