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 John Bellamy Foster: Economic crises are functional to the system in that a crisis helps capital readjust its imbalances, disproportions, as Marxian theories often say, and it sets the basis for a renewed period of expansion.  So, regular business-cycle crises . . . help the system. . . .  But, in addition to cycles . . . there are also trends, long-term trends in the economy. . . .  There's been a slow decline, decade by decade, since the 1960s.  So, the trend rate of growth is going down. . . .  The problem is that in the advanced capitalist economies now, in the United States, Europe, and Japan, it's getting pretty close to a 1% rate, so their economies would double in size every seventy years or so at this.  This is impossible for the capitalist system. . . .  Of course, the capitalist class is not going to accept their capital only doubling every seventy years.  What are they gonna do?  If the pie isn't growing, the only way you can have bigger slices for some is by having smaller slices for others. . . .  Another world war is not a way out.  Little wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, even if you add them all up, we would need fifteen wars like that to even get started in terms of stimulating the economy.  So, they can't stimulate it that way.  They need to re-financialize the economy -- that's all they can do.  What they need to do in order to do that is . . . neoliberalism on stilts. . ... >>>