Welcome to the Post-Modern Gilded Age

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/16/welcome-to-the-post-modern-gilded-age/

One word dominates political discourse in America today: Jobs! It was the centerpiece of recent the debate between Republican presidential contenders and the Democratic president’s speech to the nation.

The official unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent; when you add those who’ve given up, the rate hits 16.2 percent. Unemployment is worse among minority groups, especially African-American, Hispanic and Native-American youth. Whether president or contender, local politician or media pundit, everyone has a plan to solve the unemployment problem. Sure.

A growing number of families throughout country live in fear of getting a pink slip, knowing that with no likely new job in the short term (if at all), it will profoundly up-end their life. Many others are struggling with the painful consequences of unemployment, compounded by foreclosure, homelessness, illness and/or poverty. Shame, and a deepening sense of failure, is griping many ordinary Americans as well as the nation. America, its economy and society, is stalled. This is fueling a growing sense of despair, a dispirited belief that the system is fundamentally broken. The unasked question is not how to solve the problem, but why is it occurring?
The call for jobs hides a more serious question. Is the current crisis, one with economic, social and personal consequences, just another periodic stumble that American capitalism has repeatedly bounced-back from since the Civil War or something else? Is it but another speed bump to post-modern prosperity or a sign of something more serious, the end of the “American Century”?
Henry Luce of Time magazine coined the concept, the American Century, in 1941 to challenge the isolationist tendency shared by the then American elite. The war against fascism was spreading across the globe and the U.S. was just coming out of the Depression. Luce’s concept proclaimed an internationalist agenda, joining the war against fascism, as well as a domestic agenda, promoting the federal government, the representative of the people, as a force to restrain the excesses of capitalism, the private power of the ruling class.

More at the link --

[ixion]

1. "profoundly up-ending" is putting it mildly

it is, in fact, a likely prison sentence, at best, or a death sentence, more than likely.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. +10

[RKP5637]

2. Excellent article IMO! And two of the most salient paragraphs IMO were ...

"And they are winning. The Democrats, aligned with other sectors of big capital and a fading labor and civil-rights movement, are devoid of a meaningful agenda, a counter-narrative, to contest power. Under President Obama’s leadership of compromise and capitulation, elected Democatics are hoping only to hold on. Establishment liberals don’t want to rock-the-boat with either a radical critique or an assertive progressive agenda that is most needed in this time of crisis.

The challenge facing progressives is how to fight the good fight against growing corporate and government tyranny now remaking the nation. What is clear is that a new, more dynamic and inclusive popular movement needs to emerge, one that combines struggles at the workplace, the neighborhood and the digital commons and that reaches from the street corner to the voting booth, from the statehouse to the White House."

[90-percent]

3. Gilded Age 2.0

A fitting name for a 21st Century repeat of America in the 1890's.

-90% Jimmy