Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Ordinary Citizen
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About this ebook
Features updated material and a special foreword from Arianna for the UK audience
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the hard-working, average citizen on an average income is an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become outdated. The USA is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.
The evidence is all around: its industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of America’s economy for more than a century; the education system is in shambles, making it harder for tomorrow’s workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first-century jobs; its infrastructure – roads, bridges, water, and electrical systems – is crumbling; its economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; and its political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the chequebook to control both parties. And America’s middle class, the driver of so much of the country’s economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing this democracy to confront the fear that it is slipping as a nation – that its children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living. It’s the dark flipside of the American Dream – an American Nightmare of their own making.
Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the must-read Huffington Post, has her finger on the pulse of America and unflinchingly tracks the gradual demise of the nation as an industrial, political, and economic leader. In the vein of her fiery bestseller Pigs at the Trough, Third World America points fingers, names names, and details who’s killing the American Dream. Calling on the can-do attitude that is part of America’s DNA, Huffington shows precisely what needs to be done to stop the free fall and keep the country from turning into a Third World nation. Third World America is required reading for anyone who is disturbed by the United States’ steady descent from twentieth-century superpower to backwater banana republic.
Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington has been named one of Washington's most influential commentators by both Newsweek and People. Her syndicated column appears twice weekly in newspapers around the country, including the Los Angeles Times, the New York Post, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a frequent guest on television talk shows from Crossfire to Politically Incorrect, and a contributing writer to Talk magazine. The author of seven previous books, she lives in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with her two daughters.
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Reviews for Third World America
44 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sections on education and how to fix it are 100% naive, but the rest of the book is spot on...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Audiobook. Pretty good book. Humanizes the current recession, which the MSM only seems to gauge in terms of Wall St numbers, which no longer have anything to do with mainstream America. Offers ideas for solutions. Calls for accountability. More subversive than expected.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I've read several books about the recent recession and economic collapse, and this wasn't one of the best. I've heard most, if not nearly all, of the information presented here before; perhaps it would be a better read if you haven't read more than a book or two about the current economic climate. And Ms. Huffington spends a lot of time plugging her own site (I lost track of how many times the Huffington Post was mentioned). Still, the author is right: something has to be done, and soon. It's obvious to anyone that "trickle down economics" has failed spectacularly, and the middle class of America (as well as the poor) are suffering because of it. But I have too little faith in our politicians, and our society, to do anything to remedy the situation. We seem to be content, on a large part, to just bury our heads in the sand. It makes me afraid for our country.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I read this for a bookgroup I'm in. It wasn't a book I'd choose to read on my own, but it looked somewhat interesting so I thought I'd give it a go, on audiobook. The first half of the book was a big turn-off. It seemed like a big compilation of news events for the past several years. Not too many original ideas or stories, just sad stories about the middle class of America being pushed towards poverty and those who have money making even more. And Arianna Huffington promotes her own Web site entirely too much. The last third of the book focuses on solutions. I think this should have been the focus of the entire book. It would have been more original and intriguing to read. The solutions Huffington proposes aren't entirely stellar, but they do give food for thought. If this had been the entire focus of the book, perhaps it could have been developed even better.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Many good reasons to read this book, perhaps aloud in 12th grade as a cautionary tale. To remind that a Trickle Down economy is exactly what we have always had, operative words; Trickle + Down. No revelations here but plenty of apt summation, extrapolation and projection. Worth sharing with your children regardless of your net worth. Empathy, Resilience & Reinvention: New Hopes for the Middle Cast
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5What a great title and what a horribly lazy execution. This is essentially an undigested collection of Arianna Huffington's clipping files and bookmarks. She is even too lazy to check out the underlying sources of a media quote. Any sentient being who follows the news will learn nothing new in this book, which might as well be a prop to appear on talk shows.A real discussion about the idea of a Third World America would start with a recap of the origin of the First World (the West and its allies), Second World (Communist) and Third World (the rest) and its demise with the fall of the Communist dictatorships and George H. Bush's New World Order and Fukuyama's The End of History. The former sharp difference between Western democracies and Communist regimes gone, the internal complexity among the Western democracies has become the focus of world-wide attention.While the United States has always had some dark spots in its democratic record, it started to lose its beacon function as more and more of its failings and mishaps gained international notoriety, starting with the Florida recount.While the United States of America is falling further and further behind in many fields (education, health care, environment, human rights), an assessment and a discussion of how to reverse this slide towards a banana republic (not a Third World country) is extremely important. How this can be realistically done with even Arianna Huffington paradoxically chanting "greatest country in the world" remains a puzzle. I am not even sure whether this book helps the low information readers of the Huffington Post. Stay away.