PAKISTAN

Gated disasters

Such housing schemes are a scandalous form of class warfare.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar 

Published August 19, 2022 

AS palace intrigue around the person of Shahbaz Gill takes centre stage, the combination of gruelling economic hardship and monsoon rains continue to suck the life out of millions of working people across the country.

Yet another increase in petrol prices has garnered some attention — at least in part because of the fissures it has exposed within the ruling PML-N — but less well advertised are stealthy government ordinances that pave the way for the fire sale of public assets. Meanwhile, having backed down in the face of pressure from the trader-merchant community, the regime is pondering ‘relief’ for even bigger fish, most notably the real estate and construction sectors.

Perhaps our economic managers should pause and take note of the images which illuminate enormous monsoon-induced flooding in and around Bahria Town on the Karachi-Hyderabad highway. Other elite gated housing communities have been quickly inundated by rains in the recent past too; some in Karachi are perpetually subject to flooding because they are built recklessly on reclaimed land off the coast.

Such episodes are evidence enough that these schemes should actually be called gated disasters — after all, even the highest class brackets are not immune to the fallouts of what continues to uncritically be called ‘development’. But it is the outside of these gated communities that one uncovers the full scale of the calamity — a man-made disaster that is reproduced time and again due to the refusal of our planners, rulers and profiteers to pay attention to the increasingly urgent warnings that nature is offering us.


Such housing schemes are a scandalous form of class warfare.

Indigenous peoples in areas like Malir have been crying hoarse for years about dispossession from their historical abodes as property developers run riot in cahoots with uniformed and civilian personnel of the state. But instead of paying them heed, new ‘development’ projects like the Malir Expressway in Karachi are designed and executed with little concern about natural drainage flows and other ecological effects.

Read: Highway to hell: The real cost of the Malir Expressway

Meanwhile, in Quetta, in recent days cut off from the rest of the country due to incessant flooding on major thoroughfares, a new and sprawling Defence Housing Authority (DHA) is advancing through the usual thuggish means at the rate of knots. On the one hand, there is no concern for how this ‘development’ could potentially exacerbate flash flooding like that which has been witnessed over the past few weeks. On the other hand, the scheme can be expected to put even more pressure on the city’s scarce drinking water sources.

Adjacent to Quetta, on the other side of the Koh-i-Suleiman range, hill torrents that have historically supported agriculture in the Seraiki belt are now taking the form of devastating flash floods. Here too the immediate cause may be deluges of water caused by monsoon rains, but the deeper cause is unregulated ‘development’ in the form of roads, property developments and deforestation.

If the point is not already clear, let me be more blunt: the scenes we are witnessing are only going to be replicated in more and more parts of the country as the imperatives of profiteers, and the engineers/planners that facilitate them, take precedence over the needs of both working masses and the natural environment at large.

Read: The new landlords

Indeed, even if one ignores the long-term effects of gated housing schemes on already dilapidated ecosystems, they are a scandalous form of class warfare in a country where large numbers of working people, especially in metropolitan areas, live in squatter settlements and slums. What we should be planning are schemes that guarantee the housing, educational, health and recreational needs of this huge mass of the population, especially in the face of a virtually never-ending flow of rural migrants tow­ards urban centres.

But this requires political will, the absence of which is conspicuous across all factions of Pakistan’s ruling bloc, military and civil, the PTI and PDM/PPP.

To return to Bahria Town, all major players are implicated in the racket. Remember the reported £140 million (of the £190m settlement with Malik Riaz) that the British government repatriated to the public exchequer here? It is now widely said that while this money came back to Pakistan, it was deposited in such a way as to facilitate Malik Riaz’s partial clearance of a fine levied by the Supreme Court on account of the blatantly illegal land-grabbing practices through which Bahria Town came into existence.

The money trail and the brutalising dispossession of indigenous villagers shows our entire ruling class to be guilty.

So here we are, stuck in a dramatic race to the bottom. On the one hand, to borrow the eminent thinker Mike Davis’ term, is the intensifying immiseration of working masses, particularly those from ethnic peripheries, in a Planet of Slums. On the other hand is a ruling class merry-go-round to keep us all numb to the real crises.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, August 19th, 2022

https://selforganizedseminar.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/naomi-klein-the-shock-doctrine.pdf

THE SHOCK DOCTRINE - AUTONOMOUS LEARNING 

Shocking Times: The Rise of the Disaster Capitalism Complex. 14. Shock Therapy in the U.S.A.: The Homeland Security Bubble 283.

https://www.angelfire.com/il/photojerk/klein.pdf

DISASTER CAPITALISM By Naomi Klein THE RIVER IS A ROAD By ... 

DISASTER. CAPITALISM. The new economy of catastrophe. By Naomi Klein ... came time to update the Army manual on the rules for dealing with contractors,.

http://www.anthropolitics.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Schuller-and-Maldonado-Disaster-capitalism.pdf

Disaster capitalism | Anthropolitics 

The term “disaster capitalism,” launched in 2005 by activist jour- nalist Naomi Klein, still has res- onance within social movement circles.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/murder.htm

Murder of the Dead by Amadeo Bordiga 1951 

Murder of the Dead ... The basis of marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living labour. We do not define capitalism as the ...

The forever war

Lest anyone forget, war is a business.

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar 

Published August 5, 2022

A YEAR after the ignominious withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and the tame reconquest of that country by the Afghan Taliban, the Biden administration has reminded us that the US is still the world’s policeman.

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s killing through a precision US drone strike in a posh neighbourhood of Kabul is the talk of the town. Did Pakistan facilitate it? If so, what bounties, to borrow from Musharrafian nomenclature, did we earn?

Alas, us ordinary mortals can only speculate — there will be no answers. Beyond tired narratives of good guys versus bad guys we will learn no more than we already know; that Afghans continue to be brutalised as the American Empire and its most trusted lieutenant, Pakistan, play out another iteration of their historical love-hate relationship.

We should not be surprised that Washington continues to rely on Islamabad (read: Rawalpindi) to secure its narrow strategic objectives.

Ayman al-Zawahiri was a ruthless killer at the heart of the global jihadi movement. But I do not celebrate his death, because it does not signal an end to the (selective) patronage of religiously motivated militants by our establishment. Neither should anyone be naïve enough (again) to think that Washington’s military-industrial complex cares a jot about Afghans.

Over the past year, many have tried to appeal to the ‘conscience’ of the ‘civilised world’ about interlocking tragedies unfolding in Afghanistan — a brutally cold winter, poverty and starvation, the plight of women and girls. But this happened in the late 1990s as well, and only brute, strategic interests explained Washington’s decision to come into that country in October 2001. The Pentagon will continue to send unmanned drones to kill whichever ‘enemy’ it chooses. It prosecutes a forever war, one that will never serve the interests of people.

Lest anyone forget, war is a business.

Meanwhile, we in Pakistan can choose not to pay attention to our ‘forever wars’ in militarised ethnic peripheries. But that does not make them go away.

While most obsesses about PTI/PDM disqualifications and minus-one formulas, Waziristan, Kurram and other tribal districts are beset by targeted killings and deliberately stoked sectarian tensions, Gilgit-Baltistan is being subjected to yet another round of Shia-Sunni polarisation and Balochistan continues to burn with no end in sight.

Lest anyone forget, war is a business. The Americans still rule the world because of their military might, because they operate more than 1,000 military bases across the globe, because they have a never-ending supply of private military contractors, and because their ‘democracy’ is hostage in part to the defence industry. Washington’s protégés in Pakistan have developed their very own Military, Inc. and invoke their own indispensability due to a perennially ‘nazuk daur’ (uncertain times), and also deploy selective discourses of ‘terrorism’ to suit their purposes.

Explainer: When is the US war in Afghanistan really over?

The infrastructures of war that these states have cultivated are taking on ever more autonomous form in the nooks and crannies of society. Thousands of religious institutions operate in this country, many with substantial funding. They thrive because there are millions of families who want to be able to get free ‘education’ and board/lodging for their children. Then there are ‘welfare’ set-ups that collect meat, hides and other donations from large numbers of ordinary Pakistanis.

Militant organisations also have a political economy. Many are heavily implicated in illicit trading networks, including drugs and munitions. Their patrons include powerful individuals within our own state apparatus, and others too, most notably the Gulf kingdoms. These are truly international networks: men in suits that we tend to associate with a vague ‘corporate’ sector are just as likely to be part of defence and other war-making industries as they are other cogs in the global capitalist wheel.

In a nutshell, forever wars will continue in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the world at large. They serve profit-making, ideological and so many other purposes. When we engage in unending debates about whether PTI ‘corruption’ is any better or worse than the PDM/PPP corruption, we gloss over the fact that both play second fiddle to establishments, domestic and global.

It is not just the forever wars that major political parties appear unwilling and unable to confront. They are just as unwilling to challenge the many different forms of capitalist ‘development’ that explain the ever-worsening environmental crises. Balochistan and the Seraiki belt have been ravaged by rains, but beyond some token promises of relief by the current government and criticisms of officialdom by those in the opposition, no one is interested in identifying the root causes.

The wretched of the earth are crying out for someone to pay attention. But this is not just about those at the very margins. A viable future for all young populations in the region is at stake.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2022

CLIMATE CHANGE: THE TROUBLED WATERS OF BALOCHISTAN
Qasim Khan

Published August 14, 2022

A screengrab of a video by the PDMA shows people

 being rescued in Karwan area of Bela, Balochistan | PDMA Facebook

Pakistan contributes less than one percent to global warming in terms of greenhouse gases’ emissions as compared to the highly industrialised countries. However, it is one of the top 10 countries in the world most vulnerable to climate change.

Over the last decade, the repercussions of climate change have been gradually unfolding across the country, with symptoms including erratic rainfall, water scarcity, rising temperatures, the melting of glaciers, flash floods and rising sea levels.

Like other parts of the country, Balochistan — consisting mostly of dry and arid regions — has also been hit by climate change, after continuously facing lower-than-normal rainfall, with subsequent droughts and water scarcity. Over the past two months, however, the province was confronted with abrupt heavy rains, leading to flash floods during monsoon season.

This season’s monsoon rain, which has already broken a 30-year record, has turned into a nightmare for Balochistan and brought devastation upon its people. The disaster that has unfolded in Balochistan before our eyes, is a cautionary tale about our unpreparedness for climate change.

The death toll from the floods in Balochistan is rising every day even as thousands of houses and livestock and hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural lands have been washed away, leading to prospects of long-term economic repercussions. Could this disaster have been avoided or at least handled better?

Avoidable Negligence

The government showed little understanding of the visible warning signs and took no action to preempt the flooding that followed. Despite being well aware of the possibility of heavy rainfall weeks before, the provincial government of Balochistan failed to devise a concrete plan to counter the crisis at the earliest in order to protect the lives of the poor people living in mud houses in rural as well as urban areas.

The authorities sprung to action only after the situation was beyond control and the flash floods had already drowned scores of people and swept away thousands of houses, damaging both private property and public infrastructure.

The extent of the provincial government’s obliviousness to people’s suffering in such a terrible situation can only be judged through the heart-wrenching visuals shared on social media, where people were seen helplessly taking dead bodies out of the waters.

Had there been no social media, the cries of help of the victims would probably not have reached the authorities. The mainstream electronic media too began reporting the unfolding disaster only after the heart-wrenching visuals from Balochistan were shared on social media.

The Losses

Over the last month, thousands of people in Balochistan have lost everything to the flash floods caused by torrential rains. They have lost their loved ones, their homes and their belongings. As of August 7, the Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) put the death toll at 170, with 75 injured since June 14. Among them, 43 females, 55 children and 72 males have died, and 11 females, 16 children and 48 males have been injured so far.

Regarding the damage to infrastructure and loss of private property, the PDMA reports that 18,087 houses have been damaged in the province during this period, out of which 13,385 are partially damaged and 4,702 completely destroyed.

The flash floods have also damaged approximately 670 kilometres of roads and 16 bridges while 23,013 livestock has also been lost across the province. Overall, 34 districts have been hit, affecting a population of 360,000. According to Balochistan Chief Secretary Abdul Aziz Uqaili, more than 200,000 acres of agricultural land has also been affected.

Sadly, the numbers keep rising. What we know are only reported numbers. As per circumstantial evidence that locals are sharing, the actual figures in the peripheral areas seem yet to be taken into account.

Relief is reaching some of the affectees gradually now. However, their grief is beyond mere short-term assistance. After visiting some of the affectees who have managed to find shelter in camps, it was observed that they are extremely worried about their livelihoods in the long-term. A majority of Balochistan’s population is affiliated with agriculture and livestock, and both resources have been hit hard by the natural disaster.

This will severely impact the economic conditions, in particular, of the lower-middle class dwelling in the peripheries. According to an estimate by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics in May 2020, nearly 41 percent of households in Balochistan live below the income poverty line. The calamity is going to further increase poverty in the region if the provincial government does not take long-term initiatives regarding economic recovery for the poor farmers and others who have lost their sources of income to the floods.

Healing Balm?

To soothe the grievances of the flood affectees, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif made two high-profile visits to the province within three days. Chief Minister Abdul Quddus Bizenjo appeared later for an on-ground survey. In his interaction with the flood-affected locals and residents, the PM promised to provide compensation of one million rupees each to families who have lost a member. He also announced a compensatory amount of 0.2 million rupees for a partially damaged house and 0.5 million rupees for a completely damaged house.

While the importance of the prime minister’s visits cannot be denied in terms of pure optics — after a long time, at least the federal government looked like it genuinely cared about Balochistan — even during the visits it became clear that the government machinery was not capable.

For example, many affectees in camps complained that they had not been fed, which disturbed the premier enough for him to order the suspension of the district coordination officer and an immediate supply of food and rations. Later on, media reports indicated that some local administrations tasked with supplying relief goods were asking for the computerised national identity cards (CNICs) from affectees who had had all their belongings swept away in the floods.

Rescue and Relief Operations

Published on August 7, the Monsoon 2022 Daily Situation Report by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) stated that 600 people had been rescued while 7,000 people were shifted to relief camps through relief operations underway since June 14. The following table shows the relief provided by the NDMA, the PDMA and other humanitarian agencies:

The above-mentioned statistics may seem impressive, but the ground reality shows a different picture altogether. Local activists and journalists in Balochistan report that the concerned authorities remain negligent of the people’s suffering. Relief activities are lagging due to bureaucratic red-tape and, resultantly, the unnecessary delay in providing food and shelter to the affectees is compounding the crisis there.

If the affected people are still waiting for food, one can only wonder when they will be provided with other necessities of daily use.

Post-Disaster Assessment

The post-disaster assessment indicates that the negligence of the provincial government in infrastructural development programmes paved the path for the unfortunate large-scale disaster.

Most dams in Balochistan are either poorly constructed or ill-designed, lacking a proper structure. For instance, many small dams and reservoirs broke after being filled to their maximum capacity, while many were on the verge of breaking apart, putting the lives of more people at risk. So, the severity of the situation escalated exponentially due to the lack of a well-developed infrastructure.

As the federal government collaborates with the provincial and extends support, the provincial government must ensure that relief in terms of food and shelter and financial assistance to all the affected people is provided swiftly.

Moreover, it must also consider developing a durable weather-friendly infrastructure across the province, so that future extreme weather events can be managed in a timely manner and countered efficiently.

The writer is a political commentator and a public policy analyst based in Balochistan.
He tweets @khanzqasim

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 14th, 2022

PAKISTAN

Our living standards

Riaz Riazuddin 

Published August 18, 2022




UNDER what conditions do we live in our country? A detailed profile of our households is provided by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics in its Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey 2019-20 (PSLM). A home is more than just a shelter. A stark feature of our living standards is that 25 per cent of our households are one-room dwellings. Not everything is gloomy though, as in 2014-2015 the figure was higher — 28pc. Moreover, the majority of households (69pc) have two to four rooms, up from 67pc. The share of households with five or more rooms remains at 6pc. Shaheed Benazirabad district has the largest percentage (78pc) of households with just one room. Overall, too, Sindh is the worst performer here with 35.6pc of households having only one room, followed by Baluchistan (23.3pc), Punjab (22.6pc) and KP (16.3pc).

Close to half of our households do not have a specific place for washing hands with soap; 54pc have this facility. Ten per cent of households have no toilet, 83pc have flush toilets, and 7pc have non-flush toilets. Seventeen per cent of households in Balochistan are without toilets; the figure is 11pc for KP and 9pc for Sindh and Punjab each.

Households not connected to the sewerage system are in a majority (73pc). Only 27pc are connected. Regarding drainage, 36pc of households are not connected to any system; 35pc are connected to open drains, 23pc to underground drains, and only 6pc to covered drains. Garbage and solid waste are collected by municipalities for only 18pc of households. Most households (82pc) dump their garbage in open spaces, roads, streets or public bins. How can we describe our beloved country? Garbage is strewn everywhere. The share of households throwing their garbage on the streets is 6.8pc (of 35 million households). This share is highest in Sindh at 15pc.

Houses with roofs made up of T-iron or girders make up the majority at 39pc, followed by RCC or RBC (33pc), wood or bamboo (23pc) and sheet or other material (5pc). The share of wooden or bamboo roof houses in Sindh is 28.7pc, but in Tharparkar district it is 92.2pc. Most dwellings (80pc) have brick walls; mud walls comprise 15pc, and wood or other material 5pc.

It is hardly surprising that our country is at the bottom quarter of countries in terms of health indicators.

Most households draw their drinking water through pumps — motor pumps (30pc), and hand pumps (23pc). Only 22pc have access to tap water. Households relying on filtration plants comprise 10pc, tankers 4pc, dug wells 3pc and rivers or ponds 2pc. One would expect the use of hand pumps to reduce with development. But in Sindh, it has increased from 34pc in 2014-15 to 36pc in 2019-20. Moreover, tap water sources have also declined in Sindh from 41pc to 35pc. What is happening in Sindh? Progress in reverse? No household in Larkana has access to tap water according to this survey; all households rely on hand or motor pumps. This is difficult to believe. Are we really living in the 21st century? One silver lining is that almost all the water sources are declared as an “improved source of drinking water” and 94pc of our households have access to it. Note that an improved source of water may not necessarily be alright for drinking, but it is far better than drinking from a pond.

Given the dismal water quality and sanitation and hygiene conditions, it is hardly surprising that our country is at the bottom quarter of countries in terms of health indicators. Our life expectancy is 67 years, the lowest among South Asian countries. It is 73, 70, 71 and 77 years respectively for Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. We rank 148th among 194 countries in the world. One of the reasons for this is the extremely high infant mortality rate at 53 per thousand live births. It is 39 in India, 32 in Bangladesh, 18 in Turkiye, and 16 in Iran. Should we not all be ashamed about this situation, along with our provincial governments who are now responsible for public health after the 18th Amendment? The federal government, of course, is also always responsible.

In terms of food security, not all households feel secure. During the first wave of Covid-19 (March 2020 — July 2020), about 40pc of households became food-insecure as they did not have access to sufficient and good-quality nutritious food. For fiscal year 2019-20, PSLM reported 16pc of households as food-insecure, and 84pc as food-secure. Of food-insecure households, 2pc suffered severe food insecurity, while 14pc faced low or moderate insecurity. Severe food insecurity refers to extreme hunger and poverty as households do not have access to any meals. Low or moderate insecurity refers to access to both low quality and quantity of food — not sufficient for a nutritious life. Future surveys of PSLM are likely to report a reduction in food insecurity as both growth and employment increased significantly during FY21 and FY22.

Our educational attainments strongly reflect our living standards. This survey found our literacy rate to be 60pc. This compares unfavourably with all our neighbours, except Afghanistan with 37pc. It is 74pc in India, 75pc in Bangladesh, 86pc in Iran and 97pc in China. One of the main reasons for low literacy is that 32pc of our children (five to 16 years of age) are out of school. This percentage is highest in Balochistan at 47pc, closely followed by Sindh at 44pc, KP at 30pc and Punjab at 24pc. Learned Punjab is a well-deserved slogan when compared to the other provinces in this respect.

Can we improve our standards of living in spite of our incompetent provincial governments? Yes, we can, even as individuals. We need to improve our households’ cleanliness and hygiene to the greatest extent possible. We should not throw our garbage in front of our households. We need to send our children to school to the extent we can afford to do so. Are we doing our bit satisfactorily?

The writer is a former deputy governor of the State Bank of Pakistan.
rriazuddin@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 18th, 2022

Aping American ‘social justice’ jargon
Anis Shivani

Published August 20, 2022 

I USED to be shocked, not many years ago, to hear newly landed desi students on American shores immediately start spouting contemporary social justice jargon, as though they were born with it. Where did this strange verbal facility come from? How could they be so fluent in the language of deconstruction, when someone like me had had to laboriously struggle through the ramparts of classical liberalism, and then its various ideological opponents, just to get a handle on post-structuralist thought to see if it was relevant to my own project?

Now it’s much worse. It’s not just academics in the humanities and social sciences, but writers, artists, intellectuals — indeed, anyone with anything to say in public. With the current state of instantaneous global communications, the moment a liberal panic takes off in America, the next moment it infects opinion-makers everywhere. Whatever anxiety is agitating American intellectuals confronting a dying liberalism — #MeToo, white supremacy, transgender oppression, alleged Trumpian ‘fascism’ — it immediately saturates elite thinkers in parts of the world with no connection to the cultural petri dish wherein these self-involved viruses germinated.

This churn and froth, this lightning-fast imitation, this instant plugging into what appears as avant-garde thought, ignores that none of it is relevant to a country like Pakistan, or any developing country. The rhetoric comes from different sources and has different motivations than the needs of a violently unequal, feudal, patriarchal, even deeply misogynistic culture like Pakistan’s, where even the basics of liberal constitutionalism have yet to be worked out, let alone transcended.

Poverty, often driven by exploitative colonial dependencies, that in the case of Pakistan assumed a new darkness after the War on Terror, is the biggest problem; but the new language of social justice has nothing to say about it. It is entirely emptied of a class perspective — indeed, even in today’s popular intersectionalist vocabulary, which pretends to do so — and is rooted in the culture wars of the American right and left elites, with no relevance to working-class struggles in Pakistan or other poor countries.

The moment a liberal panic takes off in America, the next moment it infects opinion-makers everywhere.

The original French and European post-structuralists, in turn connected with the Marxist-leaning Frankfurt School, had much to say about understanding the blind spots of the Western democracies, particularly with regard to the cultural hegemony exercised in relation to then marginalised groups. Then American academics got hold of theory, never to let it go. They turned it into mush. Shorn of class content, it has become, in various iterations of identity politics, a handmaiden to neoliberal political economy. It is a mere rearranging of musical chairs when it comes to bureaucratic administration of who gets to speak at what table in elite circles — in academia, the arts, and politics.

In its popular version, which has gained total ascendance through the power of social media, it is spouted by ill-informed influencers as some sort of radical insight into the human condition, when it represents nothing but repeatedly diluted do-overs of the original post-structuralist framework. It fits well into pre-existing American notions of non-judgmentalism towards personal lifestyles, and it performs a spectacular celebration of individual choice that is by now meaningless within the constraints of neoliberal precariousness.

So it’s disturbing that it’s this brainless ideology that has caught on like raging wildfire everywhere, and is repeated ad nauseam, down to its quirkiest verbal tics, wherever elite opinion is disseminated, as though what was being spoken were a special language opening up a wormhole into timeless justice.

Consider what happened after the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police two years ago. Protests, of an intensity and spread not seen since the late 1960s, erupted all across the US, and indeed other democracies as well. At first, there was an explicit class element to it: recognising the very foundation of American police as an aid to maintaining unjust property relations. But this activist dimension came entirely from those who don’t speak the contemporary language of social justice, and these dissenters were soon marginalised and excluded. An utterly compromised and elite-endorsed institution like Black Lives Matter (BLM) then took over all the activist energy, and predictably turned it into watery slush. The radical movement against police brutality has now well and truly ended.

One could talk about how feminism, which had some truly radical class dimensions in the 1970s, slowly turned into bourgeois white feminism — obsessed with an array of lifestyle choices not available to women in the developing world, and yet somehow presented itself as universal in nature. It too is in service to neoliberal class relations, as much an instrument of oppression — because it refuses to recognise any feminist impulse as valid other than its own constrained ideology — as any economic instrument deployed by neoliberalism.

Where does one look to, then, for a vocabulary (and practice) of social justice that doesn’t imitate these compromised American culture war holdovers? This has been made difficult because neoliberal globalisation has explicitly followed the goal of cultural flattening and homogenisation, and indeed celebrated it, all over the world. But autonomous culture has not yet been fully eradicated, nor can it be.

We have plenty of sources of genuine compassion in our own culture, if we care to look for it. One needn’t resort to obscurantist philosophies, which are often a reflection of desperation, following centuries of colonial and then domestic overlordship, but there is plenty of authentic humanism in our own heritage. Edhi certainly practised it, and so many others in the past and present. Our own history, art, music, literature, philosophy, architecture and social relations and personal morality, when they are at their best, can be sources of endless inspiration.

We can be both practical and unselfish, able stewards of the human body and non-human animals and nature — cognisant of the true value of life and death — and generally good human beings, without ever having to resort to the jargon and mindset of the Western technocratic lifestyle management device known as identity politics.

The writer’s books of fiction, poetry, and criticism include Karachi Raj: A Novel and the recently finished novel The Incident of the Missing Kanchani.

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2022

Bella Hadid believes she would have been less successful had she spoken about Palestine at a younger age

Growing up with the absence of her Muslim culture made the Palestinian-American model feel separated from her roots.

Photo: Bella Hadid/Instagram

Bella Hadid has often made headlines for being vocal in her support for her home country, Palestine. The Palestinian-American model has suffered through consequences for it too in the form of brands dropping her and close friends cutting her off. Her experience makes her believe that had she started speaking up about her views at an earlier stage in life, she would not be the world renowned model she is today.

In an interview with Noor Tagouri’s the Rep podcast, Hadid said everything she says is backed up by the research she has done. “I have this overwhelming anxiety of not saying the right thing and not being what everybody needs me to be at all times. But I’ve also realised that I have done my education enough, I know my family enough, I know my own history enough. And that should be enough.”

She elaborated on the backlash, “I really do believe that if I started speaking about Palestine when I was 20, I would not have gotten the same recognition and respect that I have now. I had so many companies stop working with me. I had friends that completely dropped me, like even friends I had been having dinner with at their home on Friday nights, for seven years, like now just won’t let me at their house anymore.”

Tagouri brought attention to an ad that was posted to malign the model. “Even one of the world’s most prestigious journalistic institutions engaged. On May 22, the New York Times published a full page ad paid for by a right wing American organisation. The ad featured the faces of Bella, her sister Gigi and popstar Dua Lipa, over an image of a rocket strike, covered in bold and inflammatory text. The intention was clear — the ad attempted to link the three women to terrorism, genocide and antisemitism.”

Hadid felt like that disregarded so many years of work and so many lives that have been lost all because they reduced the trio to the leaders of a terrorist organisation. “It was really disappointing for me because we all really have taken time and money subscriptions to read something that we really felt was powerful, had integrity and [was] educational. At this point it was just, they sold their soul,” she said of the publication.

The Victoria’s Secret model also shed light on how the official account for the state of Israel on Twitter came for her, and the double standards when she speaks about other injustices in the world. “And I think that was really, the word is disappointing, but the entire country of Israel, and I mean, Israel on Twitter tweeted at me. And what’s interesting is that when I speak about Palestine, I get labelled as something that I’m not but when I speak about the same thing that’s happening there, happening somewhere else in the world, it’s honourable. So what’s the difference?”

Hadid noted in the interview that she realised very young that people are not accepting of this part of her identity. She recalled being called a “terrorist” in eighth grade. “I was being called names and being immediately blasted as a person of hatred for another people, but all I was talking about was freeing my father’s people — people who are deeply hurting.”

In a separate interview with GQ Magazine, Hadid dove deeper into her childhood and mentioned the “separation from her roots” that made her feel a sense of unease growing up in Santa Barbara. She was often the only Arab girl in her class and while she says her upbringing was mostly fine, she has long felt that there was something missing from her life. “I was never able to see myself in anything else, so I tried to just sit back,” the model said. “For so long I was missing that part of me, and it made me really, really sad and lonely.”

One of her greater regrets is that she wasn’t raised around Muslim people, particularly after her parents separated. “I would have loved to grow up and be with my dad every day, studying and really being able to practice, just in general being able to live in a Muslim culture,” she says. “But I wasn’t given that.” Nevertheless, she spends a lot of time thinking about her family and what they endured: “I speak about [this stuff] for the elderly that are still living there that have never been able to see Palestine free, and for the children that can still grow up and have a beautiful life.”

A recent interaction with an Israeli woman in the streets of New York City made her realise she’s not afraid to speak up anymore. “I was just leaving lunch, and this woman came up to me and was like, ‘I just moved to New York from Israel recently, and I told myself that if I ever saw Bella Hadid I would walk up to her and ask why she hates me so much,’” Hadid narrated on the podcast.

Adding that she actually welcomed the conversation, telling the woman that she didn’t hate her, she invited her to speak her mind. “I’m not scared of anything, but I was nervous that I wouldn’t be able to combat whatever she had to say to me. But I realised in that conversation, it never had to be combative. All it had to be was two girls talking about their history and hopefully finding a common denominator, which is that we want nobody to die.”

EU calls on Israel to allow closed Palestinian NGOs to operate

Daniel Stewart - Yesterday 


The EU on Friday expressed its "concern" over the closure of six Palestinian NGOs and stressed that it is "essential" that the Israeli authorities allow them to continue to carry out activities that, in the eyes of the EU-27, are "legitimate and peaceful".


The EU High Representative for Foreign Policy, Josep Borrell, speaks at a conference at the Menéndez Pelayo International University (UIMP). - Juan Manuel Serrano Arce - Europa Press

Police raids on Thursday put an end to the activity of the NGOs, which the Israeli authorities have accused of having links with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), considered a terrorist organization.

The EU's External Action Service, headed by Josep Borrell, has stressed that the bloc always treats "with the utmost seriousness" any accusation of terrorism and has demanded "substantial information" from Israel to substantiate the accusations.

However, "for now", there would be nothing to justify allegations such as those alluding to a possible misuse of European funds by these NGOs, according to a communiqué from European diplomacy.

The EU has stressed in its note that "a free and strong civil society is indispensable to promote democratic values and move towards a two-state solution" between Israelis and Palestinians", so it "will continue to support civil society organizations that seek to promote respect for international law, human rights and democratic values".

The squirrels 'splooting' all over New York City are just fine, officials say

Zoe Sottile - CNN.com

If you see a squirrel splayed on its belly, you might be worried for the critter’s welfare. But don’t worry: It’s just “splooting,” as officials say – and it’s perfectly healthy.

The term splooting exploded on the internet shortly after the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation posted about the behavior on Twitter.

“If you see a squirrel lying down like this, don’t worry; it’s just fine,” wrote the department on Twitter alongside an image of a squirrel stretching out its limbs. “On hot days, squirrels keep cool by splooting (stretching out) on cool surfaces to reduce body heat. It is sometimes referred to as heat dumping.”

Charlotte Devitz, a biologist and PhD student studying squirrel behavior at the University of Minnesota, told CNN that she first noticed squirrels splooting while she was researching squirrels for her master’s degree.

“At the time I wasn’t really familiar with the term. We just called it ‘flop’ behavior,” she said. “I thought it was super cute. For a long time I tried to find published articles on what this behavior was, but I didn’t have a lot of success.”

Devitz says that splooting seems more common among larger, hairier squirrel species, like grey squirrels and fox squirrels. This dovetails with the scientific explanation for why squirrels sploot: It helps them cope with the heat, according to Devitz.

The more scientific name for splooting is “heat dumping,” Devitz said. “The squirrel is putting as much of their body surface as possible in contact with a cooler surface, frequently on concrete or pavement that’s been in the shade.”

“We’ve had quite record-breaking heat this summer, so this behavior has been very, very prominent,” she said.

Splooting is a “nice way for them to thermoregulate,” especially because squirrels don’t lose much body heat by sweating, Devitz said. The behavior, she said, is “also seen in other mammals. It’s just gained a lot of visibility because a lot of people see it and become worried when they see squirrels on their belly.”

Splooting may be especially common in cities like New York because of the way urban areas trap heat, Devitz says.

“It’s quite possible there’s a higher incidence of this type of behavior in squirrels that are in urban areas, just because they’re more in need of ways to cool down,” she said.

“With climate change,” Devitz said, “overall temperatures are rising. We’re seeing more of these heat spikes, more drought. I think it’s quite possible that this behavior will be more and more prominent and more and more necessary for the squirrel.”

Devitz notes that the cooling benefits of splooting are balanced by the possible risks squirrels face from predators. The prone pose “puts them in a somewhat vulnerable position” where they may be endangered by predators, she said.

Twitter's CFO warned employees they're on track to get 50% of their typical annual bonuses because of the company's financial challenges, report says

insider@insider.com (James Dean) -

© Provided by Business InsiderTwitter CEO Parag Agrawal (left) is at loggerheads with Elon Musk over the Tesla CEO's proposed $44 billion takeover. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, 

Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Twitter CFO Ned Segal warned employees Friday their bonuses could be half the maximum, per The NYT.

Segal said the company's bonus pool was at 50% of where it could be if financial targets were being hit, per The NYT.

Twitter employees' bonuses are tied to the company's financial performance, which has declined of late.

Twitter says Musk is treating the merger process as "an elaborate joke."

In the filing, Twitter implies that Musk hasn't taken Twitter, its shareholders, or Twitter's threat of legal action seriously.

Twitter told employees Friday they're on course to get half their typical annual bonuses because of the company's financial challenges, The New York Times reported.

In an email to staff, Twitter CFO Ned Segal said the social-media company's bonus pool was currently at 50% of what it could be if financial targets were being hit, The NYT reported, citing as sources two employees who received the email.

Twitter didn't immediately respond to Insider's request for comment. The NYT said a Twitter spokesperson confirmed the email's veracity and declined to comment further.

Twitter's warning on bonuses comes as it tries to force Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to complete his proposed $44 billion acquisition of the social-media group — something Twitter highlighted in its second-quarter earnings report as having had a detrimental impact on its finances.

Twitter, Meta, Alphabet, and other platforms that rely at least in part on digital advertising for revenue are grappling with a downturn in the ad market amid fears of recession.

Twitter employees receive annual bonuses based on the company's financial performance, which could improve before they are ultimately paid out.

Twitter and Musk are at loggerheads over their proposed $44 billion deal, which has culminated in a fractious legal battle between the parties. Musk argues Twitter won't provide him with necessary detail about the volume of spam bots on its platform.

In its second-quarter earnings report, published July 22, Twitter said "uncertainty" over Musk's proposed takeover of the company, as well as advertising industry headwinds, contributed to its first quarterly revenue decline since 2020. Twitter reported a net second-quarter loss of $270 million compared with a net income of $66 million in the same quarter in 2021.

Insider's Lara O'Reilly exclusively reported Friday that dozens of Google's external recruiters just lost their jobs amid its hiring freeze.

What’s our plan to stop China’s acquisition of America?

Thomas P. Vartanian, Opinion Contributor - Yesterday 


As I drove to baseball practice last week, the radio announced that President Biden may meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping this fall, but not before Xi is reportedly welcomed with open arms by our increasingly estranged ally Saudi Arabia.


© Provided by The Hill

At practice, my first basemen complained that his new baseball bat, though bearing the logo of a revered American baseball bat manufacturer, had been manufactured in China with a bamboo center. My glove, bat, spikes and baseballs all said, “Made in China,” as did my jersey, baseball pants, hat, sunglasses and wrist bands.

We explain this away as basic economics — workers in China are paid little, so products can be manufactured there must cheaper. But this situation is getting substantially more dangerous as China’s financial and technological capabilities grow. It makes me wonder, what’s our plan?

The economic contest between the United States and China is like the second coming of the Bretton Woods meetings, which established the financial standards for the reconstructed post-war world in 1944. As it was then, the privilege of determining the rules that support global trade in the 21st century always belongs to the country with preeminent economic, military and technological leadership and stability. China wants to be that country.

Michael Schuman recently wrote about what’s at stake. Western democracies broadly adhere to a “rule of law” that is intended to be impartial and applied evenly to all, while Chinese society is “ruled by law” that is intended to ensure continued Communist Party dominance.

Sure, China’s immediate economic future is not without serious challenges given significant missteps related to population control, over building and new rules on domestic corporations. Its relations with the European Union have dramatically deteriorated, emphasizing its obligation to address the world’s lack of trust in it if it is serious about becoming a financial leader.

But China has been achieving its long-term business goals over the last 50 years and is now on a trajectory to have the world’s largest economy by 2030.

Related video: U.S. and China agree to begin trade talks this fall

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America is more and more resembling an economic subsidiary of China. Chinese companies are acquiring American businesses, buildings and land at will, with the government currently holding almost $1 trillion in U.S. Treasury notes. Coupled with the U.S. corporate debt that Chinese interests hold, China possesses potent political and economic power that it has not been shy about using.

Not surprisingly, U.S. companies are prohibited from enjoying those same investment opportunities in China, making it an economic one-way-street. A Chinese company recently acquired 300 acres of land near Grand Forks, N.D., which just happens to be about 20 minutes’ drive from the Grand Forks Air Force Base. Who’s watching the store?

China is furiously financing the sale of products, such as 5G technology, to countries around the world, hoping to make them economically and technologically reliant. In the corporate world, it equates to making a controlling equity investment in a company and placing your friends on the board of directors.

Meanwhile, the United States and China are engaged in a curious Kabuki dance as companies from both countries enthusiastically welcome each other as significant trading and investment partners while fretting about ongoing economic espionage and the existence of embedded chips collecting intelligence. The U.S. government has blacklisted dozens of Chinese technology companies like Huawei, limiting their operations and preventing investment by U.S. entities in them because of the security threats they pose. But it has been approving nearly every application to export semiconductors, aerospace components and artificial-intelligence technology to China.

China has no doubt seen what Russia has done in addicting Europe to its energy resources to neutralize those countries to it military aggressions. If it uses a similar script and attacks or occupies Taiwan, it could control more than 90 percent of the world’s semiconductor chip manufacturing capabilities. It is also intent on dominating the fields of artificial intelligence and quantum computing by 2030 and 2035, respectively, greatly outspending the United State to achieve those goals using a “catch-up ethos” that Kai-Fu Lee describes in “AI Superpowers” as making Silicon Valley look “lethargic.”

What will it mean to America if China can build trust in its state-controlled economy, use its market power to continue to erode the status of the dollar as the global reserve currency and convince the world to accept a digital yuan issued by its central bank as it achieves technological superiority? At a minimum, the cost of capital, liquidity and borrowings would necessarily increase in the U.S. But social ramifications may also follow.

In “We Have Been Harmonized,” Kai Strittmatter describes a frightening behavioral dystopia and police state where the Chinese government controls everything that can be seen or communicated. The internet is censored through control of the three digital pipelines that enter and leave the country, and approximately 300 million facial recognition cameras funnel data to the government every moment. Apps on mobile phones digitally monitor and transmit endless behavioral information about citizens, resulting in their receiving a social score from the government. If that score is too low, they may lose mass transportation or educational privileges, or ultimately be assigned to “reeducation camps.” Such technological repression can very easily become permanent, making change impossible.

Dealing with these threats will require financial, political and technological leadership supported by democratic countries around the world. It will also take enormous courage for countries to accept the short-term economic pain that will accompany reordering their financial and technological choices. I don’t know if my baseball glove will ever be made in America again. But I sure hope we have a plan to deal with all this.

Thomas P. Vartanian is the author of “200 Years of American Financial Panics: Crashes, Recessions, Depressions and the Technology that Will Change it All” and executive director of the Financial Technology & Cybersecurity Center.

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