Democracy at work in Kerala, India

Abstract

Although an exact measure of the human suffering from the spectacular crash and meltdown of the economies and financial markets of Southeast and North Asian countries is not available yet, early reports indicate that tens of millions of people have been pushed below the poverty line because of the loss of millions of jobs in the manufacturing and service sectors in countries such as Indonesia, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, and Malaysia. More working people are losing their jobs in Russia and in Latin America as the financial meltdown spreads from Asia to other parts of the developing world. In Indonesia alone, over 20 million people have lost their jobs as a result of the economic and financial crisis gripping that huge nation. There is no need to belabor the point that the “free market” economic models constructed and forcefully imposed by the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Western industrial powers on developing nations are unraveling as the wealth produced by the workers of these countries is being expropriated by speculators and greedy “investors” from the West, as well as by crony capitalists and corrupt government officials in the countries themselves.