Privatized Planet
If you thought we had defeated the big trade and investment deals like TTIP and TPP think again. Privatized Planet exposes the myths about 'free trade' in this new age of globalization.
President Trump has torn up the TTIP and TPP. Britain is distancing itself from the European Union. Does this means that corporate globalization is in retreat? Privatized Planet exposes the truth about 'free trade' in this new era of globalization. And this time it's even worse for working people... Quoting leaked documents, corporate lobby memos and a host of other primary sources, it seeks to prove that corporate globalization is simply changing shape, not coming to an end. Author T.J. Coles takes us on a tour of US-led corporate free trade deals from WWII to the present. He argues that activists helped beat back the big multilateral trade deals, TTIP and TPP, and that they must now pay attention to the 'noodle bowl' (as economists call it) of bilateral deals being signed in secret, like the ongoing US-UK free trade deal. Whether it's privatizing Britain's National Health Service, lobbying to get genetically-modified foods and hormone-treated beef into Europe, pushing fracking on Eastern European countries, or murdering environmental activists in the third world, the US-led corporate empire will stop at nothing until the planet is in private hands.
Acronyms
Introduction
Part I: Reshaping globalization
1 Free trade: From World War Two to the World Trade Organization
2 Free trade: The Bush and Obama years
3 Free trade: The Trump years
Trump’s commitment to ‘free trade’ 53
4 Rivalries: ‘Globalization is a brutal process’
Part II : Our environment
5 Activists: ‘Get a life!’
6 Fossil fuels: ‘Exploitation should be guaranteed’
7 Vehicles: Investor-State dispute settlements as ‘gunboat diplomacy’
8 Food and agriculture: ‘Mere law’
Part III: Finance and healthcare
9 Financialization: ‘A highway without speed limits’
10 Healthcare: ‘Selling splints to Europe’
Conclusion
Endnotes
Index
Free trade wants your healthcare, wages, pensions and much more. You have been warned.
Well researched, carefully argued, eminently readable and, in the end, irrefutable.