Now rueing their unsustainable largesse, they have become finance's harshest critics," he said.
After years of encouraging and financing a harsh Islam in support of the anti-Soviet jihad, the United States had reversed course — gradually during the 1990s and then dramatically after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Many new individuals now "live in freedom", in De Tocqueville's words, even as they are enslaved by finely integrated political, economic and cultural powers: the opaque workings of finance capital, the harsh machinery of social security, juridical and penal systems, and the unrelenting ideological influence of the media and the internet.
NICOSIA, Cyprus — When European finance chiefs explained their harsh terms for rescuing Cyprus this week, many blamed the tiny Mediterranean nation's wayward banking practices for bringing ruin on itself.
Already, the state is borrowing 25 billion euros annually to finance public services despite harsh cuts in public sector spending.
One of the few remaining vocal champions of strict campaign finance rules, Feingold's harsh words for Obama were hardly unanticipated.
For decades, Saudi Arabia has recklessly financed and promoted a harsh and intolerant Wahhabi version of Islam around the world in a way that is, quite predictably, producing terrorists.
Because revenues are so much lower, the strains on club finances are much harsher.
Chen Zhiwu, a professor of finance at Yale University and a harsh critic of the state's dominant role in the economy, says the Chinese government is smothering the private sector.
Instead, Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics.
