Back in the day there were big infrastructure projects, the interstate highway system, nuclear fission reactors, USA was once a leader in rail, but now it seems USA can’t build any infrastructure at all, HDI is lowering, life expectancy is not as high as most other OECD countries. Anyone know what happened to cause this?
The US benefited greatly in the 19th and early 20th century from Europe’s brain drain due to the wars and what not. After WW2 that tapered off, and recently the US has becoming far less attractive to educated Asian immigrants as well.
Getting high on their own pro-capitalist bullshit they spewed during the Cold war, which resulted in things like Reaganomics and massive corporate deregulation. As we know, corporations tend not to care about what’s good for the people at large.
Placing all their attention, money and concern towards playing power games abroad and not giving a shit about smaller domestic issues, which is exactly opposite to the approach China has been taking the last few decades. Examples include Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the amount of money being wasted on programs like the F-35, and all the money going towards USAID for the sake of funding color revolutions, which Trump finally just now cut out of necessity.
As an addendum to 1: after WWII the US was the only manufacturing power, and some of the money brought in by goods exports was spent on making life better for the chosen subset of the working class (white labour aristocracy) due to the relative power of organized labour and the concessions required of the capitalist class due to the mere existence of a powerful workers state demonstrating an alternative.
i was under the impression that this was more of a reshuffle to reprioritize the americas & the pacific over europe & africa, as evidenced by mandates for the eu countries to dramatically increase their own spending on american weaponry and sacrificing ukraine as enticement to warm up relations with russia, with the aim of isolating china.
also: usaid’s resources are still a thing, they’re also being reshuffled under the purview of the fbi to focus on china, the americas, and cointellpro-ing american citizens again.
when the first american drone strike hits a wedding party for a drug cartel kingpin’s god daughter and it “collatoral damages” hundreds of mexicans lives; it’ll become the most publicly visible sign that this is the american empire’s version of “crossing the rubicon”.