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Showing posts with the label argentina

The Qatar World Cup

The bigger picture in this article is not big enough. While nurses and other workers go on strike in Britain, for example, one has to compare the social value of a professional football player to a nurse and their incomes, and how such obscene injustice has become acceptable and normal. The world Cup and the champion leagues are a capitalist industry run on the 5 basis of competition and profit. The question of class, exploitation and ideology are also at play. Money’s chokehold on modern football Related “We are all complicit in the system” in one way or another. We clap and cheer. We succumb to amnesia. We fill in our day with hypocrisy.

Syria’s Disappeared

It is difficult to grasp the sheer magnitude of enforced disappearances in Syria. According to recent  estimates , since 2011 over 150,000 Syrians have been disappeared or arbitrarily detained (out of a total population of around  17 million ), most of them by the regime. By comparison, during the Argentinian military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, the estimated   total of   desaparecidos   was 30,000 (Argentina had a population of around  27 million   at the time). What is more, the regime is known to brutally torture those who  vanish  inside its industrial-scale secret prison system. One of the most notorious locations is the Saydnaya military prison 30 kilometres north of Damascus. Human rights group Amnesty International and a team of forensic architects from Goldsmiths, University of London reconstructed  the Saydnaya complex for an international audience in 2017. No recent photographs exist, so they had to rely exclusively on former detainees’ recollections. The picture that

IMF

In 1998 the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial that said that the IMF ‘has not been fighting financial fires but dousing them with gasoline’. The IMF pours the first tranche of gasoline. Vijay Prashad has an update The IMF does not fight financial fires but douses them with gasoline