This was the most important book I read this year.



I was supposed to read 3 chapters for my Sociology of Mass Media class, and I intended to highlight the important parts, but soon my highlighter was out of ink and I was turning to the other chapters for more information.



Firstly, this book should make you question your opinions. Some people will be defensive of their opinions.



Parenti addressed this and says something very, very important in the first few pages: "All opinions are not of the same v

This was the most important book I read this year.



I was supposed to read 3 chapters for my Sociology of Mass Media class, and I intended to highlight the important parts, but soon my highlighter was out of ink and I was turning to the other chapters for more information.



Firstly, this book should make you question your opinions. Some people will be defensive of their opinions.



Parenti addressed this and says something very, very important in the first few pages: "All opinions are not of the same value. It depends on what they are being used for, what interests they serve."



Some highlights to bum you out:



"With only 5 percent of the world's population, the United States now accounts for almost 50 percent of the world's military spending. In second place is China, with 6.6 percent of the world's expenditure on arms. In the past decade the US allocated over $6 trillion on war and preparation for war. Forty percent of the US military budget goes for overhead ... Along with immensely profitable war contracts comes increased inequality and the defunding of public services. The impoverishment of public services is not only one of the costs of empire; it is one of the goals. The imperial rulers wage war not only against people in foreign lands but against their own populace as well, diminishing their demands, expectations, and sense of entitlement ... The people who pay the costs of empire are not the same as those who reap its rewards ... The gains of empire flow into the hands of the privileged business class, the large overseas investors, while the costs are extracted from the general treasury, that is, from the 'industry of the rest of the people'" (Ch 2)



"Some of us maintain that the overriding purpose of global interventionism is to promote the interests of transnational corporations and make the world safe for global free-market capitalism and imperialism. As noted earlier, imperialism is what empires do. It is the process whereby the rules of one country use economic and military power to expropriate the land, labor, markets, and natural resources of less powerful countries on behalf of wealthy interests at home and abroad. Washington policymakers are the last to admit that they engage in such a process. They claim that their interventions abroad are propelled by an intent to defend our national security or other unspecified 'US interests,' or the intent is to fight terrorism, protect human rights, oppose tyranny, prevent genocide, bring democracy to other peoples, maintain peace ... Are we to accept these noble claims at face value? If not, how can we demonstrate that they are often false? ... First of all, we can look for patterns of intervention ... While claiming to be motivated by a dedication to human rights and democracy, US leaders have supported some of the most notorious right-wing autocracies in history--regimes that have pursued policies favoring wealth transnational corporations at the expense of local producers and working people; regimes that have tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their more resistant citizens, as in (at one time or another) Chad, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, Honduras, [etc. etc.] ... US rulers have targeted just about all leftist governments, parties, leaders, political movements, and popular insurgencies--that is, any political entity that attempts to initiate equitable reforms, egalitarian programs for the common people, restraints on corporate capital, and self-development for their own countries" (Ch 3)



"How is that as transnational corporate investments and trade with poor countries--and international aid and loans to these same countries--have all increased dramatically over the past half century, so has world poverty? ... Aid given [from the US] to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on US products. The recipient nation is required to give first preference to US companies, relying less on home produced commodities in favor of imported ones, thereby creating more dependency and debt and leaving these countries less able to feed themselves" (Ch 5)



"Only years later through my own independent study did I discover that every one of the explanations given about world poverty was false. True, the climate and topography of some parts of the Third World can be forbidding. But even in very dense jungles and frozen arctic regions, people applied themselves resourcefully in order to survive. In any case, they certainly were not lazy; they often worked just as hard or harder than people in more temperate climates. nor did they have so many more children than the rest of us ... Nor were the denizens ... 'culturally backward' (whatever that might mean). From ancient eras to more recent centuries, they had produced magnificent civilizations capable of impressive feats in architecture, horticulture, irrigation, arts, crafts, medicines, public hygiene, and the like, superior in many respects to what was found among the ill-washed, priest-ridden, diseased populations of European Christendom. Quite frequently it was the contact with the best colonizers that brought poverty and disaster to the indigenous populations of Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Once their farmlands and crops were stolen, their resources plundered, their herds slaughtered, their townships destroyed, and their peoples enslaved, deep poverty was the inescapable outcome, leaving them to be denounced as lazy, backward, and stupid. In fact, they were not undeveloped by overexploited. Their development was never allowed to proceed in peace and self-direction ... Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force" (Ch 5)



"American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by US taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost to undersell local producers ... They expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monocultural crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed local populations and sustain the local economy. Haiti is a prime example of this displacement ... Decades of US farm imports pouring into Haiti--heavily subsidized by the US government and therefore easily sold at lower prices than local agrarian commodities--wiped out about 3 million small farmers, created more debt and hunger, and seriously damaged Haiti's ability to be self-sufficient" (Ch 5)



"In its first few years over 600,000 jobs in the [US] were eliminated under NAFTA. New jobs created in that period were mostly in the lower-paying sector of the US economy. Meanwhile, Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass-produced corn and dairy products from giant American agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the US government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy and displacing large numbers of poor peasants and small businesses. With the advent of NAFTA, the incomes of poor Mexicans was halved, poverty spread from 30 percent to at least 50 percent of the population, and Mexican sweatshop profits skyrocketed. Under NAFTA, wages have fallen in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, and union memberships has shrunk dramatically" (Ch 6).



I don't want to end up typing up the whole book, but this book is worth your money, your time, and your investment to critical thought (even if you don't agree with everything Parenti says). It's also been updated and pretty recent, going into some aspects of the current obama administration.



Now if I could just get my hands on Parenti's Democracy for the Few...