This contradictory document identifies financial institution failures and calls for new regulatory measures, and at the same time, salutes the free market and some of the institutions behind the financial and economic crisis.
A civil society statement on the G20 summit from IPS Director John Cavanagh and coalition members.
As long as U.S. officials continue to refuse to face the reality of a post-market fundamentalist world, they will further contribute to the crisis.
Without bothering to learn from the mistakes that until recently had it desperately seeking a new mission, the IMF again is turning into the world’s financial firefighter.
The November 15 economic summit isn’t the best way to address many of the underlying issues that contributed to the global economic crisis in developing countries.
Welcome in fittingly the World Bank and IMF annual meetings with a discussion of the newest book by American University professor Robin Broad and Institute for Policy Studies Director John Cavanagh. Entitled Development Redefined: How the Market Met its Match, the book chronicles the rise and fall of the market-worshipping Washington Consensus, and lays out people-based alternatives to corporate-led globalization. Broad and Cavanagh have written award-winning books on globalization and development, as well as a series of articles on the development debate in Foreign Policy and World Policy Journal. IPS is co-sponsoring this event with ActionAid USA, the AFL-CIO, the Alliance for Responsible Trade, Bank Information Center, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Center of Concern, the 50 Years is Enough Network, Friends of the Earth US, the Heinrich Boell Foundation, International Labor Rights Fund, International Trade Union Congress, Jubilee USA, the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, the New Rules for Global Finance, and Oil Change International.
According to Mark Engler, the future of globalization is in question. Will the fight between “imperial globalization” and “corporate globalization” lead to the rise of democratic globalization”?
The economics behind the food crisis.
Economic policy is to blame for hunger in Africa.
The World Bank and the IMF are the real culprits behind the current food crisis, argues columnist Walden Bello.
Mark Engler will sign and discuss his new book, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy. (Nation Books, Release Date: April 7, 2008, ISBN 978-1568583655). Thea Lee, policy director for the AFL-CIO, will moderate the discussion.
"As the world readies to heave a collective sigh of relief upon George W. Bush’s exit from the White House, How to Rule the World is a caution against complacency. Mark Engler offers a timely reminder that before Bush’s boots and bombs there was Clinton’s corporate ‘consensus’–more soothing perhaps but no more sustainable than the neocons’ disastrous militarism. He then makes a case that there lies a third choice: democracy. Impressively researched and sharply argued, How to Rule the World is an essential handbook not for the few who do rule the world but for the many who should." -GREG GRANDIN, author of Empire’s Workshop
Right now a debate is taking place over what values should define our international order. For global elites, it is a debate about how to rule the world. Laying out a new and original framework for understanding globalization politics, Mark Engler describes the conflict between a Clinton-era vision of an expanding, corporate-controlled global economy and a Bush-era "imperial globalization" based on U.S. military dominance. How to Rule the World explains how these visions overlap and also how, at critical moments, they clash with one another. It is written, however, in the hopes that neither will prevail. Even as Wall Street CEOs and Washington militarists argue among themselves, citizens’ uprisings in the United States, in an increasingly progressive Latin America, and beyond are bringing to life a vibrant "democratic globalization" based on economic justice, human rights, and self-determination.
Engler, a journalist, activist, and policy expert, details how the Bush administration has reshaped globalization in ways that few protesters in Seattle or elsewhere could have foreseen: Global trade talks are collapsing. The roles of international institutions like the WTO, IMF, and World Bank are dramatically changing. U.S. unilateralism and the disastrous war in Iraq have deepened international divisions. As a result, the stage is now set for a critical new debate about the global economy.
"Fasten your seatbelt. You’re in for a ride that will change your understanding of where we’ve been, what’s really going on now, and what’s coming next. Mark Engler explores, for the first time, the emerging battle between ‘corporate globalization’ and ‘imperial globalization’- and the alternative, ‘democratic globalization, or globalization from below.’ If you want to know ‘what ever happened to the anti-globalization movement,’ why it is likely to roar back as a powerful force in world politics, and why it may make another world possible, don’t miss this unique and indispensable guide." -JEREMY BRECHER, author of Strike!, Global Village or Global Pillage, and Globalization from Below
"Full of passion, hope, and insight, How to Rule the World assures us that the future of globalization is not a foregone conclusion. Rejecting both the imperial behemoth and the leviathan of corporate rule, Mark Engler weaves disparate movements and burgeoning efforts in far flung corners of the globe together to show the strong, tensile strands of a democratic alternative–a globalization from below that has the power to shape the post-Bush era." -FRIDA BERRIGAN, New America Foundation, Arms and Security Initiative
"This is one of the most hopeful and challenging progressive books to be written in a long time. Global elites, it turns out, are no more cohesive than, say, the crime families of New York, and perhaps a good deal less so. As the fault lines among those who have ruled the world for the past few decades become ever more clear, the time is upon us to finally follow up on Seattle and to bring democracy home. Never was a book more timely." -Andy Bichlbaum, THE YES MEN
Mark Engler is a writer based in New York City and an analyst with Foreign Policy In Focus. His articles appear in Dissent, The Nation, Newsday, the Progressive, the San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, and In These Times. An archive of his work is available at www.DemocracyUprising.com.
An activist originally from Des Moines, Iowa, Mark is a member of the National Writers Union (UAW, Local 1881). He has previously worked with the Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress in San José, Costa Rica, and he has also lived in Guatemala and El Salvador.
Noam Chomsky looks at the increasing power and coordination of the countries of the Global South.
As Latin America’s leftward political shift grows deeper roots, U.S. influence over the region is declining.
Ten years after the Asian financial crisis, the Pacific economies have yet to really recover. Meanwhile, as columnist Walden Bello argues, finance capital resists any form of global regulation, making more financial crises likely.
Latin America is leading a historic break from the failed policies of the International Monetary Fund.