sexta-feira, 23 de março de 2012

Michael Parenti : The Face of Imperialism

http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=280230

In the last half-century we have witnessed a dramatic expansion of American corporate power into every corner of the world, accompanied by an equally awesome growth in U.S. military power. This book analyzes this global empire: what interests it serves and what effect it has on the peoples of the world and on their struggles for real democracy and social justice.

The enormous cost of this superpower expansionism is borne by the U.S. public. The empire feeds off the republic. A richly financed corporate-military complex is matched at home by increasing poverty, the defunding of state and local governments, drastic cutbacks in human services, decaying infrastructure, and impending ecological disaster.

This book shows that the people of the targeted nations suffer expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources, complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, loss of local markets, deterioration of their living standards, growing debt burdens, and the bloodstained suppression of their democratic movements.

The empire’s wars help maintain the international system of finance capital. Countries that attempt to pursue an independent course of self-development apart from global free-market capitalism are demonized as “anti-American” and “anti-West” and subjected to sanctions, economic strangulation, regime change, and if necessary, direct aerial attack and invasion.

Michael Parenti (Ph.D., Yale University) is an internationally known, award-winning author, scholar, and lecturer who addresses a wide variety of political and cultural subjects. Among his recent books are God and His Demons (2010), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), The Culture Struggle (2006), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003), and Democracy for the Few, 9th edition (2010).