Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream »

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON is the cofounder and editor in chief of the Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and the author of thirteen books. She is also the cohost of Left, Right & Center, public radio’s popular political roundtable program. She was named to the Time 100, Time magazine’s list of the world’s one hundred most influential people, and to the Financial Times’s list of fifty people who shaped the decade. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an MA in economics. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player.  That the United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation.
 
The evidence is all around us:
 
Our industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of our economy for more than a century; our 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; our infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, our sewage and water, our transportation and electrical systems—is crumbling; our economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; our political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the checkbook to control both parties.
 
And America’s middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation – that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did.
 
It’s the dark flipside of the American Dream – an American Nightmare of our own making.
 
Arianna Huffington, who, with the must-read Huffington Post, has her finger on the pulse of America, unflinchingly tracks the gradual demise of America 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.
 
Finally, calling on the can-do attitude that is part of America’s DNA, Huffington shows precisely what we need to do to stop our freefall and keep America from turning into a third world nation.
 
Third World America is a must-read for anyone disturbed by our country’s steady descent from 20th century superpower to backwater banana republic.

Publishers Weekly

One cannot help expecting to hear the vaguely pan-European, breathless, faintly melodic tones of Huffington—political commentator and founder of the Huffington Post—reading her own tome on the shrinking American middle class. Instead, Huffington has turned over duties to the solid Colleen Marlo, who is more conventionally all-American in tone and style. While it might have been fun to listen to seven consecutive hours of Huffington, Marlo is less exhausting to the ear and does a nice job of softening the harsh edges of Huffington’s prose. The result is surprisingly soothing—a tough diagnosis meted out with an appropriate dose of sugar. A Crown hardcover. (Sept.)

Preface

1 Third World America 1

2 Nightmare On Main Street 41

3 America The Beautiful Dilapidated 91

4 CSI USA: Who Killed The American Dream? 125

5 Saving Ourselves From A Third World Future 167

Acknowledgments 241

Notes 243

Index 271