We had a good, but fairly small, group last night to discuss Taming the Gods, by Ian Buruma.
Our next book is Third World America: How Our Politicians are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream, by Arianna Huffington. We will not meet in February, but will meet again on Tuesday, March 15, 6:30 PM, upstairs at the Toadstool Book Shop in Colony Mill Marketplace. I hope that you can join us.
Linda Cates lindacates@mindspring.com
Here’s a description of the book from Booklist: Could the U.S. be on the brink of becoming a Third World nation? Syndicated columnist Huffington argues that overspending on war at the expense of domestic issues and the alarming decline of the middle class are troubling signals that the U.S. is losing its economic, political, and social stability—a stability that has always been maintained by the middle class. She pinpoints the beginning of the decline to the Reagan era, with its denigration of a government safety net. But she is nonpartisan in assigning responsibility to George W. Bush and Bill Clinton for supporting monied interests over those of the middle class; she then takes aim at Obama for expending more money to bail out Wall Street than Main Street. She also points to loss of manufacturing jobs, outsourcing, and globalization, all with emphasis on corporate profits at the expense of workers. Although the U.S. has faced similarly fearful times during the late 1800s and the Great Depression, the middle class was not threatened, as it is today. She offers possible solutions for the decline, including creating jobs to rebuild national infrastructure, reforms in home and credit lending, and tighter restrictions on Wall Street. An engaging analysis of troubling economic and political trends.
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