You really need to investigate the migration from Reaganomics to the New Democrats, also known as Clinton Democrats, with the complete acceptance of the Corporate free trade plan. With the surrender to this new world view while enriching themselves immensely they have positioned themselves to join the oligarchy now ruling America.
After WWII American policy was to convert the world to consumers. We rebuilt Europe with construction companies built for the purpose. We marketed everything from pills to soft drinks around the world. The biggest exports we created were weapons. We had found that war is very profitable. Then came Korea and Vietnam running concurrently with the Cold War. The money flowed.
Reagan’s administration created the weapons in space program spending billions more. They had an economics professor that conveniently developed an economic theory positing that we could give all the money to the wealthy who would spend it creating jobs for all the rest of us. Unfortunately they found they could make much more money betting with each other in the Wall Street casinos than creating jobs created the all powerful CEO. Any CEO that could reduce costs significantly would improve his “earnings per share” enabling those that had bet on him to exceed their wildest expectations. We started rewarding those CEOs so well that we created a new ruling class. The Oligarchy.
Remember that “make the world” consumers policy. All those places that we weren’t bombing we started building factories. We had new cheap labor who were making money that wanted to buy iPhones.
Everything was looking great. When Reagan’s own advisors admitted that trickle down was a failure in 1985 no one noticed. The new Oligarchy class certainly wasn’t interested. The most significant thing to happen then was the Democrats lost the 1988 election. The lesson of the 80s was that corporations were going to run the world. Democrats incorporated that with a minimal progressive agenda developing the Clinton Democrats. Hillary is the death knoll of this genetically modified version of American politics. Nobody likes pseudo Republicans.
Where do we go from here? We can let the corporations run the world and all of our populations will become a modified version of 3rd world nations. We can accept the extreme right wing agenda leading to bloody revolution. Or we can create a peaceful political revolution that forces a compromise between corporations and the populations they wish to be their consumers that says “we’ll let you make a profit, we’ll let your stock holders make a profit but that profit must be limited by the requirement that the consumer class you need so badly also profits. Also, the never ending wars stop now.”
Of course, with the advancement of climate change all of this may be mute. The 4th alternative is that the oceans continue to rise while drinking water and food become scarce. Those that live near the rising oceans turn inland looking for food and water and run into the weapons of those protecting their food and water. My estimate is that this should wipe out about half the existing population. Problems solved.
