Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

“Putin Hacked Our Coronavirus Vaccine” is the Dumbest Story Yet

The Gulf States’ Political Economy

Protests predicted to surge globally

Just more of some of the usual crimes Via Michael Roberts “The finance sector is really just a criminal conspiracy to steal from the public. So much for regulation rather than public ownership and control. Take the Wirecard scanda l. Wirecard, which started out processing payments for adult entertainment and gambling websites, filed for insolvency on June 25 after the discovery of a 1.9 billion euro hole in its accounts. German prosecutors have since opened investigations into suspected money laundering, fraud and market manipulatio n at the company. Markus Braun, the company’s former chief executive, was arrested. The company's accountants failed to carry out basic obvious auditing of the accounts and the German government ignored whistleblowers about the company and instead tried to prosecute them! Then there is the Apple tax dodge . With the connivance of the Irish government, Apple booked huge amounts of its global profits in Ireland where tax rates were deliberatel...

Syria and the Second Wave of Revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa

“[ P]rogressives remain fixated on how to revive the world that engendered the present disorder. They constructed and managed that world, and it flattered their self-image as the rational vanguard of the species. It is only to be expected that they should yearn for the return of their now bankrupt authority. Yet few aspects of the contemporary scene are more laughably grotesque than defunct politicians and advisers demanding a return to the politics of competence and expertise that produced the dysfunctional euro, the ruinous Iraq War, the financial crisis, anarchy in Libya and the regime of globalisation that is currently collapsing.” State of the nation - we are entering a new age of disorder

Just a mere new story of exploitation Shocking conditions [for whom?] in PPE factories supplying UK or Workers making sacrifices to save lives in the West!

“ So, Russian "actors" (why actors?) sought to influence the outcome of the UK general election by amplifying (not leaking, but amplifying) a dossier about US - UK trade talks which showed that the NHS was being put on the table by the Tory government.  I mean, only someone really stupid would think that the serious thing here was the Russian actors amplifying, and not the actual report showing the Tories were selling off the NHS to Trump! Did the British public not have the ri ght to know? I would say that, if anything, these Russian "actors" should be thanked for having acted in the interest of democracy in revealing these scandalous secret deals being hatched behind the backs of the British electorate. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the reason why this report on Russian meddling has not seen the light of day while the Tories had control of the intelligence and security committee.  This is also likely to be the reason why on the same day that the rep...

Pandemic Economics

ما قيمة صادرات السلاح البريطانية إلى السعودية؟

People’s own struggle achieves in months what NGOs cannot achieve (or hinders to achieve) for decades. Activists react as Sudan ditches “Islamist laws” A background 

Book review of Trade Wars Are Class War Part 1 Part 2

It’s a shame that Cheng has not expanded on the concept of “freedom” in the U.S. as a capitalist but also an imperialist state. Allowing the privileged few to flee Hong Kong isn’t liberation

The century of Einstein and Planck was also the century of Hitler. The Gestapo and the scientific renaissance were children of the same age. How humane the nineteenth century seemed, that century of naive physics, when compared with the twentieth century, the century that had killed his* mother. There is a terrible similarity between the principles of Fascism and those of contemporary physics. Fascism has rejected the concept of a separate individuality, the concept of 'a man', and operates only with vast aggregates. Contemporary physics speaks of the greater or lesser probability of occurrences within this or that aggregate of individual particles. And are not the terrible mechanics of Fascism founded on the principle of quantum politics, of political probability? Fascism arrived at the idea of the liquidation of entire strata of the population, of entire nations and races, on the grounds that there was a greater probability of overt or covert opposition among these ...

Escalating Plunder

Someone asked this question: If a person born in the UK is asked to leave the country, why should an American of Turkish descent, for example, remain? The violence of the nation state. Glasgow-born singer given two weeks to leave the country

When the US swung a Russian election The full article requires subscription. Here is the rest of the main points: “When Yeltsin announced he was standing in February 1996, his chances of success were small. His political movement Our Home — Russia, had only won 10% of the vote in the legislative election of December 1995. The Communist party, headed by Gennady Zyuganov, Yeltsin’s rival for the presidency, had become the biggest party in the State Duma with nearly 25% of the vote and 157 seats (up from 42 in 1993).  A former member of Yeltsin’s team recalled of the real-life events, ‘We managed to create panic at the idea that communism was returning ... queues, shortages of alcohol, cigarettes, soap. Vote, or you’ll lose! God save us from communism! Last chance to buy food! Those slogans worked’ (BBC in Russian, 5 July 2016). Time  magazine revealed ‘the secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win’; its front page carried a now famous caricature of the vi...

The Politics of Class and the Culinary Consumption in Tehran

‘Defund the Police,’Cancel Rent’ Related How Defund and Disband Became the Demands Books about the power of protest

How counterinsurgency tactics in the Middle East found their way to American cities