Because the US has close to 20% of the world's prison population. Because we regularly experience power outages in major areas, killing hundreds or thousands of people, due to political corruption. Because our health care system only works if you are employed and relatively wealthy. We're comfortable treating our prisoners worse than livestock (and, in fact, it's still legal to require forced labor from prisoners). Because we have religious fundamentalists taking away the rights of minorities and women. Because our infrastructure is collapsing and we refuse to invest in maintaining it. Because we've invested next to nothing in mass transit, trains, or electrification of transit. Because we have a widening class divide that is increasingly extracting wealth from the poor. Because we've got a food system built around sugar and corn packaged into premade snacks.
Do you need more? Because there's more. Political corruption. Prison recidivism. Military spending at the cost of supporting education, healthcare, housing. Increasing limits on speech. (A state just said that men have to dress like men if they are performing for kids.)
Edit: because we still haven't addressed the Flint water crisis. Because we still have starving children despite producing more food than we can eat. Because care for even routine medical procedures can bankrupt a family.
You can have first world features while still skirting the line of what it means to be a first world country. Honestly the healthcare system alone is plenty to bring into doubt whether the USA can really be compared to most of western europe.
Though to me, whenever I have been there, especially California, it looks more like the American South before the Civil War, with poor people doing bad jobs (people with broken arms at the cash register, Mexicans doing hotel rooms or people 70+ years old packing groceries) and rich people in big cars driving around with an oversized cup of coffee. There is the rich elite and the servants.
It is this way here because the people whose preferences count want it that way.
The changeover happened in the early 1970s. The Powell Memorandum spells out the political program enabling it. Starting in the '70s, while the GDP has continued ever upward, middle income leveled off, and has barely risen since. All of the difference has been carefully diverted into the pockets of the 0.1%. Now the US has many billionaires and many, many millionaires, and "the rest", who are what is called a "managed population", our apparent collective consent to all this carefully curated.
Rebelliousness is channeled carefully into increasing the divide. The radical increase in fortunes of billionaires over the past four years is always blamed on something about COVID, not on very deliberate policies enacted by the government in power at the time.
I think it's a stretch. I came from third world, had parasites, pull water out of a well, lived on dirt, crapped in the woods. I would not consider the US third world.
I had to laugh out loud, speaking as a Norwegian-Australian.
I mean, this article.
You'd never experience injustice like this in any of my countries. It is the stuff of a second rate third world country, not at all becoming of a developed one.
We also generally don't need to fear random gun slaughter. I've not once worried about that for my children when at school etc, only errant drivers and pm25 pollution enters my mind.
The experience reported here is absolutely normal for underclass people.