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rarely been mentioned in media reports touting alleged “gains” for the poor. The World Bank findings are key to understanding the current political dynamic because many countries only reluctantly entered into WTO expansion talks at Doha in 2001 after being promised a “development” round aimed at rectifying imbalances left over from the original ‘Uruguay Round” multilateral negotiations that hatched the WTO. Indeed, at the 2001 Doha WTO Ministerial, where the talks that have just collapsed were started, a group of 100 developing nations had tabled an alternative agenda for negotiations, called the Implementation Agenda, which consisted of specific fixes needed to existing WTO terms. The Implementation Agenda was the developing countries’ counter-initiative after they had rejected the “Millennium Round” WTO expansion agenda at the 1999 Seattle WTO summit. So while the media still refers, without attribution, to the negotiations as a mechanism to help the poor, in fact those pushing WTO expansion merely used the false promise of poverty reduction to get the talks launched, while pursuing policies geared to fatten corporate profit margins. The Failed Model of Corporate Globalization and its Alternatives Underlying the continuing faltering of the WTO negotiations and those of other agreements based on the same model of corporate globalization is not a battle between “protectionism” and “free trade.” Rather, the current globalization model implemented by the WTO is being challenged increasingly by large numbers of elected officials, economists and civil society analysts, joining workers, farmers, and environmentalists worldwide, because the set of policies embodied in the model have proved to be harmful across the globe to all but a corporate elite representing the management of the largest of grain trading, pharmaceutical, banking and other multinationals. As we live in a world where 24,000 people die every day of hunger and poverty-related diseases, wages are stagnant yet corporate profits soar, we need to identify the causes of all of this damage – and how to fix the situation. Historically, trade agreements have dealt with lowering tariffs on goods. The United States and European nations relied heavily on tariffs to protect infant industries from foreign competition. But trade agreements no longer just deal with trade in goods. A cornerstone of the expansion of the corporate globalization agenda also encompasses services. The liberalization of services involves allowing foreign investors the right to own and operate services within other WTO signatory countries’ territories – including essential services like education, health care, electricity provision and water distribution – for profit. It also involves de-regulating service industries such as telecommunications, insurance, transportation – even banking, such as Argentina did before its IMF-induced economic collapse in 2001. Little-known negotiations in the current Doha Round would also strictly limit national, state and local authority to set service sector professional licensing, technical standards and qualification requirements. The United States has even offered to commit higher education to WTO disciplines. But privatization and de-regulation of essential services worldwide have decreased access for the poor and have eroded hard-won democratic consumer protections. Meanwhile, the WTO’s agriculture trade rules have been a disaster all around. According to