Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

une fois encore, il faut fabriquer la peur pour justifier la guerre. La cible iranienne

A journey into Russia's Muslim heartlands

As rights violation increases in Egypt, so does British investment

In 2015, researchers based in Brazil, India, Nigeria, Norway and the USA published  Financial flows and tax havens: combining to limit the lives of billions of people , which they fairly claim to be “the most comprehensive analysis of global financial flows impacting developing countries compiled to date.” Their report calculates ‘net resource transfers’ (NRT) between developed and developing countries, combining licit and illicit inflows and outflows—from development aid and remittances of wages to net trade receipts, debt servicing, new loans, FDI and portfolio investment and repatriated profits, along with capital flight and other forms of financial chicanery and outright theft. They found that in 2012, the most recent year for which they could obtain data, what they call ‘developing and emerging countries’ (which of course includes China) lost $2.0 trillion in net transfers to rich countries, equivalent to 8% of emerging nations’ GDP in that year—four times larger than t...

"Free trade" or protectionism?

It’s also likely that the Kremlin wants to have total control over the Left in much the same way it does the right wing. While ethnic supremacist, fascist forces were once ascendant in Russia,   many of those parties and organizations have been outlawed, their leaders imprisoned, exiled, or killed , their rank and file scattered to the wind. And now, Russia maintains a Kremlin-friendly, compliant fascist right wing that can be counted on to defend the Kremlin’s positions from Ukraine to Syria and beyond. Similarly, on the Left, the Kremlin may seek to smash the far left that, unlike the official Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) – a deeply reactionary communist organization that upholds chauvinist social policies combined with worship of Stalin and obedience to Putin – is not under the thumb of Putin and his clique. The repression of the radical left in Crimea

"It is imperative to ask why and how this obscure Canadian academic, who insists that gender and class hierarchies are ordained by nature and validated by science, has suddenly come to be hailed as the West’s most influential public intellectual." Jordan Peterson and Fascist Mysticism

Moishe Postone

Britain In December 1989,  Corbyn was one of only four MPs to sign a parliamentary motion  congratulating the “magnificent outburst” by striking workers in Czechoslovakia “against the corruption and mismanagement of the Stalinist bureaucracy”. “Even though Russia is no longer communist, there is still this assumption on many parts of the left that it is anti-imperialist, and they’re willing to turn a blind eye to things Russia does in other countries,” Greenberg said. “There’s a continuity between that part of the left’s attitudes back then to Czechoslovakia and its dissidents and its attitudes now to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its involvement in Syria. Those old attitudes are still there.” "Corbyn, the spy, and the cold war long shadow"

Burning Country Syrians in Revolution and War

Britain The Violence of Austerity

No one knows for certain how many Iraqis have died as a result of the invasion 15 years ago. Some credible estimates put the number at more than one million. You can read that sentence again. The invasion of Iraq is often spoken of in the United States as a “blunder,” or even a “colossal mistake.” It was a crime. Those who perpetrated it are still at large. Some of them have even been rehabilitated thanks to the horrors of Trumpism and a mostly amnesiac citizenry. (A year ago, I watched Mr. Bush on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” dancing and talking about his paintings.) The pundits and “experts” who sold us the war still go on doing what they do. I never thought that Iraq could ever be worse than it was during Saddam’s reign, but that is what America’s war achieved and bequeathed to Iraqis. "Fifteen Year Ago, America Destroyed My Country" Sinaan Antoon in The New York Times

Non-violence? "terrorism"? The writer, an ex-soldier, refers to the Palestinian violence as "terror" and "terrorism", but no where he use use the same words to refer to the structural violence of the settler-colonial state. Apartheid, occupation, oppression, etc are all fine but "terrorism" is restricted to those who retaliate against "democracies". "Palestinians' new doomsday weapon"

"The use a loan is put to is not fundamnetal for characterizing the debt as odious. Financial support for a criminal regime, even if it happens to build a school or a hospital, amounts to consolidating the said regime. The nature of the regime aside, the use of funds should suffice to qualify debts as odious whenever these funds are used against the populations's major interests or when they directly enrich the regime's inner circle. Thus, debts incurred within the framework of structrural adjustments fall into the category of odious debts, since the destructive character of the SAP [Structural Adjustment Program] has been clearly shown, including by UN agencies." Toussaint and Millet, 2010, pp. 249-50

A good take on Putin's Russia with no mention of Syria.  A bit soft on the American-led political-economy of "inevitability".  "Americans and Europeans have been guided through our new century by what I will call  the politics of inevitability  – a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done. In the American, capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity." "Vladimir Putin's politics of eternity"

"Facebook let a firm called GSR  scrape 50 million user profiles  and sell the data to another firm, Cambridge Analytica, whose express purpose was to  manipulate electoral behaviour  in favour of Donald Trump. That’s the one-paragraph summary of a story that will unfold with increasing complexity this week. Cambridge Analytica will be in the frame, basically, for lying to British MPs – and is now being investigated by the authorities in Massachusetts where it are based. But the scandal is just the latest in a series for Facebook, creating an existential moment for the world’s biggest social media corporation." Source: novaramedia.com A good analysis here (you only need to enter an email address to read it): You are the product: it zucks!

"Fuck neliberalism" by Simon Springer "while a quieter and gentler name for this paper could tone down the potential offence that might come with the title I’ve chosen, I subsequently reconsidered. Why should we be more worried about using profanity than we are about the actual vile discourse of neoliberalism itself? I decided that I wanted to transgress, to upset, and to offend, precisely because we ought to be offended by neoliberalism, it is entirely upsetting, and therefore we should ultimately be seeking to transgress it. Wouldn’t softening the title be making yet another concession to the power of neoliberalism? I initially worried what such a title might mean in terms of my reputation. Would it hinder future promotion or job offers should I want to maintain my mobility as an academic, either upwardly or to a new location? This felt like conceding personal defeat to neoliberal disciplining. Fuck that." — Simon Springer .  Well, that absolves capitalis...

What, then, explains Brexit? Mass immigration is another fear across the EU, and it was whipped up in the UK by the Leave campaign, in which Nigel Farage was a conspicuous speaker and organiser, alongside prominent Conservatives. But xenophobia on its own is by no means enough to outweigh fear of economic meltdown. In England, as elsewhere, it has been growing as one government after another has lied about the scale of immigration. But if the referendum on the EU had just been a contest between these fears, as the political establishment sought to make it, Remain would have no doubt won by a handsome margin, as it did in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. There were further factors. After Maastricht, the British political class declined the straitjacket of the euro, only to pursue a native neoliberalism more drastic than any on the continent: first, the financialised hubris of New Labour, plunging Britain into a banking crisis before any other European country, then a Con...

"We have flags, a national anthem, but everything else is decided by the West. It's all wrapped up in nice words, under cover of aid extended by such bodies as the WB and the IMF, that are nothing more than instruments of torture invented by the West to continue its domination." — Ahmed ben Bella, president of the Algerian Republic, 1963 to 1965. Quoted by Toussaint and Millet, 2010.

"Repaying the debt is an essential obstacle to satisfying basic human needs, such as access to clean water, decent food, basic health care, primary education, decent accomodation, and satisfactory infrastructure. Without any doubt, the satisfcation of basic human needs must take priority over all other considerations, be they geopolitical ot financial. From a moral point of view, the rights of creditors, shareholders, or speculators are insignificant in comparison with the fundamental rights of five billion citizens. Debt is one of the main mechanisms through which a new form of economic colonization operates to the detriment of the developing countries. It is one more brick in the edifice of historic abuses, also carried out by the rich countries: slavery, pillage of raw materials and cultural goods, extermination of indigenous populations, and colonial servitude. The time is overdue to replace the logic of domination by the logic of redistribution of wealth in the name of jus...

"Admitting" crimes? "Top three stunning admissions" from the top U.S General in the Middle East Note: Saudi Arabia in heavily involved in the Yemn war. The UK High Court has ruled that selling weapons to Saudi Arabia is lawful. When they (Russian and Syrian regimes) do it, it is a crime. When we do it, it is legal. The reversal of a fact: students are taught that "democracies" retaliate when a violence is inflicted on their citizens. The fact is: individual terrorists retaliate against the structural violence of imperialist and local states. Students are taught that the Western rich states, the World Bank and other institutions are helping in developing the poor countries. The fact is: through blunder and exploitation by multinationals, debt, support of dictatorships, and other mechanisms, the poor countries are developing the rich countries .

By authors of The Global Political Economy of Israel The authors acknowledge that their analysis/perspective is "unique". I find it so, but it is very interesting. On the one hand, the differential profits of the oil companies and the revenues of the oil-producing countries remain tightly correlated with the relative price of oil: over the past decade or so, both have plummeted in tandem. So this side of the theory still works. On the other hand, the synchronized decline of prices and earnings has occurred despite ongo- ing regional conflict and plenty of violence. On this count, the theory seems incon- sistent with recent events. Is this partial breakdown a sign of things to come? Will the differential profits of the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition continue to stir Blood and Oil in the Orient , as Essad Bey (1932) poetically called it – or are we witnessing the end of an era?  Arms and Oil in the Middle East

The Saudi predicament