There's entire books on developmental economics which explain how states create institutions that might appear to be rules based, but are ultimately just negotiation and favor. They get more money from developed countries and investors that don't look to deep, but ultimately the rate of growth is quite bad, because investing money in that kind of environment just has a poor rate of return.

All well described, with experimental numbers and everything, for countries in Africa and Latin America. Little did people realize that no, you can also apply this to developed countries when they suffer sufficient degradation.

I know a number of immigrants from economically struggling developing nations with endemic institutional corruption who very clearly see what's going on when they look at the behaviour of people who are running US federal cabinet level departments. It's all quite familiar, just on a higher budget.

The US has long been a bit of a dual system, with the world-leading and technology and wealth coexisting with a lot of poverty, violence, and discrimination; but this seems to be the point at which it becomes fully Latin American.

Could be considered "imperial rebound", from all the School of the Americas decades in which the US made Latin America more violent, right-wing, and less democratic for its own purposes, culminating in the invasion of Venezuela. I'm sure they'd have started on Cuba by now if Iran had gone as planned.