Finance

In 2006 and 2007, I spent several months in Ahmedabad while on a fellowship from my university in the US. During my time in Ahmedabad, I interacted with the mostly-Hindu NGO staff where I was based, residents of the largely Hindu shantytown where the NGO was working, and professors at Gujarat University. Less than five years had passed since the city had gone through its nightmare: vicious riots involving saffron-clad men entering urban neighborhoods and brutalizing, gang-raping, and burning other human beings. Some 1,500 Muslims were killed.

American imperialism is like a dinosaur fighting extinction.  There are two long term trajectories that have continuously intersected and are leading to its failure - the “super power” infrastructure of mass violence that gave rise to insurgents and the structural flaw in capitalism that will leave the current economic crisis unrecoverable.  

Looking through the alphabet soup of financial instruments such as Collateralized Debt Obligations, Asset Backed Commercial Papers, Credit Debt Swaps, are you feeling like a commoner back in the day, disallowed from reading holy verses in the sacred language, while being made to feel like a sinner for questioning the high order? Ali Mir explains the collapse and considers the Obama victory and the next Act in the struggle.