Jerome a Paris:

"There is no longer an Anglo-Saxon world and a European world," said Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president,

Because of the capitulation of the European elites, encouraged and pushed by people like Sarkozy (and the ThirdWayers who put the left in such a discredited mess as a result)

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

When you attack the idea of the common good to the point of eroding the public service ethos of the civil service, what else is left but oligarchy?

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma

This can be seen as the logical progression of capitalism as the socio-economic paradigm towards a conclusion.  All aspects of society are subordinated to the perceived needs of dominant capital, which is represented by the most profitable corporations.  This follows the post-Marxist analysis of Nitzan and Bichler in Capital as Power. where there are alternating regimes of "breadth" and "depth".  Regimes of breadth involve extending the system into new areas, such as the former Soviet Union, India and China and converting societies from subsistence to market based orientations. Regimes of depth involve making the differential accumulation abilities of the dominant corporations more effective, such as killing, assimilating or neutering your competitors. Breadth regimes tend to be associated with times of economic expansion while depth regimes tend to be associated with times of contraction.

Thus, as the capitalist paradigm has totally triumphed in much of the world, power has come to be further and further concentrated into the possession of a few dominant organizations who have effected a relatively complete mental capture of the political processes of the various countries in which they operate. The value of this is that when the profitability of these dominant organizations fail, as in 2008, they can rely on their capture of the government to insure their survival even in the face of their failure at their primary tasks.

The end of this process is that hereditary feudalism based on serfdom is replaced by financial feudalism based on debt slavery.  

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."