Customer Reviews

The WTO: Five Years of Reasons to Resist Corporate Globalization (Open Media Series)

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This is a concise, informative book which provides an excellent overview of the major issues raised by the WTO (and similar organizations, present and future). Specific examples are provided to illustrate exactly why the WTO is so damaging in the areas of public health, food safety, the environment, the advancement of underdeveloped nations, labor and human rights, and many others. The authors have a strong case and they basically let the (well-documented) facts speak for themselves; if anything, they're surprisingly restrained in their evaluation.

Economic issues aren't particularly sexy, of course, and I had expected this book to be dry. It was anything but. It's a brisk read, and it packs the maximum amount of useful information into its relatively few pages. If you were confused by the protests in Seattle and Washington and want to know what those people were REALLY shouting about--something you're certainly never going to get from CNN and friends--read this book. It's an essential guide to what are fast becoming the key issues of our time.

This brief, well thought out and detailed criticism of the WTO is very readable. Points out that the WTO, an unelected irresponsible body has been placed above the world's governments and given the power to nullify the laws enacted by those governments. Shows how the WTO has allowed corporations to circumvent the limitations placed upon them by government. Provides specific examples of how the WTO is systematically undermining responsible market practices. Should be read critically by those on the left and the right. If we continue on this road, we will despoil our environment, destroy representative government and enslave our people. The question here is not free trade verses no trade, as the apologists for the corporate state would have us believe, but rather who will benefit from our trade policies. The WTO is a tool of the biggest multinationals, and represents their interests alone, over everyone else. Buy it.

Everybody thinks they understand "free trade" but nobody bothers to investigate what the WTO does; which is make life more profitable for corporations at the expense of citizens around the world. Ms. Wallach is a brilliant writer/investigator who explains what the WTO is doing to our environment, health and labor rights; not very good things I might add. I believe in free trade as long as it is fair trade. I believe Ms. Wallach does too, although the corporate lackey's try and label her as "anti-trade". This is a quick read - buy it and become informed.

This pamphlet is an excellent introduction to the World Trade Organization and its power. The authors discuss many valid reasons to oppose the WTO, including its overwhelming use of threats brought on by corporations to invalidate U.S., EU, and Japanese laws, to name a few. Because of the WTO we no longer have dolphin-safe tuna, we now longer have a strong Clean Air Act, we no longer have a strong Endangered Species Act. The authors have made it clear that the WTO will do anything it can to reduce environmental, public safety, and health laws in the name of "free trade" (which the authors and Ralph Nader clearly outline as corporate trade).

It is clear after reading this pamphlet that a more appropriate name for the World Trade Organization should be the Corporate Trade Organization

Lori Wallach has got to be on her way to a Nobel Prize. She has hit an exposed nerve of the corporate system, and illuminated it in a manner that moves tens of thousands. This book, a very short version of a much longer study, is very cogent and well-documented. The bottom line is clear: the WTO operates in secrecy, for the convenience of corporations, and is systematically undermining and overturning higher standards of protections and sanctions related to the protection of children, public safety, and the environment.

It merits comment that Wallach (and her lesser known co-author, Michelle Sforza) would never have reached as many people with their thinking in the absence of the Open Media Pamphlet Series. This series is addictive, brilliant, and consistently cuts to the heart of major issues.

The complete textbook, "Whose Trade Organization?" is a remarkably potent, relentlessly-documented beast of a book, which I wish more people had the time and inclination to read. This smaller edition lacks the potency and punch of the parent text, but manages to still encompass most of the critical data.

If a book is going to be abridged like this one, chances are that it's intended for mildly curious readers who want to know, "just what are they protesting about the WTO anyway?", rather than for the scholar or intellectual activist. But I'm afraid that this book forgets its likeliest audience. For such an audience, the more effective approach would have been to describe the most extreme and outrageous WTO scenarios, leaving the reader outraged at the moral and political injustices! Instead, this book gives brief desriptions of these, and then mixes in more technical (yet abridged) histories and terms and procedural issues with the WTO. In short, it left in too much of the nuts-and-bolts when it should have displayed more of the outrageous effects on human rights, environment, national sovereinty, labor, toxins, etc.

A second shortcoming is that the book assumes its reader is sympathetic to such concerns (environment, labor, culture, etc.). What we need is a book directed at Conservatives, explaining to them why the WTO is an insult to conservative values by supplanting the laws created by a sovereign nation, overwhelming our Constitution in favor of corporate-managed meddling, and actually defying the concept of "free trade" with shockingly-entrenched meddling from an organization that does not have the U.S.'s sovereign interests in mind.

What is the leading threat to governments everywhere? --the WTO. This book details the rise of the WTO. It's stiffling of local industry in favor of cheaper, corporate alternatives. Wallach describes how corporations are attempting to patent your DNA and how farmers in India, and other places, in one example, fought back against them. This pioneering book describes, as no one else does, how governments worldwide must collaborate to control the menace of this secretive organization.

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you find out the reasons behind so muchthat seemed to be going down, to beworking against the individual.

this is just a begining to the atrocity of the WTO. it will give you great insight to its real workings kept secret by the corporate owned media. sorta old stuff for people who already know about the WTO

From the US Constitution of (especially the commerce clause) to the German Zollverein to the EEC and EU, the history of the modern world has been one of economic integration and removal of obstacles to trade. As for this book, I'd rather spend my money on Ms. Arnold Schwartenegger's silly book than this even sillier drivel.