|
Parking Alert
Barbara Garson is the author of MacBird, the 1960’s
play that sold over half a million copies, and of two
books about work All the Livelong Day and The
Electronic Sweatshop. Her articles have appeared in
Harper’s, The New York Times, The Washington Post,
Newsweek, The L.A. Times, The Boston Globe, The
Baltimore Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village
Voice, Mother Jones and many others publications.
Her most recent book is Money Makes the World Go
Around: One Investor Tracks Her Cash Through the Global
Economy. (Penguin USA, 2002). She has won a
Guggenheim Grant, A National Press Club Citation and an
OBIE.
She was Editor of the Free Speech Movement (FSM)
Newsletter in Berkeley, 1964. During the Vietnam War
she worked in an anti-war coffee shop for GIs near Fort
Lewis Army Base. She is active in the movement against
Corporate Globalism as an internationalist who believes
in Human Globalism.
Synopsis
One-world, a utopian phrase of my
youth, suggested brotherhood, peace, Esperanto, the UN.
It’s current equivalent, the global village, suggests
electronic banking and CNN. "Sometime when I wasn’t
looking" says playwright Barbara Garson, "the world has
apparently become one, but under the ethos of Rupert
Murdoch not Eleanor Roosevelt."
So Garson, Guggenheim and MacArthur
Foundation Fellow, set out to see what it actually
means to live in a world that had been united by the
free flow of money.
She deposited a sum of money in a
one-branch bank and invested a second sum in a
traditional mutual fund. Then she set out to follow her
money as it coursed around the globe. The result MONEY
MAKES THE WORLD GO AROUND, part detective story and
part global justice manifesto, is fueled by "honest,
useful outrage" (San Francisco Chronicle.)
In her talk for the "Futures of
Globalization" colloquium Garson will introduce us to
some of the people she met along the way from Chase
Manhattan bankers, to Malaysian shrimp farmers; from
the engineers building an oil refinery in Thailand to
the migrant workers and street vendors who work on the
project. Most of the people who touch or are touched by
Garson’s money don’t think a lot about the abstract
flow of capital, but by the time our tour is over we
will understand concretely how unregulated capital
produces such great insecurity both for them and for
us.
Here's what reviewers said about Money Makes the
World Go Around.
"A disarmingly balanced combination
of amazement and social concern."
--Wall Street Journal
"A subversive, sugar-coated expose of
the way the world works."
--Salon.com
"A delightfully original book about
the flow of capital."
--Barron's
"Totally Original and flat out
Brilliant."
--Book Sense
"I've been a fan of Barbara Garson's
writing ever since I read her brilliant MacBird! This
book shows her at her best—able to be funny about
serious things and crystal-clear about impossibly
complex matters. She brings all the formidable
abstractions of the new world economy--"globalization,
Eurodollars, information highways, restructuring,
currency trading--down to the human level where we can
see and feel and understand them. And always, her
writing is suffused with a passionate concern for
ordinary people overwhelmed by the giants of the
corporate world."
--Howard Zinn
|
URI
Home
Welcome
