Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Britain's National Health Service "Patients are dying in corridors" " Since 2010 the budget has been rising at about 1% a year on average whereas  traditionally the NHS got over 4%." Deliberate policies to completely privatize the sector? I think so so. People like Richard Branson have already put a foot in it. They must be rubbing hands. Remember, everything is subject to commodification, especially in the most aggressive neoliberal capitalist countries. Patients 'dying in hospital corridors'

Spain: how much of state violence will be used? "To move forward we need to understand: why are regions, states and peoples beginning to re-pose the question of national self-determination now? For Spain and Italy it is clear: the mixture of austerity, corruption and political sclerosis at the centre has limited the reality of regional democracy. It has pushed autonomous regions such as  Catalonia  towards independence and places such as Lombardy and Veneto towards seeking fiscal autonomy from an essentially dysfunctional central state." The big picture Catalonia, Lombardy, Scotland ... Why they fight for self-determination now?

Portugal 1974-2017

Surprised to see this on the BBC website Austerity is over 

Will reversing austerity end the depression?

An act of social murder and Flats acquired for survivors But a few are not happy at all " Speaking to  The Guardian,  one woman said: “We paid a lot of money to live here, and we worked hard for it. “Now these people are going to come along, and they won’t even be paying the service charge."

"The high Conservative vote, and some signal defeats for Labour in the areas where working class xenophobia is entrenched, indicate this will be a long, cultural war. A war of position, as Gramsci called it, not one of manoeuvre. But in that war, a battle has been won. The Tories decided to use Brexit to smash up what’s left of the welfare state, and to recast Britain as the global Singapore. They lost. They are retreating behind a human shield of Orange bigots from Belfast." "Corbyn has won the first battle in a long war" But he is "A mainstream [Scandinavian] social-democrat"

" The suicide attacker, as Richard Boothby has written, short-circuits this relationship between master and slave. The uneven dialectic is based on the formula: your freedom or your life. But it is uneven because, if you choose the former, you can't have either. In a suicide attack, the attacker abruptly proves willing to give up her life to end the stand-off; turning her corporeality, her body, into a weapon. Jacqueline Rose made the point, writing about suicide attackers some years ago, that every such attack is "an act of passionate identification -- you take your enemy with you". Which could be interpreted as meaning, you take a bit of their whiteness, their being, with you. You claim a share of being, seemingly always precarious, always endangered, through death. Lone wolf suicide attackers may not kill many people compared to the apparatuses of military full-spectrum dominance, or militarised policing. But they evoke a particular horror because they upend the

1. Greece's model of capitalism under oligarchic PASOK. 2. Financial terrorism by the Troika 3. As Yannis Retsis says: "It is a crime." 4. "Tsipras is a traitor", many who voted aganist the bailout and more austerity say . The Greek tragedy ... Update: Forbes.com says that the IMF predicts that unepmloyment in Greece will to 12% by 2040! These are good news for those Greeks who could wait and find a job at the age of 60+.

An interesting analysis albeit some narrative of politically blaming mainly the Tories.

The system is broken

"The belt-tightening legislation, outlined in a 7,500-page omnibus bill, includes measures that range from the taxation of coffee and luxury goods to the creation of a new privatisation fund in charge of real estate assets for the next 99 years. Under the stewardship of EU officials, the body will oversee the sale of about 71,500 pieces of prime public property in what will amount to collatera l for the €250bn in bailout loans Greece has received since 2010." “They are with the exception of the Acropolis selling everything under the sun,” said Anna Asimakopoulou, the shadow minister for development and competitiveness. “We are giving up everything.” "At the behest of the EU and International Monetary Fund, the government has agreed to adopt tighter austerity in the form of an automatic fiscal brake – referred to as “the cutter” in the Greek media – if fiscal targets are missed." Greece pushes fresh austerity drive through parliament

The Wolf Report:Nonconfidential analysis for the anti-investor