{"id":3879,"date":"2011-01-11T17:37:16","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T17:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zmetro.com\/?p=3879"},"modified":"2011-01-11T17:37:16","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T17:37:16","slug":"the_rise_of_the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=3879","title":{"rendered":"The Rise of the New Global Elite"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a HREF=\"http:\/\/m.theatlantic.com\/magazine\/print\/2011\/01\/the-rise-of-the-new-global-elite\/8343\/\">Chrystia Freeland:<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><I>IF YOU HAPPENED to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become \u201cvery distorted.\u201d In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a \u201csignificant recovery\u201d; the rest of the economy, by contrast\u2014including small businesses and \u201ca very significant amount of the labor force\u201d\u2014was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather \u201cfundamentally two separate types of economy,\u201d increasingly distinct and divergent.<\/p>\n<p>This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of \u201ctwo Americas\u201d was a central theme of John Edwards\u2019s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation\u2019s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong.<\/p>\n<p>This widening gap between the rich and non-rich has been evident for years. In a 2005 report to investors, for instance, three analysts at Citigroup advised that \u201cthe World is dividing into two blocs\u2014the Plutonomy and the rest\u201d:<\/I><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chrystia Freeland:: IF YOU HAPPENED to be watching NBC on the first Sunday morning in August last summer, you would have seen something curious. There, on the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become \u201cvery distorted.\u201d In the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3879"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3879"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3879\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}