I love my country, but I always have understood it to be arrogant and insular. Other countries can ban murderous military weapons in a couple of days if they think it will save some lives, we can’t even talk about it. Other countries understand our joint obligation to save the world, we blew off science once it seemed it would reduce corporate profits.

Whenever I go to visit Brooklyn, I am amazed at this old American story. Growth can never be controlled, only enabled. Profit and loss comes before any other value, God, the Earth, our common civic system. Socialism is an unspeakable evil even as we steadily tumble from our position as the best and most respected country on the top of the world.

If the economy is good, we are good. That is all that really matters, In Brooklyn, this brutal and almost frightening thing is happening, and there is very little fuss being made of it. The character and scope of the place is being overwhelmed by giant and condo and office towers, some more than 70 stories high.

Tens of thousands of people are being driven from their homes and apartments by rising rents and properties being knocked down for more condos. Visiting the city, walking around, I thought wow, good riddance to Amazon. Do we really need any more of this.

Everywhere I went and looked there were cranes, blocked off streets, massive traffic jams, monstrous crates rising to the sky, the deafening sound of tractors and jack hammers.

My heart sank, the ground shook, the sandwiches in the gleaming new deli cost $18, day care for two-year olds in the best schools cost nearly $40,000 a year. The schools get out at 3 p.m. After day care until 5 and 6, which is when most people there are still working, is extra.

Is there any such thing any longer as enough money? Does one family – the Waltons –  really need to own 40 per cent of the country’s wealth?  Can they even spend all that money, which would send every young student in the country to college for free.

How many skyscrapers are enough in a place that was once two or three stories high and full of people and shops, now full of condos and malls?

Karl Marx, someone I rarely have occasion to quote, wrote that the thing about capitalism is that the greedy people never fill their bellies, are never rich enough. And if they aren’t contained and knocked down once in a while, they will devour themselves and us.

I stood on a corner in Brooklyn as the sun rose over the mushrooming towers. Wow, I thought, this is a kind of brutality on a scale that is unimaginable to me.

And we hate socialism, it is a taboo and heresy because it can’t possibly work for people?

For me, it’s not about politics. They really are all the same. It’s about money, just like my first boss, Robert Ebener told me on my first day as a reporter: kid, he said, you’ll learn soon enough that there is really only one story in the world, and you will cover it again and again: the rich always screw the poor.

That’s what I see in Brooklyn. The greedy people just get greedier and hungrier, and as I walked the streets there, I thought, wow, they are devouring themselves, and us.