People wait in line for a free morning meal in Los Angeles in April 2020. High and rising inequality is one reason the U.S. ranks badly on some international measures of development. Frederic J. Brown/ AFP via Getty ImagesThe United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list. In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide,
I really don’t think this rhetoric is very constructive. It is very much within colonial discourse to sound the alarm that the city on a hill has degenerated into its nightmares of becoming like the colonies. Its an extention of old conversations on slavery imo. This rhetoric is what made the TV show The Newsroom popular. The truth is that regardless of their conditions people in the Imperial core live on the backs of the global proletariat, peasants, and Indigenous peoples.
As Americans lament their conditions the empire is manuvering to ensure Europe is entombed in vassalage to the US. I personally would gamble that the US will make efforts to improve quality of life to some degree if it can create an arrangement on par with its golden years. This is made more evident by the most ardent opponent of student debt forgiveness (Biden) coming around to a sprinkle of debt forgiveness because he has little choice but to maintain imperialism’s garden of labor stratifications.
Yeah it’s a terrible way to frame the problems that the US is facing. It trivialises why “developing countries” have never developed by ignoring that it is just liberal terminology to obscure the imperialist relations and its consequences. Even if 99% of the American people somehow end up living in squalor, will it still be a “developing country” with its multi trillion dollar military and 300 or so overseas bases. Leave it to liberals to obfuscate reality at every opportunity.
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