Review
"As the world readies to heave a collective sigh of relief upon George W. Bush's exit from the White House,
How to Rule the World is a caution against complacency. Mark Engler offers a timely reminder that before Bush's boots and bombs there was Clinton's corporate 'consensus'--more soothing perhaps but no more sustainable than the neocons' disastrous militarism. He then makes a case that there lies a third choice: democracy. Impressively researched and sharply argued, How to Rule the World is an essential handbook not for the few who do rule the world but for the many who should." --
Greg Grandin, author of Empire's Workshop"Fasten your seatbelt. You're in for a ride that will change your understanding of where we've been, what's really going on now, and what's coming next. Mark Engler explores, for the first time, the emerging battle between 'corporate globalization' and 'imperial globalization'- and the alternative, 'democratic globalization, or globalization from below.' If you want to know 'what ever happened to the anti-globalization movement,' why it is likely to roar back as a powerful force in world politics, and why it may make another world possible, don't miss this unique and indispensable guide." --
Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!, Global Village or Global Pillage, and Globalization from Below"Full of passion, hope, and insight,
How to Rule the World assures us that the future of globalization is not a foregone conclusion. Rejecting both the imperial behemoth and the leviathan of corporate rule, Mark Engler weaves disparate movements and burgeoning efforts in far flung corners of the globe together to show the strong, tensile strands of a democratic alternative--a globalization from below that has the power to shape the post-Bush era." --
Frida Berrigan, New America Foundation, Arms and Security Initiative"This is one of the most hopeful and challenging progressive books to be written in a long time. Global elites, it turns out, are no more cohesive than, say, the crime families of New York, and perhaps a good deal less so. As the fault lines among those who have ruled the world for the past few decades become ever more clear, the time is upon us to finally follow up on Seattle and to bring democracy home. Never was a book more timely." --
Andy Bichlbaum, THE YES MEN
Product Description
A journalist and social activist exposes the injustices of the Bush-era politics of globalization and offers a guide to overcoming the challenges of the post-Bush moment.
A debate is taking place over what values should define the international order. For global elites, it is a debate about how to rule the world: a conflict between one vision of global order based on U.S. empire and another based on an expanding, corporate-controlled global economy. These visions are not entirely distinct. How to Rule the World explains how they overlap and also how, at critical moments, they clash with one another. The book is written, however, not from the perspective of power, but from the perspective of those who believe the world should be governed according to principles of democratic participation and self-determination.
Mark Engler explains how the Bush administration has reshaped globalization in ways that will affect us for years to come. Such changes have created a setting that few protesters in Seattle or elsewhere could have foreseen: Global trade talks are collapsing. International institutions that drew protests, like the IMF and the World Bank, face uncertain futures. Moreover, U.S. unilateralism has created international divides that endanger the future progress of the type of multilateral globalization that thrived throughout the 1990s.
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