Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty

As we enter the 21st century, many countries of the South are in a state of economic crisis, with once optimistic visions of the future cruelly dashed by rising mass poverty, inequality, and hunger. At the same time, working people in the North find their living standards declining. Dark Victory reveals the roots of these global trends in a sweeping strategy of global economic rollback unleashed by the US to shore up the North's domination of the international economy and reassert corporate control.

Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty
Walden Bello with Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau
Foreword by Susan George

ISBN: 0-935028-61-7
176 pages, indexed
$14.95, paperback

Bello argues that lower barriers to imports, removal of restrictions on foreign investments, privatization of state-owned activities, reduction in social welfare spending, and wage cuts and devaluation of local currencies--all conditions of structural adjustment loans from the North-have had disastrous consequences. Hailed as a classic study of global poverty, Dark Victory is now reissued with a new epilog by the authors.

"Bello et al. Build their case with relentless scholarship. Even those who think they know the structural adjustment scenario inside out will be grateful to Bello for taking on the toughest cases for examination."
--Susan George

"A book that progressive political leaders the world over should read and take to heart..."
--David C. Korten, executive director of People-Centered Development ForumTable of Contents
Table of Contents

Foreword by Susan George
Chapter One: Introduction: the Great Reversal

Springtime of Freedom ...
... or Time of Troubles?
Global Rollback
Conspiracy or Ideology?
Dismantling the Activist State
Barbarians at the Gates

Chapter Two: Challenge from the South

Southern Sunrise
State and the Market in the Third World
Diversity and Unity

Chapter Three: Liberalism and Containment

Liberalism and Anti-Communism: the Peculiar Mix
The Collapse of Containment Liberalism

Chapter Four: Reaganism and Rollback

The Worldview of Reaganism
The Reaganite View of the South
The Vulnerable South
Harnessing the World Bank
Selling SALs
The Debt Crisis and the Globalization of Adjustment

Chapter Five: Adjustment: the Record

A Sorry Record at Best
Explaining Stagnation: 'Macro-Shocks' or Structural Distortions?
The Southeast Asian Case
Prescription for Stagnation
Mexico: Model Reformer?
Chile as an Economic Laboratory
Ghana: Beacon for Africa?

Chapter Six: Adjustment: the Costs

Misery: A Global Survey
Questionable Evidence
Adjusting the Environment
Intensified Resource Extraction in Chile
Adjustment and Deforestation in Costa Rica
SAP and Ghana's Environment
Intensifying the Philippine Environment Crisis

Chapter Seven: Adjustment: the Outcome

Ending the Creditors' Crisis
The New South

Chapter Eight: Resubordinating the NICs

From Allies to Targets
Penalizing Success: the Case of South Korea
Unilateralism Universalized
GATT as a Weapon
'The One and Only Path'

Chapter Nine: Adjusting America

Political Economy of the New Deal State
Collapse of the Social Contract
Reaganism: from Ideology to Policy
The Coming of the 'Service Economy'
NAFTA: Securing a Cheap Labor Preserve
The 'Third Worldization' of America
Accelerating Decline
The 'Human Capital' Question
US Capital and Global Adjustment

Chapter Ten: Dark Victory

Shutting out the South
Protracted War
The 'Islamic Threat'
Heading Off Disaster

Chapter Eleven: The Battle for the 21st Century

The Faces of Barbarism
No Room for Nostalgia
Checking Capitalism's Logic
Cooperation and Competition
Internationalizing Cooperative Organization
The Struggle for the Future

Chapter Twelve: Epilogue: The Asian Economic Implosion

The Collapse
A Failure of Leadership
The IMF Worsens the Crisis
The Social Costs
Crisis and Opportunity?

Glossary
Selected Readings