Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption Are Undermining America
by Arianna Huffington
Arianna Fights the Power
A review by Adrienne Miller
Well, I never could have anticipated I'd come around to thinking Arianna Huffington was cool, but there it is. I weirdly admire and respect this wonderfully incendiary and right-headed new book (I also weirdly admire and respect her anti-SUV campaign, but no time for that now), whose thrust is that the Enron-era is the result of governmental corruption. Huffington takes our elected representatives to task for their nauseating spinelessness: "In a bloodless coup, our government by, for, and of the people has been replaced by the dictatorship of the corporate dollar." While her prose can sound a little too snazzy, too dangerously magaziney for my taste ("General Electric knows a little something about the value of making Friends -- which is why the conglomerate...spent $23.3 million to keep the pressure on Washington to do its bidding."), she's marvelously assertive about all the right issues, and is sufficiently disgusted about all the right things. For example: big business's trashing of the environment, the evil of the pharmaceutical industry, the farce known as the Energy Task Force, the companies whose manufacturing processes give us cancer, the fact that Gale Norton, "a woman who once suggested a 'right to pollute' for property owners", is the head of the Department of the Interior. In the good old U.S. of A., we like to pretend that class doesn't exist. Only a very brave few, such as Huffington, dare these days to point out how deeply, resolutely classist our country has become, and that 99.9 percent of us are getting screwed. Huffington is as mad as hell, and rightly so.
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