Hello Diane! I admire Chomsky, but I don't find much visual evidence of greater immiseration in absolute terms around me. India's GDP has trebled in last 20 years, it's unlikeky that things are worse. There is no indication destitution will get worse in India. But then India is among the less globally integrated economies in India.
But here is what Chomsky says in his interview by The Croatian Feral Tribune on 27 April:
Toni Gabric: "What are the perspectives of overcoming the division between the rich North and poor South? We can see that the conference in Monterrey did not produce significant results. Can the cost of maintaining military control over the poor peoples become too expensive for the rich West, therefore leading to a more just distribution of world riches?"
Chomsky:"The US intelligence community, with participation of academic experts and the business world, recently produced its forecast for the next 15 years. It expects that "globalization" (in the special sense of power centers) will proceed on course, leading to greater financial volatility and a widening economic divide. Greater financial volatility means even slower growth than in the "globalization" period of the past 25 years, which was accompanied by significant deterioration of standard macroeconomic and social indicators as compared with the "pre-globalization" period of the Bretton Woods years (roughly 1950 to the early 1970s. A widening economic divide means less globalization in the technical sense (convergence to single price-wage, etc.) but more globalization in the ideologically preferred sense (concentration of wealth and power). Military planners adopt the same forecasts. US plans for militarisation of space in violation of the Outer Space Treaty are based, explicitly, on the assumption that there will be a growing divide between "haves" and "have-nots" and that new forms of military force will be needed to secure "US commercial interests and investments" in the face of rising disorder among the "have-nots". This is spelled out with great clarity in Clinton-era documents of the Space Command and elsewhere. What is planned, then, is increasing polarization, and development of sufficient force to control it in the interests of wealth and privilege. No one can predict with any confidence whether such plans will succeed, any more than in the past. The primary determinants are immeasurable and unpredictable: will and choice."
Ulhas