Saturday, September 03, 2011
Face Of Imperialism
Michael Parenti's new book "The Face of Imperialism" is a powerful, frightening, and honest book. It will be hated by those who run the Empire, and it will be loved by people who are searching for truth amidst the piles of garbage of Western propaganda. Above all, this book will be like a bright spark of hope for billions of men, women, and children who are fighting this very moment for survival, defending themselves against the Empire and against all monstrous faces and masks of imperialism.
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. These phenomena are often treated as independent developments. Here, Michael Parenti brings them together in a sharp critique aimed as much at errant and shallow thinking liberals and overly certain Marxists as at the dominant political actors who have perpetrated the imperial lie.
Parenti adds shocking new evidence to the litany of injustices visited upon victims of U.S. imperialism: expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources, complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, loss of local markets, deterioration of their living standards, a growing debt burden, and the bloodstained suppression of their democratic movements.
Just as compelling is Parenti's convincing case that the empire feeds off the republic. He shows how the 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.
In this brilliant new book, Michael Parenti redefines empire and imperialism to connect the current crisis in America to its own bad behavior worldwide.
The Face of Imperialism makes clear that:
The following two videos were taken at a book store presentation of Parenti discussing the book's themes in the first and during the following question session in the second.
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. These phenomena are often treated as independent developments. Here, Michael Parenti brings them together in a sharp critique aimed as much at errant and shallow thinking liberals and overly certain Marxists as at the dominant political actors who have perpetrated the imperial lie.
Parenti adds shocking new evidence to the litany of injustices visited upon victims of U.S. imperialism: expropriation of their communal wealth and natural resources, complete privatization and deregulation of their economies, loss of local markets, deterioration of their living standards, a growing debt burden, and the bloodstained suppression of their democratic movements.
Just as compelling is Parenti's convincing case that the empire feeds off the republic. He shows how the 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.
In this brilliant new book, Michael Parenti redefines empire and imperialism to connect the current crisis in America to its own bad behavior worldwide.
The Face of Imperialism makes clear that:
- The purpose of the U.S. global empire is not the pursuit of power for power's sake but power to fashion the world into a corporate dominated global free-market. There is a politico-economic content behind the pursuit of imperial power.
- U.S. foreign policy is neither inept nor misguided. Rather, it is largely successful in serving the interests of transnational corporate America. This process of global expropriation by the superrich —often involving the use of force and violence— is what is known as imperialism.
- Third World poverty is not a product of "underdevelopment" but of overexploitation and maldevelopment.
- The drastic development of climate change is not a thing of the next generation or end of the century. Catastrophic changes are happening now. For us to survive we must roll back the empire, develop sustainable energy, and rid ourselves of the profit pathology.
The following two videos were taken at a book store presentation of Parenti discussing the book's themes in the first and during the following question session in the second.
