The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy [Paperback]

I read a good deal of No Logo before becoming fed up with what I read to be a polemic... I didn't like the book, because Klein states her opinions as facts, and gives little evidence to back up much of what she says.

However, I paricularly liked The Silent Takeover because she prsents an ibjective argument with plenty of evidence. It is up-to-date, including events which couldn't have happened more than a short while before publication. It is not wholly negative and biased against big business, as No Logo seems to be, and gives a number of reasons why business is good.

She examines why business, in many cases, seems to be better than government - it's more flexible, less beaurocratic, and able to quickly adjust to consumer demands if it wants.

In examining the role of the WTO and World Bank, she points out the good and bad of each.

A strong book, well-argued and definitely one to replace No Logo on your coffee table... stand out from the crowd!

In this accessible book Noreena Hertz draws a frightening picture of our contemporary world, where corporations acquire more and more power over ordinary citizens and national governments and eventually replace democracy and take over the planet. Underlining her argument with numerous examples, facts and figures she argues that democratically elected governments seek to create an environment that suits businesses rather than their voters.
Hertz, however, admits to be neither strictly anti-capitalist nor anti-business. She is one of the 'critical globalisationists', like Hirst and Thompson, but nevertheless, makes it clear that she believes that not everyone benefits from globalisation. Passionately, she defends people, democracy and justice without glorifying governments or states, which in her view have 'a clear role to play in society' (p.13) but fail to live up to it in practice.
Although Hertz writes about the international economy and the changes that happened during the past three decades in this field, the book is by no means tedious. This is thanks to the many examples she uses but without over using statistics and figures. Hertz tells her story with a very personal touch and mixes her experiences with those of real life people, whom she undoubtedly admires. There is Granny D, a 91-year-old American grandmother who walked thousands of miles across America to deliver her speeches against corrupt politicians. Or on the other side of the Atlantic, she finds Oskar Lafontaine, the former German Finance Minister, who said on the day of his resignation 'the heart is not traded on the stock market yet.'
Hertz does not limit her examination of 'the silent takeover' to America but looks more closely at Europe, than does for example Naomi Klein in No Logo. Here she discovers that almost the same things happen, only perhaps on a smaller scale. For example she describes how corporations buy influence and action by donating large amounts of money to party election campaigns. And how, in fact, politicians spend more time and effort on raising funds for their campaigns than on finding solutions for social problems.
She argues, that this is then the reason for low turnouts on election days. People have lost their trust in politicians, as they seem to be unable to solve the problems most eminent to the average citizen. Hertz sees this as an indicator for the beginning of the death of democracy and the triumph of corporations.
Her views that in the contemporary world, the consumer has more power to change things than the voter has are certainly disputable. However, she has a point when she highlights that through boycott campaigns the consumer can sometimes actively change the way corporations conduct business but the voter can only chose between increasingly homogenous politicians with the same inability to solve problems seen as most urgent by the people: health, education and unemployment.
Overall, Hertz writes a consistent book with some excellent parts but does not tell the reader anything fundamentally new.

Hertz's book, like Hertz herself, is a real disappointment. A former banker and arch-Thatcherite who spent her formative years forcing gangster capitalism onto the unwary Russians she should, one would have thought, have been able to bring some intellectual rigour to the debate. Not a hope. Hertz's book is little more than a rehash of truisms about 'globalisation', based on research already done by other people and organisations less effective at hyping themselves in the media. There is no original journalism in here; I know because I have read many other books on this subject. Politically i would place myself, with caveats, in the 'anti-globalisation' camp that Hertz claims to be speaking for, and I've read all this stuff many times before, done much better by others. To add to this sloppiness, not only are Hertz's arguments trite and her 'research' unoriginal but she misunderstands or simply ignores most of the growing global movement of people who are supposedly on her 'side.' The best she can do is to interview someone dressed as a fairy in Genoa, and embellish the interview with the usual tabloidese about 'wacky' protesters, whose politics she never condescends to take seriously. This book should be a devastating and sharp indictment of global capitalism by a former insider. Instead it's a shallow, second-hand and second-rate cash-in by a blatant bandwagon jumper. If you want a book that actually does what Hertz claims to have done, try instead David Korten's 'When Corporations Rule The World', John Gray's 'False Dawn' or anything by Susan George. But give Noreena's hype-machine a wide berth.