One truly depressing aspect of all this, Umair, is that we were given a preview of where the economic and social policies of the new right would lead us in the form of Thatcherism and Reagonomics over 40 years ago. Those were bitter, broken times but we didn't learn a single thing. Like the populations in some dystopian fiction by Huxley or Orwell, we're so easily drugged into compliance by empty promises or distracted by endless wars against something or other, or threats of the bogeyman carrying a red flag, that we don't pay attention to being robbed blind and brutalized by the very people who portray themselves as saviors.