• Listen to this segment

• Listen to the entire program

At a recent campaign event, Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor, Mitt Romney answered a question about taxing corporations with the sentence, “Corporations are people, my friend.” The statement echoed around the internet and generated thousands of blog entries and tweets. What Romney did not point out was that if corporations were people, Walmart’s wealth would be greater than 10 states combined. This little fact is one of many cogent pieces of information revealed in a new book by Cynthia Enloe and Joni Seager, “The Real State of America Atlas: Mapping the Myths and Truths of the United States.” The book is divided into 6 parts, each covering a different aspect of the U.S., with astonishing graphs and statistics pulled from the U.S. Census, the Department of Labor, and various think tanks and surveys. A little discussed fact about Mitt Romney himself is that he is worth as much as $250 million. In the Real State of America Atlas, we learn in easy-to-understand graphics that the richest 1% of Americans own 35% of the country’s wealth, while the poorest 40% own only 0.2% of national wealth. The authors, Cynthia Enloe and Joni Seager, aim to reveal the state of the US as never seen before, mapping the distribution of foreclosures, the minimum wage, marriage and divorce, access to health across the nation, and much more. With so much misinformation and obfuscation being perpetrated by politicians, and corporate media, The Real State of America Atlas is a powerful tool for active citizens.

GUESTS: Cynthia Enloe, specialist feminist international politics, Research Professor at Clark University, Worcester, MA, Joni Seager, geographer and global policy expert, Professor and Chair of Global Studies at Bentley University

Special thanks to Penguin for donating copies of the book to KPFK for our pledge drive!