between a rock and a hard place:
So much so that Jim Rogers, CEO of Rogers Holdings and a staunch free marketer, calls it "Socialism for the rich." In his words "the Federal Reserve is using taxpayer money to buy a bunch of Bear Stearns traders' Maseratis." He points out that hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent to bail out Wall Street as a whole. The theologians of the global market are between a rock and a hard place. Hypocrisy has rammed into reality.
(...) Three of the basic principles the believers of corporate-led globalisation swear by have been so eloquently summed by Professor James Galbraith Jr. of the University of Texas at Austin. One: all successes are global. Two: all failures are national. Three: the market is beyond reproach.
(...) Through the reforms period, we have pushed millions of small farmers to shift from foodcrop to cash crops. The acreage under foodcrop has reduced across these years. And we also exported millions of tonnes of grain - as in 2002 and 2003. What's more, we exported at prices cheaper than those we charged poor people in this country for the same grain. The idea was that we had a "huge surplus" of grain and could well afford to export. The truth was that the massive pileup of unsold stock arose from a surplus of hunger rather than of grain. The purchasing power of the poor had collapsed. But the fake "surplus" story came in handy. It allowed the export of grain - heavily subsidised by us - to be consumed by European cattle.
(...) From 510 grams per Indian in 1991 to 422 grams by 2005. With the top fifth of Indians doing better than ever before, this meant that those below were eating far less than they did just a few years ago.