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Rating: 
Summary: Great Work
Review: I had never heard of the United States Information Agency until I read this book. Among other public diplomacy (read: propaganda) duties, the USIA is responsible for Radio Marti, the pro-US propaganda beamed in to Cuba and the Fullbright scholar program. The reason those of us living in the US don't know too much about the USIA's mission is that they are not allowed to use their propaganda skills on US citizens, even though their predecessor organization, the Committee on Public Information (CPI) was created during the Wilson administration specifically to convince the people of the US that fighting the Germans in World War I was critical to the security of the American homeland. Post cold-war and especially during the Clinton administration, the USIA became the mouthpiece of NAFTA and the evangelization of people in other countries of the benefits of accepting American-style economies. This very brief book outlines much of this history and the author Nancy Snow makes it clear that any positive aspects of the program like the Fullbright program have been long buried under the pro-business propaganda machine of the Clinton and Bush the Younger administrations. The Fullbright program in particular became a tool to influence thought on market economics in Mexico and Canada, whose citizens were ambivalent about the promises of economic development promised by NAFTA. Today, much of the USIA's work has been rolled into the State Department, headed by former advertising executive Charlotte Beers, who is charged with "rebranding America to the world" like the Uncle Ben's Rice she used to work on. The USIA is one of the vehicles of US economic and cultural hegemony, especially in countries that we can't go to war with. Snow's history and analysis ends with an action plan that is wider reaching than simply what to do with the USIA. It is really a series of concrete ideas for reforming the very government of our country.
Rating:
Summary: Tight focus
Review: Nancy Snow's modest little booklet points to an important strand in corporate America's thrust for global power: The take-over of the United States Information Agency. A propaganda organ of government since its WWI inception, the USIA now sells the Fortune 500 agenda to reluctant foreigners at tax payer expense. And here I thought only the bad old soviets made government an arm of the economy. Snow, a former employee of the agency, details this transition from cold war asset to America's neo-liberal mouthpiece to the world. Given big money's recent take-over of the Democrat party and other citizen institutions, Snow's revelation may not surprise most readers. Nevertheless, the details make informative reading, and while I would have preferred a more muckraking approach, her academic restraint undercores a deep disillusion, as reflected in her 7-Point Plan for Citizen-Based Diplomacy. The latter aims at challenging corporate dominance with citizen action and people priorities. Coming from a former insider, this speaks volumes. One hopes the message will resonate.
Rating: 
Summary: Eye-opening overview of American cultural policy!
Review: Snow presents a critique of U.S. foreign policy in a clear, accessible style. I was not at all familiar with 20th century U.S.-style propaganda (my background is in finance and marketing) but this little book got me thinking about how important it is for citizens to keep themselves informed about what the government does to promote our culture overseas. Snow doesn't just critique but offers some alternatives to the status quo.
Rating:
Summary: finally!
Review: Someone please put this woman on TV!
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing and misleading
Review: The pamphlet (so it describes itself internally) is titled as if it were a discussion of the US propaganda establishment, but is in truth a sketchy and afactual memoir of a two-year Clinton-era
internship in USIA. The pamphlet is only 60 pages long, being
prefaced by laudatory and emotional prefaces that stretch to 30
pages, probably reflecting some demand of the printing process.
About 20 pages of the pamphlet is devoted to demanding that the USIA be disbanded, the remainder to rambling far-left invectives
against the NAFTA, "globalization", "hegemonic corporations" and
other betes noires. This pamphlet may well be part of a tenure-quest rather than a knowledge quest. The reader is advised to seek knowledge elsewhere.
Rating:
Summary: finally!
Review: This book is the most intelligent written in ages. It tells the truth about how men and women are being brainwashed in our country...right along with people in foreign countries. Nancy Snow covers this brilliantly. You'll never see America the same way...
Rating:
Summary: One dollar, one vote.
Review: This small book tells the story of the USIA (the US Information Agency), a government unit.
This institution was created with very good intentions (increase mutual understanding between people), but was diverted from its original goal and streamlined as a propaganda machine to promote the US economic system and business interests. The author rightly stigmatizes harshly the democratic deficit in the US: a media monopoly, a political duopoly ruled by big business and big money, and a plutocracy which dominates without control public welfare, public lands, public airwaves and the pension trusts.
Prof. Snow proposes a seven point plan to restore true democracy, but the implementation will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. This book should be read as a classic example of how particular interest groups take control of a public institution and turn it into a pro-private interests mouthpiece. Not to be missed.
Rating:
Summary: AMERICA'S HISTORY OF DOMESTIC AND GLOBAL BRAIN WASHING
Review: Within a lean 80 pages, Nancy Snow provides for us a scholarly history of Ameria's propaganda institutions that were originally founded for preparing Americans to kill Germans in World War I. Later, America's brain washing machines became the envy of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Meanwhile, the propaganda industry evolved in the commercial sector into the multi-billion dollar enterprise it is today. At least as an American taxpayer you will want to know what the United States Information Agency is doing with your one billion dollars per year that you've provided to its budget. In his "Manufacturing Consent," Noam Chomsky describes how in a democracy propaganda is more important than it is in a dictatorship. Now Snow explains exactly who operates it, how splendidly well it works, what its present agendas are, and who is cashing in on them. All of that is worth knowing for those who value a Jeffersonian democracy supposedly governed by ordinary citizens. Because it works so well and it is so lucrative, there is no incentive for those operating Propaganda, Inc. to cease in their efforts any time soon. Snow lets us in on how the propaganda machine is now being used during the Clinto Administration to impose NAFTA and WTO on the world. For under $5 you may as well become informed on what "they" are up to and why by simply reading Nancy Snow's eminently readable pamphlet.
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