NM's blog

“The US labor movement has never been neutral: its union officialdom has a more-than-century-long history of allying with Zionism .”

Look now -- in all of history men have been taught that killing of men is an evil thing not to be countenanced. Any man who kills must be destroyed because this is a great sin, maybe the worst we know. And then we take a soldier and put murder in his hands and we say to him, "use it well, use it wisely." We put no checks on him. Go out and kill as many of a certain kind or classification of your brothers as you can. And we will reward you for it because it is a violation of your early training. —John Steinbeck, East of Eden

In such a militarised society, impunity is a national value

Robin Blackburn reviewing Karl Marx in America

The attempt to account for America’s anti-socialist exception has sustained a thriving academic cottage industry among historians, sociologists and political scientists over many decades. As long ago as 1906, the German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart was asking: “Why is there no socialism in the US?”  The answer, he thought, lay in the success of capitalism and the extent to which American workers identified as a result with the prevailing social and economic settlement. “On the reefs of roast beef and apple pie,” Sombart wrote, “socialistic utopias of every sort are sent to their doom.”  There were other factors at work too, Sombart argued. America had no feudal past, which meant that workers there felt the political system was largely responsive to their needs, in a way that their European counterparts, who’d had to fight to achieve the franchise, did not. Greater social mobility led most Americans to value self-improvement over collective action, while the open fr...

I should start reading this book

Realpolitik and selective accountability.  “The UAE is a strategic partner of the West. It is a buyer of arms, a major collaborator with Israel’s genocidal regime, a conduit for intelligence, and a financial hub. It has hosted US military bases, participated in counterterrorism operations, and invested heavily in Western economies. In short, it is too useful to punish.” Counterrevolution, gold and global impunity

For those anti-migrants who scream about refugees and asylum seeker choosing the UK for its benefit system. Another graph here

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. — Albert Einstein

The absence of questioning the colonialist foundations of Israeli politics

Antifa — short for “anti-fascist” — is a decentralised, leaderless movement of far-left individuals who stand against what they see as fascist and rightwing entities.  It is “a label for people who have a certain ideology [who] believe violence is justified to fight against fascistic entities within our society”, including the government or specific organisations, said David Schanzer, director of Duke University’s Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security.  Antifa does not have a membership list or a doctrine, and it does not raise money, hold meetings or have a website, as an established organisation would.  The “consensus” among US terrorism experts was that it was “an ideology” that “has not manifested itself organisationally”, Schanzer said Is antifa a terror threat?  Data shows leftwing extremists have posed a relatively minor security threat to the US over the past three decades, particularly when compared with violence from rightwing groups, although ...

Inequality in Chile  is 43 in the gini index. It is higher than the world average of 38. It is lower though than in Brazil or Colombia (around 45), for example. Contra la violencia– gathering of music, dance and speeches in front of Palacio la Moneda. It was in that palace that Salvadore Allende ‘was killed’ by a US-backed Pinochet's coup in September 1973.  A chat with a middle-aged Chilean man: Gaza, genocide, the US, Chile, the left, the right and far-right. He seemed a progressive man. A street in central Santiago should be named Street of Opticians. Tens of opticas shops line up the street. I have never seen such a number of opticians in one street.  A chat with a Venezuelan man. A vet by profession, but is not allowed yet to work in Chile, for he has been in the country for only two months. He is doing some illegal work as celebrations decorator and sells some handicrafts he makes. He thinks that Maduro of Venezuela is an authoritarian who wrecked the country and th...

This profligate spending on America’s militarization, coupled with tax cuts for the rich and “preemptive” strikes on Iran, laid bare just how little US conservatism has actually changed in the era of Trump. Samuel Moyn   observed that  Trump had revealed himself to be a “politician of American continuity” rather than a harbinger of change. Like his Republican predecessor, Trump has fused militarism with neoliberal economic policies (deregulation, privatization, tax cuts), which last time around produced a global financial crisis and two failed wars that enriched a select few. In the Bush era, contractors like Halliburton and Blackwater became the brazen faces of disaster capitalism. Today that mantle has been passed to private prison firms like CoreCivic and surveillance tech companies like  Palantir , which has quickly become the new avatar of the burgeoning police state. Two decades after the war on terror, we are in danger of entering what has been  described ...

I have selected the following, as the article is for subscribers only Samuel P. Huntington’s greatest contribution to the world of ideas was the phrase “Davos man.” This was his term for the capitalists to which our globalized socioeconomic order had given rise: highly educated, generally English-speaking people who profited from the world of borderless trade and travel, represented by the attendees of the yearly economic  conference  held in the small Swiss town of the same name. Huntington … was less sanguine than Fukuyama about how total liberalism’s victory had been. For him, the ideological struggle between communism and liberalism had not proved the strength and appeal of the latter but confirmed that no single universalist worldview could claim purchase on the lives of people across the globe. “In this new world the most pervasive, important, and dangerous conflicts will not be between social classes, rich and poor, or other economically defined groups,” he writes in...

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“ In trying to solve the puzzle of why people vote in politicians that do little to improve their living standards, Seymour goes for a psychological explanation. “this dismissal of the primacy of the economic is not just surprising coming from one of the foremost Marxist intellectuals in Britain today, but rests upon empirically spurious claims. “Seymour only tangentially acknowledges the role of elites in the rise of disaster nationalism. While he does point out that its political economy is mainly about furthering the interests of domestic capitalists, that is never really explored. “To get a full picture  of the social forces driving the rise of the far right and likely to benefit from it, we need more systematic and comparative analysis of party elites, their donors and their actual economic policymaking when they enter office. This could help better explain the apparent contradiction of the far right as both a rejection and reinforcement of neoliberalism. We also need to bette...

A BBC article

A chapter by Jospeh Daher  in  The Future of the Occupation of the Palestinians Territories After Gaza

“Sanctions are  instruments of power  in the world market. They do not fall on states as such; they are transmitted through  prices, access to credit, logistics, and insurance , ending up as  lower real wages  and  higher reproduction costs  for the popular classes. In this sense, snapback is a  coercive economic act  that subordinates a semi-peripheral economy to the security priorities of the core. It invites us to ask: who pays, who decides, and who benefits? “Iran’s claim to  sovereign control  over peaceful nuclear technology is legitimate. The selective use of international law by powerful states is obvious: their allies’ arsenals are tolerated; their adversaries face blockade. The E3’s language of “non-performance” and the U.S. call for compliance reflect this  asymmetry of force —and this is why many inside and outside Iran see the move as  imperial overreach , not neutral rule-enforcement. “ Sanctions are  cl...