Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

What an FT columnist means by “economic radical on the left” is Keynesians and new Keynesians. The left is winning the economic battle of ideas

America must now lift its knee from the world

“We have driven Cuba inch by inch into alliance with the Soviet,’ Norman Mailer wrote, ‘as deliberately and insanely as a man setting out to cuckold himself.’ Castro never wanted to be beholden to the Soviets. He had downplayed the role of the local Communist Party (Partido Socialista Popular) in preparing the ground for his own revolution. But there were only so many options for a single-crop economy of seven million people ninety miles from the Florida coast.”  Fidel Castro and the Making of the 1960s

Just to confirm: “We condemn a coup if we did not support it. It is not a coup if we did support/sponsor it.” —American imperialism and its allies

To loot a revolution

What sort of a PhD candidate in sociological studies who does mention capitalism and profit, but not the word 'class' even once? Could it be that an editor remove the word from the article? I don't know. Protests – and riots – are rebellion against an unjust system

A revolt must be against class and race oppression, not just race. A Call to Revolt

Is the United States on the brink of a civil war? This is what a revolution looks like Origins of the police Related The BBC does it again. Black people are classless. They are just black. Why US protests resonate in the UK

The BBC : " For three years, Donald Trump presided over a nation of relative peace and prosperity. The crises he faced were largely of his own making, and he confronted them by rallying his supporters and condemning his opponents. Now Trump faces a situation ill-suited to a playbook of division. The US economy has been hobbled by a deadly pandemic. George Floyd's death at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer has spread racial unrest across the nation. The public is uncertain and afraid - and increasingly angry." These are circumstances that would test the abilities of even the most skilful leaders. This president, however, risks becoming lost at sea. His public calls for unity and healing have been undermined by a penchant for Twitter name-calling and bellicosity. Message discipline, a valuable attribute at this moment, is not his forte. There may be no easy way to guide the nation through its current peril. Barack Obama's measured coolness did nothing to

Who are the looters and the looted?

How meat plant workers became the frontline in Covid-19 war

If anything good emerges out of this period, it might be an awakening to the pre-existing conditions of our body politic. We were not as healthy as we thought we were. The biological virus afflicting individuals is also a social virus. Its symptoms — inequality, callousness, selfishness and a profit motive that undervalues human life and overvalues commodities — were for too long masked by the hearty good cheer of American exceptionalism, the ruddiness of someone a few steps away from a heart attack.           — Viet Thanh Nguyen

The same criminal state that bombed water treatment facilities and food-storage warehouses  in Iraq denies its citizens water during an epedemic. "I can't wash my hands—my water was cut off"

US:  The coronavirus class war has already started Italy: The corona crisis and the battle with the bosses

"The United States, the organizers realized, did not have the means to quickly manufacture more essential medical equipment, supplies or medicines, including antiviral medications, needles, syringes, N95 respirators and ventilators, the agency concluded." But the U.S. and other countries found the money and resources to wage wars, increase inequality, fund the IMF, build hundreds of miliatry bases around the world and in the meantime decrease investments in infrastructure and public services. In the U.S. a ruling class and its representaives in government even left tens of millions of American without health insurance. American capitalism has had other priorities. The article blames more Trump and co., but ignores that the problem is structural .  The pandemic is but the catalyst/the trigger/the accelerator for current financial troubles, not the cause. As was warned in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, etc., the Obama Administration’s bailouts were to make rich people

"Impossible to anticipate the spur for rebellion. In Lebanon, it was a tax on the use of WhatsApp; in Chile, it was the rise in subway fares; in Ecuador and in Haiti, it was the cut in fuel subsidies. Each of these conjunctures brought people to the streets and then, as these people flooded the streets, more and more joined them. They did not come for WhatsApp or for subway tokens. They came because they are frustrated, angry that history seems to disregard them as it consistently favours the ruling class." There is something that's ours on the streets and we're going to take it back

Warning: the following may infect you with anti-Semitism, it may may sound/felt/interpreted/read as an attack on Israel and therefore anti-Semitic. "Manoeuvres must be understood in the context of the ways that Iran has functioned as an obstacle to US ruling class goals in the Middle East, a view shared by the Israeli ruling class for its own interests." "Why Israel wants Iran destroyed"

The on-going coup in Venezuela By Jorge Martin (Hands off Venezuela) Even though the coup has not yet succeeded, the impression one gets is that there is an inexorable march forward in its implementation which is pushed mainly from forces abroad rather than in Venezuela itself. There are now plenty of newspaper reports which detail the way this coup plot was hatched, in the US, with the collaboration of Marco Rubio and top Trump administration officials. The hawks now control the whole operation (having removed "moderates" like Tillerson), Pence, Pompeo, Bolton, Abrams, all of them cold war veterans committed to putting an end to anything which smells of revolution in Latin America. Meetings which have been reported go back nearly two years, but more recently, the plans around Guaidó were discussed in Washington in December, that is BEFORE he was even elected president of the national assembly.  At a rally with reactionary Venezuelans in Florida on Feb 2, Mike Pence p

Capital Versus Peace in Mexico

Gulf Cooperation Council arms race