An important consequence of the configuration of global capitalism (the increasing emphasis on seeking rents and profiting by receiving public money rather than through the creation of value, going hand-in-hand with the increasing share of US GDP claimed by finance, insurance, and real estate) were the disastrous wars and interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, driven by the hunger of arms manufacturers and various other contractors for public money to pad their profits. I suspect that the operations currently going on in Africa are likely the shape of the future: perpetual "involvement" which the public is only dimly aware of, and which can be blown up into more full-scale intervention as needed with a bit of propaganda to grease the skids.
As if it weren't enough that we allow bankers to extract private profit from a public monopoly, moral hazard has drastically increased since the GFC with an implicit guarantee of federal bailouts for banks deemed "systemically important financial institutions", encouraging them to continue fraudulent and harmful practices: many banks and other financial entities are only profitable because of this implicit guarantee.
A political economy in which private profit is largely guaranteed by the state, which also gives business a hand by repressive measures that restrict the ability of people to organize to change these things (which we see in, among other things, "right-to-work" laws and the recent Supreme Court decision allowing companies to force their employees and customers into private arbitration), is characteristic of fascism.
The rise of precarity in employment, which is related to wealth/income inequality but not an identical issue, is another serious problem. Goes hand-in-hand with directly repressive measures by the state, but hardly anyone who, in the terminology of
this paper, experiences "routine work schedule instability" has time to
be a citizen and organize for change. Another mark of how near our society is to fascism is that precarity has been rebranded through propaganda to "flexibility" and people are expected to be grateful for their own immiseration.
The rise of social media means that unaccountable private entities exert increasing control over the flow of information to which the majority of people are exposed. Many have hailed this as a positive development but this is preposterous. The Russian disinformation campaign in 2016 barely scratches the surface of the problems introduced by this model of information creation and consumption. In accordance with the rise of social media, technologies like smartphones that have genuine liberatory and other potential are being designed to function like slot machines, keeping the customer on the phone as constantly as possible with little injections of dopamine. The whole life-cycle of these devices involves the massive externalizing of costs, mostly onto the workers and bystanders in the developing world who are exposed to various toxic pollutants and dystopian working conditions.
I could probably go on but that's all I can think of now.
edit: oh, wait, how could I forget? the increasing concentration of ownership and control in 'traditional' media has had a similar erosive effect on the information infrastructure necessary to reproduce an informed citizenry capable of actually participating in government in a meaningful way. Again, the theme is increasing control exerted by unaccountable private entities which exist to turn a profit, not to inform people.
