02.25.11
Oil Up, Gaddafi Hangs On, Wisconsin Vote/General Strike ComingFebruary
Oil Up, Gaddafi Hangs On, Wisconsin Vote/General Strike Coming
February 24th, 2011
Is Wisconsin the new Egypt? I don’t think so, at least not yet. Americans are
not that hungry or pissed off, well maybe some Tea Party members are, but it
takes a lot to get reasonably well paid academic teachers mad enough to want to
start throwing bricks. On the other hand, there are plenty of young anarchists
and communists willing to throw the first brick. They just need a Seattle-like
consensus that now is the time.
There has been talk of a general strike. Now that would be something.
Gaddafi is hanging on in Libya but it seems pretty evident that the opposition
have the initiative and people in Libya are simply fed up. I read Gaddafi’s
Green book when I was in my twenties. I thought at the time it was a reasonable
option, and because he was fighting the good fight against the west and
supporting the IRA, Palestinians and such groups, he seemed to be on the side of
the people. Too bad it turns out he hasn’t been on the side of his people.
Someone like Castro was able to stay in power for so long because people in Cuba
benefited from the Communist revolution, although I think he should have retired
sooner, if the Cuban people really wanted him to stay, I have nothing against
it. Gaddafi evidently has not benefited the people of his country. It seems he
was spending his nation’s wealth glad handing Latin American leftist regimes
making one wonder exactly what he did stand for. It seems that the green
revolution was a failure; his people did not like it.
It is interesting that leftist Latin American Leaders are neutral such as
Castro, silent such as the new president of Brazil, or supportive of Gaddafi,
such as Ortega in Nicaragua, according to Al Jazeera. Even the USA seems to be
waffling when it comes to Libya.
Meanwhile the Libyan people seem to be forming a new government. The UN
assistant ambassador has asked for the creation of a no fly zone over Libya and
to seize the assets of Gaddafi. It looks like all of eastern Libya is in the
hands of the opposition and the western towns are engaged in battles based on
today’s news on the BBC, Al Jazeera and the Japanese national news service.
Finally there is an article by an Egyptian who wishes a revolution against
neoliberalism here in the USA.
====================================================
Wisconsin Unions Call For General StrikeGrace Wyler|Feb. 22, 2011, 1:15
PM|6,612|89AAA
The South Central Federation of Labor, an umbrella organization representing
more than 45,000 workers in Wisconsin, voted last night to endorse a general
strike if the state legislature passes Gov. Scott Walker’s budget repair bill,
the Wisconsin State Journal reports.
About 100 delegates of the 97-union federation voted unanimously in favor of the
strike, and called for the group to start educating its members and affiliates
on the “organization and function of a general strike.” There were no details
available about how the strike would work or how many workers would take part.
About 68,000 people came out Saturday to protest the bill, which would strip
public employee unions of most collective bargaining rights. Protests are now
entering a second week but were smaller today as most teachers returned to work.
Wisconsin’s Senate Democrats have not returned to the state from their hideout
in Illinois, leaving Republicans to try to lure them back by moving forward on
other legislation. Republicans have enough members to be able to vote on
measures that don’t spend money, but 20 senators must be present for a vote on
spending bills.
So far, there is no prospect of a resolution to the stalemate over Walker’s
bill. The Governor, who said Monday that he will not negotiate over the bill,
plans to address voters during a “fireside chat” tonight, according to the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
The emergency budget repair bill, which includes $165 million in bond
refinancing, must be passed by Friday to make sure the state can pay its bills
in the 2011 fiscal year. Walker said Tuesday that 1,500 people could lose their
jobs by July if the legislation is not passed.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wisconsin-workers-threaten-general-strike-if-governors-budget-bill-passes-2011-2
===================================================
From Christian Science Monitor
Wisconsin Assembly set to vote on budget bill that weakens unions With
Wisconsin’s senators still in hiding, the rest of the state’s lawmakers continue
to wrangle over a budget bill that would mean big changes for most public
employees. Who’ll blink first?
By Mark Guarino, Staff writer / February 24, 2011
Even with the absence of their Democratic counterparts, Wisconsin Senate
Republicans pressed forward with the budget repair bill proposed by Gov. Scott
Walker and intended to plug a $3.6 billion budget gap over the next two years.
But critics say it’s nothing more than union-busting.
The floor debate started Tuesday and continued through Thursday, making it
possible the state Assembly may vote late Thursday.
While some 70,000 advocates on both sides swarmed the Capitol in Madison over
the past week, debate over the bill reached a historic milestone. At noon
Thursday, discussions passed the 48-hour mark, making it the longest continuous
legislative debate in the state in living memory.
There is no end in sight.
The 14 Senate Democrats remain in Illinois, where they say they will stay to
prevent a quorum, which the 19 Senate Republicans need to bring the bill to the
floor for a vote.
Assembly Democrats, meanwhile, are fighting the bill on the floor by debating
each amendment, which they hope will prolong the public debate going on outside
the state Capitol building and online.
JR Ross, editor of Wisconsin Politics, an online media outlet that covers state
news in Madison, describes events so far as “high-stakes poker” for political
leaders on both sides of the aisle.
“At this point no one has an end game,” Mr. Ross says. “Everybody has painted
themselves into a corner. If the governor blinks, he’s weakened politically
going forward. If the Democrats hiding come back and see the bill pass, they’ll
have let down thousands of people and become irrelevant for the rest of the
session.”
With Democrats saying they have no intention of returning until Governor Walker
shows signs of compromise, Republicans are fast-tracking measures that critics
say are designed to lure Democrats back into the state.
Senate Republicans approved a bill Thursday requiring voters to show photo
identification to vote. Because the bill calls for $2 million in state dollars
to educate voters and poll workers, it cannot pass without a quorum. State
Democrats have long opposed the issue, but because they know the bill will pass
even with their presence, they are not likely to return for the debate.
Even with the governor tight-lipped about compromise, there are signs that
Senate Republicans may be more willing.
Earlier this week, Sen. Dale Schultz introduced a “sunset” measure into the
budget repair bill that would extend the limits on collective bargaining for
just two years.
Besides forcing non-law-enforcement workers to pay more for their pension and
health benefits, Walker’s bill removes collective bargaining power on everything
but wages, and it forces workers to vote every 12 months to certify their
union’s existence.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0224/Wisconsin-Assembly-set-to-vote-on-budget-bill-that-weakens-unions
================================================
From Reuters
Oil falls from near $120 on Saudi, Gaddafi rumor
By Gene Ramos and Matthew Robinson
NEW YORK | Thu Feb 24, 2011 6:55pm EST
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil sank from 2-1/2-year highs near $120 a barrel on
Thursday in strong, late-day profit-taking following an unsubstantiated rumor
Muammar Gaddafi had been shot and Saudi Arabia’s assurances it can counter
Libyan supply disruptions.
A U.S. official said Washington had no reason to believe the Libyan leader was
dead after the rumor swept through oil markets and sent prices tumbling more
than $2 a barrel just before settlement.
Prices surged in early activity on news the Libyan revolt had caused large
disruptions in the OPEC nation’s oil supplies — potentially up to three-quarters
of output — though the scale of the loss could not be confirmed.
Markets had earlier eased on news top OPEC exporter Saudi Arabia was in talks
with European refiners affected by the disruption to fill any supply gaps.
“After three days of moving to the upside, the market was prone to profit-taking
and then we heard the rumor that Gaddafi was dead,” said Peter Beutel, president
of Cameron Hanover in New Canaan, Connecticut.
“It was almost like the fever was breaking anyway, and this was the bucket of
water that brought the temperature down quickly.”
Traders said an increase in margin requirements for U.S. crude oil futures on
the New York Mercantile Exchange and the Intercontinental Exchange in London
also added pressure to prices late in the day.
Brent crude hit $119.79 a barrel — the highest since August 2008 — in early
activity then dropped to $110.51 late, marking the widest trading range for the
benchmark since September 2008. Brent settled up 11 cents at $111.36 a barrel,
dropping more than $1 in post-settlement activity.
U.S. crude settled down 82 cents at $97.28 a barrel, after touching $103.41, the
highest since September 2008.
Brent’s performance pushed its premium to U.S. oil, which has been weighed down
by large stocks at the Cushing, Oklahoma delivery point for the New York
Mercantile Exchange’s U.S. oil contract, out more than a dollar to over $14 a
barrel.
As concerns mounted about the impact of higher oil prices on economic growth,
the International Energy Agency again called on OPEC to draw on excess oil
production capacity if required to counter Libyan supply losses.
The IEA estimates the unrest has cut off 500,000 to 750,000 barrels per day
(bpd) of Libyan output. Italian oil company ENI, the biggest foreign operator,
estimated 1.2 million bpd of the country’s 1.6 million bpd had been shut down as
international firms pull out workers.
Options trade volumes for the New York Mercantile Exchange’s U.S. oil contract
hit a record on Wednesday as the unrest sent prices higher, with traders saying
bets were being laid for a spike to $120 a barrel by April.
While traders focused on Libya, some support also came after U.S. Energy
Information Administration data showed a lower-than-expected build in domestic
crude inventories and hefty drawdowns in gasoline and distillate stocks last
week.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/24/us-markets-oil-idUSTRE71192R20110224
====================================================
From Washington Post
Some now question U.S. deal that brought Gaddafi back into diplomatic fold
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 24, 2011; 9:01 PM
In 2003, the Western view of Libya’s autocratic president was much the same as
it is now: a dangerously unstable tyrant who slaughters his own people. But late
that year, Moammar Gaddafi sent a secret message to a British diplomat saying he
was ready to change.
“He wanted to come in from the cold,” said a former senior aide to President
George W. Bush who worked in the White House when the request came in. Within
months, the Bush administration was actively furthering a U.S. and British
diplomatic courtship of the Libyan leader that had begun under President Bill
Clinton.
With substantial U.S. backing, Gaddafi publicly abandoned his pursuit of weapons
of mass destruction in 2004 and later renounced his support for terrorist
groups, a dramatic turnabout that was rewarded with full U.S. diplomatic
recognition. Yet while the reforms succeeded in ending Gaddafi’s status as an
international pariah, Libyan promises of political reform never materialized.
Now, after this week’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tripoli, human rights
groups and some Libyan opposition leaders are asking whether the United States
was duped in 2003 into propping up one of the world’s most repressive regimes.
In hindsight, the deal struck with Gaddafi did little to help ordinary Libyans,
said Aaron David Miller, a Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars, a Washington research institute.
“We rehabilitated a cruel dictator in the interest of securing American policy
gains,” Miller said. Though the policy change had its merits, “It was a devil’s
bargain because we essentially said, ‘If you support our policies on war and
peace, we’ll give you a pass on human rights,’ ” Miller said.
Others argue that Libyans would likely be no better off today if the deal had
not been struck, and indeed, by almost every measure, the perils facing the
region would be far worse.
“His nuclear program would still be intact and even further developed, and he
would have his missiles and chemical weapons to use as he wishes,” said Elliott
Abrams, a former foreign policy adviser to both Bush and President Ronald
Reagan. Rejecting Gaddafi’s overture would have left the West without any levers
for influencing Libyan behavior, he added. “It would be saying to him, ‘You go
on making nuclear weapons and supporting terrorists, and we’ll just make
speeches’ ” about human rights, Abrams said.
The deal exemplified Gaddafi’s ability to command international attention, in
part because of Libya’s oil resources, but also because Gaddafi pursued advanced
weapons, supported terrorist groups and put himself forward as the leader of an
entire continent.
Gaddafi’s surprise diplomatic overture to the West in 2003 came at a time when
his country was struggling economically under U.N. economic sanctions and locked
in a state of perpetual conflict with the world’s only superpower. The United
States had bombed Libya in the 1980s in retaliation for Libyan-backed terrorist
attacks, and Washington was pushing for hundreds of millions of dollars in
restitution payments for Libya’s role in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103
over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. At the time, Gaddafi had also just
witnessed a devastating display of U.S military might in Iraq, as U.S.-led
forces crushed Saddam Hussein’s army in less than three weeks.
The initial contact with British diplomats in 2004 led to a U.S.-brokered deal
that would eventually lead to political rehabilitation for Gaddafi and his
government in return for dismantling programs to build nuclear and chemical
weapons and advanced missiles.
“We had a huge bonanza: cooperation on counter-terrorism and on the problem of
weapons proliferation,” said David L. Mack, a former U.S. ambassador to the
Middle East and a deputy secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs. “The
Libyans gave us the keys to the whole A.Q. Khan network,” said Mack, referring
to the international nuclear smuggling ring led by Pakistani nuclear scientist
Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Abrams, who in 2003 was the top Middle East adviser to the Bush administration’s
National Security Council, acknowledged that White House demands for Libyan
political reform were “muted,” despite the intense pressure applied by the
administration on other Middle Eastern governments to allow greater political
freedom.
“We had just cut a deal with this guy. It would have been wrong to immediately
start firing at him verbally,” Abrams said. He added that administration
officials did begin engaging with other members of Gaddafi’s family and senior
staff – including his Western-educated son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi – to win
support for the gradual introduction of reforms.
The lack of progress in those efforts was underscored by this week’s violence,
which Middle East experts said demonstrated how little Gaddafi’s domestic
policies had changed in the six years since Libya normalized relations with the
United States in 2006. Then, as now, Gaddafi wielded absolute power and sought
to crush potential rivals from tribal, political or religious groups opposed to
his one-man rule.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/24/AR2011022407696.html
=====================================
From Al Jazeera
A revolution against neoliberalism?
If rebellion results in a retrenchment of neoliberalism, millions will feel
cheated.
‘Abu Atris’ Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 17:04 GMT
Ahmed Ezz, one of several NDP officials arrested since Egypt’s revolution began
[EPA]
On February 16th I read a comment was posted on the wall of the Kullina Khalid
Saed (”We are all Khaled Said”) Facebook page administered by the now very
famous Wael Ghonim. By that time it had been there for about 21 hours. The
comment referred to a news item reporting that European governments were under
pressure to freeze bank accounts of recently deposed members of the Mubarak
regime. The comment said: “Excellent news … we do not want to take revenge on
anyone … it is the right of all of us to hold to account any person who has
wronged this nation. By law we want the nation’s money that has been stolen …
because this is the money of Egyptians, 40% of whom live below the poverty
line.”
By the time I unpacked this thread of conversation, 5,999 people had clicked the
“like” button, and about 5,500 had left comments. I have not attempted the
herculean task of reading all five thousand odd comments (and no doubt more are
being added as I write), but a fairly lengthy survey left no doubt that most of
the comments were made by people who clicked the “like” icon on the Facebook
page. There were also a few by regime supporters, and others by people who
dislike the personality cult that has emerged around Mr. Ghoneim.
This Facebook thread is symptomatic of the moment. Now that the Mubarak regime
has fallen, an urge to account for its crimes and to identify its accomplices
has come to the fore. The chants, songs, and poetry performed in Midan al-Tahrir
always contained an element of anger against haramiyya (thieves) who benefited
from regime corruption. Now lists of regime supporters are circulating in the
press and blogosphere. Mubarak and his closest relatives (sons Gamal and ‘Ala’)
are always at the head of these lists. Articles on their personal wealth give
figures as low as $3 billion to as high as $70 billion (the higher number was
repeated on many protesters’ signs). Ahmad Ezz, the General Secretary of the
deposed National Democratic Party and the largest steel magnate in the Middle
East, is supposed to be worth $18 billion; Zohayr Garana, former Minister of
Tourism, $13 billion; Ahmad al-Maghrabi, former Minister of Housing, $11
billion; former Minister of Interior Habib Adli, much hated for his supervision
of an incredibly abusive police state, also managed to amass $8 billion — not
bad for a lifetime civil servant.
Such figures may prove to be inaccurate. They may be too low, or maybe too high,
and we may never know precisely because much of the money is outside of Egypt,
and foreign governments will only investigate the financial dealings of Mubarak
regime members if the Egyptian government makes a formal request for them to do
so. Whatever the true numbers, the corruption of the Mubarak regime is not in
doubt. The lowest figure quoted for Mubarak’s personal wealth, of “only” $3
billion, is damning enough for a man who entered the air force in 1950 at the
age of twenty two, embarking on a sixty-year career in “public service.”
A systemic problem
The hunt for regime cronies’ billions may be a natural inclination of the
post-Mubarak era, but it could also lead astray efforts to reconstitute the
political system. The generals who now rule Egypt are obviously happy to let the
politicians take the heat. Their names were not included in the lists of the
most egregiously corrupt individuals of the Mubarak era, though in fact the
upper echelons of the military have long been beneficiaries of a system similar
to (and sometimes overlapping with) the one that that enriched civilian figures
much more prominent in the public eye such as Ahmad Ezz and Habib al-Adly.
Despite macroeconomic gains, tens of millions of Egyptians still live in poverty
[EPA]
To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as
corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an
outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the
problem is aberrations from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If
this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed
simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the
real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of
the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal
directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of
politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a
violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell,
was a quintessential neoliberal state.
What is neoliberalism? In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social
geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that
proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual
entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”
Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of
markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water,
education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the
state should create them.
Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate
state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to
markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services,
can be reduced to market transactions.
And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed
societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.
Rhetoric vs. reality
Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order.
First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting
neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s
Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak
era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other
neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell
published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in his book
Rule of Experts (the chapter titled “Dreamland” — named after a housing
development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by
the fall of the regime). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian
neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the
International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard
tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian
economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were
applied unevenly at best.
The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked “by the book” were the
most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was
not a pretty picture. Organised labor was fiercely suppressed. The public
education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect
and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages
relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4%
last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th
Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty
line defined as $2 per day per person.
For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its
public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public
resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization
provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase
state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolise rents
from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the
profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel
and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were
related to aid from foreign governments.
Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by
neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In
Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was
often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political
connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had
powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the
ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in
the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP.
Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter
of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few
independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in
2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination
in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public
assets to “private” investors).
Parallels with America
The political economy of the Mubarak regime was shaped by many currents in
Egypt’s own history, but its broad outlines were by no means unique. Similar
stories can be told throughout the rest of the Middle East, Latin America, Asia,
Europe and Africa. Everywhere neoliberalism has been tried, the results are
similar: living up to the utopian ideal is impossible; formal measures of
economic activity mask huge disparities in the fortunes of the rich and poor;
elites become “masters of the universe,” using force to defend their
prerogatives, and manipulating the economy to their advantage, but never living
in anything resembling the heavily marketised worlds that are imposed on the
poor.
Unemployment was a major grievance for millions of Egyptian protesters [EPA]
The story should sound familiar to Americans as well. For example, the vast
fortunes of Bush era cabinet members Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, through
their involvement with companies like Halliburton and Gilead Sciences, are the
product of a political system that allows them — more or less legally — to have
one foot planted in “business” and another in “government” to the point that the
distinction between them becomes blurred. Politicians move from the office to
the boardroom to the lobbying organization and back again.
As neoliberal dogma disallows any legitimate role for government other than
guarding the sanctity of free markets, recent American history has been marked
by the steady privatization of services and resources formerly supplied or
controlled by the government. But it is inevitably those with closest access to
the government who are best positioned to profit from government campaigns to
sell off the functions it formerly performed. It is not just Republicans who are
implicated in this systemic corruption. Clinton-era Secretary of Treasury Robert
Rubin’s involvement with Citigroup does not bear close scrutiny. Lawrence
Summers gave crucial support for the deregulation of financial derivatives
contracts while Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, and profited handsomely
from companies involved in the same practices while working for Obama (and of
course deregulated derivatives were a key element in the financial crisis that
led to a massive Federal bailout of the entire banking industry).
So in Egyptian terms, when General Secretary of the NDP Ahmad Ezz cornered the
market on steel and was given contracts to build public-private construction
projects, or when former Minister of Parliament Talaat Mustafa purchased vast
tracts of land for the upscale Madinaty housing development without having to
engage in a competitive bidding process (but with the benefit of state-provided
road and utility infrastructure), they may have been practicing corruption
logically and morally. But what they were doing was also as American as apple
pie, at least within the scope of the past two decades.
However, in the current climate the most important thing is not the depredations
of deposed Mubarak regime cronies. It is rather the role of the military in the
political system. It is the army that now rules the country, albeit as a
transitional power, or so most Egyptians hope. No representatives of the upper
echelons of the Egyptian military appear on the various lists of old-regime
allies who need to be called to account. For example, the headline of the
February 17th edition of Ahrar, the press organ of the Liberal party, was
emblazoned with the headline “Financial Reserves of the Corrupt Total 700
Billion Pounds [about $118 billion] in 18 Countries.”
A vast economic powerhouse
But the article did not say a single word about the place of the military in
this epic theft. The military were nonetheless part of the crony capitalism of
the Mubarak era. After relatively short careers in the military high-ranking
officers are rewarded with such perks as highly remunerative positions on the
management boards of housing projects and shopping malls. Some of these are
essentially public-sector companies transferred to the military sector when
IMF-mandated structural adjustment programs required reductions in the civilian
public sector.
But the generals also receive plums from the private sector. Military spending
itself was also lucrative because it included both a state budget and contracts
with American companies that provided hardware and technical expertise. The
United States provided much of the financing for this spending under rules that
required a great deal of the money to be recycled to American corporations, but
all such deals required middlemen. Who better to act as an intermediary for
American foreign aid contracts than men from the very same military designated
as the recipient of the services paid for by this aid? In this respect the
Egyptian military-industrial complex was again stealing a page from the American
playbook; indeed, to the extent that the Egyptian military benefited from
American foreign aid, Egypt was part of the American military-industrial
complex, which is famous for its revolving-door system of recycling retired
military men as lobbyists and employees of defense contractors.
Consequently it is almost unthinkable that the generals of the Supreme Military
Council will willingly allow more than cosmetic changes in the political economy
of Egypt. But they could be compelled to do so unwillingly. The army is a blunt
force, not well suited for controlling crowds of demonstrators. The latest
statement of the Supreme Military Council reiterated both the legitimacy of the
pro-democracy movements demands, and the requirement that demonstrations cease
so that the country can get back to work. If demonstrations continue to the
point that the Supreme Military Council feels it can no longer tolerate them,
then the soldiers who will be ordered to put them down (indeed, in some accounts
were already ordered to put them down early in the revolution and refused to do
so) with deadly force, are not the generals who were part of the Mubarak-era
corruption, but conscripts.
Pro-democracy demonstrators and their sympathisers often repeated the slogans
“the army and the people are one hand,” and “the army is from us.” They had the
conscripts in mind, and many were unaware of how stark differences were between
the interests of the soldiers and the generals. Between the conscripts and the
generals is a middle-level professional officer corps whose loyalties have been
the subject of much speculation. The generals, for their part, want to maintain
their privileges, but not to rule directly. Protracted direct rule leaves the
officers of the Supreme Military Council vulnerable to challenges from other
officers who were left on the outside. Also, direct rule would make it
impossible to hide that the elite officers are not in fact part of the “single
hand” composed of the people and the (conscript) army. They are instead
logically in the same camp as Ahmad Ezz, Safwat al-Sharif, Gamal Mubarak, and
Habib al-Adly — precisely the names on those lists making the rounds of regime
members and cronies who should face judgment.
Ultimately the intense speculation about how much money the Mubarak regime
stole, and how much the people can expect to pump back into the nation, is a red
herring. If the figure turns out to be $50 billion or $500 billion, it will not
matter, if Egypt remains a neoliberal state dedicated (nominally) to free-market
fundamentalism for the poor, while creating new privatised assets that can be
recycled to political insiders for the rich. If one seeks clues to how deeply
the January 25th Revolution will restructure Egypt, it would be better to look
at such issues as what sort of advice the interim government of generals
solicits in fulfilling its mandate to re-make Egyptian government. The period of
military government probably will be as short as advertised, followed, one
hopes, by an interim civilian government for some specified period (at least two
years) during which political parties are allowed to organise on the ground in
preparation for free elections. But interim governments have a way of becoming
permanent.
Technocrats or ideologues?
One sometimes hears calls to set up a government of “technocrats” that would
assume the practical matters of governance. “Technocrat” sounds neutral — a
technical expert who would make decisions on “scientific” principle. The term
was often applied to Yusuf Butros Ghali, for example, the former Minister of the
Treasury, who was one of the Gamal Mubarak boys brought into the cabinet in 2006
ostensibly to smooth the way for the President’s son to assume power. Ghali is
now accused of having appropriated LE 450 million for the use of Ahmad Ezz.
I once sat next to Ghali at a dinner during one of his trips abroad, and had the
opportunity to ask him when the Egyptian government would be ready to have free
elections. His response was to trot out the now discredited regime line that
elections were impossible because actual democracy would result in the Muslim
Brotherhood taking power. Conceivably Ghali will beat the charge of specifically
funneling the state’s money to Ahmad Ezz. But as a key architect of Egypt’s
privatization programs he cannot possibly have been unaware that he was
facilitating a system that enabled the Ezz steel empire while simultaneously
destroying Egypt’s educational and health care systems.
The Egyptian army controls a range of businesses, ranging from factories to
hotels [EPA]
The last time I encountered the word “technocrat” was in Naomi Klein’s book The
Shock Doctrine — a searing indictment of neoliberalism which argues that the
free-market fundamentalism promoted by economist Milton Friedman (and immensely
influential in the United States) is predicated on restructuring economies in
the wake of catastrophic disruptions because normally functioning societies and
political systems would never vote for it. Disruptions can be natural or
man-made, such as … revolutions.
The chapters in The Shock Doctrine on Poland, Russia, and South Africa make
interesting reading in the context of Egypt’s revolution. In each case when
governments (communist or apartheid) collapsed, “technocrats” were brought in to
help run countries that were suddenly without functional governments, and create
the institutional infrastructure for their successors. The technocrats always
seemed to have dispensed a form of what Klein calls “shock therapy” — the
imposition of sweeping privatization programs before dazed populations could
consider their options and potentially vote for less ideologically pure options
that are in their own interests.
The last great wave of revolutions occurred in 1989. The governments that were
collapsing then were communist, and the replacement in that “shock moment” of
one extreme economic system with its opposite seemed predictable and to many
even natural.
One of the things that make the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions potentially
important on a global scale is that they took place in states that were already
neoliberalised. The complete failure of neoliberalsm to deliver “human
well-being” to a large majority of Egyptians was one of the prime causes of the
revolution, at least in the sense of helping to prime millions of people who
were not connected to social media to enter the streets on the side of the
pro-democracy activists.
But the January 25th Revolution is still a “shock moment.” We hear calls to
bring in the technocrats in order to revive a dazed economy; and we are told
every day that the situation is fluid, and that there is a power vacuum in the
wake of not just the disgraced NDP, but also the largely discredited legal
opposition parties, which played no role whatsoever in the January 25th
Revolution. In this context the generals are probably happy with all the talk
about reclaiming the money stolen by the regime, because the flip side of that
coin is a related current of worry about the state of the economy. The notion
that the economy is in ruins — tourists staying away, investor confidence
shattered, employment in the construction sector at a standstill, many
industries and businesses operating at far less than full capacity — could well
be the single most dangerous rationale for imposing cosmetic reforms that leave
the incestuous relation between governance and business intact.
Or worse, if the pro-democracy movement lets itself be stampeded by the
“economic ruin” narrative, structures could be put in place by “technocrats”
under the aegis of the military transitional government that would tie the
eventual civilian government into actually quickening the pace of privatization.
Ideologues, including those of the neoliberal stripe, are prone to a witchcraft
mode of thinking: if the spell does not work, it is not the fault of the magic,
but rather the fault of the shaman who performed the spell. In other words, the
logic could be that it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but
the faulty application of neoliberalism.
Trial balloons for this witchcraft narrative are already being floated outside
of Egypt. The New York Times ran an article on February 17th casting the
military as a regressive force opposed to privatization and seeking a return to
Nasserist statism. The article pits the ostensibly “good side” of the Mubarak
regime (privatization programs) against bad old Arab socialism, completely
ignoring the fact that while the system of military privilege may preserve some
public-sector resources transferred from the civilian economy under pressure of
IMF structural adjustment programs, the empire of the generals is hardly limited
to a ring-fenced quasi-underground public sector.
Officers were also rewarded with private-sector perks; civilian
political/business empires mixed public and private roles to the point that what
was government and what was private were indistinguishable; both the military
and civilians raked in rents from foreign aid. The generals may well prefer a
new round of neoliberal witchcraft. More privatization will simply free up
assets and rents that only the politically connected (including the generals)
can acquire. Fixing a failed neoliberal state by more stringent applications of
neoliberalism could be the surest way for them to preserve their privileges.
A neoliberal fix would, however, be a tragedy for the pro-democracy movement.
The demands of the protesters were clear and largely political: remove the
regime; end the emergency law; stop state torture; hold free and fair elections.
But implicit in these demands from the beginning (and decisive by the end) was
an expectation of greater social and economic justice. Social media may have
helped organise the kernel of a movement that eventually overthrew Mubarak, but
a large element of what got enough people into the streets to finally overwhelm
the state security forces was economic grievances that are intrinsic to
neoliberalism. These grievances cannot be reduced to grinding poverty, for
revolutions are never carried out by the poorest of the poor. It was rather the
erosion of a sense that some human spheres should be outside the logic of
markets. Mubarak’s Egypt degraded schools and hospitals, and guaranteed grossly
inadequate wages, particularly in the ever-expanding private sector. This was
what turned hundreds of dedicated activists into millions of determined
protestors.
If the January 25th revolution results in no more than a retrenchment of
neoliberalism, or even its intensification, those millions will have been
cheated. The rest of the world could be cheated as well. Egypt and Tunisia are
the first nations to carry out successful revolutions against neoliberal
regimes. Americans could learn from Egypt. Indeed, there are signs that they
already are doing so. Wisconsin teachers protesting against their governor’s
attempts to remove the right to collective bargaining have carried signs
equating Mubarak with their governor. Egyptians might well say to America
‘uqbalak (may you be the next).
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/201122414315249621.html