NM's blog

Context: “California warehouse worker accused of arson raged online against capitalist greed.” (NBC News) The same day that Chamel Abdulkarim burned down his workplace, the president of the United States threatened to permanently annihilate “a whole civilization”—a statement which can only be described as a threat of genocide. “The people who carry the boxes, stock the shelves, scan the packages, and drive the routes know what Abdulkarim’s quote means. Not because they think arson is justified—they don’t. Because the sentence did not sound foreign. It sounded like something millions of people say in less catastrophic ways every day, in kitchens, in group chats, in cars outside warehouses before shifts they cannot afford to quit … Criminal acts deserve criminal consequences, full stop. But punishment does not answer the question underneath all of this, the one nobody in power addressed this week: what happens to the people who cannot afford to live in the economy being built above them?...

“ With the influx of Chinese automakers comes concerns that they don't respect Brazilian laws or unions. In China, there are no independent trade unions, they are all under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, which is led by the ruling Communist Party of China. Independent trade unions in China are banned by the state and often face severe repression. ​“‘The majority of Chinese companies have not had contact with the Brazilian trade union movement,’”says Torres. “​In December of 2024, while plant expansion was underway, the Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment conducted a surprise inspection of the facility housing 163 Chinese workers who had been shipped to work at BYD. They found that workers lived in slave-like conditions on BYD’s factory grounds.” “The Brazilian Ministry of Labor and Employment charged BYD with 'slavery' and human trafficking, and concluded that living conditions were ‘a manifest affront to the principles of the dignity of human beings.’ “A...

The Conflict Insights Group has been closely following evidence of extensive Emirati military assistance to the RSF , but "this is the first research where we can prove UAE involvement with certainty", says director Justin Lynch. Related Counterrevolution, gold and global impunity UAE 2024

Excerpts from an article by Adam Hanieh on the FT “The new high-yielding varieties of the Green Revolution, by contrast, could only deliver their promised output through large and repeated applications of industrial fertilisers, especially nitrogen-based products such as urea and ammonium nitrate. Since many of these fertilisers are derived from natural gas, the Green Revolution meant that the world’s food production became ever more closely tied to a constantly increasing supply of hydrocarbon inputs.  “Doubts have long been expressed about the sustainability of this fossil fuel-based food system. But as oil and gas prices have risen steeply amid the US-Israeli war on Iran and a significant part of the global fertiliser trade has been brought to a standstill, its potential vulnerabilities have been made clear. “The current moment differs from those earlier crises in one crucial respect. During the past two decades, Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Em...

Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West

A very good piece by Eyal Weizman .  I first knew Weizman when I read his 2007 book Hollow Land . Weizman is director of  Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London “The circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’. “The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21 st -century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will...