Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

The healthy French society Have we seen titles like " The Harvey Weinteins of France "?

Iran 1980 The Women's Liberation Movement aimed at opening up a new chapter for the revolution. They were involved for five days, beginning on International Women's Day, March 8, 1979, in continuous marches under the slogan, "We made the revolution for freedom and got unfreedom."  Women and Revolution in Iran

Italy's Ides of March

Any discussion of #MeToo must first acknowledge the fact that the deeply autobiographical testimonies of sexual violence by women actually trace the biography of something else: the workplace. Nested within the accounts of personal violations lies yet another secret, the stunningly dictatorial nature of the workplace, that is, perhaps for the first time, being discussed openly. #MeToo shows the normative nature of the boss’s control over worker’s lives, reproduced each day through the power he holds over employment and enforced each day through intimidation, bullying, and outright violence. #MeToo as our moment to explore possibilities

A Crown Prince in the UK Saudi Crown Prince visit to the UK is hailed as a partnership between the two countries in "fighting terrorism". The state terrorism of the Saudi, the US, the UK, and other states over the last 50 years?  Hang on. There is $100 billion of deals on the table during this visit.  "Human rights"? Bin Slaman is making "a progress in granting Saudi women some rights". In the meantime,  UK should sell more weapons to the Saudis to kill more Yemeni women and children, with a sanction by the High Court. We are "civilised" and "democratic", the British consumers and subjects say. For that reason we exercise pur democratic rights and feeedoms in not questioning a visit of an autocratic (or an Egyptian dictator). Business as usual.

From the archive You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to. — Humbert Wolfe Robert Fisk's crimes against journalism

This is good. What it is about capitalism that makes Keynesianism a horizon even would-be revolutionaries — including Mann himself, he admits — have trouble seeing past. It is not so much an ideological block as a strategic one. ... to the extent that Keynesianism saved capitalism, it was from barbarism rather than socialism. And leftists are pulled to Keynesianism because, deep down, they believe that too. Most have lost confidence that there is a viable political path to socialism, while threats from various shades of the Right have followed one after another. For all the antidemocratic tendencies of Keynesianism, socialists today can hardly see themselves articulating the views of the masses either. The Keynesian counter-revolution

"According to a  Political Instability Task Force  estimate that between 1956 and 2016 a total of forty-three genocides took place, causing the death of about 50 million people. The  UNHCR  estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence up to 2008."  " Next to the Jews in Europe," wrote  Alexander Werth ', "the biggest single German crime was undoubtedly the extermination by hunger, exposure and in other ways of . . . Russian war prisoners." Yet the murder of at least 3.3 million Soviet POWs is one of the least-known of modern genocides; there is still no full-length book on the subject in English. It also stands as one of the most intensive genocides of all time: "a holocaust that devoured millions," as  Catherine Merridale  acknowledges. The large majority of POWs, some 2.8 million, were killed in just eight months of 1941–42, a rate of slaughter matched (to my knowledge) only by the 1994 Rwanda genoc...

Religion "I cannot imagine life without neoliberalism." — a student at the London School of Economics, March 2018

Election in Iraq Under the current system, installed by the US following the 2003 invasion, ministers are appointed to different ministries on the basis of ethnicity and sect, in a fashion similar to Lebanon. Although this system was never written into the Iraqi constitution, it has remained in place and has angered those who claim appointments should be overseen by the prime minister. But abolishing the system will prove difficult without enraging the highly influential political actors who currently benefit from the system. "Iraqi Communists and Shia Sadrists unite" This has raised my eyebrows, too.

In  The Road to Serfdom , there is a rather chilling passage in which Hayek writes that “the manager of any plant” needs to be given “considerable” power, and approvingly quotes an engineer on the importance of economic spontaneity versus planning: “there ought to be surrounding the work a comparatively large area of unplanned economic action. There should be a place from which workers can be drawn, and when a worker is fired he should vanish from the job and from the pay-roll. In the absence of such a free reservoir[,] discipline cannot be maintained without corporal punishment, as with slave labour Freedom for whom?

Turkey German firm, sponsor of Bundesliga, fires union members

La russie expliquée par son chauffage

The Muslim Brotherhood's women activists

Complicity in crimes The Royal Family visit to Israel

Even before the advent of neoliberalism, the capitalist economy had thrived on people believing that being afflicted by the structural problems of an exploitative system – poverty, joblessness, poor health, lack of fulfillment – was in fact a personal deficiency. Neoliberalism has taken this internalized self-blame and turbocharged it. It tells you that you should not merely feel guilt and shame if you can’t secure a good job, are deep in debt, and are too stressed or overworked for time with friends. You are now also responsible for bearing the burden of potential ecological collapse. Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals

Akufo-Addo is no radical: he has more in common with French presidents than Ghanaian farmers. What the West wants to hear

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