The Age of Vulnerability

from YES! Magazine:



The Age of Vulnerability
How the 2008 financial crash redefined what it means to be economically vulnerable.

by John Cavanagh, Robin Broad
posted Jan 03, 2011


If you are wondering what the Wall Street crash did for U.S. credibility abroad, listen to this. In the middle of the pain and suffering of the global economic and food crises of 2009, a group of South Asian economists and policy makers met in India and mocked the United States: “You guys messed up, and you’re taking the world economy down with you. Thank God we were smart enough to ignore your advice, so our financial sector was never deregulated, and we still grow most of our own food. We keep government grain stocks to cushion price spikes, and we’re even better than China because we rely more on internal demand than exports so we’re not taking as much of a hit,” as one participant summed up the sentiment of the meeting.

Is anyone in the United States (and other, poorer nations of the world) listening? We certainly are intrigued. So, after 30 years of working on and off in the Philippines, we return to gauge the debate, among members of the nations' new government and among ordinary Filipinos. How is the government and how are Filipinos, we asked, responding to what we call the “triple crises of vulnerability”: the global economic crisis, the food crisis, and the spreading environmental crises of water, forests, fisheries, and climate?

Some broader context is helpful here: For these past 30 years, the United States (along with the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization) has preached the merits of “free trade”—gearing economic activity to global corporations and markets in order to take advantage of the so-called “efficiencies” of trade and investment with other countries. From the United States to the Philippines to Mexico, governments set incentives and rules so that firms shifted from local to global markets and, in the case of the Philippines, roughly 11 million people ended up working overseas.

Over these decades in most countries, banking was deregulated so that new high-risk financial instruments reaped big gains for investors, but small businesses that once formed the backbone of most economies had trouble getting loans. Firms produced goods in global factories that exploited natural resources and workers from poorer countries like the Philippines where governments offered lax labor and environmental standards. Over this period in the Philippines, the big foreign-exchange earners became overseas workers, call centers for Western firms, electronic exports, and tourism. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/john-cavanagh-and-robin-broad/the-age-of-vulnerability