Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Arab uprisings Could Morocco be next?

This is what "left" means according to the BBC. A mother of two, she came to power with a traditional centre-left focus on stronger welfare policies but also a promise to be tough on immigration. Last year she announced plans to place a cap on "non-Western" immigration including refugees and family reunions, to be voted on every year in the Folketing. She also proposed sending asylum seekers to reception centres outside the EU, for example in North Africa, for their requests to be processed. — the BBC Denmark has taken part of the American intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq. One needs to add the economic policies Mette is advocating.

"As Jews move to the right, they become more sympathetic to Zionism, British foreign policy and US imperialism. That has nothing to do with anti-Semitism." Let's be honest about Britain's obsession with "anti-Semitism"

Warning: the following may infect you with anti-Semitism, it may may sound/felt/interpreted/read as an attack on Israel and therefore anti-Semitic. "Manoeuvres must be understood in the context of the ways that Iran has functioned as an obstacle to US ruling class goals in the Middle East, a view shared by the Israeli ruling class for its own interests." "Why Israel wants Iran destroyed"

Via Michael Roberts The US economy may still be chugging along, and the official unemployment rate may be near an all-time low, but many Americans are struggling to afford the basics of life . Nearly 51 million households don't earn enough to afford a monthly budget that includes housing, food, child care, health care, transportation and a cell phone, according to a study by the United Way ALICE Project. That's 43% of households in the  United States. The figure includes the 16.1 million households living in official poverty, as well as 34.7 million families that the United Way has dubbed ALICE -- Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. This group makes less than what's needed "to survive in the modern economy." ALICE is your child care worker, the cashier at your supermarket, the gas attendant, the salesperson at your big box store, your waitress, a home health aide, an office clerk. ALICE cannot always pay the bills, has little or nothing in sav

German chemicals delivered to al-Asad regime The most important bit in the news is not that the chemicals were delivered at the height of the war (after all the German company might have thought/had the good intentions as a company making profit that the chemicals would help save Syrian lives), but that shares in the company have fallen, which is almost a disaster for some Germans! While the lawmakers and human rights institutions investigate the matter, my solidarity go to those shareholders who have been affected.

A liberal view on migration, i.e. one that avoids to deal with the structure of global capitalism, the nation state, power relations between states, and capitalism under/uneven development. And at the present situation a major factor is the low growth of the economies of the advanced capitalist countries and its impact on the power relations at home, including the rise of the far-right. Thus the usefulness of an external enemy: the monstrous alien. How the West is withdrawing into a bunker of its making

"Hong Kong's Last Battle"

A liberal view Saving capitalism to make it work for the many? I wonder when did that ever happen in history and how it would work. Robert Reich: "It's America's economic system that's broken"

This cannot be accurate, for these kind of surveys do not show the wide difference between classes in major issues.  Such a survey is merely a snapshot that refletcs the blockage towards full capitalist  "development" and therefore the dominance of bourgeois norms (e.g. sexual and gender norms), the failure of modernisation of the 1950 and 1960s, the development of rentier economies, especially in the Gulf, instead of industrialisation  on the one hand and the defeat of the 2011 revolution on the other. As for the threat of the US and Israel, the Arab world is still a very strategic battleground where local ruling classes and international ones have major and common interests in restructuring or preserving the existing order. Major questions that could be included in the survey, and that could   provide a picture beyond the symptoms, are the type of politcal regime and economic system the Arab countries need, and how should the wealth be exploited and distributed, etc