page_title: Anti-globalization movement
section_title: Opposition to international financial institutions and transnational corporations
hierarchical_section_title: Anti-globalization movement / Ideology and causes / Opposition to international financial institutions and transnational corporations
caption_attribution_description: English: World Bank and International Monetary Fund protesters vandalized two bank branches (PNC &amp; Wachovia) as well as vehicles parked at a Whole Foods Market in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
context_page_description: The anti-globalization movement, or counter-globalization movement, is a social movement critical of economic globalization. The movement is also commonly referred to as the global justice movement, alter-globalization movement, anti-globalist movement, anti-corporate globalization movement, or movement against neoliberal globalization.
  Participants base their criticisms on a number of related ideas. What is shared is that participants oppose large, multinational corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets. Specifically, corporations are accused of seeking to maximize profit at the expense of work safety conditions and standards, labour hiring and compensation standards, environmental conservation principles, and the integrity of national legislative authority, independence and sovereignty. As of January 2012, some commentators have characterized changes in the global economy as "turbo-capitalism", "market fundamentalism", "casino capitalism", and as "McWorld".
context_section_description: People opposing globalization believe that international agreements and global financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization, undermine local decision-making. Corporations that use these institutions to support their own corporate and financial interests, can exercise privileges that individuals and small businesses cannot, including the ability to:
  move freely across borders
  extract desired natural resources
  use a wide variety of human resources
  The movement aims for an end to the legal status of "corporate personhood" and the dissolution of free market fundamentalism and the radical economic privatization measures of the World Bank, the IMF, and the World Trade Organization.
  Activists are especially opposed to the various abuses which they think are perpetuated by globalization and the international institutions that, they say, promote neoliberalism without regard to ethical standards or environmental protection. Common targets include the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and free trade treaties like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the Trans Pacific Trade Agreement (TPPA), the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) and the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). In light of the economic gap between rich and poor countries, adherents of the movement claim that free trade without measures to protect the environment and the health and wellbeing of workers will merely increase the power of industrialized nations (often termed the "North" in opposition to the developing world's "South"). Proponents of this line of thought refer to the process as polarization and argue that current neo-liberal economic policies have given wealthier states an advantage over developing nations, enabling their exploitation and leading to a widening of the global wealth gap.
  A report by Jean Ziegler, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, notes that "millions of farmers are losing their livelihoods in the developing countries, but small farmers in the northern countries are also suffering" and concludes that "the current inequities of the global trading system are being perpetuated rather than resolved under the WTO, given the unequal balance of power between member countries."  Activists point to the unequal footing and power between developed and developing nations within the WTO and with respect to global trade, most specifically in relation to the protectionist policies towards agriculture enacted in many developed countries. These activists also point out that heavy subsidization of developed nations' agriculture and the aggressive use of export subsidies by some developed nations to make their agricultural products more attractive on the international market are major causes of declines in the agricultural sectors of many developing nations.
caption: World Bank/IMF protesters smashed the windows of this PNC Bank branch located in the Logan Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
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