Free Market Missionaries

First Published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In her recent book Suiting Themselves, bestselling author Sharon Beder exposed how the global corporate elite have brazenly rewritten the rules of the global economy to line their pockets. In this new book she trains her sights on the insidious underbelly of this global trend to show how they have also orchestrated a mass propaganda campaign to manipulate community values and convince us that their interest - co-opting and controlling all of us in the name of the free market - is in our interest. During the 20th century, business associations coordinated mass propaganda campaigns combining 20th century American PR methods with revitalized free market ideology from 18th century Europe. The aim was to persuade people to eschew their own power as workers and citizens, and forego their democratic power to restrain and regulate business activity. Sophisticated corporate-funded think tanks augmented these campaigns in the 1970s and 1980s, promoting free enterprise and business-friendly policies. Thesefree market missionaries now seek to change individual and institutional values through bolder strategies such as expanding share ownership and manipulating wider public concerns. In each case the goal is the same: the triumph of business values over community values. Beder‘s is an intellectual call to arms: challenge the ideology of the free market missionaries or be converted to it.

The processes of globalisation are reshaping our world dramatically and rapidly. The great issues of our day emphasise that we are all in this together: startling inequalities, pressures on the environment, continuing hunger and poverty, climate change, economic integration, mass migrations, instant communications and recurring armed conflicts.

Do you wonder; • Why is there so much national debt? • Where has the middle class gone? • Why do my kids have less opportunity than I did? If so, this book is for you! • 97% of money is created by the banks, not by governments. • The Federal Reserve is a private bank controlled by private banks. • Adam Smith did not say an invisible hand guides the markets. • Government debt was static until the mid-1970’s and has soared since. • Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan both admitted to fundamental economic errors. • About 1/3 of an average persons’ spending is goes to banks as interest. • Corporations are using treaties to overrule nations and democracy. • The TARP bank bailouts were the biggest theft in history.

The onslaught of globalization has brought with it sweeping changes to the foreign economic policy of the last 50 years. As the international political economy of nations and regions continues to be drawn and redrawn, this book traces the goals and instruments of foreign economic policy during this period, providing insight into the long-run trends and developing new theoretical generalizations. The book charts the journey from the point when foreign economic policy was solely concerned with foreign trade - pursued to promote the interests of individual countries - to the current globalization of the world economy that creates a uniform market in goods, services and factors of production that embrace all countries and regions.

This volume is not simply another general theory of world system. It is a theoretically and ethnographically informed collection of essays which opens up new questions through an examination of concrete cases, covering global and local questions of political economy.