http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/04/28/gilded_age/index.html

Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias — just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the breakaway political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order that, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared with “yes we can”?

Perhaps the answer is simple and basic: The first Gilded Age rested on industrialization; the second, on deindustrialization. In our time, a new system of disaccumulation looted American industry, liquidating its assets to reward speculation in “fictitious capital.” After all, the rate of investment in new plants, technology, and research and development all declined during the 1980s. For a quarter-century, the fastest-growing part of the economy has been the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector.

Deindustrialization has set off an avalanche whose impact is still being felt in the economy, in the country’s political culture and in everyday life. It laid the industrial working class and the labor movement low, killing it twice over. This, more than anything else, may account for the great silence of the second Gilded Age when measured, at least, against the raucous noise of the first. Labor was mortally wounded by direct assault, beginning with President Reagan’s decision in 1981 to fire all the striking air traffic controllers. His draconian act licensed American business to launch its own all-out attack on the right to organize, which continues to this day.

This anger at the decay of honesty and integrity is part of a grieving process. The Kubler-Ross model identifies the stages of grief as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Because of the lack of honesty and integrity of our elected officials, we are now grieving, as a nation and as individuals, the loss of many things: the image of what we thought our nation was and what it stood for, the hope for a resolution to our wars, our hopes for the future, our jobs.

Many of us went through the same grieving process during the democratic primaries. It is important to note that reaching the acceptance phase does not mean you condone what happened, just that you come to terms with the fact it did happen.

It’s all part of a healthy process, really. When one reaches the end of it, it is then a bit easier to build a new, hopefully effective, plan of action.

Can anyone point me to the polls that show seniors voting for Obama?

What’s next? Suicide-vest Ken?

Of all the stupid, idiotic ideas. And this is what we want to teach our young daughters in the 21st Century? Pull on that burka, cover yourself because there’s something terribly wrong in being a woman.

How very PC. How unAmerican!

http://www.comcast.net/video/1339100026/burka_barbie

I am going to call Matel and tell them I will never purchase anything with their logo on it again…ever. Outrageous and disgusting.

It’s more like the nation needs to get up to speed with Sarah Palin and leave the Darth Vader world of Obama behind.

He’s the opposite of everything the DNC, the media, and Obama himself has tried to sell to the country.

I see no peaceful way out of this until we remove the 2 party system. The next crisis will be worse.

The reason for Obama is obvious to me: boil us slowly, while the same people who backed Bush, take pound after pound of flesh. I see no recovery from this moment. We are past recovery. We are broke in every sense of the word. Our real wealth has been given to China and we have a broken system. I am no longer sure we have greatness in us. I hope we do. Good character traits may not save us tis time.