In 2008, when the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the administration of newly elected president Barack Obama, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing fifteen years hence. In his new book, The United States of Fear, Tom Engelhardt makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the United States is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed. Engelhardt offers a savage anatomy of how successive administrations in Washington took the "Soviet path"-pouring American treasure into the military, war, and national security-and so helped drive their country off the nearest cliff. This is the startling tale of how fear was profitably shot into the national bloodstream, how the country-gripped by terror fantasies-was locked down, and how a brain-dead Washington elite fiddled (and profited) while America quietly burned

Mode of access: World Wide Web