Mark Engler, How to Rule the World
What: How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy
Who: Mark Engler
When: April through December 2008
Where: United States
Website: Democracy Uprising
PRESS INQUIRIES: 508-240-4619
Right now a debate is taking place over what values should define our international order. For global elites, it is a debate about how to rule the world. Laying out a new and original framework for understanding globalization politics, Mark Engler describes the conflict between a Clinton-era vision of an expanding, corporate-controlled global economy and a Bush-era “imperial globalization” based on U.S. military dominance. How to Rule the World explains how these visions overlap and also how, at critical moments, they clash with one another. It is written, however, in the hopes that neither will prevail. Even as Wall Street CEOs and Washington militarists argue among themselves, citizens’ uprisings in the United States, in an increasingly progressive Latin America, and beyond are bringing to life a vibrant “democratic globalization” based on economic justice, human rights, and self-determination.
Engler, a journalist, activist, and policy expert, details how the Bush administration has reshaped globalization in ways that few protesters in Seattle or elsewhere could have foreseen: Global trade talks are collapsing. The roles of international institutions like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank are dramatically changing. U.S. unilateralism and the disastrous war in Iraq have deepened international divisions. As a result, the stage is now set for a critical new debate about the global economy.
Mark Engler is a writer based in New York City and an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. His articles appear in Dissent, The Nation, Newsday, the Progressive, the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, and In These Times.
An activist originally from Des Moines, Iowa, Mark is a member of the National Writers Union (UAW, Local 1881). He has previously worked with the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in San José, Costa Rica, and he has also lived in Guatemala and El Salvador.
Topics of discussion relevant to How to Rule the World include:
- How the Bush administration’s militarism has transformed the globalization debate, and how the politics of opposing empire will again change as Bush and Cheney leave office.
- Where all the global justice protests went, and why they can come back.
- How Hillary Clinton’s vision of a pro-corporate world order differs from John McCain’s vision of U.S. empire, and how we can promote a democratic alternative.
- Why issues of trade and development are creating a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party.
- Why right-wing critics, along with progressive protesters, have turned against the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization.
- Why “free market” neoliberalism, which has dominated world affairs for two decades, is now falling apart, and how this creates vital opportunities for building a better global order.
- How uprisings throughout Latin America are creating an exciting globalization from below.
- What alternatives are available to counter the type of “free trade” future promoted by Thomas Friedman.
- What the prospects of a deep recession in the United States and abroad might mean for those struggling for global justice.
- What connections exist between war and globalization, and how the invasion of Iraq represents a break from earlier models of corporate expansion.
- What impact the anti-war and global justice protests of the past years have made.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
April 9, 2008 - Fighting Empire After Bush: Book release, Bluestockings, New York City
April 16, 2008 - Busboys and Poets, Washington, DC
April 17, 2008 - Wooden Shoe Books, Philadelphia, PA
April 20, 2008 - Elliot Bay Books, Seattle, WA
May 2, 2008 - Skylight Books, Los Angeles, CA
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WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING
“Fasten your seatbelt. You’re in for a ride that will change your understanding of where we’ve been, what’s really going on now, and what’s coming next. Mark Engler explores, for the first time, the emerging battle between ‘corporate globalization’ and ‘imperial globalization’–and the alternative, ‘democratic globalization, or globalization from below.’ If you want to know ‘what ever happened to the anti-globalization movement,’ why it is likely to roar back as a powerful force in world politics, and why it may make another world possible, don’t miss this unique and indispensable guide.”
–JEREMY BRECHER, author of Strike!, Global Village or Global Pillage, and Globalization from Below
“Full of passion, hope, and insight, How to Rule the World assures us that the future of globalization is not a foregone conclusion. Rejecting both the imperial behemoth and the leviathan of corporate rule, Mark Engler weaves disparate movements and burgeoning efforts in far flung corners of the globe together to show the strong, tensile strands of a democratic alternative–a globalization from below that has the power to shape the post-Bush era.”
–FRIDA BERRIGAN, New America Foundation, Arms and Security Initiative
“This is one of the most hopeful and challenging progressive books to be written in a long time. Global elites, it turns out, are no more cohesive than, say, the crime families of New York, and perhaps a good deal less so. As the fault lines among those who have ruled the world for the past few decades become ever more clear, the time is upon us to finally follow up on Seattle and to bring democracy home. Never was a book more timely.”
–Andy Bichlbaum, activist, THE YES MEN
“As the world readies to heave a collective sigh of relief upon George W. Bush’s exit from the White House, How to Rule the World is a caution against complacency. Mark Engler offers a timely reminder that before Bush’s boots and bombs there was Clinton’s corporate ‘consensus’–more soothing perhaps but no more sustainable than the neocons’ disastrous militarism. He then makes a case that there lies a third choice: democracy. Impressively researched and sharply argued, How to Rule the World is an essential handbook not for the few who do rule the world but for the many who should.”
–GREG GRANDIN, author of Empire’s Workshop
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LINKS
