Egypt in the Throes of Another Revolution

To defeat cruel leaders and a country with a tiny elite is very hard. You can kill the monster who officially runs things, but quickly a new monster grabs the reins of power and re-imposes the cruel regime. That is exactly what is happening in Egypt.

Here is a bit from an excellent article by Ahdaf Soueif in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Since Friday the military has openly engaged with civilian protesters in the heart of the capital. The protesters have been peacefully conducting a sit-in in Ministries' Street to signal their rejection of the military's appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister.

Ganzouri announced that no violence would be used to break up the Cabinet Office sit-in. Moments later the military took on the protesters. For a week Military Police and paratroopers had kidnapped activists from the streets, driven them off in unmarked vehicles, interrogated them and beaten them. On Friday they kidnapped Aboudi – one of the "Ultras" of the Ahli Football Club. They gave him back with his face so beaten and burned that you couldn't see features – and started the street war that's been raging round Ministries' Street for the last three days.

The protesters have thrown rocks at the military. The military has shot protesters, and thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, china embossed with official parliament insignia, chairs, cupboards, filing-cabinets, glass panes and fireworks. They've dragged people into parliament and into the Cabinet Office and beaten and electrocuted them – my two nieces were beaten like this.

They beat up a newly elected young member of parliament, jeering: "Let parliament protect you, you son of … ". They took a distinguished older lady who's become known for giving food to the protesters and slapped her repeatedly about the face till she had to beg and apologise. They killed 10 people, injured more than 200, and they dragged the unconscious young woman in the blue jeans – with her upper half stripped – through the streets.

The message is: everything you rose up against is here, is worse. Don't put your hopes in the revolution or parliament. We are the regime and we're back.

What the Elite Offers When You Ask for Democracy

The ultra-rich don't like the bottom 99% "demonstrating". It is just too messy. Those 99% don't have a clear agenda. They don't have polished spokesmen who can step forth with a program.

The elite just don't like the messiness of "democracy". There are too many loose ends. It can't easily be controlled from one centre. So here is what the ultra-rich offer:



The rich like to leave running things to themselves. They have the money, so they can afford to buy the politicians, the police, the judges, the lawyers, the bureaucracy. The above video shows the elite of Egypt beating "good sense" into the heads of recalcitrant Egyptians, foolish people in the bottom 99% who don't understand that their "job" is to serve the rich. The military and police are simply on the street to remind the bottom 99% where their place is in society.

Keith Olbermann Takes Oakland's Mayor to Task

Olbermann starts out by praising Mayor Jean Quan's previous service to Oakland. It is an impressive list. But then he gets down to the horror that she unleashed by turning her police loose on peaceful protesters and makes it utterly, utterly clear the crime she has perpetrated by her actions. You must watch this video:



For a first person narrative by somebody on the ground in Oakland, read this article by Mike Godwin in reason.com:

If you've been following the mainstream media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests, odds are that you've heard about events at Occupy Oakland. What you can't tell from the news clips is how the situation has played out for those of us who live here. I can't speak for everyone, but I do know that my reaction, both to the protestors and to the violent police interventions against them, is hardly an uncommon one.

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The vibe where I was standing was tense. Occasionally an individual shouted at the arrayed police, “This is America! What are you doing here?” Or, “I can't believe you're doing this! We love you guys but what you're doing is wrong!” I didn't think it was a great idea to shout at the (silent but intent) array of police—it wasn't likely they were going to suddenly relent, and I knew they had been wearing heavy riot gear and carrying weapons (including astonishingly large batons) for six or more hours. My instinct was that it was not particularly safe to shout at tired men and women with weapons, no matter how righteous one's outrage is.

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One guy passing me on the way downtown warned about tear gas. I spotted New York Times reporter Malia Wollan talking into her mobile—as she walked past I heard her describing the apparent effects of the gas on individuals exposed to it. Her account is available here.

Of the people headed toward me, I first thought a disproportionate number were bicyclists—only a few minutes later did I realize, embarrassingly, that there were other reasons for wearing a bicycle helmet that night. The tension in the crowd was palpably building so I decided it was time to head home. Keeping my distance turned out to have been wise, because this is what I missed getting caught up in:



I was also standing 50-100 feet south from where a police officer appears to have thrown a flash grenade into a crowd of people gathered to help 24-year-old Scott Olsen, who suffered massive head injuries after allegedly being struck by a tear gas canister.



I confess that it breaks my heart to watch this clip. If I had seen someone collapsed in the street, I'd have tried to help that person too. These people were apparently punished for their impulse to help.

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I don’t know how to interpret everything I saw, and I can’t state with any authority what Occupy Oakland or any of the other protests ultimately mean. But I do know this: The millions of dollars California just spent on this crackdown did nothing to dispel or discourage the protestors. In fact, the police intervention has echoed around the world. Occupy Wall Street committed to sending $20,000 to Occupy Oakland and protestors as far away as Tahrir Square in Egypt have expressed their solidarity with the Oakland protestors.

History tends to happen when you least expect it, and my new neighbors have taken their first steps into its pages.

Go read the full article.

If you want to see the sympathy protest in Tahrir Square Egypt for the Occupy Oakland violence, here is a post on BoingBoing with pictures.

Here is political commentary in Wired magazine on the fallout from the police violence at Occupy Oakland:

But the police forces’ violent tactics worked only temporarily, and have, for the moment at least, handed the Occupy movement a moral and political victory so big that not even Occupy protestors seem to recognize it.

The nation, and even much of the world, seemed to recoil in shock from the images coming out of Oakland Tuesday night, where police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse unarmed protestors, who built a camp in the city as part of the nationwide protest against an unfair political and economic system.

Critically wounded Marine veteran Scott Olsen became a rallying point for Occupy, following widely seen footage of protestors trying to carry him to safety in the midst of a tear gas assault. There were other pictures and videos: streets littered with rubber bullets, people in wheelchairs trapped in the tear gas, and bloodied faces and bruised bodies of unarmed protestors.

On Wednesday, OccupyOakland’s fortunes reversed.

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced that people could reoccupy Frank Ogawa plaza, renamed Oscar Grant plaza by the occupiers in honor of a black Oakland man shot to death by transit police in 2009. When people arrived for the General Assembly, the occupation’s standard open meeting, the grassy area of the plaza was fenced off. But through the course of the evening, and not without violent conflict among the occupiers, the fences came down.

People fought each other over the fences, pulling at each other, some linking arms to protect the fence, and screaming, all while the GA went on in the distance. Despite the fears of those attempting to protect the fence, no police moved in after it went down. The GA proceeded through the evening undisturbed by anything but news choppers overhead and a turn-out too big for the sound system to cover.

But word came in that an attack was imminent on OccupySF across the bay, and a large contingent moved to get on the BART transit to join San Francisco’s Occupiers in Justin Herman Plaza. But when they arrived at the station they found it closed; BART wasn’t letting the occupation on in Oakland, or letting people off at Embarcadero, the station closest to OccupySF.

The roused crowd took to the streets, marching down Broadway towards the police station. They met no resistance. The police stayed a block away on all sides, and melted back in front of the path of the crowd, directing traffic away from the protestor-filled streets of Downtown Oakland. Many protestors were looking for a confrontation with police, but found none — staying peaceful and well behaved, if boisterous and peripatetic. The only property damage I observed were a couple incidents of graffiti-tagging, of which only one was definitely attributable to the OccupyOakland march. There were no broken windows or even overturned trash bins, and police stayed largely out of sight for the evening.

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During the slow, tweeted protestor pursuit of police, OccupySF drilled for a police raid, practicing locking arms around their camp and removing vital gear from the site. As the hours wore on, many tired occupiers became paranoid, and every bus or van that went by startled people and sent them into conspiratorial speculations. Some occupiers went around writing the National Lawyer’s guild phone number on the arms of occupiers who didn’t already have a lawyer.

Five members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, several running for mayor, arrived and used the people’s mic to address the occupiers. They stayed put for hours, and many occupiers credited them for preventing the police raid.

On Thursday, the SFPD stretched credulity by telling ABC Channel 7 that the whole thing was a training exercise, resulting in a sarcastic local news report regarding the whole event. At the same time, OccupySF posted a picture of a notice given to businesses around the occupation warning of “…increased activity by the SFPD in the immediate vicinity of One Market Plaza starting around this evening’s commute.”

In Oakland the occupation was returning Thursday, growing from one tent in the reclaimed area Wednesday night to eight tents. OccupyOakland is rebuilding against the background of a campaign to recall Mayor Quan, calls for OPD to be disciplined, solidarity marches around the country and the world, and the New York City GA’s consensus to devote 100 sleeping bags and $20,000 for legal and medical expenses to OccupyOakland.

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Sheamus Collins, a bartender from Dublin, showed off his rubber bullet wound.

Click to Enlarge
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No one seemed aware of how crushing their political victory in the last 24 hours had really been.

How a Revolution can be Derailed

Here is a story from CBS's Sixty Minutes that shows how the Egyptian military has squashed the "people's revolution".



The history of popular revolts and revolution is rife with examples like this. The rich and powerful do not easily give way. They find many ways to sneak back into power.

It is truly sad to see that the people's will has been thwarted. It is especially disgusting to see that the US government (via Leon Panetta, the US Secretary of Defense giving the US's blessing to the Egyptian generals) is backing this clampdown on the people's push for real democracy. Obama claims to support democracy in the Middle East, but Obama's actions belie that claim. The US is still playing the dictator/repressive military regime card to "secure American interests" in the region. Shame!

Call me cynical, but the internecine street battles between Copts and Muslims strikes me as evidence of manipulation by the generals to get people to fight among themselves rather than to focus on the corrupt military regime. Read this news from the UK's Guardian newspaper.

The above story should be a cautionary tale for the Occupy Wall Street attempt to bring democracy back to America and out the corruption of money in politics. There is much violence and many dead ends that can await this movement. Hopefully not. But idealists need to keep a sense of realism. Getting the choke hold of the ultra-rich and big corporations off the democracy can be an ugly, ugly struggle.

How to Strangle Democracy in Its Cradle

Earlier this year it was exhilerating to watch the Egyptian people struggle for their rights and for a meaningful democracy. But those in power are like illusionists. Now you see it, now you don't. Here's a video to give you an idea of where "democracy" is now headed under the military council:



More details from this CNN report.

Sadly, this backsliding is all too familiar. This is why the story of civilization is a long litany of painful struggle, moments of glory, then a falling back into the black pit of corruption and misrule. Those who want to seize power to suck the blood out of the citizenry are many. The citizens can rarely put up the superhuman effort such as was seen in Egypt to try and achieve democracy. That is why history is such a long, ugly, disheartening story of struggle and strangulation. It is hard, really hard, to get out of the grasp of the greedy powerful who have their hands at your throat almost always.

Explaining Why Some Firms are Big

The ecology of the business world is a logarithmic landscape of firms with lots of little companies, fewer middle-size companies, and a very few behemoths.

If you recall, over the last two decades, the same decades that glorified the EMH (Efficient Market Hypothesis) and globalization and small nimble firms that outsourced all but their essential operations, the world became a destablized place. I think all three phenomena are related, but I'm not an economics type so I have no evidence or real understanding. But here's my argument...

• EMH spread the lie that markets were optimal, that prices included all information, and nobody could do better in estimating real value than what the market price indicated. But this is an illusion as the 2008 stock market crash illustrates. A few who understood the enormous scale of fraud underlying the rise in liar loans and the sordid lies behind mortgage securitization foresaw the crash and made a fortune. The market price didn't "foresee" this. It did the famous Wily Coyote moment of going over the cliff, looking down, seeing there was no ground beneath it, and fell.


• Globalization spread the lie that the best market was an international market that gave everybody a chance to enhance their comparative advantage. But the disorderly collapse of internal labour markets as work was outsourced and the lie of equal and fair access to markets as demonstrated by the continued manipulation of market that exclude third world countries from fair access to developed world markets put the lie to this idealization.


• Outsourcing is built on the lie that you can spin off the "non-essential" parts of your business and focus on just those key bits where your intellectual property and business prowess are maximized. But as the following post from Krugman shows, that is a lie.

All three are lies based on utopian social thinking. During the revolutionary 19th century so many insurgencies went haywire because of utopian thinking. The utopianism of Communism's central planning was the bane of 20th century economies. The three examples I cite above are examples of late 20th century/early 21st century utopianism that have destabilized the economic future of billions of people.

Here is a post by Paul Krugman looking at the disaster that the Dreamliner has been for Boeing:

Thank You, Boeing

For providing such a clear illustration of the forces driving the theory of the firm.

Oliver Williamson shared the 2009 Nobel mainly because of his work on a question that may seem obvious, but is much less so once you think about it: why are there so many big companies? Why not just rely on markets to coordinate activity among individuals or small firms? Why, in effect, do we have a lot of fairly large command-and-control economies embedded in our market system?

Williamson answered this in terms of the difficulties of writing complete contracts; when the tasks that need to be done are complex, so that you can’t fully specify what people should do in advance, there can be a lot of slippage and strategic behavior if you rely on market incentives; in such cases it can be better to do these things in-house, so that you can simply tell people to do something a particular way or to change their behavior.

In Boeing’s case, they outsourced far too much, only to find that they were getting parts that didn’t do what they were supposed to — and also to find that the subcontractors were seizing a lot of the rents. They discovered, in effect, that there are times when it’s better to rely on central planning than to leave things up to the market.

Obviously this isn’t always true. There’s a tradeoff. But that’s the point — and it’s this tradeoff that determines how big firms should be. Boeing has now provided a clear motivating example. Their loss, the economics profession’s gain.

Go read the original post by Krugman to get the embedded links.

I always enjoy Krugman's ability to clearly get across an insight into economics. Here he points out that Boeing's failure with outsourcing demonstrates why you have big firms. There is a cost to trying to realize the idealization of "efficiencies" like outsourcing (or, as I would claim, the "efficiencies" of EMH or globalization). So for real world reasons, some firms get big so they don't have to deal with the hard reality of writing a contract that can spell out all the expectations of a collaboration between two firms.

Excellent post by Krugman. It makes a person think and understand and connect dots and get a better picture of the world.

And here's a relevant detailed bit on exactly what Boeing did wrong. From an article in the LA times:

787 Dreamliner teaches Boeing costly lesson on outsourcing

The airliner is billions of dollars over budget and about three years late. Much of the blame belongs to the company's farming out work to suppliers around the nation and in foreign countries

The 787 has more foreign-made content — 30% — than any other Boeing plane.... That compares with just over 5% in the company's workhorse 747 airliner. Boeing's goal, it seems, was to convert its storied aircraft factory near Seattle to a mere assembly plant, bolting together modules designed and produced elsewhere as though from kits. The drawbacks of this approach emerged early. Some of the pieces manufactured by far-flung suppliers didn't fit together. Some subcontractors couldn't meet their output quotas, creating huge production logjams when critical parts weren't available in the necessary sequence. Rather than follow its old model of providing parts subcontractors with detailed blueprints created at home, Boeing gave suppliers less detailed specifications and required them to create their own blueprints. Some then farmed out their engineering to their own subcontractors, Mike Bair, the former head of the 787 program, said at a meeting of business leaders in Washington state in 2007. That further reduced Boeing's ability to supervise design and manufacture. At least one major supplier didn't even have an engineering department when it won its contract, according to an analysis of the 787 by the European consortium Airbus, Boeing's top global competitor.

Boeing executives now admit that the company's aggressive outsourcing put it in partnership with suppliers that weren't up to the job. They say Boeing didn't recognize that sending so much work abroad would demand more intensive management from the home plant, not less. "We gave work to people that had never really done this kind of technology before, and then we didn't provide the oversight that was necessary," Jim Albaugh, the company's commercial aviation chief, told business students at Seattle University last month. "In hindsight, we spent a lot more money in trying to recover than we ever would have spent if we tried to keep many of the key technologies closer to Boeing. The pendulum swung too far."...

That's not to say that outsourcing never makes sense — it's a good way to make use of the precision skills of specialty manufacturers, which would be costly to duplicate. But Boeing's experience shows that it's folly to think that every dollar spent on outsourcing means a cost savings on the finished product.Boeing can't say it wasn't warned. As early as 2001, L.J. Hart-Smith, a Boeing senior technical fellow, produced a prescient analysis projecting that excessive outsourcing would raise Boeing's costs and steer profits to its subcontractors. Among the least profitable jobs in aircraft manufacturing, he pointed out, is final assembly — the job Boeing proposed to retain.

Utopian thinking is dangerous. Boeing is an object lesson in extreme optimism born of a utopianism derived from the three points made above.

Extreme pessimism is dangerous, but utopianism is an example of extreme optimism and it too is dangerous. As I watch the spreading demonstrations and revolutions in the Middle East my mind is brought to think about utopianism. These upsurges are based on an optimism that fundamental social change can be achieved quickly and easily. Unfortunately, I don't think so. I'm happy with the revolts and the overthrow of tyrants. But the people are fooling themselves if they think that social revolution is an easy thing.

Already in Egypt it is clear that the military is working from a different "playbook" than the demonstrators. They still haven't released all political prisoners, they are not laying out a path to effective democracy, they have not quickly included civilians in the instutions and created transitional organizations. Instead we are hearing echos of Obamas "security and stability" calls with the military in Egypt calling for an end to all strikes and the people to abandon the only tool they have: demonstrations. The path forward in Egypt is unclear. I remain hopeful, but the number of "worrying signs" increases daily.

Robert Reich Wants to Bring Democracy to America

When I watch the demonstrations in Egypt and the furor the people have over their three decades of stagnant economy and politics, I'm brought to think of the US and Robert Reich's cry for a new distributive justice for Americans.

Here's bit from his latest post:

My proposal to raise the marginal tax to 70 percent on incomes over $15 million, to 60 percent on incomes between $5 million and $15 million, and to 50 percent on incomes between $500,000 and $5 million, has generated considerable debate. Some progressives think it’s pie-in-the-sky. Here, for example, is Andrew Leonard, a staff writer for Salon:

A 70 percent tax bracket for the richest Americans is pure fantasy – even suggesting it represents such a fundamental disconnect with the world as it exists today that it is hard to see why it should be taken seriously. I would be deeply worried about the sanity of a Democratic president who proposed such a thing.

Fantasy? I don’t know Mr. Leonard’s age but perhaps he could be forgiven for not recalling that between the late 1940s and 1980 America’s highest marginal rate averaged above 70 percent. Under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower it was 91 percent. Not until the 1980s did Ronald Reagan slash it to 28 percent.

Incidentally, during these years the nation’s pre-tax income was far less concentrated at the top than it is now. In the mid-1970s, for example, the top 1 percent got around 9 percent of total income. By 2007, they got 23.5 percent. So if anything, the argument for a higher marginal tax should be even more realistic now than it was during the days when it was taken for granted.

A disconnect with the world as it exists today? That’s exactly the point of proposing it. For years progressives have whined that Democratic presidents (Clinton, followed by Obama) compromise with Republicans while Republican presidents (Reagan through W) stand their ground – with the result that the center of political debate has moved steadily rightward. That’s the reason the world exists the way it does today. Isn’t it about time progressives had the courage of our conviction and got behind what we believe in, in the hope of moving the debate back to where it was?

There is much more, go read the whole post.

When I see Obama put forward a budget with calls for cuts in the discretionary part of the budget because "times are tough" while at the same time the wealthy in America are far more wealthy than they have been before and making oodles more hand over fist, I'm perplexed. How can a rich country be so poor?

Ah... it is poor because those who have want more and they way they will get it by making sure that those who have less have far less than the little they have now. Cut programs to assist the impoverished because times are tough! But why weren't those "tough times" in evidence just two months ago when the full throated yell of the right was that tough times called for "no new tax" which meant that the billionaires and millionaires could keep their budget-busting Bush tax cuts?

Funny message: times are tough, so the poor have to tighten their belts. But times are tough so you dare not remove the tax cuts from the rich because they are the last bulwark between the current tough times and the complete apocalypse of a world destroyed by "high taxes"! Yes... just like those apocalyptic 1950s and 1960s where the the economy grew year after year and people felt better and all things seemed possible, even a shot at sending a man to the moon!

I watch America in the stranglehold of an ideological debate that has wandered so far from the facts that I'm dumbfounded. The Egyptians have been in the street protesting to overthrow 30 years of cruel misrule, but nobody in the US seems to notice that the past 30 years of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama era has been a 30 year reign of misrule in which the rich got astronomically rich while the poor were told they should tighten their belts, get ready to work until they are 75, accept that the government can't afford handouts to the sick, the incompetent, or the lost. It has been 30 years of even more extreme ideological regimen but the Americans have not yet gone to the streets. When will they?

The Islamic Revolution Style of "Democracy"

Iran's theocrats have discovered a more pure, a more pristine, a higher type of "democracy". One where you remove the people from the politics because they have such "undeveloped" views and are not completely dedicated to the glories of the "Islamic Revolution". Here is the Iranian parliament deciding that the best way to handle the "unfinished business" of the last "democratic" election in Iran. They call for the execution of all those who ran in an election and weren't able to use the instruments of state to stuff the ballot boxes to assure their own "victory"...



From the UK's Guardian newspaper site:

9.07am – Iran:

The Iranian regime continues to try to blame the opposition for yesterday's violence.

Members of the Iranian parliament today called for the death penalty to handed out to opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, who were put under house arrest ahead of the protests, according to Reuters.

"Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi are corrupts on earth and should be tried," the official IRNA news agency quoted them saying in a statement.

The loose term "corrupt on earth", a charge which has been levelled at political dissidents in the past, carries the death penalty in the Islamic Iran, Reuters points out.

Judiciary spokesman Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei said: "Those who created public disorder on Monday will be confronted firmly and immediately."

State-funded Press TV directly blamed opposition "rioters" for the violence.

That certainly does tidy up the loose ends of a "democratic" election where the foolish populace does not follow the gentle proddings of the supreme leader, the ayatollah-how-to-vote-so-you-do-it-or-die Ali Khamenei and his stooge Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It is so tragic that the confused Egyptians don't understand the true "Islamic" version of democracy. A political system where all the people get to vote as one following the clear directions of the supreme religious leader who knows exactly what God wants because this leader is "special". The Egyptians apparantly want a "messy democracy" where each person decides for himself what is best and tries to pick a political party that best fits his needs. How un-Islamic! Everybody knows that real Muslims love to vote like robots doing exactly what their "supreme leaders" tell them to do.

George Orwell wrote the Nineteen Eighty-Four as a dystopian novel to show the logical extreme that the despotic Communist party had created in the USSR. Sadly, the Iranian theocracy has studied the lessons of history well and have re-created all the ugly trappings, especially the newspeak which preverts language into an instrument of state policy. So Iran's leadership blandly makes completely ridiculous claims and cares not a whit whether the outside world laughs itself silly at the corruption of truth. The poor people inside Iran are forced to chant the religious "party line" and side with the Ayatollah's God-mandated terror state and accept the "benevolence" of an Islamic revolution where white is black, truth is lie, and justice is whatever the torturer in an Iranian prison decides to dish out.

A Tough Question to Answer

Robert Reich poses an excellent question on his blog:

Quiz: Which of the 2012 presidential aspirants delivered the following words at the Conservative Political Action Convention, now underway in Washington?

We have seen tax-and-tax spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous 170 years of our Republic.

Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation. And we added a new ideology of our own. That is government give-away programs….

If you want to see pure socialism mixed with give-away programs, take a look at socialized medicine.

If you guessed Jim DeMint, you could be forgiven. He talks a lot like this. But you’d be wrong. Newt Gingrich didn’t utter these precise words, either, although he uses much the same language and offers the same themes.

You’d also be wrong if you guessed Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Tom Pawlenty, Ron Paul, Haley Barbour, John Thune, Mitt Romney, or Mitch Daniels. (Sarah Palin isn’t attending.)

But again, your mistake would be understandable because these words sound a lot like theirs. Any of them could have delivered this message – and all of them have, over and over again. It’s the Republican message of 2011.

The perfectly correct answer is Herbert Hoover.

Herbert Hoover delivered these words at the Republican National Convention in Chicago on July 8, 1952.

That was almost sixty years ago.

Republicans haven’t come up with a single new idea since. They haven’t even come up with a new theme.

Herbert Hoover, you may remember, didn’t have a sterling record when it came to the economy. As president, he presided over the Great Crash of 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression. He had no idea for what to do to help the nation out of the Depression except to balance the federal budget. By the time he was voted out of office in 1932, one out of four Americans was unemployed.

By 1952, Hoover had been proven irrelevant and hidebound.

After Dwight D. Eisenhower won the 1952 Republican nomination and went on to become president, he wisely disregarded everything Hoover had advised.

Under Ike, the marginal income tax on America’s highest earners was 91 percent. Eisenhower also commenced the biggest infrastructure program in the nation’s history – the National Interstate and Defense Highway Act, which replaced America’s meandering two-lane roads with 40,000 miles of straight four and six-lane highways. He signed into law the National Defense Education Act, which trained a whole generation of math and science teachers, and upgraded American classrooms for the future. The Federal Housing Authority subsidized home ownership. The Defense Department spawned future technologies in aerospace and telecommunications.

Did the U.S. suffer fascism, socialism, deficits and inflation, as Hoover predicted? No. The U.S. economy soared. The median wage rose faster than ever before. And the incomes of America’s working class and poor rose at the fastest pace of all.

Rest assured that no Republicans are going to be disturbed by the above. First of all, they don't know the relevant history. Second, they refuse to read anything not written by an approved author and any writing which is not on the approved reading list. Third, if they knew that a liberal had written the above, they would gag and gasp, wretch and scream. This is mental poison for them. They are fanatics and already know the truth. There is no need to look in the history books. No reason to go back to the arcane past of Eisenhower's Republicans. They have the truth and it was brought down from the mountaintops in 1776 and 1789 and there has been nothing written since that deserves a second glance.

When I read about the Egyptians dancing as a united people, when I hear that Christian Egyptians protected Muslim Egyptians as they prayed in Tahrir Square to return the favour of Muslim Egyptians who used their bodies to build a protective shield around the Copt Christian churches in early January when unknown fanatics where bombing churches, when I see people dancing for joy, then I find it sad that America is burdened by narrow-minded bigots who as "social conservatives" want a Christian-only America, who want to constrict the rights of a woman to fit their narrow view of morality, then I am sad. I see one country opening up to the world. I see another country closing down. I see one country trying hard to join the modern world. I see another country deciding it wants to go back to its Puritan past when you could be put in stocks for "shameless public behaviour" as defined by the town prudes, a group that willinging burned "witches" and who were happy to declare that the only book to be read was the Bible and that all the rest should be burned.

The world is wide. It is a shame not to embrace the marvels of creation, the limitless variety, all the possibilities. It is a shame to not let individuals explore the possibilities but instead declare that everything was defined once and for all over 2000 years ago in God's word written on pages in one leather-bound book from one small corner of the world. It is a shame when the Pope refused to look through the telescope to see the moons revolving around Jupiter because he knew that the Bible had no mention of moons of Jupiter and it would be a heresy to claim such knowledge because all knowledge was already in the Bible.

I watch one group celebrate freedom with great joy. I watch another country closing its windows, turning its back on the world, and declaring that it has the Truth and has no interest in the world, its peoples, the future, its possibilities because they already know everything worth knowing because it is all written down in one book, a book written by near illiterates roughly 2500 years ago. One group is a from a civilization nearly 6000 years old that is dancing with joy tonight. The other is a civilization 225 years old that has decided that public health care is an abomination because it would require you to help fund medical care for another and everybody knows that Jesus forbade "loving the other as oneself" and that his economic principles were based on libertarianism which says "all government is bad" and "deregulate, deregulate, deregulate".

Yes... the world is a wondrous place.

Egypt: The People Win, Now Comes the Hard Part

Mubarak didn't have the courage to say the words, so he got his right hand man to step in and announce that he has given up power. Thankfully only 300 lives were lost and several thousand injured to achieve this great victory for the Egyptian people:



The power now rests with the military. Hopefully they will use it wisely to quickly put in place a civilian transitional government, set about electing a constitutional assembly, and start the rebuilding of Egyptian society. The signs I will be looking for will be announcements where commissions are set up including leading opposition figures and representatives of the demonstrators, the clear definition of timelines, and a process of education throughout the land to prepare the people for elections.

Achieving a successful democracy is hard work. It requires thoughtful leadership, an engaged public willing to bear the burdens of building a new society, and patience for putting in place the changes needed. Sadly there will be fanatics and criminals who will try to steal this victory from the people, so the nation must stay vigilant. It will take many months to build the necessary institutions and prepare the people to make wise choices. It will require the people to be patient but watchful. This is the hard work of laying the foundations for a new society.

This is hopefully the start of a wonderful new era for Egypt, an era of peace and progess, of economic growth, of properity, and the chance for Egypt to take a seat among the leading nations on earth.

Here are some hopeful voices from posts on Al Jazeera:

7:34pm Qatar: We look forward a continuous special relations with Egypt that will benefit both countries.

7:12pm Bahrain's foreign minister Khalid al Khalifa: Egypt takes the Arab world into a new era .. Let's make it a better one

6:54pm ElBaradei speaks to Al Jazeera:

We need to rebuild the Egyptian culture and intellect

Mubarak's "Mini-Me"

The attempt to pass off giving some unspecified powers to Omar Suleiman as "change" in Egypt is laughable. Suleiman is a Mini-Me, a deformed, deferential, duplicate of Mubarak. Here is a bit from an article in Al Jazeera which profiles Omar Suleiman:

According to a US diplomatic cable leaked by WikiLeaks, entitled 'Presidential Succession in Egypt', dated May 14, 2007:

"Egyptian intelligence chief and Mubarak consigliere, in past years Soliman was often cited as likely to be named to the long-vacant vice-presidential post. In the past two years, Soliman has stepped out of the shadows, and allowed himself to be photographed, and his meetings with foreign leaders reported. Many of our contacts believe that Soliman, because of his military background, would at least have to figure in any succession scenario."

In 2009, he was touted by some media outlets as the most powerful spy in the region, topping even the head of Mossad.

Following his appointment, Suleiman appeared to alienate many Egyptians when he said that he wanted to see democracy, but adding quickly: "But when will we do that? When the people here have the culture of democracy."

The White House, which sees Suleiman as a welcome successor to Mubarak, said his remark was unhelpful.

Suleiman is joined at the hip with Mubarak. He is like all the other generals, hand-picked by Mubarak and if Mubarak goes, they lose their meal ticket, so they will do nothing to force Mubarak out.

It is going to take a coup by captains and colonels in the army. But to organize a coup in a police state is very difficult. And even if you do organize a coup, what is to stop the leader of the coup from becoming a Muammar al-Gaddafi, another dictator?

Revolutions like that of the US in 1776 succeeded because it was led by members of the upper class who had turned against others in the upper class. That meant you had an educated elite with a deep political education able to take reins of power. Plus, in the colonies that elite already had tasted power and developed democracy at the local level, so they could act intelligently in building a democratic society. Even so, roughly one-third of the elite in the emerging US became enemies and were either killed, chased out, or fled the country. It was violent.

The French Revolution was less successful because the leadership there came mostly from the upper strata of the middle class with just a tinge of radicals from the lowest levels of the upper class. Hatred flared early and the revolution devolved into class warfare until a lieutenant colonel, Napoleon, rose up and seized power and quashed the revolution. A king was deposed but an emperor, Napoleon, replaced him. The good news was the the corrupt aristocracy had to cede ground to a competent bourgeoisie, but it was still an autocratic regime. Democracy was still born.

The Russian Revolution came in two stages. The first revolution was one led by the democrats. But they were naive and once their had seized power and held their parliament they thought they were done. But in the streets, the real revolutionaries, the Communists, plotted and rose and threw out the democrats in a second revolution. So that "revolution" ended up as a tyranny. No democracy.

So... revolutions are very hard to pull off. I fevently hope that the Egyptians succeed, but history says there are many, many ways for a revolution to be derailed and only a few ways for it to succeed. The Muslim world needs a real revolution to give the middle and labouring classes a say in their government, but it is looking less and less likely that this will happen because the old regime of Mubarak refuses to give way. They are too comfortable with their billions and their power.

I completely agree with this post by ElBaradei on Al Jazeera:

12:34am ElBaradei on Twitter: "Egypt will explode. Army must save the country now."

My only caution is that "the army" means the lower ranks because the generals have shown themselves unable to separate themselves from the money, power, and privilege they get from siding with Mubarak.

Sadly, I think this post on Al Jazeera is going to be the bloody way forward:

11:50pm: Among the chants heard in Tahrir Square:

We're off to the presidential palace. We're going as millions of martyrs.

A Split between Mubarak and Obama

It seems clear to me that Obama finally got exasperated with Mubarak and tried to give him a "final push" by letting the US CIA chief to "announce" that Mubarak was quitting today.

But Mubarak went on TV in Egypt to announce that he wasn't going anywhere. He would give some unspecified "powers" to his VP, but he wasn't going to step down or go anywhere.

So Obama's game plan has come to an end. The hope that the US could quietly manage things through the Egyptian army has come to naught. The army is corrupt. It stands behind Mubarak. The gentle nudge by the CIA didn't force anybody's hand.

So now the US looks like a fool. As one news analyst put it, Mubarak just gave Obama "the finger" and told him he could take his $1.5 billion and stuff it.

So the choices have become more stark. Either the lower levels of the army brass rise up in a real coup with real bullets and really push Mubarak out, or the people take on Mubarak in a blood confrontation, or the Egyptian people say "uncle" and go home and let Mubarak continue to fleece them, imprison them at will, and continue his thuggish ways. My guess is that the army won't revolt and the people won't give up. So I'm back to the scenario that I hope wouldn't happen but looks more and more likely: tens of thousands are going to have to die in order to overthrow the Mubarak dictatorship. The dream of "democracy" will be drowned in blood. If the Egyptians are lucky, the organized parties will still deliver some kind of democracy, but more likely those factions that put guns in the hands of their supporters will seize power and you will have a new regime, most likely a Muslim Brotherhood authoritarian regime.

It didn't have to be this way. If Obama had some cajones and showed leadership and pushed hard (and forced other Arab leaders to take sides) the thing could have been a bloodless coup with a constrainted democracy (under the "tutelage of the army") would have been possible. But now it looks more and more like Obama missed the train. It will be bloody revolution with the most organized people's party coming out the winner. And that "people's party" will not be a democratic organization willing to share the fruits of revolution with others. Nope. They will want to run it all and milk the Egyptian people for $70 billion just like Mubarak milked the people. It is a tragedy.

Paying a Thug to Give Up Power

Here is a report from NBC news:

Mubarak could leave with $2 billion

By Robert Windrem, NBC News investigative producer for special projects

If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is forced into exile, he is likely to have access to billions in assets. But if Egypt’s successor government tries to recover any of it, it will have a hard time, if history is any judge.

Estimates circulated inside the U.S. government, developed by various agencies, put Mubarak’s wealth at between $2 billion and $3 billion. How much of that total is outside of Egypt, and in what form, is uncertain. How much is recoverable is an even smaller fraction.

AP reported that some in Egypt believed Mubarak controlled $70 billion in assets, but U.S. officials dismissed that number as wildly exaggerated. They noted that Bill Gates, the richest man on the Forbes 400 list, is worth $53 billion.

If you look at the CIA's Factbook article on Egypt, the per capita GDP per person is $6,200. So at $70 billion, Mubarak "owns" as much as 12 "average" million Egyptians earn in a year. To let his leave with billions as his "earnings" for being a dictator is outrageous. These monies should go to his victims, not to Mubarak and his relatives.

Egypt, Now What?

The news is reporting that there has been a "military coup" and that Mubarak will leave. It also says that elections will now be held in two months. That sounds good. But the news goes on to say that Omar Suleiman, Mubarak's right hand man and the head of intelligence (the secret police, spies, and thugs) will take charge). What?

I guess this is more of Obama's maneuvering to give the appearance of "change you can believe in" while keeping the same regime in place.

I will be curious to see the people's reaction. This may be enough to diffuse the protests, but if that is the case then the Mubarak/Obama strategy will have won (except that Mubarak go elbowed aside by last minute maneuvering as the White House realized that the weren't going to be able to sell the idea of 9 more months of Mubarak "in transition" to the Egyptian people).

Here is the grim reality from earlier in the protests:

Things Continue to Look Bad in Egypt

It is becoming more and more clear that the death grip of the dictator Mubarak isn't going to loosen without a lot of bloodshed. International calls for "transition" in Egypt is too little too late.

Here is a bit from the UK Guardian's newspaper site:

11.46pm GMT: Time to wrap things up for tonight. Here's what we've seen this evening:

• Talks between the Egyptian regime and opposition figures are on the brink of collapse

• The Egyptian military has been involved in beatings and other abuses, according to an investigation by the Guardian

• Egypt's provinces have seen widespread protests, in further signs that the uprising has spread beyond the major cities

• A wave of strikes erupted across the economy, including railway workers, public employees and electricity staff

It sounds like the next big protest is being planned for Friday but there will be more to come tomorrow. Thanks for reading.

It is very worrisome that the army is not intervening on the government side. All those bland assurances from Obama's administration that their nearly $2 billion a year had bought off the military are now shown to be hollow. Mubarak came from the military. The military is still supporting him.

This bit makes it clear that Mubarak will not give up without bloodshed:

9.10pm GMT: The talks between the Egyptian regime and opposition figures are on the brink of collapse, according to a new report from Cairo just posted on the Guardian's site:

A prominent member of a key opposition group, the Council of Wise Men, said negotiations had "essentially come to an end". A western diplomat said Washington was alarmed by the lack of political progress and the Egyptian vice-president Omar Suleiman's warning of a coup if the opposition refused to accept the government's terms.

Diaa Rashwan, of the Council of Wise Men, said he offered Suleiman a compromise in which Mubarak would have remained president but with his powers transferred to a transitional government.

Rashwan said this proposal was rejected at the weekend and there had been no further movement.

"The regime is taking a hard line and so negotiations have essentially come to an end," he said. "Suleiman's comments about there being a danger of a coup were shocking to all of us – it was a betrayal of the spirit of negotiations, and is unacceptable.

"The regime's strategy has been just to play for time and stall with negotiations. They don't really want to talk to anyone. At the start of this week they were convinced that the protests were going to fade away."

Reporting by the Guardian's Jack Shenker and Chris McGreal.

If world leaders really do want a democratic Egypt, then need to act now. Any further dithering about "security and stability" simply gives Mubarak a free hand to crush his own people. The blood will be on Obama's head for dithering, for pretending he is for "democracy" when in fact he really wants to control Egypt for short term US interests while ignoring that a peaceful, democratic Egypt is in the long term interests of the American people.

Ah... but there is the problem. What the American government wants is not necessarily what is in the interest of the American people. The war in Iraq was something that Bush and the neo-cons wanted. It was never something that was in the interest of the American people.

The Mubarak/Obama Policy: Egypt is "Not Ready" for Democracy

All the supposed maneuvering by Obama and his administration to move Mubarak to give a democratic voice to the people of Egypt was all window dressing. It was not real. Here's a news report from CBS News tonight that makes that very clear because the official message from Egypt VP, the one that Obama worked so hard to get in place, now says that "Egypt is not ready for democracy"...



A very honest, very critical news reporter is CBS's Lara Logan who makes it very clear that the "maneuvering" of Suleiman is simply to crush the popular revolt. She makes it clear that Obama is doing nothing to push Egypt toward real democracy. Watch the video of Lara Logan on the Charlie Rose show. Notice that she says:

• She makes it very clear that she does not believe that Mubarak will leave willingly. She admits she may be wrong, but her "gut feeling" is that he will not willingly go.


• She clearly identifies the Mubarak regime's strategy: turn off the spotlight of news coverage so they can quietly suppress the people.


• She makes clear that the army is not truly neutral. It is not protecting the protestors. It is letting the police thugs come in a beat the protesters. She states: The army as an institution stands solidly with Mubarak.


• She makes it very clear that Egypt is a police state. She says she was shocked at not being able to identify a Mukhabarat agent, an 18 year old kid in a track suit who was clearly a long time leader of the secret police because he was giving orders while Lara Logan was being held for 16 hours for reporting "without papers". So much for "freedom of the press" in Egypt.


• She raises the obvious question about the Mubarak/Obama "plan" for Egypt: how can you give power to the head of the intelligence service, a spy, a police state thug?


• Notice that Lara Logan does not agree with me. I view Mubarak and Obama collaborating to "get past" the crisis. She claims that when Obama pressured Mubarak to step down, he made Egypt an enemy of America. She makes it clear that Mubarak will no longer play patsy to the US and do the dirty work of torturing and supplying shock troops for the war on al Qaeda. She is better placed than me to know this, but I'm cynical. I think Obama and Mubarak are collaborating. I think the White House image handlers are giving Mubarak guidance on how to "handle" this crisis and make it fizzle. I may be wrong. But that is my viewpoint.

Her fear that the situation in Egypt will get "much worse" is exactly my feeling. The longer this drags on the more likely Mubarak will turn to a bloody crackdown with tens of thousands killed by the police and the army. It will be a slaughter because Mubarak has made it very clear he is not going to willingly give up power. The rest of the world -- Obama in particular -- has to stop supporting him and demand that he and his repressive regime give up and go away and let the demonstrators build a free and democratic regime.

Update 2011feb07: Here's a video that on the surface says that my interpretation above about Obama supporting the "not ready for democracy" as a US policy. But... as the Al Jazeera reporter points out, there are "mixed messages" from the US. The Obama admin pushback on "not ready for democracy" isn't a call for democracy. It is simply making sure that Obama doesn't look anti-democratic. In reality Obama and Mubarak are aligned in wanted to slow down the revolt, turn it aside, co-opt it into endless talks instead of a transfer of power:



The first rule of "political speak" is to realize that the works can mislead. To get the real message you have to weigh many factors and peer behind the curtain and think hard about who is doing what and why. The US is not interested in "democracy" for Egypt. The US only wants "security and stability" and for that they are willing to stick with Mubarak (under the "new & improved" version called Omar Suleiman). The only people in America who want Egypt to be a democracy are people on the left who truly love liberty and want it to be spread among all the nations on the earth. But those people aren't in the government. The Obama administration is centrist and a large portion of the government (the legislature and judiciary) is crammed to the gills with right wing fanatics who are very, very happy to have an autocratic tyrant run Egypt.

The Mubarak/Obama Strategy to Crush Egypt Continues

From Al Jazeera:

1:05pm Foreign reporters in Egypt without local credentials were not permitted by the military to enter Tahrir Square today. New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has just issued a statement accusing the military of detaining journalists and confiscating their equipment.

They say that since January 30, there have been at least 140 direct attacks on journalists trying to cover the ongoing unrest in Egypt.

The Western press is full of slaps on the back about how "stability and security" are being achieved by the "control" over the revolt in Egypt. The muzzling of the press goes on. That is the "control" that Mubarak/Obama want. They continue to hope to strangle the revolt in its cradle. But today there are huge demonstrations today in various cities in Egypt. Will the strategy of empty concessions and endless delay of democratic changes win?

Does an Egyptian regime which is still playing "tricks" by showing patriotic scenes and playing mood music rather than televise the demonstrations and talk to the demonstrators give a hint about the regime's intentions? It is clear that the "authorities" are intent on suppressing the revolt. Here's the relevant Al Jazeera report:

5:15pm Egyptian State TV is currently not showing the live images from Tahrir Square.Instead they are showing a split screen with images of Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian Vice president, sitting in a meeting with minister, and images of people walking on a Nile bridge.

I'm sure that Obama's advisors are high fiving each other on having "contained" the revolt. The plotting of the Mubarak/Obama team is successfully smothering democracy so that "stability and security" can be achieved. Yes, the stability and security of high regime figures (including Army generals) who pile up cash on the backs of a people who have been subjugated, terrorized, and controlled in the interests of the West and the ultra-rich at the top of the Egyptian social heap. Sad.

The struggle continues...

Obama "Recalibrates" on Egypt

The Obama/Mubarak program to smother the revolt in Egypt continues.

From the major news channels in the US, the news is that Obama wants to stop the calls for the immediate stepdown on Mubarak and instead focus on steps to "widen the dialog". Oh yeah... more meetings. That's going to change things. Let the bloody thug stay in power through his right hand man Suleiman.

From Egypt there is ominous news that foreign news teams continue to be "picked up", hooded, held, and beaten. That sure sounds like "change you can believe in" to me. (OK, to be honest there was talk that the state-controlled TV finally is running some news about the demonstrations and one of the large state-owned newspapers has broken with Mubarak and is calling for him to leave the country. That is potentially good news, but not when the "smother them with meetings" approach continues this isn't good news.)

What is needed in Egypt are concrete actions:

• Deadlines for handing over control.


• Specifics about elections.


• Agreements to remove control of the state police and the army from the hands of the pro-Mubarak thugs and put it under the control of either independent third parties or under a pro-reform commission made up of representative parties.


• Announcements about arrests of pro-Mubarak thugs who beat, tortured, and shot protestors.


• Plans to root out corruption throughout the government especially in the police and the judiciary.


• Announcements about electoral commissions and the participation of the international community to oversee the electoral process to ensure that it is truly "free and fair".

I don't see any movement on any of those issues. Until those all get addressed, any "talks" are just window dressing and a technique to smother and destroy the revolt.

The Truth About Western Support for Democracy

The mess in Egypt has revealed the cynical commitment to "democracy" that all Western governments have. Here is a bit from an op-ed in the Toronto Star by Linda McQuaig that spells it out for those who can't see the obvious:

The fact that the Arab world is awash with dictators has long been a key piece of evidence used to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment in the West.

Surely all those dictators are proof that Arabs don’t love democracy the way we Westerners do, that they are culturally, religiously and perhaps congenitally attracted to tyrannical strongmen as leaders.

This widely held view will be difficult to sustain here now that wall-to-wall TV coverage of the Egyptian (and Tunisian) uprisings has exposed the truth: Arabs don’t like tyrants any more than we do.

In fact, they love democracy — so much so that hundreds of thousands of them have risked serious harm by taking to the streets to defy a regime that for decades has been a leading practitioner of repression and torture of dissidents.

Another truth has also inadvertently slipped out of the bag: while hated by their own people, Arab dictators have managed to hold onto power because of our support — that is, the support of Western governments, particularly the United States, which provides $1.3 billion in annual military aid to Egypt.

It turns out that some of the most horrific Middle Eastern despots — notably those in Egypt and Saudi Arabia — are there because the West has propped them up, over the fierce opposition and suffering of their own people. If we want to pinpoint responsibility for the lack of democracy in the Middle East, we might stop trying to find defects in the Arab soul and start looking in the mirror.

There's more in the original, go read the whole article.

McQuaig points out that the right wing government of Harper is more committed to its "friend" in Israel than it is to democracy. That is tragic. The governments of Israel will change and so will its policies. But democracy will remain democracy. You are far better off supporting democracy than supporting some faction or transitory government.

The Politics of Food and Oil

Here is a bit from an interesting post by Barkley Rosser on the EconoSpeak blog:

I do see two clear areas where one can see economic factors. The first has to do with oil. No Arab country that is a major oil exporter (or earns the vast majority of its export earnings from oil) is seeing an uprising, or even any noticeable hints of one, unless one counts the continuing rumblings and instability in Iraq, and Algeria is a borderline case as a somewhat significant oil exporter that has had riots. Oil prices have risen, and it would appear that most of the leaders of the countries exporting lots of oil have been clever enough to sufficiently distribute the rising earnings from this so as to tamp down any incipient unhappiness about dictatorship or monarchy or excessive friendliness with the US.

The other obvious shock has been the spike in food prices, with the massive drought due to an unprecedented heat wave in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan last summer playing the leading role in this, with something on the order of a 10% decline in world wheat production resulting. Egypt is the world's largest importer of wheat, and pretty much all the other Arab countries with demonstrations or riots are also importers of food to some extent, and almost all of wheat in particular. So, there we have a neat story. Those with rising foreign earnings from oil exports have not had political upheavals (except maybe Algeria), while those more strongly dependent on food imports and thus suffering shocks that especially impact the poorer parts of their populations have almost all had uprisings.

Beyond those two fairly clear cut matters, all else is very murky. This can be seen by considering the two reasonably large, non-oil exporting and mostly Sunni Arab, states that have not had actual demonstrations or riots, although both have had rumors and threats of same: Morocco and Syria.

I like the basic message: the events of the world are murky with many causes but there is a larger theme of food price rise as a pressure that leads societies with inequalities (and lack of jobs, a sense of the future, etc.) to revolt.