|
Missing The Opportunities
The recent events in Egypt show two entities which never fail to miss an opportunity.
The Muslim Brotherhood broke the momentum of the protester movement by joining into talks with Suleiman. Staying away would have kept up the pressure to get rid of Mubarak and his system. They earlier had announced that they would let ElBaradei do the negotiations. But he wasn't even invited to that meeting. The MB has now broken the coalition of protesters.
It even agreed on negotiating about constitutional changes. How stupid can one be? A revolution always trumps the existing constitution and writes its own, new one. That is its purpose. Thankfully ElBaradei is said to have some good folks working on that.
The Muslim Brothers probably listened to their old CIA handlers. Reading their history, have they ever managed something without screwing up?
The second entity that never fails to miss an opportunity is the United States. Instead of backing the protesters by taking away the aid from the military with a promise to reinstante it when Mubarak and his system is gone, they backed the old crony regime by sending Mubaraks own lobbyist, allegedly to tell him to leave, which the lobbyist of course did not do at all.
With ElBaradei ready to act as interim president, a liberal youth on the street and the regime at the border of collapse only a small push would have been needed to achieve real change of the system while at the same time assuring that it would be a secular and liberal one and the blood shed small. But the U.S. missed that chance. Years ago it missed a similar chance when it it supported the Shah up to his very end instead of his then secular opposition.
Mubarak and his system, which of course includes Suleiman, will fall. Raising the pay for public servants by 15%, scapegoating some functionaries and propaganda will not solve the deep problems Egypt has. The IMF has largely succeeded in destroying its economy. Egypt is now exporting strawberries to Europe – fine, but it now also has to import some 40% of the wheat it needs. This put the real basic needs of its in average dirt poor people into the hand of speculators. Such economic policies are deadly for any regime.
But when, not if, the current system in Egypt falls, it is now unlikely to come under rule that is friendly to the U.S., it will not be secular and less liberal than the crowd in Tahrir is looking. It will also be a more bloody event.
Lysander,
The protesters did little of these things. The government can reverse all of them (it already has, actually) and so There really should not be such a loss to the economy.
Yes & No:
The financial toll of Egypt’s popular uprising, already significant, is only likely to grow. In a report released Friday, the investment bank Credit Agricole estimated that the protests are costing Egypt $310 million a day. Finance Minister Samir Radwan called the economic situation “very serious.”
A certain amount of stabilization during the ongoing protests can certainly help staunch the bleeding in some local sectors, but especially with regard to tourism and the hard currency it brings, the damage has already been done.
Tourism here has proved resilient over the years – Egypt’s tourism sector has repeatedly recovered and gained strength after terrorist attacks. But the decision to unleash paid thugs on democracy protesters this week is likely to reverberate for some time in the minds of Europeans or Americans considering where to take a family holiday.
Lahcen Achy, an economist at the Carnegie Endowment Middle East Center, says tourism in Egypt won’t recover for at least the next six months.
The resumption of Internet is also important cash generator…
The single decision to cut Internet access across the country for five days probably cost the country $90 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
…but remember that the resumption of services also mean an increase in the ability of protesters to remain organized and keep up morale.
Perhaps most importantly though, the lack of stability and the uncertainty about the future retards the regime’s ability to attract international investment and makes the cost of servicing Egypt’s debt that much more difficult.
Egypt is running a record budget deficit in the current fiscal year that’s expected to top $19 billion. Tax receipts are falling as the need for food and other subsidies has grown, and Egypt’s ability to borrow abroad, as well as its potential foreign investment, have been damaged by the unrest.
Egypt’s debt rating has been cut by the major rating agencies, and the country’s borrowing costs have risen by about one percentage point, to about 6.8 percent. Constraints on borrowing abroad to plug the budget deficit could put pressure on the central bank to print money – something that would drive up already high inflation and prove devastating to the roughly 40 percent of Egyptians who live on $2 a day or less. The stock market dropped by 20 percent before it was closed, and the long closure of banks meant Egyptians living abroad couldn’t send remittances home, says Mr. Achy.
Not to mention that in the midst of all the unrest, Mubarak has just announced another $900 million in spending to give his apparatchiks a 15% raise.
Bottom line: even if the economy becomes somewhat normalized around the protests, the standoff still costs the regime far more than it can afford.
Posted by: Night Owl | Feb 8 2011 3:29 utc | 13
The Muslim Brotherhood broke the momentum of the protester movement by joining into talks with Suleiman.
All religiously founded political or semi influential bodies face contradictions and difficulties.
Organization of society (law, constitution, economy, etc.) cannot any longer be purely religious, in the sense of fundamentally (or at least somewhat literally) based on texts that are all at least more than a thousand years old.
Well there’s the Bahai and Scientology, for ex. but these are not traditional religions, they are deliberate mixes pointed to modernity.
The power of the priest’s caste can no longer function in an open space, a world where religious authority competes with, and trumps, other powers, such as the rule of the State or other domineering factions, such as finance or the military.
The framing of 9/11 as carried out by islamist terrorists was a calculated attempt to attribute attacking force, underground, hidden, quasi-military power, to a religion, to void, prevent, other analyses. Lame.
Islam is very much a ppl’s religion, without a fierce top-down power structure, though it has been instituted here and there, as part of the Higher Authority see Iran for ex. and the totally hypocritical Saudi ‘religious’ grip.
The MB’s calling card rests in the ‘caring’ part, the on the ground actions, etc. The Catholic church does exactly the same. American evangelists go abroad to care for little darkies, the dispossessed, etc.
The MB descendants knows all this.
Tariq Ramadan is a perfect example of equivocation, surfing between traditionalists and modernists/reformists, meanwhile gaining status and a fat bank account.
For all these reasons, the MB is very subservient – they are the low man on the pole – and vulnerable to whomever supports it, and they aren’t, afaik, very discriminatory.
In the same spirit, they are always ready to ‘negotiate’, to ‘deal’, to beat the multi-culti drum, find any platform that will afford them a voice. That is the agreed upon strategy, their only card, it works somewhat, with a lot of help from the scare-mongers, the Anglo world first of all, the developed world, EU, etc. second.
Having sweet veiled ladies on the TV swearing to peaceful solutions is cream to both sides of the game.
Posted by: Noirette | Feb 8 2011 16:38 utc | 26
|
