Contrary to all the tendentious happy-talk pumped out by the corporate media, the U.S. has regressed economically to the level of Britain in the 1850s; i.e., to the functional equivalent of a Third World country. This heavily-suppressed fact smacked me in the face as I was reading a history book written in 1975 - before the elitist looting and government wrecking got started. All quotes below are from that book: Eric Hobsbawm, "The Age of Capital 1848-1875" (1975).