Re: <nettime> drafts on WTO

["geert lovink" <geert@xs4all.nl>]

Mike Dolan of Public Citizens'Global Watch is covered in the September issue
of Fast Company (as well as No Logo Naomi Klein and the labor organizer Jane
McAlevey). Overall title of the section: Dissenters.

Fast Company's editorial goes like this: "The new world of business is not
just about creativity and productivity. It is also about ideology - a shared
set of ideas that define the kind of work that people want to do. But even
the most widely held ideas deserve scrutiny from aggressive, intelligent,and
passionate critics. Three dissenters from the orthodoxy of the new economy
force us to question our assumptions - and, in doing so, to sharpen our
thinking."

Mike Dolan's involvement in campaigns against the corporate agendas of
"globalization" are summarized in three parts:

1. Free trade doesn't make thing better for the average person. It makes
things worse.
2. Free trrade is bad for democracy, not pro-democracy.
3. Free trade is an example of old-style economic thinking, not some new
intellectual paradigm.

A quote from the last part:

"Champions of free borders and open markets love to portray their opponents
as being hopelessly out of step with cutting-edge business practices.
Nonsense, says Dolan. Free trade policies are themselves old-fashioned -
modeled on an outdated Cold War paradigm, developed in the aftermath of
World War II. Free trade, as the reasoning goes, promotes an environment
that is conducive to nurturing democracy and human rights - and, ultimately,
to fighting communism. But critics of globalization argue that things didn't
work out quite so neatly. Developing countries that were supposed to benefit
most from free trade have often most hurt by it. And any financial gains
that have been made have often been limited to an elite segment of a
population - creating greater social instability."

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