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And so, precisely, it has been. The Great Recession of our time is only the most obvious manifestation of a thirty year process of wealth transfer from bottom to top. Even as the global economy crumbles and America groans under the burden of record-high unemployment rates, all remains quite lovely, thank you very much, for the nice folks in America's economic stratosphere. Record high bonuses on Wall Street and a rising Dow. Meanwhile, the distribution of wealth in this country is now as it was in Herbert Hoover's day, a scenario of which any banana republic could be proud.
And the notion of what to do about it is more farcical than ever. The only serious political energy in the country belongs to the tea party morons, and their media cheerleaders on Fox and, well, seemingly everywhere. And they are calling wait for it now for less government as a solution to the country's problems. It boggles the mind. Could an ideology ever have been more obviously shown to be catastrophic in its effects? And yet here we are arguing in public about doubling down on those policy ideas, while the two major political parties both pretend to be limiting the worst practices of the most predatory actors, as they simultaneously accept bags of money from the very same folks at the very same time.
I'm sorry, but this is embarrassing. I know enough about history that I don't entirely mind if my country has a bad century or two, or falls from the lofty heights of its great power status. Falling is what you're supposed to do when you're a great power and you've already done the whole rise thing. It's called gravity, and it's pretty inevitable.
But do we have to do it to ourselves?
And does it have to be the product of such rampant stupidity?
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