what we're really talking about is ethics, because we're talking about a culture of doing things. capitalism favors profit and growth over all else. people act accordingly. while an Illuminati smoky back rooms worldview is pretty useless, so is one about reform and ethical capitalism or whatever. the reforms required would so fundamentally alter the nature of the thing as to make it something else entirely. anyway, a hell of a lot more people subscribe to the latter view than the former.
capitalism is also inherently pyramidal and can't be anything else. tho so is every post-primitive human society I know of. which is highly disheartening. not that I have an alternative. rejecting power, or dual power structures, is about as close I get but that's a passive, waiting strategy. maybe as good as it gets, I dunno.
to me the realization that humans just act accordingly is infinitely more disturbing than anything about evil ever could be. this is how we organize ourselves. consumers whose ultimate consumption is each other, our world and ultimately ourselves.
I mostly agree with you here, by the way. You skimmed over it quickly but the question and hope of ethical capitalism really is the issue here. Personally I admire markets and the way that they work but think more government control tempered equally with ethical accountability so as to neutralize competing power conflicts towards an internationalist sybiosis is probably our best bet, to overly simplify extremely. Harkering on and complaining how un-militant and how pansy Curtis' work is because it doesn't demonize neoliberalism but instead just portrays it as an ill-devised, psychotic fantasy, as if that's not bad enough, is just stupid. Yes Capitalism is inherantly hierarchical, as is the very notion of empire, but, I dunno, all this mess has resulted out of conflicts of interest arising out of the need for us to organize ourselves responsibly. Surely it's heading somewhere.
Personally I'd like to read Mikhail Khodorkovsky's 'Left Turn' some time.
On that note, I'd like to point out that you haven't offered any solution here, just defended someone complaining childishly how fucked everything is by also complaining how fucked everything is.