I don't get the point of this thread at all. It's not that "America" has failed, but that capitalism has failed. Eventually, all over the world, the situation we're in will happen. It's not a matter of if which is the question, but when.
When all you see is a person as a commodity, that allows you to gain more commodities to sell for a certain amount of profit, you have a failed state.
You can put a band aid on the ouchie but all that accomplishes is covering up the wound and not solving a thing.
Read the article. There is a lot more that's failing than just capitalism, although that's definitely a major component. Between that, the obvious and ongoing destruction of our democracy and voting systems and the nationalistic fervor being stoked across the country, I see the potential for a very different America than the one I was taught about in high school history class.
Contrary to Smogdog's batshit crazy ravings about my supposed support for it, I'm calling attention to the rise of Nazism and other racist, supremacist and nationalist groups as clear signs of what's going wrong in our society at all levels.
It IS the 1930s all over again. There WAS a Nazi fascist movement in America. The capitalists of the time, including Henry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller were indeed plotting a takeover of the United States and placing it under a regime of corporate authoritarianism. The plan fell apart when they attempted to recruit Matinee Corps General and multiple CMOH recipient Smedley Butler (he wrote War Is a Racket, still a timely analysis of the links between capitalism and corporate driven imperialism) as their leader and he refused.
This time around, they aren't trying to recruit the military; they've already co-opted it. They aren't plotting to overthrow the government; they've bought it.
Useful idiots like Smogdog and Buckwit here play into the hands of the extremists with their rabidly divisive rhetoric and territorial tactics.
A reading of this thread as it's evolved confirms my points.