Global Capitalism

Before and after World War II, a serendipitous confluence of events created a healthy balance between the market and the polity - between the engine of capitalism and the egalitarian ideals of democracy. A global financial system was devised explicitly to allow nations to manage capitalism. Yet this golden era turned out to be lightning in a bottle. From the 1970s on, a power shift occurred, in which financial regulations were rolled back, taxes were cut, inequality worsened, and disheartened voters turned to far-right faux populism. Can democracy find a way to survive?

On the same day that reporter Jeffrey Kaye visited the Tondo hospital in northwest Manila, members of an employees association wearing hospital uniforms rallied in the outside courtyard demanding pay raises. The nurses at the hospital took home about $261 a month, while in the United States, nurses earn, on average, more than fifteen times that rate of pay. No wonder so many of them leave the Philippines. Between 2000 and 2007, nearly 78,000 qualified nurses left the Philippines to work abroad, but there's more to it than the pull of better wages....

Counter-Cola charts the history of one of the world's most influential and widely known corporations, the Coca-Cola Company. It tells the story of how, over the past 130 years, the corporation has tried to make its products and brands physically and culturally a central part of global daily life in over 200 countries. Through this story of Coca-Cola, Amanda Ciafone reveals the pursuit of corporate power within the key economic transformations-liberal, developmentalist, neoliberal - of the 20th and 21st centuries. A story of global capitalism, it is not without contest.