quoted from NPQ (New Perspectives Quarterly):
"The year 2008 is thus likely to go down in American history as an even more pivotal
moment than 2001, when the 9/11 terrorrist attacks occurred, because the life
of the average American is going to be shaped far more by the consequences.We’re
not talking about the inconvenience of lining up to go through metal detectors at the
airport. We’re talking about the transformation of the American model itself. Joseph
Stiglitz was not exaggerating when he quipped to me earlier this year that “the fall of
Wall Street is to market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was to communism.” Just like that, we’re in a different era. ... Since the 1950s, when Nixon bested Khrushchev in the famous kitchen debate, our answer to the equalized deprivation of socialism has been consumer plenitude beyond compare. Khrushchev may have emptily blustered in those years about burying us, but it was the Communist Chinese, in the end, who gave us enough credit to hang ourselves when our consumer society desired more than we could pay for with our own savings."
