Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

  Gamal Abdel Nasser – An appraisal

“ The result is a world of two different trust realities. The informed public—wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news—remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right.”  Where People Are Loosing Faith in Capitalism Edelman Trust Barometer 2020

 Via Michael Roberts “Here we go again - the unending story of banking folk.” Australian bank Westpac has been fined A$1.3bn for money laundering the dubious money of 284 clients in 19m transactions worth A$11bn (yes, billion) - including clients engaged in child trafficking! But no arrests have been made of executives. Just a fine. "It’s huge, it’s the largest fine in history, it’s an eye watering number but it’s already pretty much been expected by the market" he said. "A few hundred mill difference in the scheme of a bank with a market cap of $60 billion that generates billions of profit annually, it doesn’t really have much of an impact with the valuation we put on the bank." Related Regulation does not work

  Free ebooks from Verso

 Schools should not teach about corruption. If you think the UK isn’t corrupt, you haven’t looked hard enough

 Why environmental justice is an anti-colonial struggle

There is only one truth, the God’s/Allah’s ‘way of life of free market liberal democracy’. All the rest is apostasy that must not corrupt our children’s minds. Let anyone who utters the word C be stoned. Schools told not to use anti-capitalist material in teaching 

 Atkinson, to my surprise, has echoed some of I what have personally experienced in England: the intolerance of people to my views and criticism and even their opposition to my free speech. Repression without a police state.

I am not really fond of academic events, but what Sinan Antoon says must be insightful. The ‘Sate of Emergency’ as the Rule Not the Exception

De 1956 à 1962, la France a ordonné à ses services secrets d’assassiner des citoyens français

 A Syrian gravedigger recounts a genocide, but is anyone listening?

Interesting but in fact the analysis does a disservice to socialism for its sweeping statements. The reader has the impression that both Tunisia and Algeria were socialist countries at one time. In Tunisia the cooperative experiment was a small part of the economy. There was never a socialist economy. A planned economy is not the equivalent of socialism. Ben Salah and the Fate of Destourian Socialism

 “ Although the gaze of the country and the world is focused on police abuse, there is another abuse that cannot go unnoticed: Colombia, a country that signed a Peace Agreement in 2016, is today the scene of massacres again. Massacres that, week after week, continue to create panic in the regions, without anyone doing anything about it.“ Who protects Colombians?

  YouTube, Zoom and Facebook censor Leila Khaled Meanwhile, Israeli Right raises $400K for Israeli convicted of burning a Palestinian family

One of the long-lasting effects of American war crimes Birth Defects and the Toxic Legacy of War in Iraq

The US is Using the Guardian to Justify Jailing Assange for Life Why is the Paper So Silent?

This has been “normal” and “acceptable” for decades. There is a leak that followed by a few articles or there is an investigation then followed by s fine... And it goes on and on. US: $2tn of possibly corrupt financial activity JP Morgan Chase laundering more money

 Naci in Palestina in Spanish and Tunisian Her first name is spelt wrongly almost everywhere. Emel instead of Ema’l. Emel in Arabic means hope. Ema’l means hopes/aspirations.

“ Even during the Obama years, the US was using its extraterritorial power with increasing enthusiasm.” Why ‘even’? Wasn’t Obama a president of the biggest imperialist power? Many of course believed that he could have been a benevolent imperialist. This law of imperialism is not then about a “rogue” state like Iran or “undemocratic” on like Venezuela.    Beware the long arms of American and Chinese law

  Water in the Middle East

  The labour we really need

 The Russian oligarch Abramovitch Israeli settlers’ Chelsea boss backer The reported herself used the word “view” to refer to “international law.” She repeated the same word used by Elad’s vice-president. “ In 2008,  The Times  reported that court papers showed Abramovich admitting that he paid billions of dollars for political favours and protection fees to obtain a big share of Russia's oil and aluminium assets.” Abramovitch became an oligarch thanks to the privatisation process initiated by the Perestroika. He was welcomed in Britain as an “investor”. A Chelsea football club supporter would comment on Abramovitch’s backing of Elad’s organisation: “That’s politics. I am interested in football.”

 Support miners in their fight for decent working conditions

 It’s just another ponzi scheme. Nothing new. The bank, Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corporation, Britain’s largest bank Moved Ponzi scheme despite warning Related US: $2tn of possibly corrupt financial activity JP Morgan Chase laundering more money

  Homes with ‘umbilical’ colonial links

  A History of Arab Feminism (a 2015 documentary) A liberal perspective. A whole essay could be written as a critique of the documentary. Here some of my thoughts on it: Very informative, although I disagree with the approach and the omissions. “Feminism” is not one. But it is obvious in this documentary that “liberal” feminism, i.e. the feminism of the “free market” Western capitalism, is the reference and criteria. “Liberal feminism” includes sexualisation of the body and commodification of women, exploitation of women as cheap labour, although that has a contradictory aspect, for it helps women join the labour force and gain some rights. It is also obvious in the documentary that the “liberation” of Tunisian women did originally and mostly came from above, not through a radical movement. But the documentary wanted to say that it came through both. The documentary has some inaccuracies in the English translation. Example: تونس دولة مدنية must be translated “Tunisia is a civic state,

Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers

 What is Behind Bahrain’s Normalisation Deal with Israel?

  The War Pact Among Jim Crow States

 Written by Vasily Grossman in 1959 Anti-Semitism can take many forms – from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms. Anti-Semitism can be met with in the market and in the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard. Anti-Semitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats and spinning-wheels. Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I'll tell you what you're guilty of. Even Oleinichuk, the peasant fighter for freedom who was imprisoned in Schlusselburg, somehow expressed his hatred for serfdom as a hatred for Poles and Yids. Even a genius like Dostoyevsky saw a Jewish usurer where he should have seen the pitiless eyes of a Russian serf-owner, industri

 

 The Authoritarian Personality

I have not yet watched the documentary because I don’t have a TV set and or a TV licence. Someone else has this to say about it: “ I've just watched David Attenborough's new Extinction documentary on the threat to planetary bio-diversity. It is of course well made and makes clear the deadly threats facing all life on this earth. But there was a major weakness and it can be summed up in one word: 'we'. Throughout the programme it was repeatedly said the 'we' have done this and that and 'we' are doing the other and 'we' are all responsible. The fact that there is a massive difference between the impact of  the rich countries and the poor got a very brief mention but the fact there is a huge difference between giant corporations and ordinary people , between the super-rich and the world's working class was never mentioned. Nor, of course, was 'capitalism'. In reality understanding that production for profit is THE central problem is the

  Dear white people of France,

 Maxime Rodinson and the Palestinian Question – a critique

  Responsibility measured in  terms of each country's contribution to cumulative historical emissions. “As of 2015, the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO 2  emissions. The European Union (EU-28) was responsible for 29%. The G8 nations (the USA, EU-28, Russia, Japan, and Canada) were together responsible for 85%. Countries classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations (ie, most industrialised countries) were responsible for 90% of excess emissions. The Global North was responsible for 92%. By contrast, most countries in the Global South were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China (although China will overshoot soon). High-income countries have a greater degree of responsibility for climate damages than previous methods have implied.” In addition, there are “ the emissions that high-income countries have outsourced to lower-income countries since the rise of globalisation in the 1980s.” “These results illustrate wha

 As the country faces an economic downturn, migrant workers are paying a brutal price

“ The chart shows [Gary] Lineker as the highest-earning star with an unchanged salary of £1.75m in the last financial year.” Like other similar injustices, the majority are complicit in this, for they accept it as ‘natural’ and ‘new normal’.  After all, Lineker is a frontline essential worker before and after the pandemic, and has been risking his life for many years to entertain a passive complacent audience. And now the poor Lineker “has agreed” to a £400,000 pay cut.  When politicians use the language of “we are in it together”, they express the ideology of the ruling class. And the BBC and Lineker are examples of this. “I am making sacrifices because we are all in it together.”

 Underground miners’ protest in Ukraine

 Jair Bolsonaro, wannabe dictator Related Is Brazil’s military now in power?

The  Times , on the morrow of the coup, was writing: “Whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.” Professor Hugh Thomas, from the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at Reading University: the trouble was that Allende was much too influenced by such people as Marx and Lenin, “rather than Mill, or Tawney, or Aneurin Bevan, or any other European democratic socialist.” This being the case, Professor Thomas cheerfully goes on, “the Chilean  coup d’état  cannot by any means be regarded as a defeat for democratic socialism but for Marxist socialism.” Ralph Miliband (October 1973): The Chilean experience “offers a very suggestive example of what may happen when a government does give the impression, in a bourgeois democracy, that it genuinely intends to bring about really serious changes in the social order and to move in

 A highly recommended read I would have chosen a different headline though:  The Political Economy of Modernisation and the Origins of Mass Incarceration in the US . The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration

“ Over the last five decades, the incarceration rate in the United States has exploded. In the 1960s, the United States incarcerated its population at a rate that was comparable to other developed countries. Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Black men born between 1965 and 1969 have been more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college.  American punishment is thus of unprecedented  severity  — more prisoners per capita than ever before, and more so than any comparable country in world history. It is also characterized by extreme  inequality  — some Americans are much more likely to languish in prisons than others.  These are its twin features. What explains them?” The Economic Origin of Mass Incarceration

A liberal “leftish” view, but very informative. It should be noted that The Guardian itself is in philanthropic partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Philanthropy is facade to present a human face of capitalism, mitigating the system’s negative impacts. In fact, it often exasperates the problems it claims to solve or perpetuate the status quo) and it is a state ideological tool (PR) for Westerners to reinforce the belief in their superiority and that they are helping and empowering the Other. In some cases, philanthropy is a tool promote “liberal democracy” and drawing organisations/opposition forces into the orbit of the Western powers, especially the north Atlantic states. The mushrooming of philanthropic organisation in the last two decades has to be seen in the context of the neoliberal form of capitalism. How it benefits the super-rich Related The Problem With Capitalist Philanthropy There’s no Such Thing as Good Philanthropy

Higher Education in the UK is morally bankrupt... And I’m off.

As it stands today, the so-called progressive foreign policy alternative is really no alternative at all. To the contrary, it evokes Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s seminal work,  The Leopard , whose main character, Tancredi,  sagely observes to his uncle , “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” So it is with much of what passes for a genuine foreign policy alternative: the rhetoric slightly changes, the personnel certainly change, but in substance, the policy status quo largely remains.

A biography review Whatever Made Him

The 4th Company (Mexico 2016)

Prevention Before Cure

"The climate and ecological crisis cannot be solved within today's political and economic systems", the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg argues . "That isn't an opinion. That's a fact,” she added. I agree with you, Greta. The question is: what is the nature of the alternative political and economic system?  Capitalism is a very dynamic system albeit destructive, and not only to nature but also to human body and soul. But it always seeks a way to mitigate that destruction for its own survival. Advances in technology and productivity are contradicted with obscene inequality and different forms of violence by state and non-state agencies. I think that capitalism and capitalist institutions will be able in the short term to delay a climate catastrophe or minimise its impact on the rich countries. In the long term, however, the contradictions of the system are manyfold and there is no room for optimism. 

“Stealing” from the Saracens

Ministry of Defence blacklisted site over Yemen coverage

In the more economically developed countries, one just needs to replace the factory with retail and catering service industries, HSBC gender pay gap, for example, budget airlines workers, migrant workers in farming industry (e.g. Italy and Spain), or as cleaners, low paid essential workers (e.g. nurses in England), Amazon workers, etc.  The following was written in 1976, but I think is still largely relevant globally. “The hard core of the bourgeois feminist movements has typically been the ‘career women’ elements, business and professional strivers above all. Protective devices for the benefit of women workers in factories help to make life more bearable for them, but they are usually irrelevant to upper-echelon women trying to get ahead in professions. Worse, they may introduce restrictions which get in the way. At the very least, the ‘pure’ feminists demonstrate their social purity by rejecting the idea that the women’s question has something to do with class issues. Protective

مشهد الصبّي المتبجّح  # ماكرون  وهو يقلّد  # فيروز  (أحد آخر ما بقي لنا من ذكريات الزمن العربي "الجميل") بوسامه التافه، هو أعلى درجات الإهانة لسيادة وكرامة لا شعب لبنان وحده، بل كلّ شعوب المنطقة العربية.  ممثّل الامبريالية الفرنسية، ووكيل الامبريالية الأمريكية، لم يكتف باستباحة السيادة السياسية والاقتصادية للبنان عبر تدخّله الفجّ في تفاصيل تشكيل الحكومة ومطالبته الوقحة بـ"الاصلاحات" التي حدّدها صندوق النقد الدولي وأصحابه الامبرياليون. بل هو يستبيح كذلك حتّى عالم الرموز والمشاعر ويك رّس في المخيال الجمعي الشعبي حقيقة تبعيّة  # لبنان  لفرنسا في ذكرى مئة عام على تأسيسها لنظامه الطائفي.  لم أعتقد يومًا أنّ فيروز يمكن أن تتخّذ موقفا مغايرًا للترحيب بزيارة ماكرون ووسامه. فتلك هي حدود وعيها السياسي، المرتبطة حكما بموقعها الطبقي المريح، الذي يمكن أن يصل أقصاه إلى فهم التناقض الصارخ مع العدوّ الصهيوني لا إلى تمثّل التناقض العميق مع القوى الامبريالية التي تسند هذا العدوّ. فهذا يحتاج إلى وعي سياسي يساري وطني ثوري لا تملكه. لكنّي كنت آمُلُ أن يتخّذ ابنها "الرفيق زيا

In fact the mask fell long time ago ...

More than 1,000 UK doctors want to quit NHS

100 years ago: How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs

The difference between a black or a white president in handling civil unrest : Very little. It is the state and the structural violence, not a colour of a president. I would say Obama, the liberals’ idol, was worse, for although he was black, he presided over the very same racist socio-economic structure and the institutions of violence in the American society.

Related The Bengal famine

A long round up of almost all what’s happening Roaming Charges: Sometimes They Choke

 "We wanted to contribute another dimension to these important conversations by encouraging readers to think about asylum specifically in the context of neoliberal capitalism". In addition, it aims to zoom out onto the bigger picture of migration, including long histories of colonial extraction, Western support for oppressive regimes, neoliberal structural adjustment policies, wars for geopolitical and economic gain and the impacts of climate change. "These factors are all tied to profit-making - with flows of money streaming primarily into the West". Asylum for Sale: The intersection of capitalism and migration

After the United Arab Emirates, and Kosovo (another Muslim-majority country), Bahrain might be next in striking a normalisation deal with Israel. القدس عروس عروبتكم؟؟ فلماذا أدخلتم كل زناة الليل حجرتها ووقفتم تسترقون السمع وراء الأبواب لصرخات بكارتها وسحبتم كل خناجركم، وتنافختم شرفا وصرختم فيها ان تسكت صونا للعرض؟؟؟ فما أشرفكم! أولاد القحبة هل تسكت مغتصبة؟؟؟ أولاد القحبة..... لست خجولا حين أصارحكم بحقيقتكم ان حظيرة خنزير أطهر من أطهركم تتحرك دكة غسل الموتى أما أنتم لا تهتز لكم قصبة! الآن أعريكم في كل عواصم هذا الوطن العربي قتلتم فرحي في كل زقاق أجد الأزلام أمامي أصبحت أحاذر حتى الهاتف حتى الحيطان وحتى الأطفال أقيء لهذا الأسلوب الفج وفي بلد عربي كان مجرد مكتوب من أمي يتأخر في أروقة الدولة شهرين قمريين تعالوا نتحاكم قدام الصحراء العربية كي تحكم فينا أعترف الآن أمام الصحراء بأني مبتذل وبذيء وحزين كهزيمتكم يا شرفاء مهزومين ويا حكاما مهزومين ويا جمهورا مهزوما ما أوسخنا ...ما أوسخنا ...ما أوسخنا ونكابر ما أوسخنا لا أست

“Michael Biggs, Chris Barrie and Kenneth Andrews recently showed  that the Civil Rights Movement had only negligible long-term effects on the attitudes of white Americans, making them no more likely to have liberal views on race or to support the Democratic Party. So if the effects of more ‘respectable’ protests can also be questioned, where does that leave riots.” Are riots counterproductive, and who decides?

A lawsuit seeking reparations for 1921 Tulsa massacre

Even if it was under Obama or Hilary Clinton, a similar action would have been taken because the US regime (or its army) has never committed war crimes and will never ever commit any. International Criminal Court officials sanctioned by US

1961-2020 Caustic Critic of Inequality A Driving Force Behind Occupy Wall Street and author of Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and  Debt - The First 5000 Years

 Very engaging! “I  think that Benjamin has never been as relevant to questions of politics as he is today with the exception of his own lifetime. As I read him, Benjamin offers one of the best explanations both for the ongoing resilience of capitalism, despite all of its predations and all the instability that it creates, as well as the connection between fascism and liberalism that we are seeing being expressed today. He also offers, I think, the best way to understand how to address our contemporary moment and how to resist and upend capitalism, liberalism, and fascism all round.” Histories of Violence: Why We Should All Read Walter Benjamin Today

It’s a good summary. You need a private or institutional subscription to read the whole article. 50 years ago Palestine captured a generation’s dream

Going to War with the Coronavirus and Maintaining the State of Resistance

The bitter taste of Greek strawberries

It sounds a very interesting work. Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia

How did the US’s mainstream right end up openly supporting vigilante terror?

Huda Sha’arawi Begum Rokeya

Infiltrated? Well, may be they have been in the police since their recruitment ... A serious study is required. White supremacists and militias ‘have infiltrated police’ across US

Abolishing oppressive institutions starts at home

“The study found that only 10% of the companies had expanded their renewable-based power generation more quickly than their gas or coal fired capacity.  Of this small proportion that spent more on renewables, many continued to invest in fossil fuels, although at a lower rate.  The vast majority of companies, according to the author, have just sat on the fence. She says that inertia within the electricity industry is one key cause of the slow transition.” But why? Why did only a small proportion of companies spend on renewables? Why is there inertia within the electricity industry? The articles doesn’t answer those questions, and I wonder whether the study itself does. Power companies ‘hindering’ move to green energy