Paul Wiseman, USA TODAY, 05 July 2006

Free-trade advocates "assume that freer and freer trade will create greater and greater wealth," says Walden Bello, executive director of the anti-poverty group Focus on the Global South in Bangkok. "But experience has shown this is not the case."

Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South, October 2005

(Speech delivered at Dalhousie University, St. Francis Xavier University, and York University, Canada, October 2005.)

I have been asked to speak on the crisis of American hegemony. In my book, Dilemmas of Domination, I identify three dimensions of this crisis.

Achina Vanaik,  Economic and Political Weekly, 6 August 2005

In the face of the CPM-led criticism of the "New Framework for the US-India Defence Relationship", the government sought to play down somewhat the implications of the recently signed document claiming that it is only a 'framework' that simply supersedes the 1995 "Agreement on Defence Relations" and whose content has still to be filled out.

Aziz Choudry, Seedling, January 2005

Since the breakdown of World Trade Organisation talks in Cancun in September 2003, there has been much talk of the rise of bilateralism. But bilateral trade and investment agreements aren’t so much replacing the multilateral agreements that have foreshadowed them in the last decade as working with them to create a ratcheting system to increase the levels of intellectual property protection worldwide. Interestingly, and perhaps more significantly, bilateral trade and investment agreements are also proving to be quite effective in pushing the foreign policy goals of the US and EU.

With World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations failing to deliver as much as many corporations want, the US and other governments, urged on by big business lobbies, are increasingly turning to bilateral free trade and investment agreements. These negotiations are - by design - much less visible and can easily slip beneath the radar of NGOs and popular movements that oppose the WTO and regional deals like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) or the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).