"Globalization has transformed the United States alongside Mexico, India, Bangladesh, and nearly every nation in the world. We know that globalization has led to the transfer of industrial jobs outside the United States. Cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Flint have struggled to recover after corporations fled, seeking cheap labor and lax environmental regulations. Working people in America have seen wage stagnation, long-term unemployment, and a declining standard of living over the past forty years. This book adds to this story by focusing on the effects of globalization on undermining environmental and labor activism in the United States and the result this has had on domestic politics.
"Economist Joseph Stiglitz has defined globalization as the 'closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders.' Globalization is the spread of ideas, culture, political systems, food, animals, plants, and disease. Beginning in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, trading networks connected East Asia, India, the east coast of Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and globalization started the centuries long transformation of the world, leading to the European conquest of the Americas and the genocide of indigenous peoples, the expansion of the world's food sources, the depletion of wildlife, and the movement of capital and jobs around the world.
"Of course, globalization itself is neither bad nor good. I like having access to Vietnamese food, and many Vietnamese like eating American fast food. But the system's promoters ignore or explain away the tremendous injustices caused by globalization today, especially the exploitation of the world's poor through both corporate and government policies that throw them off their land and out of their towns and villages and force them to make a living in the modern corporate economy as low-wage workers. Modern globalization creates great profit for shareholders but has undermined stable employment and middle-class lifestyles for American workers while forcing the world's poor to work in polluted, deadly workplaces."
