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

Copyright 2010 by Arianna Huffington

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos
Third World America/Arianna Huffington.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United StatesEconomic policy2009 2. United StatesEconomic conditions2009 3. United StatesSocial policy1993 4. United StatesPolitics and government
2009 I. Title.
HC106.84.H84 2010
330.973dc22 2010026871

eISBN: 978-0-307-71997-3

v3.1

For the millions of middle-class Americans fighting
to keep the American Dream alive

G rowing up, I remember walking to school in Athens past a statue of President Truman. The statue was a daily reminder of the magnificent nation responsible for, among other things, the Marshall Plan.

Everyone in Greece either had a family member, or, like my family, a friend, whod left to find a better life in America. That was the phrase everyone associated with America: a better life. America was a place you could go to work really hard, make a good living, and even send money back homea better life.

I was sixteen when I first came to America as part of a program called the Experiment in International Living. I spent the summer in York, Pennsylvania, staying with four different families. I went back to Athens, and then soon went on to Cambridge and London. But part of me remained in America.

When I came back in 1980, I knew that this time it would be for good. Thirty years later, theres still no other place Id rather live. Over that time, one of the characteristics Ive come to love the most about my adopted country is its optimism. In fact, it melded perfectly with my own Greek temperament: Zorba the Greek meets the American spirit. The Italian journalist Luigi Barzini wrote that America is alarmingly optimistic, compassionate, incredibly generous It was a spiritual wind that drove The only downside of the optimistic spirit is that it can sometimes prevent us from seeing what is unfolding until its too late.

In recent years, as the evidence mounted about the road were on as a countryone that I was sure would prove disastrous if we failed to course-correct in timeI was conflicted. I wanted to believe everything would turn out okay, as it has so often in the past. But the stubborn facts kept nagging at me as the warning signs became more and more numerous. I had to choose whether to sound like Cassandra or fall back on a double dose of the congenital optimism of both my native and adopted countries and assume it was all just another speed bump on the road to a more perfect union. Its never fun being Cassandra. But remember, Cassandra ended up being right. And the Trojans, who remained blissfully blind to her warnings, ended up being very wrong and very dead.

So, yes, as I look around at our great, sprawling country, we are obviously not yet a Third World nation. But we are well on our way. This is the unspoken fear of so many out-of-work Americans and those still at work but anxious about their futures and the futures of their children. My goal for this book is to sound the alarm so that we never do become Third World America.

America, Winston Churchill reportedly said, can always be counted on to do the right thing, after it has exhausted all other possibilities. Well, we have exhausted a lot of possibilities, and for millions of the unemployed, the underemployed, the ones whose homes have been foreclosed, and the ones whove declared bankruptcy or cant pay their credit card bills, the process has already been very painful. Its time now to do the right things.

THIRD WORLD AMERICA

T hird World America.

Its a jarring phrase, one that is deeply contrary to our national conviction that America is the greatest nation on Earthas well as the richest, the most powerful, the most generous, and the most noble. It also doesnt match our day-to-day experience of the country we live inwhere it seems there is, if not a chicken in every pot, then a flat-screen TV on every wall. And were still the worlds only military superpower, right?

So what, exactly, does it meanThird World America?

For me, its a warning: a shimmering foreshadowing of a possible future. It is the flip side of the American Dreaman American nightmare of our own making.

I use it to sum up the ugly facts wed rather not know, to connect the uncomfortable dots wed rather not connect, and to articulate one of our deepest fears as a peoplethat we are slipping as a nation. Its a harbinger, a clanging alarm telling us that if we dont correct our course, contrary to our history and to what has always seemed to be our destiny, we could indeed become a Third World nationa place where there are only two classes: the rich and everyone else. Think Mexico or Brazil, where the wealthy live behind fortified gates, with machine-gun-toting guards protecting their children from kidnapping.

A place that failed to keep up with history. A place not taken down by a foreign enemy, but by the avarice of our corporate elite and the neglect of our elected leaders.

The warning lights on our national dashboard are flashing red: 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 tomorrows workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first-century jobs; our infrastructureour roads, our bridges, our sewage and water and transportation and electrical systemsis crumbling.

And Americas middle class, the driver of so much of our creative and economic successthe foundation of our democracyis rapidly disappearing, taking with it a key component of the American Dream: the promise that, with hard work and discipline, our children will have the chance to do better than we did, just as we had the chance to do better than the generation before us.

Nothing better illustrates the ways in which we have begun to travel down this perilous road than the sorry state of Americas middle class. So long as our middle class is thriving, it would be impossible for America to become a Third World nation. But the facts show a different trajectory. Its no longer an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species.

The middle class has been under assault for a long time, President Obama said early in 2010 while announcing a series of modest proposals to bolster what he called the class that made the twentieth century the American century.

During the 2008 campaign, Barack Obamas guiding principle was that he would not forget the middle class.election, We held that North Star in our sights at all times. We made many mistakes along the way, but we always remembered that we were running because, as Barack put it, the dreams so many generations had fought for were slipping away. Well, youd need a pretty powerful telescope to see that North Star these days.