PHILIPPINES: Our Failed Labor-Export Policy (tags)
The impacts of disasters occurring in other parts of the world, from Libya to Japan, have perhaps been communicated more drastically to the Philippines than to other countries. Whether it is the tragic trilogy of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear fallout in Japan or the civil war in Libya, external crises are swiftly transformed into internal crises for our country, as thousands of families are pushed into poverty and economic hardship when their breadwinners are dislocated and repatriated back to the Philippines, where jobs offering decent wages are scarce.
The Arab Revolutions and the Democratic Imagination (tags)
The Arab democratic uprisings have brought a rush of nostalgia to many people who staged their own democratic revolutions years earlier. As they watched events unfold in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Al Jazeera and CNN, that feeling of “all that is solid melting into thin air,” as Marx would have put it, returned to many of those who went to the barricades during the original People Power Revolution in the Philippines in 1986.
The IMF Dictates More Than Ever (tags)
"Many developing countries that were independent in food production at the start of the 1980s import food necessary for their populations today. The subsidized agriculture of western countries has flooded the cou9ntries of the South. Haiti imports the rice that it once cultivated.."
When I was recently named chairman of the Committee on Overseas Workers’ Affairs of the House of Representatives of the Philippines, I was approached by members of the press for my views on migrant labor. I remembered a speech I delivered last year at the Global Forum for Migration and Development in Athens, Greece. The thrust of the speech was that migrants’ rights have to be addressed on two fronts: ending the neoliberal policies that are responsible for creating poverty in their home countries, thus forcing them to emigrate, and demanding that they are given full rights in their host countries.
Haiti Earthquake: Capitalism, Occupation and Revolution (tags)
The earthquake that wrecked the capital of Haiti and surrounding areas on January 12 produced human tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions. It has been termed “the most destructive natural disaster in modern times.” Five months later, Haiti is no longer in the headlines or on the nightly TV news, but for the hard-hit Haitian population the scene has hardly changed. Now a new disaster is in the making as the hurricane season begins. This was a calamity made by capitalism: the earthquake was predictable and was predicted; the inferior construction methods are the result of Haiti’s poverty, and the swollen slums were the result of U.S. policies that have destroyed Haitian agriculture, forcing peasants off the land. On top of everything, Haiti is under imperialist occupation: Washington makes sure it has ultimate control of the strategically placed island, as it has throughout the Cold War and since. Haiti's devastation is not the result of “natural” causes or even “neo-liberal” policies – it is the product of the oppression of this semi-colonial country by the imperial masters ever since black slaves rose up to abolish slavery and throw out the colonialists two centuries ago. No new “economic model” can resolve this: what’s required is a new Haitian Revolution, a workers revolution overthrowing capitalism throughout the Caribbean and extending into the heart of imperialism.
Capitalism's Crisis and our Response (tags)
Walden Bello delivered this speech at the Conference on the Global Criusis in Berlin, Marc h 20-21, 2009.
The Global Collapse: a Non-orthodox View by Walden Bello (tags)
"Orthodox economics has long ceased to be of any help in understanding the crisis. Non-orthodox economics, on the other hand, provides extraordinarily powerful insights into the causes and dynamics of the current crisis.."
As long as the policies of the rich North represent a mixture of cruel carrot-and-stick maneuvers, coupled with basic contempt for the South, we can expect more lethal North-South tensions, more powerful boomerangs hurled back at us.
IMF out of the Philippines and South countries now, protesters demand (tags)
On the occasion of the Annual Meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) together with the World Bank in Singapore, the Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) and other civil society organizations blame “the Fund” for being the single most influential factor for the worsening poverty in the Philippines and other countries in the South.
Seizing the Historical Moment - Anuradha Mittal, Food First (tags)
Anuradha Mittal, co-director of Food First, has been studying the effects of structural adjustment abroad for years. In this interview, she takes on structural adjustment at home, the relationship between the conventions and the larger global movement, corporate media’s effects, building solidarity globally and the power of independent media.