Dear Editor,
For many years, I’ve had nothing but admiration for the United States’ financial system. I went around, like so many others, proclaiming it to be the gold standard of capitalism. Was and is it all a façade? Are the Americans the greatest illusionists in the world? One can certainly make a convincing case that they are. How could an entire financial sector collapse to the extent that it has in the US? How could private sector companies be billions of dollars in the red and still pay CEO’s fantastic salaries and/or dole out ridiculous sums on other remuneration and pensions schemes? How did all those Harvard, Princeton, Stanford and other Ivy League graduates get it so wrong? Is the business education system in the US also pulling wool over our eyes?
The irony of this entire debacle is that the chief capitalist and democratic crusader has had to turn to a semi-socialist and authoritarian regime in China to finance and save it from impending humiliation. This fact has not stopped the US from pretending that it has unlimited funds to subsidize massive “bailouts” of its private sector. Oh well, the more things change, the more they remain the same.
Yours faithfully,
Clinton Urling
America is the land of the Greedy. That’s why the financial system is failing. No empire last forever. One day this evil empire will fall.
My concern is for the working class and the poor. I have no sympathy for the rich and the wannabe middle class, they are the ones who impose these draconian policies that affect the working class and the poor.
Re: “America is the land of the Greedy. That’s why the financial system is failing. No empire last forever. One day this evil empire will fall…” In whose lifetime!!! Certainly not mine; perhaps, yours. :-\
Despite its imperfections, the USA is still the powerhouse of the world, economically and politically.
It is a ‘work in progress’and have the elasticity, mechanisms and capacity, to make the necessary adjustments along the way.
A few ‘mornings’ ago, it was not believable that an black american would have been elected to the office of president of the USA: well, it happened.
This is not the first recession and it will not be the last.
The USA will continue to evolve, progress and calibrate the fundamentals; economy and democratic institutions, which have been responsible for its unequalled success and magnetism, as a society.
The USA’s political and economic system, have demonstrated its resilience and capacity for change,it has outlived the tyranical and totalitarian ideologies and political systems, of facism and communism.
No the Third World is the illusionist. Submerged in poverty and want,dreamers of a better life,of streets paved with gold,all the while haullicinating in Guyana and elsewhere,they have unrealistic expectations about America.