When Corporations Rule the World

A searving indictment of an unjust international economic order.
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu

The new edition is even more powerful than the original in its articulation of the issues, its stories of the struggle and its compelling call to each and everyone of us to become participants in what I believe to be a sacred trust....creating a world that works for all.
—Danny Glover

<More Reviewer Comments>

The Second Edition of the Modern Classic, Released April 2001. Considered by many to be the "bible" of the emerging global Living Democracy Movement, When Corporations Rule the World has become a modern classic with a message that seems increasingly prophetic with each passing day. Its central message is a clear and unequivocal wake up call to humanity.

The global economy has become like a malignant cancer, advancing the colonization of the planet's living spaces for the benefit of powerful corporations and financial institutions. It has turned these once useful institutions into instruments of a market tyranny that is destroying livelihoods, displacing people, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money. It forces us all to act in ways destructive of ourselves, our families, our communities, and nature. This destructive process is driven by a combination of institutional forces and an extremist ideology of corporate libertarianism that invokes the theories of Adam Smith and market economics to advance policies that systematically undermine both the market and democracy.

Human survival depends on a community-based, people-centered alternative beyond the failed extremist ideologies of communism and capitalism. This alternative is already being created through the initiatives of millions of people around the world who are taking back control of their lives and communities to create places where people can live and grow in balance with the living earth. When Corporations Rule the World provides an agenda of national and global reforms by which we may reclaim our power to localize economies while globalizing consciousness.

The second edition, released in 2001, features a Foreword by activist/actor Danny Glover and five all new chapters:

1. Introduction: Deepening Crisis--Cause for Hope frames the rapidly deepening struggle between the forces of corporate globalization and the forces of a globalizing civil society.
2. Making Money, Growing Poorer updates the deepening human crisis of an economy that is making money for the rich at the expense of the life of society and the Planet.
3. The Living Democracy Movement documents and examines the nature and implications of the growing citizen movement that has emerged in response to corporate globalization's assault on life and democracy.
4. A Civil Society provide a framework for describing the critical role of spirit and culture in distinguishing between a civil society and a capitalist society. It also addresses the centrality of culture to the political and institutional changes ahead.
5. Epilogue: A Story for Our Time places the current struggle between the forces of democracy and corporate tyranny in its larger evolutionary context to provide insight into its deeper purpose and meaning.

This book was written as a project of the People-Centered Development Forum (PCDF) to help take the analysis and vision of the alternative development movement into the mainstream.