“We may be approaching the end of the era of American possibility,” writes Orville Schell in TomDispatch. He despairs over “the best” of America’s public educational institutions “driven into the ground thanks to devastating, repeated budget cuts; a national energy system . . . terminally strung out on oil and coal . . . the court system, overburdened and under-funded, but struggling to deliver justice. The federal government, essentially busted; Congress, increasingly paralyzed and largely incapable of delivering solutions to the country’s most pressing problems; state government, largely broke; the Interstate highway system . . . bridges and tunnels . . . dikes, water systems, and many other aspects of the national infrastructure . . . old and deteriorating; airlines, some of the sorriest in the world with the oldest, dirtiest, and least up-to-date planes and the requisite run-down airports to go with them; ports that are falling behind world standards; a railroad passenger system which, unlike countries from Spain to China, has not one mile of truly high-speed rail; the country’s financial system whose over-paid executives not only ran us off an economic cliff in 2008, but also managed to compromise the whole system itself in the eyes of the world; broadcast media . . . a grossly overly-commercialized, broken-down mess that has gravely let down the country in terms of keeping us informed; newspapers, in a state of free-fall; book publishing, heading in the same direction . . . a food industry which subsidizes sugar and starch, stuffs people with fast-food, and leaves 60% of the population overweight; basic manufacturing, like the automobile industry, evidently headed for oblivion, or China, whichever comes first; the American city, hollowing out and breaking down; the prison system, one of America’s few growth industries but a pit of hopelessness. . . .” His list is “just a gesture in the direction of larger-scale decline,” he notes. “You’ll undoubtedly be tempted to add to it yourself.”