Future Shock for America: Lessons from the Southern Hemisphere

In America, the republican rich have contempt for America's poor. In South Africa and South and Central America, the rich fear the poor.

As wealth descrepency gets wider and wider in America we are looking more and more like a third world country. The minority communities have been hardest hit with double the unemployment numbers as the white communities. With the new wave of repubes coming into local, state and national power, their theme is "belt tightening", meaning cutting off what little assistence there is from the government- unemployment insurance, layoffs of teachers, closing schools. Police departments being cut back is another ominous sign. When the future called for reducing poverty, the US is headed straight towards increasing it.

In S America and Africa, robbery murder and especially kidnapping rates are off the charts. The poor see the rich as fat targets.
The affluent in these countries live behind high walls and barbed wire. They send their children to school overseas for safety. They carry guns and hire personal security and drive around in bullet-proof cars
In Brazil you don't just get robbed by one or two perps. Whole gangs now round up people and take them off. They wait for a traffic jam and go up to people in their cars armed with submachine guns. One gang robbed an entire apartment building, gathering all the residents in the lobby and took their money. They swarm shopping malls and rob both stores and customers. The police in Brazil are a joke, so underpaid and corrupt that some of them join in the looting
In Mexico city they have kidnappers who own their own taxi cabs. They cruise around looking for well dressed people, let them in their cabs and they got them. The victim gets driven to an ATM where they make you clean out your bank account at gunpoint. If you're really rich they hold you for randsom, if you're a woman you get sexually assaulted and raped while you wait for your family to rescue you. If your family doesn't pay quick enough your body gets dumped off in an alley but your head gets delivered to your door.
The impoverished of these socieities have very little sense of pity for the haves. Class resentment and warfare have real meaning in these places.
America has become a plutocracy, where a small elite rich rule over the lives of a majority of downwardly mobile. That is old news in these other countries, America has yet to adapt to it's new reality. is this our future? Maybe, maybe not, depending on how long and deep the decrepency of wealth becomes