Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Not deep or a bigger picture , but you get the idea that men and women who belong to a certain group or defend certain interests in a class society decide on major issues, mobilise men and women in uniforms, and they are backed by an army of pundits and scholars.

Four interlocking crises highlight the limits of the market

Coronavirus and the Economic Crisis

Britain Via Michael Roberts The economic ideology of the man [Boris Johnson] who is likely to be Britain's prime minister by next month. “I can’t think of any other politician, even Conservative politician, who from the crash of 2008 onwards actually stuck up for the bankers. “Can you think of anybody who stuck up for the bankers as much as I did? I defended them day in, day out, from those who frankly wanted to hang them from the nearest lamppost.” I believe passionately in UK business and as foreign secretary I spent a lot of my time promoting UK business, both in this country and abroad. I will continue to do so, if I’m lucky enough to become Prime Minister.” ****** I don't see there is something new or strange with this if one looks at the British history and spirit. Business is highly valued (as valued as the rhetoric of "human rights"). The business of Britian is business.  One should look at how much the shareholding "indusrty" ...

How to stop climate change?

Britain Michael Roberts reporting from a Labour Party conference Models of public ownership and   Why did Labour lose in 1983? "In a way, the myth that it was the 'hard Left' that cost Labour the election is an inverted form of Bennite optimism. It lays all the emphasis upon ideology, agency and leadership, albeit in a thin, polemical way that asks no searching questions of the Labour Right and Centre, long its dominant forces. But, then as now, agency and leadership turn out to depend on far bigger historical processes. And it's their obliviousness to those larger processes that leaves Corbyn's right-wing critics out in the cold, fantasising about re-staging the battles of the 1980s."

" The Parallax View is in a sense a meta-conspiracy film: a film not only about conspiracies but about the impotence of attempts to uncover them; or, much worse than that, about the way in which particular kinds of investigation feed the very conspiracies they intend to uncover. It is not only that the Warren Beatty character is framed/killed for the crime he is investigating, neatly eliminating him and undermining his investigations with one pull of a corporate assassins trigger; it’s that, as Jameson noted in his commentary on the film in The Geopolitical Aesthetic , his very tenacity, quasi-sociopathic individualism, make him eminently frameable. 
The terrifying climactic moment of The Parallax View – when the silhouette of Beatty’s anonymous assassin appears against migraine-white space – for me now rhymes with the open door at the end of a very different film, Peter Weir’s The Truman Show . But where the door in the horizon opening onto black space at the end of Weir...

This is an exageration . Banks, hedge funds, etc, have found in London a safe haven. Panama Files and Roberto Saviano, and others, have demonstrated that Britain financially "is the most corrupt country on earth", the most deregulated financial hub and most aggressive neoliberal economy in Western Europe. Where will banks and their associates find a better place?

"Finance, in a certain sense, is there to keep people from becoming too comfortable, too secure. But, as you say, when you take away people’s comfort and security, you may not like the reaction you get." Disrupters

Reminder There is no money for infrastructure, free high education, more hospitals, housing, etc. "Assuming the £13tn mountain of assets [ hidden offshore wealth ] earned an average 3% a year for its owners, and governments were able to tax that income at 30% [like in the US, Brazil, India, for example], it would generate a bumper £121bn in revenues – more than rich countries spend on aid to the developing world each year." That is not a revolutionary solution, but one can see that it makes a significant difference.

UK There are two kinds of 'generation rent'

Brexit means the end of single market access for London

"Chesnais finishes his book with two themes. One is a lament on the lack of Marxist study in universities and the lack of journals in which Marxist studies of capitalism can be published. This is true enough, and I am glad not to have been an undergraduate university student in the past few decades! Even apparently radical journals such as the UK’s  Cambridge Journal of Economics  are basically rather conservative in outlook, and are dominated by a facile Keynesian approach that dismisses a Marxist perspective out of hand if it upsets their advocacy of ‘progressive’ policies for the capitalist state to consider. Repeating radical consensus nonsense will get a pass; revealing the imperial mechanism of power has to jump a hundred hurdles to be an acceptable journal article. Such is the almost universal climate in academia today, despite the evidently destructive outcomes from the system they claim to be analysing. [6]  Ironically, this is why the most trenchant and incisiv...

The Long Depression in Italy

The global debt hangover

From Jane Austen to Beatrice and Eugenie … the long reach of UK slave-owning families