by Ahmed Bouzid

First it was Abu Ghraib, now it's Katrina. With Abu Ghraib, the world witnessed in shock the spectacular collapse of America's self-erected moral high ground; with Katrina, the collapse of America's image as the limitless land of economic might and material plenty. Of course, 'the world' has all along been well aware of America's deep moral flaws. The world remembers America's original sin that made its birth possible -- the genocide of Native Americans, the sin that made its emergence as an economic power a reality, Slavery, and its long history of military interventions and political sabotage (the Philippines, Haiti, Guatemala, Nicaragua, the Honduras, Chile, Iran, Greece, to name just the tip of the iceberg). What 'the world' has not been as well aware of are the economic and social fault lines that scar the landscape of American society. An instructive way to highlight those fault lines is to compare the United States to a first-world country and see how it fares....

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Sept05/Bouzid0909.htm