The book brilliantly confirms Trotsky's description of US imperialism as a "giant with feet of clay," and -- despite its serious limitations in relation to its conclusions -- should be read by workers in the US and internationally.

The story of Valdas Anelauskas himself is extremely interesting. He was a high-profile political dissident in Lithuania, in the former Soviet Union, who was lured to the US by the promise of wealth and freedom in 1989. When he arrived, Anelauskas shared the same political platform as Newt Gingrich, Phil Gramm and the right of the Republican Party. He even spoke at meetings of extreme right-wing organizations including the quasi-fascist Antibolshevic Block of Nations and the World Anticommunist League.

"Much water has flowed under many bridges since the day I first stepped on the North American continent. My world outlook has changed a good deal. I now understand many things that it wasn't possible to comprehend earlier. Reflecting today on the conception I had when we first arrived here, I realize how ignorant and naive I was. I really believed that the United States of America was a free and democratic country. Moreover, I imagined it to be a highly advanced and progressive nation, perhaps even the most civilized country in the history of humankind..." (from the introduction)

However, Anelauskas gradually started to get disenchanted with the right as he saw first-hand the effects of their policies and what he calls "extreme capitalism." Interestingly, despite promises of high-profile jobs, after the collapse of the Soviet block his job offers were for janitor or working at McDonalds in New York. Starting from his experience with the question of human rights, his criticism and research led him to a critique of political and civil rights, economic abd social rights in the US.

His description of his first impressions of New York are revealing: "New York seems to me to be one of the most dangerous places in earth, in many ways like the teaming cities in the Third World than what one might expect of the major city of the world's wealthiest nation." He describes the story of an old Russian man who fought for four years in the Second World War surviving without a scratch and getting shot twice in Brooklyn since he emigrated, and his personal encounters with random shootings and violence.

Further, "Before coming to the United States, I could never even imagine that a human society could be so thoroughly soaked with shameless deception and greed. Not only economic and political relationships between people here seem to be so distorted, dominated and undermined by pecuniary motives. Money is absolutely the bottom line for everything here."

The research for Discovering America As It Is is enormous, covering 80 pages of endnotes with thousands of citations on a wide swath of indicators measuring socio-economic conditions, the decline of living standards (measured not just against past levels in the US, but against the conditions of other advanced capitalist countries), drawing from a great variety of sources and research.

Anelauskas exposes most successfully the popular world view of the US as a model of prosperity and freedom and contrasts it to the reality of a country where millions of children are malnurished, 50 million lack health insurance, tens of millions more live in a life of insecurity. The statistics as well as personal experience he cites are a devastating condemnation of US capitalism, the concentration of capital in the hands of huge multinational corporations, "globalization," etc.

Discovering America As It Is correctly points out that the attempt to spread the American model and a new world order through international agencies such as the WTO, IMF or through force of arms, after the collapse of the former Soviet Union, leads to impoverishment, inequality, social and environmental devastation and will provoke a serious reaction such as we have seen in the movements of the workers, young people and poor peasants in Indonesia, in Korea, in the general strikes in Columbia and the election of a populist government in Venezuela.

While Anelauskas at different sections of the book speaks of "democratic socialism" as an alternative, it is clear that he envisages a European-model social democracy such as existed in the 60s and 70s as an alternative to the US "extreme capitalism." His problem is that this model is increasingly pushed out in the serious attacks against the welfare state, workers' rights, etc. that are taking place in Europe. In most cases, these counter-reforms are organized by socialdemocratic, "socialist" or labor parties which are anything but workers' parties. He also ignores the conditions under which these reforms were possible in the postwar period, which no longer exist today, such as robust economic upswing, the rebuilding of Europe after the war, etc.

Anelauskas correctly anticipates the emergence of an anti-capitalist consciousness for the next period in the US and internationally as the effects of neo-liberalism become crystal clear and a new downturn sets in. But he has no perspective about where this struggle should go. His main prediction is that if regimes like the former Soviet Union, collapsed, then other powers can collapse under the impact of events, including the US. The struggle against the WTO in Seattle stunned international capitalism and the US ruling class and points in the direction of the potential of the US working class and youth to enter the arena of struggle in the next period when the facade of prosperity comes tumbling down. An economic downturn will force millions of American workers and young people to start thinking about the nature of capitalism and the need for an alternative, the need for the working class to develop its own political party and the ideas of genuine socialism.

Anelauskas' book provides its readers with a great deal of factual information about the conditions working and poor people face in this country. It provides a great deal of ammunition that socialists should use in order to show the true nature of US capitalism. Discovering of America As It Is is good, but it is the ideas and program of genuine socialism that explain "How America Should Be and How to Get There."