Current Events : No LOGO: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Bestselling Backlist)

No LOGO: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Bestselling Backlist)

EUR 9,59


We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein s No Logo, walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds. Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations.In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. The global companies claim to support diversity but their version of corporate multiculturalism is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to censor the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster s policies, given that they are both divisions of Viacom?Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a living wage wrote that while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment. Those clerks should probably just be grateful they re not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring permatemps who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the Free Agent Nation observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organise workers and advocate for change.But resistance is growing and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programmes have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike s abusive labour practices but about the astronomical mark-up in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, Nike, we made you. We can break you. But there s more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organisers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centred alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of co-ordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert. No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan

Innacurate, populist drivel. - No Logo is one of those books that advertises, more than anything, the author s ignorance of economics. It is nothing more than the angst of a grown-up who should have gone through this phase when she was in her teens.Aside from being simply wrong (read Bhagwati or Wolf for example), the book exemplifies what is wrong with the anti-globalization movement. They are against the very forces that have lifted millions out of poverty in India and China and most of Asia. In the few cases she cites - like Mexico, the failure is far from the failure of free markest but a failure of a corrupt government and a poor banking system. Africa s failure, similarly, has more to do with bad governance than anything else. Nike, Walmart, and so on by employing people in poor countries have started an upward trend. Greater demand for people to do work results in better working conditions and better human rights. The world needs more globalization and fewer Naomi Kleins.Shame on you Naomi for writing such utter rubbish.

debunking the flaws of the anti-globalization movement - Arguments of members of the anti-globalization movement are usually flawed from an economist s perspective. Unfortunately, few economists try to make their counter-arguments understandable to the non-academic public. Jagdish Bhagwati (see his recent book: Free Trade Today) is a notable exception. Now, there is another famous economist who more specifically uncovers the flaws in the arguments of Naomi Klein: Paul S. Segerstrom from Stockholm School of Economics, Sweden. In his recent paper (you will easily find this on the web) entitled Naomi Klein and the Anti-Globalization Movement, he convincingly debunks some of the most striking problems of Klein s views. Inter alia, he shows that 1) there is overwhelming evidence that trade is beneficial also for developing countries in terms of growth and income levels, 2) the evidence on Mexico discussed in Klein s book is not a proof for negative effects of trade liberalization for developing countries (instead, a poor banking system and bankruptcy laws are largely responsible for the Mexican crisis), 3) contrary to what Klein maintains, absolute poverty in the world sharply declined during the last decades of globalization , 4) contrary to what Klein claims, global inequality also declined (or at least stayed constant once removing China from the data considered), 5) working conditions in sweatshops are still much better than available alternatives in developing countries, 6) whereas Klein obviously sympathizes with protectionist EU farmers, it is precisely protectionism in favor of US and EU farmers that is to a large extent responsible for poverty in developing countries (unfortunately but revealingly, Klein does not mention working and living conditions of farmers in developing countries, which are much worse than for those working in sweatshops), 7) there are surprising similarities between Naomi Klein and Karl Marx, and central hypotheses of both are clearly contradicted by empirical evidence.In sum, I do not recommend wasting time in reading Klein s book. It will not bring you valuable insights about the world economy, but only confronts you with deeply flawed arguments and propaganda by (often radical left-wing) anti-globalization activists. Instead, you better open your mind to some basic economic reasoning and read something from famous economists like Jagdish Bhagwati, Paul Krugman, Paul Segerstrom and others.

Very Timely - Whereas Greenpeace and Amnesty International have their roots in the 60 s/70 s generation, Klein describes the social-political phenomena of the 80 s/90 s generation. These younsters employ their creative strength in movements directed against multinational companies that try to sell out (and buy) humanity through brand names. Klein elaborates the tactics of these companies and the effects of hiring out labor to third world countries. She then describes the various initiatives and movements that have so far sprung up with more or less success and/or impact. Klein s issues are awareness of the phenomena and the need to gear up for more. She believes that what we see and experience today is only the tip of an iceberg.Having lived in North America for 25 years (returned 2 years ago), I can attest to Klein s descriptions and assumptions. Watch out Europe, you are not quite as deep in those murky waters of branding and being sold, but the time is not far off that you will be - unless the signs are heeded and action be taken, if only on the individual level.The book is a bit cumbersome with quite a few repetitions. That, however, should not be a deterrent considering that Klein s writing is a valuable resource for raising awareness of global commercial tactics.

No logo - Eine muss Lektüre auch für Gegner der Globabalisierungsgegner. Die deutschen Übersetzung ist schwer lesbar, da selbst Marketing Slogans übersetzt worden und diese natürlich auf Deutsch kaum verständlich sind.

A classic statement of the Seattle generation - What haunts me, confesses 29 year-old Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, is a deep craving for release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom. It is this sense of claustrophobia and impulse for liberation , in a culture where physical and mental space has been overrun by the voracious marketing frenzies of brand-name corporations that, No Logo, perhaps the first serious statement of the Seattle generation, expresses.Klein s calm journalistic irony is a touchstone of sanity through the grotesque absurdities of the new branded world - the American schoolchildren who design Burger King adverts in lessons and eat lunch sponsored by Disney, the street snitches employed to inform on their friend s new clothing tastes for desperate corporate cool hunters in some horribly comic hybrid of Stasi-style capitalism, through to the pinnacle of corporate transcendence, human branding, in the form of the ubiquitous Nike swoosh has now become the most sought after symbol in American tatto parlours. I wake up in the morning and look down at the symbol. It reminds me what I have to do, which is Just Do It, says one 24 year old internet entrepreneur with a swooshed navel.Yet, according to Klein, it is the emotionally intense relationships with consumers generated by lifestyle brands like Nike and Tommy Hilfiger that has sparked visceral anti-capitalism of the Seattle generation. Suffocated as consumers, many members of the cherished youth demographic have been discarded as workers, needed only as service sector temp fodder. Opinion polls in the US show that younger people have adopted survivalist attitudes anathema to older generations. Yet just as this can ingrain a desire to be the next Bill Gates, it can also instil a militant dissonance with the values of corporate capitalism. As Klein points out, far from selling out, a significant proportion of the younger generation has simply not bought in. Disdained by the economy, this generation has been quite prepared to look along the webs spun by the global brands to the sweatshops of Indonesia and China, to the institutions which facilitate corporate dominance, and to target corporations directly as never before.You might not see things on the surface yet but underground, it s already on fire, says Indonesian writer, YB Mangunwijaya, at the beginning of No Logo. No Logo is a classic statement of the existential undercurrents of our age, the inchoate strands of a new resistance. Whether they can be forged into a coherent alternative remains to be seen.




No LOGO: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Bestselling Backlist)