Is the USA gradually attaining the status of a third world country, financially ? Desperately in need of economic assistance, could the United States be compared to any other third world country ? Should the rest of the world alongside the IMF and the World Bank welcome them to the third world ?
Like other third world countries the US treasury department has requested the IMF and the World Bank to undertake joint stability assessment of their financial sector, hence embracing the third world culture of outside intervention in their economy.
Last week, a league of former US financial ministers accepted that the country’s financial system was truly broken and needed all the help it could get. Like Liberia, Somalia, Sierra Leone and other third world countries, the US has been asked to allow some monitoring by the IMF, and of course, help will be rendered with the care and sensitivity that they have shown other needy countries in the past.
According to experts, practising free-market extremism whilst responding to its economic woes with an extensive program of nationalizing private companies like Rwanda, Sierra Leone or Niger, the US has successfully achieved in a few years many of the key characteristics of third world economies.
Like most countries especially in Africa, the US is experiencing income inequality as the rich are getting richer while the middle class have income stagnation. The poor, in the meantime, are increasing in size. Like Ethiopia, Congo, Liberia, Malawi, Eritrea and many other countries, the US, could very well be faced with a situation whereby only very few of it citizens will have access to affordable housing, healthcare or security in retirement.
Commenting on the current financial crisis, pundits insist that, should the situation remain as it is in the US, slums may outgrow or even slowly replace the skyscrapers and mansions. If unemployment continues to rise at its current pace, the US may be flooded with a pool of angry, jobless young men, just as in Congo, Sudan and Somalia. These young men may be deployed to fight in a ceaseless round of armed conflicts, a solution that isn’t foreign to many third world countries. However, with their experiences of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US may not have any problem in recruiting the angry and jobless youths that may flood their streets.
