By Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
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When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a people to rise up in protest ...
When a handful of bull-market bullies and corporate profiteers amass vast fortunes while 35 million citizens languish in poverty ...
When average Americans decide they're sick of the burden of credit card-fueled lifestyles, tired of sending their children to violent, decaying schools, and sick and tired of sending corrupt, ineffectual career politicians back to Washington year after year to pander to their richest soft-money contributors . . .
When a majority of registered voters no longer have enough faith in our fat-cat "leaders" and their obsolete parties even to sbow up at the polls to replace them ...
When these truths become self-evident ...
Then the time has come to overthrow the government.
Arianna Huffington has earned a reputation as one of America's best-known and most independent political commentators, but this book will surprise even the most ardent followers of Beltway politics. In its pages she breaks away from the party-line platitudes of cynical Republicans and hypocritical Democrats alike and shines a harsh light on the real crises of contemporary America. Our democratic system has broken down, she contends. The two political parties have become indistinguishable. Their policies are feeble, their motives self-serving, their campaign tactics ruthless and insulting. And, as they kneel at the altar of profit, our nation's foundations are crumbling. Decay is everywhere: The physical decay of our cities and schools is matched by the moral decay of a drug industry that is allowed by politicians to push Prozac on children, a media industry that looks only for the next scandal, and a political industry that hypnotizes its candidates with polls, paralyzes them with smear tactics, and seduces them with carefully camouflaged cash.
How to Overthrow the Government, then, is Huffington's call to arms: a challenge to the average American to seize the government back from the special interests that now hold it hostage and restore control to the people themselves. From campaign finance reform to new voters' rights to grassroots Internet activism and civil disobedience campaigns, she calls for fresh and radical solutions to this national crisis--and offers a directory of local and national activist groups to contact that can help make it happen.
For if we are to preserve and protect our more perfect union, We the People must stand up and fight for our country--before it's too late."Our government is no longer serving us," declares Arianna Huffington in How to Overthrow the Government. "[It] is slow, unfair, corrupt, and peopled by politicians living on graft and sinecure." While the political class gloats about unprecedented prosperity, Americans are more turned off by their rulers than ever before: the public holds deeply cynical views about Washington, voter turnout continues to drop, and "modern campaigns ... are so thoroughly dominated by pollsters and consultants that there's no oxygen left for ideas that might challenge the status quo." Politicians have turned a blind eye to America's real problems. "Glad-handing lobbyists" (there are roughly 38 per member of Congress, says Huffington) and "the seductive allure of incumbency" have made lawmakers resistant to necessary reforms. "It's this vicious cycle that explains why 35 million Americans are living in poverty and more children are homeless than at any time since the Great Depression; why middle-income Americans are saddled with crippling levels of debt; why our children attend drug-ridden schools where they are not safe and cannot learn." Much of this book reads like an extended political column, full of anecdotes and zinging one-liners. Yet there's also more earnestness and less satire on these pages than was glimpsed in Huffington's previous book Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom. How to Overthrow the Government and its provocative recommendations will appeal mainly to the supporters of America's dissident politicos, such as Sen. John McCain, Ralph Nader, and the Reform Party. --John J. Miller Read more
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