Perceptive, and well reasoned and written, April 28, 2005

Hertz, professor of international business at the University of Cambridge, argues that global trade and economic development has become seriously unbalanced in favour of multinational corporations, and that governments have become little more than handmaidens to corporate interests.

Hertz argues that after the fall of communism in Eastern Europe the right-wing in the United States, Britain, Canada, and much of the rest of the developed world vilified the redistributive role of government in society and forced governments to retreat from involvement in the economy.

Known as the Washington Consensus, this movement made International Monetary Fund and other institutional loans to nation-states contingent on government deregulation and trade liberalization. Hertz contends that this retreat from the public sphere has increase inequality and poverty throughout the world and reduced governments to handmaidens for corporations. She writes:

"The role of nation states has become to a large extent simply that of providing the public goods and services that business needs at the lowest cost while protecting the world's free trade system."

Heertz points-out that many Asian governments rejected the imposition of American-style capitalism and regularly intervene in the market for social, political and economic reasons. Although these countries are subjected to the same vicissitudes as states operating on other economic principles, they continue to prosper and some have been so successful they are considered threats by many "First World" states.

Anti-globalization protests are, Heertz contends, motivated by a variety of well-founded suspicions of the emerging capitalist world order. She argues protestors recognize the principle proponents and beneficiaries of globalization in its present form are the United States, international organizations controlled by the U.S. such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and multinational corporations. The protestors suspect - rightly in my opinion - current trends in globalization will result in gross income equalities like those that have emerged in the U.S. in recent decades. Heertz notes that 97% of the increase in income in the U.S. in the last 20 years has gone to the richest 20% of the population, and that the 13,000 wealthiest households in the United States have almost as much income as the 20 million poorest households.

Heertz claims anti-globalization activist are motivated by the hypocrisy of so-called "First World" countries demanding poor states open their doors to international trade and cease intervening in their economies. The world's richest nations are far more likely to offend the principles of free trade than the world's poorest. The United States pays American cotton growers and buyers approximately 4 billion dollars a year in subsidies. The United States and the European Union use non-tariff trade barriers to keep foreign goods and commodities out of their domestic markets.

Heertz also notes that political campaigning has become so expensive in the United States - and elsewhere in the developed world - candidates must solicit financial and logistical support from corporations, making politicians beholden to corporate interests rather than the electorate they putatively serve. As corporations and their agents use their influence to shred the social contract, anti-globalization activists respond by demanding they provide the services once offered by the state.

From my perspective, the major flaw in this book is Noreena Heertz's failure to address historical claims made by proponents of current trends in globalization. Heertz's critique would be stronger had she pointed-out that the richest nation-states in the world today are wealthy because their governments intervened in their economies. Nonetheless, Noreena Hertz "the Silent Takeover" is a coherent and well written analysis of globalization.

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