Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Highlights from Jason Hickel 1)  Compensation for atmospheric appropriation .  This is my top highlight. We show that rich countries have already dramatically exceeded their fair-shares of the carbon budget for 1.5 ° C and 2 ° C and are rapidly appropriating the fair-shares of others, forcing them to mitigate faster than would otherwise be required. In a scenario where all countries aim for zero emissions by 2050, rich countries will owe $192 trillion to global South countries in compensation for atmospheric appropriation. In  Nature Sustainability . 2)  Climate change and racial justice .  Rich countries and elites are overwhelmingly responsible for excess emissions, but communities in the global South—and Indigenous and racially minoritized groups within nations—face a disproportionate burden of illness and mortality due to climate change. The climate crisis is a process of atmospheric colonization, and the consequences are playing out along colonial lines. Make sure to check out the

“The pretense of “saving” Iraqi women was a dimension of the neocolonial narrative of democracy building leveraged by the US administration to invade and occupy Iraq. “Saving” implies that US imperial domination is superior and even necessary and inherently good for women. Iraqi women are perceived as an ahistorical homogenous object, portrayed as essentially voiceless victims. Even 20 years after the destructive and devastating invasion and occupation, the gendering of the democracy narrative on the Middle East remains. The focus on women’s political participation and visibility is a central dimension of the democracy narrative that has dominated the US discourse on Iraq: the idea that Iraq now runs free elections, has women in its parliament and therefore the country is a democracy. In reality, Iraqis have turned away from the polls—the 2021 elections had the  lowest voter turnout  in Iraq post-2003—and many have decided to take to the streets to voice their political vision outside

Shalash the Iraqi

Systematic delays, economic opportunities and the risk of green colonialism

Joining ‘the West’

An autocratic post-Soviet state, repression, and foreign capital

The crisis boils down to the form of British capitalism. “It still seems more likely that Japan and Britain will secure enough gas, in the same way they secured enough coronavirus vaccines, by the expedient of poorer countries not getting enough. But for Britain the price crisis will be harsh. Free market fanaticism combines with the brutal practice of making the poorest citizens pay a disproportionate share of the cost of funding the transition to zero-carbon energy.” On the boil Related Why India is on the brink of a power crisis

 

Johnson’s been a ‘culture war’ warrior since the ‘90s

This is not news; it’s been going going for years. “Rather than selling off the NHS  outright – a decision politicians know would be unpopular – they are instead doing this through the backdoor, by stealth.” The NHS is being privatised by stealth under cover of the pandemic

Violence and dispossession invite violence and death. This is the long-lasting virus. Jihadists and the curse of gas and rubies in Mozambique

 The road to neoliberal autocracy

  Pandemic, China, Israel, the US, the Arab uprisings ...

“While official anti-corruption campaigns are at best a PR exercise, the opposition’s drive to weed out corruption rests on the idea that corruption is an incidental addition to the system, which could be made to function more fairly and rationally without it. Yet this is to mistake a feature for a glitch: the orgies of illicit enrichment [Alexei] Navalny and others rightly attack are not simply a product of the personal greed of Putin’s colleagues, they are part of the system’s very architecture. Far from being an extraneous or incidental aspect of contemporary Russian capitalism, corruption has been built into it from the outset.” Russia’s appointed billionaires

Tory privatisation? Doesn't that absolve New Labour? Tory privatisation is at the heart of the UK's disastrous coronavirus response

Is it a coincidence that the two pioneer states of the most aggressive form of "neoliberal" capitalism at home and abroad in the last 40 years or so are so far the most affected by the coronavirus? How the Anglo-American model failed to tackle the coronavirus

"We are all in it together" A letter from a doctor to Boris Johnson published a few months ago: ' Johnson has contributed to thousands of deaths ' Related 'The greatest global science failure for a generation' 'Herd immunity' or lockdown

Coronavirus and the Economic Crisis

For decades the dominant view in academia and outside academia has been blaming corruption for the ills and problems in the MENA region. Up until the 1970s, cultural factors had blamed been for the failures of the region to develop. Cultural factors were also used to explain China's underdevelopment from a capitalist perspective. It's been convenient for the centres of powers in the West and the international institutions to dessiminate such a view so that the structural roots and the form of capitalism (rentier economies) as well as imperialist domination is masked and not questioned. I am glad to see that an opinion on bloomberg , a hardly Marxist website, that is sceptical of that dominant view. One thus has to think of the class structure in the MENA region, the lack of the political will to pursue a development path based on productivity and acquire the technology to be able to compete globally in a world where technological know-how and markets are monopolised by a h