What America do you live in?

So I'm sitting here at work, and someone left a newspaper out. One of the front page stories is apparently about how police forces around the country are cutting back response to "lesser" crimes like burglary. I can't get much further than that without messing with someone else's newspaper and, honestly, I'm feeling sort of ill and don't want to search for the news story online. (I ought to be home but need the money - ok, this is too much of a tangent now.)

You gotta wonder if the bastards at places like Goldman Sachs (or the aptly named Magnetar Capital) ever read the local newspaper. Or watch TV. Or have kids in public schools. Do they feel remorse for the domino effect their ideas and actions had on the rest of society? Working people have lost their homes, their jobs - all of the security that prosperous America once bestowed its middle class. Never again, reports the NYT, will real estate multiply the wealth invested in it. (Perhaps because the capitalist magic known as "bubbles" relies on speculation and market tricks.)

It may very well be that the era in which ordinary Americans participated in economic mobility is over.

So how do they sleep at night? I wonder if it isn't that they occupy a different social class than we do, and that the accompanying psychology inside that class creates a sort of co-occupant America, a country not of use and practicality but of trade-for-profit's-sake. Wherein everything has a price tag, nothing an end use.... Wherein we, the end users, the consumers and the workers, are, effectively, invisible.