by Arianna Huffington

Chronicling the Assault on America's Middle Class and the Solutions

"The latest job numbers are out -- and they're not good."

That's a phrase we've heard a lot lately -- and will likely continue to hear for the foreseeable future. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.5 percent, the economy actually lost another 131,000 jobs in July. The only reason the unemployment rate didn't go up was because so many people had quit looking and dropped out of the workforce. Tens of thousands of people throwing in the towel is definitely not good news. More "not good news": the number of Americans unemployed for 26 weeks or more is now over 6.5 million.

Clearly, we're not in the middle of a normal recovery. Wall Street may have its casino up and running again, but Main Street shows no signs of bouncing back anytime soon. From foreclosures to unemployment to household debt to bankruptcies, the American middle class is under assault -- and America is in danger of becoming a Third World nation.

Though it is far from what dominates the debate in Washington, every day brings fresh evidence of the new reality that America is entering. And it's not just about dismal unemployment figures and gloomy foreclosure numbers. As The New York Times reported last week, Hawaii has gone beyond laying off teachers and has begun laying off students -- closing its public schools on 17 Fridays during the last school year. In the Atlanta suburb of Clayton County, the entire bus system was shut down. Colorado Springs turned off over 24,000 of its streetlights. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Camden, N.J., is soon to permanently shutter its entire library system. And last month the Wall Street Journal reported on the trend of cash-strapped states and counties giving up on the idea of maintaining paved roads, allowing them instead to turn back into gravel. And those localities that can't even afford to put gravel down are just letting the roads, as the Journal put it, "return to nature." A seminar at Purdue University on this trend was titled "Back to the Stone Age."

Though the particulars of our country's transformation are painfully real to the rest of the country, Washington and Wall Street remain blind to our trajectory toward Third World status.

Witness the joint appearance on Fareed Zakaria's CNN show by former Treasury Secretaries Paul O'Neill and Robert Rubin. According to both of them, we don't need a second stimulus. "We are moving forward at a pretty gradual pace," said O'Neill, "but I don't think things are terrible." Is "not terrible" the new definition of success?

As for Rubin, he "wouldn't do a major second stimulus, because I think &ellips; we run a risk that it could be counterproductive in creating a lot of additional uncertainty and undermining confidence."

Uncertainty? I guess that's true in the sense that the nearly 15 million people without a job are currently quite certain they don't have one; if a new stimulus bill were passed, there will at least be some welcome uncertainty as to whether they would be one of the lucky ones getting hired.

In fact, it's not uncertainty that is stopping business from expanding capacity -- it's a lack of customers. Because the potential customers don't have jobs!

The O'Neill and Rubin Continue-The-Misery Show certainly proves that this is not a left-right issue -- the willful lack of awareness of the reality being experienced by so many Americans is truly bipartisan.

But it's going to take more than a new stimulus to stop our slide into Third World status. While pushing those in charge to do the right thing, we're also going to have to push ourselves.

In "Waiting for Superman," his new documentary on America's failing public school system, Davis Guggenheim (the Oscar-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth") tells how the project began. Every day, while taking his children to their top-flight private school, he would pass several troubled public schools, filled with children not nearly as lucky as his own -- trying his best to not see the tragedy staring him in the face. Finally, after, as he puts it, "every morning betraying the ideals I thought I lived by," he decided to stop not-seeing the problem and do something about it. At the moment, our country is afflicted with an epidemic of not-seeing.

Unemployment, foreclosure, bankruptcy -- these are all isolating experiences. And that isolation takes its toll. A 2002 study by researchers at Yale found that "high unemployment rates increase mortality and low unemployment decreases mortality and increases the sense of well-being in a community." Indeed, the recession has coincided with an increase in the suicide rate.

So we all need to do our part. Though we can't let our leaders off the hook -- or fail to speak out when they, and/or their former mentors who got us into this mess continue to put forth policies that will hasten the decline of America's middle class -- we have to take responsibility for our communities as well.

If we don't change course -- and quickly -- Third World America could very well be our future.

Available at Amazon.com:

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

Third World America