By Michael Parenti
City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA (1995)
ISBN 0 87286 298 4
Michael Parenti was born in 1933 into a tightly-knit, working class Italian community in New York's East Harlem and obtained a PhD at Yale in Political Science. Having experienced at firsthand the force of political thought-control in the USA, he has, in his writings, sought with relentless intensity to document this relatively ignored phenomenon.
Against Empire is an eloquent and well-reasoned expose of the exploitation by multinational corporations of the majority of human beings currently on earth. Profits are pursued to the detriment not only of vast numbers of 'Third World' citizens, but also of most Americans and Europeans. It shows how those who benefit from these mega-corporations deliberately and consistently undermine democracy both in the USA and throughout the world to maintain global capitalism. It also shows how the mass media and the US academic world largely support these aims and, even worse, how the vast US power machine, including the military, the CIA and the FBI, are always on hand to further this agenda both in the USA and abroad: 'US leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the US national security state.' .
