The New Gilded Age

[…] The system is largely responsible for the greatest concentration of the nation’s income and wealth at the very top since the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, with the richest 400 Americans owning as much as the bottom 150 million put together. And these multimillionaires and billionaires are now actively buying the 2012 election—and with it, American democracy.

[…]

We’ve entered a new Gilded Age, of which Mitt Romney is the perfect reflection. The original Gilded Age was a time of buoyant rich men with flashy white teeth, raging wealth and a measured disdain for anyone lacking those attributes, which was just about everyone else.Romney looks and acts the part perfectly[…]

[…]

We’ve had wealthy presidents before, but they have been traitors to their class—Teddy Roosevelt storming against the “malefactors of great wealth” and busting up the trusts, Franklin Roosevelt railing against the “economic royalists” and raising their taxes, John F. Kennedy appealing to the conscience of the nation to conquer poverty. Romney is the opposite: he wants to do everything he can to make the superwealthy even wealthier and the poor even poorer, and he justifies it all with a thinly veiled social Darwinism.

[…]

(Robert B. Reich. Deutsche Übersetzung bei Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik.)

Ich stolpere gerade über das Blog von Robert Reich (dank eines Hinweises auf den NachDenkSeiten) – ich denke, es lohnt, seine Website weiter im Blick zu behalten.

Amerika ist mE. immer noch (nicht bloß wegen der Produktion von sehr sehenswerten TV-Shows) ein großes Vorbild. Man findet dort Stimmen von altersweisen Frauen und Männern, die in ihrer Wut und ihrem Engagement ungebrochen sind – ein Ideal, für das man im europäischen Raum kaum noch jemanden findet, der es vertritt.