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A young boy studying his lessons sitting on a mausoleum in Cairo's city of the dead where he live with his family and thousands of poor families, Egypt. طفل يذاكر دروسه جالساً على ضريح احد الموتى في مقابر البساتين بالقاهرة حيث يعيش مع اسرته و الالاف من الأسر الفقيرة, مصر Photo by mostafa_bassim #egypt   #everydayegypt
07 January 2015 - 07 January 2016 Charlie Hebdo is Sadism, not Satire Shlomo Sand: 'I am not Charlie' See also The Red Flag and the Tricolore Le Rouge et le Tricolore
To understand the sheer scale of the Syrian refugee situation, here's a picture of a Syrian refugee camp in Jordan.
"War  is a “terrible” thing? Yes. But it is a terribly  profitable  thing." — Lenin (April 1915) Sale of U.S. Arms Fuels the Wars of Arab States
Embracing Crisis in the Gulf (A background article) "To the extent that the United States endorses the status quo, it is complicit not only in the Gulf regimes’ efforts to quash citizen protest, but also in the redesign of Gulf security architecture by which crisis becomes the norm." See also The New Saudi Borgias
Modern-Day Slavery Vulnerable Migrants in the Gulf The Long and Dangerous Road to Slavery China's Missing Children Brazil's Slaves Face Death Threats and Debt Trapped and Trafficked in the UK
عزف على العود
" Using both the published and unpublished  London Notebooks , Pradella, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London, reconstructs Marx’s critique of globalization to show the remarkably consistent development of his political and economic views. Pradella also problematizes a widespread view, shared most notably by David Harvey and Samir Amin, that Marx’s  Capital  only deals with self-enclosed national economies, leaving it unable to analyze the uneven development of capitalism and prone to “Eurocentrism” (2–3). She claims that, on the contrary, the laws of capitalist development elaborated by Marx systematically include an analysis of imperialism and colonialism. Pradella not only helps contextualize Marx’s critique of political economy in the discursive constellations of his time, but also prepares her own theoretical basis for a critique of globalized capitalism today."
Executions in Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Yes, both Iran and the Saudi Kingdom are barbaric and we know that. The difference, however, between their barbarism and the barbarism of the US, the British, the French, etc. is that Western modern babarism is carried out "democratically": there are meetings, debates and voting before deciding on the actions (invasions, occupations, air-strikes...), which, by the way, directly and indirectly, kill, maim, displace, etc far more people. One figure comes to mind: half a million Iraqi children killed by sanctions .  When they do it, it is barbarism and terrorism. When we do it, it is protecting "our way of life" because they are against freedom" and "democracy". Some people are exempt from being called barbaric and terrorists because they are our friends, they buy weapons from us, we helped them establish their Kingdom, they put money in our banks, they keep pumping enough oil which help us maintain "our

The West and the Arab World, Between Ennui and Ecstasy

My comment: A very good dissection by some "progressive" liberals ends with remedies which have been already proven pernicious. We can take one example of the remedies proposed: the micro-projects and the business establishment that "must undertake a conversation about its own responsibilities, in such fields as philanthropy, social impact entrepreneurship, job creation, and private equity for small and medium-sized enterprises..."  The West and the Arab World, Between Ennui and Ecstasy
It has been 5 years since the start of the Tunisian uprising.  What Happened to "the Arab Spring"? See also Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East and A Brief History of ISIS
" More than is often realized, the Civil War was fought not over the morality of slavery or the abstract sanctity of the American Union, but over what kind of economy the nation should have. It is difficult to grasp the degree to which the United States, on the eve of the Civil War, had truly evolved into what Lincoln called, quoting scripture, a “house divided”: virtually two separate nations based on very different economic structures. More than anything else, the secession crisis and the Civil War became a clash over expanding the economic and social system of either section. The question became: which economy and society would define the future of America as it migrated westward, that of the North or that of the South?" We Have Lincoln Wrong