Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The colour of economic anxiety

A very modest attempt by me. Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t even liberate Afghanistan .. Oh George! Oh Barack! Why did you leave it to Biden? Oh man! Oh man! They couldn’t liberate Afghanistan .. Oh Hilary! Oh Hilary! Who would have had a laugh  Other than Bin Laden? Oh man! Oh man! Who will liberate the Afghan If not the Americaaan?* * Plural pronunciation of Americans in Arabic. —Nèdeem Mahjoub

  Joe Biden’s America is [another] myth

There were real differences between neoliberals and conservatives on the family. Although they converged around the idea of family responsibility, there were different motivations and different inflections to this convergence. Social conservatives saw the family and its moral order as foundational to any social and economic order. Even when they became converts to the free market, as was the case with Irving Kristol, they saw the family as the necessary foundation on which market freedom needed to rest. They were also more often than not invested in a particular vision of the family – patriarchal, heteronormative, monogamous. Ideas about responsible fatherhood and the need to reinstate the place of men within the family come from this conservative tradition. Neoliberals had a more minimalist understanding of family responsibility. For them, family responsibility meant that the family or the couple should be the primary source of economic security and in this way function as a subst...

Femmes en lutte

No Separate Queue for Cubans

Against Diversity This was written in 2008. It is good to remember what has produced Trumpism.

Against liberal nostalgia "[T]he neoliberal variant of capitalism was not the result of a a “corporate coup.” It is the result of the familiar, systematic workings of a capitalist state seeking to resolve a crisis and restore the system to 'health'... ... to say that the last thirty years of neoliberal policy were not simply the result of a “corporate coup” does not mean that Donald Trump is simply a “boilerplate” Republican. If he were, how could we explain the tremendous fight the GOP establishment waged against him? Trump did   not receive a single donation   from a Fortune 100 CEO, while a broad range of top military brass and   establishment Republicans  — including George Bush, Mitt Romney, Colin Powell, Paul Ryan, Hank Paulson, Bill Kristol, and others — either endorsed Clinton or suggested they couldn’t support Trump. All this indicated a wide-ranging consensus among the capitalist class behind Clinton, founded upon maintaining the status quo abroad (“fre...

"Here is the biggest problem with elevating sexism to the defining explanation of Mrs. Clinton’s loss: It lets her machine and her failed policies off the hook. It erases the role played by the appetite for endless war and the comfort with market-friendly incremental change, no matter the urgency of the crisis (from climate change to police violence to raging inequality). It erases the disgust over Mrs. Clinton’s coziness with Wall Street and with the wreckage left behind by trade deals that benefited corporations at the expense of workers." — Naomi Klein

Liberal crap Putting the blame on those who did not vote.  Clinton is not a friend of women; she is part and parcel of a criminal state. A state that implemented reactionary policies on wages, working conditions, commodification of women, imperialist policies towards women in the Middle East and elsewhere through killing by drones and IMF adjustment prgrammes, corporate lunder and exploitation, support of theocracies that oppress women... She is not a friend of women. Nor is Mother Theresa a friend of the poor. Those who have been staunch defenders of the status quo wanted a continuation of the very same neoliberal injustice at home and abroad. The 50% or so who did not vote are fed up with the dictatorship of the two-party system. Conversely, those who wanted the status quo, the affluent and the rich support and backed Clinton to the hilt. Paraphrasing Brecht, the liberals wish they could dissolve the people and elect another. Richard Seymour: " This is part of a genre ...

Note that the Washington Post here is not questioning corporate education and how the system is organised to reproduce the elite in the US and in other countries. It is only questioning/exposing the excesses, which shouldn't be exploited by Trump in a context of electoral campaigns. Good! The more they stink, the better.

Sanders' has officially endorsed Clinton? Well, what about those who had illusions in him? Being selective and picking up this or that point in his social democratic programme is not seeking real change, but it is trying to manage what you have in a slightly better way. I've never trusted him since the day I read about his would-be Middle East policy.

Sander's Defeat is no Great Loss to Progressive Politics