America Besieged

by Michael Parenti

America Besieged deals with the underlying forces within U.S. society that deeply affect our lives. Showing how we are being misled and harmed by those who profess to have our interests at heart, Michael Parenti writes: "We are indeed a nation besieged, not from without but from within, not subverted from below but from above; the moneyed power exercises a near monopoly influence over our political life, over the economy, the state, and the media...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872863387
• ISBN13: 9780872863385
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 205 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.0" x 7.6"

Customer Reviews

Something for those who want to know more.

Michael Parenti's America Besieged is a wonderful book. It is a political science type book that tells what's really going on in America. Parenti focuses on America and what is really going on behind closed doors. He reminds us of how democracy really works in the USA. This book is organized in five parts. It doesn't go easy to hard stuff, but from how politics work to how things are really run. Parenti dives into how well we are protected from certain problems that might occur at certain times. He also tells about those things, that we really aren't supposed to know about. Raids on certain protect organizations in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, and the reasons for the raids. Parenti also gives examples of how certain ethnic groups in Europe, and in the Middle East aren't allowed into America because of political ideology. How certain security agencies in the US have files on numerous people who don't believe in American beliefs. Parenti looks at all branches of government, and what they really do for Americans. He tells the real job of the President, and how the economy really runs. Parenti goes on to remind us that the rich are the ones that are in a Democracy, not the lower class Americans. He ties this in with the media and how they shift things to make a certain group look better, instead of telling it without bias. How they always do this no matter what the cause or problem is. Overall, this book is wonderful. I think anyone that really wants to know about America's secrets should read this. The insight that Michael Parenti gives is immeasurable.

Magnificent

Great book!Michael Parenti did it, a great well-organized book which step-by-step examines everything revolving around our life, from the media to the economy, to the politics, and relates it to how all these three strangleholds on society are manipulated and/or owned by capital and corporations. Parenti also confronts capitalism as an "system without a soul or humanity" which reduces every human activity to market profitablity. This book really does go to the core of America and emphasizes that democracy has not been achieved, that democracy is only for the rich and the owning class, from the two-party system where both parties are pro-corporation, which supresses left wing ideology by various ways in history, as well as tactics still being practiced today. Overall, this book is a summary of all the problems that are happening in the US that most of the rich do not know or want to admit are happening. I recomend this book as a vivid overview of the supressed problems in todays society to any open minded reader.

Goes to the core

A reader can learn more about how the system works from this one book than from a standard four-year course in political science at a respectable university. I know I did. Not that my eyes were opened by Parenti's insights, good as they are. Most have been around for some time. What the author has done instead is present them in highly readable and accessible style that both illuminates and persuades. There is more floodlight wattage in Parenti's single bulb, than in the paid-for dimness of the professional journals of American political scientists combined.From its DNA imperative to produce profits or die, to its spread through politics and culture, we see how capitalism as an organizing principle systematically dehumanizes people and devastates the land, while rule by its moneyed elite crouches behind a thin veil of democacy. This is not fantasy, folks. It's reality, and the next time you get ripped-off on the job, see an election rigged, or watch pristine countryside get eaten up, think about it. We don't have to act this way toward other people, other creatures, or ourselves. The commies may not have had the best solution, but like it or not, they understood the problem. As Parenti shows, that problem is now metastizing across the globe under a variety of ugly acronyms, GATT, IMF, NATO, and a host of other anti-democratic covers. If people can devise better tools, we can devise better ways of living together. Apathy is not an option.

A Valuable Book That Confirms...

what many already know or suspect about corporate capitalist control of our economy and therefore, to a great extent, our lives. I think it was George Orwell who once said: "The greatest threat to Democracy is the notion that we have already achieved it." This book (as well as Parenti's others) should blow away once and for all that false idea that we live under a system of government "of, by, and for the people". That quote should be amended to read: "of, by, and for the rich." American's suffer from mass delusions and illusions about capitalism and Marxism due to decades of indoctrination and propaganda, I think mainly through TV commercials that portray corporations as "friendly" entities "serving the public". And then there are the politicians, the executive committee of the ruling class. To my further dismay, Parenti and others like him, are often "preaching to the choir"; that the people who most need to hear him, the one's who rarely, if ever, question the conventional (corporate media) "wisdom", will not come in touch with this book. But it's one that deserves to be a national bestseller. Unfortunately, because it talks openly of the class system and class rule in America, it will not. Parenti says it all in a very compelling down-to-earth style.

Excellent Analysis!

Every American who is not independently wealthy should read this book. Michael Parenti makes sense out of why the "American Dream" is evaporating for so many of us; what GATT and NAFTA really mean to the average American; in what ways, and why, politicians are so out of touch with the American people; and what we can do about the growing income disparity.