Welcome to the Third World

 Alternet has a good piece on how, despite jingoistic sloganeering to the contrary, America is not number one in most categories that matter.  As the author points out:

 Three decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of labor protection has resulted in 50 million Americans living in abject poverty, while 400 individuals own more than one-half of the nation’s wealth. As the four Walmart heirs enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.

 What is frightening is the degree to which we have essentially cannibalized ourselves into lowering wages and, hence, lowering our standard of living.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their jobs to the U.S. In other words, we’ve become the new India. Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have the non-unionized South to thank for that... 

 IKEA has set up a factory in Virginia. Volkswagen has set up in Tennessee, and the likes of Hyundai, KIA, BMW, Honda, and Toyota have all set up in the South to take advantage of the world’s latest cheap labor source. 

This has resulted in an America that does not have any cities among the top 10 cities in the world, that ranks behind 30 countries in life expectancy and infant mortality, and ranks first in such distinguished categories as incarcerated citizens per capita and adult onset diabetes.  Despite the ascendancy of and the abject failure over the last three decades of Reagonomics and other supply-side economic fantasies, we have a Congress that thinks the answer is to shrink the government further, privatize public goods to unparalleled extents, and cut the few benefits those hit hardest by their policies rely on to put food on the table.  Perhaps most frightening is the fact that a near majority of persons in the United States thinks Congress is right.  

For anyone interested in the incarceration issue, WUWM is doing a series on the rate at which Wisconsin incarcerates black males.  We're number one in this category also.