The concentrated power of tech and finance relies, in part, on private equity. This industry controls controls newspapers, hospital systems, supermarket chains, apartment complexes, even municipal water systems and fire departments. Megan Greenwell explains how it works in her disturbing and important book “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.”
[Here’s] a four-stage sequence of dysfunction that define[s] the politics and social structure of... countries. A waterfall of decay, deterioration, and ultimately societal destruction.• Disney and the Decline of America’s Middle Class (gift link, Opinion, by Daniel Currell, Aug 28, 2025): Well-written piece about Disney World as an example of how companies use surveillance to exploit the wealth gap. Straight out of dystopian sci-fi - the best services are reserved for the ultra-rich, out of reach for everyone else.
Besides the obvious physical decline, what also dissolves in each stage is the notion of a common good. That ultimately is more important then the visible material loss, because a shared national ethos is the only thing that ultimately holds a country together, making it something more than an opportunistic economic and legal union.
More on all that below, but here are the four stages as I see them:
1. Extreme Inequality
2. No Compromise
3. Corruption
4. Cynicism
. . . . Where are we now in the US? When I originally wrote about this I thought we had entered stage two (No compromise), and now, eight years later, it's pretty clear we are through that and are at incipient stage three (corruption).
Predicting is close to impossible, but it's hard to get too optimistic about the immediate future of the US, although it's worth pointing out this process can reverse (look at much of Asia) and a downward trajectory isn't immediate, or fated.