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From Richard J. Barnet, coauthor of the groundbreaking bestseller
Global Reach, and John Cavanagh comes an authoritative portrait of global
corporations as they have evolved over the last twenty years -- replacing national
power; controlling the flow of money, goods, and information across the world;
and dominating the fate of the world's economy and people. On
the threshold of a new century, the world is shrinking fast, but it is not coming
together. Global Dreams explores the many different ways in which the global
economy shapes our lives, changing politics, work and families in the United States
and throughout the world, including: How the integrated global production system
is creating a job crisis that affects every American; how a few corporations,
thanks to their control of earth-spanning technologies, control a global commercial
culture that can penetrate any village or neighborhood; how the clash of global
commercial culture and traditional societies is unleashing fundamentalist backlash
and political conflict; how great corporations have become less and less accountable
to public authorities everywhere, and what this means for the environment, job
opportunities, and our economic future; how "globalization," the business
buzzword of the decade, is creating not a global village but a divided planet
in the grip of global gridlock. With major profiles of
these corporations based on hundreds of interviews on four continents, Richard
J. Barnet and John Cavanagh reveal how a few hundred companies with worldwide
connections dominate the four intersecting webs of global commercial activity
that make up the new world economy. In the Global Cultural Bazaar the focus
is on Sony and Betelsmann as they compete with Philips, Time Warner, Matsushita,
Disney, and the other giants in the global market for education and entertainment.
In the Global Shopping Mall, the frontrunner is Philip Morris against RJR
Nabisco, Nestlé, Sara Lee, and H.J. Heinz in the battle to decide what
people around the planet will eat, drink, smoke, wear and enjoy. Ford leads the
way into the Global Workplace, a network of factories, workshops, hospitals,
and restaurants with participants as far-ranging as Levi Strauss, Nike, Texas
Instruments, and Toyota. Citibank, the largest bank based in the United States,
is the window through which the authors explore the rapidly changing Global
Financial Network. As all this activity and reach
come together, Barnet and Cavanagh show how these conglomerates contribute to
political and social disintegration as they become the fragile world empires of
the twenty-first century. Richard J. Barnet is the
author of Global Reach (with Ronald E. Muller) and ten other books. His
articles have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New
York Times, and numerous other periodicals. He lives in Washington, D.C. John
Cavanagh is the coauthor of seven books on the world economy and is currently
a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute in
Washington, D.C., where he lives. |
