Taking Back Our Lives In the Age of Corporate Dominance

Ellen Schwartz and Suzanne Stoddard

Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco

224 pages, $14.95

Taking Back Our Lives is a passionate, eclectic book covering everything wrong with America, now that the corporations are in control and democratic rights so badly eroded.

From loss of sovereignty due to NAFTA and the WTO; to women suffering “chronic anxiety” as they are driven by images in corporate media to be anorexically thin; to the high cost of free TV; to overworked, stressed-out, over-consuming lives, the authors sum up the problems and suggest political action and personal reflection to effect change.

Schwartz and Stoddard strike at an important center of the problems when they note that since the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was passed in 1994 (with its administrative arm, the World Trade Organization), “life as we know it has dramatically changed, but most of us [don’t have] a clue.”

After only 20 hours of debate in the US Congress, they note, “our ability to protect our environment, our health, and local economies was signed away. It is now a matter for three bureaucrats in Geneva, Switzerland, to decide if our fuel efficiency mandates, pesticide residue laws, or statutes for recycled content in newsprint are ‘non-tariff trade barriers and therefore illegal under GATT.’”

What to do about this particular problem? The authors urge readers to order a copy of ‘A Citizen’s Guide to the WTO’; to join Public Citizen’s Trade Watch; to call their local media and ask for stories about toxics that are “permitted” under GATT; and to work with Breast Cancer Action to combat the toxics related to breast cancer.

Schwartz and Stoddard also examine the effects of floods of money on political campaigns; the pervasiveness of entertainment and how it separates people from each other; how cooperation is a better spur to creativity than competition, and more.