ABSTRACT
With the dawn of the new millennium, the Gilded Age and its updated neo-liberal “‘dreamworlds’ of consumption, property, and power” has returned to the United States with a vengeance.1 The new exorbitantly rich, along with their conservative ideologues, now publicly invoke and celebrate that period in 19th-century American history when corporations ruled political, economic and social life and an allegedly heroic entrepreneurial spirit brought great wealth and prosperity to the rest of the country. Even the New York Times ran a story in the summer of 2007 providing not only a welcome endorsement of Gilded Age excess, but also barely contained praise for a growing class of outrageously rich chief executives, financiers and entrepreneurs, described as “having a flair for business, successfully [breaking] through the stultifying constraints that flowed from the New Deal” and using “their successes and their philanthropy [to make] government less important than it once was.”2 And while the rulers of the Gilded Age have suffered some major financial losses with the onslaught of one of the worse financial crises ever to befall the United States, they still retain a substantial amount of wealth and can hardly be viewed as victims; ironically, in some cases the traditional media have gone so far as to portray them in sympathetic terms because they have had to modify their lifestyles in light of the monetary losses they have incurred.
