Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Brexit: A Fake Revolt "Leaving the EU won’t guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, or a fall in NHS waiting times and class sizes. The only thing it guarantees is more rightwing Tory control." Yes, Paul. It's a fake revolt and I would add that it is reactionary. Remain is not progressive, either. It is a ruling class crisis as the referendum itself is a product of an economic and social crisis. 

Spain "If the Socialists allow the PP to govern it is likely that big business will be relieved. But they will have set their party on a course towards decomposition. Their social base would never understand it.” According to Mr Garzón, a government led by Unidos Podemos would not push for radical or instant change to Spain’s social and economic model. “We know that capitalism won’t end overnight,” he says. Instead, the group would aim to create 300,000 jobs through a public works programme, financed by raising taxes on capital income and closing tax breaks and deductions for businesses. “Pretty classical social democratic measures,” argues Mr Garzón. Garzon's version of Marxism aside, clearly this is part of a social democratic programme, admits Garzón, opposing austerity and saving the EU's capitalism. A programme which include working with the same people who have implemented neo-liberalism, PSOE. Full article on FT.com Background analyses The Spa

On BBC Radio 4

Football Apart from being the opium of the our era , it is a crminal industry. Here is just one feature of this criminality, which people support and encourage it. Find out how long it takes Ronaldo, for example, to earn your annual wage. Or, how long it would take you  to earn Cristiano Ronaldo's annual wage? 

"People are violent, and people can dress their violence up in any number of justifying causes that seek to relieve people of their personal responsibility because the cause or religion, be it Communism or Catholicism or Islam , is simply bigger than themselves." ( Foreignpolicy.com ) I read that and smiled. The liberals too hide their heads in the sand and turn a blind eye on the violence of capitalism and imperialism since the inception of the system: the slave trade, slave labour, conquests and colonization, two world wars, and to this day the violence of the global system is both direct and symbolic and we can see its effects also on nature and on our Earth. Actually, a serious observer traces the emergence of Daesh not only to the Iraq occupation, but also to the neoliberal policies of the Assad regime, climate change and the drought in Syria.

" The ceremony was followed by a panel discussion about trade union rights in the Middle East in which I participated, together with three people who've been featured in LabourStart campaigns: Nermin Al-Sharif, head of the Libyan Dockers’ and Seafarers’ Union, victim of an assassination attempt. Kamal Abbas, founder of the Cairo-based Centre for Trade Union and Workers Services, arrested numerous times by the authorities for his work. Mahdi Abu Dheeb, president of the Bahrain Teachers Association, just released after five years in prison."

Not bad at all! I like anyone who at least hints to the major source of crimes

Tunisia قرقنة: على خط المواجهة في مقاومة صناعة البترول Kerkennah : en première ligne du changement climatique et de la résistance à l’industrie fossile

I salute MSF! Let Them Drown The Violence of Othering in a Warming World

On the Brexit, again.

An interesting blog written a year ago. The Euro train: going off the rails?

"The Orlando shootings did not happen in a vacuum: we are being killed every day. We are being killed by a lack of social housing and increasingly punitive welfare reforms . We are being killed by inhumane austerity cuts to life-saving mental health services. Systematic homophobia, transphobia and racism come from the top. They come from policies ingrained with intolerance, and from right-wing and neoliberal ideologies. Only a grassroots, militant movement from the bottom up has any chance to disrupt it: the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house." 'All Cops are Bastards.  Even the Gay Ones'

"It may seem absurd to conflate the fear and hatred of Muslims with the fear and hatred of Jews when the two groups are united in the popular imagination only by their fear and hatred of each other. But they both appeal to the same dark archetype in the European imagination: swarming, sinister, lecherous, and dirty . Both are supposed to have subverted the elites to strike at the common people. Both are supposed to constitute an existential threat to civilisation."

Brexit, China, the Fed and the global recession

F: Hu Feng's Prison Years

Sovereignty, Brexit and Power: Lessons from 1975

While the French police says that most of the violence in France was caused by Russian football fans... " If the psychic energies of the average mass of people watching a football game or a musical comedy could be diverted into the rational channels of a freedom movement, they would be invincible. — Wilhelm Reich .

Orlando mass shooting: US President  Barack Obama  described the attack as "an act of terror and an act of hate". Nothing new here. Obama and co will continue to wrongly describe such acts and talk superficially. " According to Omar Mateen’s father, the reportedly Islamic State-supporting terrorist had expressed revulsion  at the sight of two men kissing. His co-workers have described  his anti-gay comments . Omar Mateen could have chosen many clubs, full of people laughing and living, but he chose a LGBT venue. This was homophobia as well as terrorism. It is not enough to simply condemn violence: we have to understand what it is and why it happened . " It wasn’t only Sky News at fault. In the New York Times’ original reporting, it didn’t even point out that a gay club had been targeted. The Daily Mail didn’t bother to put the atrocity – the worst terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 – on its front page, instead  opting to stir up xenophobia  over Turkish

Saadat Hasan Manto

Sander's Defeat is no Great Loss to Progressive Politics