Kenneth Galbraith has been at the center of the American economy since before the First World War. In this his new book, he offers a distillation of these years in both the public and the private sectors, the academy and the government, and explains where we are and how we got there. Galbraith argues that inherent in our economic system is a continuing divergence between reality and "conventional wisdom," or as he puts it self-serving belief and contrived nonsense, or "fraud." He contends that we observe the current state of the nation in a cloud of myth, believing that stockholders and owners run our corporate world. In reality, it is the management of giant corporations that controls not only the private sector, but also the public sector, too, from politicians, to the Federal Reserve Bank, to the Pentagon.


In a work filled with provocative ideas that come from his years as an astute observer, Galbraith looks at today's economy and America's military actions in Iraq and sees that the gap between myth and reality has never been wider.


Fraud within the American Economy:
The myth of stockholder ownership
The myth of a market economy
The myth of the Federal Reserve System
The myth of two sectors; public and private
The myth that war is justifiable