CORPORATIONS BRIBING GOVERNMENTS TO BUILD DAMS AND POWER PLANTS

Arundhati Roy wrote in Power Politics that Enron bribed state legislators and judges in India with millions of dollars (rumors of $13 million) to commit to a contract to pay very high prices ($30 billion for water) for a power plant that Enron was building in Maharashtra. It is cheaper for the people to pay penalties (of $ 220 million per year) for not buying the electricity than to buy the water at the high price. The ex-US ambassador to India joined the Board of Enron and threatened that if the Indian government did not auction off public buildings to pay off Enron, the US would impose penalties. The judges in India are bribed too and impose contempt of court sentences on dam protestors. The Supreme Court justice even said all rivers must be connected. Roy writes that the media, the courts, the nationalistic religions, the political parties are all bribed to enrich foreign corporations that gouge the poor for water, taxes, and electricity. Small scale farmers are committing suicide as cheap US subsidized crops are let in and loans for pesticides, seeds, and fertilizers are manipulated to bankrupt them. Also, dams are built that flood the land, displacing farmers and villagers, while providing power and water to large corporations. Then the farmers are taxed to pay for the dams. It is like John Nichols' The Malign Beanfield War a novel of natives and Latinos being heavily taxed to build a dam to take away their land and water and give it to real estate developers to build tourist traps, vacation homes for the wealthy, and a golf course.