Abhishek points me at a new, typical Arundhati Roy rant in the Nation:

In January 2003 thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Alegre in Brazil and declared--reiterated--that "Another World Is Possible." A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George W. Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

...New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodeled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets.

As much as I disagree with her, I must acknowledge that, like Naomi Klein, Roy can turn quite a phrase.  I'm not going to fisk every point Roy makes.  That would be a LONG, and ultimately, not terribly interesting article to read or write.  It preaches to the already converted and does little to communicate with the other.  For example:

Bush believes that Iraq can be occupied and colonized as Afghanistan has been, as Tibet has been, as Chechnya is being, as East Timor once was and Palestine still is.

I'd argue that Chechens and Timorese would welcome the fate of the Afghani's and Iraqi's vs what's beset them due to American NON-intervention.   The Palestinians, sigh, God only knows what it would really take to cure all that ails them.   In Roy's mind, the situations are all the same because they are arbitrary instances of war by a powerful group against the weak (and thus it is wrong).  But I digress...

Roy & I look at (generally) the same stream of facts but sift & prioritize them with completely different lenses.    She sees an imperialistic, military / industrial / corporate complex that's taken over the United States and the world.   I see freedom and markets improving lifestyles globally.

Instead of going point-by-point, I'll instead argue that this wide gulf boils down to a couple, axiomatic beliefs -

• Is War a fact of life or an artificial creation?
• Is Capitalism a bottoms-up phenomena or a top-down imposition?
• Is Capitalism a positive- or zero-sum game?

Similar, to my position on Guns (not surprisingly), I find war a sad fact of nature.  Peace is the precious exception and when it exists, it's more the product of deterrance (US vs. USSR) or mutual dependency - often through business and itself a form of deterrance (US vs. China) - rather than philosophic convergence (US vs. UK/Canada).  War or a credible threat of it is a useful tool of last resort to secure the "bending of wills" (US vs. Afghanistan / Iraq / Libya).

Global capitalism is the natural result of free individuals transacting with each other.  Even when suppressed through bad politics, it naturally percolates up even if only via black markets.   And as long as transactions are voluntary, capitalism is a positive sum game. 

Roy's beliefs couldn't be more divergent and hence the polar opposite conclusions she reaches from same set of facts.  In particular, she instinctively believes that the "rules" of capitalism and deterrence are artificial, arbitary constructs of Power, and thus finds them inextricably intertwined.  [Cheney ran Halliburton?   Halliburton got an Iraq contract?  Well surely that's one of the reasons we went to war!] 

This is a deep cultural faultline that flows well past myself and Roy.   "Tragics" like myself accept certain Laws as universal and impossible to skirt for long (deterrence, capitalism, Human Nature...).  Roy fundamentally has a hard time believing that the intricate code of conduct required by global capitalism could have spontaneously arisen.  Or that even War has it's own emergent logic that means we will NOT invade Russia to access their "God forbid, natural resources of value" and is why multi-party WMD deterrence is such a delicate game.

While the rules spring out of the human condition, they aren't arbitrary.  In a sense, they are as universal as physics and math.  Roy rages because while I consider it acquiescence to a certain tragic, but Natural law, she sees a fetish or glib choice by Power holders -- "Let's make war against the Iraqi's today!  Let's bankrupt Argentina tomorrow!"  In her book, war exists because people like myself, or George Bush exist.

In short, she thinks the US invented and imposes these rules upon an otherwise happy world.  To her, the US has an a priori "power" and creates new rules from thin air to reinforce that power.  To me, the US is "powerful" because we accept and play by these rules so well.  (Reality, of course, is not as clear cut as these 2 extremes - for ex., Ag subsidies....)

In a particularly pointed example from her diatribe, Roy notes that "magnificent men" such as Nelson Mandela "are rendered powerless on the global stage" by the threat of Capital Flight. 

Within two years of taking office in 1994, [Mandela's] government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God 

...the moment they cross the floor from the opposition into government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats--most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the corporate cartel is to have no understanding of how capitalism works or, for that matter, how power works.

To Roy, Capital Flight is a threat bludgeoned by an imperialist against a weaker nation (for ex., Goldman Sachs doing the bidding of Uncle Sam) - there's a man behind the curtain somewhere.   To me, Capital Flight is the natural result of millions of individuals making rational, free choices with their money (for ex., a Japanese pension fund divesting South Africa from Salarymen's retirement portfolios).  The "rules" imposed on Mandela by capital markets are a natural, emergent phenomena and, I argue, a truer expression of the Will of the People than any alternative Roy would proffer.  The natural conclusion of Roy's argument is that South Africans have some sort of right right to other people's money.

Neither I nor Uncle Sam can avoid these rules.  The US has a strong economy because so much of it is ultimately accepts them, protects capital, allows its free movement, preserves property, etc. regardless of what might be politically expedient that day.  In fact, as Prashant notes:

But the options that are being suggested -- controls on businesses, fear of big companies and multinationals, scaling back of privatization and increased taxation -- are not practical. India has tried all this and the result was stagnation.

The tens of thousands of activists from around the world who have gathered in Mumbai for the World Social Forum that ends this week have come to India a decade too late. If they look beyond the seminars led by critics of globalization like the French farmer Jose Bove and Indian activist Arundhati Roy, they will find a radically transformed India: vibrant, optimistic and confident. The forum's slogan is "another world is possible." But India has already lived through the alternate world that the speakers are advocating.

Finally, Roy's model of capitalism is predicated on absolute winners and losers.  Here, our authoress is just plain factually wrong.    During the last Capitalistic decade, both China and India have moved over 100M people out of poverty EACH.  And mostly by replacing a socio-economic system Roy approved of with a system that accepts the pragmatic constraints of Global Capitalism .

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