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Recent content by John Cavanagh

Turning Points: Is a Different Future Possible?

With the citizen-backed blockage of a proposed aluminum smelter, is Trinidad and Tobago changing course toward a rooted future?

The Coming Global Food Fight

As anger mounts in response to rising global food prices, small-scale farms rooted in local markets are showing how to avert international disaster and lead the way to "food democracy."

Farmer by Farmer, an Organic Transition

After decades of chemicals, farmers in the Philippines are seeing the benefits of organic farming. But what convinced them to make the switch in the first place?

Philippines: Food for a Rooted Future

The successful initiatives of farmers to take back control of their lives and gain food security are empowering communities in the Philippines and around the world.

Why I'm breaking the law for health care

We're standing up to insurance companies and demanding the reform our country so desperately needs.

Change can be tougher than hope

The Obama administration can learn from its first year's setbacks to guide the country in the right direction in 2010.

Our jobs crisis needs drastic action

Obama's recovery plan has helped to slow the job loss, but we need a full-scale emergency relief plan that goes much further.

No Consensus on the Washington Consensus

Today, just as faith in deregulated markets has evaporated in the nightmare on Wall Street, so too is the long reign of market fundamentalism ending in the development arena.

London Econ Summit: Born of Good Intentions, But Ends in Disastrous Results
The governments of the largest economies in the world walked out of the summit with a plan that takes the global economy three big steps backwards.
We're in the midst of an epic battle over the direction of this nation
Obama has opened the door to change. Whether we can blow on through depends on us and our ability to organize.
A bold proposal for a new economy

The free market guru Milton Friedman understood what so many progressives do not: that crises create opportunities for radical change.  From low-wage workers, to local entrepreneurs, from independent
thinking elected officials to the global networks that brought you the
Battle in Seattle a decade ago, there's a new questioning of the Wall
Street-based economy.

Swear off market fundamentalism
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.
World Bank should not be solving food crisis

The World Bank should not be in charge of solving the global food crisis. Its record should disqualify it from playing a leading role.

How Badly Can the 'Experts' Ruin the Planet?
Look no further than the World Bank to see how many economic, social and environmental problems so-called experts can make worse.
The Bailout and 'Greedy' CEOs
Congress should use the proposed bailout legislation for much-needed reform ' in particular the need to start confronting the top-heavy distribution of American income and wealth that has fueled this Wall Street meltdown in the first place.
Development redefined: How the market met its match

This book takes readers on a journey through the rise and fall of the one-size-fits-all model of development that richer nations began imposing on poorer ones three decades ago. It brings into question the entire conventional notion of “development,” and offers readers a new lens through which to view the way forward for poorer nations and poorer people.

Development Redefined

Today, just as faith in deregulated markets has evaporated in the nightmare on Wall Street, so too is the long reign of market fundamentalism (or neoliberalism) ending in the development arena. And, a debate over the best route to development has returned.

Beyond Bretton Woods

A series of provocative essays by leading researchers and activists on three crucial questions: what kind of development should new global economic institutions promote, what are the viable alternatives to the World Bank and IMF and what other global economic institutions are needed to promote a more just trading order with greater social and ecological responsibility.

The Rich and the Rest of Us
Politicians and their corporate backers have engineered the most colossal redistribution of wealth from the bottom up, from working people to a tiny global elite.
Shape up and ship out
The US needs a new foreign policy, one that realises that the main security threats such as climate change and growing global inequality do not need a military cure.