Qaddafi’s Son Is Alive. And He Wants to Take Libya Back.Seif has made use of his absence from public life, watching the currents of Middle Eastern politics and quietly reorganizing his father’s political force, the Green Movement. He is coy about whether he is running for president, but he believes that his movement can restore the country’s lost unity. His campaign pitch is the kind that has worked in many countries, including our own: The politicians have brought you nothing but misery. It is time for a return to the past. “They raped the country — it’s on its knees,” he told me. “There’s no money, no security. There’s no life here. Go to the gas station — there’s no diesel. We export oil and gas to Italy — we’re lighting half of Italy — and we have blackouts here. It’s more than a failure. It’s a fiasco.” Ten years after the euphoria of their revolution, most Libyans would probably agree with Seif’s assessment. In Tripoli, the half-built Grand Hotel, a dark gray colossus of raw cinder blocks and cranes overlooking the ocean, is inhabited only by sea gulls. One of many building projects backed by Seif, it has sat untouched since 2011. Scores of other empty hulks mar the Libyan landscape, their foreign backers unwilling to risk another cent in such a volatile place. Some Libyan warlords have become immensely rich — Libya pumps about a million barrels of oil a day — but many people suffer daily power outages that last for hours and struggle to get enough drinking water. Tripoli and other major cities are riddled with bullet holes, reminders of a war that has lasted on and off for most of a decade.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/30/magazine/qaddafi-libya.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimeshttps://archive.is/54mwmGove: ‘transforming’ the Civil Service into cashMICHAEL GOVE has announced plans for “reform” that look designed to give favoured corporations and Tory insiders more control of the supposedly independent Civil Service. He wants to turn government into “Gove-rnment,” a system that hands over public services to his mates, so they can make a profit at our expense. Gove pushed the plans at a conference arranged by a former Tory MP’s personal think tank. The event was funded by a former Tory adviser’s company, one that tries to win public-sector contracts for corporations — which rather gives the game away about what is being planned here. In his speech Gove claimed the Covid-19 pandemic showed the government needed reform. But he didn’t say it showed the government struggled to contain the crisis because it relied too much on crony companies after they had starved or ignored the public sector. Quite the opposite. Instead of worrying about the weakness of the public sector, Gove wants to give more influence to the private sector, to say the pandemic shows we need more “willingness to draft in outsiders” — meaning Tory-linked businesspeople.
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/f/gove-transforming-the-civil-service-into-cashChris Hedges: The Collective Suicide MachineThe debacle in Afghanistan, which will unravel into chaos with lightning speed over the next few weeks and ensure the return of the Taliban to power, is one more signpost of the end of the American empire. The two decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 troops deployed to subdue Afghanistan, the high-tech gadgets, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs and the Global Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air commandos, black sites, torture, electronic surveillance, satellites, attack aircraft, mercenary armies, infusions of millions of dollars to buy off and bribe the local elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never exhibited the will to fight, failed to defeat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that funded itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest countries on earth. Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/chris-hedges-collective-suicide-american-empire/278058/