The net asset worth of India’s richest has also shrunk by over a third from the time of the last Forbes scroll. By 2007, that worth had reached $ 335 billion. That is, 53 individuals in a population of one billion held wealth equal to almost a third of their nation’s GDP at the time. This year, that worth plunged to $107 billion. (A moment’s respectful silence in memory of the dear, departed billions seems in order.) But there is some comfort in that our team is still worth more than twice what their Chinese rivals are. And we even now have 8 billionaires more than all the Nordic nations put together -- though they boast the highest living standards in the world.

Trains were shifted from electric to diesel engines. Sometimes, they were simply done away with and replaced by buses and then cars. Together with Big Oil, Big Auto converted electric transit systems to fuel-based bus systems. In one estimate: In 1935, electric train engines outnumbered diesel train engines 7 to 1. "By 1970, diesel train engines outnumbered electric ones 100 to 1. And GM made 60 per cent of the diesel locomotives." The electric rail system in and around Los Angeles was almost erased.
(...) By 2001, that goal was achieved, beyond belief. Some 90 per cent of Americans drove to work by that year. The findings of the 2001 National Household Travel Survey are striking. Only 8 per cent households reported not having a vehicle available for regular use. The survey showed that "that daily travel in the United States totalled about 4 trillion miles, an average of 14,500 miles per person." Trips by transit and by school bus each made up just 2 per cent of daily trips taken in 2001.
(...) An average American family in 2004 spent up to a fifth of its income on transportation. That's against 13 per cent on food. In "automobile dependent neighbourhoods," according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics, that could go up to 25 per cent. In bigger cities, the traffic only gets worse, never better. There were over 135 million passenger cars in 2006. Overall, registered vehicles clocked in at more than 250 million. Imagine the centrality of oil, autos and private vehicles to just about everything. This is the very model our own Indian elite seek to transplant. Private automobiles at the cost of public transport. Never mind the latter is a lot cleaner and creates large numbers of jobs. And so we add thousands of such vehicles to the roads each week.
(...) Each car that GM puts out carries a health care cost of around $1600. For Chrysler, that's $1500. But for Toyota, that cost is under $300 per car. Japan has a far superior public health system. In the corporate-media of the United States, this does not lead to calls for a good health system. Or for making health access cheaper. It leads to calls for doing away with the union contracts that guaranteed auto workers health benefits for life. For retirees, the pullback has already begun.

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.

survival of the fattest:
"The United States had doled out $27 billion in federal subsidies to its `farmers' in the last fiscal year. That's Rs. 135,000 crores." Just the top 10 per cent of America's farm owners collared close to two-thirds of this largesse. That includes "multi-million dollar corporations".
(...) The needy farmers thus rescued include media baron Ted Turner, a Rockefeller and other assorted struggling billionaires. Turner is "one of the largest landowners" in the U.S.. He owns ranches in Montana, South Dakota and Florida. And his companies raked in $1,90,000. That's Rs. 95 lakhs. David Rockefeller, who owns a 3,000-acre farm, got $146,000. A modest Rs. 73 lakhs. He is a former Chase Manhattan Bank chairman and grandson of John D.
(...) There were at least 20 "Fortune 500" companies among yet other poor farmers pulled back from the brink. Including Chevron, Caterpillar, IBP and Archer Daniels Midland.
(...) These included, as the AP report written by John Kelly put it: "more than 1,200 universities and government farms, including state prisons". They got cash from programmes "touted by politicians as a way to prop up needy farmers. Subsidies also went to real estate developers and absentee landowners in big cities from Chicago to New York".
(...) Well, "63 per cent of the money went to the top 10 per cent of recipients". Many of whom "don't fit the image of the struggling family farm". In Iowa in 1998, I saw small holdings go bust that did fit the image of the struggling family farm. How did those families read their misfortune? Many felt they were victims of wasteful spending on welfare, affirmative action and immigrants. In truth, they were just squeezed out by big corporate farmers. Farm corporations who also held great control over input prices. And government subsidies. In fact, it all sounds a bit like home — only on a scale unthinkable in India. Top Indian business houses have plundered fertiliser subsidies worth thousands of crores of rupees for years. Of course, their amounts, crushing by Indian standards, look trifling next to the largesse doled out in the citadel of neo-liberal market economics.
(...) At the bottom end of this food chain, the average "real" farmer got about $16,000 each. These are perhaps the "needy" ones in the U.S.. And that's still Rs. 8 lakh per farmer. Compare that with the Indian small holder, relieved to have seen off another year when he's earned $80 from an acre.
(...) What happens if Africa, Latin America and Asia increase their share of world markets by just one percent? An Oxfam report says that 120 million people could beat the poverty trap. But that won't happen in the field of agriculture. Not while corporations — with billions of dollars of subsidies behind them — rule theworld.
(...) Lawmakers want to restrict "information about who receives federal farm subsidies". Why? Beats me.

they've got the world by the belly:
As the Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2008) notes: “At a time when parts of the world are facing food riots, Big Agriculture is dealing with a different sort of challenge: huge profits.” The WSJ points to the grain-processing giant Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., which saw a 42 per cent leap in its fiscal third quarter profits. “Including a sevenfold increase in net income in its unit that stores, transports and trades grains such as wheat and corn, as well as soybeans.”
(...) “Some observers think financial speculation has helped push up prices as wealthy investors in the past year have flooded the agriculture commodity markets in search of better returns.” So much so that “The Commodity Futures Trading Commission last week held a hearing in Washington to examine the role index funds and other speculators are playing in driving up grain prices.” The WSJ cites research showing that total index fund investment in corn, soybean, wheat, cattle and hogs has risen by 37 billion dollars (which is well over double India’s farm loan waiver for millions of farmers) since 2006.
(...) But you cannot live without food and water. The latter “commodity” is the focus of the biggest thrust of some huge multinational companies. And we are well into the process of privatising water in India (for them) in a process that promises chaos, misery and conflict on a scale we cannot begin to grasp at this point.
(...) Across the globe, the entire chain of resources and inputs is now getting cornered by corporations. Farm land, water, fertilizer, seed, pesticide and many more. Grab these together and you’ve got the world by its belly. The giant companies are now putting out papers on how they will solve the world’s food problem. Never mind they are at the heart of it.
(...) Meanwhile, making chemical fertilizer requires large use of fossil fuels. So rising oil prices further spur the fertilizer crisis. The rip-off by the top corporations in that sector has been so great that even the United States Senate saw moves to impose a windfall profits tax on oil companies. (In India, the government responded to such calls by transferring the burden to the people and asking for “patience on the inflationary trend.”) Of course, it was scotched in the Senate, too.
(...) For well over a decade now, we have invested less and less in agriculture. Following the World Bank-IMF menu, we discouraged food crop and focused on cash crop and sang the hymns of export-led growth. Mindless de-regulation saw corporate control grip more sectors of agriculture. Seed, fertilizer, markets, you name it. We reduced our agricultural universities to labs for private corporations. We stepped up our use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Millions of farmers were shifted to a much higher-cost economy where input costs are crippling. A (non-organic) farmer in 1991 could cultivate an acre of cotton in Vidharbha for Rs. 2,500. [Just over $60.] Today that would cost him or her Rs. 13,000 or more, given the “miracles” of chemicals, pesticides and Bt.
(...) And then we withdrew credit. Even if the fertilizer comes through this season, countless farmers in the post-loan waiver world find themselves without fresh credit. “We’re not mad,” say bank managers in crisis regions. “The farmer has no new income. Nor better prices. How will someone who could not repay Rs. 10,000 repay thrice that sum?” So who do farmers seeking credit turn to? The very input dealers who are emerging the major source of informal credit in the countryside. And who are implicated in the black marketing of vital inputs in every crisis.