The USA Is Now a 3rd
World Nation
By Charles Hugh Smith
July 09,
2018 "Information
Clearing House"
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Dividing the Earth's
nations into 1st,
2nd and 3rd world has fallen out of
favor;
apparently it offended sensibilities. It
has been replaced by the politically
correct developed and developing nations,
a terminology which suggests all
developing nations are on the pathway to
developed-nation status.
What's been lost in
jettisoning the 1st, 2nd and 3rd world
categories is the distinction between
developing (2nd world) and dysfunctional
states (3rd world),
states we now label "failed states."
But 3rd
World implied something quite
different from "failed state": failed
state refers to a failed government
of a nation-state, i.e. a government
which no longer fulfills the minimum
duties of a functional state: basic
security, rule of law, etc.
3rd World referred
to a nation-state which was
dysfunctional and parasitic for the vast
majority of its residents but that
worked extremely well for entrenched
elites who controlled most of the wealth
and political power. Unlike failed
states, which by definition are
unstable, 3rd
World nations are stable, for the
reason that they work just fine for the
elites who dominate the wealth, power
and machinery of governance.
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Here are the core
characteristics of dysfunctional but
stable states that benefit the
entrenched few at the expense of the
many, i.e. 3rd
World nations:
1. Ownership of stocks
and other assets is highly concentrated
in entrenched elites. The
average household is disconnected from
the stock market and other measures of
wealth; only a thin sliver of households
own enough financial/speculative wealth
to make an actual difference in their
lives.
2. The infrastructure of
the nation used by the many is poorly
maintained and costly to operate as
entrenched elites plunder the funding to
pad their payrolls, pensions and
sweetheart/insider contracts.
3. The
financial/political elites have
exclusive access to parallel systems of
transport, healthcare, education, etc. The
elites avoid trains, subways, lenders,
coach-class air transport, standard
healthcare and the rest of the decaying,
dysfunctional systems they own that
extract wealth from the debt-serfs.
They fly on private aircraft, have their
own healthcare and legal services, use
their privileges to get their offspring
into elite universities and institutions
and have access to elite banking and
lending services that are unavailable to
their technocrat lackeys and enforcers.
4. The elites fund lavish
monuments to their own glory disguised
as "civic or national pride." These
monuments take the form of stadiums,
palatial art museums, immense government
buildings, etc. Meanwhile the rest of
the day-to-day infrastructure decays in
various states of dysfunction.
5. There are two classes
that only interact in strictly
controlled ways: the
wealthy, who live in gated, guarded
communities and who rule all the
institutions, public and private, and
the debt-serfs, who are divided into
well-paid factotums, technocrat lackeys
and enforcers who serve the interests of
the entrenched elites and rest of the
populace who own virtually nothing and
have zero power.
The elites make a PR show
of being a commoner only to burnish the
absurd illusion that debt-serf votes
actually matter. (They don't.)
6. Cartels and
quasi-monopolies are parasitically
extracting the wealth of the nation for
their elite owners and managers. Google:
quasi-monopoly. Facebook:
quasi-monopoly. Healthcare: cartel.
Banking: cartel. National defense:
cartel. National Security: cartel.
Corporate mainstream media: cartel.
Higher education: cartel. Student loans:
cartel. I think you get the point: every
key institution or function is
controlled by cartels or
quasi-monopolies that serve the
interests of the few via parasitic
exploitation of the powerless.
7. The elites use the
extreme violence and repressive powers
of the government to suppress,
marginalize and/or destroy any dissent. There
are two systems of "law": one for the
elites ($10 million penalties for
ripping off the public for $10 billion,
no personal liability for outright
fraud) and one for the
unprotected-unprivileged: "tenners"
(10-year prison sentences) for minor
drug infractions, renditions or
assassinations (all "legal," of course)
and institutional forces of violence
(bust down your door on the rumor you've
got drugs, confiscate your car because
we caught you with cash, so you must be
a drug dealer, and so on, in sickening
profusion).
8. Dysfunctional
institutions with unlimited power to
extract money via junk fees, licensing
fees, parking tickets, penalties, late
fees, etc., all without recourse. Mess
with the extractive, parasitic
bureaucracy and you'll regret it:
there's no recourse other than another
layer of well-paid self-serving
functionaries that would make Kafka
weep.
9. The well-paid
factotums, bureaucrats, technocrat
lackeys and enforcers who fatten their
own skims and pensions at the expense of
the public and slavishly serve the
interests of the entrenched elites
embrace the delusion that they're
"wealthy" and "the system is working
great." These
deluded servants of the elites will
defend the dysfunctional system because
it serves their interests to do so.
The more dysfunctional
the institution, the greater their
power, so they actively increase the
dysfunction at every opportunity.
The USA is definitively a
3rd World nation. Read
the list above and then try to argue the
USA is not a 3rd World nation. Try
arguing against the facts displayed in
this chart:
I know it hurts, but the
reality is painfully obvious: the USA is
now a 3rd World nation.
The views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House.
