Nations are like extended families. The various sovereign governments representing these nations are intimately familiar with and sympathetic to the individuals and their situations inside of those nations. These governments have served to protect the interests of the peoples in these nations. As the powers of the governments are taken away by the New World Order many people inside those nations will suffer from it.
In India there are hundreds of millions of people who work the land or depend on somebody who does work the land. These small farms are very unproductive. The food they produce cannot compete in price with the big corporations. The Indian government has tried very hard to protect these people. But as time goes on it seems that it is New World Order policy to force India to turn their backs on these people and accept the imports from the big corporate agriculture firms.
In China, Mexico, Brazil and many other nations it is the same. It has really just begun to force these nations into abandoning their protections of these poor farmers.
We do need a framework for international trade and international trade can bring forth tremendous benefits. But the way it is handled by the World Trade Organization we are preventing nations from providing the special protections they need to watch out for the welfare of their citizens.
We live in interestng times. It is easy to dismiss critics like this Arundhati Roy as being leftists or anti-american zealots. But my read of it is that the New World Order represents something all new and is outside of the parameters of our several decades long conflict between the liberals and the conservatives.
Hope this is at least food for thought. I respectfully submit to you all that we are being seduced into supporting something that is evil. I'm talking about the NWO, not about the Iraqi war. If we allow this to happen, then we will account for this one day. Prosperity for all should be our goal. Voluntary agreements with sovereign governments concerning trade and other matters should be our means. The WTO should be scrapped. This article makes me want to move to Argentina. They may be poor in Argentina, but oh what a glorious cause they are engaged in as they have snubbed their noses at the IMF and thus all the imperialism that the New World Order is.
If this article and my comments make no sense to you, then I suggest that you are a good little sheeple and are behaving well also or at least that you should make a point to read different views about this New World Order.
It is easy to dismiss critics like this Arundhati Roy as being leftists or anti-american zealots.
It is easy because that is what she is. She could have stated a few relevant things about farms, corporations, globalization. Instead she wraps it up in her tangential anti-Americanism, like a pol giving a stump speech. She seems most concerned about resuscitating the word "Empire" into a different context.
Citing Chavez in Venezuela shows that she follows the news in shallow fashion.
She is putting together a litany of things she doesn't like, and calling it NWO, and laying it all at Bush's feet. You notice, in her world, The Indian government is part of the Empire she hates.
This is not a well-reasoned thesis.
the men who signed the deal with Enron in India
The case could be made that India took Enron to the cleaners. Enron built a large power plant on the promise of a power contract at market prices. The promise was not kept, and Enron is out the money. I have seen similar things happen elsewhere, where US companies have put up truly enormous sums only to lose them when promises are not kept. Multinationals who invest in 3rd world countries are playing in a very risky environment, and risk losing their shirts. And no sympathy from anyone when it happens. They just take a charge against profits, and move on.
the men who want to privatize water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication -
Countries where the key elements of the economy are government owned are always economic backwaters, trapped in poverty. Its called socialism. These countries are always poor, but if you try to change the path they are on, you are the evil one. She admits that the status quo is bad, but she cannot bring herself to want to change the status quo. On the contrary, she blames the misery of her people on the people who are trying to bring change.
Last March, in the state of Gujarat, two thousand Muslims were butchered in a State-sponsored pogrom.
She conflates religious bigotry in India, which has a very old pedigree, with NWO. Think about this. Think about the history of India, both in classic times, and in the last couple of centuries. Limit it, if you like, even to just the post-independence era, and you will see that to blame South Asia's civil wars on GWBush is laughable.
It is tragic, it is something that people of good will are going to have to work through. The struggle to unite Indians of all faiths would be well worth the investment of Roy's talents and life-force. By blaming it on people she doesn't like, she trivializes it, and does nothing to advance a solution.
In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the U.S. government's best efforts
Chavez is another case of a socialist trying to save his country from the ravages of socialist economics, by imposing ever more universal socialism. And then wondering why things only get worse. News Flash; centralized economies, which Venezuela has always been, are doomed to failure, no matter how much oil they have, no matter how charismatic their leaders. And, no, the US isn't lifting a finger to drive him out of office; the Venezuelans will have to do this themselves.
And the world's gaze is on the people of Argentina, who are trying to refashion a country from the ashes of the havoc wrought by the IMF.
No, they are having to dig their way out of the rubble caused by years of deficits, to the point that no bank in the world would loan them anymore money. The obvious answer, balance your budget, they dismiss as the evil machinations of the NWO. Again, socialist governments have driven a perfectly good country into the dirt, and then blamed capitalism.
Killing people to save them from dictatorship or ideological corruption is, of course, an old U.S. government sport. Here in Latin America, you know that better than most.
After decades of struggle, every country in latin america is a democracy except Cuba. With the fall of the Soviet Empire, within weeks the remaining communist insurgencies had all ended, amazing isn't it, with the exception of the rebellion in Colombia which metasticized into a narco movement.
While bombs rain down on us, and cruise missiles skid across the skies, we know that contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized, and George Bush is planning to go to war against Iraq.
This is a juicy one. Where are the bombs raining down on you? Since when has productive work become criminal? When did oil pipelines become evil?
Resources are developed by investment, by the employment of technology, and by hard work. When did this become evil? What makes it evil, in Roy's eyes, is if it is done by private actors rather than governments. Remember, in countries where governments control resources, including India, including most of the third world, wealth is extracted and there is little to show for it. Her answer is more of the same. Her enemies are anyone that proposes another paradigm.
We can expose George Bush and Tony Blair - and their allies - for the cowardly baby killers, water poisoners, and pusillanimous long-distance bombers that they are.
Think about this one. She is using these words about men who would stop the real killer of babies, poisoner of water, and long-distance bomber. Study Saddam's career. Study the death toll under his rule, and then get back to me.
The canard that we once had dealings with him, and are therefore disqualified from stopping him now is juvenile. We were never his ally. The Persian Gulf states supported his war against Iran out of raw fear, and we supported him out of loyalty to them. The moment he became a threat to them, our supposed "alliance" with Saddam vanished. We know very well what he has done to the Kurds, and we have spent a decade stopping it. Now we are going to take him down. Roy can squeal all she wants, but she has place herself in the wrong camp, and if she were not lost to rationality, she would have to be ashamed to back Saddam against the liberators of his prison nation.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
We don't need you. You produce nothing, you stand for nothing. We are the doers and the builders. We are the ones who actually put people to work, and push back the walls of poverty. And we are the ones who are going to liberate Iraq, if it can be done. Watch us.
Anyway, it seems to me the the great obstacle to liberation from the Global Economic Plantation is language. The language is trapped in a time warp and polemics are conducted with mummified words---insofar as polemics are even conducted. It usually ends up with a so-called "conservative" shouting: "That's class warfare! You're a marxist!" And thus ending any critique from the Right--which was always the more profound critique of capital.
There is also the problem with the myth of "rugged individualism". An inability to accept that Class warfare is being waged by someone--even if the "classes" do not conform to marxist dogma. And so, only one side is fighting--and wiping up the planet with the confused, atomized remnants of traditionalism.
It's old hat, but I don't see why more people haven't awakened to the fact that "communism" and "capitalism" are joined at the hip.
Instead we have a series of dislocated groups being brutally awakened. First the farmers, miners, loggers, fishermen---all the unimportant rednecks out in the hinterlands who don't play as well on TV as Michael Jackson's nose.
Then, slowly, groups in the suburbs are hit by HBI visas; by shoe factory closings; by the sickening revelation that all those people in the so-called "Third World" have brains too, and will toil for lower wages. The myth of secure brain jobs is exploded. But again, it doesn't play as well as a nightime bombing display over the capital of some recalcitrant "un-free" society with a New Hitler as their Leader.
And never fear! There will always be another Hitler out there crouching in the tall weeds who, along with his un-free People, will need to be treated with a great many high tech weapons and thus, liberated into economic freedom.
Anyway, I don't think we have the cultural skills anymore to confront this looming disaster with a sense of communal affection and loyalty.
(Just a footnote: It's interesting that Indian Lefties seem to hate their Native "rednecks" even more passionately than American Lefties hate their Native rubes.)