People Before Profit or Brave New Neighborhoods

People Before Profit: The New Globalization in an Age of Terror, Big Money, and Economic Crisis

Author: Charles Derber

Has globalization failed us? The promises of economic stability, increased prosperity, and cultural cooperation seem more like a pipe dream than ever before. But rather than stop globalization, Charles Derber challenges us to rewrite its rules in order to fulfill its potential as an agent of democracy and global harmony. In this provocative and optimistic work, one of the first examinations of globalization after September 11, 2001, Derber argues that only a democratic cure--begun at the grassroots level--will end global terror and economic insecurity. People Before Profit provides an essential understanding of our world economy as well as a practical guide for building a stable and more equitable global community.

Tom Hayden

Derber makes sense of such numbing issues as globalization, terrorism and world poverty...

Noam Chomsky

A provocative and stimulating work, directed to issues of the highest significance.

Ralph Nader

Derber describes the realities that affect everyday life...and elaborately presents sensible solutions for strong democracies [and] just economies...

...this book is about the urgent need to re-invent globalization to create a safe, democratic, and economically secure world.

Charles Kernaghan

This is a remarkable book, which deconstructs the myths of the global economy...

Naomi Klein

With any luck, it will help kick start a much needed debate on he principles that should unite our world.

Edward M. Kennedy

His ideas will be of interest to everyone who wants to know more about these basic issues of our time.

John J. Sweeney

...a thoughtful and penetrating assessment of the global economy, the inequities it has generated, and the global justice movement...

Publishers Weekly

Sociologist Derber (Corporation Nation) has a breezy writing style, slightly more academic than that of Thomas Friedman, whom he invokes often in this critique of the increasing trend toward globalization. Where Friedman sees globalization as an inevitable process, Derber believes we can still change globalization's direction, eliminating its market-driven excesses to provide truly universal economic development. The goals he proposes-ending global poverty, promoting local democracy and culture, making businesses socially accountable and creating a framework for genuinely collective peace and stability-aren't new, nor is his observance that people all over the world are coming together to achieve those goals, but what his analysis lacks in originality, it makes up in accessibility. Despite Derber's optimism that American citizens will sympathize with the emphasis of "third-wave" activists on combating corporate corruption and influence over government, he does admit his insistence that "we cannot have global democracy in a world so thoroughly dominated by the United States" is likely to meet with mainstream resistance. Reaction to that frank assessment is likely to overshadow other discussion, such as Derber's cogent explanation of the threats that the WTO and IMF pose to local sovereignty, especially with regard to labor and environmental legislation, and his 25 suggestions for "what to do right now," simple actions that almost anyone can take to become politically aware and active. It's clear Derber wants to do more than preach to the choir and less clear that the public is ready to listen. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An optimistic critique of globalization from Derber (Sociology/Boston Coll.; Corporation Nation, not reviewed). Despite the bluster of its proponents, the course of globalization is neither safe, democratic, nor economically secure, says Derber. This isn't because the system is inherently flawed or, as Thomas Friedman has it, outside of human intervention. Derber contends that globalization has within it the groundwork for a worldwide constitutional system that would allow active participants to think globally and act locally, pursue the basic set of human rights outlined in the UN Declaration of 1948, and seize the constitutional moment—aided by the technological innovation of instant global communication—at a time when "making history is a realistic prospect for ordinary people, as they find themselves caught up in seismic struggles over the basic rules of the world they inhabit." Today's globalization need be no more profit-driven, US-managed, or consumerist than, say, colonialism or the Gilded Age were socially flawed—those being examples of the fact that world systems have been with us since the beginning—if, as in Derber's scheme, a limited mega-government oversees global rights, with citizen-controlled national governments protecting participatory democracy on the local level and enforcing socially accountable global business standards. Obvious areas of reform include the antidemocratic, shadow governments of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and World Trade Organization—though be it said that Derber is no conspiracy theorist, more a time-honored Social Democrat—as well as the tempering of the power grab by the US Fundamental in movingglobalization toward democracy is an informed, traveled, abolitionist, green, active citizenry, keen-eyed to all antidemocratic institutions and to interventionism and unilateralism. The effort "will involve engaging citizens not only in free and fair elections, but in active participation in local, national, and global politics through civic, grassroots, labor, feminist, and public-interest associations." Derber wants long-term stability, where accountability starts at and proceeds from the individual guided by the basic tenets of human decency.

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction: 911 globe	1
1	Globalization's Ghosts	23
2	Three Myths	35
3	One World Under Business	59
4	The American Umpire	80
5	The WTO and the Constitution	105
6	The UN, the Barbershop, and Global Democracy	127
7	A Global New Deal	143
8	People Power	170
9	Sleepless in Seattle	199
10	Global Democracy as Antiterrorism	234
	Epilogue: What To Do Right Now	271
	Notes	285
	Index	308

Book about: Ismail Merchants Paris or Matsutake Mushroom

Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space

Author: Margaret Kohn

Fighting for First Amendment rights is as popular a pastime as ever, but just because you can get on your soapbox doesn't mean anyone will be there to listen. Town squares have emptied out as shoppers decamp for megamalls; gated communities keep pesky signature gathering activists away; even most internet chatrooms are run by the major media companies. Brave New Neighborhood s considers what can be done to protect and revitalize our public spaces.
In recent years, courts have upheld prohibitions preventing homeless people from begging in the subway, tenants from distributing newsletters to their neighbors, and activists from leafleting in front of the post office. Brave New Neighborhood s lays out the blueprints of the future towns these changes have created, and in this new geography, the First Amendment comes from the wrong side of the tracks.