It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.
Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.
We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.
The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as “poor”, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as “growing” and its people as “enriched”.
But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet’s Chile and Park’s Korea and Diem’s Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.
The US is strange
It’s all very normal when you recognize how much of our institutional structure is corrupted by profit-seeking.
Its no different than a police officer taking a bribe to let you out of a speeding ticket. Or a customs official demanding a kick-back to let a ship unload its cargo. Or a mafia goon shaking down a local storefront for “protection” money. Just institutionalized so there’s no risk of being punished.
*Lists things that only happen in third world shitholes 😂
When you look at the statistics on education, Healthcare, poverty etc… in the US you can see which country is the true “third world shithole”.
We are, by strict definition of the term, a first-world shithole.
The third world is simply the set of states that were unaligned during the Cold War. The term took on a secondary implication of poverty largely because of American foreign policy. Failure to implement neoliberal market reforms marked a country out as “poor”, while embrace of those reforms would result in your country being spotlighted as “growing” and its people as “enriched”.
But its all just marketing. While Americans threw billions into the economic sinkhole of Pinochet’s Chile and Park’s Korea and Diem’s Vietnam, countries like Burkina Faso and Yugoslavia and Iraq raced ahead of their peers by triangulating a path between the Great Powers while embracing local economic development instead of fixating on a debt-laden export market expansion.
The yanks and their shitty primary education are the first to claim that their inability to type coherently is “language evolving”
I’ll use “third-world” how I like 😁
Abolishing history and etymology make Yanks of us all.