Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Italy "One country is widely viewed as the most acute of all cases of European dysfunction. Since the introduction of the single currency, Italy has posted the worst economic record of any state in the Union: twenty years of virtually unbroken stagnation, at a growth rate well below that of Greece or Spain. Its public debt is over 130 per cent of GDP. Yet this is not a country of small or medium size in the recently acquired periphery of the Union. It is a founder member of the Six, with a population comparable to that of Britain, and an economy half as large again as that of Spain. After Germany, its manufacturing base is the second biggest in Europe, where it is runner-up too in the export of capital goods. Its treasury issues form the third largest sovereign bond market in the world. Nearly half of its public debt is held abroad: the comparable figure for Japan is under 10 per cent. In its combination of weight and fragility, Italy is the real weak link in the EU, at which i...

"Development" Between 1970 and 2007, the external debt of the developing countries was multiplied by twenty-nine. During this time, they repaid the equivalent of ninety-four times the amount owed in 1970. Between 1985 and 2007, developing countries sent to their creditors the equivalent of 7.5 Marshall Plans*...with the local capitalist elite taking their commission on the way. It is a well-oiled mechanism, with part of the money coming back to the South in the form of new loans to ensure that the transfers continue. Thanks to the debt, the wealth of the citizens of the South is being transferred under our very eyes to the elite of the North, with the complicity of the elite of the South. * Marshall Plan cost around $100 billion in 2010 value. Toussaint and Millet, Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank,  2010

Sex Power Violence #MeToo A verso free ebook

The response by mainstream liberals in the U.K. and U.S. has been the cynical use of moments of public outrage over Assad’s crimes for the perusal of the American geo-political goal of limiting Russian and Iranian regional control. In opposition to this, a significant part of the Western Left has eschewed all criticism of Syrian, Iranian, and Russian leadership in the name of resisting U.S. empire. Syria and the Problem of Left Solidarity

Against "totalitarianism": a conversation with Enzo Traverso

Syria's white helmets

There are a number of issues that organizations such as the UGTT must contend with, namely the role of government in post-January 14 Tunisia and the allocation of roles between the state, elected officials, political parties, and civil society, ensuring new social and political dynamics achieve the recognition they deserve, and resistance to the neoliberal agenda imposed by the international aid donors. The traditional organizations of Tunisian civil society will have to make progress on all these fronts if they wish to recover their ability to emancipate the people and neutralize financial backers’ attempts to sweep aside the social and economic demands of those who initiated the Revolution of Dignity (and not the “Jasmine Revolution,” as the Nobel Committee put it). The actors leading these new social dynamics have not yet had their last word. Trade Unions and Arab Revolutions: The Tunisian Case of UGTT

"The national economy, once protected, is literally controlled today. Loans and donations fund the budget. Fishing for capital, either the heads of state themselves or their governmental delegates pay a visit to the capital cities of their former metropoles each quarter. The former colonial power makes countless demands and secures concessions and guarantees, as it takes less and less care to mask its hold on national power. The people miserably stagnates in unbearable destitution and slowly becomes increasingly aware of its leaders’ heinous treason." — Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth . How much has changed since Fanon wrote those words in 1963?

Hey Muslims, let's join the NRA

Walmart: an exmaple of neoliberalism hijacking of social movements Also An in-depth analysis by Nancy Fraser

The Tarboush Transformation

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms—elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest—will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of non-violent totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial—but Democracy and freedom in a strictly Pickwickian sense. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit." Aldous Huxley,  Brave New World Revisited , published 1958

The Market is God, say the "free market" fundamentalists "I am determined to pursue an aggressive strategy of opening up the markets in all the regions of the world."* — Bill Clinton, firmer U.S. president, address to the WTO, May 18, 1998.  Quoted in  Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank  by Éric Toussaint and Damien Millet, 2010 One can scratch her head and thinks about what effects that has had in the U.S. Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Egypt, South Africa, Argentina, and other countries. Clinton in fact was not pursuing something new, the "shock doctrine" was already apace, and it would be soon complemented by "shock and awe". 

At least there is a mention of the complicity of the capitalist Western companies and the hypocrisy of the "Western leaders" who preach "human rights" and "freedoms" but do business with authoritarianism. The Thoughts of Chairman Xi

Learning assessment has not spurred discussion of the deep structural problems that send so many students to college unprepared to succeed. Instead, it lets politicians and accreditors ignore these problems as long as bureaucratic mechanisms appear to be holding someone — usually a professor — accountable for student performance. All professors could benefit from serious conversations about what is and is not working in their classes. But instead they end up preoccupied with feeding the bureaucratic beast. “It’s a bit like the old Soviet Union. You speak two languages,” said Frank Furedi, an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Britain, which has a booming assessment culture. “You do a performance for the sake of the auditors, but in reality, you carry on.” The misguided drive to measure 'learning outcomes'

The UK, U.S. and the EU loathe to impose sanctions, "for fear of hurting the ordinary people or derailing a delicate democratic experiment." Hahahah! The humanist imperialists who stood by and watched during Rwanda's genocide, hurt around 200,000 Iraqis, mostly children, and then invaded a country where there was no "democratic experiment". Then they watched again during a Syrian revolution turned into a war in which the regime is the main killer and torturer. Myanmar

"Seven years into this process – first counter-revolutionary and now exterminatory – the Ghouta has tumbled to the lowest pit of hell. This didn’t have to happen. Nor was it an accident. Local, regional and global powers created the tragedy, by their acts and their failures to act. And Arab and international public opinion has contributed, by its apathy and relative silence." The Ghouta Slaughter and Arab Responsibility

"Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess."  Orwell,  What is Science , 1945

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. —George Orwell

"New forms of industrial action need to be instituted against managerialism. For instance, in the case of teachers and lecturers, the tactic of strikes (or even of marking bans) should be abandoned, because they only hurt students and members (at the college where I used to work, one-day strikes were pretty much welcomed by management because they saved on the wage bill whilst causing negligible disruption to the college). What is needed is the strategic withdrawal of forms of labor which will only be noticed by management: all of the machineries of self-surveillance that have no effect whatsoever on the delivery of education, but which managerialism could not exist without. Instead of the gestural, spectacular politics around (noble) causes like Palestine, it’s time that teaching unions got far more immanent, and take the opportunity opened up by the crisis to begin to rid public services of business ontology. When even businesses can’t be run as businesses, why should public ser...