ABSTRACT
The contemporary global economy is primarily driven by asset and debt economies rather than by production and consumption economies. When the commons, resources of the earth, or communities have been "partitioned and divided up as private property rights guaranteed by the state" in order for the environment to be monetized or made tradable—thus facilitating the extraction of social wealth from the ownership of a commodified nature as well as from the monopolization, securitization, and lack of regulation of these geopolitical economic relationships—then the contradictions of capitalism and the likelihood of global financial crises are heightened, portending to the ultimate departure of the unsustainable political economy. In these matters, as with amoral investments, environmental damage, labor exploitation, and the harms of multinationals more generally, the colluding violations of states and corporations represent symbiotic assaults on the cultural and natural resources that were once accessible to all people and that have now become the institutionalized subjects of austerity, contraction, neoliberalism, and privatization.
