Foxes and fossils is a band who represent the very best of America *.
The USA today has all the qualities of a third world nation. Indeed the evidence is mounting that Americans are caught in a poverty trap [a mix of factors that prevent individuals from escaping a cycle of poverty in life] and that their nation is heading towards the status of a failed state.
Third world status is assigned to nations that have many of the character traits that are normal in America today.
Washington DC is a seething mess of corruption, hypocrisy, abuse of power, secrecy, legal infractions, rule by Cliques, and much more. This is a common pattern within governing circles of the most infamous third world nations. A case can be made that the toxic culture of DC is more dangerous to hardworking American patriots than any natural or manmade virus. Indeed the greatest damage to the nation is done because these actors corrupt the legal system in ways that support an Elite Clique [Democrats, Republicans, Independents, non-elected bureaucrats, etc] yet punish law abiding American citizens in show trials [General Michael Thomas Flynn] that present a false facade of the first principles of US justice.
A national economy that has been shown in the early months of 2020 to be a very flimsy house of cards built on credit and debt not on innovation and productivity. Wages have been held down because Corporate America imported low-cost goods and services from the world and therefore placed unrelenting downward pressure on in-country remuneration.
Meanwhile the US Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in an ongoing and sustained program of quantitative easing that is printing money [as per Modern Monetary Theory principles] to flood the world with $US dollars. They can do this because, and only because, the $US is the reserve currency [often referred to as petrodollars because these are used exclusively to trade barrels of oil]. As an inseparable ally Wall Street has become the shop window for the US Federal Reserve as stockbrokers work hard to inflate assets and suck in the Superannuation Funds of a generation of public sector workers [teachers, nurses, firemen, policemen, etc] into lower and lower returns on their capital.
Banks invented credit and debt instruments that have plunged consumers into a new form of what economists call "the poverty trap". This credit and debt cycle is only sustainable because the $US is a reserve currency and therefore is able to support a consumer-based economy. But the real cost of this false economy is a US debt to GDP ratio that runs at about 107% [and rising] which means it is at levels last reached during WWII. It is rising because recently another $US 6 Trillion dollars was injected into the economy largely via Wall Street during the current Coronavirus shutdown.
Education in the US begins with subsidy supported child-care system and then proceed to lock kids into a didactic teaching method that leaves College Graduates with a huge debt [student debt at the national level in 20202 is around $US 1.7 Billion and rising]. Many current day graduates struggle to pay off their student debt because they have difficulty nailing a wage that can cover this perennial "sunk cost" which appears on their household accounts.
Healthcare is attached to employment in ways that lead Americans into a vast array of insurance schemes that leave patients with high [in some cases unrealistic] co-payments for medical and hospital bills for their non-life threatening procedures. Meanwhile the drugs that such patients need to manage their underlying health conditions are notoriously expensive [on a world price scale] because many are linked to patents that are used to insulate these high prices in America.
And so on and so on.... I have to stop because I have made myself depressed as I write this post. The truth for me is that I have always enjoyed going to visit America and thus have many remarkable friends who live there today. But. What I came to realise over the past 5 years is that I love Americans not America.
"Helplessly hoping" is what most Americans are doing today....
Richard
* Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaqTl1jLdkE
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