Blow Out, Blow Back, Blow Up, Blow Off: The Plutonomic Politics of Economic Crisis Since 2001

Two decades after the close of the Cold War, 2011 is an opportune time for reflections about the present and recent past.Twenty years ago as the Soviet Union was crumbling, Christopher Lasch asserted in The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (1991), "it ought to be clear by now that neither fascism nor socialism represents the wave of the future. . . .None of this means that the future will be safe for democracy, only that the danger to democracy comes less from totalitarian or collectivist movements abroad than from the erosion of its psychological, cultural, and spiritual foundations from within" (Lasch, 1991: 24).At the same time, Lasch fretted about the growing "revolt of the elites" in which he saw a powerful, prestigious, and a privileged new class of wealthy professionaltechnical experts--emerging all across the U.S.A. and other developed Western economies--increasingly were making themselves and their embedded institutional networks at the top 5, 10 or even 20 percent of society independent of public services, decaying cities, and civic activities in their nation states.By 1995, Lasch argued with regard to the new class that "in effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. . .Many of them have ceased to see themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America's destiny for better or worse" (Lasch, 1995: 45).On the one hand, with the growth of "the borderless global economy, money has lost its links to nationality," and, on the other hand, the mobile, cosmopolitan, and self-centered new class increasingly had "little inclination to make sacrifices or to accept responsibility" as their denationalized businesses, professions, and skills followed their money into the liquid modernity of globalism in which "the cosmopolitanism of the favored few, because it is uninformed by the practice of citizenship turns out to be a higher form of parochialism" (Lasch, 1995: 46, 47).Being proponents of more material progress in 1991, the new class did not seem at all enamored with "a return to a more frugal existence: such views fell outside the progressive consensus" (Lasch, 1991: 529).Things have changed, however, during the past two decades.The worried open acknowledgement of global climate change, excessive state borrowing, overextended public services, and rapid economic globalization have become secure articles of faith for many among this new class.Indeed, for their most successful factions among "the super-rich" (Brenner, 2002;Hacker and Pierson, 2010;and, Taibbi, 2010), there is a willing acceptance of frugality, impoverishment or dispossession, as long as these deprivations are endured by the many rather than them, while they affirm a renewed faith in the central importance of growing prosperity for the elite few (Kapur, Macleod, and Singh, 2005).These rhetorical concessions, then, are foundational principles among "the new global elite" (Freeland, 2011), which has become more evident in Lasch's "revolt" of talented and wealthy elites in richer and poor countries alike.This brief study of the U.S.A. in the twenty-first century examines aspects of the "more frugal existence" for the many, now known as "the 99 Percent" after the Occupy Wall Street occupation of Lower Manhattan's Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, created by continuous economic upheaval.It also probes the consolidation of greater wealth among the privileged and/or talented elites, who are now identified as "the One Percent" at the top of today's twirling economic booms and busts.From 1968 to 2009, income inequality between the richest Americans versus those at the poverty level almost doubled, this income inequality was the largest of all Western industrial economies, Blow Out, Blow Back, Blow Up, Blow Off: The Plutonomic Politics of Economic Crisis since 2001