It took decades of inaction, repression, and neglect to produce the mass demonstrations we're seeing in Egypt. The only real surprise is that something on this scale didn't happen years earlier.
The gospel of deregulation, privatization, and coddling ruling elites with tax breaks and subsidies, while starving the workers and the poor of basic social services through austerity, has once again created conditions so unbearable that millions of people are taking to the streets in protest. Like Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, now North African Arab societies are buckling under the failed neo-liberal policies of the "Washington Consensus." Democracy is breaking out in Tunisia and Egypt not because of U.S. actions in the Middle East, but despite them.
IMF austerity measures and years of failed neo-liberal economic policies led Egyptian ruling elites dating back to the late 1970s to balance their books on the backs of the poor. Thirty-four years ago, in January 1977, President Anwar Sadat cracked down on Cairenes who rose up in protest killing at least 80 people and injuring 1,000. Sadat then cleared out much of the Ishash-al-Turguman slum in the Balaq district (trying to follow an urban planning model based on Los Angeles and Houston), which swelled the ranks of the city's homeless. In 1981, he suffered his own demise in a spectacular assassination while viewing a military parade. Then came the current president, Hosni Mubarak, whose days look like they might be numbered after thirty years of neglecting the crying social needs of his people.
In Cairo and other Egyptian cities, children under 12 constitute as much as 7 percent of the workforce. There are thousands of children in the streets "employed" as cigarette butt gatherers amassing tobacco to resell cigarettes.
In Cairo, a city estimated in 2004 to have a population of 15.6 million, there are more people living in slums -- about 6 to 8 million -- than the entire population was in 1950 (2.5 million). Cairo also has 100,000 or more apartments that are standing empty despite the enormous number of homeless people because they are too expensive for the poor to rent and their absentee landlords reside in Saudi Arabia or elsewhere. According to Jeffrey Nedoroscik, a researcher at the American University in Cairo, in Cairo's "City of the Dead" about a million people use Mameluke tombs as makeshift housing. Cairo has an affluent gated city for the rich where they can pretend they live in Beverly Hills in million-dollar California-style homes shielded from the filth and destitution all around them.
The Egyptians were never really allowed to establish their own "New Deal" of reforms that might have taken the edge off the inequality and injustice rampant in their society -- even after decades of being one of the United States' staunchest allies. In recent years, the U.S. mobilization against the "bad" dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, diverted attention away from the deeply unpopular "good" dictator in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. Now, it's too late.
What happens in Egypt might not stay in Egypt because its ruling elite is so closely tied to other ruling elites of the region. No one can predict how history will unfold. The regime could hold on or be replaced with something even worse. But not being able to predict the future should not stop those who desire justice from acting now and doing their best through direct action to try to bring about positive social change.
In June 1966, it looked like the apartheid regime in South Africa, with all its attendant injustices, would stand forever. But Robert F. Kennedy could envision a better future. The people of Egypt, who are now participating in historic protest, might find some inspiration from Kennedy's words spoken 45 years ago: "Few will have the greatness to bend history itself," he told a racially integrated audience of about 15,000 at the University of Cape Town, "but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation."
"It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man [or woman] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he [or she] sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
Follow Joseph A. Palermo on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JPalermo
Egypt, today has a mob in the streets, with the military saying they will not fire as long as the mob does not ransack the capital. This on one side seems the military is pro change, or they are setting on the fence or they are allowing the people to express their displeasures because the military supports the Egyptian government.
But what happens when the flush of freedom and democracy turns into another government that can't make changes fast enough. What happens when elections are called and the new government is filled with religious favored parties that turn legally the state of Egypt into a hard core Muslim fundamental country that is working hard to help any nation against Israel and works to over throw the Arab oil nations.
Because Democracy allows for change, just being allowed to vote does not mean a better future for the people. In fact many Arab nations are Democracies as was the USSR and even China.
Its coming....the dunces that created the global problems we face are losing control, Egypt we are with you stand your ground!
Islamic or military rule are at least as likely as democracy.
If the fall of the Mubarak government results in the victory of the Islamists, version Iran 1979, when the students ( mostly from the left) succeded on overthrowing the Shah, they were hanged and imprisoned by the Ayatollah's regime.
So yes for reform, yes for more freedoms, yes for true democracy to prevail in all of the Middle East..... But I am scared that contrary to Tunisia where there is a real chance for good change, Egypt will fall in the arms of the Brotherhood of Islam, the founding movement of islamo-fascism and this is not good news for women, gays, freedom of religion and of speech. The absence of women in the protests in Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere might be the proof that the islamists are leading this rebellion ( In Tunisia the presence of young and older women by the thousands is quite comforting).
There are millions of uneducated, poor people in Egypt, and those have always been a fertile ground for the islamists.
El Baradei is no good news as well, He is and has been an ally of the Brotherhood movement.
Let's hope that the people of Egypt will not go along with the extremists, that they will remember the repression in Iran.
I fear the outcome will not be very good for the people of Egypt, but miracles happen and I do wish the people many.
There is probably going to be a strong Islamist component to this revolution, but Egypt is more aware than most nations of the difference between a theocracy and a government for the people, by the people.
I do hope for a ripple in the Middle East. It is time the archaic systems of governance either catch up with the 21st Century or bow out - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/firas-alatraqchi/earthquakes-in-the-middle_b_815163.html
Five team member of AJS production team have been arrested. The protesters are refusing more military-security personnel in the new government. The crowd was buzzed by fighter jets and military helicopters yesterday. A tipping point is approaching - either way.
We have seen how napalm or 50 caliber machine guns affect a crowd, sorry to say.
A nationwide strike is being planned. The regime is in a holding patern, Mubarak will not negotiate with the protesters. The military is the middle but the tension within the military is growing. In revolutions, this is often the case. The US gives 1.3 billion USD to the military in Egypt so the US has leverage.
You mean the failed neo-conservative policies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
The Capitalist economic system is more formally known as "Liberal Economics". Liberal, in this sense, means Classical Liberalism (sovreignty of the individual, emphasis on property rights, limited government, social contract, free markets, inaliable rights etc),. It has nothing to do with Rachel Maddow, CNN or Barack Obama.
In the U.S.both political parties are based in Classical Liberalism. "Neolliberalism", therefore, simply describes the Capitalist Economic model, specifically the resurgent "laissez faire" variety (limited social spending, fiscal austerity, privatization, deregulation, etc), it is also known as "The Washington Consensus".
The policies of the Bush administration reveal that he was infected with the same poisonous virus of corruption as Mubarak, which needed to be opposed with the same fortitude that the Egyptian people are demonstrating. I was not downplaying anybody's struggle - I said the Egyptian people are setting an excellent example.
As for your sweeping generalization of 'a peaceful American life' - there are multitudes of underprivileged people in the US whose lives are just as viciously oppressed by powerful interests as the poor of Egypt.
The real threat is having the new regime made up of more neo-liberal stooges of the Washington Consensus variety.