Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

An article behind a pay wall , but you still get the gist. “Over the last 50 years, France has sold arms to some of the world’s most brutally repressive governments. In the 1970s its customer list included South Africa’s apartheid regime, Argentina’s junta, Franco’s Spain and the Greek colonels. Today its preferred clients are Saudi Arabia and Abdel Fattah al-Sissi’s Egypt.”

Is he really trying to redistribute wealth to workers? ‘Redistribute’, not ‘distribute’ implies that wealth was once distributed to workers. No, what happened between 1945 until the ascent of the neoliberal form of capitalism was a social contract based on compromise between the state, capital and trade unions.  Are the profits too high? I don’t think so. One of the reasons we are in an “era of anaemic economic growth” is that the low rate of profit/of return to capital is not high enough to incentivise the capitalists to invest. Thus some governments are intervening and pouring money into the economy and corporations as well as giving financial support to families and individuals, especially because of the pandemic. As Cédric Duran put it: “  Is this shift sufficient to tackle the century’s social and ecological crises? Not nearly. Does it alter essential class relations? On the contrary: it strives to re-legitimize the social order. Is it unambiguous? No: while private finan...

 Fedex-TNT: Stop the job cuts

“This is the people’s vaccine,”  said corporate critic Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program.  “Federal scientists helped invent it and taxpayers are funding its development. … It should belong to humanity .” Calling the shots

"Our Lives Are Worth More Than Your Profits"

The missing profits of nations

Corruption and plunder in Britain: the example of Branson "What all this resembles is a looking-glass version of capitalism. The public are handing money to private businesses for them to take a clip and pay us back the rest. Just in case that wasn't ludicrous enough, remember that Virgin's parent company is listed in British Virgin Islands, a sunny tax haven that is a stop pretty far from Wigan. And as we've seen repeatedly with the east coast line, the ones who don't make a profit can simply walk away, dumping their service back in public hands. Heads they win, tails you lose. Branson is not the sole offender here; he's simply the most flamboyant representative of a completely rotten system for siphoning money from the public into private hands. The entire industry, as Treasury adviser Shriti Vadera put it in 2001, is peopled by  "thinly capitalised … profiteers of the worst kind" . And as a former investment banker, she'd know what those...