Case Against Free Trade : Gatt, NAFTA and the Globalization of Corporate Power: Case Against Free Trade

This book examines the notion of "free trade" and the issues raised by adopting the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Essays by Ralph Nader, Jerry Brown, William Greider, Margaret Atwood, Mark Ritchie, Wendell Berry, Pat Choate, and others.

"This book contains essays by leading citizen-oriented trade experts. They dissect the ideological roots of the free trade mantra, discuss the trade negotiations themselves, and most vividly and most importantly, detail the devastating effect that such trade governance has had—and the much more sever effect it will have if the Uruguay Round expansion of GATT and NAFTA are enacted—on real people and real communities around the world. All of humanity has a shared interest in opposing trade agreements that threaten to exacerbate rather than eliminate great global threats to our human well-being and reckless exploitation of people and environments."
- Ralph Nader

"It does not require great political imagination to see that the world system is heading toward a further dispersion of governing power so that the closet dictator of the marketplace can command things more efficiently, form everywhere and nowhere. The historic paradox is breathtaking: at the very moment when western democracies and capitalism have triumphed over the communist alternative, their own systems of self-government are being gradually unraveled by the market system."
- William Greider

"The proposed GATT revisions offend against democracy and freedom, against people's natural concern for bodily and ecological health, and against the very possibility of a sustainable food supply. Apart from the corporate ambition to gather the wealth and power of the world into fewer and fewer hands, these revision make no sense, for they ignore or reduce to fantasy all the realities with which they are concerned: ecological, agricultural, economic, political, and cultural."
- Wendell Berry