A great political debate is emerging over the many unexpected and profound consequences of the rush toward the global economy and its effects on jobs, human rights, cultural diversity, democracy, and the natural world. The world's political and corporate leaders are restructuring the planet's economic and political arrangements in ways that directly affect humans and the environment more than anything since the Industrial Revolution. New, giant globalizing institutions such as the World Trade Organization, GATT, and the World Bank, created with scant public debate or scrutiny, have moved real power away from citizen democracies and nation states to global corporate bureaucracies, with grave results.