Third World America: Why I Wrote the Book and What We Need to Do to Save America's Middle Class
Arianna Huffington
quote: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 knew someone who'd left to find a better life in America. That was the phrase everyone associated with America: "a better life."
I was sixteen when I first came to this country, 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 to Cambridge and London. But part of me remained in America.
When I came to live here in 1980, I knew that this time would be for good -- and that there was no other place I'd rather live. Thirty years later, I still feel that way.
But something went wrong -- terribly wrong -- and put our country on a very dangerous path that threatens to transform us into Third World America....
Wherever I looked, and in so many of the stories we covered on the Huffington Post, I kept seeing all the ways the middle class was getting the short end of the stick.
It was the way that Washington rushed to the rescue of Wall Street but forgot about Main Street. It was the daily drumbeat of depressing statistics: One in five Americans unemployed or underemployed. One in nine families unable to make the minimum payment on their credit cards. One in eight mortgages in default or foreclosure. One in eight Americans on food stamps.
Upward mobility has always been at the center of the American Dream -- a promise that if you work hard and play by the rules, you'll do well, and your children will have the chance to do even better.
Well, that promise has been broken, and America's middle class is under assault. The American Dream is becoming a nightmare.
What became clear while writing the book is that the decline of the middle class was no accident. Middle-class America didn't suddenly lose its mojo. It was the result of tricks and traps. Tricks in the ways we financed our homes. Traps in the ways credit-card companies used hidden fees and fine print and skyrocketing interest rates to get their hands on our money, driving more and more people into debt.
Here's the bottom line: The fix is in. The game is rigged. The dice are loaded. And it starts in Washington, where special interests run the show -- and where lobbyists outnumber elected officials 26 to 1. Unfortunately, there are no lobbyists for the American Dream.
Our financial system is similarly rigged -- it's become a bad carnival game where the rich always get the grand prize and the average American walks away empty-handed. We've gone from an economy where we make things to an economy where we make things up: default credit swaps, derivatives, CDOs and the like have turned Wall Street into a casino. Actually, a casino is fairer: At least you know the odds going in....