A fairly believable explanation of why we are where we are:

Bailouts for Dummies

The problem is that the US has never had a 'free' market economy. It subsidizes large corporations to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and ignores international legal and 'free' trade rulings that go against American corporations. It uses its economic wealth and power to bully other nations into giving it easy and uncompetitive access to their resources, labour and markets at bargain prices. So the current state in the US is an "unbalanced economy" -- one where a few rich corporations essentially dictate policy to governments. Any government that refuses to play ball is threatened with the withdrawal of reelection funds by these large corporations in favour of other parties and candidates. In the US it takes a huge amount of money to get elected, and dueling with the corporatists is political suicide. It is not surprising, then, that the wealthiest 1% of Americans now control more than half of the nation's total wealth, resources and private property, and that while the top 5% of Americans have achieved staggering real increases in wealth and income over the past 40 years, real net wealth and real income for everyone else have declined.

So far he makes the US sound like Wal-Mart.

The US economy was substantially built on war. Most of the accumulated wealth of the country was made through war and "defense" activities, a large proportion of American innovations stemmed from huge military investments, and military and defense spending still directly or indirectly provides 20-30% of US economic activity (economic production and jobs).

Or War-Mart.

On top of this, our global economy is addicted to growth. Without steady, continuous, unending growth, corporations could not raise capital or borrow money, so they would collapse. The stock market requires sustained double-digit growth in profits to keep it from collapsing -- current share prices have an implicit "price/earnings multiple" that assumes continuous rapid growth in profits, forever, and if you took away that profit growth, shares would be worth substantially nothing. Every stock market 'investment' is a gamble on perpetual growth.

Read the whole thing.