SYNOPSIS
DISCOVERING AMERICA AS IT IS, is a monumental study of the
devastating effect American-style capitalism was already having on
the American people during the so-called "boom" years of the Clinton
era -- even before the systemic ravages that have resulted from the
policies of George W. Bush. 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.
Anelauskas, a Lithuanian patriot and former anti-Soviet dissident,
paints an extraordinary portrait of the America he discovered — the
America as it exists for most Americans. While it has been argued
that capitalism in Russia failed because the Russians "didn't know
how to do it," in the United States, the veritable beacon of world
capitalism, capitalism does not appear to be working for most
people, either. America’s two-decades-long love affair with its free
market gurus under Democrats and Republicans alike, gutted the
body politic, leaving the American Dream of prosperity for the ordinary
man little more than a charade the U.S. corporate, media and
government elite successfully fronts to a credulous world.
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.
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!
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.
|
|
