Capitalism: A Ghost Story (Arundhati Roy)
A very long and very dense essay by Roy about how capitalism colonizes (physical and social) territory, with specific reference to the situation today in modern India... The information it contains is rarely reported in the US press, and the parallels to what's happening today in the US & elsewhere are also interesting...
Rather than try to summarize it, I'm just going to pull some provocative quotes...
1.
Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? ...Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani... in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP... After 20 years of “growth”, 60 per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, 90 per cent of India’s labour force works in the unorganised sector...
2.
Only days after (the government made a series of agreements with resource corporations)...the Salwa Judum, a vigilante militia, was inaugurated. The government said it was a spontaneous uprising of local people who were fed up of the “repression” by Maoist guerrillas in the forest. It turned out to be a ground-clearing operation, funded and armed by the government and subsidised by mining corporations...the Salwa Judum burned, raped and murdered its way through hundreds of forest villages, evacuating 600 villages, forcing 50,000 people to come out into police camps and 3,50,000 people to flee. The chief minister announced that those who did not come out of the forests would be considered to be ‘Maoist terrorists’. In this way, in parts of modern India, ploughing fields and sowing seed came to be defined as terrorist activity...Hundreds of people have been jailed, charged for being Maoists under draconian, undemocratic laws. Prisons are crowded with adivasi people, many of whom have no idea what their crime is. Recently, Soni Sori, an adivasi school-teacher from Bastar, was arrested and tortured in police custody. Stones were pushed up her vagina to get her to “confess” that she was a Maoist courier...
3.
In the US, (the Ford Foundation) provided millions in grants and loans to support the Credit Union Movement... pioneered by... Edward Filene...(who) believed in creating a mass consumption society...by giving workers affordable access to credit—a radical idea at the time. ...the other half of what Filene believed in was the more equitable distribution of national income. Capitalists seized on the first half...and...turned the US working class into people who are permanently in debt... Many years later, this idea has trickled down to the impoverished countryside of Bangladesh when Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank brought microcredit to starving peasants with disastrous consequences. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides—200 people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone. A national daily recently published a suicide note by an 18-year-old girl who was forced to hand over her last Rs 150, her school fees, to bullying employees of the microfinance company. The note said, “Work hard and earn money. Do not take loans.”
4.
The gathering of information to control people they rule is fundamental to any ruling power. As resistance to land acquisition and the new economic policies spreads across India, in the shadow of outright war in Central India, as a containment technique, the government has embarked on a massive biometrics programme...the Unique Identification Number (UID). People don’t have clean drinking water, or toilets, or food, or money, but they will have election cards and UID numbers. Is it a coincidence that the UID project run by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, ostensibly meant to “deliver services to the poor”, will inject massive amounts of money into a slightly beleaguered IT industry...?
5.
Scholars of the Foundation-friendly version of economics and political science were rewarded with fellowships, research funds, grants, endowments and jobs. Those with Foundation-unfriendly views found themselves unfunded, marginalised and ghettoised, their courses discontinued. Gradually, one particular imagination—a brittle, superficial pretence of tolerance and multiculturalism (that morphs into racism, rabid nationalism, ethnic chauvinism or war-mongering Islamophobia at a moment’s notice) under the roof of a single, overarching, very unplural economic ideology—began to dominate the discourse. It did so to such an extent that it ceased to be perceived as an ideology at all...
6.
The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has been a conceptual coup in which NGOs and foundations have played a crucial part. The narrow focus of human rights enables an atrocity-based analysis in which the larger picture can be blocked out and both parties in a conflict—say, for example, the Maoists and the Indian government, or the Israeli Army and Hamas—can both be admonished as Human Rights Violators. The land-grab by mining corporations or the history of the annexation of Palestinian land by the State of Israel then become footnotes with very little bearing on the discourse. This is not to suggest that human rights don’t matter. They do, but they are not a good enough prism through which to view or remotely understand the great injustices in the world we live in.
7.
Another conceptual coup has to do with foundations’ involvement with the feminist movement.... Why is it that the dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land which they owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem...? By manipulating the disbursement of the funds, the foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what “political” activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs now prescribe what counts as women’s “issues” and what doesn’t... Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It is what allowed the US government to use western feminist groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001...
8.
Having worked out how to manage governments, political parties, elections, courts, the media and liberal opinion, there was one more challenge for the neo-liberal establishment: how to deal with growing unrest, the threat of “people’s power”. How do you domesticate it? How do you turn protesters into pets? How do you vacuum up people’s fury and redirect it into blind alleys...? Here too, foundations and their allied organisations have a long and illustrious history. A revealing example is their role in defusing and deradicalising the Black Civil Rights movement in the US in the 1960s...A similar coup was carried out in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa...
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280234
= new reply since forum marked as read
..... Noam Chomsky.
Neoliberalism = Disaster Capitalism. The news of what is happening in her country is absolutely abhorrent. If things aren't bad enough in that country, vulture capitalists have to go in there and make it a million percent worse. Wonder what kind of editorial or book Tom Fieidman will come up with to shore up this ugly but true 21st century story of reality in India?
I hope nobody mentions God or Old Glory to me today..... because I'm NOT in the mood for either after reading this this morning.
... already that I missed (or don't remember due to a senior moment? 
), re. Tom Freidman? That went straight over my head. I forgot to say thank you for bringing Roy's essay to DU. 
India Shining was a marketing slogan referring to the overall feeling of economic optimism in India in 2004. The slogan was popularized by the then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for the 2004 Indian general elections.
The slogan initially developed as part of an Indian government campaign intended to promote India internationally. Advertising firm Grey Worldwide won the campaign account in 2003; the slogan and the associated campaign was developed by national creative director Prathap Suthan, in consultation with Finance Minister Jaswant Singh.[1][2] The government spent an estimated $20 million USD of government funds on national television advertisements and newspaper ads featuring the "India Shining" slogan.[3]
Some editorials also suggested that the India Shining campaign was one of the causes for the subsequent defeat of the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government in the 2004 parliamentary elections, particularly in urban areas, the target audience of the campaign.[4][5][6][7]
The India Shining slogan drew criticism from various columnists[12][13][14] and political critics of the ruling National Democratic Alliance government[15][16] for glossing over a variety of social problems, including poverty and social inequality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India_Shining
