Following the first "Global Day of Action", which took place on January 26th, and after 7 years of existence, the World Social Forum is in debate.

Read and participate in the debates >>>   
The World Social Forum  at the Crossroads by Walden Bello>>>  
The WSF as  "Moment" by Walden Bello>>>  

Walden Bello was invited to participate in the Economist’s Debate Series on "Freedom and its Digital Discontents." The proposition of the debate was “By intervening to regulate business and financial risks, governments have made things worse.”

The full debate can be accessed at The Economist.

 
Walden Bello's comments:

Central planning and market freedom: manifestations of the same fundamentalist mindset

There are two doctrinaire positions that have proved singularly destructive over the last half century. One is that the government riding herd on the economy is the way to go. The other is that the market is always right.

September 2005

As part of the BBC's Who Runs Your World? series, the BBC News Website asked two experts to debate whether global corporations are the most powerful beasts in the jungle.

Held on 23 September 2000 at the time of the WB-IMF annual meeting in Prague, the Prague Castle debate featured an interface between representatives of civil society (Walden Bello, Ann Pettifor of Jubilee 2000 UK, and Katarina Liskova) and the leadership and representatives of the World Bank and the IMF (World Bank President James Wolfensohn, IMF Managing Director Horst Köhler, global financier George Soros, and South African Finance Minister Trevor Manuel, chair of the joint IMF/World Bank Board of Governors). The debate was chaired by Mary Robinson, the United Nations Human Rights Commissioner and former President of Ireland, and sponsored by Czech President Vaclav Havel.

The following is an edited composite version of Walden Bello's interventions during the debate.