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The world's political and corporate leaders
have begun a radical restructuring of the planet's economics
and politics that will affect human life and the natural
world as profoundly as anything since the Industrial Revolution.
Expressed in such new institutions as GATT, NAFTA, the World
Trade Organization, and Maastricht, as well as by the development
schemes of the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund, economic globalization has been bulldozed through
legislative bodies throughout the world, with scant public
debate or discourse.
These tremendous changes are hailed by their
backers as leading to a new era of prosperity and peace,
but is this true?
Thus far, most people experience globalization
as threatening their jobs and communities, diminishing democracy,
increasing economic anxiety, and stimulating social disintegration,
while devouring the last remnants of resources and wilderness.
The only beneficiaries seem to be the global corporations
that advocate free trade and globalization.
Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive
point-by-point analysis of the workings of the global economy,
its premises, and its dire implications told by more than
forty of the world's leading social, environmental, and
economic thinkers from the Americas, Europe, Asia, and the
Pacific. They charge that free trade and economic globalization
create exactly the opposite results from what is promised.
Far from a new paradise on earth, here's
what to expect:
- Acceleration of the very model of development
that has already brought the natural world to the brink
of breakdown, as free trade eliminates all controls on
corporate behavior
- Severe threats to cultural and
biological diversity, and to human health worldwide
- The frustration of democratic countries
attempting to sustain laws that protect wilderness, jobs,
food, safety -- the frustration of the democratic process
itself
- Dramatic increases in unemployment in
all economic sectors
- Increases in mass migration, as self-sufficient
peoples are driven from their lands to make way for the
new export economies
- A new corporate colonialism that dominates
poor countries, and the poor in rich countries
- And, a global homogenization of culture,
as once distinct places -- from Borneo to Costa Rica --
are taken over by Citibank, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wal-Mart,
and automania, all to fit into the massification drives
of a global economy
Each of the forty-three chapters in The
Case Against the Global Economy takes one part of the
story and delves into it, to show both the root assumptions
of globalism and its multiple failures. In the end, it is
clear that we need to reverse course; away from the
global toward a revitalization of local political and economic
control, self-sufficiency, and ecological health. That the
drive to localize is viewed by many as utopian puts the
case backwards; what is revealed as truly utopian is the
idea that separating people from control of their lives
and placing them in the hands of a global corporate bureaucracy
can possibly satisfy social or ecological needs.
Jerry Mander is a senior fellow at the
nonprofit Public Media Center in San Francisco and is program
director of the Foundation for Deep Ecology. He is a co-founder
and chair of the International Forum on Globalization, a
new international organization of activists opposed to the
global economy. He is the author of the bestsellers Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television and In
the Absence of the Sacred.
Edward Goldsmith is founder and publisher
of The Ecologist, Europe's leading environmental journal.
He has campaigned on ecological issues for more than three
decades, and is a cofounder of the International Forum on
Globalization. He is the author of fifteen books, including
Blueprint for Survival and
The Way: An Ecological Word-View.
He was a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award.
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