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"The scandal is that Lula's personal and political trajectory suggests it is impossible for anyone in Brazil, no matter how well-meaning, to get elected to public office and govern from that office without actively playing the corruption game.  Dilma Rousseff , it appears, refused and  was impeached for it  by a bevy of Congressmen busy lining their pockets. The tragedy of Lula is not just that a good man was brought down so low, but that there seems such scant chance that the system which forced him to kneel at the trough of corruption is likely to meaningfully change any time soon." Lula's corruption conviction
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"[M]any of the arguments against Islamophobia in anti-racist circles turn out to replicate rather than subvert the underlying logics that attack, demonize and dehumanize Muslims. Challenging the Islamophobic far-right cannot simply be about upholding the same capitalist and imperialist — even if slightly less racist — stances that have destabilized much of the Global South in recent decades, furthering war and displacing Muslims who have travelled to Europe’s shores only to be met with an explosion of nativist hatred." The Problem with Liberal Opposition to Islamophobia Note: the 8% of the UK's Muslim population is inaccuarte. I have checked a few sources (BBC, wikipedia). In fact it ranges between 5% and 5.5% of the total population.
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France "In the first round of the elections this year, the number of workers who voted for it [the Front National] was far ahead of any other party—37 per cent; in the second round, 56 per cent. As inequality of income and insecurity of employment steadily increased under the system of collusive alterna- tion, so have those willing to cast their ballot for the fn : 4.8 million in the Presidential election of 2002, 6.8 million in the regional elections of 2015, 7.7 million in the rst round in 2017, 10.6 million in the second round—the last gure, however, an arti ce of the distortions imposed by the double tour . Its real level of support is about a fth of the elector- ate, less than those—mainly workers too—who abstain, vote blank or spoil their ballots. 12 There was never the slightest chance that Marine could win the Presidency. Far from being a deadly threat to the system in place, the fn is an eminently functional part of it, clasping together all respectable opinion...
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Some interesting arguments from a liberal: "Even when they did empirical analysis, Leontief said economists seldom took any interest in the meaning or value of their data. He thus called for economists to explore their assumptions and data by conducting social, demographic and anthropological work, and said economics needed to work more closely with other disciplines."
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"There is usually a noisy crowd who deride any such review with shouts of “Lighten up! It’s only a movie!”–as though popular culture is neither popular nor culture, the soundtrack to our lives that slowly shapes our assumptions and our values, and does so at a level we rarely examine critically." Wonder Woman: The hero of The military-industrial complex See also My 2006 interview with Lina Khatib: Filming the Middle East My interview with Johnathan Cook: Blood and Religion
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The Syrian government is essentially a family dictatorship rooted in the anti-leftist military wing of the Ba'ath Party. Virtually the only "liberalization" that has taken place under the younger Assad has been economic, privatizing once-public assets to various crony capitalists who pledge fealty to the regime. Just because the United States and other Western governments oppose a particular leader out of their hypocritical imperialist interests doesn't thereby make that leader "progressive." How Syria Divides the Left
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It is to precisely such contradictions that Collins was drawn. “He was bound to the system in a way that a lot of us are,” he says. “His resistance within the system is very familiar. There is no anterior position now, no position outside the system. You take an easyJet to an environmental conference. We are all compromised by the system and articulate resistance within it. He’s a perfect reflection of our problems today.” Why I took a Soviet statue of Engles across Europe to Manchester
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" In the last twenty-five years (since when, in February 1991, a ship loaded with 26,000 Albanians entered the port of Brindisi) we have known that the great migration had began. Two paths were possible at that point. Opening its borders, starting a global distribution of resources, investing its wealth in a long lasting process of reception and integration of young people coming massively from the sea. This was the first path. The second was to reject, to dissuade, to make almost impossible the easy journey from Northern Africa to the coasts of Spain Italy and Greece. Europeans have chosen the second way, and they are daily drowning uncountable children and women and men. Auschwitz on the beach." Is Bifo being harsh on the "civilised Europeans"?
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Being complicit in mass murder is legal, court rules After all the business of England is business. " The sales contribute to thousands of engineering jobs in the UK, and have provided billions of pounds of revenue for the British arms trade."
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