Arundhati Roy Quotes
Privatisation is presented as being the only alternative to an inefficient, corrupt state. In fact, it is not a choice at all... it is a mutually profitable business contract between the private company (preferably foreign) and the ruling elite of the Third World
Roy, Arundhati. Power Politics. South End Press, 2001, p. 45.
These loans come from either the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, both of which are headquartered in Washington. Usually, financially distressed countries participating in such a program have to agree to a series of economic reforms which the government of the country would not make if the pressure were not there. Therefore some like Goldsmith argue that there is a loss of sovereignty.
The United States was desirous of providing assistance to the Benito Juarez Republican government of Mexico. Both governments were desirous of American foreign investment in Mexico. However, the Juarez government was not in real control of Mexico. State and local government, many corrupt, seized foreign owned business property, reneged on agreements. Others tried to regulate some of the abusive labor employment practices that some American firms had practiced. But little of this, both reasonable and not, was with the consent and even knowledge of the Mexican national government. Capen’s basic observation, so relevant to economic development in modern times was prescient and fundamental to the development of the third world and even the former Soviet Union. If there is insufficient government protection for business, then the high risk will drive out investors who would take reasonable returns. The only investors would then require very high returns, which themselves would inhibit the very growth and development that we want to stimulate.
This was the classic weakness of colonies where the colonial power was only interested in importing a raw material—in this case, gold. Everything else tends to be ignored—even today. With independence, things often do not change and the export of raw material like oil, tin or lumber dominates the whole economy to the exclusion of the rest of the economy
During the revolution against apartheid, a number of communist organizations allied themselves with the ANC against the White minority regime. A few of the communist leaders rose and became officials of the ANC. The vast majority of the ANC supported private enterprise with the kind of socialist aspects that were then typical of the Scandinavian countries, Germany and even France. Mandela, before the successful ousting of the Apartheid held a number of communist ideas and principles as the “capitalists” were making money from the apartheid system and there would support the status quo, However, he had a change of heart and mind regarding private enterprise after the successful effort to end white minority rule. He was good to his word, and even after he retired, the ANC and the government maintained pro private enterprise policies.
Suzanna Arundhati Roy is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the best-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes.
