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Capitalism: A Ghost Story - Arundhati Roy
http://dawn.com/2012/03/18/capitalism-a-ghost-story-2/
(snip)
The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt, local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and made over to private corporations for ‘public interest’— for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had, is actually part of employment-generation. But by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of ‘growth’, 60% of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90% of India’s labor force works in the unorganized sector.
(snip)
The DMIC web site says that approximately 180 million people will be “affected” by the project. Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019. That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last time a State, despot ns of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?
(snip)
The Army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle-class, white collar workers, intellectuals, ‘opinion makers’—it has to be ‘perception management’. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
(more at link)
(snip)
The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
The other major source of corporate wealth comes from their land-banks. All over the world, weak, corrupt, local governments have helped Wall Street brokers, agro-business corporations and Chinese billionaires to amass huge tracts of land. (Of course this entails commandeering water too.) In India the land of millions of people is being acquired and made over to private corporations for ‘public interest’— for Special Economic Zones, infrastructure projects, dams, highways, car manufacture, chemical hubs and Formula One racing. (The sanctity of private property never applies to the poor.) As always, local people are promised that their displacement from their land and the expropriation of everything they ever had, is actually part of employment-generation. But by now, we know that the connection between GDP growth and jobs is a myth. After twenty years of ‘growth’, 60% of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90% of India’s labor force works in the unorganized sector.
(snip)
The DMIC web site says that approximately 180 million people will be “affected” by the project. Exactly how, it doesn’t say. It envisages the building of several new cities and estimates that the population in the region will grow from the current 231 million to 314 million by 2019. That’s in seven years’ time. When was the last time a State, despot ns of people? Can it possibly be a peaceful process?
(snip)
The Army is experienced enough to know that coercive force alone cannot carry out or manage social engineering on the scale that is envisaged by India’s planners. War against the poor is one thing. But for the rest of us—the middle-class, white collar workers, intellectuals, ‘opinion makers’—it has to be ‘perception management’. And for this we must turn our attention to the exquisite art of Corporate Philanthropy.
(more at link)
Oh my, so very hard to pick only four paragraphs. It is must-read stuff. Truly.
11 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
grassroots organizations.
It really is like the matrix today.
psst... pass the word 
