Synopses & Reviews
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.
Synopsis
The relationship between US economic and military power is not often considered within mainstream commentary. Similarly the connection between US military interventions overseas and US domestic problems is rarely considered in any detail. In this brilliant new book, Michael Parenti reveals the true face of US imperialism. He documents how it promotes unjust policies across the globe including expropriation of natural resources, privatisation, debt burdens and suppression of democratic movements. He then demonstrates how this feeds into deteriorating living standards in the US itself, leading to increased poverty, decaying infrastructure and impending ecological disaster. The Face of Imperialism redefines empire and imperialism and connects the crisis in the US with its military escapades across the world.