Articles by Walden Bello
We found 41 results.
Crisis in the West, Opportunity for the Rest?
Walden Bello | CounterPunch – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Jul 2024
17 Jul 2024 – The crisis of U.S. hegemony may lead to a deeper crisis or to opportunity. Like Ulysses, we cannot avoid the dangerous passage between Scylla and Charybdis to get to the promised safe harbor.
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Palestine Lights the Way Forward
Walden Bello | FPIF – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Mar 2024
22 Feb 2024 – In these worst of times, still there is hope.
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The Three Revolutions of the Chinese Communist Party
Walden Bello | Human Wrongs Watch - TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Jul 2021
The Communist Party of China led three revolutions of world-historic significance in its short 100-year-history: national liberation, the “Cultural Revolution,” and China’s rapid capitalist transformation. Reflecting on the meaning of the 100th anniversary on 1 Jul 2021 of one of the most important institutions of our time, the Chinese Communist Party, the first thing that entered my head was that the present does change the significance of the past.
→ read full articleThe Face of Things to Come
Walden Bello | Human Wrongs Watch - TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Jan 2021
7 Jan 2021 – The storming of Capitol shows America has entered the Weimar Era.
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The Racist Underpinnings of the American Way of War
Walden Bello | Foreign Policy In Focus - TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Jul 2020
1 Jul 2020 – The deadly interplay of racism, genocide, and denial at the heart of American white society has been reproduced in the country’s wars. The political economy of the U.S. is built on two “original sins:” genocide of Native Americans to clear the ground for capitalist relations of production, and slave labor of African Americans. The reproduction and expansion of U.S. capitalism over time have consistently reproduced its racial structures.
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The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism
Walden Bello | Foreign Policy In Focus - TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 May 2020
13 May 2020 – The world’s prevailing socio-political models aren’t going to survive this pandemic. What’s going to replace them? In response to the cataclysm occasioned by the coronavirus, three lines of thinking are emerging.
→ read full articleDuterte Does the Right Thing for a Change
Walden Bello | Foreign Policy In Focus – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Feb 2020
19 Feb 2020 – Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s termination of a key military pact with the United States, the Visiting Forces Agreement, which governed the deployment of US troops in the country, has evoked varied responses. He might be the devil incarnate, but Duterte is beginning the process of ending over 120 years of colonial subjugation.
→ read full articleIt’s Not only Necessary to Develop an Alternative to Globalization — It’s Entirely Possible
Walden Bello | Foreign Policy In Focus – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Jul 2017
It was the left who diagnosed the ills of globalization. So why is the right eating our lunch?
→ read full articlePhilippine President Rodrigo Duterte Is a Wildly Popular Fascist
Walden Bello – The Nation,
16 Jan 2017
Now what? Instead of creeping repression, the new Philippine president began his reign with a blitzkrieg of extra-judicial killings, stupefying the country and blazing a new trail for fascism.
→ read full articleRevisiting the Lessons of the Battle of Seattle and Its Aftermath
Walden Bello | Transnational Institute – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Sep 2016
Walden Bello shares some reflections on the meaning of Seattle for change in knowledge systems, discusses how despite the deep crisis of neoliberalism, finance capital has managed to retain tremendous power, and appeals for a new comprehensive vision of the desirable society.
→ read full articlePeople Are Likening the Next Philippine President to Donald Trump. Here’s Why.
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
23 May 2016
A hapless elite, an angry electorate, and a brash front-runner with little regard for democratic norms: The latest Philippine election sounds a lot like America’s.
→ read full articleSlavery, Genocide, Abuse: The Dark Side of Asia’s ‘Tiger Economies’
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
29 Jun 2015
From declining worker protections to violent labor trafficking and ethnic cleansing, the dark underbelly of Southeast Asia’s “tiger economies” is on full display this year.
→ read full articleThe U.S. Military Just Plunged Philippine Politics into Crisis
Walden Bello – The Nation,
23 Mar 2015
American fingerprints are all over a botched commando raid in the southern Philippines that left dozens dead and shocked the country.
→ read full articleHow the Left Failed France’s Muslims
Walden Bello, TeleSur – Foreign Policy In Focus,
16 Feb 2015
In a different world, Cherif and Said Kouachi might have become progressive activists. But where the left abdicated its outreach to marginalized communities, the Islamists moved in.
→ read full articleHow Liberal Democracy Promotes Inequality
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
15 Dec 2014
Western-style democracies — not the dictatorships they replaced — have allowed deeply undemocratic economic systems to flourish. So what’s to be done? The evidence from Thomas Piketty, the UN and other sources is quite conclusive: Neoliberalism is to blame. The old Marxist term “bourgeois democracy” is still the best description for this kind of democratic regime.
→ read full articleThe BRICS: Challengers to the Global Status Quo
Walden Bello – Foreing Policy In Focus,
8 Sep 2014
Can the BRICS wrest control of the global economy from the United States and Europe, or will their internal contradictions tear them apart?
→ read full articleWhat the World Cup Can Teach Progressives about Corruption
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
21 Jul 2014
Fighting corruption is a proven means to reduce inequality. But the issue has often been co-opted by elites looking to do just the opposite.
→ read full articleClass War: Thailand’s Military Coup
Walden Bello – The Nation,
2 Jun 2014
Thailand’s military coup is a victory for the country’s elites and middle classes [Yellowshirts]. But the country’s rural majority [Redshirts] is unlikely to stand aside while the elites dictate a new constitution.
→ read full articleObama in Asia: Washington Extracts Rent-free Basing from the Philippines
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
5 May 2014
What the agreement boils down to is that the Philippines will give the United States the right to operate bases in the country—for no rent—without the guarantee of U.S. protection of the country’s island territories.
→ read full articleThailand’s Edsa 2: From Civil Conflict to Uncivil War?
Walden Bello – CETRI-Centre Tricontinental,
3 Mar 2014
With no third force to break the deadlock, there is no prospect in sight except deeper and sharper polarization. If Yingluck is ousted, it will be the turn of the Redshirts to invade Bangkok.
→ read full articleThailand’s Deep Divide
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
3 Feb 2014
Thailand’s anti-corruption protesters appear to have lost faith in the key tenet of representative democracy: rule by people or parties elected by the majority of citizens.
→ read full articleSpineless in Bali
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
23 Dec 2013
Developed countries are still using the WTO to squeeze small farmers in the developing world–and developing world governments are going along with the charade.
→ read full articleGMO Wars: The Global Battlefield
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy In Focus,
4 Nov 2013
The GMO wars escalated earlier this month [October] when the 2013 World Food Prize was awarded to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive VP and chief technology officer, Robert Fraley, responsible for development of genetically modified organisms.
→ read full articleThe Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention (Revisited)
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
11 Sep 2013
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Events in Libya and Syria have again brought to the forefront the question of armed humanitarian intervention or the “responsibility to protect.”
→ read full articleA Brewing Storm in the Western Pacific
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
26 Aug 2013
China’s aggressive territorial claims, Washington’s “pivot” to Asia, and Japan’s hawkish bluster add up to a volatile brew in the Asia-Pacific.
→ read full articleI’ll Miss Hugo
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
18 Mar 2013
His was a life that was larger than life, from the Caracas riots against the IMF in 1989 to his failed coup in 1992, and from his victory in the 1998 presidential election to his reinstatement by the urban poor when the right removed him in a coup in 2002. Along with Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Chavez put an end to the reign of neoliberal IMF policies that had impoverished the masses. Goodbye, Comandante Hugo. You were a class act, one impossible to follow. Wherever you are right now, give ’em hell.
→ read full articleWashington Debates the Pivot to Asia
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
25 Feb 2013
Over the last two years, the Obama administration has executed what the president has termed the “Pivot to Asia” strategy, whereby the United States’ global military force posture is being reconfigured to focus on the Asia-Pacific region as Washington’s central front. The truth of the matter is that, as in the Middle East and Latin America, there is more continuity with the Bush administration than rupture in the Obama administration’s approach toward Asia.
→ read full articleChina’s Transformation: A Southeast Asian Perspective
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
26 Nov 2012
China’s once-in-a-decade leadership transition will have major implications for China’s neighbors in Southeast Asia. Given this, it might be worthwhile to review the changing understanding of the momentous developments in China on the part of people in our region, using my generation—the so-called “baby boomers”—as an example.
→ read full articleEconomic Crisis Shakes Old Paradigms
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
29 Oct 2012
Many of the same people who brought you the global financial crisis are also behind the global ecological crisis, observes Walden Bello. To find a common solution to both, we need to search for new models.
→ read full articleThe Apple Connection
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
13 Feb 2012
Apple’s products are top of the line, distinguished by their superior design, engineering, and personality or “soul.” The iPad and iPhone are engineering masterpieces. But these commodities are not simply material. They also incarnate the social relations of production. They are the expression of the marriage between a demanding enterprise that has become the cutting edge corporation of our time and what Slavoj Zizek has called today’s “ideal capitalist state”: China, with the freedom it offers capital along with its unparalleled capacity to discipline labor.
→ read full articleThe Crisis of Humanitarian Intervention
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
15 Aug 2011
Events in Libya and Syria have again brought to the forefront the question of armed humanitarian intervention or the “responsibility to protect.” Perhaps there is no better way to sum up the tragic odyssey of the doctrine of humanitarian intervention than by invoking the old saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
→ read full articleCapital Is a Fickle Lover
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
27 Jun 2011
“China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for capital, with the state doing the ‘dirty job’ of controlling the workers,” writes the prominent Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek. “China as the emerging power of the twenty first century… seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, disdain for workers’ rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new world force.”
Capital, however, is a fickle lover.
The Arab Revolutions and the Democratic Imagination
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
28 Mar 2011
Breaching the psychological barrier of fear was coupled with another feeling that ran through the crowds in both Tahrir Square and Manila: the sense that people were truly determining their destiny, that they were taking matters into their own hands. This was the primordial democratic moment, the pristine moment of self-rule that is so inadequately conveyed by theoretical treatises on democracy.
→ read full articleLessons of the Obama Debacle
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
18 Oct 2010
The key problem is the failure of progressives to translate their vision and values into a program that is convincing and connects with the people trapped in the terrible existential conditions created by the global financial crisis. This fluid process is preeminently political. It requires translating a strategic perspective into a tactical program that takes advantage of the opportunities, ambiguities, and contradictions of the present moment to construct a critical mass for progressive change from diverse class and social forces.
→ read full articleWHY FIGHTING CORRUPTION IS NOT ENOUGH
Walden Bello – Inquirer,
12 Apr 2010
Corruption is blamed by most Filipinos for its economic quagmire, but it has been neoliberal policies and clean-cut technocrats who have been most responsible for causing poverty.
→ read full articleLESSONS OF THE GAZA FREEDOM MARCH
Walden Bello – Foreign Policy in Focus,
9 Jan 2010
At 8 a.m., on Wednesday, December 30, I took my seat on a bus in downtown Cairo that was about to head for Gaza.The evening before, Medea Benjamin, co-founder of Code Pink, the central organization in the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), had asked me to be titular head of a 100-person delegation that represented the […]
→ read full articleHOW HYPER-CAPITALISM MAY HOBBLE THE COPENHAGEN SUMMIT
Walden Bello - ZNet,
11 Dec 2009
Unless we re-think the export-oriented capitalism that’s causing all of our climate problems, the Copenhagen conference will be nothing more than a Band-Aid. Beginning in the second week of December, representatives to the United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen will wrestle with the challenge of climate change. This week, influential actors in the World Trade Organization […]
→ read full articleTHE VIRTUES OF DEGLOBALIZATION
Walden Bello,
10 Sep 2009
The current global downturn, the worst since the Great Depression 70 years ago, pounded the last nail into the coffin of globalization. Already beleaguered by evidence that showed global poverty and inequality increasing, even as most poor countries experienced little or no economic growth, globalization has been terminally discredited in the last two years. As […]
→ read full articleKEYNES: A MAN FOR THIS SEASON?
Walden Bello,
14 Jul 2009
One of the most significant consequences of the collapse of neoliberal economics, with its worship of the "self-regulating market," has been the revival of the great English economist John Maynard Keynes. Not only do his writings make Keynes very contemporary. There is also the mood that permeates them, which evokes the loss of faith in […]
→ read full articleCHINA: THE PARTY AND THE PEASANTRY
Walden Bello,
30 Jun 2009
Political sociologists have sometimes described the Chinese Revolution as the product of an alliance between middle class intellectuals and the peasantry. In his innovative revision of Marxist-Leninist theory, Mao Zedong transformed the peasantry, a class disdained by Marx, into the "main force" of his anti-feudal, anti-imperialist revolution. Translated into practice by the Communist Party, which […]
→ read full articleASIA: THE COMING FURY
Walden Bello,
10 Feb 2009
As goods pile up in wharves from Bangkok to Shanghai, and workers are laid off in record numbers, people in East Asia are beginning to realize they aren’t only experiencing an economic downturn but living through the end of an era. For over 40 years now, the cutting edge of the region’s economy has been […]
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