Truthout | Op-Ed - Monday, 13 January 2014
A society consisting of the sum of its vanity and greed is not a society at all but a state of war. -
Lewis Lapham
The Gilded Age is back, with huge profits for the ultrarich, hedge
fund managers and the major players in the financial service industries.
In the new landscapes of wealth, exclusion and fraud, the commanding
institutions of a savage and fanatical capitalism promote a
winner-take-all ethos and aggressively undermine the welfare state and
wage a counter revolution against the principles of social citizenship
and democracy. The geographies of moral and political decadence have
become the organizing standard of the dreamworlds of consumption,
privatization, surveillance and deregulation. For instance, banks such
as JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and other investment companies
including Barclays, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and UBS
prosper from subterfuge and corruption. They also have been transformed
into punishing factories that erode the welfare state while pushing
millions into hardship and misery and relegating an entire generation of
young people into a state of massive unemployment, debt, and
repression. The profits seem endless and the lack of moral
responsibility unchecked as the rich go on buying sprees soaking up
luxury goods in record numbers. The New York Times reports that
dealers of high-end luxury cars cannot keep up with the demand.
Indulging in luxury items is no longer a dirty word for the ultrarich in
spite of living in a society wracked by massive unemployment,
inequality and poverty. One example provided by the Times,
without either irony or criticism, points to "Matt Hlavin, an
entrepreneur in Cleveland who owns seven businesses, mostly in
manufacturing, bought three Mercedes last year: a $237,000 SLS AMG and a
$165,000 S63 AMG for himself, and a $97,000 GL550 sport utility vehicle
for his wife."[1] This example of shameless consumption reads like a scene out of Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street, which
portrays the financial elite as infantilized frat boys out of control
in their unquenchable craving for greed, sex, power, and every other
debauchery imaginable.[2] At
a time when the United States has descended into forms of political and
moral amnesia, massive inequity and high levels of poverty, coupled
with narratives of excess and over-the-top material indulgence, have
become normalized and barely receive any critical commentary in the
mainstream media.Read more....
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