The US is actually one the most corrupt countries on earth.
What makes it worse: They always try to give lessons to the rest of the world, but meh.
The result is here: Record homeless Americans, drug addicts in the streets, health crisis, education crisis, while the ruling elite (it's even more hypocritical when it's the left like Yellen) gets even richer. Time for a revolution maybe.
The USA seems to get a third world country. The step between poor and rich is huge, there is no health insurance, people can buy weapons and kill each other, the political system is broken and corruption is everywhwere.
The United States are broken beyond repair, this is just the beginning of the shitstorm of corruption that has been building up since the end of the 19th century.
The United States is the World's richest third-world country.
You have crazy levels of gun violence, high inequality, tribal politics, high levels of corruption that have been legalized via Super-PACs, effectively state-run media (Fox News), highest per-capita incarceration, a failing medical system, failing infrastructure, etc, etc...
The best example I can think of to show how far the US has fallen behind the rest of the world is that it's one of only a handful of countries that hasn't adopted the Metric system!
It's amazing what the US has turned into. US citizens are subjected to torture by the government and its agencies, citizens are put through hell and treated like criminals by the TSA just to fly, the rich and the powerful are bailed out of their own mistakes while citizens are left with nothing.
To someone looking in from the outside (like me), it looks like the US is slowly devolving into a third world state going by the shabby treatment of its own citizens.
The entire U.S. is feeling more and more like a third-world country. Corrupt government. Unreliable and deteriorating infrastructure. Extreme poverty (I recently learned that 30% of houses on Indian reservations don't have running water). Marginalization or even outright vilification of intellectuals. 75 years ago we saved the world from fascism. Who is going to save us from ourselves? :-(
Oh man, the irony of America turning into the dumping ground of the world. As other countries get richer they seem to start caring more about the environment, poor people, national health etc.
The US in contrast seem to regress. It seems to be heading back to the dirty old days of the industrial revolution with high income inequality, poor enironment protection, an unhealthy underclass.
It is bizzare watching a country deliberately turning itself into the 3rd world.
Corrupt and selective-outrage motivated Judiciary systems in China, former USSR republics and many countries in Africa -- is exactly what will continue to prevent citizens of these countries to want to stay there.
Corruption of law enforcement (including FBI), pay-to-play corrupt politicians, and selective-outrage judiciary system -- is causing enormous damage to US credibility (and to continuing dominance of US dollar as peg currency).
This is one of 3 reasons why Trump was elected, and this is what he is fixing as well (and it is hard).
(the other two are: a US president must put US citizen's interests prioritized first.
Second, is that policy and economic decisions MUST be based on merit, not wordsmithing exemplified by the smoke and mirrors of political correctness).
This exceptionalist view about America is as common as it is laughable. We're not the only way to live, even (or especially) as a wealthy nation. The US is growing more corrupt, and the decline of civic society is being actively driven by a cynical agenda of ultra-wealthy people and the corporations which they control.
The result: depending in which state you live, the US is becoming more like Brazil or Mexico (fast) or like Denmark (slowly, but it is happening).
I often describe the US as the richest (and most well armed) underdeveloped country.
It's unfair, as all short takes are, and it saddens me to see my friends who live there, who are at no fault for the mess they are in, suffer. I fear the coming mid-terms will only make things worse.
Yeah the US is a little more like east Europe each day. Nepotism, oligarchy, politicised branches of administration and military, poor healthcare, corruption and most important corruption tolerant voters. I’d recommend changing course, as the US is no longer a country the world looks up to - quite the contrary, it is increasingly given as a negative example, and those are signs of rapid decline. A sad state of affairs.
The USA just had the losing president incite a riot at the capital to stop the rightful winner of the election from taking power. On top of asking multiple foreign governments for election help and pardoning his cronies who helped him with this. In response his party has put in hardcore laws limiting the right to vote for many liberal and disenfranchised communities.
The USA lied to start a war in Iraq that killed at least 200,000 people. The US started and led and funded War of Terror has killed 900,000 people (Brown University). Nearly all these deaths were Muslims.
The USA has intense income inequality and the police regularly murder its citizens with impunity.
The current president is at best a mislead old man or an active oppressor, responsible for much of the law that keeps communities of color in debt and unfairly jailed by draconian crime bills that targeted the PoC community.
The US media is almost exclusively corporate and owned by a handful of corporate entities most own by billionaires who use such media to push views that benefit them politically and economical.
The USA is rife with conspiracy theories and has a very low vaccination rate compared to its western peers for reasons above.
The USA is best seen as an oligarchy where the wealthy get what they want from a legislative agenda perspective and are almost always above the law. Trump's only signature piece of legislation and the GOP's top priority was a significant tax cut for the wealthy that was permanent and a lesser one for the middle class that expires.
The USA has nearly 30m uninsured people compared to their western peers who all have some type of universal health insurance system.
The USA is destroying women's right, especially the right to choose and access to birth control and the morning after pill.
The USA has an incarceration rate of 639 inmates per 100,000 people, which is the worst in the world. This almost twice the USSR's rate. 40% of these inmates are black in a country where 13% of the population is black.
I think a lot of Americans are in denial of the everyday corruption here.
>There's a reason so many Russians fled for the USA
I'm not sure how true this is. We didn't see significant migration from the Eastern Bloc until their economies got much much worse. Communist nations that did well economically had low levels of migration. The same way largely Democratic, yet poor, Crimean Ukrainians welcomed corrupt Russian annexation because it meant being part of the powerful Russian economy ($3k gdp per capita vs $10k). In other words, people welcome an oppressive state if it means more money. Flights for freedom are often propaganda. Flights for money are often the truth. My parents fled their country to go to the USA solely for economic reasons. "Freedom", mom, apple pie, and baseball are laughable bullshit to the immigrant community.
>and not vice-versa.
The USA had 2x the GDP capita than the USSR during 1980s migrations. Again, this was purely an economic flight for nearly all immigrants.
This reads like something that normally would be written about an underdeveloped country, which, lacking established institutions and rule of law, is run by a kleptocracy for the kleptocracy. Yet we're talking about the United States. It's embarrassing for the country on so many levels. Unbelievable.
I would highly encourage you to reassess where you are getting your information about the world if you genuinely believe this.
I’m seeing this sentiment expressed more and more, and it seriously concerns me. If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.
This isn’t blind patriotism. Seriously if you are feeling like the US is becoming a “3rd world country” see if you can quantify it in some way. What is deteriorating, and how does that compare to other places in the world?
The United States will not be a part of the “developed” world in 20 years; too much aging infrastructure is being neglected because the country is too corrupt to actually govern effectively.
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