New York Times bestselling author Seth M. Siegel shows how our drinking water got contaminated, what it may be doing to us, and what we must do to make it safe. If you thought America’s drinking water problems started and ended in Flint, Michigan, think again. From big cities and suburbs to the rural heartland, chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, birth defects, and lowered IQ routinely spill from our taps. Many are to blame: the EPA, Congress, a bipartisan coalition of powerful governors and mayors, chemical companies, and drinking water utilities—even NASA and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, the bottled water industry has been fanning our fears about tap water, but bottled water is often no safer. The tragedy is that existing technologies could launch a new age of clean, healthy, and safe tap water for only a few dollars a week per person. Scrupulously researched, Troubled Water is full of shocking stories about contaminated water found throughout the country and about the everyday heroes who have successfully forced changes in the quality and safety of our drinking water. And it concludes with what America must do to reverse decades of neglect and play-it-safe inaction by government at all levels in order to keep our most precious resource safe.

Expressed in such new institutions as GATT, NAFTA, the World Trade Organizations, and Maastricht, as well as by the development schemes of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economic globalization has been bulldozed through legislative bodies throughout the world, with scant public debate or discourse. These tremendous changes are hailed by their backers as leading to a new era or prosperity and peace, but is this true? Now, for the first time, we have a comprehensive point-by-point analysis of the workings of the global economy, its premises, and its dire implications told by more than forty of the world's leading social, environmental, and economic thinkers from the America's, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. They charge that free trade and economic globalization create exactly the opposite results from what is promised. Each of the forty-three chapters in The Case Against the Global Economy takes one part of the story and delves into it, to show both the root assumptions of globalism and its multiple failures. In the end, it is clear that we need to reverse course; away from the global toward a revitalization of local political and economic control, self-sufficiency, and ecological health.