How the Shadow Elite Is Shorting 'Third World America'
Monday, August 9, 2010 at 09:18PM Huffington Post
That riotous metaphor should give you a sense of Arianna Huffington's engaging and insightful call-to-arms -- her new book, Third World America. In it, she catalogues the alarming signs of decay in American life -- the "better life" she admired so deeply as a child in Greece now seems in dire straits: the vanishing industrial base, the crumbling infrastructure, the failing schools, the economy battered by rogue corporations, and the political system controlled by a small elite -- the foxes, if you will -- dominating both parties.
In my book, Shadow Elite, I have another name for the foxes -- flexians -- the most agile of a new breed of movers and shakers who glide effortlessly in and out and around government, corporate, media, and think tank roles. The cachet of these new power brokers is in information: their access to and control of official (or should-be official) information, their ability to use information gleaned in one venue in other venues, their skill at getting their own version of the truth branded as the most authoritative one and using the media to promote it.
In pressing personal agendas regardless of the broader impact, these power brokers, who've risen over the past few decades, have been "shorting the middle class," as Arianna aptly puts, to devastating results. In the economic arena alone, she demonstrates, the decisions made by this new breed -- from those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage -- have had a huge impact on the lives and futures of Americans. They have shown disdain for shareholders and ordinary people, and by extension, the American dream. To quote an anonymous email called "We Are Wall Street" that circulated this spring, directed at Main Street America: "We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that."
Reader Comments (1)
Arianna won't allow 9/11 Truth on her site but she writes this cute little book(Third World America)! Who does she think she is fooling?