The story was run by EPW in Vol. 52, Issue No. 24, June 17, 2017.

In response to the article, EPW received a legal notice from a lawyer representing Adani Power, which is headed by Gautam Adani. The legal notice accused EPW and the writers of the article of defamation and threatened legal action unless the piece was retracted, an unconditional apology was issued, and any defamatory material on Adani not be published by the magazine “in any manner whatsoever”.

EPW, has completely stood by its story and in his reply to Adani Power’s lawyer, EPW’s advocate reaffirmed that each and every word in the article was truthful and backed by documentary evidence. In the reply to the notice by Adani, they have stated among other things,

"8.            That on the issue of misuse of the export promotion scheme, even the Hon’ble Supreme Court has used very harsh language against your client as to how your client has misused the scheme and fraudulently inflated export turnover, and how your client has even without making actual exports, played around with the provisions of the scheme and tried to take undue advantage thereof. This finding of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India has also been quoted by my client’s in the said article. Thus, the reporting done by my client’s is not only back and supported by documentary evidence, but also by judicial pronouncement.

"9.            That in view of the above it is re-iterated that there is not an iota of substance in your client’s bald claims. Your client will be well advised to withdraw your legal notice dated 24.06.2017, failing which my client shall be constrained to invoke the majesty of law to the hilt, should your client choose to trigger the first ill conceived/advised shot. Your client may kindly note the adage “be you ever so high, law is above you”. Your client may further be informed that truth can never be suppressed and it is the constitutional obligation of an independent journalist to surface the truth at any cost. I do sincerely hope, you would be gracious enough to suitably advise your client appropriately."

The EPW article can be read here

Adani Power’s legal notice can be read here

EPW’s reply to the legal notice can be read here.
 
 

The post Adani Group’s Defamation Notice To EPW Journal For Story On Rs 500 Crore Favors From Modi Govt appeared first on SabrangIndia.

India’s banking system, which was robust enough to withstand the financial crisis of 2008, is facing a crisis today. The banks, particularly the public sector ones, are burdened with huge amounts of non performing assets (NPAs), which are threatening the viability of the banking sector.
In the last three years, under BJP rule at the center, the NPAs of the banks have tripled – from Rs. 2.3 lakh crores to Rs. 6.8 lakh crores. Currently, the NPAs of public sector banks stand as high as 11% of their total advances.

Non-repayment of loans by some of India’s biggest corporate houses is the major cause of this huge accumulation of NPAs. According to the chairman of Parliamentary Accounts Committee, K V Thomas, a handful of big corporate houses account for 70% of the NPAs of the banks.

The Finance Minister Mr. Arun Jaitly, tried to absolve himself and his government of all the blame, claiming that the NPAs are a legacy problem. According to him the loans that were given during UPA government have turned bad and are accumulating as NPAs today.

While it is true that the UPA government compelled the public sector banks to dole out loans worth lakhs of crores to a handful of corporates, the BJP government is not far behind. It is helping the same corporates in continuing to default on the repayments – with the aid of loan refinancing and restructuring schemes introduced by the Reserve Bank.
In the last three Modi years, public sector banks have been pressured to restructure bad loans (under various schemes of RBI) worth Rs. 3.5 lakh crores belonging to the corporate houses.. These restructuring deals simply meant that the companies get new loans to pay off their old loans, which they have already defaulted on. These schemes also involve changing the terms of payments in favour of the defaulting corporates.

The infamous case of Vijay Mallya defrauding the public sector banks, is all too well known. Less publicised are those of Modi’s own crony capitalists. It is estimated that companies controlled by Adani, owe a debt of Rs. 72,000 crores mostly to public sector banks.
Since 2014, two power companies controlled by Adani’s firms have been extended loan refinance worth Rs. 15,000 crore by the public sector banks. This was done when both the companies’ earnings -before tax- were not even enough to cover the interest cost on the loans they have taken. In this sweetheart deal, the previous defaulted loans were replaced with new loans and loan repayment date was extended by one more decade. Additionally, a moratorium on interest payments was given for a considerable period, meaning that in this period these two firms need not pay even the interest amount.

Similarly, after Modi came to power, Mr. Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Gas Transport Infrastructure Ltd. (RGTIL), was given a loan refinance of Rs. 4,500 crores and an extension of payment period by more than a decade.           

According to Arun Jaitly, most of the NPAs and bad loans are due to projects in power, infrastructure, mining and steel sectors – which are owned by the large corporates like Reliance, Adani and Vedanta. Let us not forget, these are the same companies (remember Vedanta’s land grab in Orissa), whose factories and plants were set up by grabbing thousands of acres of land belonging to famers and tribals.

These billionaire promoters and owners of the companies should have been compelled to transfer the shares (equity) of these companies, to the public sector banks, in lieu of the unpaid loans. Or, they should have been made to inject fresh capital in to the defaulting companies. Refinancing of the loans, extension of payment schedules and moratoriums on interest payments – without placing any responsibility on those who control the companies are bound to bring even heavier losses to the banks in the coming days.

The government seems to think that Mukesh Ambani, with net worth of more than Rs. 1.5 lakh crore rupees needs assistance in paying back the loans of his companies, while the farmers of this country are given no recourse after severe droughts and crop losses. Desperate after years of draught, farmers from Tamil Nadu and elsewhere have been agitating for months for loan waivers. Their appeals to the central government have fallen on deaf ears. Modi government steadfastly refused to provide any assistance to the debt ridden farmers. Are the farmer’s making ridiculous demands? Consider this – The entire amount of crop loans in India is worth Rs. 75,000 crore, while Mr. Adani’s firms alone owes Rs. 72,000 crores to the banking system. Adani gets a generous restructuring on the defaulted loans, while the farmers get tough love.

While the corporates are being given a free pass, Mr. Modi’s pets in RBI are baying for the blood of public sector banks. Recently, RBI’s deputy chairman Viral Aacharya suggested that the solution to the NPA crisis is re-privatisation of some of the public sector banks and some divestment of government’s stake in others, in favour of private players. RBI Chairman, Mr. Urjit Patel was not far behind, with suggestion that small banks afflicted with NPA problems should be allowed to perish naturally. The RBI satraps seem to be forgetting that it is the bulwark of public sector banks that protected India’s financial system from the crisis of 2008.

For Mr. Modi it is not enough, that Indian corporates have defrauded banks of the public money, they are now being offered the ownership of these banks.
Concession after concession given to corporates is what marks Mr. Modi’s 3 years at the helm and there is no indication of change in course away from this. Mr. Modi is making sure that those whose money purses have brought him power are going to stay safe and sound from the consequences of their own financial and business follies. Now that he has passed a law allowing corporates to make anonymous donations to political parties, grateful corporates will no doubt be flooding him with gratitude funds for his never ending election campaigns.

Courtesy: Newsclick

The post Corporate Loot of Our Banks Has Tripled in 3 Years of the Modi Regime appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Interview with Kiran Chandra
May 19, 2017
Interviewed by Pranjal , a Newsclick Production

Recent media reports have showcased  massive job cuts in the IT sector. Here, in this interview, Kiran Chandra from Forum for IT Professionals, speaks to  Newsclick on the  issue. Automation is one of the chief reasons for this retrenchment. 

Global leaders in the industry, especially in the U.S, have started adopting a protectionist policy for their countries. As a result, they are also altering the way jobs are outsourced to India.

The third important reason for this is the policy paralysis which has affected India over the past three decades. The government has been depending on the US economy for job opportunities rather than building these within India .

The post The Real Reasons Why Jobs are Being Lost in the IT Sector appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Modi government’s historic blunder of banning notes on Nov.8 has destroyed the lives of crores of poor people in the country, causing irreversible damage that will cast a long shadow in the months to come. Typically, Modi and his sycophants have been going around claiming that this disastrous ‘plan’ will usher in achhe din for the country, ignoring the hardship and pain it has caused. Here is a brief look at some of the destructive results of Modi’s folly.

Jobs
Various economists have estimated that economic growth will dip by anything between 2 to 7 percent because of note ban. If the economy itself slows down, jobs are going to be lost. This is confirmed by evidence from all corners of the country. Various sectors like automobiles, construction and allied sectors, jewelry, textiles and real estate have reported temporary closures and retrenchments for formal/regular workers. Some reports have indicated that over 4 lakh jobs were lost in the first three weeks of note ban. In the textile sector, nearly 25% jobs were reportedly lost while over 60,000 workers became jobless in the leather sector and about 15-20% workers in the gems and jewelry sector lost their jobs. But the real axe has fallen on contract and casual workers in India’s informal sector that employs 94 percent of the workforce. Large scale stoppage of work was reported from agriculture, micro and small manufacturing, retail and wholesale trade, and various service sector units like shops, warehouses, etc. Informal sector job losses are such that when and how they will be recovered is uncertain. Large scale return migration of agricultural labour from states like Punjab has also taken place. Even MGNREGS jobs declined by 23 percent in the aftermath of notebandi. This was the most devastating blow to the poor given by Modi’s plan.

Wage Loss
Apart from those who lost their jobs, lakhs of agricultural labourers, casual labourers in rural and urban areas, and even formal sector workers lost wages for two to three weeks after the note ban. This was because the whole economy ground to a halt. In some parts of the country, like Jharkhand and Odisha’s tribal belt, daily wage fell to a mere Rs.50 per day. For these millions of daily earners, this was a huge damage and has pushed many into debt. Regular wage earners too had to spend days in queues trying to get out cash just to sustain themselves. Many had to barter away small items in exchange for other necessities while others were forced to accept payments in kind, often at much lower rates (like a kilo of rice for a day’s work). 

Rabi crop
Another major economic loss at mass scale, especially in the Northern states, has been the delay in rabi sowing, especially of wheat. In the week ending 11 November, wheat sowing was down by 41 percent over the normal. After that it continued to be behind schedule and reached normal levels only by 16 December. It was only on 21 November, almost two weeks after the ban was announced that some concession was given for farmers to withdraw cash for completing the sowing process. Reports indicate that farmers somehow managed to get the sowing done after delaying as much as they could but they are now facing the problem of providing water, fertilisers, and other inputs. Many farmers have reported that new plants are not going to survive or may yield low grain output because of pinched input availability.

Farmers' prices
A direct result of the notes ban was that for several weeks afterwards, producers of fruits and vegetables were unable to transport their produce to bigger mandis because of lack of cash. This resulted in prices crashing in rural areas across the country, with some APMCs recording 70 percent drop in prices. In many areas farmers abandoned standing crops of tomatoes and other vegetables, or threw away harvested produce because they did not have the money to transport it. Small farmers have been especially hit because they did not have the kind of resources, credit-worthiness or connections to ride out the storm. Fruit farmers in the hilly states as also orange farmers in Vidarbha lost heavily because their precious crop was sold at throwaway prices.

Nutrition
According to various reports, govt. run nutrition programs in anganwadis and in schools have suffered because of the note ban. Anganwadis reported that over 16 lakh less children turned up to get supplementary nutrition across the country in November compared to October. This was because the anganwadi workers were struggling to arrange food for them with funds inaccessible in banks. Similarly about 5.8 lakh pregnant women and 4.7 lakh nursing mothers, both in dire need of nutrition, were unable to get the supplementary nutrition from anganwadis. Note that in India, over half of pregnant women are anemic and almost a third of infants/children are badly nourished. The sudden deprivation of nutrition would cause irreversible damage to them. Besides this, lack of cash has also destroyed family budgets and would have led to slashing of daily food consumption for at least a few weeks.

Other Suffering
Life was completely thrown out of gear with normal activities like schools, marriages, other family occasions, trips etc. getting postponed. Sickness and injury had to be neglected and treatment postponed, even child birth in remote areas was undertaken at home rather than the nearest govt. center because of lack of cash for transportation. In many cases when expenditures were unavoidable – as in a pre-fixed marriage or medical emergency – the family ran up a huge debt. Many families suffered losses because of having to exchange old notes for less than their value in emergencies. In many rural areas, commodities were selling at higher price if you had only old notes to give, effectively causing a loss to the owner of those notes. Those without bank accounts or who could not get easy access to their banks suffered the most.

Courtesy: Communist Party of India Marxist

The post 50 days of Notebandi : Disastrous Impact of Modi’s Folly-One appeared first on SabrangIndia.

रेटिंग एजेंसी ने इसके पीछे भारत के ऋण स्‍तर और बैंकों के नाजुक हालत का हवाला दिया था। रॉयटर्स ने कई दस्‍तावेजों की समीक्षा के बाद इस बात की खबर दी है।
 
रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक, वित्‍त मंत्रालय ने अक्‍टूबर में कई लेटर और ईमेल के जरिए रेटिंग करने की मूडीज की कार्यशैली पर सवाल खड़े किए थे। इनमें कहा गया था कि हाल के सालों में भारत के कर्ज स्‍तर में नियमित तौर पर कमी आई है लेकिन मूडीज ने इसका ध्‍यान नहीं रखा। मंत्रालय ने कहा कि मूडीज जब व‍िभिन्‍न देशों की राजकोषीय ताकत की समीक्षा कर रही थी तो उसने इन देशों के विकास स्‍तर को नजरअंदाज कर दिया। सरकार ने इसके लिए जापान और पुर्तगाल का उदाहरण दिया था। अपनी अर्थव्‍यवस्‍था से करीब दोगुना कर्ज होने के बावजूद इन देशों की रेटिंग बढ़िया थी।
मूडीज ने वित्‍त मंत्रालय के इन आरोपों को खारिज कर दिया और कहा कि भारत के ऋण संबंधी हालात इतने बढ़िया नहीं हैं, जितना कि सरकार बता रही है। मूडीज ने इसके अलावा भारत के बैंकों को लेकर भी चिंता जाहिर की थी। मूडीज की एक प्रमुख स्‍वतंत्र विश्‍लेषक मेरी डिरॉन ने कहा था कि दूसरे देशों के मुकाबले भारत का ना सिर्फ कर्ज संकट ज्‍यादा बड़ा है बल्कि कर्ज वहन करने की इसकी क्षमता भी काफी कम है।

मीडिया रिपोर्ट्स के मुताबिक, डिरॉन से जब इस प्रकरण के बारे में पूछा गया तो उन्‍होंने टिप्‍पणी करने से इनकार कर दिया और कहा कि रेटिंग संबंधी बातचीत सार्वजनिक नहीं की जा सकती है। उधर, वित्‍त मंत्रालय ने भी इस बारे में कमेंट करने से इनकार कर दिया। वित्‍त मंत्रालय के एक पूर्व अधिकारी अरविंद मायाराम ने सरकार के इस अप्रोच को पूरी तरह असाधारण बताया। उन्‍होंने कहा, 'रेटिंग एजेंसियों पर किसी भी तरीके से दबाव नहीं बनाया जा सकता है। ऐसा नहीं किया जाना चाहिए।'

Courtesy: National Dastak

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2. मूडीज की नरेंद्र मोदी सरकार को दो टूक- आपने ऐसा कुछ नहीं किया कि हम भारत को दें बेहतर रेटिंग

The post फर्जी रेटिंग से लिए मूडीज से सेटिंग करना चाहती थी केंद्र सरकार, मिला झटका appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Demonetisation is not merely an ill-thought out strike against the real economy by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his troupe of sycophants and followers.

The post Demonetisation – Hindutva’s obscurantism In the Economic Sphere appeared first on SabrangIndia.

New Delhi: The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) has pulled up the Income Tax Department for giving benefit of Rs 1,767 crore to the port and terminal arm of Reliance Industries by allowing deductions meant for public facilities to the company's captive jetties. It said the income tax assessing officer allowed deduction of Rs 5,245.38 crore to Reliance Ports and Terminals Ltd towards construction of four captive jetties at Port Sikka in Gujarat without examining the eligibility criteria for allowance of the deduction. PTI
 

The post Crony Capitalism at Work, Reliance Ports gets Rs 1,767 cr Irregular Tax Benefit: CAG appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Surprising as it might seem, "the most truly Islamic” countries in the world are not Saudi Arabia, Iran or other Muslim-majority countries. Instead, New Zealand, Luxemburg, Ireland, Iceland and Finland are on top of the list of the most ‘Islam complaint’ countries.

Not a single majority Muslim country made the top 25 and no Arab country is in the top 50 in the researchers’ list.

Only Malaysia (38) and Kuwait (48) featured in its top 50 countries, compared to the US at 15, as is the Netherlands, while France is at 17.

The findings of the research first published in the Global Economy Journal in 2010 (‘How Islamic are Islamic countries?’) made it to the mainline media in 2014 following an interview given by one of the authors, Hossein Askari, to BBC. A Google search indicates that even after that the findings were not widely reported, at least in English language media.  

How did the two Muslim authors-researchers – Scheherazade S Rahman and Hossein Askari, both professors at George Washington University – arrive at this apparently highly intriguing finding? They evolved four different indices based on economic factors, governance, human and political rights, and international relations to arrive at an ‘Overall Islamicity index’ which was then applied to grade each country.

The country which emerged as the most faithful to the values of the Quran was Ireland, the Iran-born Askari told BBC in his 2014 interview.

Professor Askari noted that “many countries that profess Islam and are called Islamic are unjust, corrupt, and underdeveloped and are in fact not ‘Islamic’ by any stretch of the imagination.”

On the index of ‘Economic Islamicity’, applied to analyse how closely the policies and achievements of countries reflect Islamic economic teachings, Ireland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Sweden, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore, Finland, Norway and Belgium made it to the top 10.

In their ‘Overall Islamicity Index’, the rankings were much the same: New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, Iceland, Finland, Denmark, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Netherlands.

“If a country, society, or community displays characteristics such as unelected, corrupt, oppressive, unjust rulers, inequality before the law, unequal opportunities for human development, absence of freedom of choice (including that of religion), opulence alongside poverty, force, and aggression as the instruments of conflict resolution as opposed to dialogue and reconciliation, and, above all, the prevalence of injustice of any kind, it is prima facie evidence that it is not an Islamic community,” professor Askari said.

“Islam is, and has been for centuries, the articulation of the universal love of Allah for his creation and for its unity, and all that this implies for all-encompassing human and economic development,” he concluded.

The full report published in the Global Economy Journal may be accessed here.

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If we stopped imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers, desire could become an engine of social transformation.

At a recent event featuring my son’s choir in Indianapolis, I was dismayed when the director urged the audience to fill out a national “economic impact of the arts” survey that had been inserted into our concert programs. Are we still making the arts and humanities justify their existence like this? It’s a trend that emerged 20 years ago when I worked at my first arts organization at a time when Bill Clinton was elected President on the back of his famous slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid."

In the intervening years I’ve seen the business model take over more and more arts groups, universities, NGOs and even cities (aka the “city as start-upCEOS for Cities”), a process that’s been accompanied by increasing poverty and inequality, failing infrastructures and social safety nets, and systems that perpetuate war and austerity. Yet despite these failures we still cling to business-as-usual economic icons.

I turned my back on these icons long ago. Not only do I balk at creativity born in service to pragmatism (because it’s illogical as well as uninspired), but I also fear the loss of the ‘poetic’ in society—something I’ve since learned to be a gender-coded word for ‘not us,’ its power diminished to second-class status under all things feasible, fundable, scalable and profit-making.

As a social entrepreneur and a consultant to others who are trying to push the economy further in the direction of caring, equality and sharing, I’ve found it impossible to conform to what has been expected of me. Rather than sales tools, the advice I offer is purposely thoughtful and philosophical, but rejected as “too pink” by one tech incubator, so “stick to your knitting

Even the urban-creative Maker’s Movement, awash with bearded transcendentals heralding a much needed return to craft, is over-masculinized in its bias for doing and making things by artisans, tech- and tool-makers and ‘men of action.’ Meanwhile, no one is talking about the more complex, relational, change-centered, feminine equivalent called poiesis or the craft of the imagination. No concrete outputs or return on investment? You’re fired!

We are inundated daily with images of balloonishly inflated boobs, untemptingly taut torsos and artificially outsized arses or the opposite—skeletal legs and faces. This isn’t erotic, it’s neurotic, cartoonish and grotesque. These cultural fetishes are junk food, offering a momentary mirage of satisfaction but in the longer term sexually malnourishing.

All of which has made me lean out still further in my attempts to prepare for a radically different economy, but what language should I be using to describe it? ‘Poetic’ sounds fine to me but seems ‘too feminine’ to others, but then I listened to American author and activist Audre Lorde and that’s when it hit me: the erotic economy is really what we need.

“The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros,” she writes, “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony…it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?”

Of course, well trained by mainstream economy’s consumer and capitalist underpinnings, a phrase like eroticeconomy is bound to turn our thoughts to the sex industry, pornography and adult entertainment or, perhaps even worse, to the dreary notion of sexual capital – a dark, asset-based perspective on erotic power.

We are inundated daily with images of balloonishly inflated boobs, untemptingly taut torsos and artificially outsized arses or the opposite—skeletal legs and faces. This isn’t erotic, it’s neurotic, cartoonish and grotesque. These cultural fetishes are junk food, offering a momentary mirage of satisfaction but in the longer term sexually malnourishing. If you’re like me, you are sick of these dehumanizing cultural phenomena: tired Kardashian tropes about what is sexy and the constant application of the word capital to human beings who are used, exchanged and depleted in the process.  

But we don’t have to think this way. Here’s Lorde again

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

Unfortunately, conventional economics does just that—settling for the convenient, shoddy and expected by focusing on private profits and the financial bottom line. What’s missing is creative tension, a vital and free interplay between forces, people, ideas, exchanges, colors, genders, sexualities and intellects, brimming with hopeful and authentic purpose and satisfaction.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the depths of economic reductionism parallel the heights of capitalism’s hubris. After all, a recent Presidential ‘debate’ between Republican contenders in the USA featured Donald Trump comparing his genitals with those of a group of fellow frat boys. Definitely not erotic.

What Lorde is saying, it seems to me, is that “erotic knowledge” in the deeper and richer sense provides a radically different foundation for politics and the economy, and one that has some strong historical precedents. For example, less than a year after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 in which more than 100 young women perished in New York, the Bread and Roses textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts galvanized the international labor movement by refusing “an economistic approach that reduced the question of justice to the fulfillment of bare needs

Instead, their campaign slogan—“We need bread, but we need roses, too”—challenged the prevailing notion of a ‘hierarchy of needs’ by placing human dignity and creativity at the same level as physiology. As a sustainable apparel entrepreneur, I’m keenly aware that just over a century later in 2013, more than 1,100 people died in the Rana Plaza garment factory collapse in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where many American clothing companies manufactured cheap, fast fashion. In the process, people of relative privilege in one part of the world made themselves look sexy in exchange for the blood, trauma and lives that were lost elsewhere. This is the opposite of a true, erotic economy.

In the existing scheme of things, people are objectified in a system that’s invested in making sure that we dress, act, perform and compete in the public arena as economic units, while keeping our erotic power silenced in private isolation. The conventional economy manipulates and manufactures our desires; it doesn’t liberate them to be used in processes of transformation as Lorde demands.

That sort of transformation starts with the moral and aesthetic desire to design a better system that reflects our highest ideals. Then it provides a structural platform made up from a basic income, fair labor and wealth distribution, and social-safety nets on which people can be free to learn, contribute, care and create rather than to compete, leverage and destroy. An erotic economy like this would underwrite and unleash everyone’s creativity and capacity for living, re-imagining economics not as a manipulative and mechanistic game but as a humanly crafted means to liberation.

In my own work I’m trying to put these ideals into practice by creating a radically different incubator called the Imaginarium, which aims to honor and nurture the value of poetic, creative and erotic elements in new start-ups. I envision a free, local community platform for discussion, engagement, and the development of ideas, which will help to reclaim the human capacity for free thinking and imagination.

The erotic economy is a yin economy, a full inversion of everything we currently believe about economics, driven not by unsexy abstract dollars and cardboard men in suits but by human beings who fulfill their unique capacities for inquiry, inventiveness, experimentation, emotion, love, empathy and free expression. If these things can be made into our common currency instead of money and shareholder value, then true wealth might be available to all, even to those who are already financially well-off.

If we stopped imprisoning our emotions in industrially manufactured profit centers and let them permeate our entire human enterprise, desire will be ours again. The erotic economy could be a supremely renewable form of energy and an engine of social transformation.

This article was published on Open Democracy.
 

The post The Erotic Economy: It’s Not What You Think appeared first on SabrangIndia.