The strength behind Obama's re-election

Those grand times when some people made lots of money ceased forever when the Great Financial Crisis hit the world in 2008. It is a lie to promise people that it will happen again in its old freewheeling way.

Capitalism in the form that we once knew it actually died that year, and rigor mortis set in rapidly. It is beyond resurrection and will be replaced gradually by something more meaningful to the era in which we live.

Thankfully, neither Communism nor Socialism will make a comeback, as both have been tried, often in brutal fashion, over a long period of time, and have failed miserably.

The strongest possible basis for a renewal of prosperity is via a new type of economics that is best described as Community Capitalism.

US President Obama has touched on some elements of it in his current election campaign. He envisages a marketplace that is designed to operate on a level playing field, where hard working and honest people all have a fair chance to compete.

However, the majority of participants in the market will accept that they have a personal responsibility for the alleviation of poverty and the preservation of the environment as a fundamental core of good market economics.

They will also have an opportunity to inject much more private capital into health, education and infrastructure on a basis that offers them a fair return on their investment - replacing the role of governments in those fields.

Outstanding features of this community marketplace will be the active presence of not-for-profit corporations, as well as State Capitalism based on an improved version of the current Chinese model.

These institutions will have far greater capacity for growth than traditional corporate structures and, as a result, there will not be a very wealthy one per cent dominating the scene while most of humanity misses out. It will, however, develop a powerful middle class that is far more likely than the wealthy to generate the economic enhancement of those living in poverty.

Community Capitalism will evolve steadily. Barack Obama appears to have absorbed the message of change, and seems to be heading in this new direction.

Unlike Romney, he acknowledges that there is a new world out there dominated by rapidly changing technology, which gives little guys a lot of power in the social media as well as new found opportunities in an online marketplace. His challenge in leading America through a period of change will be to bring the Congress with him on the journey.

Sadly, most of them are so far to the right, and so lost in the past, that they refuse to accept the obvious fact that the world has undergone a transformation where no sensible person now believes that wealth trickles down from the wealthy to the masses. In truth, it has never done that.