Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Similarities with the Tunisian uprising in 2008 and the Egypt under Mubarak are there. Related Striking garment workers

There is a focus on capitalism in the UK .  I don’t understand what Michael Roberts means by three socio-economic systems. Is it not capitalism the socio-economic system of our era?

“It would take human jobs faster than the Kardashians ‘dump boyfriends’.”

 Another piece using the so-called divide to throw dust and hide the real divide. Red or blue, capital rules. ‘The misunderstood state’

We went to Iraq in 2003 and we "liberated" it from a brutal dictator. In fact we had tried to "liberate" Iraq before that, in 1991. 16 years later   " protests earlier this month were brutally put down by security forces, leaving nearly 150 people dead," reported the BBC. You see, there is no hope. These "backward people" even after helping them with training an army and security forces, they failed in front of the "Islamic State" and now they are killing their own people.

" The new wave of protests that erupted early this week in Baghdad, in which protesters are demanding dignity, jobs and services, has spread to other southern cities including Basra, Najaf, Karbala, Diwaniyah and Nasiriyah. It has escalated quickly and now includes calls for the 'fall of the regime'." It is interesting to notice another counter-sectarianism evidence. The majority of Iraq's population is Shi'a and the protests are taking place in Shi'a-dominated cities, with anti-Iranian slogans raised and the Iranian flag burnt. When the first Arab uprising erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, one the dominant slogans was: "Jobs are a right you band of thieves." Then came "the people want the overthrow of the regime." The socio-economic revolution in the MENA region is yet to come. And in the absence of radicalism, leadership and strategy, it is going to a be a long and protracted process that the counter-revolutionary forces, i...

Carney, Bowles and Varoufakis

The Robotic Future

Germany When doves cry Note: there is no word about the selling of submarines, for example, to the settler colonial state of Israel.  Complicity in crimes for jobs and accumulation of capital.

" Andy Merrifield’s The Amateur is a quite different beast. Merrifield is a leftwing “urbanist” whose thinking has been influenced both by obvious figures (Marx and Weber) and more unexpected ones (Baudelaire and Kafka). The Amateur is an old-style polemic arguing that many ills of the modern world (inequality, rising levels of stress and depression) stem from the increased specialisation of knowledge — or what Merrifield calls the “professional” mindset. He advocates instead a return to amateurism — which he defines as the pursuit of ideas for their own sake, and the freedom to roam promiscuously between disciplines." See also this FT article on the 'gig economy'

France Cuts in corporate tax (that's assuming corporations are paying taxes). How is that even Nordic, Financial Times? One of the things that made Sweden as it is today was that the Social Democrats in the country imposed 40% corporate tax. Slashing of 150,000 jobs and cuts in public spending? The recipe is more riots and more burning of cars. Thos who will lose their jobs could join the police to face the riots :) Whether a right-wing or a far-right government, France will be heading towards serious social conflicts. France: Macron's electoral programme

France BBC website: Mr Fillon is " proposing dramatic economic reforms that include slashing 500,000 public jobs, ending the 35-hour week, raising the retirement age and scrapping the wealth tax. On foreign policy, he advocates closer relations with Russia." It sounds great! Probably 40% of the electorate will vote for that.

Why Do White-Working Class People Vote against Their Interests?  They Don't.

Education in Britain (source:  bbc ) But researchers highlight some other questions muddying the waters. Students do not enter university unshaped by what went before.  How much of higher earnings in later life might be linked to coming from high-income parents, rather than anything to do with higher education? A key finding of the income research was that graduates from wealthy families ended up earning more than than those from poorer families, even if they studied the same course at the same university. But there is no escaping the growing sense of stratification in the university sector and differences in status. Belonging to the Russell Group [i.e. elite universities] has become a kind of self-conferred status symbol for its membership.

Sarkozy/Juppé (status quo), or Trumpette? "The FN has become the party of the working class,” says Bruno Cautrès, a political sciences researcher at Paris-based Sciences Po Cevipof. “The party offers a double explanation for their malaise: Europe has failed to protect their jobs from globalisation and failed to protect their way of life from Muslim immigrants.”  (the Financial Times) England :  Neoliberal vultures contnue their plunder, "legally".  Virgin Care and the NHS Branson's Virgin Rail profits Crony capitalism Branson, The Stuntman

The Financial Times:  "Social class, defined today by one’s level of education, appears to have become the single most important social fracture in countless industrialised and emerging-market countries." Richad Seymour: "This is, of course, the way that social class is talked about in the US, but it isn't a helpful way to proceed. Apart from overlooked the glut of uneducated managers, supervisors, CEOs and owners, and forgetting the deliberate expansion of higher education to skill up workers, the trope allows on e to say that the working class are a bunch of thickos. Trump's support came from diverse social classes. Education wasn't that big a predictor of the outcome either: college graduates were *overrepresented* in Trump's support (in part because they are overrepresented in the electorate). The big thing that happened with the working class in this election is that most of them didn't vote."  Richard Rorty, a philosopher and social...

Insecurity and the New World of Work " Since 2007*, almost all the aggregate increase in employment in the UK is accounted for by ‘ non-standard jobs’ , according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). These included low-pay self-employment, ‘flexible’ and zero-hours contracts and part-time work."

The long depression Via Michael Roberts " Back in work, still out of pocket : Labour market recovery since the Great Recession - the jobs gap will not be closed until 2017 at the earliest AND the wages gap may never be closed. Some countries have real wages over 20% below where they would have been without the Great Recession and subsequent weak recovery. The UK scores worse than Greece on this relative measure . According to a study by the OECD, the labour market recovery in OECD countries has been steady but slow s ince the Great Recession. More worrying is the fate of wage growth over the same period.  The jobs recovery has been underway since the first quarter of 2010, when the OECD average employment rate reached its post-crisis trough, with only 58.6% of the population (ages 15-74 years) employed. This was 2.2% lower than the employment rate in 2007, corresponding to 20.3 million missing jobs. Despite the slow and uneven nature of the economic recovery, the jobs de...