for Bob Herbert's article published in: Spiegel, 3/13/2008, click on

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,druck-541207,00.html

"The dream is in grave danger because the ruling elite stopped looking out for the collective interests of the society and all but stopped investing in the future."

It's not that they ever stopped, it's that the system of capital digestion has begun to show its own cannibalism while it now consumes the infrastructure built by the public's taxes to meet it's ever increasing appetite for new capital.

Public assets are now on the sale block to private ownership for private profit to the very institutions and families who engineered this crash.

Simply put, it's serial and ongoing economic rape in a closed, positive feedback loop.