The Atlantic, one of the oldest Anglo-American journals of record, serves up an indictment of America's descent into Third World status:
In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending.
(snip)
But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests — financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.
The Atlantic's only real rival for the title of most intellectual publication in America is Harper's (and it's just as old!), whose editor emeritus Lewis Lapham has always held a rather jaundiced view of his peers in the ruling elite. His florid prose is always a joy to read (excerpted from Money and Class in America, 1988):
By abdicating their authority and responsibility, the sovereign people also relinquish their courage. Like rich old women in Palm Beach or a committee of dithering lawyers, the American electorate listens to the wisdom of its public servants as if to voices of minor oracles. Politicians and Cabinet ministers appear in the role of of the omniscient butler who finds phrases of art with which to conceal the embarrassments of the young master’s profligacy and reduced circumstances.
Finally, Rolling Stone offers us this colorful portrait of our dire straits as a result of the above:
People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.
The authors all recognize that neofeudalism is here. I've seen it coming too, probably since my days at Notre Dame when I first encountered the children of one wing (the hard-right, hypermoralistic, hypocritical Catholic wing) of our ruling class. I have spent my adult life aspiring to join the ranks of America's patricians only to find that, in the main, they won't have me among them. No matter. The turmoil now brewing will allow me and others like me to simply displace them with new wealth, like the Darwinian process that allows mutated species to survive ecological catastrophes.
There were numerous warning signs on our national road to economic annihilation. Many of my fellow Americans seem to have mistaken them for billboard advertisements. I read every sign up close, took notes, and marked their locations. I will wait patiently for the day when I will sign the deed on a San Francisco mansion. Quite a few will be vacated by people who couldn't be bothered to pay attention.
Welcome, neofeudalism. Let the jousting matches for fiefdoms begin.
