Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Is Iraq steering towards post-sectarianism? I think there is some intellectual laziness in describing some non-traditional/governing parties as "populist". This is the adjective that has been (mis/ab) used in Europe as well. I also think that the support of the protests by the highest Shi'a authority is indicative. It aims at absorbing the anger, but also a move that is aware of the growth of the Sadrist movement. After all, this same authority has been generally complicit for more than a decade and has not mobilised the Shi'a (the majority) for  economic and social rights.

Israeli weapons used against Rohingya Muslims

Midle East Monitor , which the bbc says it is pro-Hamas, is trying to tarnish "our British values", spreading hatred of "our democracy and freedoms"!  "UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee reported that British intelligence officers have been involved in human rights abuses on hundreds of occasions. According to government lawyers, there are concerns that some potential human rights abuses took place within international armed conflict and could amount to war crimes."

Then as now I align myself with Orwell's pessimism. "To the British working class, Orwell argued, the massacre of their comrades in Vienna, Berlin, or Madrid had seemed less worthy of their consideration than 'yesterday’s football match.' Even more disappointing to him was the total lack of solidarity that the English working class had shown for “colored” workers in the colonies." Today, despite a tremendous global flow of information of what is happening elsewhere, Orwell's pessimism has an echo when one looks at the extent of the working classes passivity in the "West" before the plunder, inequality, exploitation and ‘Islamophobia’ at home and people's struggle during the Arab uprisings or barbarism in Syrian and Myanmar. " Orwell’s late collaboration with the propaganda apparatus of Western imperialism is a sad, regrettable, and inexcusable fact." I think the following is a good assessment of Orwell. Geroge Orwell and the

Then as now, the question still stands: "Which side are you on?" In Dubious Battle (a movie) (close a few pop up windows and select 'openload')

The coffee shop chain Costa has been bought by Coca Cola   " I will never drink Costa coffee again! Oh boycot them, its a disgrace. I will never set foor in there again! Yes you will.  After all it will be like everything else in this country.  You know, five minutes of frothing at the mouth, righteous indignation and bluster. Then its back to our normal apathetic, lie down and be used as a doormat status quo ante. Nothing changes, sad but true." — a comment on the bbc article The previous owner of Costa,  Whitbread, reported the bbc in 2015 ,  "no longer recognises trade unions. Whitbread has always paid above the national minimum wage, but otherwise pay in the company is set by supply and demand ." Why do you need trade unions in the land of milk and honey and where workers rights are guranteed by the free market? Over to you, Coca Cola! Google "Coca Cola human rights" and you'll get an idea. 

Before the next attack Once examined, the terms 'British values' and 'Western values' unspool into a sequence of connotative links connecting territory, birth and culture in a roughly 'historicist' manner.  It is a given that 'the West', for example, is not a geographical entity so much as a historically produced caste of national states comprising Europe and its colonies, from North America to Australasia.  This white West is connected to its supposed values through the crucial vector of culture.  Thus, it just so happens that white people are the legatees of a particular level of civilizational and cultural development that give them these unique, priceless assets such as democracy.  This necessitates forgetting how passionately and often violently democracy was resisted within the social formations of 'the West', as well as how much modern democratic revolutions owed to the decidedly 'non-Western' Haiti.  But the link between terri

Very good! The temporal paradox is that, although Marx comes after Spinoza, it is Spinoza who can now help us fill the gaps in Marx.” The gaps concern a problem Marx poses, but never completely resolves: Why, and how, do workers return to work each day? If labor power drives the entire capitalist economy, then what is it that motivates individuals to continue to sell their labor power? Lordon believes the answer can be found in Spinoza’s theory of desire, of the conatus that constitutes an individual’s striving, and the affects that define it. In Lordon’s approach to the Spinoza/Marx relation there are echoes of Spinoza’s fundamental political question, “Why do the masses fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?” coupled with Marx’s basic critique of the alienation of capitalism. It is a question of knowing why people will continue to work for a system that exploits them, appropriating their productive powers while granting them less and less control. On labour and human bo

Business first Billions of pounds and jobs "The British government has no British values" You British women who want to liberate backward Muslim women from oppression, what are you up to these days?

The disappeared and the dead at the hands of the Syrian regime

From the history of 'liberalism' or things my American professors at university never told me The famous French political theorist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) who is known for his major work Democracy in America. "In May 1847, noting that the 'Bey of Tunisia' had already abolished the 'odious institution' [of slavery]—which in Muslim countries, by the French liberal's admission, took a 'milder' form—de Tocqueville expressed the opinion that 'we should doubtless only proceed to the abolition of slavery with care and moderation'. De Tocqueville seemed to be ready to accept a compromise even more favourable to the slaveholding South [of the U.S.]. 'As for the policy permitting slavery to develop in a whole portion of the territory where it was hitherto unknown, I will concede ... that one can do nothing but tolerate this existence in the special, current interests of the Union.' [A letter of 13 April 1857]

Whenever you do something stupid, just remember that Roman emperor Caligula waged a war on Poseidon [the Greek god of the seas and other waters]. He had his army march to the beach and told them to start stabbing the water.

The Islamophobe Dutch politician Geert Wilders is organising a cartoon competition to depict the prophet Mohammed. Here is what Alain Badiou wrote in the aftermath of the attack on Charlie Hebdo : "Here and there, people say that  Charlie Hebdo ’s cartoons aren’t attacking Muslims as such, but rather the fundamentalists’ terrorist activity. That is objectively false. Let’s take a typical example of their cartoons: we see two naked buttocks and the caption ‘Et le cul de Mahomet, on a le droit?’ (‘And what about Mohammed’s arse – can we use that?’). So is the Muslim faithful’s Prophet, a constant target for such stupidity, a contemporary terrorist? No, that’s not any kind of politics. It’s got nothing to do with the solemn defence of ‘freedom of expression’. It is a ridiculous, provocative obscenity targeting Islam itself – and that’s all. And it’s nothing more than third-rate cultural racism, a ‘joke’ to amuse the local pissed-up Front National supporter.  It may be amusing f

The tip of an iceberg - Honour bound .. - To defend freedom. Those two of my favourite lines in this film Camp X Ray (a movie) (close the three or four pop-up windows)

Islams and Modernities By Aziz Al-Azmeh

Iraq Protests and anger of Shia men diretced at Shia politicians? I tought it was fundamentally, inherently and eternally a Sunni-Shia war! "Sunni and Shia politicians sat in the parliament and built fortunes with the blood of the people who massacred each other in the street." Oil flows freely, but corruption fuels growing anger You see, there is no hope in these people. We "liberated them", we "helped them having democracy" after 2003, but it seems they are not fit to catch up with "the civilised world".

The burka and handshaking, and other personal freedoms "Everyone should be able to attend their religious as well as their bodily needs without the police sticking its nose in". — K. M.  But today is not only the state or a company that might repress your freedoms, but also people who disagree with you; they avoid you, marginalise you, or even side with the state in repressing you in the name of "integration" and "our values". You are the Other, the threat, the radical, the non-conformist, etc.

Theresa May in Africa "Aid" is a con. It is partly to mask the criminal role of the City of London in capital flight and as a route to tax havens In figures: "In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States. for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows." How poor countries develop rich countries Or aid in reverse I add the following mechanisms: Uneven and combined development serves the imperialist st

Qat, Friedman explained to his uninitiated readership, was “the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work.” Though Friedman himself “quit after fifteen minutes,” he still managed to devise the following “new rule of thumb” for US involvement in the country: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build fifty new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.” This magical “ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens” was, Friedman felt, America’s best bet “to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.” The US [and its allies] helped massacre Yemeni schoolchildren

Iran 74 lashes for being a trade unionist

"Criminal sons of bitches on the make. That's what we've been." Route Irish (a movie)

The multiculturalism the European right fears ...

John Gamey: As the forces of Bashar al-Assad, backed by the Russian air force, reconquered Daraa city, the birthplace of the Syrian revolution, an aid worker reported to Kareem Shaheen in The Guardian that “people have accepted the reality that the entire world is fighting against the revolution, and therefore it cannot continue.” Shaheen is correct; the realisation however is late. The “the entire world” – all the major imperialist and regional reactionary powers – has been against the revolution since its outbreak in March 2011. Their differences have been entirely tactical. The crushing of heroic Daraa involved an unwritten agreement between the Assad regime, Russia, the US and Israel. Four ‘heroes’ of today’s global ‘alt-right’ – Assad, Netanyahu, Trump and Putin – have emerged triumphant over the corpse of the Syrian revolution.” Syria Endgame

This headline is on Foreign Policy, not on a marxist website America is committing war crimes and doesn't even know why (In the url the adjective 'awful' is added to describe the crimes. I am not aware whether under Obama, for example, the likes of FP, ever called the actions of the US "war crimes").  Personally, I began to learn about the crimes of American imperialism only in the build up to the 2003 war on Iraq. At that time, it was through books and documentaries by authors such as Noam Chomsky and William Blum. Before that I mainly knew the crimes of Stalin, Mao, Saddam Hussein ...  The claim in the FP article that Iran has been supporting the Houthis is flimsy and has been disputed by a few analysts  who qualified such "a support".    Here is one of those analyses . Related One of Blum's book is the famous Rogue State . Ironically, it is endorsed by Osama bin Laden and available on the CIA website. No, it is not a conspiracy theory

From the archive The contradictions of identity Gary Younge will be speaking at the British Academy , London, 17 September 2018

An admission that this one of the inherent aspects of capitalism In Tooze’s view,  “These crises are hard to predict or define in advance,”  and, short of more regulation, there is nothing we can do. In a way, as long as capitalism continues as the dominant mode of production globally, that is pretty much right.  That reminds me of what Greenspan said in his final summation of the crisis: “ I doubt that stability is achievable in capitalist economies, given the always turbulent competitive markets continuously being drawn toward but never quite achieving  equilibrium” . He went on,  “unless there is a societal choice to abandon dynamic markets and leverage for some form of central planning, I fear that preventing bubbles will in the end turn out to be infeasible. Assuaging the aftermath is all we can hope for.” Crashed: more the how than the why

"If we don't understand class struggle, we don't understand anything"

Aerial photographs 

Foreign Powers and the Syrian Calculus

"When Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999, there was hope. He was a man who championed the poor in what has always been a deeply divided society. He was a vibrant and controversial figure who wanted to lead a socialist revolution in Venezuela.  But Chavez was helped by strong commodity prices that funded his ambitious social programmes. With a fall in oil prices, President Maduro has had no such luck - and little of the charisma his predecessor had. During his leadership, the country has fallen into economic decline." ( The BBC ) Yes, strong commodities benefited Venezuela and other countries for a while, but a new socio-economic project cannot be built on a temporary boom or in one country or some "islands". That is impossible in a global capitalist system. The experience of Venezurla has proved that any faltering in the boom affects not only state revenues but also any deepening of popular democracy. And if the new leadership, whatever ideas and ideals it

The rising tide

Business first ... and austerity  I witness this everyday in London: a "civilisation" that cannot provide toiltes/access to toiltes. In many cases, one has to pay for a drink/food just to use a toilet. Greater London has a population of more than 8 million, visitors not included. Big chaines like Pret a manger do not even have toilets. Some Wasabi restaurants do not have toilets. It seems there is no legal obligation that these busineeses must have such vital facility. Next time when you are in London make sure you empty your bowels very well before you go on the street. There is  no particular right to access a toilet in public  and local authorities do not have a duty to provide them Businesses that provide toilets for their customers have no legal duty to do so for non-customers Public toilets in London "Why is San Francisco covered in human feces?"

This is unprecedented. I'm very shocked and surprised! And these academics have always been using their most effective tools at their disposal: letters and petitions. "UK puts money before human rights in Egypt"

الرجل الذي لم يُوَقَّع

Trailing ... The Mujahidin, Taliban and the CIA  (wikipedia) Sleeping with the devil (the Washington Post) The CIA and Islamic fundamentalism   (Weekly Worker) How the Taliban got their way in Afghanistan (the New York Times, a review of Ahmed Rashid's Taliban ) Political Islam in the service of imperialism (Samir Amin)

"Lady Rothschild wanted to persuade company chiefs that capitalism must go  “beyond financial performance only, in an effort to enhance the value of environmental, human, ethical and social capital”.   The idea was backed by luminaries like Bill Clinton; Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England; Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Church of England; and, to cap it all, Prince Charles of the British monarchy! These eminences were out to tell the world that capitalism is a great and good thing and can be made even better if we can reduce inequality and poverty, end global warming and wars, and operate in a ‘moral’ way.  Like Warren, Lady Rothschild argued that  “the imbalance of capital and labour”  must be acted upon." "Accountable, inclusive or responsible capitalism?" I disagree with stating that "capitalism won't and can't deliver". I think it is more complicated than that. The system in fact has been delivering and not del

UK Facts about previous MPs before voting in the last general election You get the idea about their education, wealth, "representation", and what interests/system they are expected to defend

We willingly buy the screens that are used against us "willingly"? 

Syrian security forces did not reach the targeted villages for several hours.  "The regime forces could have stepped in to prevent the attack or at least mitigate it once it happened," Dr Yahya said. "It's very easy for people to see this as a payback for them having not sided with the regime or for their attempt to take a neutral position in the conflict." Druze village massacre 

Four types of slavery throughout the world

"There can be no question that violence and racism were essential traits of fascism. But for most Italians, Germans and other European fascists, the appeal was based not on racism, much less ethnic cleansing, but on the fascists’ ability to respond effectively to crises of capitalism when other political actors were not. Fascists insisted that states could and should control capitalism, that the state should and could promote social welfare, and that national communities needed to be cultivated. The fascist solution ultimately was, of course, worse than the problem." It was not just hate, racism and violence. Fascism offered robust social welfare Two young nation states in the biggest economic crisis of capitalism. Offering solutions to a system in crisis appeals to the conservatism in the majority and makes them complacent and even complicit in racism and violence. A threat is created and some-people-"are-better-than-others" find an echo in the shell of the na

Arsène Tchakarian (1916-2018)

The lives of African fruit pickers in Italy

England "Free market" fundamentalism The prison will be returned to G4S when "sufficient progress" has been made. This is despite the criminal record of G4S. Other examples are mildly called "controversies" by wikipedia . See also An undercover findings in an immigration detention centre " The UK is the only country in the European Union that doesn’t put a specific time limit on immigration detention."

"The U.S debt to Syria"

"[Y]ou may observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day, but still not have learned the lessons of history. You may be remembering to forget, practicing a spurious innocence, externalising evil, forgetting that, as Adorno argued, as long as we live in the conditions that could produce Auschwitz, we are all guilty . The only thing that could conceivably alleviate that guilt is to act against those conditions. Hence, Stone's preference for many and varied forms of memory, at different levels, detached from the rituals of the great and good. What are those conditions? The Trust identifies "racism and hate" in a general way, presumably intending to be as uncontroversial and therefore inclusive as possible. However, histories of Germany and fascism in recent decades, by Mark Mazower, Enzo Traverso, Jurgen Zimmerer, Isabel Hull, Sven Lindquist, Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga and Shelley Baranowski, to name just a few, have in common that they have foregrounded an emp

"Orteguista ,  rather than Sandinista ,  [is]  a linguistic distinction that has become a common indicator of Ortega’s divorce from the FSLN’s founding values. Where the Sandinista Front was established as socialist, the Ortega government has  privatized  Nicaraguan industries and made welfare services contingent upon party allegiance." Activists speak out about Nicaragua's crackdowns

Classical Syrian cinema The film was released in 1972 and based on a story by Haydar Haydar, a prominent Syrian writer and Arab nationalist. The events of the film/story take place in the aftermath of the formal independence of Syria. The film is subtitled in English.

"The label 'terrorist' works to identify a little enclave of evil, a sub-population of evil-doers, from whom the rest of humanity distinct. It works to hypocritically stratify global violence, so that we know who is entitled to its use, and whose rustiest weapon is an outrage." When the ANC were "terrorists"

"English" literature Looking forward to reading this book "This analysis is often supported by a discussion of the worldviews, or ideologies, of the writers concerned, whether it is the conservative Jane Austen acting as a watchdog for the morality of the landed gentry at a time of social upheaval but in the process exposing their many moral failures, or the liberal intellectual George Eliot meticulously recording the stifling society of parochial England and ultimately finding it too claustrophobic and oppressive, a world to escape from in order to breathe freely. Eagleton refreshingly demystifies the cult of the 'great writer'. A fine example of this is with the chapter on DH Lawrence, where he broaches the thorny subject of the relationship of politics to literature. It is, I think, a definitive summary, and one that explains how it is possible to reject a writer's reactionary views but at the same time appreciate what is best in their art. Lawren

How the Nazis bought the German people A new book

"Can We Understand Populism Without Calling it Fascism?"

Independent India and the Secret US-UK Deal That Changed It All

BBC's 'Lost Boys?' is a lazy reproduction of racist, culturally essentialist stereotypes approved by an 'insider' "The story of British Pakistani men"

The U.S military budget in 2017 was more than $600 billion. That's more than the budgets of the next 13 countries put together. Trump has requested an increase of $54 billion for this  year budget.  That is almost the entire military budget of Russia. "No one is gonna mess with us, folks, no one."  —Donald Trump

These Muslims are causing us so much pain . When is it gonna end?

Boris and the burka: taking cue from the EU

"With the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the rise of the U.S. to unparalleled power, Amin wrote of the ‘empire of chaos’, of a new era that would result in great inequality, precarious labour, the destruction of agriculture and the dangers of political religion. What Amin tracked in 1992 would become clear two decades later, when he revisited these same themes in  The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism  (2013). Monopoly firms had sucked the life out of the system, turning businesspeople into ‘waged servants’ and journalists into the ‘media clergy’. An unsustainable world system, with finance in dominance and people whipping from one precarious job to another, seemed to threaten the future of humanity. He surveyed the world and found no real alternative to the monopoly-dominated system that—like a vampire—sucked the blood out of the world. This did not mean that history was to drive humanity over the precipice. Other choices lay before us." Death of a Marxist

"There is a basic level of ignorance in British society - partly wilful ignorance, partly genuine misinformation, partly flat-out denial - about how the Israeli state actually came to be. There seems to be in Britain - in TV commentators, in mainstream academics, in ordinary public opinion - a deep reluctance to acknowledge how, in 1948, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were forcibly evicted, with British backing, off their own land. To recognise this as racist, in the words of the IHRA code, would be "anti-semitic". A large part of the mainstream media anger towards the Labour Party for refusing the "internationally recognised" code is an establishment anger against a political party for refusing to accept the post-war narrative - a narrative, moreover, which has been successfully disseminated and internalised among many people in the UK since 1948. This is the scale of the British Labour Party's problem - if it is to go through with this, it

"More than seven years after the beginning of the popular uprising in Syria, which increasingly turned into an international war, the causes of this eruption are often forgotten. When they are discussed, the vast majority of authors reduce the uprising to a struggle against authoritarianism while neglecting its socio-economic roots almost entirely." Syria: the social origins of the uprising

"The Corbyn incident suggests that to be complicit in the violence of the Israeli occupation – as western governments are – is acceptable, but to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause is to court condemnation." Another exercise in hypocrisy

 "the militants of political Islam are not truly interested in discussing the dogmas that form religion. The ritual assertion of membership in the community is their exclusive preoccupation. Such a vision of the reality of the modern world is not only distressing because of the immense emptiness of thought that it conceals, but it also justifies imperialism’s strategy of substituting a so-called conflict of cultures for the one between imperialist centers and dominated peripheries. The exclusive emphasis on culture allows political Islam to eliminate from every sphere of life the real social confrontations between the popular classes and the globalized capitalist system that oppresses and exploits them. The militants of political Islam have no real presence in the areas where actual social conflicts take place and their leaders repeat incessantly that such conflicts are unimportant. Islamists are only present in these areas to open schools and health clinics. But these are nothi

The crimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and others have been explained and condemned by socialists. When will capitalism answer for its crimes?

الأمة والدولة والطبقات في الوطن العربي سمير أمين

Sexuality and Solitude Foucault and Sennet, 1981

"Today the concentration and centralization of capital is manifested in the growth of international monopoly capital. Capital is more and more mobile (along with technology), as the giant firms become increasingly globalized and financialized. Nevertheless, nation-state divisions remain intact with governments promoting the interests of “their” corporations over those of other countries, along with restrictions on the mobility of labor.  The result is a system of unequal exchange, in which the difference in the wages between labor forces in different nations is greater than the difference between their productivities. This creates a system of “imperial rents” accruing to the global corporations in the center—referred to less directly in mainstream economic circles as the “global labor arbitrage.” (An analogous process affects natural resources, drawn from the global South.) All of this points to the superexploitation of labor in the periphery, which receives in wages less than th

"Invoking collective ownership of former colonial property for individual gain is not an isolated incident in Algeria. The widespread occupation of colonial-era properties and refusal to pay state rent in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in addition to more recent examples -- including SIFFAN, UNIAL, and several cases of former colonial agricultural land claimed by tribes in the High Plains  -- underscore a consistently held perception of colonial-era property. When Algerians invoke the colonial period to justify access to land and properties whose value has exponentially increased as Algeria has become increasingly embedded in the international economy, they are not mnemonically reciting tropes and slogans of the past, as French president Emmanuel Macron seemed to have hinted during a recent visit to Algiers.  Rather, they are making a very clear set of claims based on collective memory. They are invoking colonialism in order to appropriate and claim the spoils of the Algerian war of

"Visitors to ramallah these days are often struck by its boom-town appearance. There are large-scale construction projects underway, a proliferation of hotels and nightclubs, Mexican restaurants, luxury cars, cappuccino prices on par with London or Brooklyn—jarringly at odds with prevailing notions of Palestinian life under the shadow of Israeli occupation. Arafat’s hilltop compound, reduced to rubble by Israeli shelling and bulldozers in 2002, has been rebuilt at vast expense and now houses his pharaonic tomb. The city’s ‘diplomatic quarter’ of al-Masyoun boasts quasi-embassies from the  OECD  countries, as if it were the capital of a real nation-state, while international dance and theatre companies regularly perform at its state-of-the-art Culture Palace. For some, Ramallah is Palestine’s Green Zone, as isolated from the rest of the Occupied Territories as the notorious  US  headquarters in Baghdad. It represents an enclave cosmopolitanism, a ‘Bantustan sublime’. The latest met

"It is notable and important that anti-Muslim Western propaganda and Pan-Islamic narratives of history resemble one another. They both rely on the civilisational narrative of history and a geopolitical division of the world into discrete ahistorical entities such as black Africa, the Muslim world, Asia and the West." What is the Muslim World? The idea of "a Muslim world' is both modern and misleading

"The biggest provider for these activities was the Cayman Islands," a British Overseas Territory. Tax haven link to rainforest destruction and illegal fishing

The New Panopticon

The Young Karl Marx (movie) It is not easy to find a free online version. You might experience annoyance with pop up windows, but will evetually get it play.

I wonder what Klein's use of the description "deregulated capitalism" means in this context. Does she mean that "regulated capitalism" would have averted the worsening of the earth's eco-system?  Klein describes Sweden, Denmark and Uruguay as "democratic socialists." I think that is inaccurate. As a leftist she should be aware these countries are "social democracies." In Sweden, for example, approximately 90% of resources and companies are privately owned . High taxation, generous welfare state, etc does not make an economy socialist. "My focus is the central premise of the piece: that the end of the 1980s presented conditions that “could not have been more favorable” to bold climate action. On the contrary, one could scarcely imagine a more inopportune moment in human evolution for our species to come face to face with the hard truth that the conveniences of modern consumer capitalism were steadily eroding the habitability of t

Science and space exploration have achieved wonders in a short time of human history.  The paradox, however, is not only how the benefits have been spread out unevenly and how dangers of catstrophic misuse of science are real, but also how human priorities have been defined by the powers that control science. The latest example is the sending of the fastest object ever made by humans to the sun . The probe mission has cost $1.5 billion. A sum of money that could feed 41,667 children for 17 years. And that is in the U.S.  This is just an sxample. There huge sums of money wasted by lobbies and on armament and advertisements that are even higher.

UK From the archive The Daily Mail and Ralph Miliband

"The world at a fascist moment" "Fascist"? Not even "neo-fascist? I have also noticed that there is no questioning of "democracy", the one used in the mainstream discourse.

With the inability of the state to invest, large-scale plunder has taken place. Also, complicity in crimes with the U.S. Anti-corruption is symptomatic of a deeper problem. Neither side of the political spectrum ever bucks their shared Atlanticist bent. In late 2014 Romania’s growing European diaspora propelled Klaus Iohannis—a nonentity in national politics, but heralded as an efficient German by the mythologizing middle classes. In 1990, 86 per cent of Romanians went to the polls; in 2008 and again in 2017, a mere 39 per cent. Once the badlands of neoliberal Europe, Romania has become its bustling frontier. "The Romanian banking system was taken over by Société Générale, Raiffeisen and the Erste Group. Its energy sector fell to Österreichische Mineralölverwaltung of Vienna and České Energetické Závody of Prague. Its steel manufacturing went to Mittal, its timber production to the Schweighofer Group, its national automobile, the Dacia, to Renault. Much of what isn’t yet