This book exposes the reality of the "American dream". The American way of life today is torn by ever deepening contradictions. The great wealth created by the world's major industrial power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the super rich, the owners of property and capital, and the creators of the wealth, while the working class and middle class are being driven into poverty.

The author estimates there are now 100 million people in the USA, more than one third of the population, who live below the poverty line, and it is increasing rapidly. He explores the social consequences of this unbridled capitalism permanent underemployment, debt from cradle to grave, homelessness all rampant now in America and forever increasing.

To most people, the journey the author of this book has traveled in just ten short years from 1989 to the present, would seem quite remarkable. From a political dissident in his native Lithuania during the Soviet period he has turned into an anti-capitalist who is particularly opposed to the American way of capitalism. In 1990 he shared a platform with the arch-exponents of free enterprise in America, Newt Gingrich and Jesse Helms; today he asks: "What should I call men like these? -- it's hard to pick a name strong enough".

Anelauskas' "anti-Sovietism" was not based on any desire for individual personal gain, but for the freedom of, first his native Lithuania, then for the other oppressed nations of the former USSR. His opposition to the Stalinist oppression of his homeland and the working masses of the USSR, has now become a reaction against the American ruling class. He writes very strongly about the way the early white Europeans destroyed almost 95% of the estimated 12 million native Indian Americans, and the suppression of Black American desire for their own land in America.

But it is "present day" America that has aroused his indignation at oppression, which is so splendidly portrayed in this book.

When he and his wife were forced to leave Lithuania, enormous changes were taking place in American and world capitalism. This was the period of the rapid growth of what has been termed Globalisation. The book's chapter headings show how powerfully it sets out the stark contrasts in US society, for example Promoting family values while destroying families; The wonder of childbirth -- just another disability; Desperate people do desperate things.

Anelauskas illustrates dramatically what the American-led globalisation process means, for the American and world working class and oppressed masses in a chapter which starts with a quote from Gore Vidal: "America is a unique society in which we have free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich".

The author continues: "There is no doubt that the environment of misery, greed and crime Americans live in today is caused first of all by the permeation throughout American society of a perverted corporate ethic which distorts human nature, discourages compassion and co-operation amongst people, and encourages competition and ultimately violence. American corporations are major causes of poverty, exploitation, community destabilisation, discrimination, ill health and environmental destruction in the United States and even around the world".