NM's blog

“Anger directed at high levels of economic corruption and mismanagement in the regime often target the  aghazadeh , a pejorative used to describe children of the elite accused of amassing great wealth thanks to the political connections of their relatives.”

The achievements, the limits and the contradictions of Chavez’s government in an analysis from 2016. 

An in-depth analysis Rethinking anti-imperialist politics in the Middle East

An obituary by Joseh Fahim Note: Fahim calls Egypt under Nasser socialist (!!) Related The Egyptian novel in the sixties

By Richard Seymour Patreon , 29 January 2026 You want to break the regime's ICE offensive? Get [Stephen] Miller. "This, briefly, is a lifelong political obsession for Miller. He is now back in the White House with general authority extending well beyond Homeland Security. He lobbied for Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and for a massive funding surge for ICE. The use of the Alien Enemies Act, declaring migration an invasion, has long been a strategic goal of white supremacists. And for Miller it comes with the crucial benefit that, for the right, this gives the executive practically unlimited power to deal with the crisis. Miller has claimed that Trump has ‘plenary authority’, meaning his authority is practically limitless. The idea of using paramilitary force, organised as anti-immigration enforcement, to attack the left, comes from Miller. Even the propaganda themes, blitzing the press with endless garish examples of immigrant venality and criminality, and the fascinati...

Dutch police assaulted two muslim women, hitting one with baton and kicking the other in the stomach outside a shopping center in Utrecht on January 26. Via TRT World

“Deep political-economic transformations created the context for the events of this month …” What is  their meaning for the future of the Iranian regime? “Roiled from within and menaced from without, what are its chances of survival?”

It's only terrorism if they do it to us. When we do much worse to them, it's not terrorism. ― Noam Chomsky,  Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propagand a

A senior correspondent with a degree in Politics and History.  American power, unilateralism, interventions…,but nothing about the global capitalist economy in the last 40 years or so and the social reconfigurations in the US and the world. The most Little could say in passing: “ In any age of economic stagnation and extremes of inequality, popular trust in democratic institutions corrodes …” Words like economy and China do not feature even once. The innocent liberals are in denial. Robert Brenner and Dylan Riley: The current form of capitalist democracy, characterized by regular universal-suffrage elections and the alternation in power of competing parties of government, was largely an achievement of the post-war epoch. If the cataclysm of the First World War largely destroyed the  ancien régime  in Europe, it was the Second that opened the way to universal suffrage, under American military predominance, and at least began the process of unravelling Jim Crow in the...