Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes and Pandemic Profiteers

 What is Behind Bahrain’s Normalisation Deal with Israel?

  The War Pact Among Jim Crow States

 Written by Vasily Grossman in 1959 Anti-Semitism can take many forms – from a mocking, contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms. Anti-Semitism can be met with in the market and in the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard. Anti-Semitism has been as strong in the age of atomic reactors and computers as in the age of oil-lamps, sailing-boats and spinning-wheels. Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and State systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of – I'll tell you what you're guilty of. Even Oleinichuk, the peasant fighter for freedom who was imprisoned in Schlusselburg, somehow expressed his hatred for serfdom as a hatred for Poles and Yids. Even a genius like Dostoyevsky saw a Jewish usurer where he should have seen the pitiless eyes of a Russian serf-owner, industri...

 

 The Authoritarian Personality

I have not yet watched the documentary because I don’t have a TV set and or a TV licence. Someone else has this to say about it: “ I've just watched David Attenborough's new Extinction documentary on the threat to planetary bio-diversity. It is of course well made and makes clear the deadly threats facing all life on this earth. But there was a major weakness and it can be summed up in one word: 'we'. Throughout the programme it was repeatedly said the 'we' have done this and that and 'we' are doing the other and 'we' are all responsible. The fact that there is a massive difference between the impact of  the rich countries and the poor got a very brief mention but the fact there is a huge difference between giant corporations and ordinary people , between the super-rich and the world's working class was never mentioned. Nor, of course, was 'capitalism'. In reality understanding that production for profit is THE central problem is the...

  Dear white people of France,

 Maxime Rodinson and the Palestinian Question – a critique

  Responsibility measured in  terms of each country's contribution to cumulative historical emissions. “As of 2015, the USA was responsible for 40% of excess global CO 2  emissions. The European Union (EU-28) was responsible for 29%. The G8 nations (the USA, EU-28, Russia, Japan, and Canada) were together responsible for 85%. Countries classified by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as Annex I nations (ie, most industrialised countries) were responsible for 90% of excess emissions. The Global North was responsible for 92%. By contrast, most countries in the Global South were within their boundary fair shares, including India and China (although China will overshoot soon). High-income countries have a greater degree of responsibility for climate damages than previous methods have implied.” In addition, there are “ the emissions that high-income countries have outsourced to lower-income countries since the rise of globalisation in the 1980s.” “These results illu...

 As the country faces an economic downturn, migrant workers are paying a brutal price

“ The chart shows [Gary] Lineker as the highest-earning star with an unchanged salary of £1.75m in the last financial year.” Like other similar injustices, the majority are complicit in this, for they accept it as ‘natural’ and ‘new normal’.  After all, Lineker is a frontline essential worker before and after the pandemic, and has been risking his life for many years to entertain a passive complacent audience. And now the poor Lineker “has agreed” to a £400,000 pay cut.  When politicians use the language of “we are in it together”, they express the ideology of the ruling class. And the BBC and Lineker are examples of this. “I am making sacrifices because we are all in it together.”

 Underground miners’ protest in Ukraine

 Jair Bolsonaro, wannabe dictator Related Is Brazil’s military now in power?

The  Times , on the morrow of the coup, was writing: “Whether or not the armed forces were right to do what they have done, the circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene.” Professor Hugh Thomas, from the Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at Reading University: the trouble was that Allende was much too influenced by such people as Marx and Lenin, “rather than Mill, or Tawney, or Aneurin Bevan, or any other European democratic socialist.” This being the case, Professor Thomas cheerfully goes on, “the Chilean  coup d’état  cannot by any means be regarded as a defeat for democratic socialism but for Marxist socialism.” Ralph Miliband (October 1973): The Chilean experience “offers a very suggestive example of what may happen when a government does give the impression, in a bourgeois democracy, that it genuinely intends to bring about really serious changes in the social order a...

 A highly recommended read I would have chosen a different headline though:  The Political Economy of Modernisation and the Origins of Mass Incarceration in the US . The Economic Origins of Mass Incarceration

“ Over the last five decades, the incarceration rate in the United States has exploded. In the 1960s, the United States incarcerated its population at a rate that was comparable to other developed countries. Today, America ranks among the most punitive states in world history — second only to the Soviet Union under Stalin. Black men born between 1965 and 1969 have been more likely to go to prison than to graduate from college.  American punishment is thus of unprecedented  severity  — more prisoners per capita than ever before, and more so than any comparable country in world history. It is also characterized by extreme  inequality  — some Americans are much more likely to languish in prisons than others.  These are its twin features. What explains them?” The Economic Origin of Mass Incarceration

A liberal “leftish” view, but very informative. It should be noted that The Guardian itself is in philanthropic partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Philanthropy is facade to present a human face of capitalism, mitigating the system’s negative impacts. In fact, it often exasperates the problems it claims to solve or perpetuate the status quo) and it is a state ideological tool (PR) for Westerners to reinforce the belief in their superiority and that they are helping and empowering the Other. In some cases, philanthropy is a tool promote “liberal democracy” and drawing organisations/opposition forces into the orbit of the Western powers, especially the north Atlantic states. The mushrooming of philanthropic organisation in the last two decades has to be seen in the context of the neoliberal form of capitalism. How it benefits the super-rich Related The Problem With Capitalist Philanthropy There’s no Such Thing as Good Philanthropy