Discovering America As It Is

Rating:
Summary: Some Books Just Have To Be Read
Review: And this is one. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is, this book will open your eyes and make you think. Sometimes you need to see another point of view to help you understand your own.

This book was out of print until civil rights lawyer Michael O'Neill underwrote the second printing. Until then, it was impossible to find a used copy of this book anywhere. This is an important book, and I recommend you buy it now before it goes out of print again.

Rating:
Summary: Some Books Just Have To Be Read
Review: And this is one. It doesn't matter what your political persuasion is, this book will open your eyes and make you think. Sometimes you need to see another point of view to help you understand your own.

This book was out of print until civil rights lawyer Michael O'Neill underwrote the second printing. Until then, it was impossible to find a used copy of this book anywhere. This is an important book, and I recommend you buy it now before it goes out of print again.

Rating:
Summary: Must Reading for Anyone Who Cares About this Nation
Review: Anelauskas does the American people a huge favor in writing this book. Had it been written by someone born in the U.S., the author would have been denounced as a subversive communist traitor and invited to move to Russia. But Anelauskas was born in Lithuania and grew up under Soviet imperialism. He knows the system well. Until coming to the U.S., he had few kind words for it, which earned him repeated arrest and, ultimately, exile to the U.S., where he took up with the likes of Newt Gingrinch and Phil Gramm. Being an intelligent and educated person, it did not take him long to see through the lies of the American right. In retrospect, he now sees there were some positive qualities to the USSR. The irony is not lost on him, and it is somewhat discomforting to me--having no love lost for the Soviet model--as he says some things were better, and certainly more humane, in the USSR than in the U.S. Yet, it is hard to argue he is not correct.

Discovering America As It Is systematically exposes the lies of the American right, Republicans AND Democrats alike. Some of Anelauskas' most scathing comments are reserved for Republican in Democrat drag, Bill Clinton, whom Anelauskas clearly demonstrates waged an even more merciless and devastating war against the least affluent 40% of the American population than did Reagan. Anyone who thinks a (Daddy George) Bush or Dole presidency would have been more harmful to the poor, or who thinks, somehow, Al Gore would be the "lesser of the evils" will have to reexamine their logic after reading Discovering America.

Anelauskas' work is meticulously documented from a myriad of sources--academic scholarship, poll data, census data, think tanks, studies by agencies of international organizations such as the United Nations, non-governmental organizaitons, government data from the U.S. and other nations, particularly other capitalist nations. The sheer volume of information, of sources, and the consistency of the data, truly, is astounding. During the recent presidential election, George Dubya raised the spectre of "class warfare" in response to (another Republican in Democrat drag) Al Gore's so-called "populist" nomination acceptance speech. The data Anelauskas presents makes it crystal clear there is a long running class war in the U.S.--a war of the most affluent 10% of the population against the other 90%. And the 10% are winning!, primarily because they control all of the major institutions of soceity; in partiuclar the political institutions, schools, media and churches.

Anyone who reads this book should recognize Alan Greenspan, Phil Gramm, Milton Friedman, and David Horowitz for the lying charlatans they are. Anyone who reads this book should realize the Democrat party is as much the party of the propertied class as the Republican party. And anyone who thinks the there is any worthiness to capitalism as an economic system, or who believes the propertied class is not waging unremitting class war against eveyone else should consider the words, not of Karl Marx, but of Abraham Lincoln: "These capitalists act harmoniously and in concert to fleece the people."

If I were to fault Anelauskas, it would be for implying America's "ultra-capitalism" is some perverse, grotesquely mutated version of an otherwise viable economic ideology. One need only read the originators of capitalist ideology--Malthus, Ricardo, Adam Smith--to see they fully understood what they were creating. They knew capitalism would be a tremendously productive economic system; but, as they followed the logic of the economic principles they were developing and articulating, they also realized it was a system which eventually reduces virtually the entire population of capitalist societies to starvation while all the wealth becomes vested in the hands of an ever shrinking elite. As they themselves predicted, capitalism is an economic system which ultimately destroys itself and takes everyone with it. It, quite literally, is the Titanic of economic systems; and its advocates preach it is unsinkable. Because the version of capitalism practiced in most European nations is not as pure, not as true to the principles of capitalist ideology as in the U.S., the inherently destructive consequences of the ideology are not as pronounced and as profound as in the U.S. The European nations may be "behind" us, but what is happening here will happen to them; it is inherent in the logic of capitalist ideology.

That fault notwithstanding, the book is superb. Only the blindest of readers will not be profoundly affected and disturbed.

Rating:
Summary: Best of the Best
Review: Anelauskas' book is a tour de force which could only have been written by a person brutally disillusioned with the candy-coated image of America as an ideal democracy. It is a must read for all seeking a serious critical examination of the fundamental institutions of American capitalism. Impassioned, yet dispassionately objective in its recounting of facts, it injects the reader with moral imperative to rethink the most basic assumptions of our political order. Not since Tocqeville has such an insightful outsider's inside view of America been written. I will use it in my courses and am recommending it to my friends.

Rating:
Summary: As far as America-bashing goes, this one's not too bad
Review: Don't get me wrong: I disagree with Anelauskas on almost every count. We used to have long discussions with him over e-mail, and there are few people further apart than him and I in our thoughts and convictions. The closest things about Anelauskas and myself is that we're both Lithuanians.

I think, however, that in the crowded and ungrateful industry of bashing America this man is among the more skilled ones: definitely a better writer than the celebrated (but talentless) Michael Moore. Yes, in common with other militant left-wingers, Anelauskas rarely allows factual truth to stand in the way of his ideological convictions, but there are no shameless fabrications here or totally rabid ramblings that Moore often plunges into.

Anelauskas' research is impressive: he did dig deep to get all the facts and quotes together. This skill alone could elevate him to the rank of first-grade journalists; sadly, facts here are hand-picked only to support the ideas directed and shaped by ideology.

Anelauskas is candid: he does not conceal that his hatred of America is, in many cases, just sour grapes. He came to America with inflated expectations of a Soviet dissident and was let down. He now hates America with the same black-and-white passion with which he once hated the communist regime. Fair enough, but he never asks himself (and never responds when asked) - if America is so awfully bad, how come it does not have to build fences to keep people in, like Soviet Union had to do?

And if capitalism is so wrong and so bad for the people, how come you don't see queues of people trying to get to Cuba or North Korea? Valdas Anelauskas prefers not to answer this.

Then again, on the positive side - the man is a skilled writer and manages to keep his book readable and entertaining (not a bad achievement for a publication so full of figures and percentages).

It's probably one of the more enjoyable books which I managed to read back to back without agreeing with its author.

Rating:
Summary: Not sure what this nut case is doing in the United States
Review: I did not read this book. So why am I writing this if I have not read his book? Mainly because I just came from a website that he helped set up and the link to this book was accompanied by a burning American flag. The whole website dealt in anti-American BS! I am curious why this Eurotrash from Lithuania is still sucking up the air in the United States?
And it does not deserve any star rating but you can not post without giving it at least one. In the real world it gets a minus ten star rating from me.



Rating:
Summary: A new de Toqueville
Review: Sometimes it takes an outsider to cut through the wishful thinking, and outright lies, and make you see your country as it truly is. That is why history departments still quote Alexis de Toqueville as an unbiased outside observer after all these years. I suspect that future historians may refer to this book in the same manner.

The author, a former anti-Soviet dissident, once saw the American political and corporate power structure as an ally and role model. Then, upon actually seeing the reality of the American capitalist system, first hand, and on it's own turf, he began to realise that it was just the "other end of the same stick" when compared to Soviet state capitalism. He saw it was the same old story, a small elite at the top benefitting from everything while spinning an illusion of lies. This massive volume shows the facts of the corporate/government/military monolith that has usurped the true Ameican Democracy.

Read this, sometimes it takes an intelligent outsider to show you how badly you have been fooled.

Rating:
Summary: I need at least one MORE star.
Review: This is the best book to date on the subject of the "state of the nation". I highly recommend it to EVERYBODY. Twenty bucks well spent! Anelauskas steam rolls through the American political and social landscape meticulously covering every angle - backing it up with facts.