Naked Capitalism has republished an excellent (but long) article Europe Is Not “Coming Together” in Response to the Euro Crisis. Why? In one of the explainations of why a central currency works for the United States, but is failing in Europe, the author has the following to say:

Despite its numerous faults and toxic politics, the American Constitution evolved through an unabashedly political process of conflict between vested interests, between federal and states authorities, between capitalists and labour unions. The United States has been a political process from its inception, well before turning into a fully-fledged fiscal union. Economic and financial power was, of course, always at the heart of that political process and played a substantive role in the outcome of the ongoing political struggle. Nevertheless, economic power in the United States, while highly concentrated, was of a relatively fluid type. The dominant corporations came and went, their power being fairly widely dispersed. The mighty corporations of the 1900s are no longer central to the political game in Washington today, having been displaced long ago by ‘upstarts’. There were even instances when the federal government would attack and destroy large cartels, even confine for decades the financial genie into a tight, proverbial, bottle (e.g. Standard Oil, the Glass-Steagall Act).

The one major flaw I find in the article is that the author does not seem to recognize that the United States which produced this working system is a thing of the past.  We no longer have the political ability to fix what is broken.  If democratic control of this country is not wrested from the hands of our current oligarchs, then the fate of the United States is destined to follow the fate of Europe.