True or False?

Sometimes it takes a stranger to put your thoughts into words.  I don't think that Jakob Augstein has exactly the same thoughts as I, but I was struck by his article in Der Spiegel.  He argues that "Regardless of who wins the election on Tuesday, total capitalism is America's true ruler, and it has the power to destroy the country".  He tries to prove his case by pointing out a number of contradictions to illustrate that the country is run by the elite.  He begins:

The United States Army is developing a weapon that can reach -- and destroy -- any location on Earth within an hour. At the same time, power lines held up by wooden poles dangle over the streets of Brooklyn, Queens and New Jersey. Hurricane Sandy ripped them apart there and in communities across the East Coast last week, and many places remain without electricity. That's America, where high-tech options are available only to the elite, and the rest live under conditions comparable to a those of a developing nation. No country has produced more Nobel Prize winners, yet in New York City hospitals had to be evacuated during the storm because their emergency generators didn't work properly.

Augstein feels that we no longer have a choice. 

The political system is in the hands of big business and its lobbyists. The checks and balances have failed. And a perverse mix of irresponsibility, greed and religious zealotry dominate public opinion.  The downfall of the American empire has begun. It could be that the country's citizens wouldn't be able to stop it no matter how hard they tried. But they aren't even trying.

Fundamentally I agree with him in that this is no longer the country in which I grew up.  We have forgotten or discarded many of the values that made us great. We have become intolerant of the opinions of others.  We have a great degree of difficulty in accepting reality.  We have ceded leadership roles to people who care only for their own advancement, the rest of us be damned - but only after we've donated to their cause or voted for them.