Third World America - Arianna Huffington [0]
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Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huffington, Arianna Stassinopoulos
Third World America/Arianna Huffington.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. United States—Economic policy—2009– 2. United States—Economic conditions—2009– 3. United States—Social policy—1993– 4. United States—Politics and government—
2009– I. Title.
HC106.84.H84 2010
330.973—dc22 2010026871
eISBN: 978-0-307-71997-3
v3.1
For the millions of middle-class Americans fighting
to keep the American Dream alive
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1. THIRD WORLD AMERICA
Chapter 2. NIGHTMARE ON MAIN STREET
Chapter 3. AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL DILAPIDATED
Chapter 4. CSI USA: WHO KILLED THE AMERICAN DREAM?
Chapter 5. SAVING OURSELVES FROM A THIRD WORLD FUTURE
Acknowledgments
Notes
PREFACE
Growing 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, who’d 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 home—a 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, there’s still no other place I’d rather live. Over that time, one of the characteristics I’ve 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 Americans irresistibly ahead from the beginning.”1 The only downside of the optimistic spirit is that it can sometimes prevent us from seeing what is unfolding until it’s too late.
In recent years, as the evidence mounted about the road we’re on as a country—one that I was sure would prove disastrous if we failed to course-correct in time—I 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.” It’s 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.”2 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 who’ve declared