The Hail Mary Empire: How Desperation Economics Is Rewriting America's Future
How America’s Leaders Are Trading Prosperity for Power and Dismantling a Nation in the Process
In a different era, American policymakers moved with the confidence of an empire in ascendance: investing in infrastructure, expanding civil rights, and creating institutions that projected stability both at home and abroad. Today, under the shadow of a declining superpower, America is moving fast in the opposite direction. As Professor Richard Wolff so vividly explains, what we are witnessing now isn't a policy shift or an ordinary partisan squabble. It is the thrashing desperation of a nation whose elites are throwing Hail Mary passes because they know the clock is nearly out.
The signs are everywhere, and they are unmistakable to anyone willing to look.
Florida offers one of the most shameful examples of our decline. Under Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has loosened child labor protections, making it legal for 14-year-olds to work longer hours, into the night, during school weeks, and without the mandatory breaks once required by law. The "solution" to labor shortages, created by the administration's brutal crackdown on immigrants, is not to improve wages or working conditions for adult workers. It is to legalize the exploitation of children, paying them less than the deported immigrants they are meant to replace.
