http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR24605.shtml
Interview with Jové Bové, French farmer famous for busting up a McDonald's. I like this interview. Bové is principled, intelligent, consistent. I agree that most of the things he identifies as problems are problems, and with many of his suggested solutions.
The same magazine also ran a not-so-good article by Naomi Klein. "Does Mexico have the right to deny a permit for a hazardous toxic-waste disposal site? Not according to Metalclad, the US company now suing the Mexican government for $16.7 million damages under NAFTA." Klein argues that countries should be allowed to arrange their own affairs, and not be forced to obey laws laid down by higher powers such as NAFTA or the WTO. But wasn't the government of the Philippines practising self-determination when it set up the Cavite export processing zone (EPZ), the tax-free, union-free, factory-worker hell-hole described in her book No Logo? Wasn't this the product of a more-or-less democratically elected government that decided its affairs for itself?
Sometimes the problem is NAFTA, sometimes it is short-sighted and naive governments, sometimes it is the power difference between companies of the developed world and the people of the developing, sometimes it it something else again. I wish Klein would acknowledge the situation's complexity. In his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King explains why he is willing to break some laws (parading without a permit) whilst at the same time insisting that others should be obeyed (the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw segregation in public schools). This is a difficult intellectual course to navigate; he manages it reasonably well. Klein, meanwhile, pretends there is no problem.