Gilded Age vs. NOW: Instead of Carnegie founding libraries-we have Trump yelling at people on TV [View all]

[kpete]

The New Gilded Age: A bigger con job than the first one
Inequality has reached 19th-century levels – but that era had a dynamism and optimism that ours can only fake

There are unquestionably things to prefer about our own era: Women, people of color and LGBT folk participate more or less fully in our cultural and political life, and the discourse of rights has evolved in directions few 19th-century Americans could have imagined. (Pot is almost legal now — but opium and cocaine were legal then!) But in economic terms, the first Gilded Age was a period of production and expansion (perhaps unsustainably so), whereas the New Gilded Age is its negative image, a period of contraction and consumption. Instead of Andrew Carnegie founding libraries, we have Donald Trump yelling at people on television like a low-rent parody of the Calvinist God. Instead of rising wages for almost everyone and universal free education, we offer ever cheaper goods made in countries we used to bomb, a mortgage you can’t afford on a house you don’t want in the middle of a former soybean field, and the prospect that one day you’ll get to sit on an airplane in a temporary bubble of pretend wealth – on your boss’s dime! — drinking Champagne and listening to tinny string-quartet music while the rest of us curse at our kids and cram our oddly shaped packages under the seat.

more:
http://www.salon.com/2014/04/26/the_new_gilded_age_a_bigger_con_job_than_the_first_one/