Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

Sorrows of the Black City By Mohammed Elfitory

"The prison camps are not just an anomaly from a nativist Trump administration, they are something that has been happening for years and years. I’m not only referring to short-term Border Patrol detention, but also the mass round-up, incarceration, expulsion, and banishment of non-citizens that has been happening in a sustained way in the United States since the 1990s, and through a variety of huge operations before then. And it’s not something that is just limited to the United States. While the concentration camp may vary from country to country, it is one of the cornerstones of a global border system designed to arrest and confine uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed people. Many are on the move because of the current global economic and political system (globalization and the free market neoliberal economic model) that has long privileged the wealthy elite and protected the interests of multinational corporations, all else be damned." Empire of the Borders

Russia A meaningful change in Russia is not coming after/through these coming elections, but there is discontent and there is some dynamic going on. " Society should not perceive the situation as having only the authorities and the liberals, who support the same economic system but are unhappy with corruption. Our task is to show that there is a big role in the democratic process for left ideas and social demands. On the whole, the society tends toward left social democracy. For me personally, that may be too moderate. But in any case, people want social transformations and a mixed economy." The situation on the ground is not allowing more than being "too moderate".  It is also good to be "too moderate"; otherwise, the bulk of Western media and "leaders"  would call you either an extremist or populist! "Russia Needs Its Own Bernie Sanders."

This is a very interesting publication by Oxford. Michael Roberts has reviewed some chapters with a focus on profitability, crises and financialisation. The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx

Berlin, Germany It seems that the police of the strongest economy in Europe, which exports submarines, trains and surveillance equipments lacks the technologies to make arrests of far-rights criminals! Ferat Kocak believes this is one reason why the violence here has flared up. "This is traditionally a very white middle-class area, but that's now changing, it is becoming more multicultural, with people with different lifestyles. These far-right guys don't feel comfortable with that." I thought the problem was with the uneducated, the unenlightened! Far-right violence in a Berlin district

"The professional who moves to a neighbouring city for work is not usually described as a migrant, and neither is the wealthy businessman who acquires new passports as easily as he moves his money around the world. It is most often applied to those people who fall foul of border control at the frontiers of the rich world, whether that’s in Europe, the US, Australia, South Africa or elsewhere. That’s because the terms that surround migration are inextricably bound up with power, as is the way in which our media organisations choose to disseminate them." How the media contributed to "the migrant crisis"