Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Modi and Monsanto: a wake up call for India...

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. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Hypnotic trance in Delhi: Monsanto, GMOs and the looting of India’s...
  2. How Monsanto wrote and broke laws to enter India...
  3. Monsanto and the subjugation of India...
  4. Narendra Modi's first year as prime minister of India: good for business or...
  5. Arundhati Roy: Beware the ‘gush-up gospel’ behind India’s billionaires...
  6. Organic farming thrives in India as growers revert back to traditional...
  7. Monsanto caused 291,000 suicides in India...
  8. Thousands of farmers in India rise up against Monsanto..

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