Check these out:
LINKS

INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON GLOBALIZATION. A group of over sixty thinkers who have come together to engage a dialogue about the negative effects of global trade agreements. A good place to learn the basics.

INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR ECOLOGY & CULTURE. A leading organization promoting local economies and cultures while presenting the problems of economic globalization.

INSTITUTE FOR NONVIOLENT ECONOMICS. The Institute's mission is to build understanding among the public and among community organizers and activists of the ways by which economic globalization impacts local issues and daily lives. The Institute forms broad alliances across issues and cultures locally to link with international campaigns that counter the consumer monoculture and to research and begin to build a life-affirming economy in northern New Mexico.

EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE, dedicated to providing a vision of an environmentally sustainable economy—an eco-economy—as well as a roadmap of how to get from here to there.

MORE LINKS . . .

BOOKS

Ancient Futures, by Helena Norberg Hodge. Using the small northern Indian state of Ladakh as her model, Norberg-Hodge demonstrates the devastating effects of the global economy on local indigenous cultures.

Development As Freedom, by Amartya Sen. By showing that the quality of our lives should be measured not by our wealth, but by our freedom, Sen's writings have revolutionized the theory and practice of development." (Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the UN)

Globalization and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz. "I have written this book because while I was at the World Bank, I saw firsthand the devastating effect that globalization can have on developing countries, and especially the poor within those countries."

The End of Poverty, by Jeffrey D. Sachs. It may seem too easy to cite a popular book by a world-famous economist, introduced by an even more famous self-proclaimed rock star. But it would also be too easy not to read the book, which in fact takes us to the very heart of the idea of Interbeing.

MORE BOOKS . . .

JOURNALS
Poverty and Economic Justice

Pope John Paul II said, “If the aim is globalization without marginalization, we can no longer tolerate a world in which there live side by side the immensely rich and the miserably poor, the have-nots deprived even of essentials and people who thoughtlessly waste what others so desperately need. Such countries are an affront to the dignity of the human person.” He further sad, “Ethics demand that systems be attuned to the needs of man, and not that man be sacrificed for the sake of the system.”

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and uses 40% of the world’s resources. The wealthiest countries—Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan—use 65% of the world’s electricity. 2 billion people live on less than $2 per day. 1.3 billion people worldwide struggle to survive on $1 per day or less. To think about economic justice from a comfortable place in the world’s richest nation, it requires a stretch of unpleasant imagination to think what genuine poverty is like. To be poor in America is still relatively wealthy compared to some people in some places on our planet. And to be poor in America, the richest nation on Earth, is unthinkable, unacceptable and avoidable. (Since 2003, 1.1 million more Americans have fallen below the official poverty line.) We need to find the clarity and compassion to look at the national and global class structure and how the powerful governmental and military organizations enforce that structure, and begin to find ways to chip away at that monolith.

It is necessary to recognize how such great poverty has happened. “If we are serious about ending poverty, we have to be serious about ending the system that creates poverty by robbing the poor of their economic wealth, livelihoods and incomes. Before we can make poverty history, we need to get the history of poverty right. It’s not about how much wealthy nations can give so much as how much less they can take.” ((Vandana Shiva, physicist, prominent Indian environmental activist, and Right Livelihood Award winner.)

On the surface, it would seem that the global economy has increased the wellbeing of the world’s countries. But this is only if you measure a country’s total income growth. If there is a huge growth in the income of the upper 20 percent of the population, without counting the dramatic declines in the incomes of the lower 80 percent of the population, you can cover up what’s really happening. The Seattle WTO demonstration and subsequent gatherings in opposition to the global economic oligarchy show us the stirrings of a revolutionary fervor that recognizes the brutal and ultimately self-destructive juggernaut for what it really is. It is not only the social fabric of communities that is unravelled by huge-scale corporate domination, but ecological systems as well. The answer is in building local, human-scale economies that support people, communities, and restores the environment on which they depend for their livelihoods. It is hard to act out of compassion when the scale of our enterprises is so large that the chains of cause and effect are hidden, leading us to unwittingly contribute to the suffering of other beings.