If the whole capitalist system seems more predatory and unsustainable than ever, it's because it is. The destruction of the middle class in the U.S. is the capitalist system eating its seed-corn.

There seems to be a mad scramble to grab whatever you can before the ship turns turtle. The clock is approaching closing time for the drunken party, and now the guests have gone from drinking all the booze to stealing the silverware. No one intends to clean up the mess, much less wait for the cops to show up.

The corporate media reflects this increasing insanity. News coverage continues to get further and further from reality. As issues become more important, they get talked about less and less. Meanwhile the trivial, and sometimes imaginary, becomes the obsession of the news media.

Surely everyone other than Free Market Fundamentalists can see this. So why doesn't the ruling elite stop this?
It's because systems are more powerful than individuals. Just like honest people getting elected to Congress usually wind up corrupt and cynical, a wealthy person may want the world to improve, but he/she will still get swept up in a tsunami of greed and pillaging.

That's why I think the surge in unsustainable theft, fraud, and greed is happening because the capitalist system has no other choice. The feature is built into the system. Karl Marx described it as such:

“The progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall is, therefore, just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labour. This does not mean to say that the rate of profit may not fall temporarily for other reasons. But proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved a logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labour is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialised labour set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labour, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall.”

Because Karl Marx said it, and because a falling rate of profit has a negative/fatal impact on the capitalist system, it instantly became controversial. Many an economist have been richly rewarded in "disproving" Marx's Law.

But there are two problems for those distinguished economists:
a) it wasn't Marx that discovered this flaw in capitalism. Adam Smith did.
b) this tendency for the rate of profits to fall is measurable.

"THE rise and fall in the profits of stock depend upon the same causes with the rise and fall in the wages of labour, the increasing or declining state of the wealth of the society; but those causes affect the one and the other very differently.
The increase of stock, which raises wages, tends to lower profit. When the stocks of many rich merchants are turned into the same trade, their mutual competition naturally tends to lower its profit; and when there is a like increase of stock in all the different trades carried on in the same society, the same competition must produce the same effect in them all."
- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nation, 1776

Adam Smith wasn't even the first to notice that the rate of profits tended to fall. Merchants had already accepted the fact. Smith was just the first to give a reason for it.

Almost on the same scale as Smith was economist David Ricardo. A few decades after Wealth Of Nations, Ricardo wrote this:

“The natural tendency of profits then is to fall; for in the progress of society and wealth, the additional quantity of food required is obtained by the sacrifice of more and more labour. This tendency, this gravitation as it were of profits, is happily checked at repeated intervals by the improvements in machinery, connected with the
production of necessaries, as well as by discoveries in the science of agriculture which enable us to relinquish a portion of labour before required, and therefore to lower the price of the prime necessary of the labourer”

You may have noticed that Smith and Ricardo gave different reasons why the capitalist rate of profits decline. Neither of them were 100% correct at explaining what causes this phenomenon.
So a few decades later, in 1848, another giant of economics, John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy (1848), wrote:

“The tendency of profits to fall as society advances, which has been brought to notice in the preceding chapter, was early recognised by writers on industry and commerce…

“On a limited extent of land, only a limited quantity of capital can find employment at a profit. As the quantity of capital approaches this limit, profit falls; when the limit is attained, profit is annihilated; and can only be restored through an extension of the field of employment, either by the acquisition of fertile land, or by opening new markets in foreign countries…”

Mill's explanation is both easiest to understand, and the most accurate analysis until Marx's explanation roughly 20 years later.
Then, about 70 years after Marx's Das Kapital Volume III, the last true giant of economics, John Maynard Keynes wrote:

“The demand for capital is strictly limited in the sense that it would not be difficult to increase the stock of capital up to a point where its marginal efficiency had fallen to a very low figure… The return from [new means of production] would have to cover little more than their exhaustion by wastage and obsolescence together with some margin to cover risk and the exercise of skill and judgment”.

So essentially everyone that ever knew anything about capitalism all came to the same conclusion - that capitalism has a built-in flaw.
A lot of ink has been spilled in attempts to disprove Marx's explanation for the falling rate of profits, while no one has convincingly proven that the rate of profits isn't falling (although plenty have tried).
That's like attacking Newton's theory of gravity, while ignoring the fact that apples are still falling toward the Earth.

If you look at the charts above, they all show that the rate of profits declined to roughly 1990 and then stabilized.
Does that mean the problem of falling profits was solved?
No. It means 2 billion consumers, not burdened by debts, were suddenly exposed to the capitalist markets.
While it stabilized the rate of profits, it should have in theory caused them to spike higher. It didn't.

Now the markets in China, Russia, and Vietnam are mature. Which means that their rate of profits should be falling now as well.

I can't prove that the falling rate of profits is the reason for the wholesale pillaging of the globe by the ruling elite. The reason may be different, or there may be several reasons.
But if the falling rate of profits is the reason then we can expect the pillaging to get worse and worse, and it will only end with a collapse of the global economy. Or a socialist revolution.