Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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 The states supplying the guns that kill Mexican journalists

 The crux of this had been already analysed by Stratfor, the intelligence company, 5/6 years ago. The great uncoupling 

The 4th Company (Mexico 2016)

As of 27 July 2020, UK tops the list of countries with the highest deaths per thousand people.

Poverty, not just populists, to blame for Covid-19's impact

"Since the late 1980s, US migration controls have worked to discipline low-wage migrant labor, ensuring the availability of a population of vulnerable, deportable workers for exploitation by US capital. After the 2008 financial crisis, however, the deportation machine kicked into high gear, earning Obama the title of 'Deporter in Chief.' Under Trump, the expansion of the war on migrants has reached dystopic dimensions." Migrants on the Front Lines of Global Class War But if you are "an Iraqi who helped the US military" or from persecuted religious minorities [Rohignyan? I doubt it], you are in .

Out of Africa

"Revolutionary Cycles Are Contagious"

I have just finished reading The Man Who Loved Dogs by Leonardo Padura, in its English translation. It is a great novel. I wish I could read it in Spanish.

The coming crime wars

He was an antidote to the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver Bourdain’s political transformation happened on the road to Beirut. He landed there in 2006, days before Israel bombarded the city. The episode is a verite documentary of a society upended in an instant. Lebanese journalist  Kim Ghattas  says that as a result, “Bourdain developed a new approach that used conversations about food to tell the story and politics of the countries he visited in ways that hard news couldn’t.” Anthony Bourdain (1956-2018)

Which country works the longest hours ?

After Obregón founded the modern Mexican state, back in 1920, his successor Plutarco Elías Calles, established the ruling elite’s political party, which eventually became the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000. For decades the PRI won all the elections for every office, from president to mayor of the smallest town. This was done through fear and favors, clientelism and patronage, fraud and, when necessary, murder. Will the Mexican elite and its foreigner allies tolerate a social democrat, a "populist"? Last time they used fraud. Even if Obrador wins, cooptation and betrayal might do the work. The recent examples in Latin America, Venezuela being the most obvious case, has showed that if the economic power of the elite is not attacked, local and international capital would not let a social democratic movement succeed in instilling small changes. The plot against López Obrador

"The financial crises that affected the developing countries between 1994 and 2002, resulting from the deregulation of the market and the private financial sector as recommended by the World Bank and the IMF, led to an enormous increase in internal public debt. In short, by following the Washington Consensus, governments of developing countries had to give up their currency and capital controls. This was combined with the deregulation of the banking sector in different countries. Private banks had to take more and more risks, which led to numerous crises, beginning with Mexico in December 1994. Capital was massively withdrawn from Mexico, sparking off a chain reaction of bank failures. The Mexican government supported by the World Bank an dthe IMF, transformed the banks' private debt into internal public debt. This took place in extactly the same way in countries as different as Indonesia ((in 1998) and Ecuador (1999/2000).  In addition, even in those countries whose bank...

China wages now higher than in Brazil, Argentina and Mexico

Perspectives "Though new technologies will not completely erase the benefit of cheap labor, they will reduce the number of opportunities countries have to industrialize, diversify and grow their economies... As advanced, industrialized countries no longer have to rely on low-wage labor in far-off places, they will take advantage of new technologies and start producing low-end goods closer to home. States that have not yet begun to industrialize will have the hardest time; the longer it takes them to develop over the next few decades, the more difficult it will be for them to do so as the growth of advanced manufacturing elsewhere shrinks the opportunities available for emerging manufacturers." One can imagine what the fall-outs are in the "developping" countries: higher unemployment, more erosion of social services, more migration, social unrest, uprisings, coups, wars, etc . The rise of manufacturing marks the fall of globalization

"This process of appropriation includes many others: framing the Law of Value as something morally and politically valuable; mapping natural resources, translating Cheap Nature into a portable, readable format; codifying the limits of nature and society in laws and bills, so as the first remains cheap, and creating new institutional arrangements, which  allow the market and the state to produce this logic through space and time . Appropriating Cheap Nature is not only a process of violent material dispossession. It is also a way to see the world which naturalises – and makes desirable – this process, upon which capitalist accumulation depends." Capitalism as Ecology: Mexican Resistance at the Frontier

Viva La Revolución by Eric Hobsbawm review – Latin America from leftwing hopes to bloody dictatorships

"Astonishingly, the US mainstream media have barely covered what everyone here calls “the massacre.” Make no mistake: If police in Venezuela had shot down 11 unarmed demonstrators, a pack of American reporters would have raced there." Rebellion spreads in Mexico after police massacre