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This Just In: World watch

The cost of free trade

By Dan Kennedy

Globalization & Human Rights sounds like a seminar course to stay far, far away from. It also just happens to be the unfortunate title of an engaging, thought-provoking hour-long documentary that will be shown on WGBX-TV (Channel 44) this Sunday, November 8, at 10 p.m.

Hosted by veteran broadcast journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Globalization was produced by former Bostonians Danny ("News Dissector") Schechter and Rory O'Connor, who head up Globalvision, a New York-based independent production firm.

Featuring interview subjects including human-rights activist Desmond Tutu and international financier George Soros, the documentary looks at how the influence of multinational corporations has contributed to the economic collapse of South Africa's gold mines (a former hotbed of anti-apartheid activism), environmental devastation and military repression in Nigeria, and the financial crisis in Asian countries such as Indonesia and Thailand. "This is global trade without global law, without global democracy," Ralph Nader tells Hunter-Gault.

Isolationists such as Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot have been telling us for years that free trade hurts Americans. What's interesting about Globalization & Human Rights is that it offers the flip side of that argument -- an essentially leftist critique that free trade is hurting the world's poor as well.