Category: Uncategorized

by B. R. GOWANI

Geographic twins

The unequal twins, India and Pakistan, got partitioned in 1947. Since then there has been a (less) love-hate (more) relation between them. They are conjoined and chances are nil that they can file for geographical divorce.

There are only two ways India and Pakistan can distance themselves forever: fortunately, one is impossible <1> and the other one is more than couple of hundred million years in the future <2> — and even in that scenario, there is no guarantee things can turn out the way both want. Besides, after the continent merge, who knows the neighbor might be someone like the US! Ask Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum.

In reality, both countries are bound together for eternity, and they should improve relations, increase trade, ease travel restrictions, jointly produce music, films, TV dramas, and so on.

The recent Monsoon floods have killed about 800 people in Pakistan, and dozens of people in Indian Kashmir.

At 48 miles (72 km) length, the Himalayan Siachen glacier, known as the “Third Pole,” consisting of 15,000 glaciers all over the range is the 3rd largest snow and ice deposit, after the Antarctica and Arctic.

A recent study states that due to rising temperatures, the glaciers are melting 65% faster, since the 1990s. This affects more than a billion people. It causes floods, affects water availability, agriculture, and other issues.

Joint efforts by Pakistan and India are needed to address this, for the sake of their people, many of them live and work in subhuman conditions.

Most of the dirty work in India is done by untouchables and outcasts known as Dalits. In Pakistan, most of it is done by tiny minorities of Hindus and Christians.

Pakistani newspaper Dawn’s India correspondent Jawed Naqvi points out:

“Why is it so difficult to instill a simple, inexpensive idea for diplomacy? Why not let the masses — as opposed to state-backed mobs — take the initiative to build inevitable excellent ties, and see the menace called terrorism vanish in a jiffy?”

The leaders of Pakistan and India, and 20 other leaders, will attend the SCO Summit 2025 in Tianjin, China, on August 31 and September 1.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)

In 1996, the Shanghai Five was formed by China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan. In 2001, Uzbekistan became the sixth member. Shanghai Five name was then changed to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). SCO is a Eurasian political, economic and international security organization. Later, four more countries with observer status became members: India and Pakistan in 2017, Iran in 2023, and Belarus in 2024.

Fourteen countries Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Cambodia, Egypt, Kuwait, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and UAE (United Arab Emirates) are dialogue partners.

Afghanistan and Mongolia have observer status, while Turkmenistan attends summits as a guest attendee.

The United Nations (UN), Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), and Commonwealth of Independent Sates (CIS) are guest attendees too.

In 2005, US asked to attend as an observer but was denied the request.

Chinese overture

As the host, China is trying to make the summit a success, highly aware that India’s relations with the US have hit a roadblock. China would like to gain from this. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has decided to attend the summit in person, not virtually, as he has been doing last several years. He will be visiting China after seven years.

Last week, the Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan. In Pakistan, on August 21, he declared:

“South Asian countries have a long history, splendid civilization, large population, and huge development potential.”

He further added: Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan are:

“China’s close neighbors linked by mountains and rivers, and also an important direction for China to build a community with a shared future in its neighborhood.”

In New Delhi, breaking protocol, Modi himself met Wang Yi and accepted the SCO summit invitation.

Modi

Modi, a member of the paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) became chief minister of Gujarat in 2001. The very next year, under his watch about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were murdered in a Hindu-led pogrom. This turned him into a hero for his Hindu followers. His grip on power gained strength and, eventually, led him to the premiership.

For this Gujarat massacre, Modi was denied a US visa and remained banned from the country, for almost a decade. It was only after he became prime minister, that the ban was lifted.

Modi had gotten too close to US President Donald Trump with his 2019 “Howdy Modi” spectacle in Houston with 50,000 Indians in attendance. In 2020, in Modi’s home state, “Kem chho Trump” (How are you, Trump), later renamed “Namaste India,” to avoid impression of using Modi’s native Gujarati, was attended by Trump and more than 100,000 people. Both events were also kind of election rallies.

Modi made some wrong moves and great blunders in 2024 and 2025:

• In 2024 September, he attended the UN annual session in New York. The US presidential campaign was in full swing with Vice President Kamala Harris (Democratic candidate) and Trump (Republican candidate). On September 17, before Modi’s arrival, Trump stated Modi was coming to meet him. Modi didn’t meet either candidates. Trump didn’t like that, so Modi was not invited for his second inauguration. That was a serious blunder on part of Modi because Trump expects strong loyalty.
• In wake of terror killing of 26 people in Kashmir, Modi blamed Pakistan without providing proof and broke all contact with its neighbor. Two weeks later, he initiated a war against Pakistan. The war lasted less than 100 hours and cost India several air planes and caused a big dent in Modi’s reputation as a strong leader.
• With war, Modi augmented Pakistan’s Chief of the Army Staff Asim Munir‘s personal ego and public popularity. Thus, he did great disfavor to the people of Pakistan, where the military’s grip has further tightened. That was yet another blunder.
• Pakistan thanked Trump for bringing the war to an end, but Modi never commented on this. India’s stand is that the ceasefire came into effect at Pakistan’s request, Pakistan rejects this. Trump remembers Modi’s silence.
• Trump had invited Modi for a formal dinner at the White House on June 17, 2025 but Modi declined, fearing Trump would make him face Munir. Modi again blundered.

Modi’s stand is that Kashmir is a bilateral issue and should be solved between Pakistan and India. That is wrong policy. Sometimes, a mediator is needed and there is nothing wrong as a solution can emerge from it.

Trump regime doubled the tariff rate to 50% on Indian goods on August 27 because of India’s import of oil from Russia. (The biggest beneficiary of Russian oil imports has been Modi’s supporter and fellow Gujarati Mukesh Ambani, Asia’s richest and world’s 13th richest person.)

18% of Indian exports go to US, India’s biggest importer. Production in three Indian cities have been stopped by apparel and textile manufacturers on August 26 because of these high tariffs.

This is a big problem for Modi, but it looks like finally, he has decided to take some stand. In recent weeks, Modi has refused to take four phone calls from Trump, according to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). The paper speculates that Modi’s refusal is due to the “depth of his anger, but also his caution.”

It’s hard to predict if Trump will reduce the tariff rate, or whether Modi will call Trump. Both have big egos and are like cult leaders to their followers. Modi has now realized putting all eggs in one basket (US), now showing much uncertainty, is not a sound decision so he is getting closer to China.

The Global South leaders should bear in mind the US national security advisor Henry Kissinger’s words:

“… it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”

Munir

A Pakistani general once told Tariq Ali:

“Pakistan was the condom that the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan. We’ve served our purpose and they think we can be just flushed down the toilet.”

But the Pakistani army is environmentally friendly and would like to recycle that condom for reuse again and again through flattery, suggesting Trump’s name for Nobel Prize, or, handing US some or other alleged or actual terrorist, etc.

Pakistan’s Islamist Supreme Leader General Asim Munir is still flying high for a few reasons:

• Pakistan’s slight dominance in aerial warfare during the May war,
• Munir’s lunch with Trump,
• his other US trip to attend a farewell event for General Michael Kurilla, the 15th commander of the United States Central Command, and
• the meet with the Pakistani diaspora.

Munir, intoxicated with power, declared in Tampa, Florida:

“we are a nuclear nation, if we think we are going down, we’ll take half the world down with us.”

Pakistan/India should remember

The leaders of India and Pakistan should remember that the Columbian era hasn’t ended yet — still The conquest Continues as Professor Noam Chomsky put it back in 1992 when the US was celebrating the Columbus Quincentenary. This is year 532 of the post-Columbus era.

German Chancellor Friederich Merz recently told the public broadcaster ARD:

“It would be good if this [Iranian] regime came to an end.” “[If they refuse to talk, then] Israel will go all the way.”

Just look at the Israeli carnage being carried out live in broad daylight, without any fear, on a daily basis on Palestinians in Gaza.

The Palestine Chronicle‘s Ramzy Baroud, a target of Zionist forces in the US, describes how Israel is systematically eliminating Palestinians:

“But for the systematic destruction of a whole nation to succeed, it must include the deliberate targeting of its scientists, doctors, intellectuals, journalists, artists and poets. While children and women remain the largest categories of victims, many of those killed in deliberate assassinations appear to be targeted specifically to disorient Palestinian society, deprive it of societal leadership, and render the process of rebuilding Gaza impossible.”

The white Western world is not out of the colonialist and imperialist mindset, and of divide and rule or divide and conquer mode. Indo-Pak leaders should stop competing for the role of “favorite” of the US and instead concentrate on enhancing their own relations.

Financially and economically challenged Pakistan, has hired six lobbying and legal firms spending $600,000 every month to get access to DC’s power corridors. India, with an economy ten times bigger than Pakistan, has hired two lobbyist firms and pays $200,000 a month for the same.

I have not included China above, because Chinese leaders demonstrate self-respect. They remember Opium Wars (First and Second), and the humiliation, death, and destruction inflicted on Chinese populace. China stands up against the US rather than bowing to it.

Chinese intervention is needed

By Chinese intervention I don’t mean military intervention; just a discussion breakthrough in mediation. China and India have border problems, and so do India and Pakistan. In this situation, some flexibility is needed on part of all the parties.

China is more powerful economically and technologically than India, so it should be somewhat charitable to India. On the other hand, Pakistan is an economically and technologically weaker neighbor of India who should extend some generosity towards Pakistan.

China should also make Pakistan military understand to come out of its exhilarated state and face the real world.

All three countries should understand that a war between any two of them — either through misunderstanding, provocation, or US instigation — will affect the third one and also affect the region. The US has nothing to lose as it’s situated thousands of miles away.

Why is common sense in so many country leaders so rare? Why are so many novice leaders so obsessed with power and not employing wise seasoned talent for the betterment of world citizenry?

Notes

<1> There are several maps, as Big Think (2010) and Medium (2021) where the most populated country gets matched with a country with the largest territory. The constantly changing population of each country and using a different methodology, are reasons why India, and Pakistan get assigned a different territory in both maps.

It is 2025, so the new map will assign Russia to India because in 2023, India became the most populous country.

<2> Some natural phenomenon occurs. About 335 million years ago, our world was one giant subcontinent or Pangaea. It started to break into many continents about 200 millions years back. Scientists say there will be one supercontinent again in 200 to 300 million years. Even if that happens again, there is no guarantee it would split the way Pakistan and India want. What if it splits in the middle making halves of both into two new units?

B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com

by NOOR MAHVISH

While Rs 1200 crore was spent on Swachh Bharat advertisements, Dalit workers continue to clean human waste with bare hands — and often die doing so. Manual scavenging remains a caste-imposed, deadly occupation masked by state neglect and public apathy. This is not development — it’s a democracy burying its most dehumanised citizens beneath the promise of cleanliness.

They go down into the sewers, but never come back the same. Some don’t come back at all.

This is not a line from a tragic novel. It is a brutal reality for thousands of Dalit workers across India who die, suffer, or disappear in the dark trenches of our gutters, septic tanks, and drains — all in the name of keeping our cities clean. Despite being legally banned, manual scavenging continues to kill, maim, and marginalize a community that has been historically dehumanized.

The Reality Beneath Our Feet

According to the National Commission for Safai Karamcharis (NCSK), over 400 deaths due to manual scavenging were recorded between 2018 and 2023. Activists and ground-level workers, however, insist the actual number is much higher, as many deaths go unreported, misreported, or simply ignored by local authorities. These are not accidents. These are institutional killings rooted in caste, class, and indifference.

Manual scavenging involves cleaning human waste from dry latrines, open drains, and septic tanks without protective gear. The Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013, outlaws the practice, but enforcement is feeble and convictions are rare.

In 1993, India first banned manual scavenging. In 2013, the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act expanded the ban and introduced rehabilitation measures. Yet, nothing changed on the ground. The sewers remained full, the machines missing, and the same community kept dying.

According to official figures, over 400 sanitation workers have died cleaning sewers in just the last five years, but some social organisations claim this is a gross undercount, as many deaths go unreported, misclassified, or settled quietly. The fact that even today humans are sent into toxic, oxygen-deprived chambers to clean feces with bare hands is not just a policy failure — it is a moral crisis. A democracy that promises dignity to all still allows one caste to die for the cleanliness of others.

Caste and the Curse of Birth

At the heart of this injustice lies India’s caste system. Nearly all manual scavengers belong to Dalit communities, particularly sub-castes like Valmiki, Balmiki, or Hela, historically labelled “untouchables.” This is not just a coincidence. It is caste-based occupational segregation — society telling people: “You were born to clean our filth.”

Insaf Bulletin for more

by JINOY JOSE P.

Dear reader,

“I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep,” Alexander the Great supposedly declared, “I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” History, it turns out, got this backwards. History’s most celebrated military genius was actually scared of cats, prone to alcoholic binges, lived a suitably blemished life, and died at 32 in Babylon under circumstances so mysterious that conspiracy theories persist even 23 centuries later. His empire crumbled within decades.

Yet, we remember him and many like him not despite his flaws, but perhaps because of them.

Today, as artificial intelligence promises us a world scrubbed clean of human error, we face an unprecedented question: What happens when the magnificent mistake-makers are finally perfected out of existence?

The digital revolution, powered now by the AI juggernaut, has ushered in what we might call the Great Standardisation—a relentless march towards algorithmic perfection that makes even our heroes uncomfortable with their own humanity. The force is omnipresent now. And it’s made out to be omnipotent, too. Reports from McKinsey to Stanford tell us that already more than two-thirds of the globe is using AI, and its adoption in business surged about 80 per cent in 2024. We’re witnessing the fastest technological adoption in human history, yet ironically, the cost of this efficiency may be the very essence of what makes us human.

Consider the modern predicament: To prove you’re human online, you must solve puzzles and identify traffic lights with mechanical precision. Make a mistake? You’re clearly a bot. Meanwhile, our culture increasingly demands the kind of flawless execution that would make even machines nervous. Perfect bodies sculpted by algorithms, relationships optimised for social media, and careers that tolerate zero learning curves. The irony is clear and present: in our quest to become more human, we’ve accidentally become less so.

The psychology of perfectionism tells a sobering story. Studies show that constantly chasing the spectre of perfection may harm your mental health and well-being, with researchers finding that perfectionism is prevalent among adolescents and may be harmful in terms of its association with mental health problems. The most debilitating form—socially prescribed perfectionism—occurs when “individuals believe their social context is excessively demanding, that others judge them harshly, and that they must display perfection to secure approval”.

Sound familiar? It’s the psychological blueprint of our AI-optimised world.

Frontline for more

THE GRAYZONE

Some of the most frequently downloaded Apple and Google apps were developed by Israeli spies and war criminals, generating billions in revenue for the apartheid economy.

The developers behind hundreds of Android and iPhone apps with billions of downloads are former Israeli spies whose apps are generating significant revenues for Israel’s genocidal war economy.

The apps I’ve identified range from innocuous image and video editing apps to casual games, and most users won’t be aware they’re installing Israeli products on their phones. Many of these app developers operate under the radar, their ownership structures are opaque and the identity of their owners isn’t commonly known.

The identification of these apps should add another frontier to the boycott, divest, sanctions movement, as it provides a straightforward way for ordinary people to avoid Israeli products that contribute to apartheid, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The proliferation of these apps on Apple’s App Store and the Google Play Store also raises questions over privacy and the harvesting of personal data, given the reputation of Israeli technology and past scandals involving spyware being smuggled onto devices by apps made in Israel.

One of the most significant Israeli app holding companies and developers is ZipoApps, whose model is to buy-out and monetise apps at a large scale. The apps owned by Zipo (which also goes by the name Rounds.com) include a suite of photo and video editing apps that have received hundreds of millions of total installs. Individual apps include Collage Maker Photo Editor and Instasquare Photo Editor: Neon, both of which have received more than 50 million downloads from the Google Play Store. Other ZipoApps products include baby photo editing and retouching tools. In 2022, the founder and CEO of Zipo, Gal Avidor, told an interviewer (in his only interview to date), that all the founders of the company are former Unit 8200 Israeli intelligence personnel. On Reddit, users have complained about ZipoApps approach to privacy and data mining. One popular group of tools known as Simple Gallery went from free and open source to a paid product with ads and trackers just one week after ZipoApps acquired it.

Another Israeli-owned photo editing app on the Play Store is the AI-powered Bazaart, which was founded by Dror Yaffe and Stas Goferman, two former IDF intelligence officers. Goferman far exceeded his mandatory service, spending a decade in the IDF up to 2011.

Facetune, made by the developer Lightricks and available for Android and iPhones, is another Israeli photo editing app with over 50 million installs. Users on the Apple Store have called Facetune, which demands access to unique identifiers and your location, a scam. The co-founder of Lightricks, Yaron Inger, spent five years in Unit 8200.

If you’re into mobile gaming, or if you create mobile games to sell, you will have come across Israeli company Supersonic from Unity, probably without knowing it. With billions of downloads in recent years, Supersonic is one of the largest mobile game publishers in the world with revenues estimated at around $23 million per year. Earlier this year the company reported that they owned three of the top ten most downloaded casual player mobile games in the world: Build a Queen, Going Balls, and Bridge Race. Trash Tycoon is another popular title. The company also has a game called ‘Conquer Countries’ which has been downloaded millions of times and on its advertising tile features a cartoon version of Donald Trump. The founder of Supersonic, Nadav Ashkenazy, spent seven and a half years in the IDF where he rose to become the head of operations for the Israeli air force, managing almost half the full-time staff. You can see all Supersonic’s games here.

A better-known Israeli mobile game app maker whose revenues we don’t have to estimate is Playtika. Listed on the NASDAQ, Playtika brings in revenues of more than $2.5 billion, generating significant taxes for Israel’s mass slaughter machine. Playtika, which builds gambling apps, is firmly enmeshed in the genocidal Israeli war machine. The company was founded by Uri Shahak, son of the former head of the IDF, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and last year its annual report revealed that 14% of its staff had been called up as reservists to participate in the genocide in Gaza. Current CEO Robert Antokol says the company has a “responsibility” to Israel and the taxes paid by its staff are “wonderful for the Israeli economy.”

The Gray Zone for more

by RAMONA WADI

Burns’s book brings South American history to the fore, explaining the regional dynamics and economic turmoil that led to Salvador Allende’s downfall and the beginnings of Operation Condor.

“When Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile in 1970, Brazil had been a right-wing dictatorship for over six years.” Mila Burns’s opening sentence in the introduction to her book Dictatorship Across Borders: Chile and the South American Cold War immediately shifts the attention away from the more popular narrative of U.S. involvement in Chile’s coup to regional politics and, more specifically, Brazil’s role in Allende’s downfall. Indeed, Brazil’s right-wing dictatorship, which perceived Chile’s left-wing government as an inroad to communism in South America, worked assiduously to undermine Allende’s government. Brazilian officials participated directly in plots to overthrow Allende, advised Chilean officials on tactics to torture radicals, and repressed and surveilled opponents of their own regime living in exile in Chile.

Instead of foregrounding the role of the United States, Burns looks at the dynamics of the South American Cold War and the anti-communist sentiment in Brazil, which made the country both a U.S. ally as well as a country with its own political and economic reasons for aiding Chile’s military coup. Brazil’s rationale for its military coup against the government of João Goulart was restoring order. The same reasoning was used by the right-wing in Chile to justify the coup against Allende.

Burns relies on both oral history and archival research to build a comprehensive picture of Brazil’s interference in Chile, and the surveillance of Brazilian exiles in the country. Around 1,200 Brazilians were living in Chile at the time of the coup; 123 were detained at the National Stadium and six were executed. Burns establishes three waves of Brazilian exiles to Chile. In 1964, several politicians and professionals left for Chile after the 1964 coup after being classified as enemies of the Brazilian dictatorship. In 1968 and 1969, considered the most dangerous time of state repression in Brazil, several students and activists left the country. When Allende triumphed in the 1970 presidential elections, socialist supporters left Brazil for Chile in the hopes of being part of the socialist revolutionary process and policies.  

“While Burns notes that Brazil had started collaborating with the United States to bring down Allende as soon as his electoral campaign started gaining ground, the country played a major independent role, corroborated by both exiles and diplomats.”

While Burns notes that Brazil had started collaborating with the United States to bring down Allende as soon as his electoral campaign started gaining ground, the country played a major independent role, corroborated by both exiles and diplomats. Burns’ book therefore seeks to “reframe the United States as merely one of the countries that influenced Chile, among which Brazil appears as central.” During a meeting with U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1971, for example, Brazilian dictator Emilio Garrastazu Médici made it clear that his country had already been working with the Chilean military to depose Allende.

NACLA for more

by RAMZY BAROUD

The consequences of the Israeli genocide in Gaza will be dire. An event of this degree of barbarity, sustained by an international conspiracy of moral inertia and silence, will not be relegated to history as just another “conflict” or a mere tragedy.

The Gaza genocide is a catalyst for major events to come. Israel and its benefactors are acutely aware of this historical reality. This is precisely why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a race against time, desperately trying to ensure his country remains relevant, if not standing, in the coming era. He pursues this through territorial expansion in Syria, relentless aggression against Lebanon, and, of course, the desire to annex all occupied Palestinian territories.

But history cannot be controlled with such precision. However clever he may think he is, Netanyahu has already lost the ability to influence the outcome. He has been unable to set a clear agenda in Gaza, let alone achieve any strategic goals in a 365-square-kilometer expanse of destroyed concrete and ashes. Gazans have proven that collective sumud can defeat one of the most well-equipped modern armies.

Indeed, history itself has taught us that changes of great magnitude are inevitable. The true heartbreak is that this change is not happening fast enough to save a starving population, and the growing pro-Palestinian sentiment is not expanding at the rate needed to achieve a decisive political outcome.

Our confidence in this inevitable change is rooted in history. World War I was not just a “Great War” but a cataclysmic event that fully shattered the geopolitical order of its time. Four empires were fundamentally reshuffled; some, like the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman, were erased from existence.

The new world order resulting from World War I was short-lived. The modern international system we have today is a direct outcome of World War II. This includes the United Nations and all the new Western-centric economic, legal, and political institutions that were forged by the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1944. This includes the World Bank, the IMF, and ultimately NATO, thus sowing the seeds of yet more global conflicts.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was heralded as the singular, defining event that resolved the lingering conflicts of the post-WWII geopolitical struggle, supposedly ushering in a new, permanent global realignment, or, to some, the “end of history.”

Z Network for more

by SCOTT FERGUSON & WILLIAM SAAS

We speak with Vijay Raghavan, Professor of Law at the Brooklyn Law School, about his recent article, “The Radical Potential of Consumer Financial Protection,” published in Boston College Law Review in April 2025. Raghavan builds on the work of constitutional money theorists, as well as his legal experience in the public sector. In particular, he argues that consumer financial protection is an essential and potentially radical response to the “finance franchise,” a predominantly anti-democratic process by which modern governments delegate the money creation process to private actors like banks. The consensus in contemporary left sociological and legal scholarship dismisses consumer financial protection as a rearguard effort to sustain neoliberal capitalism. Raghavan, by contrast, reconceptualizes consumer financial protection as a vital counterweight to legally structured domination in financial markets. By tracing the history of this struggle from the early 20th century to the present, Raghavan provides a powerful legal framework for today’s debtor movements, including the national campaigns to cancel student and medical debt. In doing so, Raghavan offers a forward-looking vision for how to build a durable consumer financial protection regime capable of reclaiming democratic authority in the post-Trump era.

Visit our Patreon page here: https://www.patreon.com/MoLsuperstructure

Music by Nahneen Kula: www.nahneenkula.com

Transcript

This transcript has been edited for readability.

William Saas

Vijay Raghavan, welcome to Money on the Left.

Vijay Raghavan

Thanks for having me.

William Saas

Just to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about your professional and personal background and how it ties in with your fabulous work that we’re going to be talking about on the consumer financial protection regime?

Vijay Raghavan

Yeah, sure. I’m happy to go as in-depth as you want me to, but I’m a lawyer by training. Although my license is no longer active, I graduated from law school in 2007.

My early career was pretty conventional. I went to a big law firm to make money. I think I went to law school with some aspirations to do good, like, in a broad sense, but I ended up at a big law firm doing tax work. It was just as terrible as people say that kind of work is. I worked for really mean people for really long hours. I made what at the time seemed like a lot of money, but I didn’t really understand the work that I was doing. That might feel a little uncharitable. It’s funny, after I became an academic, I ended up contacting one of the former partners I used to work for who’s now in New York in a different firm, and he sort of copped to being a jerk when he was my boss and apologized for it.

I was like, it’s been a decade. If I wanted to place my students there, I thought it was a good professional connection to rebuild or rehabilitate. It wasn’t hard to rehabilitate. He was like, “I’m so sorry. I probably chased you away.” Which, it’s all true.

I was a tax associate at a big law firm. I guess the work was kind of intellectually stimulating, but I really didn’t understand what I was doing. I was definitely working on the tax aspects of transactions that were kind of adjacent to things that caused the world to collapse.

In 2008, when Obama got elected, I — like other people — was really hopeful. I mean, his presidency was pretty disappointing, at least for the kind of work that I do, but at the time I was pretty hopeful. I wanted to be broadly involved in doing something good. The financial crisis was in full effect at that point.

I think it started as early as April of 2006, but the world found out about it in September of 2008. I think those two things kind of pushed me to leave the firm, plus I didn’t like the work that I was doing. As someone who was a tax associated big law firm, trying to make the switch to something public oriented was a little bit hard.

It’s hard to convince people that you have the skills or the desire to do anything. There were lots of people who were similarly situated who were not happy with the work that they were doing, saw something happening, wanted to do more, but didn’t really have a good case to make. I ended up getting this two-year fellowship at a legal aid organization in northern and central Illinois. It was called Prairie State Legal Services. It serves suburban, exurban and rural Illinois outside of Chicago. I was doing tax base legal aid work, mostly representing people who had tax debts to the IRS and then some people who were losing their home to property tax foreclosures.

Monthly Review Online for more

by USSAMA MAKDISI

First devised by the British to disguise colonial rule, the Arab facade now serves US imperial interests shielding Israeli expansion behind a mask of sovereignty

The post-Ottoman Arab states were created after the First World War to serve the interests of western imperialists, rather than those of the region’s native inhabitants.

In 1918, as British domination of the post-Ottoman Middle East took shape, an official in the British India Office admitted: “The old watchwords are obsolete, and the question is how we are to secure what is essential under the new ones. This thing can be done, but a certain re-orientation is necessary. The ‘Arab facade’ may have to be something rather more solid than we had originally contemplated.”

By the time the so-called Paris Peace Conference of 1919 began, British imperialists realised that in an age of ostensible “self-determination”, they needed to disguise their domination and rule behind a facade of native authority.

Some of these imperialists, such as TE Lawrence, indulged their vanity by thinking they were aiding the Arabs, but their one true master was the British Empire.

They sought to continue dominating the Middle East, while also claiming to sincerely comply with the new era of freedom allegedly dawning in the post-Ottoman Middle East.

The mantra of an “Arab facade” was an adaptation of an older British ploy known as “indirect rule”, used in colonised Africa, now attuned to neutralising any emancipatory practice of “self-determination”.

Indirect rule

The British helped the Arabs overthrow the Ottomans.

They subsidised the Arab Revolt led by the Hashemite Sharif Husayn of Mecca in 1916. The Hashemites had served the Ottomans but threw in their lot with the British during the First World War.

The British promised Sharif Husayn an independent Arab kingdom across the Arab East, including Palestine, but they had no intention of granting him any such sovereignty over so vast an area.

The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs, with the term ‘Sykes-Picot’ becoming a metaphor for colonialism

They needed him to undermine Ottoman unity, or what was left of it at that point.

Most people in the Arab world today know that the British and the French simultaneously agreed to partition the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces among themselves.

The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 directly contradicted British promises to the Arabs. The term “Sykes-Picot” is used as a metaphor for colonialism more broadly.

In 1917, the British government further muddied the waters. It granted the European Zionist movement in England an infamous anti-Palestinian declaration of support known as the Balfour Declaration, which committed the British government to support the establishment in Palestine of a vaguely worded “national home for the Jewish people”.

The declaration, in effect, supported a European Jewish nationalist and colonising project in Palestine – where Jews at the time were a small minority of the population – yet denied national rights to the vast majority of the population of Palestine: the Arabs, whom the Balfour Declaration referred to dismissively as “non-Jewish communities”.

Middle East Eye for more

by ROBERT INLAKESH

If the resistance is Kurdish, Sunni, Shia, Communist, Socialist, Nationalist, Liberal, Christian, or Druze, the Israelis will demonize and murder them all the same.

In an interview with I24 News earlier this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his first public admission that he seeks to impose “Greater Israel” on the surrounding region. A plan long labeled as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theory” by pro-Israeli propagandists, it involves taking all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan, while seizing most of Syria, parts of Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Türkiye.

The idea of a “Greater Israel” has for some time been the ultimate goal of many Israeli politicians, political parties, and religious nationalist citizens. The idea itself actually predates the Israeli state and can be linked back to the early Revisionist Zionist movement.

In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, was part of the infamous Irgun terrorist organization and was active in ideologically influencing the movement. The Irgun played a role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine (1947-49) and had waged a terrorist campaign against both Palestinians and the British Mandate authorities in Palestine prior to this. The Irgun’s symbol is of a “Greater Israel” map that includes all of Jordan.

Theodore Herzl, the founding figure of Zionism, also once stated that the “Jewish State” should have boundaries, “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” Then there’s the infamous “Yinon Plan,” written by Oded Yinon, an advisor to former Likud Party Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The article written by Yinon laid out a strategy for Israel’s survival, arguing that to survive, it must become a regional empire and collapse all the surrounding Arab states, dividing them along ethnic and religious lines to achieve this goal and secure Greater Israel.

Fast forward to March of 2023, before the genocide in Gaza began. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich sparked outrage from neighboring Arab countries after he spoke at a podium that featured a “Greater Israel” map, which included all of Jordan in addition to parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. This map is very similar to the one on the Irgun emblem from the 1930s and ’40s.

Even earlier this year, in January, the official social media handles of “Israel” published a map that represented what they called “historic Israel,” which expanded into neighboring Arab countries. Now, we no longer have to turn to the voices that are often shrugged off as “fringe” and “extremist,” as Benjamin Netanyahu is himself admitting to seeking a “Greater Israel.”

No Longer Just a Plan

On Wednesday morning, Israeli military chief of staff Eyal Zamir paid a visit to occupied southern Lebanon, where Israel’s army has set up six bases and outposts, commenting that he had visited the area due to a changed reality on the “northern front.”

Palestine Chronicle for more