Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

What is common in these two stories? 1. Canadian PM " Trudeau has denied wrongdoing and says any lobbying by him or his inner circle for engineering giant SNC-Lavalin was done to protect jobs. SNC-Lavalin is one of the world's largest engineering and construction companies. The company faces fraud and corruption charges in relation to approximately C$48m ($36m; £28m) in bribes it is alleged to have offered to Libyan officials between 2001 and 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi was in power." In 2016 Canada was the second provider of weapons to the Middle East.  2. " UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia ruled lawful . Equipment sold to Saudi Arabia includes Typhoon and Tornado fighter jets, as well as precision-guided bombs. The sales contribute to thousands of engineering jobs in the UK, and have provided billions of pounds of revenue for the British arms trade."

"Fittingly for the fact that Assad has maintained his firm grip on power, an emotionally charged story of a child and his fate satiates the middle-class, very white desire to carry the weight of the evil world on our shoulders, albeit without consequences or responsibility. Oh what a dreadful place the rest of the world is!" The white perspective

Breaking news We have never been so close to equality, global justice, development and prosperity for all. Now both the IMF and the World Bank are headed by women! That will certainly make a radical change in the operation of global capitalism. 

"The British never had the capacity to reshape coercively the internal arrangements of other capitalist  states. Their speciality was taking over and reshaping pre-capitalist societies, defeating traditionalist forces of resistance within them. So the principle of absolute states’ rights and non-interference was perfectly acceptable to the British, once they had reached the limits of their empire.  But Washington had a different and more advanced agenda: first, to penetrate existing capitalist states and reorganize their internal arrangements to suit US  purposes; and second, to defeat any social forces there that rejected the American path to modernity in the name, not of traditionalism, but of an alternative modernity. The UN model simply did not address these issues which were so central for Washington. Indeed, it offered a notional defence against American interference in its emphasis on national sovereignty. As a result, the UN politico-legal order was a cumbersom...

Anti-union harassment and victimization escalate at AB InBev Sonepat India

A liberal account of 'humanitarian intervention' The Liberal Defense of Murder

Tureky's position on Venezuela I wouldn't describe the current Brazilian regime as fascist though. It is a racist, far right regime with fascistic tendencies, but it is not fascist .

The nurses in Bulgaria are rising up!

Making the Economic Political in Jordan's Tax Revolt

Yugoslavia, Argentina, Egypt, Tunisia, Greece ... Venezuela How to depen a crisis and accelerate conflict or how to make a killing The example of Yugoslavia Basil Davidson's review of Susan Woodward's The Balkan Tragedy

Venezuela The liberal BBC is not only putting the blame mainly on Maduro, but ignores any alternative.  If it is not about a regime change to replace the current regime with a pliant U.S. ally and open the country to privatisation for more local and foreign capital, why don't other countries (which are not subordinate the the American hegemony), or international agencies negotiate with the Venezuelan government to create a "humanitarian zone" to provide aid in both Venezuela and Colombia? What the U.S. and  the opposition are trying to do now is to split the Venezuelan army or push a faction in it to overthrow Maduro. And we all know what that might lead to. One does not have to look at Syria and how army defectors did not tilt the balance for those who rose up against al-assad's repressive machine. Worse, this is not an uprising or a revolution in Venezuela.  We have been here before. The day the current situation escalates to an armed conflict, more media a...

From the archive Iraq 2003: was it... Blood for oil?

My favourite article on Venezuela (so far). Excerpts (an individual or institutional subscription is required to read the full piece) "Beset by five-digit inflation, food shortages and rising poverty and unemployment, the economy contracted by more than a third between 2013 and 2018, and has slid even further since. This has wiped out the real gains made by most of the population between the mid-2000s and the time roughly when Maduro succeeded Hugo Chávez as president in April 2013. There is no doubting, either, that Maduro has failed to address this crisis. Hampered by the razor-thin margin by which he won his mandate in 2013 – 1.5 per cent – he has governed with a combination of bluster and repression. He stuck to a disastrous exchange-rate policy even though it was visibly making things worse for most of the population. The effects of this were made even worse by the US sanctions that started under Obama, who in March 2015 declared Venezuela an ‘extraordinary threat’ t...

Jordan New labour law must recognise workers' rights

The prophet perverted

Britain "I find it hard to believe that the government would have made the decision to strip a British born subject of their citizenship and the media and public being so supportive of the decision if Shamima Begum had been a 15 year-old impressionable white girl who had made the same foolish and immature decisions. If this was a young BRITISH white girl she would be sitting on a Breakfast TV sofa recounting her traumatic adventurous experience with book deals and film scripts piling up at her door and with Newsnight and Dispatches competing for an exclusive interview. Such is the subtlety of society’s unspoken racism, the nature of our warped reality and the power of the state to manufacture and manipulate public opinion to serve their own nefarious desires."   —Ishmahil  Blagrove, 22 February 2019 "I think that she should be returned to face an investigation and for justice. That a court of law should decide what happens from there, rather than a court of Fac...

Venezuela A disaster caused by  - the economic policies of the government,  - the sanctions imposed by the US,  - and the control of what is left of food and foreign aid by the "mafia" food. ويرجع عدد من التقارير المتخصصة أسباب هذه الأزمات إلى سياسات الحكومة الاقتصادية، إلى جانب الحصار الاقتصادي الذي فرضته الولايات المتحدة على فنزويلا، إضافة إلى سيطرة "مافيا" الغذاء والدواء  على ما تبقى من مواد غذائية أو ما يصل من مساعدات خارجية. ماذا خلف المساعادات الإنسانية لفنزويلا "Aid groups on the ground worry, however, that a political operation thinly padded with humanitarian objectives could send a precarious situation down an even worse path—disastrous American efforts to intervene in Latin America from decades past serve as a reminder of how badly things can go. Even some liberals tell us that The examples are numerous. The United States  sought to overthrow  Chile’s socialist president Salvador Allende in the 1970s, a move that eventuall...

In 2002, Abrams  reportedly  “gave a nod” to the military coup that attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to remove the democratically elected Hugo Chavez from power. The Observer, which broke the story, called Abrams “the crucial figure around the coup.” Abrams has had his eye on toppling Venezuela’s government for some time. When Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, Abrams, then the point man for George W. Bush’s Middle East policy,  helped implement a scheme  to nullify the results by fomenting a Palestinian civil war which, they hoped, would remove Hamas from power. When the plan backfired, with Hamas emerging victorious and in full control of Gaza, Abrams accused Hamas of staging a “coup.” Elliott Abrams: a criminal record

The cosmopolitan project for unifying humanity through the agency of the dominant capitalist states—on the normative basis that we are all individual global citizens with liberal rights—will not work: it is more likely to plunge the planet into increasingly divisive turmoil.  There is another version of cosmopolitanism abroad today, which places at the centre of its conception of a new world order the notion of a democratic global polity. This comes in a number of different editions, some scarcely distinguishable from liberal cosmopolitanism save for more voluble democratic piety. But in its most generous version, exemplified by Daniele Archibugi’s essay in these pages, this is a programme with the great merit of seeking to subordinate the rich minority of states and social groups to the will of a global majority, in conditions where the bulk of the world’s population remains trapped in poverty and powerlessness. Yet even its best proposals suffer from two crippling weaknesses. ...

"[T]he extraordinary support for Israel among the U.S. political class isn’t all about the Benjamins. If AIPAC and the dozens of political action committees (PACs) whose contributions it coordinates were trying to convince politicians to adopt a policy that did not contribute to maintaining and expanding the American empire in the Middle East and beyond, then we would be hearing comments like Kevin McCarthy’s truly antisemitic tweet quoted above with great regularity from across the political spectrum. It’s the confluence of imperial interests, political money and the popular Jewish and non-Jewish understanding of Israel as the moral legatee of the victims of Nazi mass murder that have combined to shut down debate on US Middle East policy." — Joel Beinin, merip, 18 February 2019