· Από την αμερικάνικη πολιτική καθημερινότητα... της εποχής..

Από την αμερικάνικη πολιτική καθημερινότητα... της εποχής..

Bernie Sanders

Αυτή είναι η ολιγαρχία:

Ο Μασκ πηγαίνει στο Ουισκόνσιν για να δώσει επιταγές εκατομμυρίων δολαρίων σε υποστηρικτές του υποψηφίου κατά της επιλογής για το Ανώτατο Δικαστήριο της πολιτείας.

Δεν μπορούμε να επιτρέψουμε σε έναν δισεκατομμυριούχο να αγοράσει αυτές τις εκλογές.

This is oligarchy at work:

Musk is going to Wisconsin to give million dollar checks to supporters of the anti-choice candidate for the state Supreme Court.

We cannot allow a billionaire to buy this election.

«The best days of the American economy are long in the past, and better days for the US are unlikely in the foreseeable future.

The 20th-century idea of an “American Dream”  – where a sizable majority of people in the US could become or aspire to become middle-class, affluent or even extremely wealthy – is mostly dead in the second quarter of the 21st.

..According to a report from Moody’s Analytics in February, the richest 10 percent of Americans (households with an annual income of at least $250,000) drove half of all US consumer spending (about $10 trillion) between September 2023 and September 2024.

The fact that 12.7 million households could collectively outspend much of the rest of the nation is truly jaw-dropping. It points to the end of an economy that has depended primarily on the needs-based and discretionary spending of ordinary working Americans since the end of World War II.

The biggest surprise of all on the end of the American dream, though, is that for tens of millions of Americans, this is not a surprise. The dismantling of the American dream and the consumer capitalism that defined the nation from 1945 through the housing bubble bust in 2008 began more than a half-century ago.

The gradual austerity leaders imposed on social welfare and education programmes combined with multiple rounds of tax cuts for the wealthy and the corporations, killed social mobility, especially for Americans living in poverty.

The transition from manufacturing to service industry jobs, along with automation, regional shifting, downsizing, and the offshoring of millions of other jobs, the saddling of millions of Americans with healthcare and higher education debt … All of these changes and more have turned the American middle class into a class of strugglers and not strivers. And the worst thing is, this is exactly what the wealthiest of Americans have wanted for decades.

By the measure of most experts, the economic power of ordinary Americans peaked sometime between 1970 and 1974. More than six out of 10 Americans could claim middle-class status, and Black, Latin, and other Americans of colour had begun to climb into the US middle class in larger numbers.

The story goes that the OPEC oil crisis, brought on by the US supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, along with the deindustrialisation of the American Midwest, ground down the US economy from 1973-74 onward. The combination of higher unemployment and higher inflation, known as stagflation, ended a three-decade run of endless US economic dominance and prosperity. But this story makes it seem as if a set of unfortunate circumstances ended the Pax Americana. In truth, the major corporations, the wealthiest of Americans and the federal government began shifting resources away from ending poverty and sustaining the American working and middle classes during the 1970s....»

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/3/27/the-american-dream-is-officially-over