No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs by Naomi Klein
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Book Reviews of No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs
Book Review: Anti-Corporate Handbook
Summary: 5 Stars
What are the effects of multinational corporations in the Branding Age? Naomi Klein tackles that in this seminal work on the subject. While somewhat dated (published in 2000), it gives the most comprehensive picture of the transition corporations have undergone from providing competent products and services to providing ubiquitous branding and advertising to produce loyalty and sell peripherals. This book gives the total picture of the devastation left in the wake of total corporate dominance in the U.S., Canada, and worldwide.
As she details, what has emerged in the last half of the 20th century is a new kind of totality - an economic imperialism spearheaded by Nike, The Gap, McDonalds, Shell, and Microsoft and their lawyers, contractors, and advertising agencies. As they break open markets, crush competition, and lower wages across the globe they've gotten so powerful as to dictate to scores of countries what their trade and economic policies are going to be. These policies are always anti-Union and terrible for workers, leaving nations worse off than before they were Industrialized and Advertised - creating massive wealth gaps and uneven distributions across the board.
The four major sections of the book: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs, and No Logo, each show in example after example, case study upon study that advertising is the product now and the more money spent in that avenue, the more profitable the corporation can be while taking every opportunity away from the poor and disenfranchised, forcing horrible conditions and worse jobs on them, and decreasing their access to health care and nutrition. This is not an accident. This is a concerted policy foisted upon the world through the corporate enforcement arm of the WTO, World Bank, and U.S. Military.
Is it hopeless? Well, civil disobedience is one way to combat the trends and takeover and Klein offers many suggestions and examples in this book. However even she admits that the situation is bleak.
Good luck . . . and good read.
- CV Rick
Book Review: great work on the future of our economy/culture
Summary: 5 Stars
As different foces such as free trade, globilization and increases in advertising budgets, our society and economy will change as a result. Nomi Klein takes a look at these different factors in No Logo in which she tries to make sense of all these differenat changes. Klein takes a stab at the growing levels of advertising and corporate sponsherip in society such as corporate ties with schools such as having pepsi and subway deals with schools as well as the extent to which corporations such as Nike and Marlboro create images of successful athletes and wide open cowboy country to sell its products to people such as inner-city youth and workers in third-world cities.
Klein also takes a look at how corporations are limiting our choices in terms of product. There has been a proliferation of franchising and expansion of companies such as Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Subway and so forth over the past years that our country is looking like one huge strip mall without much character. Mergers such as AOL and Time Warner futher consaladate the media so we have fewer voices being heard. Because of growth of corporations, they can affectively silent views such as Wal-Mart refusing to carry certain albums and book stores refusing to carry certain books.
Furhter more, she begins to deal with jobs. Increasintly corporations are moving to the third world to open up factories while closing factories in the united states thus sucking away what was decent paying jobs and creating poverty wage jobs in the third world. When in retail or food services, corporations are eliminating full time jobs in favor of part time jobs such reducing people's ability to have a decent paying job.
Finally Klein ends wiht how people are begining to challenge corporate dominance such as through through boycotts and grass roots activism. People have been successful in gettinc local and state governments to stop doing business with corporations that deal in certain countries with questionable governments such as Burma and Nigeria.
Overall, pretty good read on where we are going as a society
Book Review: The best book on the topic
Summary: 5 Stars
No Logo is the most detailed, fact giving book ever written on modern corporate policy, and how it affects ordinary people around the world.
Covered in this book are topics like Export Processing Zones (AKA sweatshops), Western employment, corporate advertising styles, corporate influence over public space, how the Reagan administration's policies caused schools to have to turn to corporate sponsorship and how so many professors felt betrayed when their schools sided with sponsors when the results of an experiment did not turn out the way the sponsor planned. In fact, the book's content is so broad that it has to be divided into different sections that can easily be like books in themselves.
Klein is obviously an activist, so the reader can be assured that the book will be written from a very progressive standpoint, and will, "pull no punches," when assigning blame when dealing with the problems facing the industrial world. This is a sharp contrast to the book, Globalization and its Discontents, which was written by a former member of the World Bank and Clinton's administration; who parted for reasons other than revulsion, like why William Blum quit the State Department.
I think that Naomi Klein is one of the writers best suited to describe modern corporate behavior. Almost every instance she gives is backed up by a personal experience, such as traveling to Indonesia and interviewing EPZ workers or to Manhattan to get a perspective of those working for big chain stores in America and to explain what the companies' propaganda to their workers is. Therefore each fact giving chapter seems to come bundled with a story of one of, "Naomi's Adventures," which leaves the reader feeling like he/she has a new understanding of an issue.
I highly recommend No Logo for anyone interested in the harmful effects of Western corporate policy and obsession with corporate brands.
Book Review: A Woman of Conscience and Intellect
Summary: 5 Stars
Naomi Klein possesses enough creativity and brain power to be earning a large salary contributing to the mania she has thankfully chosen instead to decry -- the advertising generation where logos are supreme and catchy phrases and images are perpetually advanced so that consumers will hopefully, through a rote process, toe the mark and make the purchases which make such campaigns lucrative.The Canadian Klein wastes no time, focusing on the heart of the matter. Directly at the heart is the popularity of a word and concept sweeping certain elements of corporate America, that of the permatemp. What can be better than making overworked people logging long hours at small pay scales temporary rather than permanent workers? The Wal-Mart folks fired up all cylinders and proceeded full speed ahead! The era of the temporary worker has arrived, uncluttering all kinds of potentially messy details such as employee benefits. Health care? Sick leave? Remember, you're a temp and what is so nice is there is no meddlesome union standing in the way. Now we have a direct one-on-one "bargaining position." Guess who has top standing?
Americans have never been as overweight as they are today, and here the logo culture has played a major role. The corporate sponsors have not only indoctrinated adults, they are working franctically on the younger generation. They have marched into the schools and replaced all that presumably wimpish fare such as fruit juices and salads with the really hip and macho food and drink. Let's pony up with more soft drinks and hamburgers, then wonder why the kiddies' arteries are hardening.
Hopefully there are those who will pay heed to the message of Naomi Klein before it is too late. The alternative is a nation of overworked people with hardened arteries and virtually empty pocketbooks as the designer suit brigade chalks up ever increasing profits.
Book Review: Economic feudalism
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a powerful and exceptionally well researched book which documents the economics of globalisation in frightening detail. The globalisation equation goes like this: first, sack as many of your US employees as possible, and certainly all of your employees which actually manufacture anything your company sells. Second, contract out your manufacturing to developing countries while putting political and economic pressure on the governments of those countries to keep the wages at below what anyone could possible live on. Your goods will be made in sweatshops under dangerous and sub-human conditions and each worker will cost you only cents an hour. Contracting out the manufacturing also conveniently distances you from the human rights violations involved. Third, import your goods back to the US and sell them for the same price or higher than you used to when they were made by Americans, but now cream in the 100's of percent higher profit margins. Fourth, pay yourself an annual bonus for increasing profits which is so large that it could support all, or most, of your sweatshop workers (in good conditions) for a decade or more of their lives. Fifth, couch your company's globalisation strategies in terms of increased efficiency and job provision in poor countries - perpetuate the myth that gobalisation is good for everyone. For an example of this equation: that "family values" company Disney pays its CEO $9,783 an hour, while their Haitian manufacturing workers get 28c a hour - at such a rate it would take a worker 16.8 years to earn the CEOs hourly income. In addition the CEO exercised $181 million of his stock options in 1996, which is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for 14 years! Welcome to the world of economic feudalism.