Alternet/ by Nomi Prins
Author and social critic Morris Berman says the fact that we're a nation of hustlers lies at the root of our decline.
Several years after the Wall Street-ignited crisis began, the nation’s
top bank CEOs (who far out-accumulated their European and other
international counterparts) continue to hobnob with the president at
campaign dinners where each plate costs more than one out of four US
households make in a year. Financial bigwigs lead their affluent lives,
unaffected, unremorseful, and unindicted for wreaking havoc on the
nation. Why? Because they won. They hustled better. They are living the
American Dream.
This is not the American Dream that says if you work hard you can be
more comfortable than your parents; but rather, if you connive well,
game the rules, and rule the game, your take from others is
unlimited. In this paradigm, human empathy, caring, compassion, and
connection have been devalued from the get-go. This is the flaw in the
entire premise of the American Dream: if we can have it all, it must by
definition be at someone else’s expense.
In Why America Failed,
noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman’s brilliant, raw and
unflinchingly accurate postmortem of America, he concludes that this
hustling model, literally woven into the American DNA, doomed the
country from the start, and led us inevitably to this dysfunctional
point. It is not just the American Dream that has failed, but America
itself, because the dream was a mistake in the first place. We are at
our core a nation of hustlers; not recently, not sometimes, but always.
Conventional wisdom has it that America was predicated on the republican
desire to break free from monarchical tyranny, and that was certainly a
factor in the War of Independence; but in practical terms, it came
down to a drive for "more" -- for individual accumulation of wealth.
So where does that leave us as a country? I caught up with Berman to find out.
Click here to read the full article.
Alternet/ by Nomi Prins
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