The Sword & The Dollar
Imperialism, Revolution & the Arms Race
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
To many, the foreign policy directives of the United States seem bewildering and sometimes inharmonious with its domestic political values. Why does the U.S. seem to support foreign dictators? Why has it invested so many of its resources in stockpiling nuclear arms? Why doesn't the U.S. act as a force for peace throughout the world? In this probing, provocative analysis, Michael Parenti reveals the hidden agenda of American foreign policy decsisions. No matter which party is in power, the U.S. acts to protect the interests of large American-based corporations, in order to maintain valuable overseas markets and cheap foreign labor.
In lucid detail, Michael Parenti examines just how these very private interests determine America's public policy goals, from the impoverishment of developing nations to the building of an intimidating nuclear arsenal. What he discovers will surely be controversial and suggests that the greatest threats to democracy—both here and abroad—may emanate from within the United States itself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this bluntly provocative book on U.S. foreign policy and capitalism, Parenti ( Inventing Reality ) denounces economic imperialism as practiced by corporate and financial interests in the United States, pointing to what he sees as the profiteering interests of the U.S. arms industry and the link between multinational industrial wealth and Third World poverty. U.S. policymakers support privileged autocracies and reactionary governments that ``use fascism to protect capitalism while claiming they are saving democracy from Communism,'' he asserts, concluding that the containment of socialism is the basis for most U.S. interventions around the world. Naming names, he maintains that most Americans in the field of foreign policy are drawn from overlapping corporate circles and policy groups. In his view, ``the state's primary task is to protect capitalism as a system, bolstering client states and opposing revolutionary or radically reformist ones.''