whose youth after graduating from college are forced to live back home in the basements of their parents underwater mortgages, where they themselves are left to drown in student loan debt.

I'm just not sure who is writing this, who it's written for and what its purpose is.   Is the diary writer simply presenting a summary of a der speigel article for the benefit of eurotrib readers?  Or is there a bigger agenda?  Just not clear what that is.  

The last paragraph makes it seem that the point is to urge readers to support Occupy Wall Street and "American unions," but, I don't know what is meant by "the American working class dream."   I am an American and a member of a union, and I've never heard anyone talk about such a thing.

Nevertheless, I'm inclined to agree that we are living under a kind of "oligarchy," though I usually push my students to think a little harder when they say that.  I teach at a community college, and many of my students have no idea what is meant by "oligarchy"  unti they encounter the term it in my class.

I wonder what it means that at this moment, the German magazine and the writer of this diary want readers to consider that the US is perhaps turning into an oligarchy, and to wonder about how that is similar to the so-called Gilded Age days (of approximately 130 years ago) which in some sense sparked all kinds of Progressive reform efforts.  It seems to me that the Gilded Age reference makes more sense in a global context than it does in a US specific context, but things do seem to be changing and not for the better, so who knows.  The US may be heading in a direction that some call "third world" which implies a mass of really poor people and a small group of corrupt and extravagant people at the top, but I think the mass of really poor people who are supporting the richest in the US, are the same poor people who are supporting the richest in the rest of the world.   And I do think there is a sense that the workers here are being pushed to join the global poor, accept less in terms of wages and benefits, and quietly accept the situation and the shenanigans of a company like JP Morgan who can lose $2 billion, and the idea that such a loss is not really a big deal for them (!!?).  (See Washington Post front page today)