Wall Street Excess and Main Street Distress: the Apple Connection

By Walden Bello*
Foreign Policy in Focus 

Apple’s march to market supremacy has been accomplished at tremendous cost to both American and Chinese workers.

Ever since the beginning of the current global economic crisis, the focus of both critical analysis and public odium has been speculative capital. In the populist narrative, it was the breathtaking shenanigans of the banks in an atmosphere of deregulation that led to the economic collapse. The “financial economy,” characterized as parasitic and bad, was contrasted to the “real economy,” which was said to produce real goods and real value. Resources flowed into speculative activities in finance, resulting in a loss of dynamism in the real economy and eventually leading to credit cutoff at the height of the crisis, causing bankruptcies and massive layoffs.

• Deglobalisation
• China
• Walden Bello

[Video] Where is the Social in Green Economy?

Now Comes the Hard Part…

by Walden Bello
from PDI

Successful revolutions are rare; successful reform is even rarer, claims Samuel Huntington in his classic “Political Order in Changing Societies”.  Today, what can only be described as a serious enterprise at reform is unfolding in dramatic fashion in this country.  Whether it will succeed will depend, to a great extent, on its leading edge, President Benigno Simeon Aquino III.

• Philippines
• Walden Bello

[Video] Nicola Bullard: Final hours of COP17 - Are they cooking the planet?

• Climate Justice

Germany’s Social Democrats And The European Crisis

by Walden Bello (FPIF)

Germany towers over Europe like a colossus. Its economy is the biggest in the European Union, accounting for 20 percent of the EU’s gross domestic product. While most of Europe’s economies are stagnating, Germany’s will have grown by some 2.9 percent in 2011. It boasts the lowest unemployment rate, 5.5 percent, of Europe’s major economies, compared to those of France (9.5 percent), the United Kingdom (8.3 percent), and Italy (8.1 percent).

In many ways, Germany is like Japan. Both countries were forced to give up armed expansion during the Second World War, only to have the national energy channeled into building formidable economies. But whereas Japan faltered in the 1990s, Germany has steadily plowed ahead, becoming the world’s biggest exporter from 1992 to 2009, replaced in first place by China only in 2010.

• Deglobalisation
• Walden Bello