In the state's place stand these institutions, subordinating civil rights, laws and the environment to the ever-expanding needs of the free market and the pocketbooks of rich individuals and international conglomerates, many of whose annual earnings exceed the gross national products of many second and third world countries. In short, such financial organizations have assumed the previous role of the state. In doing so, they ve further contributed to the erosion of democratic political institutions, already battered in North America and the European Union by nearly twenty years of continuous scaling back of government spending on welfare, education, health and the environment. North Americans and Europeans are finally criticizing capitalism again because they sense some kind of radical discrepancy between the decreasing quality of their lives and how the government and the media tells them they re supposed to be living. At a certain point, overwhelming poverty and an increasingly lack of access to upward mobility in a world with so much money and so many freedoms becomes too hard to ignore, regardless of how frequently you ve been told that every opportunity for self-advancement in the service industry is naturally yours.
People have good reasons to feel disenchanted and lied to.
Despite the massive profits being generated by the new economy, in America the discrepancy between rich and poor is now greater than it was during the 1920s, when interest rates were at a similar all time low, and unemployment was extremely high. Even though commodity and gas prices have reached record levels, there s been no significant increase in wages for Americans in almost thirty years. Meanwhile, the homeless continue to proliferate, the police get more violent, anti-crime legislation becomes even more medieval, and minorities consistently get pushed out of urban areas into new suburban slums. While one could cite numerous other examples of disenfranchisement in the United States, insufficient employment opportunities and wages that lack purchasing power to buy into the new economy ought to be enough evidence to explain why Americans are becoming ambivalent about capitalism. Because these are uncontestable physical realities that we all have to personally confront in our everyday lives, regardless of how much time we spend watching television, attend worship services or surf the Internet.