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Showing posts with the label infrastructure

US

 An entrenched and poisonous status quo will continue. “  Rather than a rejection of Trump, the election results reshuffle the finely balanced and deeply polarised configuration that has prevailed in American politics since the days of Bill Clinton in the 1990s.” Trump has not been repudiated Related The left (sic) just got crushed There is leftist wing in the Democratic party, but to say it represents the Left is a fallacy that has been going on for decades, and not only in the US, in order to reject the real left. Even if Biden won with a comfortable majority, including the Senate, his administration would be like others: a representative of big business, making cosmetic changes if the declining economy allowed, hawkish, and imperialist.

Egypt

"The challenge these mega-infrastructure projects present is that they are often pursued in lieu of projects that would bring tangible economic improvements and raise the standard of living of the average Egyptian." Al-Sisi's vanity projects
"Internet fibre optic cables around the world trace out the routes of former empires. Cables from Africa route back to their former colonial powers. Lots of cabling from South America still goes back to Spain. Imperialism didn’t stop with decolonisation: it just moved up to infrastructure level. James Bridle is the author of New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future - a brilliant new work that reveals the dark clouds that loom over our technological future: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, and the hollowing out of empathy."
Iraq We have been here before: the destruction of the Ba'th's regime state by imperialism had led to similar consequences: neglect, fuelling sectarianism, geopolitics...  Actually, those consequences have significantly determined the present situation in Iraq. "Nascent territorialism in Mosul threatens long-term reconstruction efforts by institutionalising division between traumatised populations and security actors, as well as by breeding local resentment at perceived government neglect. With insufficient military and economic resources to commit to liberated areas, the Iraqi government may struggle to reverse trends toward factionalism without sustained international assistance. Yet today, long-term international aid seems unlikely, as Baghdad’s critical foreign partners scale back post-ISIS cooperation." Rivalries threaten post-ISIS Mosul