Last fall at the Green Festival I came across a table for the International Forum on Globalization, where they were selling these books titled Alternatives to Economic Globalization. I got one because it looked interesting, and put it on my "to read soon" pile. It sat there until I heard Scoop Nisker interview Jerry Mander (one of the authors, along with John Cavanagh and many others) on the radio one Sunday morning. That made me pick it up and read it.

The authors have studied the current global situation and how we got into it in enormous detail. Their perspective is that of the crowds outside the WTO ministerial meetings in Seattle and Cancun. Instead of slogans, there is page after page of thoughtful analysis. This is followed by page after page of suggestions for ways to steer our system towards a better future. This pattern is repeated in chapter after chapter, as the major "operating systems" (Energy, Transportation, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Media, and others) of our world are examined. The ideas are explained clearly enough that you can see how the concepts of globalization can be replaced with something better.

For example, the authors feel that one of the big forces of economic globalization is subsidies for large private enterprises by big government. There is an entire chapter titled "Subsidiarity: Recalling Power from the Global". In it they suggest a number of simple rules for making local communities, businesses, and governance a bigger part of the system we live in. These are things like "put new controls on corporate activity", "ground capital and investment in the community", "increase direct public participation in policymaking", and "Encourage social cohesion and local economic renewal." Then there are suggestions on investment like "all investors should respect basic human rights and protect the environment as top priorities." Many of the ideas seem like the kind of thing readers could use as guidelines for their own activism, although others would clearly require change in governance structures.

In the section on media, the authors begin by explaining that the goal of economic globalization is to create a situation where "every place on earth is more or less like every other place on earth: 'globalized'." By this they mean that huge media conglomerates (Time Warner, Disney, Fox, etc.) get huge economies of scale by selling the same information with the same advertising to people who want the same thing all over the planet. As an alternative, they point to things like a campaign in New Zealand in 1991 that made local content in broadcasting a "human rights issue", or IndyMedia, that burst on the scene in Seattle during the WTO meeting there, putting out a version of what was happening radically different from the one in the Corporate Media. Among other things, they suggest "supporting and empowering Alternative Media."

At the end of the book there are a couple of chapters of suggestions of things a reader can do to change things. They range from things like "buy local" and "support fair trade" to "work against urban sprawl by voicing your concerns at county and state meetings" and "learn how the World Bank, IMF, and WTO how their policies affect your country". This is followed by 22 pages of contact information for groups working to change things and a fifteen page bibliography. Browsing the list, I found many organizations I have never heard of before like "World Forum of Fisher Peoples" mixed in with familiar ones like Global Exchange and GreenPeace.

Tian Harter
My father looked it over and said "There are a number of places where the authors are dead wrong about the WTO."