The New Rulers of the World is a powerful look at the effects globalization has on poor countries across the globe. Pilgers shows how institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are used by Western superpowers to pillage poor countries of their resources and wealth. He compares globalization to colonialism and shows us how many striking similarities there are between the two practices.

"Paying the Price" is the second chapter in Pilgers' book. It focuses on port blockades instituted by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq. The blockades were started as a form of sanctions against Iraq for failing to comply with the wishes of the United Nations requests.

However, Pilgers tells us in this chapter that these blockades were causing 6,000 children's deaths daily in Iraq. The question Pilgers wants us to ask ourselves here is how could economic compliance ever be worth this steep of a cost in innocent lives. The US's and UK's actions here are a great example of Pilgers' overall opinion, which is that globalization is equitable to colonialism.

"Paying the Price" discusses port blockades imposed against Ira by the US and the UK under the auspices of the United Nations. One of the epigrams heading the chapter quotes Madeleine Albright, former Ambassador to the UN: 

We think it is worth it ...
US Ambassador Madeleine Albright, when asked if the deaths if half a million Iraqi children were a price worth paying for sanctions [against Iraq].

She is, as the postscript shows, responding to the statistic that Pilger specifies in the Introduction enumerating 6000 children daily as victims of ocean blockades that sanctions allow for. This is one of the implied opinions Pilgers expresses in chapter 2: the price of thousands of children's deaths is a price too high to pay for "Medieval" actions against Iraq in hopes of attaining an end.

One statement Pilgers makes through the voice of medical Dr. Jawad Al-Ali is that the depleted uranium used by Us and British forces in the Iraq war have created a Chernobyl-like environment where the carcinogenic rate has risen to 48 percent of the population being afflicted; where mutations are seen in plant life, like enormous mushrooms and now inedible grapes, and in fish in the rivers, which are also now inedible. This is something that is not reported in US micro-bite news bulletins.

Through sculptor Mahammed Ghani, Pilgers makes the statement of the suffering families of civilians endure because there is not food for their children nor any medicine for them. Ghani is working on a line of figurines of all the waiting women "in a long line at the end of [his] road." The figurines show the waiting and the bowed heads of the women, their children "gripping" their legs, "pleading for food" before "a dispensary door that is permanently closed." The opinion Pilgers exposes here is that the suffering of the children and the corollary suffering of their mothers and that of their fathers is too high a price to pay for keeping chemicals--in the form of medical treatment drugs--that might conceivably be used to build weapons of mass destruction out of Iraq.