STWR - Share The World's Resources

Davos is a small, and for much of the year, an ordinary Swiss ski resort. But, for about a week every year, limousines and helicopters converge in Davos as the world’s rich and mighty congregate to attend the World Economic Forum. It is not clear exactly what role this forum plays in world affairs — or whether it plays any role at all. But what is certain is that every year, many heads of state, and an even larger number of chief executives from some of the world’s largest companies, congregate here.

An average of nearly two out of three people in 34 countries around the world believe that the benefits and burdens resulting from changes in their nation's economy over the last few years are not being distributed fairly, according to a new multinational survey released Thursday by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). That view was held by a majority in 27 countries and by well over two-thirds of respondents in Latin America, continental Europe, non-oil-producing nations of the Middle East, and East Asia.

Wild stock market gyrations and a global financial meltdown open 2008.  Around the world, old and new critics of neo-liberalism smirk and repeat "I told you so."  Neo-liberal dogma -- that private enterprise is good and efficient whereas state economic interventions are bad and wasteful -- suffers deepening disrepute.  The private, deregulated capitalism of recent decades produced imprudent credit orgies that generated unsustainable bubbles bursting across scary headlines.

The processes of globalisation sweeping across the world today are being driven by neo-liberal ideologies which celebrate untrammelled market forces, the free movement of capital and the sovereignty of the citizen-consumer. Labour remains subject to many more restrictions than capital, but it too has become a global resource. As governments are increasingly forced to pursue competitive advantage in the global economy through the construction of flexible labour markets, in which workers can be hired and fired with impunity, women have emerged as the flexible labour force par excellence.

Now, India is on the boil with ‘democracy’ set for a head on collision with the ‘free market’, as a variety of social movements challenge the government’s policies and pitch for changes to safeguard the rights of the urban and rural poor, women and indigenous people. The question on many minds is whether the scale and intensity of such protests will prove sufficient to make a dent on these policies or prevent the Indian state from resorting to more repressive methods to contain dissent. The jury is still out on what will blink first-- democracy or the free market. 

British Petroleum, Beyond Petroleum . . . Biofuel Promoter, Biosphere Plunderer.  Regardless of what the BP abbreviation actually stands for, one thing is clear: this oil giant knows a good deal when it sees one.  For a relatively small financial contribution, BP appropriates academic expertise from a leading public research institution, founded on 200 years of social support, to maximize its return on energy investments.  These investments, in turn, are focused primarily on promoting the market for biofuel, the newest darling of those in power who stimulate change while maintaining "business as usual."

The paradox of our times can be stated simply: the collective issues we must grapple with are of growing extensity and intensity, yet the means for addressing these are weak and incomplete. Three pressing global issues highlight the urgency of finding a way forward.

In 1992, Dr. Walden Bello issued a macro-economic warning about the so-called Asian miracle in his book "Dragons in Distress". Six years later, the Asian financial crisis Bello predicted swept the region, throwing millions into poverty. Born in the Philippines in 1945, Dr. Bello is the author of more than 10 books, including "Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty" (1999), "Global Finance: Thinking on regulating speculative capital markets" (2000) and "The Future in the Balance: Essays on globalisation and resistance" (2001). After receiving a Ph.D from Princeton, he is the executive director of Focus on the Global South and a visiting professor in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. He spoke by phone from the Philippines with IPS Canada correspondent Chris Arsenault.

Once again the people of Mozambique are facing serious flooding with thousands of square miles submerged and tens of thousands of people displaced. The floods are the result of exceptional and sustained rainfall across southern Africa, the heaviest since records were first kept more than a century ago. Mozambique's misfortune is to lie between the coast and the massive central plateau: rain that falls in six or more neighbouring countries has to find its way to the sea through Mozambique, which is straddled by four massive rivers, the greatest of which, the Zambezi, is the focus of the worst flooding.

Humanity’s greatest challenge is upon us. It’s a converging set of ecological problems. No other difficulty we now face has the potential to impact the human future as profoundly as the convergence of climate change, peak energy, mass extinction, groundwater depletion, and a slew of related environmental catastrophes in the making. People need to know about it. It needs to saturate the media, to be in the headlines, in best-selling books, and on talk shows. And we need feature length films about it. By now, there should have been many theatrical documentaries on the subject.