Cut Deals, Carry WaterCorporate interests have pursued schemes to privatize, commodify, and export water for decades. We have seen how this plays out in Canada. For instance, in the late 1990s, Sun Belt Water, Inc., sued the Canadian government under NAFTA because British Columbia banned water exports, ...
In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond tells of a Viking colony that for 450 years eked out a living on the southern coast of Greenland. About 1400 A.D., after a series of harsh winters, the mainstay of the colony's diet—their livestock—began to die off. There was not enough hay to carry them through the ...
This issue of YES! tells the stories of people who have declared independence from the global corporate economy. These folks are not waiting for government or corporate leaders to get the economy working for ordinary people. They're taking action at the local level to provide livelihoods and goods and ...
“No deal is better than a bad deal” is a slogan of Our World Is Not For Sale, a worldwide alliance of farmers, environmentalists, and labor and fair trade activists concerned with the World Trade Organization (WTO) and international trade. In a victory for global civil society, “No Deal” is the current ...
Jerry Moore had always been a hard-working guy. He earned a decent salary working for the local phone company in Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish, but he was always reaching for something better. So he bought a used dump truck and started a hauling business on the side. But his truck was old and didn't ...
The argument against local production often comes down to “economies of scale.” The products we depend on will be cheaper, the argument goes, if they are made in huge factories and then shipped around the globe.Not necessarily, says Michael Shuman, author of The Small-Mart Revolution, a book about the ...
There's only one thing worse for the poor in the Global South, we're told, than a job in a sweatshop: It's the alternative--no job. That's basically what New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof argued recently. If true, then "buy local" campaigns in the North that cut imports could harm the planet's ...
Call it "globalization," or the "free market," or "capitalism." Whatever its name, people across the United States and throughout the world are experiencing the devastating effects of an economy that places profit above all else.
None of this, of course, is news. Many of us have come to believe ...
Imagine a world where everyone has what they need,
where people make the decisions that matter and where government truly
is for and by the people. Now, imagine we are working, talking,
debating and planning to bring that world into being.This
is the World Social Forum (WSF) process, an open space ...
1 IMF: For
most Americans, the International Monetary Fund is just one of the
hulking edifices in downtown Washington, D.C., filled mostly with men
in dark suits. But for millions of people in the developing world, the
IMF is painfully familiar. For more than a
quarter-century, this public financial ...
Business 
