Huffington uses her vantage at The Huffington Post to gain access to the best thought on the financial crisis. She capitalizes on this perspective to add to our understanding of how millions of American lives have been damaged or destroyed by the narcissistic behavior of some truly bad actors in our financial and political communities. This individual, personal perspective is the greatest value of this book, allowing us to see exactly how so many of us have been brutally harmed by parasites on our system of democratic capitalism. The individual accounts here are heart breaking. This evocative perspective arms us to move forward (as we must) to ostracize corrupt or incompetent politicians and reassert common control of the economic system that, after all, belongs to all of us. Huffington also adds to our empirical ammunition against bad actors – she names names, specific acts, individual politicians, particular financiers. This detail is a useful addition to the insight we also get from powerful recent accounts by professional scholars (see, especially, “Winner Take All Politics” by Pierson and Hacker and “Predator State” by Galbraith). Policing bad actors on the basis of the information we share as members of the pan-human wise crowd is our ancient strategy for dealing with all adaptive challenges. Huffington makes a powerful addition to our mutual use of this ancient human strategy as we proceed to recapture our society and our economy.
Reviewed by Paul M. Bingham and Joanne Souza
Coauthors of “Death from a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe”
Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
Crown (2010)
