A New America Emerges

    The end of the Golden age came during the 1970s as the period of postwar econimoc expansion and prosperity for the middle class especially came to an end. What came next was a time of slow growth and high inflation. Manufacturing was declining rapidly as those jobs were being taken to other countries with less regulation and taxation. The United Sates was part of the problem because the United states promoted the reconstruction of counties like Japan and Germany and they became centers of manufacturing in combination with other counties like South Korea and Taiwan. These new companies received almost unrestricted access to the American market while. American companies found it hard to compete with them because of

regulations such as the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 which bounded the dollar with gold. So much that just by 1971 for the first time in the 21st century the United states experienced a merchandise trade deficit which means it imported more than it exported.When Carter took office he had a tough job trying to secure a declining economy. Carter viewed inflation not unemployment as the counties main economic problem and to combat it he promoted cuts in spending on domestic programs. When Reagan came into office his proposed solution to the economy came to be known as Reaganomics. Economic freedom for Reagan meant curtailing the power of unions, dismantling regulations, and radically reducing taxes. Reagan had declared that taxation violated the principle that "the right to earn your own keep and keep what you earn". Reagan supply side economics initially produced the most severe recession since the 1930s but soon after an expansion took charge till 1981.
    The 1980s can be seen as a second Gilded age, were buying out companies generated more profits than running them and making deals instead of making products became the way to get rich. Some of this can be seen today as big companies seem to care less and less about the consumer and more about making their investors happy with more profits. At&t has been a big company under fire for trying to buy out companies to gain power but still providing poor quality and costumer support. On March 20, 2011 At&t tried to buy out T-Moble USA but the United states department of justice blocked this action because it would make at&t too power full. Also just recently At&t has been making planes to buy out Direct TV for a whopping 49 billion which they seem to proclaim will give them a better chance of giving better deals to the consumer. Fewer industry players, of course, means a greater likelihood that prices will go up. It's competition that keeps prices down" This leaves the consumer on the loosing side. Craig Aaron clearly puts it into says it by saying"The captains of our communications industry have clearly run out of ideas. Instead of innovating and investing in their networks, companies like AT&T and Comcast are simply buying up the competition." This can also bring us back to the times of Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and JP Morgan when they all had monopolies on their businesses giving and making billions and the expense of the workers and the consumer suffering with over priced products from lack of competition.
Telling us the only true winner is us but that is most likely not true as Los Angles times writer David Lazarus says "
    This push fore profits has given rise to a wave for anything and everything to make profits even the prison system has been marked as an industrial complex. The more prisoners you have the more money you can potentially get from free labor. The United states has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With private prisons on the rise and with their only intent is making a profit they develop a strong force to get more and more inmates to work for them for free. Plus as the number of inmates that come back to prison because the prison system that is supposed to rehabilitate inmates to be able to get back to society is failing at that. Most inmates will return
with repeated offenses. This creates a never ending cycle of  more prisoners and more free labor. Plus the prison system employes  many people witch gives jobs to many who with out that prison in their area would not have a job.
    An area that has also left America wondering is their truly equality is the large amounts of pay CEOs of big corporations get paid. They are now earning up to 300 times the amount the normal worker gets payed. The worst part is that if the company gets bad press over  something or starts loosing money and decided to let the CEO go they get a "reward" for their bad job. They call them termination benefits but why do we reward these people with failure on top of their high paying job. Well its all for the companies sake so the CEO wont try to sue them it sort of a getting payed to forget whatever happened here and u can just leave us your problem and we will handle it now. This is truly seen in companies that are classified as "to big to fail". These companies had to be bailed out during the recession because they were seen a s to big and their failure would cause an enormously bad impact on the economy and spiral out of control with one bank taking the nest in a domino effect. When these companies especial banks made bad mistakes and bad investments but they still get bailed out and hard working Americans who worked hard were not even helped. If true capitalism would have stayed in course most of those businesses would not be here today and new ones would have taken their place , probobly in a slow very hard to way but at least we would not be going into more debt just to bail out these greedy companies that only care about profits. I think if this trend like this continuous there will need to be  a change to protect the consumer and  accountability in the companies actions. Sure they don't want higher regulation to make sure they don't do bad investments but they sure will except money from the government when they are about to go down and under.