Starts with a report from Newsday reporter Laurie Garrett from the 2003 Davos summit (pp. 3-4):

In January 2003, the invasion of Iraq loomed on the horizon. Unsurprisingly, it was a main topic of conversation at Davis. At the forum, U.S. military representatives advocated for war, arguing, according to Garrett, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."

Among corporate leaders, the reaction was almost uniformly negative. These participants were not salivating over possible profits in Iraq. Rather, they saw bad times for capitalism ahead. Garrett wrote, "the business community was in no mood to hear about a war in Iraq. Except for diehard American Republicans, a few Brit Tories and some Middle East folks the [forum] was in a foul, angry anti-American mood." CEOs deplored arrogant White House unilateralism and its potentially harmful consequences for the global economy. In Garrett's words, "the rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes."

The most dramatic confrontation came after the U.S. secretary of state made an unreserved push to persuade the conference to support Washington's invasion. "When Colin Powell gave the speech of his life, trying to win over the non-American delegates," Garrett reported, "the sharpest attack on his comments came not from Amnesty International or some Islamic representative -- it came from the head of the largest bank in the Netherlands.

The image -- the irate banker sniping at the secretary of state -- stayed in my head long after I first read Garrett's e-mail. It is striking because it is so unlike the scenes we more commonly picture of CEOs and powerful politicians clinking martini glasses, drinking to one another's prosperity. The confrontation that occurred at Davis illustrated a divide that has been [sic] become increasingly significant over the past decade, though we rarely consider it. It embodied a debate, now raging, about how to rule the world.

(pp. 32-33):

Although versions of this notion are still prevalent, it is worth considering a contrary notion: Maybe George Bush and Dick Cheney aren't very good capitalists after all.

George W. Bush's history as a failed businessman is well known. As Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out, by 1986 Bush "had run through millions of dollars of other people's money" in two failed business ventures, "with nothing to show for it but a company losing money and heavily burdened with debt. But he was rescued from failure when Harken Energy bought his company at an astonishingly high price," thanks to Bush family connections.

Dick Cheney, who was portrayed by conservatives as a brilliant ex-CEO and by progressives as a Halliburton shill, also has a suspect past. Although he certainly increased Halliburton's profile in his nearly five-year tenure as its chief, his foremost accomplishment was the $7.7 billion acquisition in 1998 of Dresser Industries, a rival that turned out to be plagued with staggering asbestos-related liabilities. In the wake of Cheney's reign, multiple Halliburton divisions sought bankruptcy protection, and the company's stock price plunged. For several years, the company was a losing investment, although it would later rebound with Cheney out of the corporate driver's seat (and in a more helpful position in government).

Many analysts held Cheney accountable for the company's distressing downturn. Those detractors argued that Dresser's asbestos problems, which cost Halliburton billions, were predictable. Even the less harsh critics have questioned Cheney's success as a business leader. For instance, Jason E. Putman, an energy analyst at Victory Capital Management, stated that, as a Halliburton executive, "overall, Cheney did maybe at best an average job." Newsweek's Wall Street editor, Alan Sloan, was less complimentary, maintaining that Cheney was a "CEO who messed up big-time."

(p. 46):

Even before the [Iraq] war started, there were those who predicted that it could become an economically burdensome disaster. In a policy report titled The Economic Costs of a War in Iraq, progressive economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot documented worrisome prospects for business. Beyond the costs of anti-Americanism abroad, they focused on three additional areas of concern: a war-related oil shock that could cost the American economy hundreds of thousands of jobs over a seven-year period; a heightened risk of terrorist attacks in the United States, which could result in increased security costs, slowing the growth of the gross domestic product (GDP); and a likelihood that increased oil prices could drag the developing world into a deep recession.

(p. 62):

The militarist mind-set of the Bush administration is at the core of the imperial globalization agenda. On the one hand, this agenda promises a continuation of the neoliberal policies of the Clinton era. On the other, it carries the neocon suspicion of "free trade" as a governing ideology and subordinates economics to a secondary role, By insisting that American foreign relations be based on a proactive, interventionist militarism, imperial globalization breaks not only from the Clintonian philosophy of how to rule the world but also from earlier Republican traditions of how to conduct business. It regards a healthy global capitalism not as a key end in itself but as the by-product of U.S. dominance.

(pp. 67-68):

With such a large list of targets, it did not necessarily matter to the imperial globalists where the United States began. Asserting U.S. dominance itself was the key first objective. Jonah Goldberg calls this idea the Ledeen Doctrine. The principle is named after a neocon godfather with a particularly unsavory past. Michael Ledeen is the resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute and a past consultant to the Pentagon, State Department, and White House under Ronald Reagan. Working with National Security Advisor Robert McFarland in the 1980s, Ledeen became an important figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, helping to establish links between Israeli officials and Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen has consistently been one of the most hawkish voices in the conservative foreign policy establishment. He is longtime advocate of regime change in both Iraq and Iran, as well as a prominent admirer of Machiavelli. In 1999, Ledeen penned a book titled Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, where he contended that war "provides a real test of character" and "creates a pool of leaders for the nation." Peace, on the other hand, "increases our peril, by making discipline less urgent" and "encouraging some of our worst instincts."

As Jonah Goldberg explained, the Ledeen Doctrine essentially means that "every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." For Goldberg, this behavior makes perfect sense. "There are plenty of excellent geostrategic, legal, and political arguments in favor of regime change in Iraq," he wrote in 2002. For example, the British understood that the second-largest oil producer in the region needed to be, if not a client state, then at least allied with the West." But, in the end, none of these justifications were really necessary. The neocons believed that the Ledeen Doctrine alone was sufficient: "The United States needs to go to war with Iraq because it needs to go to war with someone in the region and Iraq makes the most sense."

(pp. 90-91):

Of these financial imbalances, two of the most pressing are trade deficits and the dramatically overvalued dollar. In 2006, the U.S. trade deficit rose to $765.3 billion, setting a record for the fifth consecutive year. Americans are buying far more from the rest of the world than other countries are buying from the United States. The imbalance with China was particularly severe, reaching an unprecedented high of $232.5 billion. For every dollar in goods and services that Chinese consumers bought from U.S. manufacturers, Americans bought almost six dollars worth of imports from China. While economists endlessly debate the ramifications of this imbalance, it's not hard to see how it can create problems. Chinese exporters are opening new factories and expanding operations with the money pouring in from U.S. consumers. Factories in the United States, in contrast, are closing their gates.

In the broad picture, the United States is living beyond its means. The government is relying on foreign investors to pay for its excessive military spending. And on the consumer level, families are going into credit card debt and are borrowing against the value of their homes to keep spending.

Normally, a country would not be able to maintain this situation. The IMF would rail against wanton economic mismanagement and warn creditors not to invest in that country unless the government promised sweeping reforms. Even without the institution's influence, textbook economics holds that upon seeing such signs of economic weakness, investors would shy away from the country, its currency would fall, consumers would no longer be able to afford as many foreign goods, and the economy would undergo a necessary, if painful, "correction."

What makes the United States different? As the world's political superpower and largest economy, America's dollars serve as the reserve currency for the rest of the world. Foreign countries keep their money in dollars because they believe they are more dependable than any alternative. As long as other nations are willing to keep pouring money into the dollar, the currency will remain strong, imports will remain relatively cheap, and the United States can finance ever-larger deficits. The dollar has been sinking in the Bush years and fell sharply in 2007, but most economists believe that it is still significantly overvalued and could fall further. Foreign governments are paying much more to invest in dollars than market logic would warrant; other currencies, such as the euro, would seem to be a safer bet, based on the relative strength of European economies.

The reason foreign nations are willing to keep buying dollars is that they have based their own economic strategies on the strength of the U.S. currency. So far, foreign creditors -- especially the central banks of China and Japan -- have propped up the dollar because it helps them to keep their exports strong and to boost their economies. After all, if the dollar is worth more, Americans can buy more Chinese and Japanese goods. Consistent with this economic strategy, these two countries each have reserves of U.S. treasury bills worth nearly a trillion dollars. Whether a Democratic administration would have managed this situation any better than the Bush administration is not clear. But liberals are finding solace in a certain irony. As Michael Steinberger of the American Prospect pointed out, "An administration determined never to surrender an inch of American sovereignty has now, through its fiscal recklessness, created a situation in which several Asian central banks control the fate of the dollar and, to a large extent, the U.S. economy."

(pp. 96-97):

Chalmers Johnson, like many analysts, has declared that the hard costs of militarism will eventually lead the United States to bankruptcy. But a focus on direct military expenses is too narrow to reveal the true price of trying to remain an unchallenged hegemon. According to economist James K. Galbraith, "The real economic cost of Bush's empire building is twofold: It diverts attention from pressing economic problems at home and it sets the United States on a long-term imperial path that is economically ruinous.

SAPRI stands for Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative, an effort to study the effects of the "structural adjustments" mandated by the Washington Consensus agents at the World Bank and IMF (pp. 110-111):

Originally released in draft form in 2002, the initiative's findings were later collected into an independently published book called Structural Adjustment -- The SAPRI Report: The Policy Roots of Economic Crisis, Poverty, and Inequality. The final report "identified four basic ways in which adjustment policies have contributed to the further impoverishment and marginalization of local populations, while increasing economic inequality.

First, trade and financial sector reforms, the research concluded, destroyed domestic manufacturing, throwing local employees and small producers out of work. "Instead of helping producers that need capital to maintain or expand their operations," the report observed, "financial intermediaries have directed financing toward large (usually urban) firms and extended the largest share of loans to a few, powerful economic agents. This has hindered the development of small and medium-size enterprises, an important source of employment generation.

Second, the promotion of export-oriented agriculture threatened food security, particularly in rural areas, and it worsened prospects for small farmers. In the words of the report, "Where exports have expanded and earnings increased . . . much of the economic benefits has accrued only to large-scale producers, as small farmers have lacked equal opportunity to enter and gain within a liberalized market."

Third, privatization and labor market reforms suppressed wages and weakened workers' bargaining power. After changes to the labor code in Ecuador in the 1990s, for example, "72 percent of large and medium-sized businesses and 16 percent of small businesses have turned to employing temporary workers, and 38 percent of them laid off permanent staff," creating job insecurity and depressing real wages.

Finally, the cutting of state services reduced poor communities' access to utilities, health care, and education in the SAPRI countries. "The establishment of user fees for health-care services" in such places as Zimbabwe and Ghana "has led an increasing number of people and families to resort to self-medication and home care instead of visiting clinics and hospitals. This has especially been the case for women," the report asserted. As a result, these countries witnessed "an increase in the number of people who die in their homes from curable diseases" as well as the unnecessary spread of diseases that endanger public health.

"What one realizes when reading the report is that all is interlinked," said Swedish activist Johanna Sandahl upon release of the SAPRI findings. "Even as very different countries are being assessed, their experiences are very similar. The same model was being implemented everywhere and it appears that it didn't work anywhere.

(p. 123):

Conservatives would prefer that the [World] Bank give up. The report of the Meltzer Commission contends that the World Bank should be "transformed" into something that is hardly a bank at all, "from capital-intensive lenders to sources of technical assistance, providers of regional and global public goods, and facilitators of an increased flow of private sector resources to the emerging countries." In short, the Bank would remain an overseer of neoliberal policy, while the private sector would handle most of the cash.

(pp. 125-127):

Although the World Bank loans much more money, the IMF has a greater role in setting policy. In recent decades, if developing countries did not meet the Fund's highly ideological standards for good economic governance, they would be disqualified from World Bank loans. They would also lose funding from regionally based multilateral development lenders, such as the Asian Development Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Furthermore, many private-sector lenders took their lead from the IMF, so that countries not eligible for public funding found it very difficult to get private money.

Finally, the IMF derived power from its role in managing financial crises. When times got hard for a developing country, the United States and its European allies would engineer bailout packages through the IMF, making the institution the world's "lender of last resort." Thus, few countries in the global South could afford to fall out of favor with the Fund. For this reason, some economists saw it as the head of what they dubbed a "creditors' cartel"; when the Fund offered its guidance to a country, the nation's leaders were presented with "an offer they couldn't refuse."

While the World Bank has been besieged by critics of both the left and the right, the IMF faces struggles of its own. Just as they would scale back the Bank, many conservatives would limit the IMF mostly to gathering and disseminating information about financial markets. But the Fund's bigger problem is that its supposed beneficiaries are in revolt. Asian countries burned by the region's neoliberal financial crisis in 1997 are building large cash reserves to prevent a return to the Fund in times of economic downturn. And many countries are paying off their IMF debts early to escape the institution's oppressive oversight, as noted by Adam Lerrick: "One after another, developing nations -- Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Indonesia, the Philippines -- paid off their loans early. Finance ministers across the globe, who'd trained at Harvard and the University of Chicago, had figured out that it was better to give up the Fund's subsidies than to cede control over their own economic destinies. . . . Desk managers at the Fund once micromanaged 50 different economies. But those days are now gone."

The International Monetary Fund is no longer the intimidating bully it once was. Indeed, it has been forced to contemplate a future of reduced global sway. Moves from the global South are sapping both IMF revenue streams and the institution's influence. Its loan portfolio, which had soared to nearly $100 billion in 2004, fell to under $20 billion by early 2007. A single country, Turkey, accounts for much of the remaining sum. The IMF's dramatically curtailed lending is also producing funding shortfalls for the institution. Three of the IMF's four largest clients -- Argentina, Brazil, and Indonesia -- used currency reserves and financing from other countries, such as oil-rich Venezuela, to pay off their IMF debts early. This early payback has deprived the institution of lucrative interest payments, making a sizable dent in the institution's operating budget. The IMF anticipated a $116 million shortfall in fiscal year 2006. Turkey, the largest remaining client, is also considering buying it sway out of IMF oversight in the near future, which would put an even tighter squeeze on the institution's finances. Of course, it should be noted that the Fund is not going broke; among other assets, the institution sits on some $75 billion worth of gold. Nevertheless, the enterprise cannot hemorrhage money indefinitely.

(p. 154):

In the fall of 1994, Ralph Nader famously issued a challenge to members of Congress who were about to approve U.S. entry into the WTO. He offered to donate $10,000 to charity on behalf of any legislator who would actually read the dense, several-hundred-page text on the pending bill and answer ten simple questions about it. The only person to take Nader up on his offer was Republican Senator Hank Brown, a proponent of "free trade." Brown read the bill and aced the test. He then voted against the WTO legislation. Encouraging his colleagues to do likewise, he stated, "Anyone who thinks this agreement expands free trade has not read it."

(pp. 173-174):

In the wake of 9/11, [Thomas] Friedman served as one of the country's most prominent liberal hawks. As he described it, the attacks on New York and Washington made him angry -- "angry that my country had been violated in this way, angry at the senseless deaths of so many innocent people, angry at the megalomaniacal arrogance of Osama bin Laden and his men." For Friedman, the appropriate response to this anger was for the United States to go to war. Through his Times column and his public appearances, he insisted that policymakers, even those with reservations about the Bush administration, should support the ousting of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq. His was a convoluted stance: Although he conceded that White House belligerence was alienating allies throughout the international community, that official claims about weapons of mass destruction were lies, and that the postinvasion management of Iraq was ill-planned, he nevertheless sided resolutely with the war effort.

A good part of his argument came down to support of the Ledeen Doctrine -- the idea that the United States needed to exercise its military power if only to show the rest of the world who is boss. According to Friedman, "sometimes smashing someone in the face is necessary to signal others that they will be held accountable for the intolerance they incubate. Removing the Taliban and Saddam sent that message to every government in the area." He later contended, "Saudi Arabia would have been fine; Pakistan would have been fine. We did Iraq because we could." As he explained it, "My motto here to my liberal friends is that some things are true even if George Bush believes them."

(p. 177):

The connection between Friedman's hazy writing and his suspect conclusions about the global economy shows up even in the very premise of his second book on globalization. During a meeting between Friedman and Nilekani in Bangalore, the Infosys CEO offers that "the playing field is being leveled." For Friedman, the tired cliché is a revelation. He mulls it over for hours and then suddenly decides, "My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

Now, it is quite a stretch to take a routine sports metaphor and superimpose it on global geography -- and it is not clear that Nilekani would want credit for such a feat. Not only is Friedman's interpretation of this conversation suspect, but there could be few worse metaphors for talking about a global system that is more integrated and networked than ever before. [ . . . ]

"Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms," [Matt] Taibbi argues. Nilekani offhandedly mentions a level field, and Friedman attributes to him the radical idea of a flat world. "This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing 'launch' instead of 'lunch' in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off."

(p. 181):

Friedman's own position amid this global divide is telling. He regularly represents himself as just an average guy from Minnesota trying to make sense of the world. The real picture is far from average. In July 2006, the Washingtonian magazine reported that in the 1970s Friedman married into one of the one hundred richest families in America -- the Bucksbaums -- who have amassed a fortune worth some $2.7 billion, with origins in real estate development. The magazine noted that he lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7.5-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." Given that the uber-rich, those with huge stock portfolios and investments in multinational corporations, have benefited tremendously from corporate globalization, commentators like David Sirota have suggested that Friedman's vast wealth represents an undisclosed conflict of interest in his journalism.

(pp. 192-193):

One of [Joseph] Stiglitz's more interesting moves is to link his criticisms with his pathbreaking early work on the economics of information. The awarding of the Nobel Prize in economics to Stiglitz in 2001 represented another epic instance of bad timing for defenders of the Washington Consensus. Just as they had hoped to discredit the renegade economist, they were forced to look on helplessly as the Nobel committee heightened his acclaim tremendously. Since Stiglitz's earlier work was unimpeachable, critics were forced to try a different tack. They sought "to portray Stiglitz as a highly respectable 'scientist' gone mad in his old age," according to Ha-Joon Chang. Detractors asserted that he had strayed far from his mainstream research in making his criticisms about the international financial institutions.

Stiglitz explicitly rejects this interpretation. His long-established body of research highlighted ways in which unregulated markets can fail to work properly in real-world circumstances. At the core of neoclassical economics is the assumption that all actors in the market operate with perfect information. As explained by Stiglitz, "My research . . . showed that whenever information is imperfect -- where some individuals know something that others do not (in other words, always) -- the reason that the invisible hand seems invisible is that it is not there." Asymmetric information leads to distortions in supposedly perfect markets. Thus, "without appropriate government regulation and intervention, markets do not lead to economic efficiency."

Stiglitz carries his original critique of textbook economic models into his discussion of globalization. He does not so much reject the specific policies of neoliberalism but rather charges that they have been deployed in a way that was far too rigid and ideological. "I believe in privatization," he explains in one illustrative passage, ". . . but only if it helps companies become more efficient and lowers prices for consumers" -- outcomes that are most likely to arise if the government intervenes with "strong competition policies." The IMF leaves little room for such measured views. It bases its prescriptions on a fundamentalist belief in the infallibility of markets and inefficiency of governments. Because markets are not perfect, the results have been disastrous.

"The IMF has made mistakes in all the areas it has been involved in," Stiglitz asserts, "development, crisis management, and in countries making the transition from communism to capitalism." Such errors included "forcing liberalization before safety nets were put in place . . . ; forcing policies that led to job destruction before the essentials for job creation were in place; forcing privatization before there were adequate competition and regulatory frameworks."

Problems with "pacing" and "sequencing" were especially significant in Russia, where the IMF pushed rapid privatization. Without proper banking systems, competition policy, or government regulation, sales of state industries swiftly developed into a process of "briberization." A new class of criminal oligarchs took over state monopolies, forcefully shut out rivals, and fostered rampant government corruption.

(p. 209):

Mahbub ul Haq and the Human Development Reports are significant not because they embody the pursuit of democratic globalization. They represent only one of many attempts to set out a worldview with different values and priorities than those of neoliberalism or empire. In fact, the Human Development Reports are more notable for having been produced within the mainstream confines of the United Nations and for effectively attracting media attention than for being unusually visionary or far-reaching. But the reports provide an excellent entry into the question of alternatives because they do two things that are essential to the emergence of any globalization from below: they demonstrate that policies other than those favored by neoliberalism have long been available, and they demand a change in the way that our societies define progress.

Where democratic globalization must go further is in insisting that we alter the relationships of power that govern the international system -- changing who chooses the policies and who determines whether they have succeeded. The first part of this book focused on the rise of imperial globalization under George W. Bush, examining how this starkly militaristic worldview represented a break from earlier strategies of corporate rule. The second part discussed how the debate about trade and development has unfolded in this context, reviewing the dramatically altered fates of the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO. The U.S. shift to imperial globalization and the decline of the international financial institutions have produced a new landscape for battles over the shape of globalization.

(p. 219):

ATTAC, one of the organizations that founded the World Social Forum, has set up tents promoting campaigning for the Tobin tax. First proposed by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin in the 1970s, the initiative would impose a low-percentage tax on the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of international financial transactions that take place each day. This would provide a disincentive for short-term gambling on currencies, and it would encourage longer-term and more productive investment. Moreover, even a miniscule levy could create an annual fund of more than $100 billion, which could be used to stop the spread of disease and alleviate global poverty.

(p. 230):

When the Washington Consensus demands the privatization of public industry and the division of the commons into private property, an alternative is to keep these things in the hands of the public, defending the provision of public goods as a way of ensuring economic human rights -- including guaranteed public access to water, electricity, and health care. If it calls for cuts in social services, an alternative is to reject the cuts, maintaining or bolstering these services and instead pushing for a redistributive tax system that makes the wealthy pay their fair share. When Washington mandates a more "flexible" labor market -- one without unions or worker protections -- an alternative is to defend living wages, collective bargaining, and the right to associate. And when IMF bailouts for wealthy investors create a situation in which, to paraphrase author Eduardo Galeano, "risk is socialized while profit is privatized," an alternative is simply to end these bailouts, making speculators bear the cost of their gambles.

(p. 298):

The neocons were unique in envisioning a post-Cold War order in which the United States would be unapologetically, preemptively, and unilaterally interventionist. But they were not alone in their faith that America must remain an unchallenged military power. The use or threat of force has always been a part of U.S. foreign policy. While a majority of leading politicians may now focus on exercising the nation's "soft power," none are lobbying to limit Pentagon spending, much less to dismantle the "baseworld" of sprawling American military encampments overseas.