Modi and Monsanto: a Wake Up Call for India
September 22, 2015
Modi and Monsanto: a Wake Up Call for India
by Colin Todhunter
Immediately prior to Narendra Modi being elected India’s PM last year, there were calls from some quarters for him to usher in a Thatcherite-style revolution. The hope was that he would accelerate the trend of privatisation, sops and tax breaks to business, deregulation, land and labour reforms, etc., and would also eradicate ‘blockages’ to various projects (i.e. remove dissent and relax or do away with existing procedures).
What Margaret Thatcher did in the eighties was to make Britain friendly to global capital. Global financial institutions became the mainstay of the economy and much local manufacturing industry was offshored. Under Thatcher, anti-trade union legislation, welfare reforms and pro-business policies became the order of the day. Three decades on and Britain has one of Western Europe’s most ‘flexible’ workforces in terms of a lack of protection and rights.
Thatcher’s policies helped to deindustrialise Britain and financialise the nation with a deregulated and corrupt City of London finance sector being a key driver of the economy. The result is record corporate profits, an unofficial unemployment rate of 30 percent, high personal debt, bank bail outs, stagnant demand, increasing national debt and ‘austerity’ for the masses. Any semblance of democratic rights that did exist have become gradually eroded as global capital increasingly dictates.
What happened in Britain is part of a global trend whereby sovereign states have become hollowed out and made supine in the face of transnational corporate power. Various ‘free trade’ agreements have by-passed (NAFTA) or are about to (TTIP, TPA) by-pass the last vestiges of national sovereignty as ‘regulatory barriers’ and ‘investor trade rights’ will essentially mean that major political decisions that affect every aspect of people’s lives could be moved to the technocratic sphere and taken by unaccountable tribunals and committees behind closed doors in Brussels, Washington and elsewhere.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/22/modi-and-monsanto-a-wake-up-call-for-india/