Third World America - book

Third World America How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, Arianna Huffington, Crown Publishers, New York, 2010.

This is a book that should be required reading for everyone, particularly those in the Nation’s Capital who would be in the best position to do something useful, if they would. Very succinctly and with no frills, Huffington describes the manifold problems that beset us and appear to be forcing us more and more into the status of a Third World Country. Using appropriate statistics from the various agencies involved she paints a dismal picture of America as it presently exists, sparing no one from either government or the private sector. Starting with jobs and the problem of unemployment, she discusses our massive debt, the definition of middle class and what has slowly happened to it, the obscene unequal distribution of wealth, taxes, bankruptcy, credit cards and their abuses, and the fear and anxiety that has been generated by all this and now reign in our nation. There is also a long section on our failing infrastructure, including the effects of the stimulus bill, our failing water supply, deteriorating bridges, sewers, electric grid, roads and the problem of commuting long distances, the railroads, dams and levees. Our deteriorating and failing educational system does not escape her attention as she discusses why they are failing and the overwhelming importance of education both in the modern age and in the functioning of our democracy. In short, it is a pretty comprehensive, intelligent, if brief review of where we unfortunately are as a nation.

Arianna (if I can be so bold) discusses in some detail how it is we have come to be in the situation we find ourselves in and how the control of the country has slipped away from the people and into the hands of business, including the huge corporations that now wield such enormous power. She discusses lobbyists and the fact there are none for middle class America and the American dream. The dangers of corporate power have existed in America for a long time. Huffington describes briefly the problems that both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt had to deal with in this respect. But the American Congress has become more and more on the auction block, which has allowed business interests to more and more write their own rules, rules that do not favor the disappearing middle class, and rules that are written with deliberate loopholes to allow things that should not be allowed, thus enabling businesses to in effect regulate themselves, often with devastating effects. She also shows how it is that the beliefs of the business community have become identical with the beliefs of our politicians, how now there is a revolving door between politicians and lobbyists, politician one day, lobbyist the next and sometimes even vice-versa. In closing this section Huffington does not overlook the fact that corporate crime rarely goes punished.

In the concluding section of Third World America the author offers suggestions as to how we might reverse this trend towards Third Worldism. The first and most important element would be, of course, to get the money out of politics entirely and create a system of public financing for campaigns. We must also fix our broken educational system and create jobs, as well as overcome the mortgage crisis. Similarly, we must exert more control over Wall Street. She does offer suggestions as to how these things might be done but I think this is the weakest part of the book as she doesn’t offer any suggestions as to how her suggestions might actually come about. She seems to believe that if the American people just work together, just “pull up their socks” as they have always done, just use that famous American ingenuity and creativity, they can force the system to change. While this might be so if it happened, one wonders how the very people that have been brainwashed into either believing in the system or have been too “dumbed down” to even pay attention, are going to pull themselves together to do anything. Asking politicians to give up their current, lucrative ways is rather like asking successful bank robbers to stop robbing banks. This is not really meant as a criticism of her book as no one could expect her to do everything, especially the impossible, and what she has done is certainly revealing and worthwhile and deserves a broad audience.

Something that bothers me about the spate of books now appearing that discuss how it is we might recover is that they seem to suffer from one, or two, or possibly both shortcomings. First, they all seem to accept the cliché that “history always repeats itself.” Second, they all seem to me to be entirely “Amerocentric “ (I’m not sure that is actually a word). That is, in the first case I rather doubt that history always repeats itself as that seems to me to assume that nothing really changes. In the second case it seems to imply that America can solve these problems purely internally with, again, ignoring the vast changes that have occurred in the world since the 1929 crash. This is not the place to attempt a detailed argument about this, but in brief, the world has grown much smaller, the oceans are no longer as protective as they once were, the available resources are no longer as great as they once were, competition for them is much greater, and Western-European dominance in general is beginning to slowly crumble. While it is true that we could do things to make our situation much better for all, there is never going to be a return to “the good old days” and the American standard of living is not going to survive as it has been for so long.