The Indian novelist writes a cogent counternarrative to the effect of globalization on developing nations, particularly India.  Well worth reading, IMO.  In PDF format.  Quotes follow

…the system of representative democracy—too much representation, too little democracy—needs some structural adjustment.

 …all of us know that just like global capital, political systems are interconnected too. More often than not it is the great democratic nations— masquerading as the gatekeepers of morality and the saviors of humanity— that support, fund and reinforce military dictatorships and totalitarian regimes.

What happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?

As the globalized corporate economy strengthens its grip on our lives and our imaginations, its beneficiaries have united and seceded into outer space.  From there they look down at the forests and river valleys where the poor live and see superfluous people sitting on precious resources. They are puzzled. They wonder: What’s our water doing in their rivers, what’s our bauxite doing in their mountains? What’s our iron-ore doing in their forests? The Nazis had a phrase for superfluous people überzaÅNhligen Essern, superfluous eaters.

Today, words like ‘Progress’ and ‘Development’ have become interchangeable with economic ‘Reforms’, Deregulation and Privatization. ‘Freedom’ has come to mean ‘choice’. It has less to do with the human spirit than it does with different brands of deodorant. ‘Market’ no longer means a place where you go to buy provisions. The ‘Market’ is a de-territorialized space where faceless corporations do business, including buying and selling ‘futures’. ‘Justice’ has come to mean ‘human rights’ (and of those, as they say, ‘a few will do’). This theft of language, this technique of usurping words and deploying them like weapons, of using them to mask intent and to mean exactly the opposite of what they have traditionally meant, has been one of the most brilliant strategic victories of the new dispensation. It has allowed them to marginalize their detractors, deprive them of a language in which to voice their critique and dismiss them as being ‘anti-progress’, ‘anti-development’, ‘anti-reform’ and of course ‘antinational’— negativists of the worst sort.

http://www.literaturfestival.com/intern/reden/arundhati_roy_engl