Third World America

It's not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are endangered and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player. As a result, the United States of America is in danger of becoming a third-world nation.

The evidence is all around us. 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 tomorrow's workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first-century jobs;

Our infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, our sewage and water, our transportation and electrical systems—is crumbling; our economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; our political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the checkbook to control both parties.

And America's middle class, the driver of so much of our economic success and political stability, is rapidly disappearing, forcing us to confront the fear that we are slipping as a nation – that our children and grandchildren will enjoy fewer opportunities and face a lower standard of living than we did. It's the dark flipside of the American Dream – an American Nightmare of our own making.

Arianna Huffington, who, with the must-read Huffington Post, has her finger on America's pulse, unflinchingly tracks America's gradual demise as an industrial, political, and economic leader. In the vein of her fiery bestseller Pigs at the Trough, Third World America points fingers, names, and details that are killing the American Dream.

Finally, calling on the can-do attitude that is part of America's DNA, Huffington shows precisely what we need to do to stop our freefall and keep America from turning into a third-world nation.

Third World America is a must-read for anyone disturbed by our country's steady descent from a 20th-century superpower to a backwater banana republic.