Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

He is a bourgeois businessman and hypocrite, complicit in crimes against Kurdish, Palestinians and others. “Erdoğan is the quintessential demagogue — he issues challenging statements to the established order while maintaining the status quo. Erdoğan’s denouncements of Israel tend to coincide with periods of heightened violence. But once public outrage declines, it’s back to business as usual .”

  Smarter Empire 

  Inside the university recruitment machine

 A subscription is required to read the whole article. Mass incarceration and profit-making

“ The result is a world of two different trust realities. The informed public—wealthier, more educated, and frequent consumers of news—remain far more trusting of every institution than the mass population. In a majority of markets, less than half of the mass population trust their institutions to do what is right.”  Where People Are Loosing Faith in Capitalism Edelman Trust Barometer 2020

Reconsidering the business of business

Britain Via Michael Roberts The economic ideology of the man [Boris Johnson] who is likely to be Britain's prime minister by next month. “I can’t think of any other politician, even Conservative politician, who from the crash of 2008 onwards actually stuck up for the bankers. “Can you think of anybody who stuck up for the bankers as much as I did? I defended them day in, day out, from those who frankly wanted to hang them from the nearest lamppost.” I believe passionately in UK business and as foreign secretary I spent a lot of my time promoting UK business, both in this country and abroad. I will continue to do so, if I’m lucky enough to become Prime Minister.” ****** I don't see there is something new or strange with this if one looks at the British history and spirit. Business is highly valued (as valued as the rhetoric of "human rights"). The business of Britian is business.  One should look at how much the shareholding "indusrty"

"Business is business" "Pubs charging more during England games," says the BBC. Prices at London hotels more than doubled after London bombing  It's all goood for business! Court ruled seeling weapons to Saudi Arabia during Yemen war was lawful! It saves British jobs!

UK turns blind eye to dirty Russian money, say MPs Mafia Expert Roberto Saviano Denounces London As 'The Most Corrupt Place On Earth'

"This is one of the craziest things about the modern age. We would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us. But we just went ahead and did it ourselves [ and for free ] because – to hell with it! – I want to watch cute dog videos." — Dylan  Curran, the Guardian Did Orwell forsee this? 

Britain Alan Sugar is a representation of what is low, crass, agressive, and disgusting in doing business. He is the opposite of what human ingenuity, innovative skills, and energy is and what should be invested in. He has been promoted as an example to emulate, someone who embodies the spirit of self-made man and entrepreneur. Many British and non-British love him though. But that says a lot about the type of the economy and 'ideology' of the last 40 years and the power relations fostered and perpetuated to obfuscate reality. It is not a surprise then that he considers this a joke . He is in fact an embodiment of those capitalists who would fight against the existing order tooth and nail, and fight against any small progressive change.

From a community of scholars to a purveyor of degrees

"Over the past thirty years [add nine years since these words were written], capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business. As any number of radical theorists from Brecht through to Foucault and Badiou have maintained, emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a 'natural order', must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable. It is worth recalling that what is currently called realistic was itself once 'impossible': the slew of privatizations that took place since the 1980s would have been unthinkable only a decade earlier, and the current political-economic landscape (with unions in abeyance, utilities and railways denationalized) could scarcely have been

A year ago the critic and cultural theorist  Mark Fisher passed away. Here is one of his pertinent observations: R: How has capitalism persuaded us that it’s the only ‘realistic’ political-economic system? M: "One way of getting to this is by forcing ritualistic compliance, where there’s no other available language or conceptual model for how we understand life, work, or society, except that of business. And that’s one of the key things that happened in that period, particularly with public services – and that’s something I dwell on at some length in the book ‘Capitalist Realism’. It’s the extent to which teachers are now required to go through these self-surveillance procedures, these self-assessment procedures, which have been imported in from business, and the strange subjective disavowal comes with these procedures often - managers who are uncomfortable imposing kind of business rhetoric, business methods, nevertheless will say to workers, say to teachers, ‘You

England The fat cats have got their claws into our universities The worst place to grow up poor

When was America great?

To foreign ministries in the global north, Sisi is a familiar face in an ever-more unfamiliar region – and one that they’re ready to do business with. In the past two years Egypt has signed major new arms deals with both the US and France. Donald Trump has labelled his Egyptian counterpart ‘a fantastic guy’. In late 2015, David Cameron rolled out the red carpet for Sisi at Downing Street; Theresa May has promised ‘a new chapter in bilateral relations’ between the UK and Egypt and as I speak Boris Johnson is in Cairo, drumming up trade deals. Italy did, thanks to popular pressure on the ground, temporarily withdraw its ambassador to Egypt in protest at Giulio’s murder. But between 2011 and 2013 alone, Italy sold Egypt more than half a billion euros worth of guns and bullets. The police trucks that many of the journalists and political prisoners I mentioned earlier found themselves locked up in after being dragged from their homes in the night are manufactured by the Italian company Ive

India Modi rules, Harvard doesn't Aristotle: “Even if they have no share in office, the poor, provided only that they are not outraged or deprived of their property, will be quiet enough.” … “prevent the lower from getting more; they must be kept down, but not ill-treated. … Friendship [among members of the ruling class] we believe to be the greatest good of states and the preservative of them against revolutions.” Jlowry: " We should avoid designating India or any other capitalist state as a democracy . They are oligarchies i.e. states where the rich rule as opposed to democracies where the poor or unpropertied rule. As Aristotle notes in his ”Politics” it is quite inadequate to define democracies as the rule of the majority and oligarchy as the rule of the few; it is rather that the poor are many and the rich few, which is why he notes that the mark of a democracy is selection by lot, that of an oligarchy election by ballot , which the rich will usually win. Wal B

It is not my government; it is a criminal regime " It’s a country where civilians are driven from their homes because of US- and British-backed violence, then have their pleas for refuge denied, partly on the basis that they may be terrorists. What is the onslaught from Yemen’s skies if not state terrorism?" Britain has blood on its hands over Yemen

" Hitler's disdain for the complacency of the 'old' bourgeoisie was life-long. But he honoured thrusting meritocrats. Notably, one of Hitler's early and long-standing heroes was the United States automobile magnate, Henry Ford, whom he lauded for his entrepreneurial brilliance and rabid anti-Semitism . Indeed, the Führer celebrated the entrepreneur as a bearer of racial superiority in any national population , and had nothing but contempt for democ­racy in the economy. For example, Hitler rebuked Otto Strasser, an anti-free-market Nazi, in 1930: 'The capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and on the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead.' Faced with the prospect of social turmoil or even Communist revolution, the German middle classes were willing to be cajoled by Hitler. The Protestant theolo­gian, Paul Tillich, writing in 1933, anxiously observed the bourgeoisie ready