Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

David Hearst.: “ Britain offered $2.7bn in arms to Ukraine and $6m in disaster relief for 23 million people in Turkey and Syria? Is this for real? Apparently yes. ” I think this is a simplistic argument, especially that Hearst does not explain the reasons. There are priorities that dictate the big powers policies, including the UK’s. And those priorities are not new and one needs to mention and explain them. Talking about ‘morality’ or ‘a moral duty’ is misleading and throwing dust in the eyes.

The floods devastating Pakistan

How food is used as a weapon

“The UN has forecast that Afghanistan’s gross domestic product will contract 20 per cent within a year following the Taliban’s takeover of the country, representing one of the worst economic meltdowns in history. Such a contraction took five years of civil war in Syria to achieve, and was expected to worsen to 30 per cent next year. The UNDP said aid accounted for as much as 80 per cent of budget expenditure. The UNDP estimates that the loss of female employment could cost up to $1bn, or 5 per cent, of GDP, and slash productivity.” Source: the Financial  Times

Teetering on the brink of economic collapse

Degrowth economics

And this is only one example. It is a con more than a scandal. It is a smokescreen, a cover, employed by a an imperialist state as an ideological tool: “we are good people and we show compassion.”  It is a deception. British aid is a scandal Related Aid in the case of Palestine

This is a good take on the political economy of occupation/colonisation. Confronting the Reality of Power in Palestine

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...

Theresa May in Africa "Aid" is a con. It is partly to mask the criminal role of the City of London in capital flight and as a route to tax havens In figures: "In 2012, the last year of recorded data, developing countries received a total of $1.3tn, including all aid, investment, and income from abroad. But that same year some $3.3tn flowed out of them. In other words, developing countries sent $2tn more to the rest of the world than they received. If we look at all years since 1980, these net outflows add up to an eye-popping total of $16.3tn – that’s how much money has been drained out of the global south over the past few decades. To get a sense for the scale of this, $16.3tn is roughly the GDP of the United States. for every $1 of aid that developing countries receive, they lose $24 in net outflows." How poor countries develop rich countries Or aid in reverse I add the following mechanisms: Uneven and combined development serves the imperialist st...

"We have flags, a national anthem, but everything else is decided by the West. It's all wrapped up in nice words, under cover of aid extended by such bodies as the WB and the IMF, that are nothing more than instruments of torture invented by the West to continue its domination." — Ahmed ben Bella, president of the Algerian Republic, 1963 to 1965. Quoted by Toussaint and Millet, 2010.

How fundamentalism works "As economics is not an exact science, the number of counter-examples is irrelevant. If I put forward a hypothesis in physics which is proved wrong by an experiment, I must question the theory. And the theory progresses through such invalidation. In economics, you can undermine the existence of millions of people, but none of that human evidence will affect the ideology of structural adjustment ." — Susan George, vice president of ATTAC France, December 6, 2000 See also "How poor countries develop rich countries" "A tonne of cocoa is roughly US $1,300, while one 4x4 vehicle is now about US $120,000. So you need about 92 tonnes of cocoa to exchange for one 4x4. But to get one tonne, you will need not less than 20 acres of land. The average cocoa farmer in Ghana has only around 2-3 acres, meaning it would take him or her well over 500 years to produce enough cocoa to buy a 4x4.” John Opoku, human rights lawyer and activist, Gha...

Ports and roads mean China is 'winning in Africa' (FT)

The Role of Oxfam, Unicef, Live Aid in the Systematic Destabilization of African Nations

"Aid in reverse: how poor countries develop rich countries" A good article. Useful data. In his 2013 book Globalisation in Africa Daniel Offiong mentioned that in every $1 that goes into Africa $10 leave the country. I don't think the author's suggestions as a solution would work though. It is because the motive force of the capitalist system (led by corporations and especially Western governments and international instituions) is ignored. Corporations seek profit even if that happens at the account of people and the earth. A high enough rate of profit makes the system greased. Otherwise stagnation or crisis takes place. One should add of course the context of neocolonialism and the way it operates in making other countries dependent. The author, or probably the Guardian editor, has not used the appropriate terms to describe the situation: capitalism, imperialism (through institutions or violence), and neocolonialism, support of the status quo, including supporti...