The Sword & the Dollar

In this bluntly provocative book on U.S. foreign policy and capitalism, Parenti ( Inventing Reality ) denounces economic imperialism as practiced by corporate and financial interests in the United States, pointing to what he sees as the profiteering interests of the U.S. arms industry and the link between multinational industrial wealth and Third World poverty. U.S. policymakers support privileged autocracies and reactionary governments that ``use fascism to protect capitalism while claiming they are saving democracy from Communism,'' he asserts, concluding that the containment of socialism is the basis for most U.S. interventions around the world. Naming names, he maintains that most Americans in the field of foreign policy are drawn from overlapping corporate circles and policy groups. In his view, ``the state's primary task is to protect capitalism as a system, bolstering client states and opposing revolutionary or radically reformist ones.'' (Nov.)