Money monster: What if the problem's not the candidates but capitalism?

In case you haven't been paying attention, President Obama's approval rating keeps rising and rising, up to 53 percent which -- barring a war -- is about as good as it gets in this bitterly divided country of ours. A lot of that may be The Trump Effect: Looking good in comparison to what might be coming in January. Other analysts cite/blame the improving economy, but is a lower official unemployment rate really the change we need? What about stagnant wages, or people leaving the workforce, or middle-aged workers stuck in low-paying part-time jobs?

Consider:

Item 1: A big new Pennsylvania facility for one of the world's economic powerhouses -- Amazon -- could mean fewer jobs:

The irony is that Amazon made the announcement the day after a news report that retailers were prepping to lay off 37,000 workers this year, due largely to the shuttering of brick-and-mortar stores.

The 37,000 is the most in one year since the 2008 recession - and more than double the number of layoffs in 2015.

Online shopping is the cause, led by Amazon.com.

Item 2: It's possible that for all the presidential-year blather, there's nothing that can be done to bring back U.S. factory jobs.

In America's factories, jobs are inevitably disappearing, too. But despite the political rhetoric, the problem is not mainly globalization. Manufacturing jobs are on the decline in factories around the world.

"The observation is uncontroversial," said Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia University. "Global employment in manufacturing is going down because productivity increases are exceeding increases in demand for manufactured products by a significant amount."

The consequences of this dynamic are often misunderstood, not least by politicians offering slogans to fix them.

No matter how high the tariffs Mr. Trump wants to raise to encircle the American economy, he will not be able to produce a manufacturing renaissance at home. Neither would changing tax rules to limit corporate flight from the United States, as Mrs. Clinton proposes.

Item 3: This:

Workers in plants run by the largest U.S. poultry producers are regularly being denied bathroom breaks and as a result some are reduced to wearing diapers while working on the processing line, Oxfam America said in a report Wednesday.

"It's not just their dignity that suffers: they are in danger of serious health problems," said Oxfam America, the U.S. arm of the U.K.-based global development group. The group works for a "just world without poverty" and focuses on topics ranging from refugees in Greece to malnutrition.

You look at stories like this and you wonder if maybe there's a bigger problem here. What if the problem isn't the corporate tax rate or pinching unions a little harder or any of the other political quick fixes you hear on the campaign trail. What if modern capitalism is fundamentally broken? This week, the cover story in Time magazine (yes, they're still in business) asks that very question:

This crisis of faith has had no more severe expression than the 2016 presidential campaign, which has turned on the questions of who, exactly, the system is working for and against, as well as why eight years and several trillions of dollars of stimulus on from the financial crisis, the economy is still growing so slowly. All the candidates have prescriptions: Sanders talks of breaking up big banks; Trump says hedge funders should pay higher taxes; Clinton wants to strengthen existing financial regulation. In Congress, Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan remains committed to less regulation.

All of them are missing the point. America's economic problems go far beyond rich bankers, too-big-to-fail financial institutions, hedge-fund billionaires, offshore tax avoidance or any particular outrage of the moment. In fact, each of these is symptomatic of a more nefarious condition that threatens, in equal measure, the very well-off and the very poor, the red and the blue. The U.S. system of market capitalism itself is broken...

Author Rana Faroohar thinks she knows the culprit. The rise of a financial-sector Goliath that's good at generating profits and has little appetite for promoting actual business growth:

To get a sense of the size of this shift, consider that the financial sector now represents around 7% of the U.S. economy, up from about 4% in 1980. Despite currently taking around 25% of all corporate profits, it creates a mere 4% of all jobs. Trouble is, research by numerous academics as well as institutions like the Bank for International Settlements and the International Monetary Fund shows that when finance gets that big, it starts to suck the economic air out of the room. In fact, finance starts having this adverse effect when it's only half the size that it currently is in the U.S. Thanks to these changes, our economy is gradually becoming "a zero-sum game between financial wealth holders and the rest of America," says former Goldman Sachs banker Wallace Turbeville, who runs a multiyear project on the rise of finance at the New York City—based nonprofit Demos.

Maybe now it makes sense that voters respond so well to Bernie Sanders' call to break up the big banks, even if the details are fuzzy. Not to mention Trump's talk on trade, not that I think that's the main reason for his support. But for all the horrible things that we're saying about the 2016 race, the scariest thought may be a thing that we're not even talking about. What of the likelihood that the next president -- regardless of who he or she may be -- can do almost nothing to stop the slow, steady rot of capitalism as it's practiced in the 21st Century?

You think the torches and pitchforks are out now? Wait until 2020.