Third World America: How our politicians are abandoning the average citizen

Features updated material and a special foreword from Arianna for the UK audience

Its not an exaggeration to say that the hard-working, average citizen on an average income is an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become outdated. The USA is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.

The evidence is all around: its industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of Americas economy for more than a century; the 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; its infrastructure roads, bridges, water, and electrical systems is crumbling; its economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; and its political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the chequebook to control both parties. And Americas middle class, the driver of so much of the countrys economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing this democracy to confront the fear that it is slipping as a nation that its children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living. Its the dark flipside of the American Dream an American Nightmare of their own making.

Arianna Huffington, editor in chief of the must-read Huffington Post, has her finger on the pulse of America and unflinchingly tracks the gradual demise of the nation 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 whos killing the American Dream. Calling on the can-do attitude that is part of Americas DNA, Huffington shows precisely what needs to be done to stop the free fall and keep the country from turning into a Third World nation. Third World America is required reading for anyone who is disturbed by the United States steady descent from twentieth-century superpower to backwater banana republic.