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OpinionWalden Bello Walden Bello is one of the leading critics of the current model of economic globalisation, combining the roles of intellectual and activist. He is Director of Focus on the Global South, an organisation that combines policy research, advocacy, activism and grassroots capacity building in order to generate critical analysis and encourage debates on national and international policies related to corporate-led globalisation, neo-liberalism and militarisation. David Korten is a cofounder and board chair of the Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, and is founder and president of the People-Centered Development Forum. In the late 1980s, while based in the Philippines, he concluded that the leadership needed to redirect the human course would not come from within establishment institutions, but rather would depend on citizen groups working from a shared understanding of the deeper problems afflicting the species and a common vision of unrealized possibilities. At that point, he became a defector from the establishment and has since worked through public interest citizen organizations devoted to a transformational social change agenda. Gustave Massiah is a French economist, urbanist, and political analyst. He was a professor of urbanism at the French Ecole spéciale d'architecture in Paris, as well as the head of the CRID (Centre de recherche et d'information sur le développement). Gustave Massiah is one of the founders of the French Attac, and had been its vice-president until 2006. Immanuel Wallerstein is a sociologist, historical social scientist, and world-systems analyst. His most important work, The Modern World-System, appeared in three volumes in 1974, 1980, and 1989. Wallerstein rejects the notion of a Third World, claiming there is only one world connected by a complex network of economic exchange relationships — i.e., a world-economy or world-system, in which the dichotomy of capital and labor, and the endless accumulation of capital by competing agents (historically including, but not limited to, nation-states) account for frictions. This approach is known as the World Systems Theory. On 29 September 2006, the U.S. Senate agreed to give President Bush extraordinary power to detain and try prisoners in the so-called war on terror. The editors of the New York Times described the law as tyrannical. They said its passage marks a low point in American democracy and that it is our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. The legislation strips detainees of the right to file habeas corpus petitions to challenge their own detention or treatment. It gives the president the power to indefinitely detain anyone it deems to have provided material support to anti-U.S. hostilities. Secret and coerced evidence could be used to try detainees held in U.S. military prisons. The bill also immunizes U.S. officials from prosecution for torturing detainees who the military and the CIA captured before the end of 2005. |
2011 Center for a World in Balance