Susan George chairs the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. She says the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement could give powerful companies the right to challenge domestic laws which restrict their future profits.
A LEADING international political economist has warned that democracy is being damaged by the insidious creep of transnational corporations into government policy and their refusal to adopt country-by-country accounting practices, which have helped them avoid taxes.
Activists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe argue that regional integration is the only viable response to the convergence of economic, climate, food and energy crises.
Dr. Pedro Paez talks about the creation of a new financial architecture in Latin America, based on principles of redistribution, environmental sustainability and social cohesion rather than market principles that dominated the old architecture.
Obama's trip to Latin America: about gaining economic advantages, ignoring historical and recent diplomatic interferences and strategically placed critisism.
Free trade or slave trade? How the EU's free trade agreements in Colombia and Peru reward human rights abuses, destroy livelihoods, promote land grabbing and strip governments of their sovereignty to regulate capital flows.
Boris Kagarlitsky, Dr. Chaohua Wang, Research Scholar in Chinese Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
21 January 2011
Multi-media
The economic elites are turning to a neoliberal Keynesianism to save the crisis of capitalism, which is doomed to fail because it does not address its root causes.
As the U.S. and Europe appear to be headed for a deeper economic crisis, some analysts discern a “decoupling” of East Asia and other developing areas from the western economies.
Alternative ‘regional’ South-South alliances and strategies hold out the most promising possibilities for shifting the global balance of power and creating living non-capitalist alternatives
The U.S. and India should not sign a treaty that will only serve the short-term interests of large corporations, and undermine the authority of governments to protect their people from financial crisis.
The flawed neoliberal notion behind India's hosting of the Commonwealth Games, that 'development' starts with attracting foreign capital investment - has brought only corruption and the destruction of communities to Dehli.
The neoliberal FTAs pursued by the EU with Colombia and Peru threaten to exacerbate human rights abuses - which include killings of trade unionists, forced expropriations of indigenous people from land, and environmental destruction - for the sake of corporate profit.
The language contained in agreements being negotiated by the EU through the WTO with their southern counterparts often deliberately diguises real political goals, obscuring the negative economic implications for those countries of the neoliberal agenda.
"The financial crisis" is one facet of the systemic and converging crises of capitalism - a predictable symptom of oligopolistic late capitalism; but what main challenges lie ahead for the Left in South Africa?
Why the EU's so-called "Economic Partnership Agreements" and free trade policies will have exactly the opposite effect of development on Least Developed Countries' economies.
Despite repeated democratic rejection of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Commission pushed ahead with it via the EU Constitution via a private, technocratic and non-democratic process. Susan discussed the treaty and its implications in a workshop at the EA4 summit in Madrid, 15 May 2010.
"The banks are ours!" Public money was used to bail out the banks, and now they are lending back to the public at interest, while governments ignore the social and environmental crises that confront society. It is time to demand real solutions that will work not only for the sake of the economy but for the lives and conditions of people on whom it depends.
Programme and background to Peoples' Tribunal on "Neoliberal Policies and European Transnational Corporations (TNCs) in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
