Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“ Real wealth concentration is about the ownership of productive capital, the means of production and finance. It's big capital (finance and business) that controls the investment, employment and financial decisions of the world.    A dominant core of 147 firms through interlocking stakes in others together control 40% of the wealth in the global network according to the Swiss Institute of Technology.   A total of 737 companies control 80% of it all.   This is the inequality that matters for the functioning of capitalism – the concentrated power of capital. And because inequality of wealth stems from the concentration of the means of production and finance in the hands of a few; and because that ownership structure remains untouched, any increased taxes on wealth will fall short of irreversibly changing the distribution of wealth and income in modern societies.”

What is it?

Related In England and the United States, the police were invented within the space of just a few decades — roughly from 1825 to 1855. The new institution was not a response to an increase in crime, and it really didn’t lead to new methods for dealing with crime. The most common way for authorities to solve a crime, before and since the invention of police, has been for someone to tell them who did it. Besides, crime has to do with the acts of individuals, and the ruling elites who invented the police were responding to challenges posed by collective action. To put it in a nutshell: The authorities created the police in response to large, defiant crowds. That’s — strikes in England, — riots in the Northern US, — and the threat of slave insurrections in the South.

  Smarter Empire 

 Selling weapons of death, partner in crimes. US remains top arms exporter

Undoing Lenin

 Climate activism and the fetishization of nonviolence

Martin Luther King’s anticapitalism Related Sanitising King’s radical legacy Big business is hijacking our radical past

‘Due to travel restrictions the United States is forced to organise a coup at home this year.’ —Andrew Burgin In 2000 they were telling us how by 2020 globalisation would deliver new types of cars, planes, etc and prosperity for all. We ended up learning how to wash our hands. —N. M.

 ‘America has entered the Weimar era’ by the author of Dilemmas of Domination

Here is how the Capitol building was defended against the Black Lives Matter protesters. It reflects the white supremacist nature of the state, not of Trump’s administration. So was with the war crimes committed by American and British troops against Iraqis. So was the crimes committed by Australian elite troops against Afghanis. Trump supporters has gone this far because the state forces have been sympathetic. ‘Riot on the Hill’

 An American view A history of deadly meddling

 Record number of journalists jailed worldwide

It must be clearly established ... that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression against the peoples of the world and against a large part of its own population.     —Che Guevara, from a speech at the General Assembly of the United Nations, 11 December 1964

India, the EU, the US, Canada and the UK are among the countries which have reserved the most doses of the vaccine, according to the latest data. It would be insane if the vaccines were to be put under a democratic health organisation that distributes the doses worldwide according to those who need them first, i.e. the frontline workers, the aged and the vulnerables. But we live in a world of nation states, capitalist competition and profit and intellectual property. And that’s the ‘rational’ and ‘natural’ order of things.

  Why Trump gained support among minorities

 

“The United States, as pundits hourly remind us, is now cleaved into two almost equal-sized political universes. But power abhors stalemates and clearly in the present world the evolution is towards differential experiments in post-fascist oligarchy and pseudo-democracy. A weak and court-enchained Biden-Harris White House, built on the betrayal of progressives and subservient to a donor class of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, will face a new depression without the wind of popular enthusiasm at its back. Where does this point except to total destruction in the 2022 midterm and the further triumph of the new darkness?” — Ecologist and geographer Mike Davis

A la John Wayne’s.   Another extrajudicial assassination by Israel and the US within a sovereign country “The New York Times newspaper reported that Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, al-Qaeda's second-in-command” [and his daughter] “were shot dead in the street by Israeli agents following a request from the US.”

 Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-crush