Resisting Globalization: Action

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Resisting Globalization Action Critique
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Naomi Klein on Brands vs Products

• Brands are products, plus the added value of
  identity, the idea or story behind the brand
• Brands sell a kind of pseudo-spirituality -- a
  sense of belonging, a community
• filling a gap that citizens, not just consumers,
  used to get elsewhere, whether from religion,
  whether from a sense of belonging in their
  community
• Behind these brand meanings is a privatized
  concept of what used to be public

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Identities

• Identities in general consist of social relations
  and their representations, as seen from the
  perspective of one actor or another
• Not durable or encompassing attributes or persons
  or collective actors as such

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Brands add value, but depend on image and
reputation for success making brands vulnerable
to brand bombing

• Consider this satirical take on MasterCards
  promo line circulating on Twitter and other
  social networking sites after MasterCard
  suspended processing transactions for WikiLeaks
• Freedom of speech? Priceless. For everything
  else, theres MasterCard

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The Yes Mens counterhegemonic globalization
demanding justice for Bhopal victims

• Bhopal catastrophe known as the worlds worst
  industrial disaster
• In December 1984, the Union Carbide pesticide
  plant in Bhopal began leaking gas and other
  chemicals that resulted in the exposure of
  hundreds of thousands of people
• Estimated death tolls vary a government
  affidavit in 2006 stated the leak caused 558,125
  injuries including 38,478 temporary partial and
  approximately 3,900 severely and permanently
  disabling injuries
• Civil and criminal cases are pending
• The plant was purchased by DOW in 2001

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A Better World is Possible!

• International Forum on Globalization, Ch. 60, pp.
  482-493 (Excerpted from IFG, A Better World is
  Possible!, report summary, 2002)

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Introduction

• Global resistance
• World Economic Forum
• World Social Forum
• Different worlds
• Corporate globalists
• Transformational imperative
• Economic democracy
• Global governance
• Building momentum

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Chapter 1 - Critique of Economic Globalization

• Key ingredients and general effects
• Pillars of Globalization
• Beneficiaries of Globalization
• Bureaucratic expressions of globalization
• Conclusions

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Chapter II - Ten Principles for Democratic
Sustainable Societies

• New democracy
• Susidiarity
• Ecological sustainability
• Common heritage
• Human rights
• Jobs/livelihood/employment
• Food security and food safety
• Equity
• Diversity
• Precautionary principle

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Chapter III - Issues on Commodification of the
Commons

• The process of privatizing, monopolizing, and
  commodifying common heritage resources and
  turning public services into corporate profit
  centers and the protection of this process
  within global trade agreements must be halted at
  once

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Chapter IV - The Care for Subsidiarity Bias Away
from the Global Toward the Local

• Understanding subsidiarity
• subsidiarity if democracy is based on the
  principle of popular participation, whenever a
  choice exists, local organization is preferred
• The road to the local