A pesar de haber causado la peor crisis financiera de las últimas décadas, el sector financiero ha salido de ella aún con mayor fuerza. En la octava edición de Estado del poder, publicada en español por el Transnational Institute, Fuhem Ecosocial y Attac España, analizamos, a través de artículos e infografías, las diversas dimensiones y dinámicas del poder financiero, y cómo los movimientos populares podrían recuperar el control sobre el dinero y las finanzas.
The international bank transfer system, SWIFT, is a form of contemporary digital colonialism and surveillance capitalism as it is run by US firms and provides data to US government agencies. Drives by governments and philanthropists to increase use of digital money will only strengthen it further.
Despite causing the worst financial crisis in decades, the financial sector emerged even stronger. TNI's eighth flagship State of Power report examines through essays and infographics the varied dimensions and dynamics of financial power, and how popular movements might regain control over money and finance.
Popular movements everywhere are on the rise at the same time as we face ever-greater corporate impunity and increasing state violence. In TNI's seventh flagship State of Power report, we examine today's social movements, their potential to build counter-power, and how we can best resist injustice as well as lay grounds for long-term transformation.
This sixth annual State of Power report examines the cultural processes that are used by corporations, military and privileged elites to make their power seem 'natural' and 'irreversible'. It also explores how social movements can harness creativity, art and cultural forces to resist and to build lasting social and ecological transformation.
TNI's fifth annual State of Power 2016 report explores the intersect of power and democracy. Featuring prominent activists and academics, its essays feature the long battle between economic power and popular democracy, expose the different powers seeking to undermine democracy today, and tell the stories of radical popular democratic alternatives emerging worldwide.
Esta es la cuarta edición de nuestro informe anual Estado del poder, coincidiendo con la cumbre en Suiza de lo que Susan George denomina “la clase de Davos”. Esta recopilación de ensayos persigue analizar las diferentes dimensiones del poder, poner al descubierto a quienes lo ostentan en nuestro mundo globalizado e identificar fuentes de contrapoder transformador.
El actual saqueo en África es una reedición de las tradicionales relaciones imperialistas queel continente experimentó durante el colonialismo. Pero, ¿cuáles son las diferencias entre el pasado y el presente? ¿Quién detenta el poder en último término?
Si alguien nos ha dicho algo relevante sobre el poder del Estado en 2013 fue Edward Snowden, que reveló la enorme capacidad de vigilancia de algunos gobiernos occidentales.
The fourth edition of our annual State of Power report, coinciding with the international meeting in Switzerland of what Susan George calls “the Davos class”. This series seeks to examine different dimensions of power, unmask the key holders of power in our globalised world, and identify sources of transformative counter-power.
Dos años después de que Occupy Wall Street diera voz al descontento popular por las crecientes desigualdades en todo el mundo, la cuestión del 1% frente al 99% se mantiene como asunto número uno de la agenda política.
La evidencia muestra que la autoridad ilegítima va en aumento y la democracia sucumbe de modo gradual a la ideología neoliberal en que más y más funciones del gobierno son asumidas por agentes ilegítimos, opacos y no elegidos.
Illegitimate authority is on the rise and democracy is gradually succumbing to the disease of neoliberal ideology. More and more functions of legitimate government are being assumed by illegitimate, unelected, opaque agents and organisations. Illegitimate, corporate rule now occupies greater and greater space at every level of government including the international sphere, which is gravely damaging democracy and that has an impact on our countries and our lives.
The UN Charter begins with “We the peoples” and affirms the “equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small”. Today the defense of those principles, though never robust, seems weaker than ever. The camel of private interests, having made itself at home in the tents of domestic political life, has today pushed its nose and much more into the rickety tents of international governance. Helping it has been a shrewd camel-trader, a broker of corporate ideas and networks, the World Economic Forum (WEF). Its annual invitation-only gatherings in Davos, Switzerland, have given rise to the half-mocking term “Davos Man”. That archetype represents a global elite who “have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations.”
"[E]ven if you’re not doing anything wrong you’re being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude to where it’s getting to the point where you don’t have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody even by a wrong call. And then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you’ve ever made, every friend you’ve ever discussed something with. And attack you on that basis to sort to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer..."
When the New York Times dubbed the global anti-war protesters of February 15, 2003, “the second super-power,” it challenged the decade-plus view of undisputed U.S. global reach that followed the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The surging protests that brought 12–14 million people in 665 cities around the world were not enough to stop the U.S.-British wars against Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. But in the decade since that extraordinary mobilisation, the U.S. empire’s reach is showing the effects of rising people’s movements, increasing multi-polarity in the world of nations and governments, declining influence in all international spheres other than military, stubbornly lasting economic crisis, and an extraordinary loss of legitimacy both at home and abroad.
How much change in the existing patterns of geo-political and geo-economic relations will the rise of the global South countries bring? And just how should this ‘rise up’ be measured? Furthermore, does the selective rise of some countries mean that the weight and power of the South as a whole will rise up?
The State is Dead! Long live the State! At the turn of the century, many commentators from the right and left seemed united in their analysis that the state as an economic player was dead or at least no longer relevant. The combined pressures of globalisation, liberalisation and marketisation unleashed by the market-driven dogmas of Thatcherism and Reaganomics had massively expanded the private sector and concurrently downsized the public sector. Corporate power was in the ascendancy and many state-owned companies had become little more than second-rate government departments, and the underlying assumption was that, as the economy evolved, the government would close or sell them to private investors.
Our inability to grapple with and adapt to our current ecological crisis has its roots in the world’s social and economic systems that concentrate power and authority in the hands of a few. We currently live in the “Corpocene Epoch,” due to the disproportionate role certain arthropods — directors of large corporations and Wall Street banks — play in the ecological transformations under way. Financial institutions, corporate powers and complicit governments have formed a “fateful triangle” accelerating the effects of climate change and preventing mitigation and adaptation strategies that could plug the gap between our volatile present and future planetary stability.
