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...our interest in the public good using its vast wealth and influence.
Here's a book EVERYONE should read. It's authored by a Lithuanian Soviet dissident who was used and trashed by the American Right Wing when he no longer useful or critical to the anti-soviet propaganda efforts.
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Discovering America As It Is
by Valdas Anelauskas
“This is an extraordinary book..."
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus, Boston University and author of A
People’s History of the United States.
DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS is a monumental study of the devastating effect American-style capitalism has been having on the American people. It raises serious questions not only concerning America’s role as a leading model for development, but even as to its future capacity to compete due to the deterioration of its human capital resulting from anti-social domestic policies.
In thousands of citations, Anelauskas documents the precipitous plunge in living standards of American citizens, measured not only against the standards enjoyed by citizens in other capitalist countries in the industrialized world, but against their own past levels. Among the many searing results: in all categories that measure economic equity, citizens of all other industrialized countries generally fare better than do
Americans.
This blistering reality is culled from innumerable researches by international organizations, domestic and international NGOs, independent U.S. think tanks, journalists, scholars, and even from American government sources, documented in over 80 pages of endnotes. While most critiques focus on one social sector or another, this multidimensional study brings them all together, and the impact is staggering. What
this book enables us to grasp — intellectually and emotionally — is the predatory and wasteful operation of unbridled capitalism in its systemic dimensions, and the needless, preventable injury it wreaks upon millions. The linkages between government, wealth, poverty and policy, the conflicts between elite interest and collective well-being, clarify as we read.
Here are just a few of many mind-catching findings scattered liberally throughout the book: An American child has one chance in 432 of becoming a doctor -- but one chance in five of growing up illiterate. One in four Americans working full time does not earn enough to stay above the official poverty line. "Food insecure households" add up to over 34 million people. The notion that stock ownership is widespread in America is absolutely false -- the bottom 90 percent of Americans own 15.6 percent of stocks (including through mutual funds), while the bottom eighty percent only own three percent!
Twelve highly-documented chapters — on poverty, crime, health, education, homelessness, the deterioration of the family, income inequities and the replacement of welfare by workfare — detail the public disarray which results from an unfettered system of great wealth where the rich determine the social priorities.
Anelauskas’ ominous thirteenth chapter, "The New World Order Takes Shape," elaborates the socio-military resources and paradigms which serve to entrench and extend American hegemony, as it seeks to deflect global efforts to institute the rule of international law, and to turn the world back to the rule of force. From the expropriation of Indian lands, and the exploitation of African labor, to a taste for empire which spread to the continental rim, then jumped across many waters in a hundred-year history of invasions all around the globe, culminating at last in the hegemonic military-economic grip on the world by what many in the Third World view as a Rogue Superpower -- from domestic colonialism to imperial America -- this is America as it is.
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus of Boston University and author of A
People’s History of the United States: “This is an extraordinary book,
especially startling not because it is a diligently researched and
scathing critique of contemporary America, but because it is written by
a Soviet dissident who arrived here with great expectations and
discovered a sobering reality. The scope of the book is breathtaking, a
sweeping survey, factually precise and philosophically provocative ,
which deserves to be compared to de Tocqueville’s 19th century classic.
I hope it will be widely read.”
David Gil, Director, Center for Policy Change, Brandeis University:
"Anelauskas' examination of many dimensions of current and past
realities of the United States is a veritable tour de force. He avoided
the usual approach to deal with these dimensions as separate fragments,
each with supposedly separate solutions, but traced them to their
underlying common roots in the dynamics of the capitalist institutions
and ideology of this society and its culture. Teachers and students of
social sciences, history, and philosophy will find in this book a rich
source for understanding the forces which shape the quality of our lives
and human relations, at home and abroad."
Ward Churchill "Valdas Anelauskas' Discovering America As It Is illuminates the dark corners of U.S. history and current events, and draws all the right conclusions. If just on-in-ten lifelong Americans had ever bothered themselves to learn as much about their country as has this recent Lithuanian immigrant, the horrors he writes about would never have existed. This is must reading for the entire population."
Inter-Press Wire Service
"What Anelauskas fears is not the clash of civilizations, but their elimination and the headlong flight from what is civilized itself... It is more than a book for policymakers, it is for common Americans and foreigners alike...."
Bernard Mergen, George Washington University, in American Studies International."Books such as this need to be read and discussed in American studies courses around the world to challenge us to think deeply about what America means to the disaffected and why everyone does not feel the same."
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Your Revolutionary Socialist fellow DUer,
Will
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