While Arundhati Roy addressed Washington Square Park in New York, held at Judson Memorial Church this week:
I like her vision:
We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality. We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations. As “cap-ists” and “lid-ites”, we demand:
Ӣ An end to cross-ownership in businesses. For example, weapons manufacturers cannot own TV stations; mining corporations cannot run newspapers; business houses cannot fund universities; drug companies cannot control public health funds.
Ӣ Natural resources and essential infrastructure Рwater supply, electricity, health, and education Рcannot be privatised.
Ӣ Everybody must have the right to shelter, education and healthcare.
”¢ The children of the rich cannot inherit their parents’ wealth.
Meanwhile, the decade since 9/11 has seen a growth of militarised forces on the streets of so-called democratic societies. Stephen Graham is a professor of Cities and Society at Newcastle University in the U.K and his book is called Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. He speaks to Democracy Now!:
Well, there’s been a longstanding shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized policing, using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy militarized weaponry. That’s been longstanding, fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns. But more recently, there’s been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems, that have been used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere, as sort of a domestic policing technology. It’s basically a really big, booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems, on the back of the war on terror.