When people talk about the free market they talk about the level playing field but we live in a world where disparity and inequality have been institutionalized for thousands of years. You have racism and class and caste, villagedom, and ethnic divisions, this is the kind of world that we live in. So in a world like this, what is the free market? Its like playing marbles on a very steep slope. However good you are at playing marbles, all the marbles are going to roll downhill and all the people who are downhill are going to own all the marbles and they are the ones who are going to actually make all the decisions. Theyre the ones who control the WTO, the IMF, and the World Bank and in a context like this they are the ones who use institutions in developing countries -- parliamentary institutions, the court, the press are all then being manipulated by them. In a democracy what are you doing by privatizing infrastructure? You are disengaging politics from the market. You are taking away the last weapon that the poor man has, which is his vote. . . Cooperative globalization, nationalism and religious fundamentalism are all marching hand-in-hand through the 21st century and each of them sets off the other, each of them is almost necessary for the other. The only thing worth globalizing is dissent. --- Arundhati Roy
Posted on: Thu, 27 Nov 2014 23:46:13 +0000
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