Tag Archives: Egypt

Political Rants

Ripped from the heads.

This is just another survey of current issues in the news – don’t mind me. Tired, can’t focus.

Best friend
Some best friend you got there, doggy.

The Koreas. Yes, there are two of them. And yes, there was a war. But that’s about all Americans know about the Korean peninsula except that “North Korea started the war!” and “Kim Jong Sombody is crazy!” Meanwhile, we are flying stealth bombers and stealth fighters and nuclear armed B52s over South Korea in ostentatious demonstrations of force, using some of the very same aircraft that once turned the North into an apocalyptic hellscape. Earth to Obama: There is no military solution to this problem. You’ve got a State Department full of diplomats – send a few over to fashion a treaty with the North, and this will stop being a problem.

K-9 abuse. A few weeks ago, when the latest gun nut incident took place in nearby Herkimer, the State Police used a dog to sniff out the suspect in an abandoned building. The dog was shot dead, as you may have heard. Since then there have been several news stories about K-9 patrols, how the police care about them, etc. Bullshit. These animals should never, ever be put in harm’s way in this manner. There was no reason to sacrifice that dog for the sake of capturing this suicidal dead-ender who had nowhere to go but jail or the grave. I think the police lose sight of the fact that, for all their utility, working dogs are dependent upon humans for their welfare. They are, in essence, like toddlers in that they are trusting, inquisitive, and unable to make their own decisions. They rely on us to keep them from needlessly sacrificing themselves.

Rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t allow a young child to do something, don’t ask a dog to do it either.

Debt Patrol. Egyptians may have thought things were going from bad to worse over the last couple of years. Now the IMF has pulled into town, and the likelihood is that their misery has just begun. Mubarak had already substantially “liberalized” the country’s economy. Now their foreign reserves are extremely low, thanks in part to years of political upheaval and disruptions in tourism and other industries. Next stop, the Bolivia / Argentina treatment. One would hope that, once they’ve endured some of that, they will follow South America’s lead and break free of the global neoliberal institutions of economic control that have led so many to the land of misery.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Failure to add.

It’s almost November, and the occupations are continuing. With so much bad news on so many fronts, this is a little bit of good. Movements often emerge at the most unexpected times, in the most unexpected ways. And while the titanic unfairness of our economic system (as currently operated) should lead us to expect a massive uprising, I think we have experienced so many years of seeing so little reaction to outrageous assaults by the powerful that we have come to believe the response will never come. Well, the occupation movement is a response; how broadly it will resonate has yet to be seen.

I think it’s worth remembering that in Egypt, in Tunisia, and likely elsewhere, it was economics that really lit the fire under people. Torture in police custody, exclusion from meaningful political participation, persecution of minorities … abuses of every kind and character were endured by Egyptians – not without resistance, mind you, but without broad outrage. It wasn’t until Mubarak instituted substantial neoliberal economic “reforms”, opening up the Egyptian economy to greater international corporate penetration, that people had had enough. Now not only did you lack a voice in government and enjoy no constitutional rights when detained; you also could not make even the meager living you were making a year or two before. In a nation of extreme economic inequality, this was more broadly felt even then the hard end of the police baton. Everyone was affected.

Something similar has happened here. When Bush invaded Afghanistan, relatively few people stood in the street. When he invaded Iraq, the crowds were much bigger, but still not massive enough even to slow the administration down. But when our overleveraged, underregulated banking system imploded, exposing the corruption within these massive institutions, and our government’s only response was to throw literally trillions of dollars at them while millions of Americans were put out of work, that was a little hard to ignore. Now banks and businesses are sitting atop a pile of cash probably larger than any in history. Now firms are making their remaining employees do the work of two, three, perhaps four, knowing that they will not complain in this job market. Now people are seeing that without meaningful intervention on the side of working people, capitalism reverts to its core principles – one of which is maintaining a large surplus labor force to keep pressure on wages down.

Perhaps now people are waking up and realizing why the 1% is not adding any employees: because this economy works for them. It just doesn’t work for the rest of us.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Strange medicine.

Obama’s Middle East address was full of familiar themes. There’s been a lot of dust kicked up about the suggestion that any lasting peace in Israel/Palestine should be based on the pre-June 1967 borders with mutually agreeable land swaps. That was a bit like Gingrich saying he didn’t believe in gutting Medicare and turning it into a lame, unworkable voucher program. Nothing draws criticism like brief moments of relative sanity. But I digress.

What wasn’t surprising about the speech? The hard swipes at our perennial punching bags, Syria and Iran. The heavily caveated criticism of Bahrain and Yemen. The non-existence of Saudi Arabia. These are all too attractive not to make it into the final draft. But in my mind, there were probably three items worth referencing:

“Drawing from what we’ve learned around the world, we think it’s important to focus on trade, not just aid; and investment, not just assistance. ” 

This was the magic of the marketplace passage that’s been previewed over the past few days. Obama promised to get the IMF and World Bank working to “modernize and stabilize the economies of Tunisia and Egypt.” What he didn’t say was that the mass protests in Egypt he referenced earlier were fueled, in part, by neoliberal reforms of the type he’s describing. All I can say is that the revolutionaries in Egypt and Tunisia had better be on their guard, because plugging their economies into the Washington consensus only means striving to be another Honduras.

“For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own.”

This is, in a sense, boilerplate framing of the issue. Only Israelis are killed, blown up, etc., in this conflict. Palestinians are merely “humiliated”. From this statement, you’d never know that the vast, vast majority of deaths in this conflict have been among the Palestinians. Also, you never hear this or any president talk about Palestinian security. The only time they use the term security in reference to Palestinians is when they’re talking about Palestinian responsibility to ensure Israeli security. That thing Obama said about every nation having the right to defend itself? Within a few lines he was talking about a “demilitarized” Palestinian state. So much for self defense.

Still, the 1967 borders argument is a rare glimpse at sanity, and I credit him for it. Will it last the weekend? We shall see.

The Strauss-Kahn Consensus.  Not sure why Dominique Strauss-Kahn is under arrest. He only did to that poor woman what the IMF has been doing to poor countries for decades, to choruses of praise from the U.S.

luv u,

jp