Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

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 eventually le

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. They