Arundhati Roy: The People Who Created the Crisis Will Not Be the Ones That Come Up With a Solution

one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. This movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, and a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale

The need for a different imagination than that of capitalism.

In the United States 400 of the richest people owns wealth equivalent to that of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth.

Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organizations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

The whole privatization of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop.

People has been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilization and progress.

There is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilization, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfillment.

ending pervasive corporate control of the political system

introducing a new political language into the United States

the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped US's political discourse

reigniting a new political imagination

discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomize. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

US people excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East.

The Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse.

In the US the poor have been invisibilized, because its model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell.

We need to reclaim language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

Whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theater, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball. A pretty elaborate trap.