Chris Riger @RigerChris

Al-Sheeb closure: Iraq’s border becomes a battleground for regional corridors A shuttered crossing with Iran exposes Baghdad’s struggle to balance US pressure, Tehran’s economic lifelines, and the contest over West Asia’s trade routes. By @khourymalek_ thecradle.co/articles-id/40…

Legendary Fela explains what he means by “colonial mentality”

In case y'all are unaware of how Lula turned it around and prevented an authoritarian takeover of Brazil: the kids decided to get involved in their future. When young voters rise up to save their democracy, magic happens.

Who would have thought that a bunch of Arabs on horses and camels would be the ones to stop Netanyahu from securing an outright majority? THE ARABS HOLD 18 SEATS.

Earlier this summer, the wonderful editors at @thebafflermag asked me if I wanted to contribute an essay for a forthcoming issue. I said I wanted to write about Iranian bricks. Iran's remarkable brick architecture has become something of a meme. Everyday there's a new picture circulating online of a beautiful brick edifice in some Iranian city (often courtesy of @SustainableTall). But why is Iran, a country dealing with so many traumas, the site of the most innovative and ambitious brick architecture in the world? That's the question I set out to answer in this essay, which starts with a visit to the mudbrick village of Abyaneh, just over the ridge from the nuclear site at Natanz. thebaffler.com/salvos/brick-b…

WHAT LULA’S RE-ELECTION TELLS US: The Class War Need Not End in Fascism On Sunday, Brazilians did something that the commentariat had told us was a lost cause. On the eve of his eighty-first birthday, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former metalworker, turned the Trumpist, evangelical, neofascist, Zionist tide in Latin America to get re-elected President of Brazil. Three weeks earlier, he had come second in the first round, behind Flávio Bolsonaro, son and political heir of the man who trumpeted the merits of fascism, who had embraced Trump as his lord and master, who plotted a cynical coup against Brazilian democracy – moreover, the main candidates that were eliminated were rightists whose voters were meant to move to Bolsonaro. Yesterday, Lula overturned this deficit and won with a margin of nearly four and a half million votes. I want to use Lula’s victory to tell a broader story. A story about a war, the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. And a story about how that war need not end, as so many now fear, in a neofascist revival. THE HIDDEN CLASS WAR “There’s class warfare, all right,” Warren Buffett once said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many. Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth explained nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40 per cent, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. That is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, inflated by cheap money and paraded on the evening news as “a strong economy”. Then look at the rescues. 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023: each time, the state rushed in to save the asset holders. Together they reveal the rule: to save the economy, you must save the wealth of those who own it – not those who produce stuff, not even productive companies. In the United States, the top tenth own almost 90 per cent of all shares. The Fed and the US federal government insure it for them, doing ‘whatever it takes’ to prop them up whenever their prices tank. The rest of us in the West pay the premium, in the form of the austerity that always follows the bailout. And the owners need never sell. Why do billionaires pay so little tax? Because they do not earn incomes - they accumulate capital gains, taxed only when sold. So they borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2 per cent and live on the loan. Then they die and pay no tax on their capital gains, passing on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, to pay bills and put food on the table, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20 per cent, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes. Then, a large chunk of these accumulating assets seek even higher rents in places like Brazil where the US government intervenes to ensure that the local governments will also place the defence of these assets’ values above all else. CAPITAL IS NOT A THING, NOT MERELY AN ASSET Why does austerity keep returning, even though it is economically self-defeating? Marx tells the story of Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had an alternative. Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather did not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept whatever is on offer. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: rich, but without the power to compel. IS FASCISM INEVITABLE? Here is the part of the story that keeps so many of us awake at night. When centre-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, Francois Hollande and Andy Burnham abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the recalcitrant far right, the rebranded fascists. They offer left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirect their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad or sold their council house to some fund and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side – the workers – to rule over them. It camouflages it. From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern seems relentless. And so, a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival. Brazil has just refuted this fatalism. Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s rag tag storm troopers, they had years of running a dictatorship. It won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated. How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western centre-left forgot how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to five thousand reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, it proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor. PIX – AN EXAMPLE OF AN ANTI-OLIGARCHY DIGITAL TOOL But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix. Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2 or 3 per cent, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you grasp one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but rent extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is part of what I call technofeudalism. Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians took to it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online. Pix is, in effect, the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the toll collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25 per cent tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard. Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place. NOT A REVOLUTION, BUT AN AUSPICIOUS PORTENT Let me not romanticise. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with these vested interests, and lost support as a result. But Brazil has shown three things the rest of us must learn. First, the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism wins only when the left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines. So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States. -Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard. -Tax capital gains, ill-gotten wealth that is, not just income. -Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return. -Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and the freedom to say no. Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many. unherd.com/2026/10/why-lu…

🇻🇪|A profound shift is underway in Venezuela, where the illusion of democratic transition has collided with the reality of a foreign-backed carve-up of the nation's wealth. The protests erupting across the country are not merely a demand for elections; they are a rejection of a new form of colonial administration that has turned the state into a subsidiary of the U.S. Treasury. The "democracy" being offered by Washington is a carefully managed enterprise designed to legitimize the theft of the world's largest oil reserves. 💥 The Architecture of a Managed State The foundation of this new arrangement was laid on January 3, 2026, when U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro and transferred him to New York. In his place, the U.S. installed former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as interim leader, making it clear her hold on power depended on staying in Trump's good graces. This was not a transition to democracy; it was a transfer of operational control. The financial mechanism of this control was established almost immediately. Washington brokered the greater part of Venezuela’s oil exports, channeling the proceeds into an account controlled by the U.S. Treasury, which now decides how and when the revenue is spent. The Venezuelan state, in effect, lost its fiscal sovereignty. 🎯 The Oil Deal: 65 Billion Barrels and a 100-Year Concession The material prize was formalized on August 28, 2026, when President Trump announced an agreement purportedly giving Washington control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuela's proven oil reserves, calling it "the biggest oil deal in world history". The terms were staggering: a 100-year concession, to be run by a private company under de facto U.S. government control. Trump promised the deal would come at "no cost to the U.S. taxpayer" while allowing the U.S. to "replenish its strategic stockpiles". The Venezuelan government confirmed the arrangement, offering conflicting details on its duration and terms, a clear sign of a diminished sovereignty and informal U.S. dominion. 📜 "You’re Not Going to Street-Protest Your Way Into a Democracy" The U.S. response to the genuine democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people was swift and revealing. When opposition leader María Corina Machado returned to Caracas and demanded elections be held in 2027, while criticizing the massive oil deal, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a veiled but unmistakable warning: "You're not going to street-protest your way into a democracy". The U.S. was not interested in a free vote that might jeopardize the oil arrangement. Instead, Washington backed a different dialogue process negotiations between the interim government and a faction of the opposition led by Dinorah Figuera, a process that excluded Machado and the apparent 2024 election winner, Edmundo González Urrutia. The message was clear: democracy is acceptable only if it is the right kind of democracy, one that does not interfere with the extraction of resources. ⚔️ The Mirror: A People Demanding What Was Taken The protests of October 2026 are the physical manifestation of this contradiction. Thousands took to the streets in Caracas, Valencia, Maracay, and Maracaibo, demanding free elections and an end to the foreign exploitation of their oil. For the demonstrators, the connection is direct: they are demanding a government that answers to them, not to a foreign treasury. A young student in Maracay explained her participation: "I've been through so many hardships, so many problems because of the dollar, and difficulties studying. I have high hopes for my country and for our next leader and president". The hardship is not abstract. It is the lived experience of an economy managed for external extraction, where the nation's wealth flows into an account in Washington while its people struggle. The U.S. narrative of "promoting democracy" collapses under the weight of its own actions. It captured a president, installed a compliant successor, seized control of the national treasury, signed a century-long oil concession, and then warned the opposition that protest is not the path to democracy. The Venezuelan people are being told that their voice does not matter, that their resources belong to the empire, and that the "transition" will be managed by those who delivered their country into foreign hands. Long live the people of Venezuela. Long live the Resistance. Long live the Axis of Resistance.

Para quem deseja começar a estudar o comunismo, recomendo muito seguir esta ordem de leitura: Manifesto do Partido Comunista — Karl Marx e Friedrich Engels. Do Socialismo Utópico ao Socialismo Científico — Friedrich Engels. ABC do Socialismo — Organização de Bhaskar Sunkara, Aline Klein e Victor Marques. 17 Contradições e o Fim do Capitalismo — David Harvey. O Estado e a Revolução — Vladimir Lênin. Essa sequência permite construir uma base teórica de maneira gradual, partindo dos fundamentos do marxismo, passando pela crítica ao funcionamento do capitalismo e chegando às questões do Estado e da revolução socialista. Depois dessas cinco leituras, vocês terão uma base muito mais sólida para mergulhar em obras mais complexas e aprofundar seus estudos sobre o marxismo, o socialismo e o comunismo. O importante é começar, ler com atenção e compreender que a formação política é um processo contínuo.

José Mujica pasó casi catorce años preso, y buena parte de ellos aislado en calabozos y pozos. Era uno de los nueve dirigentes tupamaros que la dictadura uruguaya tenía como rehenes. Si la guerrilla atacaba, los mataban. Lo iban cambiando de cuartel en cuartel, sin libros y muchas veces sin nadie con quien hablar. Contaba que llegó a hablar con las hormigas, y que en esos años, muy cerca de perder la cabeza, entendió lo poco que hace falta para vivir. Salió en marzo de 1985, con la vuelta de la democracia. Tenía 49 años. Veinticinco años después era presidente de Uruguay. Siguió viviendo en su chacra de las afueras de Montevideo con Lucía Topolansky, compañera de militancia y de cárcel, y con Manuela, una perra a la que le faltaba una pata. Donaba la mayor parte de su sueldo y conducía un Volkswagen escarabajo de 1987 por el que, según se publicó, un jeque llegó a ofrecerle un millón de dólares. Cuando lo llamaban el presidente más pobre del mundo, respondía que pobres eran los que necesitaban mucho y siempre querían más. En enero de 2025, con un cáncer extendido, anunció que dejaba el tratamiento. «Me estoy muriendo y el guerrero tiene derecho a su descanso», dijo. Murió en mayo, a los 89 años, y lo enterraron en la chacra, junto al árbol donde descansaba Manuela. Pienso mucho en esos años de encierro. Hay gente a la que algo así la deja amargada para siempre, y a él le dejó una calma rarísima.

🇲🇽🇺🇸 ¿Habrá operaciones conjuntas entre México y EEUU contra el narco? Sheinbaum lo explica 🚔 La mandataria Claudia Sheinbaum reveló que la Administración Trump sí ha solicitado abiertamente a las autoridades mexicanas realizar operaciones binacionales contra el crimen organizado en el país latinoamericano, algo a lo cual se ha negado México. 🗣 "Ellos han pedido varias veces la operación conjunta en nuestro país y nosotros siempre hemos dicho que no, que la integridad territorial, pues esa no puede vulnerarse y que nos coordinamos, pero sin la participación de ellos en nuestro territorio", afirmó ante medios de comunicación.

Lula's reelection in Brazil is not just a domestic victory. It is the single biggest geopolitical defeat the US empire has suffered in Latin America in decades. Here is what was actually at stake: The Resources: Brazil holds the world's second-largest rare earth reserves — nearly a quarter of the global supply. The US military-industrial complex is desperate for these minerals to break its dependence on China. The Bolsonaro dynasty was ready to hand them over. A US government-linked company already bought Brazil's only active rare earth mine from Bolsonaro-aligned oligarchs for $2.8 billion. They wanted Petrobras privatized next. Lula said no. These are our minerals. We will build our own economy. Palestine: Lula lost a finger in a factory at 17. He is the working class. The Bolsonaros are the landlords, the oligarchs, and the cheerleaders of settler colonialism. They waved Israeli flags at their rallies. They held Zoom calls with Netanyahu on stage. They posed with a map of Israel colonizing ALL of historic Palestine — Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights. Lula stands with Palestine and calls the genocide what it is. The Multipolar World: Lula co-founded BRICS. He is building parallel financial systems to bypass the weaponized US dollar. He called for a new global reserve currency. He wants Latin America to trade in its own currency, free from Washington's sanctions. The empire cannot tolerate a continent that refuses to pay rent in dollars. So how did Washington respond to a sovereign democratic choice? Trump slapped Brazil with 50% tariffs — even though the US has a trade SURPLUS with Brazil. The tariffs were never economic. They were punishment. Meta censored Lula's accounts and boosted Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro campaign hired a US AI company to spread disinformation. Eduardo Bolsonaro literally called on Trump to send the US military to attack the Brazilian government. They threw everything at him. Tariffs. Censorship. Disinformation. Coup attempts. And they still lost. The American empire tried to enforce the Monroe Doctrine with algorithms, tariffs, and a puppet dynasty. But the Brazilian working class just voted to keep their minerals, defend Palestine, and build a world where Washington doesn't get to decide who eats. You can tariff the economy. You can censor the candidate. You can beg for a military coup. But you cannot colonize a people who have already decided they belong to themselves. x.com/ShaykhSulaiman…

“No minister or government official of Madagascar shall send their children abroad for education. We are building our nation from the ground up, and this cannot be achieved with a half-hearted commitment. To take our development seriously, we must ensure equality in our educational system. No one receiving taxpayers’ money from Madagascar will be permitted to sponsor their children’s education abroad. This will not be tolerated in my government!” ~ President of Madagascar, Colonel Michael Randrianirina 🇲🇬 Captain Traore did the same thing, now his Madagascan counterpart has followed.

HISTÓRICO! Claudia Sheinbaum, presidente do México, inicia sua coletiva de imprensa saudando a vitória do presidente Lula, faz o L e manda um recado a Trump e ao imperialismo americano: “É um sopro de ar fresco para a América Latina e o Caribe.” Espalhe esse video!

El que abraza a Lula es @AndreJanonesMG el diputado que con un canal de WhatsApp rompió el bloqueo de Meta y las otras empresas tecnológicas, y cambió la campaña después de la derrota en primera vuelta. Hijo de una empleada domestica y un padre discapacitado, se pagó su carrera de abogado trabajando como cobrador de pasajes en los buses. Su canal de WhatsApp (donde creó el “Ejército de Lula) pasó de 50 mil personas en primera vuelta a 10 millones para la segunda. Sin el trabajo de Janones no hay remontada, Lula lo sabe y por eso el reconocimiento de ayer. Como anécdota, fue quien convenció a Lula de finalmente usar teléfono celular, un iPhone. Ahhh y reivindicó la camiseta de la selección Brasil para la campaña, de la que se había apropiado el bolsonarismo.

seriousguy @seriousguybr

2 days ago

Esta é a foto que está estampando a vitória de Lula nos principais jornais do mundo (vi no The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian e no The Times). Bastante representativa para ilustrar a importância de @AndreJanonesMG nesta campanha! Arrisco dizer que sem Janones,

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بص يا صديقي لو مش متابع اللي بيحصل في العالم في آخر 24 ساعة فاتك كتير أوي . حرفيا 4 ضربات ورا بعض لأمريكا وإسرائيل في نفس اليوم، والنتيجة ممكن تغير خريطة السياسة كلها! تعالى ناخدها بالعكس، من التقيلة للأخف 👇 1- من كام ساعة بس 3 طيارات عسكرية سعودية وتركية وباكستانية نزلت في مطار مهرآباد في طهران. اللي قاعدين دلوقتي على ترابيزة واحدة: وزير الدفاع السعودي الأمير خالد بن سلمان، وقائد الجيش الباكستاني عاصم منير، ورئيس المخابرات التركية إبراهيم قالن، مع الرئيس الإيراني مسعود بزشكيان وأمين الأمن القومي محسن رضائي. الاجتماع تحت اسم "اتفاقية مكة للدفاع المشترك" وإيران بتقول عايزين نعمل منظومة أمن إقليمي داخلية من غير تدخل أجنبي، والسعودية بتقول هدفنا تهدئة وخفض تصعيد. يعني اللي كان مستحيل من سنة بقى بيحصل دلوقتي قدام عنينا. 2 - تمرد داخل جيش الاحتلال نفسه القناة 12 الإسرائيلية نفسها وبموافقة الرقابة العسكرية قالت قنبلة، قبل انتخابات الكنيست بـ 24 ساعة بس. رئيس الأركان إيال زامير جاله أمر مباشر من نتنياهو ينفذ ضربة كبيرة كانت هتولع مواجهة شاملة مع إيران ودولة عربية تانية. اللي حصل إن زامير رفض! وقاله بالنص مش هورط الجيش في حرب عشان تكسب انتخابات أو تهرب من المحاكمات، ولو عايز الضربة دي هاتلي تفويض مكتوب وموقع من الحكومة كلها تتحمل المسئولية. في إسرائيل دي مش خناقة عادية، ده زلزال. الجيش هو مصدر الشرعية هناك، ولما رئيس الأركان يطلع يتهم رئيس الوزرا انه بيستغل الدم لمصلحته الشخصية، فدي ضربة سياسية قاتلة لنتنياهو قبل الصناديق ما تفتح بساعات. 3 - صربيا.. الطلبة أسقطوا أهم حليف لنتنياهو في أوروبا القصة بدأت من سنتين بعد انهيار سقف محطة قطر في مدينة نوفي ساد ومات 16 واحد بسبب الفساد. شوية طلبة وشباب نزلوا الشارع وعملوا حاجة اسمها "قائمة الطلاب"، مفيهاش سياسيين محترفين، كلها دكاترة جامعة وممثلين ومزارعين، لفوا صربيا كلها على رجلهم وبالعجل. امبارح بالليل ألكسندر فوتشيتش اللي حاكم صربيا من 12 سنة بيد من حديد طلع بعد قفل الصناديق بساعة ونص وقال: "من الواضح أننا خسرنا هذه الانتخابات". الطلبة جابوا أكتر من 135 مقعد من 250! ليه دي ضربة لإسرائيل؟ لأن فوتشيتش ده كان من أكبر الداعمين لنتنياهو في أوروبا، ولسه في أبريل اللي فات كان عامل مشروع مشترك مع إسرائيل لتصنيع درونز عسكرية، ده غير مشاريعه مع ترامب. كله طار في ليلة واحدة. 1- البرازيل .. الجون اللي جه في الدقيقة 90 نيجي بقى للضربة الأكبر، في البرازيل أكبر دولة في أمريكا اللاتينية. من 2023 أمريكا وإسرائيل شغالين على خطة لتغيير وش القارة كلها ودعم صعود اليمين المتطرف عشان يبقوا حلفاء لهم، والعين كانت على البرازيل. السباق كان بين اتنين: لولا دا سيلفا 80 سنة، اللي بيسموه بطل الفقراء، اللي بدأ حياته مساح جزم وعامل مصنع واتسجن واتبهدل لحد ما بقى رئيس، ومعروف بعدائه الشديد للصهيونية وترامب ولبس الكوفية وقال على اللي بيحصل في غزة إبادة جماعية وسحب سفيره. وقدامه فلافيو بولسونارو ابن الرئيس السابق وأكبر حليف لترامب وإسرائيل هناك، واللي كسب أول جولة في أكتوبر اللي فات 47% مقابل 45% للولا، وكل الناس قالت خلاص لولا انتهى. ده غير إن إدارة ترامب كانت بتضغط اقتصاديا وتهدد بعقوبات لو لولا كسب، وميتا نفسها قللت وصول بوستاته لدرجة المحكمة العليا اتدخلت، وحتى في آخر ساعات الانتخابات عطلوا المواصلات العامة عشان الناس البسيطة متعرفش تنزل تصوت! اللي حصل كان معجزة بكل المقاييس. الناس نزلت تمشي على رجلها عشان تصوت. ولأول مرة في تاريخ البرازيل الحديث، اللي يخسر أول جولة يكسب الإعادة. لولا كسب 51.8% بفارق أكتر من 4 مليون صوت ورجع في ولاية رابعة. يعني في 24 ساعة بس: البرازيل قلبت على ترامب، صربيا وقعت حليف نتنياهو، جيش الاحتلال اتمرد على نتنياهو، وإيران قاعدة مع السعودية وتركيا وباكستان على ترابيزة واحدة! اللي جاي شكله مختلف تماما، وربنا يجعلها بداية نهاية الغطرسة !

The conflict with Iran is not about nuclear weapons. It never was. It is a clash between two entirely different views of existence. The empire sees the world as dead matter to be extracted, priced, and dominated. Everything has a number. Every nation has a price. Submit to the ledger, or be destroyed. Iran sees the world as something with purpose, destiny, and meaning beyond the balance sheet. A civilization 2,500 years old that refuses to kneel before a spreadsheet. That is why sanctions don't work. You cannot starve a civilization into submission when it does not worship your god. And the West's only god is the dollar. The empire demands compliance. It wants Russia compliant, Iran compliant, Ansarallah compliant. Because these are the nations that looked at the "rules-based order" and said: No. We will build our own. But here is the part the ruling class cannot admit: The money is gone. - The US now pays more in debt interest than its entire defense budget. - Europe is closing hospital beds and cutting school funding to find another €155 billion for Zelensky. - The working class is told to accept "short-term pain" while the financial elite post record profits. The empire is trying to fight 21st-century wars with a bankrupt checkbook. So what does a ruling class do when it can no longer buy compliance, and can no longer enforce it? It panics. In the UK, the government is telling citizens to stockpile tinned food and water, blaming "Russian sabotage" for its own collapse. In Washington, they refuse to even speak to Putin about actual security. Instead they send envoys offering "reconstruction funds" as bribes, completely ignoring that sovereign civilizations demand security, not charity. They cannot accept that they are no longer the head of the world. So they will use the threat of World War III to distract you from the fact that the hospitals are closing, the debt is unpayable, and the empire is broke. They are preparing you for war because they cannot survive the peace of a multipolar world.

IRAN WAR ANALYSIS: With the Quadrilateral summit taking place today between Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey, many people are hoping that this will bear fruit towards a potential peace deal between the United States and Iran... It ain't happening. First and foremost, the ONLY way that Iran would possibly consider letting President Trump off the hook prior to the US Midterm elections is if President Trump made a concession that was TRULY irreversible for Iran. This is because Tehran is well aware, through repeated American reversals and strikes in the midst of negotiations, that there is an extreme likelihood that after the midterms... Trump would just go back to war anyways. As a result of this, the ONLY way that I could see the Iranians making any kind of deal with the United States to avoid a return to all-out war and escalation is IF the United States coughed up an ENORMOUS amount of cash and gold to Iran, to be delivered PHYSICALLY into the Iranian Central Bank. Irreversible. No getting it back. ... I don't find that terribly likely. But without an irreversible and SIGNIFICANT concession from the US, Iran would be foolish to take Trump on trust that he will stick to his word on any deal. See: MOU. But beyond this, there is also the Israeli perspective that needs to be addressed. Listen to the rhetoric coming from Bibi Netanyahu about how he, and to be honest, many Israelis view this war. It's existential. It's the last chance Israel will ever have to secure the Greater Israel Project, their regional hegemony, to even HOPE to avoid a complete and total collapse of their relationship with the United States in the decades to come. Israel has no INTENTION of allowing the United States and Iran to make a deal. We saw this during the Memorandum of Understanding when the Israeli Lobby, the Iran Hawks, and the Neocons FLOCKED to Fox News and Newsmax to rip Trump to SHREDS about signing the MOU. The MOU fell apart because, despite my best efforts and op-ed in The Hill advocating for Trump to NOT do it, the United States revoked the Iranian oil sanctions waiver and imposed an escrow account under the amended General License X-1. How can I prove that it was the Israeli Lobby that advocated for this and pressured Trump behind the scenes? Because Mark Dubowitz, the CEO of the Israeli-First think tank The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Miad Maleki, a Senior Advisor for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, published an op-ed in The New York Post entitled, "Iran deal tosses a tremendous cash lifeline to terrorist regime". In this piece, Dubowitz and Maleki say that (falsely) Iran will get an ENORMOUS windfall from these oil sanction waivers, and therefore, we must attach escrow mechanism that completely destroy any and all value they provide to Iran. I published a rebuttal in The Hill entitled, "The backlash to Iranian oil sanctions relief misses the point" where I argued (correctly) that Maleki and Dubowitz are idiots, and revoking or attaching non-starter escrow account mechanisms will destroy the MOU. I was right. Again. Israel has no INTENTION of letting the United States reach a deal with Iran. They played Trump like a FIDDLE to get the US into this war of choice, and they are going to fight like HELL to keep America trapped in another Middle Eastern forever war. Regardless of the costs. While I would love to believe that this Quadrilateral Summit between Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Turkey will yield a framework in which the United States and Iran can agree to terms that will avoid catastrophic and reckless destruction of the global economy... Not likely.

Prof. Richard Wolff: ‘The only solution for Europe’s decline to re-orient themselves to the rest of the world. The only European country to have done that is RUSSIA🇷🇺.’ ‘World Wars One and Two were the culmination of European colonialism, in which the leading colonial powers slaughtered each other on a spectacular level that the world had never seen before or since, luckily speaking. But that was the end of all of those empires. Only one survived: the United States, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and by the limits of air power at that time, they came through. You know, Russia lost 27 million people in World War II. The United States death count: 400,000. No comparison between these two. The last 70 years have been the uni-empire. The United States inherited, benefited from, and consolidated, and became the global empire. With all the wealth that had been siphoned out of the so-called Global South to Europe, now going instead, here to the United States. The United States gave a portion of that back to Europe, a kind of debt, if you like, of having inherited all that empire, all that wealth, but they never gave the empire back to the Europeans, so they lost it, and now they’re losing what little bit they held on to, and it’s over. And the question is, can military Keynesianism replace the fantastic transfer of wealth in the 17th, 18th, and 19th century into the 20th? And my answer is no. There is no way that that domestic program can do for England or for Europe, all the colonial powers, what they lost. The only way to do that, ironically, would be for European countries to understand the need to reorient themselves to the rest of the world, and there’s only one country in Europe that has done that, and that’s Russia.’ Full interview in the quoted post 👇 @profwolff

Going Underground @GUnderground_TV

2 days ago

🚨 NEW EPISODE OF GOING UNDERGROUND ⚡️ Prof. Richard Wolff: China🇨🇳 is Waiting & Watching as the US🇺🇸 Empire and the West IMPLODE Why has Western Europe erupted in uprisings and mass mobilisations against its governments? What is Russia's 🇷🇺 and China's 🇨🇳 strategy as the US

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Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov🇷🇺: ‘Over the past 500 years, all tragedies in the world originated in Europe or occurred owing to European policies: colonisation, the Crusades, the Crimean War, Napoleon, WW1, Hitler…’ After 300 years of slaughtering the peoples of the world and plundering the wealth of the global south to build the cities of Europe… Their empires crumbled in 1945. Since then, all they have had to offer the world is neocolonialism, uncritical vassalage to the United States, and now face being an afterthought and an irrelevance. Instead of recognising a new world exists where neocolonialism will not be tolerated, and prioritising economic rejuvenation via engagement with the rising powers of the 21st Century… Europe instead decides to invest its remaining and dwindling fortunes into the military-industrial complex to fight a war against Russia which none of their populations are remotely interested in…while the rest of the civilised world invests in trade and development. Europe had a last chance to look to the future, and instead violently jerked their heads 180 degrees back to the past.

Going Underground @GUnderground_TV

2 days ago

Prof. Richard Wolff: ‘The only solution for Europe’s decline to re-orient themselves to the rest of the world. The only European country to have done that is RUSSIA🇷🇺.’ ‘World Wars One and Two were the culmination of European colonialism, in which the leading colonial powers

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Even though the war has not escalated yet & all the fighting is limited to the Persian Gulf, it is still very much present in the lives of Iranians. Prices continue to go up at breathtaking speed. Every family I talked to has mentioned needing to budget more & a noticable lowering of their standard of living to afford basic items. There have also been declines in quality of certain items, most notably gasoline (though there may be some regional variation in this). Businesses have to adjust how they work. For example, a friend explained to me that whereas previously he would get 25 or 50% upfront from clients, he now only accepts 100% cash upfront & has significantly declined what projects he takes on. There is much lower risk tolerance across the board. The impact is not just economic. I recently had a conversation with a mother who talked the paralyzing fear she has every day when she drops off her children to school, worrying something happens and she won't ever see them again. I found that very haunting and highly doubt she's the only one. On the other, if we look at it from another perspective, life is getting noticably more difficult, but it still is moving forward. Things are getting more expensive & people's portions are getting smaller, but there are no shortages. Supermarkets still have full shelves. Gas may have some quality issues & the higher consumption tiers are more expensive, but gas stations still have it. People still go to work. Kids go to school. The country functions as normal. This is in stark contrast to previous experiences Iran had, such the widespread famines during both World Wars. Now of course one question whether this is sustainable in the long run. But as of now, it is difficult, it is stressful, the blockade is clearly being felt ... but everyone is adjusting and limping on. Nothing has collapsed.