If we look at the situation globally, we see two trends, one good and one bad. The good one is that the gap in average incomes between people in the developed world and the developing world is closing. But while inequalities between nations (as measured by statistics on averages) is decreasing, inequalities within nations are worsening, as income and wealth disparities get larger. As a result, we now have two worlds emerging that, unlike the old divisions of rich and poor nations, now consist of rich and poor groupings that transcend nations. As Chrystia Freeland says in an article in the January/February 2011 issue of The Atlantic titled The Rise of the New Global Elite of the new oligarchy:

Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

No good can come from this trend of a rapidly widening gap between a tiny rich coterie and the ever-increasing numbers of the poor. It is too uncomfortably reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary France and is destined to self-destruct.

Within the US, the collapse of the US empire will not be because of any external threat. Its military is too powerful to be overcome. It will collapse from within for economic reasons, as it becomes bloated, bankrupt, arrogant, over-extended, and hubristic, thinking that its military might alone is sufficient to ensure its continued dominance over other countries. As with past empires, people will not realize until the very moment of collapse how bad things are, and then look back and marvel as to how they could have missed all the screaming warning signs.

The structural warning signs are already there: rapidly rising inequalities in income and wealth, declining services and quality of life, lower standards of living for the many, endemic large budget deficits, a national debt that is approaching the size of the GDP, and a political class that has become so subservient to the oligarchy that it will not address the problems head on but blusters over trivialities.

A serious warning sign is when other nations become wary of the US dollar serving as the reserve currency. That feature has enabled the US Federal Reserve to print money (euphemistically called ‘quantitative easing’) to paper over its chronic deficits and try and boost the US economy by putting more money in circulation, even though this has a negative impact on the economies of the rest of the world because it essentially devalues the dollar and thus cheapens the value of their dollar reserves. This practice has allowed the US to live well beyond its means for many years now.

But there are limits to how long this can go on. Other countries are starting to seek alternatives to the dollar. Paul Craig Roberts says that here have been rumblings already on this front and that “Russia and China have concluded an agreement to abandon the use of the US dollar in their bilateral trade and to use their own currencies in its place”. Troubles with the euro have kept the threat of that currency becoming the reserve temporarily at bay. Meanwhile, China, India, and France are calling for a new international monetary system in which the dollar is no longer the sole reserve currency.

A symbolic warning sign that things are bad is the increasing frequency of grandiose rhetoric making claims to national greatness. Witness this recent effusion from Rich Lowry in the National Review: “Our greatness is simply a fact. Only the churlish or malevolent can deny it, or even get irked at its assertion.” It is a truism that the truly great in any field never have to boast about it because they simply take it for granted. It is only those who are insecure who do so.

Barack Obama campaigned on a platform of hope and promises of change and a new direction that we now know he had no intention of fulfilling. He used hope as a lure to delude people the same way that religions use hope of a wonderful afterlife to get them to accept terrible conditions here and now. We need to kill that sense of hope. This sounds terrible but it is only when we lose our illusions about the current state of affairs in the US that we can begin to create a better society. It is only when we see the reality, that the US does not have two parties with different visions but is a one party oligarchic state that is pursuing policies that benefit a few but are causing the nation as a whole to tumble into disaster, that we can set about creating the kind of movement that will unite the base of both parties, including even the tea partiers, and can see clearly what the real problems are and what needs to be done.

Next: Who makes up the oligarchy and what needs to be done?

When it comes to politics, my preference is to think long-term and to use short-term trends simply as indicators of what the long-term future is going to be like. So I have little patience with much of news ‘analysis’ that is primarily tactical, following the fortunes of individual elections and individual candidates, unless I think those races signify some major trend.

Given my gloom about the current direction that the US is taking, it may surprise some readers that I am by nature an optimist and I can often find silver linings in the darkest clouds. But in the case of the US, the only silver linings that I see are in the long term. In the short term, I fear that things are going to become very bad.

The reasons for my gloomy outlook are because of the systemic causes of the problems that currently beset the US. As long as there is no mass recognition of the deep causes of problems, we are doomed to pursue ineffective policies. The US is at present mired in two publicly acknowledged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two secret wars in Pakistan and Yemen, and two potential wars in Iran and Somalia. These are all part of a futile ‘war on terror’ that it can never win by force of arms but which is a huge drain on the treasury. Couple this with an oligarchy that seems to have lost all sense of restraint and seems hell-bent on looting the public treasury for its own short-term benefit with little or no concern for the long-term consequences for the nation as a whole, and you have a prescription for major trouble ahead.

Even conservative Francis Fukuyama writes that we now have a plutocracy in the US.

We mean not just rule by the rich, but rule by and for the rich. We mean, in other words, a state of affairs in which the rich influence government in such a way as to protect and expand their own wealth and influence, often at the expense of others. As the introductory essay to this issue shows, this influence may be exercised in four basic ways: lobbying to shift regulatory costs and other burdens away from corporations and onto the public at large; lobbying to affect the tax code so that the wealthy pay less; lobbying to allow the fullest possible use of corporate money in political campaigns; and, above all, lobbying to enable lobbying to go on with the fewest restrictions. Of these, the second has perhaps the deepest historical legacy.

Countries are almost always run by a ruling class largely for the benefit of that ruling class, so what Fukuyama is saying is not new. What is new is that larger segments of even the conservative intelligentsia are coming around to that realization that even within such a system, what creates some semblance of national unity and prevents deep social unrest is the idea of noblesse oblige, the sense among the ruling class that they have at least some obligation to serve the needs of society as a whole in addition to enriching themselves. At the very least this was a form of self-interest, to create a positive image of themselves to avoid things becoming so bad as to create a revolutionary situation. As a result of this sensibility, one saw investment in public works and amenities (roads, rail, parks, libraries, schools, etc.) and the rise of the welfare state within capitalism. In days gone by one even saw members of the ruling class actually volunteer to fight in their country’s wars, an idea that would seem quaint to the members of the current oligarchy.

Those days are gone. The concept of noblesse oblige is completely foreign to the present oligarchy in the US. They would find laughable the idea of any personal sacrifice for the common good or that the well being of the nation requires at least some checks on their own wealth accumulation. We are now past the stage of the ordinary capitalism that unleashed enormous productive capacities and growth and have entered an era of rapacious and predatory capitalism, where unchecked greed reigns supreme, and where the wealthy are beginning to compete amongst each other to see how much and how quickly they can enrich themselves at the expense of the public good.

Felix Salmon points to an article by Chrystia Freeland in the January/February 2011 issue of The Atlantic titled The Rise of the New Global Elite on how the present oligarchy is quite different from the oligarchies of the past and views the middle classes with contempt. They see themselves as having succeeded purely on their merit and entirely deserving of their huge wealth and see no obligation to society as a whole.

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly.

The idea that the poor are poor through their own fault and are thus ‘undeserving’ of any consideration and quite expendable is a very old idea. What is changing is that the line of demarcation has shifted upwards quite suddenly so that the group that constitutes the lower middle class and even the middle class, once considered the bedrock workers on which the economy was built, now find themselves also being considered expendable because their jobs can easily be outsourced to other countries or replaced by machines or by squeezing other workers to do more. This is why we can now have a ‘jobless recovery’, whereby the stock market and profits are soaring while unemployment remains high.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in a short story The Rich Boy (1926), “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me”, a theme he had elaborated on in his novel The Great Gatsby that was published in the same year. What we see is that the very rich now are not just different from you and me, they are even different from the rich of the past. And not in a good way.

Next: Warning signs of trouble ahead.