End of the Line

At this California event, Barry Lynn, a New America Foundation senior fellow, discussed his ground-breaking book, End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation.

We are used to thinking about the effects of globalization and outsourcing in terms of winners and losers: how these trends harm certain classes of American workers or benefit consumers. Lynn goes beyond the stereotypical debate about whether this economic revolution is good or bad to expose the dangerous underside of our new global economic order in End of the Line.

At the event, Lynn explained how today’s economic system is a global industrial commons that is extremely fragile, and increasingly so. The real question Americans need to ask today is whether this production system is safe. Is it structured so we can count on it to provide us, given almost any foreseeable natural or political disaster, with the food and clothing and medicine we need to live? End of the Line makes clear that right now the answer is no. It is perhaps the single most devastating indictment of laissez faire economics in a generation, based on factual evidence gathered by one of the few reporters who understands the ways today’s global corporations really work.

Participants

• Barry Lynn
  Senior Fellow, New America Foundation