The Bush years represent the culmination of a fifty year trend which has resulted in the collapse of any moral claim the United State has to leadership in political or human progress.
The historic events of the last week have provided a stark and unavoidable perspective on the trajectory of American history. The Wall Street debacle represents such rapacious greed and governmental irresponsibility, as well as being of a magnitude, that it will shake the whole world for years to come. This is, as the debacle of the 1930s was, the pinnacle of "free market fundamentalism." This economic model is now proven to be unmasked or revealed for what it always was: Predatory Capitalism. Unfortunately, this is not the result of a few greedy folks or a few crooks; this is the result of the brazen cultural pursuit of wealth, the denigration of beneficial government agency, and the loss of any moral or value compass. Free market fundamentalism has bankrupted our fellow citizens as well as our country. The same culture has spread throughout the world through our institutions of control: the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund and will result in a net increase in human misery as it collapses. Add to this the imperialistic and incompetent pursuit of oil wars in the Middle East with all their expense and failures; the destruction of 200 years of Constitutional balance of powers and precedent by the Bush/Republican unitary government; the policy of the sadistic torture of prisoners; and the total abdication of our responsibility to intervene in the global warming climate crisis and history will judge us poorly.
Tragically none of this grave overview of abject failure is being presented to the American public by our media. No one in the mainstream media, other than perhaps Paul Krugman, spends any time revealing what an ideological as well as moral failure these events represent. Furthermore, so far the solutions presented an imperial treasury Czar and privatization of profit and socialization of loss only carry forward the policy and ideological failures of the past. This is not going to be cured by the voluntary ministrations of the Bill Gates or the Bill Clinton Foundations. The rest of the world is both terribly afraid of our precarious state and mocking us for our selfishness and incompetence while damning us for a our ideology, which, though polished up, was as false as the communist one. History, I'm afraid will judge the United States of America poorly as just one more rapacious empire that ruled and exploited more by financial instruments than armaments and had high flying but hollow rhetoric to hide and justify our selfishness. Thus it will be for all times.