Rewriting History In Real Time: Egypt

If the Arab Spring can say to have "started" anywhere, it was in Tunisia on December 18, 2010 in rural Sidi Bouzid when a 26 year old vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, gravely insulted by an authoritarian policewoman, set himself on fire, igniting weeks of demonstrations that spread across the country and unseated Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali after 23 years of repressive rule. Protests spread rapidly to Algeria, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Syria, Bahrain, Libya and Egypt. Less than a month after the protests started Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and one month after that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned following 18 days of massive protests, ending 3 decades as president/dictator. Last week Tunisia had a freely contested presidential election and will likely form a broad coalition government after next month's runoffs.

That isn't the how things turned out in Egypt, which has fallen under the iron grip of a violent, repressive military dictatorship. And earlier today, that dictatorship utterly rehabilitated the 86 year old Hosni Mubarak who had been convicted of every kind of corruption under the sun and for the murder of 846 Egyptians. A pack of Mubarak political and business cronies and his two crooked sons, Gamal and Alaa, also saw all their charges thrown out. Mubarak's life sentence was reversed-- counter-revolution in action, courtesy of the new dictator, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who had been Mubarak's equivalent of the head of the CIA.

Commenting on the verdict, deputy Head of the Conference Party Salah Hasaballah said that “Egyptians are more concerned with the political future of their country than with the past."

Hasaballah told Ahram Online that Mubarak had given a lot to Egypt during his presidency and “after two revolutions and after a new elected president, our priorities are to focus on how to build the new Egypt.”

Political analyst Mohamed El-Agaty of the Arab Forum for Alternatives thinktank told Ahram Online that he expects that the political backlash to the verdict to be small and to pass quickly.

El-Agaty argued that the state and media have been propagating a state of "panic" that will not allow for any mobilisation against the verdict.

"It was also clear from the start that this case will go nowhere… there are no proper laws to fight corruption…you cant put them [former regime figures] on trial using their own laws," he opined.

Head of the liberal Constitution Party Hala Shukrallah told Ahram Online that politically things "are going back to how they were before the January 25 revolution."

"The old political order is being reinstated… even the figures of the old regime are resurfacing," she said.

The decision more or less acquits the entire regime of the crimes that sparked the revolution in Egypt in the first place. Tahrir Square was closed down immediately. Today's NY Times points out that "state-run and pro-government media now routinely denounce the pro-democracy activists who led the 2011 uprising as a 'fifth column' out to undermine the state. Some of the most prominent activists are in prison, and the Islamists who dominated the elections are now jailed as terrorists." Earlier this month prosecutor's asked for the death sentence for the elected president, Mohammed Morsi, who was overthrown and put in prison by the military junta. His supporters are still being imprisoned and murdered by the authorities.

Too late to rehabilitate Gaddafi... but something tells me Bashar al Assad's public image is going to undergo quite the transformation in coming months. As for Egypt... the revolution is over. Better luck next time. The muderous "king" of Bahrain, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifah, called Mubarak to congratulate him. Presumably the two of them had a good laugh over the fake Bahraini elections underway now.

Egyptian Update... From Bad To Worse

From the very first, the coup leaders prioritized the systematic intimidation-- not to mention murder-- of members of the independent media. Independent reporting is the last thing the Egyptian security state and their American backers wanted. As we pointed out before, they had their story down and that is the only story they want out there. Even though their story is patently absurd. And killing members of the media isn't where it ends. Now they're even hauling Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading neo-liberal and until last week the "vice president" of the junta's puppet regime and the best known face of the coup to the outside world, in front of a court. He faces trial on the charge of "betrayal of trust" and could get 3 years in prison. The junta is furious because they think his high profile resignation "gave the wrong impression to the international community" that they were using excessive force against the protesters. If they're putting a figure like ElBaradei on trial, this thing has spiraled out of control and is heading into an even worse confrontation.

Without the independent media that the coup leaders have tried to silence, we wouldn't know anything about what's really happening in Egypt except for the propaganda from both sides and the spin from untrustworthy U.S. corporate media. The best summation right now is available in a story from Wednesday's Guardian. It's not very optimistic.

The police lieutenant put his boots up on the desk and casually reloaded his machine gun. "The problem is," he said, nodding at a television that was live-broadcasting the siege of a nearby mosque, "these people are terrorists."

It was mid-afternoon last Saturday, and for nearly 24 hours, the lieutenant's colleagues in the police and army had surrounded the al-Fath mosque in central Cairo, inside which were hiding a few hundred supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi. On screen, it seemed like it was the soldiers doing the terrorising. But for the lieutenant, the terrorists were the ones on the inside. They had bombs, the policeman said: they deserved what they got. And a mob of locals agreed. "The police and the people," chanted a crowd that had gathered to lynch the fugitives as they exited the mosque, "are one hand."

It was a wretched scene-- but one that has become familiar in Egypt. Here was yet another symptom of the widespread hatred of the Muslim Brotherhood, which in the space of a year has gone from being Egypt's most powerful and most popular political group – to fugitives. Here, also, was brutal violence. A shortage of humanity. And above all: scant regard for the truth.

For those inside the mosque were not terrorists. An armed man may have later been filmed on top of the minaret, but the mosque's imam claimed access to it was controlled by security forces who had by that point breached parts of the building. For certain, when I visited the mosque the day before-- shortly before troops surrounded it-- it mainly housed doctors and corpses. After the police fired on nearby Morsi supporters-- who had gathered to oppose not just the 3 July overthrow of the group's scion, Mohamed Morsi, but also the massacre of hundreds of Morsi backers last Wednesday-- the mosque had been turned into a makeshift field hospital to deal with the fallout of Egypt's fourth mass killing in six weeks. "After they finish outside, [the police] will come in here," a doctor, Mahmoud el-Hout, said, "and arrest all the wounded." He wasn't far wrong, with only women and the dead later granted a safe exit.

Inside and outside the mosque, then, two parallel realities existed-- much as they do across Egypt as a whole. The country is largely polarised between, on the one hand, those who believe their livelihoods and way of life were threatened under Morsi's incompetent and divisive presidency, and that his Muslim Brotherhood are violent traitors who must be destroyed-- and, on the other, the Brotherhood and its dwindling Islamist allies, who remained camped in Cairo's streets after Morsi's ousting to defend his democratic legitimacy.

The split is not even. Millions marched on 30 June to call for Morsi's departure, and the vast majority of the country is firmly behind the army who deposed him days later. But perhaps less than 25% of Egyptians now have strong Islamist leanings, if Morsi's quarter of the vote in the first round of last year's presidential elections is anything to go by.

Here and there, activists prominent from the 2011 uprising that toppled Hosni Mubarak reject this binary division and express disgust at both the new fascistic army-backed regime and the authoritarianism of Morsi's own government. Army rule may be counter-revolutionary, they argue, accompanied as it is by a return to favour of figures, institutions and policies that buttressed the Mubarak era. But so too was Morsi, who tried to co-opt corrupt state institutions, rather than reform them-- and who had little interest in building consensus, reigning in police brutality, or increasing social freedoms beyond those of his once-oppressed Islamist allies.

Yet few share this nuance. Most so-called liberals have thrown their lot in with the army, since the current environment has forced almost everyone into a with-or-against-us mindset. When Mohamed ElBaradei, Egypt's leading liberal politician, resigned as interim vice-president in protest at last Wednesday's massacre of Islamists, he was roundly attacked-- even by former allies. Sayed Bedawy, leader of Egypt's oldest liberal party, told a breakfast show that he didn't want to call ElBaradei a traitor-- before strongly implying that he was. "Mohamed ElBaradei is a son of a bitch," summarised one woman in the mob outside the al-Fath mosque on Saturday.

Haranguing western media's lack of support for the army's crackdown, an otherwise measured psychologist recently told me that he felt Muslim Brotherhood members-- many of whom have obediently remained in the streets on the say-so of their leaders-- were suffering from some sort of collective psychosis. Yet if the Brothers are delusional, then it seems only fair to apply the same rhetoric to their opponents, who seem to be under an equally debilitating spell.

Spurred on by a jingoistic and uninquiring media (some Egyptian television presenters cried with joy on air the day Morsi was overthrown) much of Egyptian society is convinced that the former president's supporters are wholly a terrorist force bent on making Egypt part of some wider Islamic state. "We are not against any protesters-- but we are against terrorists. We have a war with terrorists," says Mohamed Khamis, a spokesman for Tamarod, the grassroots campaign that successfully encouraged millions to march against Morsi in June.

Khamis said he accompanied the police last Wednesday, when security forces murdered hundreds at two six-week-old pro-Morsi campsites. "We asked the police officers to shoot them with pistols and the police officers refused to shoot them," Khamis counter-claimed. "Really, that was what happened. So I am surprised people died. How come so many people died then? I think it was the Brotherhood who killed them-- not the army or police."

But while the Brotherhood is no stranger to violence-- not least during clashes last December outside the presidential palace when Brotherhood members attacked anti-Morsi protesters-- their recent involvement in acts of aggression, to be fair, remains unproved. Certainly, jihadi insurgents outside the Brotherhood's command-- but nevertheless angered by Morsi's removal-- have mounted a terrorist campaign in the lawless Sinai peninsula during the past six weeks. Twenty-five police conscripts were murdered in cold blood by Sinai insurgents on Monday. Undeniably, Morsi sympathisers of some form have attacked dozens of police stations since Wednesday's massacre-- and desecrated at least 30 Christian churches, following prolonged sectarian incitement from some Morsi supporters at Brotherhood-led sit-ins over the past month. And if the crackdown against the Brotherhood and its allies continues, it is hard to see how more extremist violence can be avoided.

But the central charges-- that most Brotherhood supporters are violent, that their two huge protest camps were simply overgrown terrorist cells, and that their brutal suppression was justified and even restrained-- are not supported by facts. My experience during six weeks of reporting at Rabaa al-Adawiya in Cairo suggested the vast majority of protesters there-- including many women and children-- were peaceful. Many may have failed to face up to Morsi's own incompetence and autocratic governance, and some may have turned too blind an eye to sectarian attacks recently completed in their name. Others have actively incited them. On the day of the coup, an imam from Minya, in southern (or "Upper") Egypt, ominously said backstage at Rabaa: "It's going to be a civil war-- and it's going to be very bad in particular for the church in Upper Egypt, because everyone knows they have spearheaded this campaign against the Islamic project." Anti-Morsi sentiment stems from both Muslims and Christians, but some members of the Brotherhood have disgracefully scapegoated and attacked the latter.

But many Rabaa protesters have simple, sincere reasons for their anger: they are upset at the theft of their votes, and fearful of a return to the anti-Islamist oppression of the Mubarak era. "We all voted for democracy," housewife Aza Galal told me last week, six-year-old son Saif in tow. "And then, because some people gathered in Tahrir Square [on 30 June], they put our votes in the rubbish bins." Morsi's government hardly promoted the wider democratic values on which a successful democracy relies-- but Galal's anger is understandable: Morsi or his allies won five consecutive votes between 2011 and 2012.

"If we leave the square, it will be worse than the 90s," added Suzanne Abdel Qadir, referring to Mubarak's treatment of Islamists. "We're back to the days of oppression under Mubarak. If we go home, then the fight is over."

The pro-regime propaganda comes right from the top. On Sunday, Egypt's state information service published a public memorandum to foreign correspondents in Egypt, rebuking western media for failing to acknowledge that the 3 July coup reflected the will of the people, and for being overly sympathetic to the Brotherhood-- apparently unable to distinguish between support for Morsi's disastrous and autocratic presidency, and criticism for the flagrant human rights abuses of his successors. Among many other false claims, it justified the siege of two mosques used by pro-Morsi doctors last week to house, respectively, a makeshift morgue and a field hospital-- on the grounds that they had, in fact, harboured terrorists.

As one journalist noted, such claims would have been amusing had they not further endangered the lives of foreign journalists in Egypt (several of whom have been either assaulted, detained, or even killed last week while trying to cover Egyptian news)-- and had they not flown in the face of the truth. At the Iman mosque, where hundreds of dead bodies were taken from the site of one of the massacres on Thursday, there were no insurgents-- just corpses. Filling the floor of the mosque in its entirety, many of them had already begun to rot, and one was so badly burnt that it looked less like a body and more like a blackened tree stump. Doctors said it was the remains of a boy in his early teens-- and an old woman squatted beside it in the belief it was her lost relative. But only its sunken eye-sockets and internal organs identified the corpse as that of a human.

The next day, at the al-Fath mosque, there were again no obvious terrorists, but simply unarmed and injured protesters, many of whom were bleeding to death. One man, Mohamed Said, was carried in, barely conscious-- a gunshot wound to his back-- and leant against a pillar. Then his head slumped, and doctors rolled his eyelids shut.

Egypt has been awash with cruelty-- from the desecration of Christian churches by Islamists, to the burning of corpses at Rabaa. But perhaps the most heartbreaking sight has been the street outside the Zeinhom morgue, Cairo's main mortuary. Due to the massacres, morgue staff, already severely stretched, struggle to deal with the unprecedented number of bodies arriving for autopsies. As a result, dozens of grieving families have clogged the street outside, their dead relatives rotting in the heat. A curfew is in place in Cairo, but families dare not leave the queue until their relatives are admitted to the morgue-- decomposing though they may be. "Curse the curfew," said Atef Fatih, whose brother was shot dead last week. "We don't care about it. We will wait until they let the body inside."

Some pile the coffins high with slabs of ice to stop the rot. But the ice melts fast, leaving the ground a sludgy mess of mud, blood and corpses. To add to the injustice, many families report that the police have refused to sign off their corpses as murder. Humanity and truth are in short supply.

And nor are they the only virtues to have been sacrificed in Egypt. So too have logic and common sense. Amid the rhetoric about Islamic terrorism, few seem to recognise that most of the terrorising has in fact come from the state. The government justifies the state-sponsored violence as a necessary step towards avoiding civil war. But it does not seem to realise that its provocative brutality is the thing that makes such a horrific outcome more likely-- further alienating and radicalising Islamists, and pushing some towards violence. (One commentator suggests that this may, in fact, be the state's desired outcome-- a heightening of extremist violence, which gives the government more cover to increase their powers.) Similarly, few seem to have seen the irony in appointing a new cabinet whose primary objective is to fix Egypt's economy, but which has since given its full backing to the state massacres that have further frightened away the very investors on which a revived economy would depend.

With the state seemingly unwilling to reign in its violence, the Brotherhood unlikely to curtail its street presence, and unwilling or unable to prevent its allies and harder-line followers from violence, the future looks utterly bleak. Here and there, there are moments of fleeting dark humour. Egypt's leading private broadsheet, al-Masry al-Youm, published last week an interview with a Republican "senator", one Maurice Bonamigo, a man very approving of Egypt's controversial new domestic direction-- but one who also sadly later emerged to have never been elected to higher office.

There have also been moments of unexpected personal kindness. They range from the soldier photographed aiding a grieving woman during last Wednesday's massacres to the police lieutenant who, putting his machine gun to one side and switching off his television, handed me a carton of guava juice-- bringing to an end a two-hour-long detention at the hands of both police officers and an angry mob of vigilantes. "You are welcome in Egypt," the lieutenant said, and smiled.

I suppose if he mentioned the fact that the Egyptian military has a sordid history of burning down Coptic churches to blame it's enemies and curry favor in the West, he wouldn't be as welcome next time. Meanwhile, Obama seems pretty freaked out by how rapidly the whole project has-- as these things tend to-- careened out of control. The New Yorker's John Cassidy asserts that there is, after all, a limit to Obama's pragmatism. "In the 2008 campaign," he reminds us, "Obama talked about reshaping the international architecture, defending democratic values, and ridding the world of things like climate change and nuclear weapons. On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, in 2009, he spoke of 'bending history in the direction of justice.'" In reality, though, he's been less transformational and more of a pragmatic transactionalist.

Nowhere has Obama’s caution been more evident than in the Middle East, where his rhetorical embrace of the Arab Spring, combined with a reluctance to get involved in messy situations, has outraged interventionists on the left and the right. In Syria, the Administration had, until recently, more or less stood by as the Assad régime killed many thousands of people in a brutal effort to put down an insurrection. Even the recent decision to provide small arms to the rebels was a modest move: few analysts think that it will be sufficient to alter the course of the civil war. Now the focus is Egypt, where a violent crackdown continues in the wake of a coup. According to reports over the weekend, the military-backed government is now considering designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and banning it completely.

Obama’s refusal to truly break with the Egyptian generals who now control the country, and, in particular, his decision not to suspend U.S. military aid, is being criticized on both sides of the political divide. Last week, after security forces broke up a Muslim Brotherhood-led sit-in protesting the coup, at the cost of more than six hundred lives, the Republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who travelled to Cairo two weeks ago in a vain attempt to persuade the authorities to refrain from violence, said that the military-installed government was “taking Egypt down a dark path, one that the United States cannot and should not travel with them.” Senator Rand Paul tweeted, “President Obama says he ‘deplores violence in Egypt,’ but U.S. foreign aid continues to help pay for it.” Speaking on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Democratic Senator Jack Reed, of Rhode Island, joined the calls for a cutoff in aid, saying that the Egyptian government had used the unpopularity of Mohamed Morsi’s administration as a license to restore the old military régime.

Obama's response has been criticized as too tepid, but Cassidy insists his pragmatic approach has been "the self-interested approach that the United States had adopted throughout the Middle East for decades until George W. Bush blundered into Iraq." That pragmatic approach tolerates-- to put it mildly-- "autocratic and repressive régimes that agree to promote Western interests... [I]t is Egypt’s official recognition of Israel, and its maintenance of peace with its eastern neighbor, that explains why, for years, it was the second largest recipient of U.S. aid. (Following the misadventures of the past decade, it has fallen to fifth place, behind Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, and Pakistan.) And it is Egypt’s supportive role in the 'War on Terror' that explains why so many figures in the U.S. defense establishment continue to have warm feelings towards the country’s security forces."

The real test of a pragmatic President is whether his policies hold up over time. Looking back on the first Iraq war and comparing it to the still unfolding disaster that followed the second one, most people would agree that George H. W. Bush and Scowcroft made the right decision in leaving Saddam in power and adopting a policy of containment.

In Syria and Egypt, it is too early to reach a definitive judgement on Obama’s policies... If [Sisi and the junta] make the state of emergency permanent, ban the Muslim Brotherhood, and restore the Mubarak era, Obama’s reluctance will look worse than craven. Even then, though, some realists would argue that as long as the Egyptian government sticks with the Camp David accord and opposes Islamic fundamentalism, it is in the interests of the United States to support it.

I don’t think that Obama would go that far. His hope appears to be that once the current crackdown ends, the government will abandon the state of emergency, free most of the people it has rounded up, and set in train a process for rewriting the constitution (one that was endorsed in a referendum, mind you), engaging some of the religious parties, and holding parliamentary and presidential elections. At this stage, it looks like a rather forlorn hope.

And then there's the whole "innocence" of Hosni Mubarak thing.

Egypt's former autocrat Hosni Mubarak was flown from jail on Thursday in a symbolic victory for an army-dominated old order that has overthrown and imprisoned his freely elected Islamist successor.

A blue-and-white helicopter took Mubarak from Cairo's Tora prison, where scores of his supporters had gathered to hail his release. He was flown to a military hospital in the nearby southern suburb of Maadi, officials said.

"He protected the country," said Lobna Mohamed, a housewife in the crowd of Mubarak well-wishers. "He is a good man, but we want (Abdel Fattah) Sisi now," she said, referring to the army commander who overthrew Islamist Mohamed Mursi on July 3.

The Arab Spring... Cancelled?

A few weeks ago millions of Spaniards took to the streets as Spain followed German orders to wreck the country's public education system in the name of Austerity. And this weekend, even with Spain's right-wing pro-Austerity prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, rejecting, at least temporarily the IMF's insistence that workers' wages be cut even further and sales taxes be increased, there were severe anti-Austerity demonstrations in Madrid, Barcelona and several other Spanish cities. People know Rajoy's in the pockets of the banksters and the Germans and that he'll look to implement more Austerity measures as soon as he can get away with it... as the right-wing Economist cheered Friday More Pain For Spain. "Market pressure [predatory banksters] on Spain seems likely to intensify."

Today Greece voted on whether to stick with a German/bankster-demanded Austerity regime or to go it alone and reject the brutal forces of that have impoverished Greek working families and are leading to national dissolution, anarchy and, inevitably, a military backlash. It was another inconclusive round of voting. New Democracy (their version of the GOP) wound up with 29.66% of the vote and Syriza got 26.89%. The Greek version of the Blue Dogs, PASOK, got 12.28. So it looks like another deadlock. (The Nazi Party, Golden Dawn took 6.92% and will have 18 deputies in Parliament.) Krugman took a stab at what happens next:

So it appears that the governing coalition in Greece has pulled out a narrow victory-- winning only a minority of votes, but getting a narrow majority in the parliament thanks to the 50-seat bonus New Democracy gets for coming in first.

So they will now have the ability to continue pursuing an unworkable policy. Yay!

Joe Wiesenthal tells us that there’s a meme in Greece to the effect that Syriza didn’t really want to win, because it would rather see the current government flail some more. Conversely, establishment types should actually be dismayed by this outcome: if current policies fail completely, which seems almost a given, and Greece exits the euro anyway, which seems highly likely, the entire Greek center will end up discredited; better, in a way, to be able to blame the radicals.

And I gather I’m not the only one thinking along these lines; Business Insider also reports hints that Pasok, which has suffered terribly from its identification with failing policies, might not continue in the coalition unless Syriza is also brought on board-- which then raises the question, why would Syriza do that?

The debacle rolls on.

Egypt already has it's military backlash as the generals have let the kids know that fun and games are over and that everything's going back to normal now (sans the Mubarek family). Let's take a look at Esam Al-Amin's latest writing on what's happening in Egypt, alongside this weekend's presidential election. June 4 he wrote a post called The Charade is Over-- Sacrificing Mubarek to Save His Regime; a week later: Back to Square One In Egypt (about reviving a moribund, once-so-inspiring revolution); and this weekend, with a gaggle of Mubarek-appointed judges, dissolving Parliament, The True Face of Egypt's Military. "The masks," he writes, "dropped. The cards are shown. For over a year, Egyptians have wondered who was leading the efforts to frustrate and obliterate their nascent revolution, or what was dubbed in the local media as the 'third party' or the 'hidden bandit.' But the mystery is no more."

It was none other than the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), the same body that took power from deposed president Hosni Mubarak under the guise of leading the transitional period towards democracy. It was a masterful work of political art.

The final act was on display on Thursday, June 14, 2012, when Egypt's High Constitutional Court (HCC) not only ruled against banning the military's candidate and Mubarak's last Prime Minister, Gen. Ahmad Shafiq, but also dissolved parliament, the only institution that represented the political will of the people in post-revolutionary Egypt. It is important to note that all the justices on the HCC were appointed by Mubarak, and that most if not all are considered regime loyalists.

Incidentally, last March, Parliamentary Speaker and MB leader, Dr. Saad Katatni, said that he was told, in the presence of SCAF's deputy commander, Gen. Sami Anan, by SCAF's appointed Prime Minister Dr. Kamal Ganzouri, that the order to dissolve the parliament was in the drawer but would come at the appropriate time.


This dramatic announcement was therefore followed by the parliament passing a law banning most of the former senior officials of the Mubarak regime (including Shafiq) from politics on the grounds of corrupting Egypt's political life and institutions for decades. Nevertheless, Shafiq was shortly reinstated by the Presidential Elections Commission (PEC) even though it had no jurisdiction on the matter. It is perhaps important to note that the head of the PEC is also the Chief Justice of the HCC. He declared on the same day that the parliamentary elections' law (that resulted in the victory of the Islamic parties, led by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), winning 75 percent of the seats) was unconstitutional. It was the same law that several of the same justices assured all political parties last summer that it passed constitutional muster.

With this brazen act of thwarting the political will of the Egyptian people, the emerging Islamic and revolutionary parties have now been totally stripped of their political ascendancy, less than five months after their rise to power. This was accomplished simply by utilizing the institutions of the deep state crafted by a regime that was controlled for decades by corrupt officials, senior military officers, and intelligence agencies. Further, a Mubarak-era military man is now on the verge of being "elected" president using the assorted tools of the democratic process.

One of the major demands of the revolution was to end the three-decade old emergency law that allowed the security agencies and the military to arbitrarily arrest and abuse the civil and human rights of any activist at will. But under tremendous public pressure throughout last year, these laws were repealed at the end of last May. But what was kicked out of the door crawled back through the window. Egypt's Justice Minister announced this week, less than two weeks after the repeal went into effect, that he was empowering all military officers and intelligence personnel to arrest indefinitely any person deemed a security threat to public order.

In a transparently coordinated fashion, before parliament could react to this shameless challenge to the essence of the revolution, it was dissolved within 24 hours by the High Court. Further, within minutes of the decision to dissolve the parliament, hundreds of military and security officers occupied its buildings, preventing any member to enter or even clear their offices. In short, Egypt has come a full circle, the transition to democracy was aborted, the process hijacked, and its remarkable revolution put on life support.

The final act of quietly killing the hopes of Egypt's youth and the aspirations of its people is coming this Sunday when the presidential elections end in the declaration of a Shafiq presidency. ... Meanwhile, Shafiq, who does not deny his admiration for Mubarak and considers him a role model, has brazenly declared that his first state visit would be to the U.S. in order to signal that he was its preferred candidate. He also said that he would not only keep the peace treaty with Israel, but would also deepen it.

If you were planning a trip to see the Pyramids this year... I'd switch to the Mayan heartland in Guatemala or the Yucatán. I'm not ready to predict that Egypt is going to go down the road Syria is on, but I wouldn't predict that it won't either. Or how about Wisconsin. It all seems pretty peaceable there now, doesn't it? You bet. Democrats more-or-less accept that voters, no matter how pissed off they are at Scott Walker's Austerity Regime, do NOT like using recalls and Republicans, no matter how outraged they are that the Democrats won control of the state Senate and can now stop that Austerity regime from going any further, more-or-less accept that the days they could ram anything they wanted through the state legislature are gone. So... it's still safe to visit Hayward's National Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame or the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, or the world's largest six pack in La Crosse or even the monsters of Rhinelander, the seven-feet long, fanged Hodags.

Is The U.S. #1 In Insider Trading? Egypt Makes A Move

Romania beats us out for the worst hunger among children, but just barely

We all want this country to be great-- although over on the plutocratic right, they define "this country" in more exclusionary terms than normal people do. I don't think rightists, for example-- and particularly not the Paul Ryan/Ayn Rand variety-- give two hoots that the U.S. now ranks second worst in childhood poverty of any countries in the developed world. And they count Romania-- the one we beat-- as part of the "developed world," which is kind of spurious to begin with. Even economic "basketcases" like Greece, Spain, Portugal, Poland and Ireland are doing better, in fact much better, than we are. (At least "we" in the inclusive meaning. I'm sure they're not doing as well as the Romney family and the families of Romney donors.)

Out of the 35 wealthiest countries analyzed by UNICEF, only one, Romania, had a child poverty rate above the 23 percent rate recorded in the U.S. The rate is based on the definition of relative poverty used by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which states a child is living in poverty if he or she is growing up in a household where disposable income, when adjusted for family size and compensation, is less than 50 percent of the median disposable income for the country in question.

Over in the U.K., which is also doing quite a bit better than the U.S. in this area, The Independent pointed out that "The Government's spending cuts will have a 'catastrophic' effect on British children... endangering their future health, education and employment."

I could be wrong about this-- I could be looking at it through the lens of youthful idealism-- but when I was a kid, one place where the U.S. seemed to have excelled beyond most other countries was in its abhorrence of corruption. And when I was a kid, I started tramping around the world. I remember marveling at how incredibly corrupt day to day life was in Asia. You even had to bargain with the stamp seller at post offices in India! Later I realized the corruption in the Third World was more up front and out in the open. Here it is more hidden and quasi-subtle, or, at least, less in your face. I've always said the richer someone is the more likely they are to be a grasping, avaricious crook. So why not rich countries too? Is that what we're #1 in? Corruption?


Let's take a very easy-to-understand aspect of corruption: insider trading. Here's how the SEC defines it (officially):

Illegal insider trading refers generally to buying or selling a security, in breach of a fiduciary duty or other relationship of trust and confidence, while in possession of material, nonpublic information about the security. Insider trading violations may also include "tipping" such information, securities trading by the person "tipped," and securities trading by those who misappropriate such information.
Examples of insider trading cases that have been brought by the SEC are cases against:

• Corporate officers, directors, and employees who traded the corporation's securities after learning of significant, confidential corporate developments;

• Friends, business associates, family members, and other "tippees" of such officers, directors, and employees, who traded the securities after receiving such information;

• Employees of law, banking, brokerage and printing firms who were given such information to provide services to the corporation whose securities they traded;

• Government employees who learned of such information because of their employment by the government; and

• Other persons who misappropriated, and took advantage of, confidential information from their employers.

Because insider trading undermines investor confidence in the fairness and integrity of the securities markets, the SEC has treated the detection and prosecution of insider trading violations as one of its enforcement priorities.

Members of Congress, for example, shouldn't be doing it, especially not Members who are on Committees dealing with non-public information. But that's exactly what House Financial Services Committee Chairman Spencer Bachus was routinely doing until he was called out on it-- he won reelection is a backward. low-info Alabama district anyway-- and that's exactly what House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon has been doing. McKeon isn't representing a backward Alabama district, however, and he's likely to be defeated in his reelection bid in November. The news on Insider Trading this week didn't come from corrupt congressmen like Bachus and McKeon. Bachus's case is still pending before the House Ethics Committee-- and McKeon is also up on charges in front of that committee, although most likely on other unrelated corruption charges involved with bribe-taking from Countrywide. The big news on insider trading came from Egypt, where it's become convenient for the ruling elite to crack down on two of Hosni Mubarek's sons.

Prosecutors charged Gamal and Alaa Mubarak, the imprisoned sons of former President Hosni Mubarak, with insider stock trading on Wednesday, just two days before both men are expected to hear the verdict in a criminal trial charging them with corruption during their father’s three decades of rule.

State television reported that the Mubarak brothers and seven other men, including the co-chief executives of Egypt’s most prominent investment bank, were charged with obtaining over $400 million through corrupt practices in relation to the 2007 sale of Al Watany Bank. Gamal and Alaa have been in prison since last spring.

The new charges against Mr. Mubarak’s children, once untouchable jet-setters, are another episode in the former ruling family’s fall from grace. Gamal Mubarak, 48, was once widely expected to inherit the presidency after his father’s death. Alaa, 49, is a once-prominent businessman who kept a low public profile.

And when will it become convenient from the ruling elite here to prosecute such crimes? Never... well, never unless the current ruling elite is replaced and it can happen before a new ruling elite is corrupted and gets ossified.

Winds Of Change Blowing In Egypt-- But Not Everyone Is Thrilled With The Direction

Last week in Tahrir Square- ©2011 Reese Erlich

How long will it take for Fox News to find this article in the English-language edition of the Egyptian newspaper Al Masry Al Youm and then start yowling about who lost Egypt... and it won't be McCain or Lieberman they turn their guns on.

Muslim Brotherhood Sheikh Hazem Abu Ismail announced his intention to run in Egypt’s upcoming presidential elections.

He said that if elected he would implement Islamic sharia law and cancel the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

...Abu Ismail said that his platform revolves around Islam, while "Mohamed ElBaradei, Amr Moussa, and Hamdeen Sabahi, the liberal candidates, will be unable to present a clear vision” for the country.

“If I could apply sharia in Egypt, all people, including non-Muslims, would applaud me four years later,” said Abu Ismail.

The sheikh said that no current presidential candidate represents the Egyptian people.

“We seek to apply Islamic law, but those who don’t want it prefer cabarets, alcohol, dancers and prostitution, as the implementation of Islamic law will prohibit women to appear naked in movies and on beaches,” Abu Ismail added.

...Concerning the peace treaty with Israel, he said, “The Camp David peace treaty is insulting to the Egyptian people, so it must be canceled, and I will do my best to convince people to cancel it."

Our old friend Reese Erlich is in Cairo this week, on assignment for a number of public radio networks and blogging for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. He's been writing about the struggle to determine what kind of new government Egyptians will create post-Mubarak. Last week, on his first day in Egypt he "lit out for Tahrir Square."

Tahrir has taken on mythic status in the Arab world, but it’s really just a large traffic circle surrounded by high rise buildings. At one point several million people filled the square, symbolically stopping the government, and leading to the overthrow of the autocratic regime of Hosni Mubarak.

On this day, however, only a few thousand rallied here, chanting slogans against the military government that took over from Mubarak, and demanding release of political prisoners. Dozens had been arrested on May 15 for protesting in front of the Israeli Embassy. They were tried in military, not civilian, courts. Under popular pressure, one week later, almost all the protesters were given one-year suspended sentences and released. The military also released over a hundred demonstrators from previous protests.

And that’s the contradiction facing today’s Egypt. The old dictatorship has been replaced with a military council that carries out many of the same domestic and foreign policies as Mubarak, according to the Tahrir activists. It arbitrarily arrests dissidents, and still engages in abuse and torture. Tahrir activists want the military out of power as soon as possible.

But many other Egyptians support the military as a force for stability. They see developments in Syria and Libya, where most of the military supports the old regime, and praise the Egyptian Army for forestalling a similar disaster.

“We should give the government some time,” truck driver Ahmad Fathi tells me. “We shouldn’t have sit-ins and demonstrations every day. We need time for things to get back to normal.”

Tahrir activists admit they’ve got a lot of organizing to do if they are to have a significant impact on the wider public. “We need 5 million in the streets to make change,” Tahrir Square leader Tarek Shalaby tells me.

Everyone is scrambling to prepare for parliamentary elections now scheduled for sometime in September. Presidential elections may be held two months later, although no date has been set. Tahrir Square activists are hoping to consolidate their gains by backing leftist candidates. But so far the conservative Muslim Brotherhood and elements from Mubarak’s old party, the National Democratic Party, seem better organized.

Meanwhile, workers continue wildcat strikes demanding higher wages. Violent conflicts have broken out between extremist Muslims and Coptic Christians. And activists have called for a mass mobilization against the military government to be held in Tahrir on May 27.

The revolution is far from over.

This morning Reese sent us an update from Cairo as he prepares to set out for his next stop: Gaza via the newly-opened Rafah crossing. He writes that "for many young activists Egypt’s revolution isn’t over" and describes a large Tahrir Square rally he covered-- over 100,000 people-- Friday. It had been called by many of the same people who had called the rallies and demonstrations that had toppled the Mubarak regime this past January and February.

They demanded that a civilian dominated council take over from the current all-military government. They wanted an end to military trials for civilians and stronger protection for Coptic Christians being violently attacked by Muslim extremists. They were angry that former President Hosni Mubarak and his entourage weren’t already facing trials for corruption and ordering the murder of protesters.

Student activist Shimaa Helmy told me, “This is our day of anger because we feel our revolution is being taken over by people who didn’t participate.”

But the Moslem Brotherhood, which did participate in the Tahrir Square uprising, boycotted today’s event. Officially, Brotherhood leaders were affronted because they weren’t consulted about rally plans. But many protesters believe that the Brotherhood’s senior leadership doesn’t want to offend the military.

Some Moslem Brotherhood youth defied their leaders and came anyway. The Brotherhood faces numerous internal contradictions, with two of its former leaders announcing plans to run for president. They defied Brotherhood national leadership’s decision not to run anyone for president and to run parliamentary candidates for not more than 50% of the eligible seats.

Many of the demonstrators were middle class, but workers and urban poor also attended. Activist Helmy admits, however, that the mainly secular and leftist demonstrators had their work cut out to win over ordinary Egyptians.

“Some people are starting to hate the uprising,” she told me. “The prices are getting high, and they think it’s the revolution. We’re trying to explain ‘it’s for you, not just for us.’”

Pro-military government rallies were called in other parts of Cairo and a few hundred supporters showed up.

Protesters argued that popular support for the military is declining. They saw today’s demonstration as one more battle in what promises to be a long struggle for power.

To the degree most Americans have any interest in what's going on in Egypt, it revolves around how the events there-- a country of over 80 million people with immense influence on the entire Arab world-- impacts Israel's 7 million people. But, as Robert Naiman wrote for Common Dreams yesterday, "You can't love democracy and denigrate protest, because protest is part of democracy. It's a package deal. Likewise, you can't claim solidarity with Egyptian protesters when they take down a dictator, but act horrified that the resulting government in Egypt, more accountable to Egyptian public opinion, is more engaged in supporting Palestinian rights. It's a package deal."

It was the Tahrir uprising that brought about an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion, and it was inevitable that an Egyptian government more accountable to public opinion would open Rafah, because public opinion in Egypt bitterly opposed Egyptian participation in the blockade on Gaza.

In addition, opening Rafah was a provision of the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation accord brokered by the Egyptian government-- an achievement facilitated by the fact that the post-Tahrir Egyptian government was more flexible in the negotiations with Hamas that led to the accord.

Mubarak had a deal with the U.S. government: I obey all your commands on the Israel-Palestine issue, and in exchange, you shut your mouth about human rights and democracy. Tahrir destroyed this bargain, because it forced the U.S. to open its mouth about human rights and democracy in Egypt, regardless of Egypt's stance on Israel-Palestine. When it became clear to Egypt's rulers that subservience to the U.S. on Israel-Palestine would no longer purchase carte blanche on human rights and democracy, there was no reason to slavishly toe the U.S. line on Israel-Palestine anymore.

The Mubarak regime also had a domestic motivation for enforcing the blockade: it saw Hamas as a sister organization of Egypt's then semi-illegal opposition Muslim Brotherhood, and it saw enforcing the blockade as a means of denying Hamas "legitimacy," figuring that more "legitimacy" for Hamas would mean more "legitimacy" for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, thereby threatening Mubarak's iron grip on Egypt's politics.

But of course post-Tahrir developments in Egypt threw that calculation out the window: the post-Mubarak government in Egypt has reconciled with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a de facto partner in the present interim government, and is expected to do well in September's parliamentary elections. It would be absurd for the Egyptian government to try to isolate the Muslim Brotherhood by trying to isolate its sister Hamas, when the Muslim Brotherhood is de facto part of the Egyptian government and the role of the Brotherhood in running Egypt is likely to increase.

What Happens To The Billions Mubarak And His Family Stole?

Two autocracies have fallen in North Africa, Tunisia's and Egypt's. Down With Tyranny! Tremors are being felt all over the world, particularly the Muslim world, although I loved that the right-wing regime in the U.K. was forced to make a U-turn on selling off the country's forests after protests looked like they could threaten David Cameron's battered government coalition, and the developing situation in Wisconsin is looking promising in terms of forcing puffed up twerp Scott Walker to back down on draconian plans to take away human rights from unionized public sector workers. But in Iran, things don't look as hopeful.

There won't be a government overthrow in Iran, like the ones in Tunisia and Egypt. It's not that the majority of Iranians are not angry at the religious dictatorship that has been running the country since the 1980s. It's just that not enough Iranians are willing to risk their lives to change the government. Instead, getting out of the country is seen as a more likely (and less dangerous) path to freedom and prosperity. Three decades of such emigration has deprived Iran of many entrepreneurs and educated specialists. Meanwhile, the government remains in power because it has hundreds of thousands of armed followers who are willing to kill, and die, to keep the religious dictatorship in power. As long as that force, the Revolutionary Guard, is around, so will the government survive.

The brutal monarchy in Bahrain and the military dictatorships in Yemen and Libya are also using armed regime thugs to terrorize (and murder) peaceful protesters. Although the whip-brandishing assholes on camels made for compelling TV, when the military wouldn't follow his orders to shoot down demonstrators in Cairo's Tahrir Square, Mubarak's days were numbered. They gave him enough time to get his affairs in order, although it now seems that he may conveniently die while under virtual house arrest in his Sharm el Sheikh palace.

Yesterday the NY Times reported that Switzerland has located some of Mubarak's assets, as Egypt seeks to repatriate billions of dollars in stolen wealth and the debate begins over whether Mubarak will be tried. The bulk of the stolen wealth won't be repatriated and Mubarak won't be tried; there's too much complicity among Egypt's still in control ruling elite. And Mubarak used those two-and-a-half weeks from the time Egypt's 80 million people told him they'd had enough of his brutal kleptocracy until he finally passed on the baton to the military to secure his family's ill-gotten three decades of gains.

The former Egyptian president is accused of amassing a fortune of more than £3 billion-- although some suggest it could be as much as £40 billion-- during his 30 years in power. It is claimed his wealth was tied up in foreign banks, investments, bullion and properties in London, New York, Paris and Beverly Hills.

In the knowledge his downfall was imminent, Mr Mubarak is understood to have attempted to place his assets out of reach of potential investigators.

On Friday night Swiss authorities announced they were freezing any assets Mubarak and his family may hold in the country's banks while pressure was growing for the UK to do the same. Mr Mubarak has strong connections to London and it is thought many millions of pounds are stashed in the UK.

But a senior Western intelligence source claimed that Mubarak had begun moving his fortune in recent weeks.

"We're aware of some urgent conversations within the Mubarak family about how to save these assets," said the source, "And we think their financial advisers have moved some of the money around. If he had real money in Zurich, it may be gone by now."... [D]emands were growing among protesters in Cairo last night for Mr Mubarak to be put on trial for corruption.

The former president was at his family villa in the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. There were unconfirmed reports that he was effectively under house arrest, as the focus of protesters moved from toppling the hated ruler to seizing his fortune, although the army's ruling council which is in charge of the country pending its transition to democracy said Mr Mubarak was being treated with due respect.

During the protests last week, former deputy foreign minister Ibrahim Yousri and 20 lawyers petitioned Abdel Meguid Mahmoud, Egypt's prosecutor general, to put Mr Mubarak and his family on trial for stealing state wealth.

...A US official told the Sunday Telegraph: "There's no doubt that there will have been some frantic financial activity behind the scenes. They can lose the homes and some of the bank accounts, but they will have wanted to get the gold bars and other investments to safe quarters."

The Mubaraks are understood to have wanted to shift assets to Gulf states where they have considerable investments already-- and, crucially, friendly relations. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have frequently been mentioned as likely final destinations for Mr Mubarak and possibly his family.

The UK Treasury said it would have the power to seize Mubarak's British assets if Egypt made a formal request-- and no order had yet been made.

But Lord Malloch-Brown, a former Labour foreign minister and former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, told the Sunday Telegraph: "When people are forced out of office, if they have money way beyond what they should have earned, then a country like Britain should freeze those assets pending a court action by the new government.

"Given his and his family's strong links to the UK, it is reasonable to assume at least some of his assets are here."

Reports emanating from Egypt claim that Mubarak had accounts with the Swiss bank UBS as well as with HBOS, now part of Lloyds Banking Group, which is 41 per cent owned by the British Government. But it is understood that Lloyds bank officials have so far found no evidence Mubarak had secret accounts with them.

Quite how much Mubarak has stashed away-- and where he has hidden that fortune-- in the past 30 years is open to speculation. His 69-year-old wife Suzanne Mubarak-- known in some circles as the Marie Antoinette of Egypt-- is half-Welsh while it is claimed the couple's two sons Gamal and Alaa may even have British passports.

Intelligence sources indicate that the Mubarak fortune may be most easily traced via the business dealings of Gamal Mubarak, 47.

He once lived in a six-storey house in Belgravia in central London and worked in banking before setting up an investment and consulting firm in London. He resigned as a director of the company 10 years ago.

The president made his two sons the "go to" men for any companies that sought to do business in Egypt.

Kefaya, an opposition coalition that emerged before the 2005 elections to oppose the then president and his plans to transfer power to Gamal, released a lengthy investigation into nepotism, corruption and abuse of power by the ex-president and his two sons.

It said it was routine for businesses to be required to hand a cut-- between 20 to 50 per cent-- to Gamal or Alaa simply to set up shop. Favoured entrepreneurs who worked with the brothers were given virtual monopolies in return.

How could I have forgotten to include Tom Tomorrow's take on the U.S. Right's take on Egypt?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"In Washington, a State Department spokesperson revealed that the U.S was actively searching for a replacement for Mr. Mubarak, 'but we don’t want to use the same headhunting firm that found Karzai.'"

-- from the Borowitz Report's breaking exclusive,
"In Sign He Is Still In Charge, State-run Media
Names Mubarak 'Sexiest Man Alive'"

by Ken

It was the Tom Tomorrow strip that emboldened me to write about the situation in Egypt last night. And speaking of Karzai, as Andy Borowitz just was, I thought it might be fun -- just as a reminder of how spectacularly well we Americans do nation-building -- to juxtapose the very end of Dexter Filkins' "Letter From Kabul: The Afghan Bank Heist" in the current New Yorker, a close-up look at some of that famous corruption in Karzai's Afghanistan, which always seems to lead right up to the doorstep of the president, what with his brother's well-established involvement.

IIn February, 2008, Joseph Biden, then a senator, arrived with two colleagues at the Presidential palace for a dinner with Karzai. Biden got right to the point, urging Karzai to address the corruption in his government. In a fashion later described as bordering on the surreal, Karzai denied that graft was a serious issue in Afghanistan and changed the subject. Biden persisted. Karzai offered Biden plates of lamb and rice; Biden pressed his host about corruption. Finally, Biden threw his napkin on the table and stood up. "This dinner is over," he said, and walked out.

Last month, Vice-President Biden returned to Kabul, and, according to Afghans with knowledge of the visit, this time the two leaders got along splendidly. They had talked on the phone before Biden’s arrival, to smooth the way. Biden thanked Karzai for his efforts. Their meeting, originally scheduled to be brief, went on for more than an hour, officials at the American Embassy said.

Afterward, Biden and Karzai stood before a group of American and Afghan reporters. They took no questions. Instead, Biden read a prepared statement making clear what America intended to do in Afghanistan and, more important, not to do. He turned and faced President Karzai.

"Let me say it plainly, Mr. President: It is not our intention to govern or to nation-build," Biden said.

"Wonderful," Karzai said.

And the two men walked out of the room. ♦

I was groping for something to say when President Karzai rescued me. Wonderful!

Yes, just wonderful.

#

The World's Richest Crook, Hosni Mubarak, Wasn't A DLC Member... And Now It's Too Late

I knew Hosni Mubarak had appropriated an unconscionable amount of Egypt's national wealth-- for himself, his family and his circle of cronies/enforcers (including, of course so called "vice president" Omar Suleiman)-- including, of course, the tens of billions of dollars the U.S. has been bribing him with to protect Israel. But who knew he was the richest man in the world, richer even than Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Mukesh Ambani or Carlos Slim... or even the Koch Bros, currently the chief financiers of the Republican Counter-Revolution? Yesterday's NY Post:

Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak is laughing all the way to the casbank.

The most hated man in Egypt, where anti-government protests raged for a 13th day yesterday, is likely the richest man in the world, a bombshell report reveals.

The teetering tyrant’s family fortune is worth about $70 billion-- stashed away in Swiss and other foreign bank accounts and shadowy real-estate holdings in Manhattan, London and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, the Guardian newspaper reports.

That puts the 82-year-old despot comfortably ahead of Mexican business magnate and New York Times sugar daddy Carlos Slim Helu, who’s worth about $53.5 billion, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, the richest American with $53 billion, according to a list of the world’s richest men by Forbes.com.

And that golden nest egg has the Arab world seeing red.

“Mubarak! This is not your money. You must return back every penny to Egypt,” a poster named Hassan commented on the Web site of PressTV, a Mideast-based broadcast.

“Leaders in the Arab world are the richest men in the world, while their people are poor and oppressed. The only peace is knowing these people will face justice when they meet Allah,” added Nazir, another poster.

Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and his family managed to make off with over $7 billion that belonged to the Tunisian people, which partially explains why he was so willing to pack up the last of his country's gold reserves and head off to a very sympathetic Saudi Arabia, another Middle Eastern tyrannical kleptocracy. If the Egyptian people thought Mubarak would follow the same trajectory, they hadn't reckoned with the masters of the universe having decided that the slide had to stop in Egypt and not bring down the established order in Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Oman, the Emirates and, ultimately, Saudi Arabia. No one really cares about Mubarak-- even if he is a close and generous family friend of the Clintons-- but the regime had to be stabilized and maintained. Even if he really wanted to get the hell out, the U.S., the Saudis, Israel, et al. could not let that happen until one of their own was in place to keep running the show. The status quo doesn't die off without a fight, and it rarely dies off.

In the U.S., the corporate interests fully own-- "fully" is different from 99%-- one political party, the Republicans, and have made tremendous strides toward taking complete ownership of the other one, the Democratic Party, ostensibly the one that represents ordinary working families but, under the disingenuous guise of a "big tent" has sold its ass to Wall Street and corporate America. 

Just yesterday Digby reassured us that centrism, the polite way of talking about corporate whores in certain circles, is intact despite the retirement from Congress of Blue Dog multimillionaire Jane Harman and the demise of the insidious, corporately funded Democratic Leadership Council. "The truth of the matter," she wrote, "is that the DLC's function has been taken over by Third Way. Nobody needs to fear that the centrists aren't going to be well represented in the Democratic Party. They run the place." 

In fact, "centrist" Heath Shuler (he's actually a C Street extreme-right-wing religionist, a once and future Republican in control of the shriveled-but-far-from-defanged Blue Dog Caucus) has been working overtime to undercut Nancy Pelosi-- and, with a helping hand from conservative ex-Blue Dog Steve Israel, currently chairman of the DCCC, recruit lots of anti-choice, anti-union, anti-gay, anti-equality, anti-consumer conservatives to run in the districts that rejected this same type of "centrist" in November. 

Corporate Central wins no matter who wins when a Blue Dog faces a Republican. And American families lose. I hope you won't consider me too crass for pointing out that Blue America, which helped end the political career of the worst Blue Dog in Congress last year, Bobby Bright (AL), is still fighting Blue Dogs and could sure use some help. $5, $10, $20 contributions will help us go up against the millions corporate America is funneling into Third Way's and Health Shuler's operations. They are counting on making sure Blue Dogs dominate the Democratic primaries next year so that Democratic voters have no choice in November of 2012. We're determined to fight that scenario.

Obama And Egypt

The month I spent in Egypt was wonderful-- but it doesn't make me an Egypt expert like all the imbecile babbling away this week on cable TV. I don't speak Arabic; I wasn't tuning into the Arab street. I was on a boat floating in a leisurely fashion up the Nile visiting ancient sites like the crocodile god's Temple of Kom Ombo in what was once the ancient city of Nubt. Not a whisper of Nubt, Kom Ombo, Sobek or even the falcon god Horus (who shared the temple with Sobek, the crocodile god) or Ptolemy VI, who started building the temple, or Jacques de Morgan who cleaned and restored it in 1893. Actually, a Canadian oil explorer, Sea Dragon Energy, whose stock price has tumbled precipitously, reported that they're having trouble getting supplies to their operation in Kom Ombo but that production is humming along uninterrupted.

"Street demonstrations are restricted to major cities and therefore have little or no impact on the company's field operations in Kom Ombo and NW Gemsa," the company, whose activities are concentrated in Egypt, said in a statement.

Sea Dragon said it is experiencing some shortages in supplies in Kom Ombo because of the remoteness of the area, and that drilling and service rigs have temporarily been placed on stand-by until regular transportation of goods and services resumes.

We were lucky in our trip in 1997. Egypt had emptied out of tourists because of a massacre at the temple of Hatshepsut, the female pharaoh, at Deir el-Bahri across the Nile from Luxor the day before we arrived. 62 people were massacred, mostly tourists from Switzerland and Japan, and everyone in Egypt's hotels just packed up and went home. There were basically no tourists in the country; we had it all to ourselves. You know the guy who always see on TV whenever they talk about pyramids or mummies or excavations-- Dr. Zahi Hawass? He took us for a tour of the Pyramids that he said was the kind of trip usually reserved for heads of state like Charles DeGaulle (Americans heads of state being too busy for the tour).

Anyway, I'm no expert on Egyptian politics. I think I follow it more than most Americans without Egyptian heritage or who don't work for the State Department. But not enough to pump myself up as some kind of an expert the way all these clowns on CNN are doing. Friday we tried putting the Muslim Brotherhood into a little historical context with an article by a real expert, John Loftus. And a week before that I pointed out that Egyptians Hakin and Cleopatra do a really spectacular cover version of the Bangles' "Walk Like An Egyptian."

One thing I do know, though, is that... I don't really know squat about what's actually going on there, especially behind the scenes. Neither do the talking heads on cable, especially not the ideologically-motivated sociopaths at Fox. Although I tried to make it clear that so-called VP Omar Suleiman (who "someone" seems to have maybe/maybe not already tried to assassinate) is Russia's man on the scene and that America's guy is Field Marshall Tantawi, head of the military, here's a passage from what Loftus sent me that I didn't use-- explaining who China seems to be betting on:

For nearly two decades, the PLA [China's People's Liberation Army] leadership had been selling components of the atomic bomb to Arab leaders’ in return for influence and oil. Chinese nuclear weapon technology had been delivered to North Korea, Libya, and Pakistan. The entrepreneurial Pakistanis re-sold the Chinese nuclear secrets to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Egypt. China’s contact in the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency had played a vital role in squelching any mention of the PLA’s role in nuclear proliferation. With his help, the Chinese had managed to keep their secret, secret. It was time to repay the favor.

The elegantly dressed Egyptian switched off his encrypted email and frowned in thought for a moment as he stared out the window at the falling snow. Life was comfortable here among the wealth Swiss. The risks of returning to Egypt were enormous. Too soon, and he might spend his life in a prison cell. Too late and he would miss his date with history. Ego triumphed over discretion. He turned to his secretary and ordered “Book me on the next flight to Cairo.” With that command, the die was cast and the war for Pharaoh’s succession began in earnest.

The secretary in Switzerland used a computer to make an online reservation for the Cairo flight. It was a common mistake. All over the world, electronic robots wait to vacuum up every signal coming down the wires. The passenger’s first name, Mohammed, was so ubiquitous in the Arab world as to be almost untraceable. His last name, ElBaradei, was still fairly common, and even the data from the office credit card
was ignored by the targeting computers, but just for the first few seconds. As soon as the secretary keyed in the passenger’s frequent flyer number, the unique digital sequence was intercepted.

Before the electronic request had even been processed by the airline booking computer,
intelligence computers of several nations had matched the passenger’s frequent flyer number to the target list, and automatically red flagged his airline ticket for immediate attention. The advent of supercomputers enabled intelligence services to vacuum the world for electronic patterns. Every day, every email you send, every telephone call you make, every fax, every online transaction is recorded. Collecting billions of bytes of data is easy. Targeting is hard.

...In Washington, the response to the flight booking was predictable; a snort of disgust, a sigh of regret, and then grudging acceptance of a duty to an old ally. “We probably should let Mubarak know before he arrives.”

Mohammed ElBaradei was flying back home to join the Egyptian revolution, if not as its leader, then to establish himself in the Egyptian press as the best alternative to President Mubarak’s thirty year old dictatorship. The conventional wisdom in Washington was that ElBaradei would do anything for Egypt, as long as he did not actually have to live there. The fact that he was coming home probably meant that
ElBaradei believed that the rioting in the streets was more than just a temporary phenomenon; it was the harbinger of a Tunisian-style instant revolution.

In the Moscow, the news of ElBaradei’s return was handled differently. “We had better tell our man to get ready. We may have to plan for an accelerated takeover.”

Like China, Russian intelligence believed that President Mubarak’s days were numbered...

Thrilling, isn't it? Loftus writes a column, SPYGLASS, for Ami Magazine. This one, on the stands now, is called "Who Will Be The Next Pharaoh?" It helped inform me, of course; but it also made me certain that I can't put myself in Obama's shoes. He's getting shit from all sides-- from the hard realities of soaring worldwide food prices to an understandably freaked out Israel and other panicky U.S. allies in the region-- and this isn't like a bunch of Glenn Beck's racist zombies marching around yelling about his birth certificate. This is the real thing with a lot of moving parts on a lot of levels. I wish him the best. And I wish the spite, bigotry and hatefulness of the "loyal opposition" would, for once, put America first, even over their personal ambitions and social psychosis.

It's also worth reading George Soros' OpEd in Friday's Washington Post. He's not a hippie and he's more aware than most of us of what realpolitik actually means and that there are times when liberation trumps dysfunctional and crumbling strategic relationships.

Revolutions usually start with enthusiasm and end in tears. In the case of the Middle East, the tears could be avoided if President Obama stands firmly by the values that got him elected. Although American power and influence in the world have declined, our allies and their armies look to us for direction. These armies are strong enough to maintain law and order as long as they stay out of politics; thus the revolutions can remain peaceful. That is what the United States should insist on while encouraging corrupt and repressive rulers who are no longer tolerated by their people to step aside and allow new leaders to be elected in free and fair elections.

That is the course that the revolution in Tunisia is taking. Tunisia has a relatively well-developed middle class, women there enjoy greater rights and opportunities than in most Muslim countries, and the failed regime was secular in character. The prospects for democratic change are favorable.

Egypt is more complex and, ultimately, more influential, which is why it is so important to get it right. The protesters are very diverse, including highly educated and common people, young and old, well-to-do and desperately poor. While the slogans and crowds in Tahrir Square are not advancing a theocratic agenda at all, the best-organized political opposition that managed to survive in that country's repressive environment is the Muslim Brotherhood. In free elections, the Brotherhood is bound to emerge as a major political force, though it is far from assured of a majority.

Some have articulated fears of adverse consequences of free elections, suggesting that the Egyptian military may seek to falsify the results; that Israel may be adamantly opposed to a regime change; that the domino effect of extremist politics spreading to other countries must be avoided; and that the supply of oil from the region could be disrupted. These notions constitute the old conventional wisdom about the Middle East - and need to be changed, lest Washington incorrectly put up resistance to or hesitate in supporting transition in Egypt.

That would be regrettable. President Obama personally and the United States as a country have much to gain by moving out in front and siding with the public demand for dignity and democracy. This would help rebuild America's leadership and remove a lingering structural weakness in our alliances that comes from being associated with unpopular and repressive regimes. Most important, doing so would open the way to peaceful progress in the region. The Muslim Brotherhood's cooperation with Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel laureate who is seeking to run for president, is a hopeful sign that it intends to play a constructive role in a democratic political system. As regards contagion, it is more likely to endanger the enemies of the United States-- Syria and Iran-- than our allies, provided that they are willing to move out ahead of the avalanche.

The main stumbling block is Israel. In reality, Israel has as much to gain from the spread of democracy in the Middle East as the United States has. But Israel is unlikely to recognize its own best interests because the change is too sudden and carries too many risks. And some U.S. supporters of Israel are more rigid and ideological than Israelis themselves. Fortunately, Obama is not beholden to the religious right, which has carried on a veritable vendetta against him. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is no longer monolithic or the sole representative of the Jewish community. The main danger is that the Obama administration will not adjust its policies quickly enough to the suddenly changed reality.

I am, as a general rule, wary of revolutions. But in the case of Egypt, I see a good chance of success. As a committed advocate of democracy and open society, I cannot help but share in the enthusiasm that is sweeping across the Middle East. I hope President Obama will expeditiously support the people of Egypt. My foundations are prepared to contribute what they can. In practice, that means establishing resource centers for supporting the rule of law, constitutional reform, fighting corruption and strengthening democratic institutions in those countries that request help in establishing them, while staying out of those countries where such efforts are not welcome.