Political Capitalism

We all dream of the day when the majority of Americans own their own homes. A day when families are healthy, and children are loved and valued. We dream of a country where people work 20 instead of 60 hours a week to make a living. What can we do to prevent a culture ruled by the “Gospel of Greed” from imploding? Luther Wissa believes he has a new way forward. It is radical, it is neither Republican nor Democrat, left nor right, purely Christian nor atheist, and communist nor capitalist. It is a new way rather than a middle way.

America has a huge problem. It faces four major challenges, on which its future depends, and it is failing to meet them. In That Used to Be Us, Thomas L. Friedman, one of our most influential columnists, and Michael Mandelbaum, one of our leading foreign policy thinkers, analyze those challenges - globalization, the revolution in information technology, the nation’s chronic deficits, and its pattern of energy consumption - and spell out what we need to do now to rediscover America and rise to this moment.

Charles H. Ferguson, who electrified the world with his Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, now explains how a predator elite took over the country, step by step, and he exposes the networks of academic, financial, and political influence, in all recent administrations, that prepared the predators' path to conquest. Over the last several decades, the United States has undergone one of the most radical social and economic transformations in its history.

Empires rise, decline, and fall. History has witnessed this cycle with the Romans, the Ottomans, and the British. They have all toppled, and if we are not careful, the US will be the next. Many of today’s enterprises are a gaggle of debt-addicted extreme financial engineering frogs floundering in tepid snake oil. Unfortunately, many will find their demise in the clutches of IP vultures. If we don't play our trump cards right, the next voracious empire—the Middle Kingdom of China—will consume us.