Revolution in Tunisia & Egypt, Protests in Libya, Bahrain, Oman & Yemen - Page 8 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Baraka_Guru · 02-21-2011, 03:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I worship at the alter of capitalism, so to speak. I put capitalism above any form of government. In my mind capitalism is more than just a concept.

Capitalism is more than a concept. Free-market capitalism is just a concept.

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It is my nature.

This is unfortunate because it limits you to a theoretical mode of thinking. It is probably why we disagree much of the time, and would also explain why much of the time our discussions are non-starters.

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I can ask you - why do you think in straight lines and right angles? Your thought processes are linear - similar to many others who post here.

Can I get an explanation with an example? I try to think of these things logically and realistically. If that brings about a linear process, then so be it.

Quote:

I disagree.

I can only assume the reason for this is largely theoretical. In the real world, capitalism in and of itself does not cure social ills. In the real world, capitalism should be tempered with good governance. It's why we have such things as laws against child labour and slavery.

aceventura3 · 02-22-2011, 08:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

Capitalism is more than a concept. Free-market capitalism is just a concept.

I know some have a problem when I use quotations, but this is an example of when quotations would come into play - no one that I know has ever clearly defined "free-market capitalism". So, in that regard I agree with you. However, depending on scope and timing there can very well be micro-economies that are based on free-market capitalism.

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This is unfortunate because it limits you to a theoretical mode of thinking. It is probably why we disagree much of the time, and would also explain why much of the time our discussions are non-starters.

I once described my style of thought to French impressionist art (use of dots or simple yet small definitive brush strokes), to a linear thinker there is no clear image because of the lack of straight lines and the inability or unwillingness to take a step back and look at the picture from a different point of view. Very frequently I feel a need (and it happens with my wife who is also a linear thinker) to have to make a special effort to connect the dots for a linear thinker.

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Can I get an explanation with an example? I try to think of these things logically and realistically. If that brings about a linear process, then so be it.

An example would be the use of Maslow to understand the "revolution" in Egypt. A linear thinker has problems connecting the two because there is no direct line. A "black and white" thinker says Maslow was correct and is obviously applied to understanding human behavior, even when it comes to Egypt - so the motivators become as clear as a bell very quickly.

Quote:

I can only assume the reason for this is largely theoretical. In the real world, capitalism in and of itself does not cure social ills. In the real world, capitalism should be tempered with good governance. It's why we have such things as laws against child labour and slavery.

This is getting outside the scope of this thread - I stand by my view. Child labor is not inherently bad and slavery is about poor governance or one governing body exploiting another based on force.

Baraka_Guru · 02-22-2011, 09:05 AM

I don't see it, ace.

Thinking in absolutes doesn't conjure images of impressionism. What is impressionistic about your thinking, however, is that although your big-picture ideas are clear (albeit disagreeable), upon closer examination, they tend to become a confused muddle.

Thinking in absolutes tends to remove context and ignore unavoidable factors and influences.

I've asked you to elucidate, and you've instead bewildered.

It would seem we've come across another non-starter. Enjoy your theories.

roachboy · 02-22-2011, 09:19 AM

meanwhile, out in the world:

Quote:

5.06pm: Muammar Gaddafi has now finished his speech. A few people seem to be congratulating him – but not many. Here were the key points:

• Gaddafi is not standing down or leaving the country. He said he would die in Libya "as a martyr".

• He called upon his supporters to take back the streets from those who have been rebelling against his rule. He said they should go out tonight and "chase them".

• He railed against the rebels, threatening them with the death penalty and calling them "rats" and drug addicts. He hinted that he had not yet used the type of violence he could do, pointing to China's massacre in Tiananmen Square and the FBI's infamous siege in Waco. At times he would change tack and say he did not blame the young people for rebelling, saying they had been unduly influenced by their counterparts in Tunisia and Egypt.

• He announced vague reforms to local government, reforms in which his son Saif will have some kind of role. Saif will also address ambassadors and the media.

Libya erupts as Gaddafi clings on - live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk

i don't know, but it seems to me that kadhafi is unhinged. he has at least some control over the military (aspects of it remain loyal) and the mercenaries he's brought in.

and he claims that he hasn't really started to use the kind of violence that he could use.

um....

i don't see anything good coming of this.

an analysis of libya under kadhafi:

Libya's falling tyrant - Opinion - Al Jazeera English

aceventura3 · 02-22-2011, 12:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

I don't see it, ace.

Of course not. I think it is because of a lack of effort.

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Thinking in absolutes doesn't conjure images of impressionism. What is impressionistic about your thinking, however, is that although your big-picture ideas are clear (albeit disagreeable), upon closer examination, they tend to become a confused muddle.

This comment further illustrates my point.

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Thinking in absolutes tends to remove context and ignore unavoidable factors and influences.

Yes, we know you only color inside the lines. I don't, never did, never will.

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I've asked you to elucidate, and you've instead bewildered.

The primary motivating factor in "revolution" in Egypt is all about basic human needs. That is it, that is the answer. Why do you and others insist it is more than that? No doubt we can understand what those basic needs are and why those basic needs are not being fulfilled, but once we know it is all about basic needs all that flows from that is simple. To pretend that obscure il defined and vague concepts are behind the "revolution" is wasteful and will lead to problems going unsolved. So, if you think democracy is the answer time will prove that you were wrong but you will never go back and see it because linear thought processes won't allow it.

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It would seem we've come across another non-starter. Enjoy your theories.

I do thoroughly. Thanks.

---------- Post added at 08:00 PM ---------- Previous post was at 07:53 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

meanwhile, out in the world:

What has it been a day or two without me asking you a question that you can't honestly answer without you appearing to contradict yourself?

Do you unconditionally support equal rights for women in the ME? Or, do you stand in support of equal rights for some, but not all in the ME? How the does the "revolutionary" view of what is happening in the ME really differ from what is currently in place assuming all this in not about basic human needs?

roachboy · 02-22-2011, 12:03 PM

ace: i cannot imagine anyone caring about your dilletante forays into pseudo-explanations for egypt and tunisia and libya and bahrain and morocco and algeria and yemen.

that you can repeat the same fatuous "thinking" means only that you can repeat the same fatuous "thinking"---what you're arguing is self-evidently wrong. particularly this goofball theory that you've pulled out of your ass that somehow or another these revolts are for some imaginary "free-market capitalism."

all evidence in the actually existing world that other people know about point in almost the opposite direction---this is about the collapsing american empire and the "free market" ideology that it has used since reagan in an attempt to legitimate american domination.

here's an article you are unlikely to read.

Quote:

Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking

It's not only in the Middle East that the balance of power is moving. The old neoliberal order has also been shaken

Peter Hallward

In the late 1940s, Simone de Beauvoir was already bemoaning our tendency to "think that we are not the master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to submitting to it". By the late 70s such regret, repackaged as celebration, had become the stuff of a growing consensus. By the late 80s, we were told that history itself had come to an end. The sort of history that ordinary people might make was to fade away within a "new world order", a world in which a narrow set of elites would control all the main levers of power.

Sure enough, for much of the last 30 years, these elites have waged a relentless assault on the people they exploit. Trade unions have been decimated, real wages cut, public services privatised, public resources plundered. For many of these years during which "there was no alternative", resistance in most places was either marginal or symbolic. In one guise or another, resigned submission remained the prevailing order of the day.

Not any more. In different ways in different places (including most dramatically some places that until very recently were often taken for granted as among the most "docile" and "stable" countries around), people all over the world are rediscovering a principle at work in every revolutionary sequence: if we are willing to act in sufficient numbers and with sufficient determination, we already have all the power we need to devise and impose our own alternative. If we are determined to pursue it, we now have an opportunity to help change the world.

This isn't to say that either the neoliberal order or the imperial power that protects it are in any imminent danger of collapse. An opportunity is nothing more, or less, than an opportunity. The governments led by people like David Cameron and Barack Obama continue to press an agenda of "reform" that amounts to little less than a form of class warfare. In the UK, current government plans for education and public services are far more aggressive than anything Margaret Thatcher could have proposed. Nevertheless, in the last few years, and most obviously in the last few months, the general balance of power has begun to shift in three far-reaching ways, which together may well transform not just the Middle East but also the world as a whole.

First of all, of course, after demonstrating more clearly than ever before what the unrestricted pursuit of profit involves, in 2008 neoliberal credit mechanisms imploded in spectacular style, and the credibility of the capitalist world system itself took an unprecedented hit. The costs associated with what many have declared the "financial coup d'état" have now exposed the current rule of political accounting for all to see: privatise the profits, socialise the losses. This is the kind of rule that tends to suffer from publicity.

We have always been told that we cannot afford to pursue utopian projects that might reduce social inequalities, or prevent the millions of avoidable deaths that take place each year as a result of disease or starvation. Our governments and central banks, however, have now spent many trillions of dollars – thousands of times more money than what is required to end global hunger – to bail out some of the most blatantly corrupt institutions the world has ever seen. This public money was spent, just as blatantly, to avoid change rather than implement it. The underlying contradictions in the economy haven't been addressed, and the banking sector has been left to carry on more or less as before. As the consequences of this monumental failure start to hit more and more people over the coming months, class-polarising austerity may well become a difficult political position to defend, especially since measures once justified in terms of economic necessity are now so visibly a matter of deliberate choice and priority.

At the same time, the imperial power that only a few years ago insisted on "full-spectrum dominance" has encountered significant limits to its deployment, both at home and abroad. Washington hawks may still dream of attacking Iran, but it's perhaps more difficult now to imagine a new US war of aggression than at any time since 1945. Rarely has so dominant, so large and so expensive an army looked so powerless. Rarely, too, has so much diplomatic power looked so hollow, fractured and hypocritical. As it has done so often in previous decades, the US is still free to use its UN veto to thwart justice in the Middle East, but it now finds itself obliged to veto its own policy along with it, at a cost that has already endangered its most essential goal in the region: an end to the Palestine liberation movement.

The US and its allies have been discovering that it's a lot harder, these days, to lie about what this and other deceitful political processes involve – a difficulty that may soon also have consequences for the ongoing missions to stabilise Haiti, pacify Iraq, conquer Afghanistan, demonise Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, and so on. This is the second factor at issue here, dramatised most obviously in al-Jazeera's publication of the Palestine papers last month, following the WikiLeaks revelations last year. A combination of new technologies, new social media and new sources of information (not least al-Jazeera itself), enabling new forms of association and deliberation, are starting to make it more difficult for political elites to rely on a compliant press to set and limit the political agenda.

These new means of accessing and sharing information are also starting to have a transformative impact on the third and most important development: the extraordinary resurgence of popular mobilisation and solidarity – a renewal that began with the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela and indigenous movements in Bolivia and Ecuador (and at work more recently, among other places, in Puerto Rico and Guadeloupe, in Iran, in China, across Europe), but that has now crossed a new threshold in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Libya. As one Egyptian protester put it, very concisely: "I used to watch television, now television watches me." On the other side of the world, the tens of thousands of protesters who are mobilising to protect their unions in Wisconsin are among the many millions who have been watching and learning, and who see some similarities between their state governor and Egypt's deposed president. In the UK, students and workers gearing up for another round of direct confrontation with Cameron's government have been watching, too.

Diplomats and pundits rush to assure us that what we're really seeing in north Africa is just an oriental variation on the east European uprisings of 1989, or the subsequent "colour revolutions" – uprisings that served mainly to consolidate rather than challenge the global status quo. Of course, no one can say how the north African mobilisations will develop, or how far they will spread. Like earlier revolutions in France, Haiti and Russia, these are mobilisations whose spatial and temporal (let alone ethnic or religious) dimensions are quite emphatically not fixed in advance. But we do know that they have already changed the course of history, and that they will continue to change it. In each new confrontation, they have demonstrated anew the truth of an old conviction that will always be more powerful than any amount of violent repression or scornful dismissal: the people, united, will never be defeated.

Whatever happens next, the people of north Africa and the Middle East have already won victories that will never be erased. The clashes in Tunis on 11-12 January, the capitulation of riot police in Cairo and Alexandria on 28 January, the retaking of Manama's Pearl Square on 19 February, the liberation of Benghazi on 20 February – in the annals of revolutionary history, events of the 2011 Arab spring may one day invite comparison more readily with the summer of 1789 or the autumn of 1917 than with the winter of 1989.

In each case, what's been at stake first and foremost is less a specific demand for objective change than a subjective process of self-empowerment. Every revolutionary sequence applies in practice a principle that every counter-revolutionary theory seeks to deny or disguise: there is indeed no deeper source of legitimacy than the active will of the people. A revolutionary sequence is one in which those people who set out to transform their situation find a way to clarify and mobilise the will of its people as a whole. Where it exists, the will of the people is sustained through the practice of those who compose and impose it in the collective interest – and who thereby invariably risk, at the hands of those few who oppose this interest, misrepresentation as criminals or outsiders.

As the philosopher Alain Badiou points out in a recent editorial, "once they cross a certain threshold of determination, persistence and courage, the people can indeed concentrate their existence in a public square or avenue, in a few factories, or in a university. In the wake of a transformative event, the people are composed of those who are able to resolve the problems posed by this event" – for instance, the problems involved in defending a square, or sustaining a strike, or confronting an army. Buoyed by the assertion of their hard-won power, the people of north Africa and the Middle East are currently inventing means of solving such problems at a rate that already defies any sort of historical comparison at all. Their priority now is clearly to consolidate and organise this power in the face of the many new and more daunting problems they will soon have to confront.

Needless to say, the struggle to come will again play out in different ways in different places. The consequences of even the most resounding victory are always uncertain, and it may take a long time for those of us who live in the more sheltered parts of the world to learn our own lessons from north Africa's example. The old neoliberal assault remains set to continue. Now everyone knows, however, that it will only prevail if we allow it to.

Arab uprisings mark a turning point for the taking | Peter Hallward | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Baraka_Guru · 02-22-2011, 12:16 PM

ace, you missed my point. You think of your way of thinking as the opposite the way it is, and you think of my way as the opposite the way it is.

I'm now thoroughly convinced that you have no interest in pursuing any line of thinking outside of your own pristine theories. You seem to refuse to look at situations within the context of reality, which includes a level of multiplicity that you avoid to even acknowledge.

I normally welcome attempts at having a discussion with you. However, this time you've outdone yourself by mischaracterizing both you and me.

For example, you don't even understand the level at which I agree with you, nor the level at which I disagree with you, in your theories. And yet you continue to make assumptions and continue to muddy the waters.

I don't even know your position on the topic, really. I heard something about Maslow and free-market capitalism. Beyond that, I don't know what you mean to say beyond "people don't like to starve and generally like capitalism." You haven't really applied any of that theoretical stock to anything real. And now you've gone ahead and assumed I don't know what you're talking about—that I can't understand conceptually or logically—which is false. I know exactly what you're talking about. Half of it is bullshit, the other half irrelevant.

aceventura3 · 02-22-2011, 12:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

ace: i cannot imagine anyone caring about your dilletante forays into pseudo-explanations for egypt and tunisia and libya and bahrain and morocco and algeria and yemen.

For the record, I do unconditionally support equal rights for women in the ME. A "revolution" that fall short of that is incomplete in my imagination.

---------- Post added at 08:29 PM ---------- Previous post was at 08:16 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Baraka_Guru

ace, you missed my point. You think of your way of thinking as the opposite the way it is, and you think of my way as the opposite the way it is.

No I did not miss your point. My response is that it depends on perspective. Perhaps, you are getting lost in the French Impressionism thing because the art appears to be fluid or that it flows. Perhaps, a mosaic would be more helpful because it appears more digital.

Quote:

For example, you don't even understand the level at which I agree with you, nor the level at which I disagree with you, on this matter. And yet you continue to make assumptions and continue to muddy the waters.

You actually agree with me on something, what? Come on, my assumptions that you find fault in everything I present here has been wrong? If true, I will openly and publically state that I have been a fool in my exchanges with you - just give me something specific.

Quote:

I don't even know your position on the topic, really.

Basic human needs, like food and being able to provide for family, are the driving motivations of the mass protests in the ME. Other suggestions of the driving motivators are pseudo-intellectual b.s.

roachboy · 02-22-2011, 02:03 PM

from bbc

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2009: More reports of dissent from within the Libyan regime as its interior minister calls on the army to join the people and respond to their "legitimate demands", according to Al-Jazeera.

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2020: Al-Jazeera says Abdel Fattah Younes al Abidi has announced his defection and support for the "revolution".

al abidi was kadhafi's security minister.

kadhafi's regime is crumbling before our eyes, but the process is not over by any means.
and while accurate information is a problem---things appear to be devolving for kadhafi at speed.

the question is whether he is nuts enough to use the materials he still has at his disposal to scortch some earth on his way out---or if he is looking for an escape hatch, as some reports have suggested.

it's very confusing and potentially quite chaotic.

al jaz live blog on libya:
Live Blog - Libya Feb 22 | Al Jazeera Blogs

bbc:
BBC News - Middle East and North Africa unrest[COLOR="DarkSlateGray"]

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==================================

added: now that libya is maybe crumbling, the first of the major oil-producing authoritarian systems may come down and with that an image will pop to the surface of the financial belly of the beast.

closer and closer.

Quote:

Gaddafis' hidden billions: Dubai banks, plush London pads and Italian water

Libya's oil wealth has been siphoned out of the country by a powerful elite – including Gaddafi and his nine children

The Gaddafi family could have billions of dollars of funds hidden away in secret bank accounts in Dubai, south-east Asia and the Persian Gulf, much of it likely to have come from Libya's vast oil revenues, according to analysis by leading Middle East experts.

Professor Tim Niblock, a specialist in Middle Eastern politics at the University of Exeter, has identified a "gap" of several billion dollars a year between the amount Libya makes from its oil reserves and government spending – a shortfall he expects has contributed greatly to the wealth of Muammar Gaddafi and his nine children.

"It is very, very difficult to work out with any degree of certainty just how much they have because the ruling elite hides it in all sorts of places," said Niblock, who is also vice president of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES). "But at the very least it would be several billion dollars, in whatever form and it could potentially be a lot higher although I wouldn't want to predict just how much it might be."

Alistair Newton, senior political analyst at Nomura, the Japanese bank and president of BRISMES, agreed that it was difficult to establish the extent of the Gaddafis' wealth but said he "would be surprised if it didn't run into billions".

Where the Gaddafis have hidden their vast funds is anybody's guess, although Niblock expects that most of it is "in bank accounts and liquid assets in Dubai, the Gulf and south east Asia" rather than in relatively transparent countries such as the UK, where the Libyan state has invested in London properties and in companies such as Pearson Group, owner of the Financial Times.

In addition to squirrelling away much of their income, the Gaddafis have spent fortunes over the years "propping up" various African regimes, with Zimbabwe's president, Robert Mugabe, widely acknowledged to be among the biggest recipients, Niblock said.

In the 1990s Gaddafi is thought to have given money to the Zaghawan tribe in Darfur, "and I suspect some of them are among the African mercenaries fighting the civilians in Libya," Niblock added.

Libya's breakneck growth has enabled the country to build up myriad investments overseas. In addition to the Gaddafis' private holdings, the state is thought to have invested close to £61.8bn in assets across the globe.

Their investments in the UK include an eight-bedroom home in Hampstead, north London, with a swimming pool and suede-lined cinema room. Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the Libyan leader's second son, bought it in 2009 for £10m.

Most of the state's investments are made by the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA), a so-called sovereign wealth fund set up in 2006 to spend the country's oil money, which has an estimated $70bn of assets. LIA bought 3% of Pearson last year for £224m, making it one of the group's biggest shareholders, and had a 0.02% stake in RBS, although this has been sold in the past few months.

The fund's UK property investments include Portman House, a 146,550 sq ft retail complex in Oxford Street, London, which houses retailers such as Boots and New Look, and an office at 14 Cornhill, opposite the Bank of England in the City.

Aside from the Hampstead home, which is not primarily an investment, the only two direct investment projects that the Gaddafi family are known to be involved with both involve water.

In 2009, when Silvio Berlusconi hosted the summit of G8 leading economies, he invited the Libyan leader as a special guest. Speeding towards the earthquake-stricken city of L'Aquila, which Berlusconi had chosen as the venue, Gaddafi's motor cavalcade stopped in a remote town by a river at the bottom of a deep gorge.

Not many people find their way to Antrodoco, let alone a "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution". Such was the welcome he received that shortly afterwards a Libyan delegation returned to the town to announce that the colonel wanted to plough money into it.

Agreement was reached on a complex involving a luxury spa hotel and water bottling plant. Last September, Antrodocoís mayor, Maurizio Faina, said the €15m (£12.7m) scheme was "firming up".

Whether it survives the current turmoil in Libya, however, remains to be seen. A similar question mark hangs over the established, if struggling, spa town of Fiuggi, south of Rome where pope Boniface VIII, among others, took the waters. In January, the Corriere della Sera reported that Gaddafi's family had formalised a proposal to sink €250m (£211m) into a conference centre with an airstrip and a complex that, once again, involved a spa and a water bottling plant.

The paper said the deal was being brokered, not through Libyan channels, but by the Italo-Iraqi chamber of commerce. Fiuggi's mayor, along with his counterpart from Antrodoco, was a guest at a party thrown by Silvio Berlusconi in honour of the Libyan leader when he visited Rome last September.

Gaddafi and Berlusconi have a famously warm personal relationship. Less well-known, however, is the fact that Berlusconi is in business with one of the Libyan state's investment vehicles.

In June 2009, a Dutch-registered firm controlled by the Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company, took a 10% stake in Quinta Communications, a Paris-based film production and distribution company. Quinta Communications was founded back in 1990 by Berlusconi in partnership with Tarak Ben Ammar, the nephew of the late Tunisian leader, Habib Bourguiba.

The Italian prime minister has a 22% interest in the company through a Luxembourg-registered subsidiary of Fininvest, the firm at the heart of his sprawling business empire. Last September, the Libyans put a director on the board of Quinta Communications to sit alongside Berlusconiís representatives.

Libyan investors already hold significant interests in several strategic Italian enterprises. They reportedly own around one per cent of Italy's biggest oil company, Eni; the LIA has an acknowledged 2% interest in the aerospace and defence group, Finmeccanica; Lafico is thought to retain more than 2% of Fiat and almost 15% of a quoted telecommunications company, Retelit.

The Libyans also own 22% of the capital of a textile firm, Olcese. Perhaps their best-known investment is a 7.5% stake in the Serie A side Juventus. But undoubtedly the most controversial is another 7.5 per cent interest in Italyís largest bank, Unicredit.

Last September, the bank's chief executive, Alessandro Profumo, walked out after a row over his willingness to let the Libyans build up that stake. The Northern League, Berlusconi's key allies in Italy's rightwing government, was known to be particularly queasy about the emergence of such a powerful Libyan presence.

Experts say if Gaddafi is overthrown, the investments made by Libya's various state funds would probably be unaffected, since any new government would have far more pressing matters to attend to, and any sudden movements could damage their reputation for the future.

However, it is thought likely that a new regime in Libya could look to freeze the assets of the Gaddafi family, as the new government in Egypt did with the assets of Hosni Mubarak and his family. Since most of these are held in liquid form – and in country's outside Europe and the US – this would have no significant ramifications for business, they argue.
UK interests

About 150 British companies have established a presence in Libya since the US and Europe lifted economic sanctions in 2004, after the country renounced terrorism, ceased its nuclear weapons programme and handed over two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing case.

The most high profile have been the oil companies, keen to tap Libya's vast reserves of fossil fuels. In a deal brokered in 2007 by Tony Blair, BP signed a £560m exploration agreement allowing it to search for oil and gas, offshore and onshore, in a joint venture with the Libya Investment Corporation. Shell is also exploring for oil in Libya as western companies seek to capitalise on a country with the largest oil reserves in Africa and substantial supplies of gas.

High street retailers such as Marks & Spencer, Next, Monsoon and Accessorize have also set up in the country to serve the growing middle-class population, as oil revenues have "trickled down" into the broader Libyan population.

Companies such as AMEC, an engineering firm, and Biwater, a waste treatment company, have supplied services to Libya, which is using its oil revenues to reshape the country through an infrastructure spending spree that will cost about £310bn over the next decade.

British exports to Libya have soared to about £930m in recent years, while the business momentum in post-sanctions Libya is so great that the economy managed to grow by about 5% last year, while much of the rest of the world struggled.

Many British and foreign companies – including M&S, BP and Shell – are evacuating
staff from Libya and it could be some time before they return. Tom Bawden

Gaddafis' hidden billions: Dubai banks, plush London pads and Italian water | World news | The Guardian

aceventura3 · 02-22-2011, 02:11 PM

Hey Roach,

Unconditional rights for women in the ME is complicated, right?
I don't understand the real issues, right? It's just Ace and his "black and white" imaginary world right?
Or as DC would say i don't understand that women may have to compromise for the good of the formation of a new government.
Or as Baraka might suggest, unconditional rights for women in the ME is just a concept.

Oh, sorry for yet another tangent from what is really important, let's get back to the real world after all no one really wants that in the ME.

Baraka_Guru · 02-22-2011, 03:47 PM

So I guess it's safe to say, at least, that the shit is currently hitting the fan in Libya.

A couple of tidbits from the interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younes, who has resigned:

"The Libyan people have suffered too long. We have so much oil, the people could have lived as in a 5 star hotel."

"Gaddafi's speech was very clear to any one who has a brain. He is nervous, he is stubborn. He may commit suicide."

Also, in other developments, the Canadian government has finally condemned Gadhafi, and has begun the planning and process of extracting Canadians from the country:
Ottawa condemns Gadhafi, plans evacuation - The Globe and Mail

Also, have a look at an interesting infographic regarding Libya and Gadhafi's influence in Africa, and the implications of it vapourizing:
Gadhafi's influence on Africa - The Globe and Mail

Seaver · 02-22-2011, 05:08 PM

Sorry Ace, I enjoy political discussions a great deal... but I honestly feel I'm done with your conversations here. I don't feel you're adding to the discussion as it's not pertinent to realities on the ground.

I find Libya very interesting. Reports of the Air Force bombing protesters I was initially skeptical of, resulted in Air Force Pilots defecting as they refused orders to bomb their own civilians and feared execution from their own officers. I've also read about tanks firing on protesters and even some tanks defecting to the other side.

samcol · 02-22-2011, 08:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

I find Libya very interesting. Reports of the Air Force bombing protesters I was initially skeptical of, resulted in Air Force Pilots defecting as they refused orders to bomb their own civilians and feared execution from their own officers. I've also read about tanks firing on protesters and even some tanks defecting to the other side.

I can't imagine being on one of these planes or ships that are defecting. How do you coordinate landing in another country? Totally justified when ordered to fire on your own people, but what a terrible position to be in.

dlish · 02-22-2011, 09:03 PM

malta adds two planes to their air fleet. sweet!

i cant imagine what malta was thinking when these guys first showed up on the radar heading towards it from libya.

Willravel · 02-22-2011, 09:42 PM

Armed Forces of Malta: "AFM to unidentified crafts, identify yourselves and your intentions."
Defectors: "Defecting from Libya."
Armed Forces of Malta: "I... wait, what? Frank? Frank, is that you? This isn't funny, Frank."
Defectors: "No joke, we're defecting."
Armed Forces of Malta: "John? Come on, John, I have an important job!"
Defectors: "DUDE, WE'RE SERIOUSLY DEFECTING!!"
Armed Forces of Malta: "DUDE, CAPS IS ON"
Defectors: "Oh, sorry. But yeah, totally defecting."

aceventura3 · 02-23-2011, 07:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

Sorry Ace, I enjoy political discussions a great deal... but I honestly feel I'm done with your conversations here. I don't feel you're adding to the discussion as it's not pertinent to realities on the ground.

When people don't understand the root causes of problems the problems don't get fixed.

It won't matter what form of government Egypt adopts if it is without adopting capitalism or at least taking major steps in that direction.

It won't matter who is in charge without adopting capitalism.

The details in a new constitution won't matter unless it includes capitalistic principles.

You can be done with me, but understand that 5/10/15/30 years from now Egypt will have the same problems without capitalism. Yes, it is that simple.

Quote:

Cairo’s six-story Arcadia Mall, a symbol of modern commerce on the Nile River, is a charred ruin. Military officers now rule in place of Western-educated businessmen. Spending by a government that is already in debt is heading up, not down.

This is Egypt after the Feb. 11 fall of Hosni Mubarak, and if its future is uncertain, it has nonetheless drawn investor cheers as officials promise to pursue market-oriented policies. The Market Vectors Egypt Index ETF, an exchange-traded fund that holds Egyptian shares, has risen 11.5 percent since Jan. 27, when the Egyptian Exchange was shut down as protests intensified.

Yet a history of on-again, off-again economic reform and the rise of forces, including the military, that have resisted liberalization suggest that the path to a competitive economy integrated with the world will be a difficult one, according to experts on the region.

“In the near term, the impulse is to beat up on the capitalists not reward them,” said Jon Alterman, a former member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “I don’t see a champion of economic reform arising out of this process. The go-go privatization period will be blamed for the breakdown of order.”

Incomplete Change

Post-Mubarak Egypt inherits a legacy of incomplete attempts at change, including privatization of state assets and a redo of the tax system. The political costs of needed steps such as shedding state workers or levying new taxes likely will challenge the country’s next leader. Likewise, little action is expected to correct inefficiencies, including the fuel subsidies that devour more than 5 percent of gross domestic product.

“This is not the time to scale back on subsidies,” said Samer Soliman, assistant professor of political economy at the American University in Cairo. “If anything, they may increase.”

For two decades, officials from the U.S. and Washington- based International Monetary Fund and World Bank encouraged Egypt to overhaul its statist economy, betting that prosperity would foster stability.

Instead, Egypt imbibed just enough globalization to enrich an elite, though not enough to become broadly prosperous. About 18 percent of the population -- including 40 percent of rural dwellers -- lives below the poverty line and one-third of Egyptians are illiterate, says the World Bank.
‘Trickle-Down Economics’

Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, calls the Egyptian approach “trickle-down economics without the trickle.”

Despite its position astride trade routes in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, Egypt has failed to secure a role in global supply chains. Nike Inc., for example, buys shoes and clothing from 42 Vietnamese manufacturers, which employ more than 198,000 workers, according to the company’s website. Egypt, with a similar population, is handicapped by numerous taxes, uncertain contract enforcement and insufficient supplies of skilled labor. Just five Egyptian companies, employing 5,129 people, supply finished products to Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike, the largest maker of athletic shoes.

“The opening was half-hearted, reluctant,” said Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, who was the IMF’s resident representative in Cairo from 1995 to 1997. “The Egyptians understood that while the U.S. wanted reforms, they could get away without reforming.”

News From Tunisia

Seven years after beginning the most recent push for change, Egypt remains a nation with one foot planted in the global economy and one stuck in a state-dominated past. Even as globalized information flows via social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter brought Cairo residents news of protests in Tunisia in January, their country lagged behind in global commerce.

Between 1990 and 2009, Egypt’s per capita exports of goods and services rose at an average annual rate of less than 5 percent -- about half India’s annual average and one-third that of China, according to the IMF.

By 2020, the Middle Eastern nation, with unemployment above 8 percent for more than a decade, must create 9.4 million jobs to absorb the out-of-work and anticipated new entrants into the labor force. To do that, the IMF says, the economy will need to grow at an annual rate of almost 10 percent, about twice the average since 2000.
Cabinet Ousters

The ambivalence about transforming the economy was evident during Mubarak’s final days as president, when he attempted to appease protesters by increasing government workers’ salaries and deferring cuts in fuel and food subsidies. He also jettisoned Cabinet and ruling party officials regarded as pro- business, such as the housing minister, Ahmed El-Maghraby, the former chairman of Accor Hotels Egypt.

El Maghrabi and other prominent members of the Egyptian business elite, such as Ahmed Ezz, chairman of Ezz Steel, the country’s largest steel producer, were barred from traveling and had their bank accounts frozen by the public prosecutor’s office, which said it was investigating claims of “public funds embezzlement” against the former officials. Ezz dismissed any suggestion of wrongdoing as “groundless allegations” in a Feb. 14 statement.

‘More Populist Take’

“Going forward, there’s going to be a much more populist take on where the economy should go,” said Michele Dunne, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, who served in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and on the National Security Council between 2000 and 2003. “They’ll have to be much more sensitive to public opinion.”

The military officers now in control are no fans of selling off state assets. Retired generals operate military-owned companies in several industries, including cement, construction, hotels and olive oil. And the Egyptian military regards privatization as a “threat to its economic position,” according to a classified cable from U.S. Ambassador Margaret Scobey dated Sept. 23, 2008 that was disclosed by the anti- secrecy group Wikileaks.

Egypt’s caretaker civilian ministers insist they will shrink the state’s role in the economy.

‘No Relapse’

“There is no rolling back of reform,” Finance Minister Samir Radwan, a London-educated economist, told Bloomberg News Feb. 14. “There is no relapse into state intervention.”

Radwan, named to his post Jan. 31, said Egypt now has “a fantastic opportunity to have a new phase of reform, to deepen the reforms that have taken place.”

Egypt’s efforts at economic modernization began in the early 1990s, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall inaugurated an era of global economic integration. Encouraged by the World Bank and IMF, Egypt began creeping from its traditional state-centric economy -- where the public sector claimed 70 percent of GDP -- toward greater market openness.

“Egypt was a centrally administered economy with an implicit promise that the central government could control everything, organize everything, distribute everything and essentially eliminate uncertainty from the lives of all,” said Youssef Boutros-Ghali, then-minister of finance, in a 2006 speech.

Early transformations cooled inflation topping 21 percent and reined in a public deficit of more than 15 percent of GDP. While the U.S. and the international financial institutions supported economic change, the top U.S. priority was always the Arab-Israeli peace process.
IMF Demands

In 1987, C. David Finch, the head of the IMF’s department of exchange and trade relations, resigned after the U.S. objected to IMF demands for economic policy changes that Egyptian officials feared would spark a popular backlash, according to a 1993 book by Anne Krueger, the former first deputy managing director of the IMF.

In a 1996 speech, Robert Pelletreau, then-assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, put economic transformation last in a list of U.S. objectives in the Middle East, behind Israel’s security, stability in the Persian Gulf, counter-terrorism, assistance to U.S. business and political change.

Egyptian hopes for a comprehensive bilateral trade accord with the U.S. were dashed in 2006 by the administration of President George W. Bush after the government jailed the dissident Ayman Nour, who ran against Mubarak in 2005 presidential elections.
‘Root of Extremism’

In February 2006, according to another Wikileaks cable, the Egyptian intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman, confided to a visiting U.S. official that “insufficient educational and economic opportunities were at the root of extremism in Egypt.”

The threat to stability was so alarming, Suleiman told the U.S. official, FBI Director Robert Mueller, that the Egyptian government was embarking upon a five-year plan “to shore up and modernize Egypt’s economy.”

Almost precisely five years later, on Jan. 25, 2011, the clock ran out on the Egyptian government’s chances of preserving the status quo. Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters filled the streets of Cairo demanding Mubarak’s ouster.

Suleiman’s 2006 acknowledgement of the need for Egypt to tune its economic engine occurred almost two years after the start of the most recent and most successful reform phase. In 2004, market-oriented Egyptian officials affiliated with the president’s son Gamal enacted policies that more than doubled the economy’s annual growth rate to about 7 percent.
Privatization Push

State-owned enterprises, including the Bank of Alexandria and the Omar Effendi department store, were sold to private investors. Regulations were streamlined and tariffs reduced. Foreign investment from companies such as Houston, Texas-based Apache Corp. and Cincinnati-based Procter & Gamble Co. rose to more than $12 billion annually from less than $1 billion at the turn of the century.

Left undone were tasks such as political transformation, pruning the bureaucracy, and encouraging competition in the domestic economy. Privatization of state enterprises, which began in 1990, inched forward. By 2008, just 20 percent of the public sector had been sold off to private investors. The budget deficit remained around 8 percent of GDP.

“They essentially dealt with the low-hanging fruit, the easy stuff,” said George Abed, director of the IMF’s Middle East department in 2002-03.

Outpaced by Vietnam

Egypt was evolving at a crawl while other nations, especially in East Asia, rode export booms to prosperity. From 2004 to 2009, per capita income rose 20 percent in Egypt. That fell well short of export-oriented dynamos such as Vietnam, which posted a 34 percent income gain over the same period.

“They really need to penetrate global industrial supply networks. They’ve had trouble gaining a foothold,” said Marcus Noland, author of “The Arab Economies in a Changing World.”

Liberalization sometimes carried political and financial costs that undermined prospects for additional changes. The IMF and World Bank prodded Egypt to open its markets to imported grain, a move that undercut local farmers and left Egypt dependent upon volatile global markets for staples, according to Marie Brill, senior policy analyst at ActionAid, a Washington- based nonprofit organization.

In April 2008, rising food prices were blamed for anti- government riots in Mahalla, a textile town in the north. In response, Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif rushed to the town and Mubarak ordered a 30 percent pay raise for public-sector workers. Plans to phase out food and fuel subsidies in favor of payments targeted to the neediest Egyptians were quietly shelved, then-U.S. Ambassador Frank Ricciardone wrote in an April 16, 2008 cable disclosed by Wikileaks.
‘Sour Mood’

“Egyptians are in a sour mood and their frustration seems more vocal than just a few months ago,” Ricciardone wrote.

The Egyptian government was able to repeatedly defer economic improvements thanks to financial flows that continued regardless of the economy’s competitiveness. Over the past two years, the government reaped almost $5 billion annually from Suez Canal transit fees and an additional $1.5 billion in U.S. aid. Remittances from Egyptians working in Saudi oil fields or hotels in Bahrain brought in around $8 billion, while the country’s oil wells contributed about $9 billion. Combined, these passive flows amount to about 12 percent of GDP.

Though Mubarak is gone, those sources of revenue remain. So at least for now, there is little reason to expect reinvigorated reforms.

“I don’t think there will be any significant change in economic policies,” Soliman said. “This is a transitional period.”

Egypt ETF Gains in Post-Mubarak Era Hobbled Without Free Market - Bloomberg

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 08:43 AM

meanwhile, back out in the world

Quote:

4.25pm: Adam Gabbatt provides an evening summary:

• Benghazi appears to have fallen irretrievably beyond the control of Muammar Gaddafi, reports the Guardian's Martin Chulov, the first foreign journalist to reach the city. Troops who have defected from the Gaddafi regime are barricading a police station in the city to prevent it being seized back by Gaddafi's forces in the city, where doctors said at least 230 people have been killed. One air force officer told the Guardian he personally witnessed up to 4,000 mercenaries arrive on Libyan transport planes, each of them carrying 300 armed men.

• The cities of Zliten and Misrata, close to Tripoli, are reportedly under the control of anti-Gaddafi protesters. If the reports are correct they would be the first cities in the west of the country to fall to the demonstrators, whose support base is mainly in the east. The Guardian's Ian Black said the fall of Misrata suggests the west of Libya is now beginning to be seriously affected.

• The UK foreign secretary, William Hague, has said the UK will provide "as many planes as are necessary" to evacuate British nationals from Libya. He said that in addition to those Britons in Tripoli, Benghazi and other cities, there are some 170 Britons working in remote, isolated camps in the desert in Libya who are in a "perilous and frightening situation". One charter flight is en route to Tripoli to collect British nationals, while another will arrive later today. A third flight may be scheduled for Thursday morning.

• Mercenaries and militias are reported to be roaming Tripoli, with much of the capital deserted. Overnight a "heavy force of supporters and militiamen" were on the streets, brought out by Gaddafi's speech, Associated Press reported. Tripoli airport is "very, very chaotic", an English teacher who flew out last night told the Guardian. "There was a real crush – it was a very frightening experience," Peter Thomas said. "Our tickets had been bought in Turkey so we didn't have them with us. We just had to persuade the guards at various checkpoints that we should be allowed through."

Libya on the brink as Gaddafi promises showdown - live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk

and the international community does nothing.

Quote:

Intervening in the Libyan tragedy

The unfolding situation in Libya has been horrible to behold. No matter how many times we warn that dictators will do what they must to stay in power, it is still shocking to see the images of brutalized civilians which have been flooding al-Jazeera and circulating on the internet. We should not be fooled by Libya's geographic proximity to Egypt and Tunisia, or guided by the debates over how the United States could best help a peaceful protest movement achieve democratic change. The appropriate comparison is Bosnia or Kosovo, or even Rwanda where a massacre is unfolding on live television and the world is challenged to act. It is time for the United States, NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League to act forcefully to try to prevent the already bloody situation from degenerating into something much worse.

By acting, I mean a response sufficiently forceful and direct to deter or prevent the Libyan regime from using its military resources to butcher its opponents. I have already seen reports that NATO has sternly warned Libya against further violence against its people. Making that credible could mean the declaration and enforcement of a no-fly zone over Libya, presumably by NATO, to prevent the use of military aircraft against the protestors. It could also mean a clear declaration that members of the regime and military will be held individually responsible for any future deaths. The U.S. should call for an urgent, immediate Security Council meeting and push for a strong resolution condeming Libya's use of violence and authorizing targeted sanctions against the regime. Such steps could stand a chance of reversing the course of a rapidly deteriorating situation. An effective international response could not only save many Libyan lives, it might also send a powerful warning to other Arab leaders who might contemplate following suit against their own protest movements.

I don't have any illusions that the outside world can control what happens in Libya, if the regime really wants to try to hold power by force. I don't call for a direct military intervention. And I am keenly, painfully aware of all that could go wrong with even the kinds of responses I am recommending. But right now those fears are outweighed by the urgent imperative of trying to prevent the already bloody situation from getting much, much worse. This is not a peaceful democracy protest movement which the United States can best help by pressuring allied regimes from above, pushing for long-term and meaningful reform, and persuading the military to refrain from violence. It's gone well beyond that already, and this time I find myself on the side of those demanding more forceful action before it's too late. The steady stream of highly public defections from the regime suggest that rapid change is possible, yesterday's speech by Saif al-Islam Qaddafi and today's events suggest that so is terrible violence.

There is no avoiding what is happening in Libya. Al-Jazeera Arabic has been covering the Libyan situation heavily for the last couple of days and has powerfully conveyed the gravity of the situation, including broadcasting some truly disturbing images and video of protestors. I've been stunned by what Libyans inside the country and outside have been willing to say on the air about the regime --- prominent Libyan diplomats declaring Qaddafi to by a tyrant, major tribal leaders calling for his overthrow, Yusuf al-Qaradawi calling on the air for someone to shoot Qaddafi, and more. The Arab world's attention is focused on Libya now, after several days of a fragmented news agenda divided among Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt and more. Voice after voice, Libyans and other Arabs alike, denounce the silence of the international community and call for action. Qaddafi has few friends, and Qatar has called for an urgent Arab League meeting to deal with the crisis. While history doesn't suggest we can expect all that much from that club, their public support for international action could go a long way towards overcoming any suggestion that this is an imperialist venture.

That's all for now.

Intervening in the Libyan tragedy | Marc Lynch

aceventura3 · 02-23-2011, 09:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

and the international community does nothing.

What do you want the international community to do? Should the international community use military force to control the situation?

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 10:11 AM

there are reports that kadhafi is already using the military to attack opposition actions.

well, the interior security forces as he has apparently been afraid of a military coup since he came to power via a military coup in 1969 so has worked to keep the military weak...libya is controlled by the interior security forces that overlap with effectively private militias----you know, the kind of feudal arrangement that would result in a lot of place as the logical outcome of taking conservative paranoia about the state seriously

there are reports of military jets being used.
there are reports that there are naval vessels in position off tripoli that may be used to bombard the city.

so no, there's no reason to worry too much about what might happen.

the international community has a great track record of not knowing what to do when massacres present themselves:

Rwanda: Why the international community looked away | World | Deutsche Welle | 07.04.2009

much better to sit around and watch people get massacred and complain about how o so terrible it all is.

aceventura3 · 02-23-2011, 11:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

there are reports that kadhafi is already using the military to attack opposition actions.

well, the interior security forces as he has apparently been afraid of a military coup since he came to power via a military coup in 1969 so has worked to keep the military weak...libya is controlled by the interior security forces that overlap with effectively private militias----you know, the kind of feudal arrangement that would result in a lot of place as the logical outcome of taking conservative paranoia about the state seriously

there are reports of military jets being used.
there are reports that there are naval vessels in position off tripoli that may be used to bombard the city.

so no, there's no reason to worry too much about what might happen.

the international community has a great track record of not knowing what to do when massacres present themselves:

Rwanda: Why the international community looked away | World | Deutsche Welle | 07.04.2009

much better to sit around and watch people get massacred and complain about how o so terrible it all is.

The implication in your posts is that you want something done, but you don't say what? What is the point of your compliant? Is it just too complicated? Not for me, I know what I would do, but I am a simple minded person who is in an imaginary world.

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 11:16 AM

i know.....let's let capitalism solve the problem....

actually, this is a consistent problem with transnational organizations, moving from saying tsk tsk tsk to actually doing anything.

there are reports that nato has warned kadhafi to use restraint. i haven't seen anything else about it. in this case, if the situation escalates, i wouldn't object to nato intervening to effectively depose kadhafi.

the e.u. is handwringing a lot...on the one hand tsk tsk violence is bad but on the other, led by italy, starting to freak out about refugee flow potentials.

the security council hasn't managed to put together a resolution even. so none of the related transnational agencies (in a loose sense, from peacekeeping forces to the international court) can do anything.

the united states has apparently been waiting to say much until a ferry with us citizens reaches malta.

it would be a bad bad idea for any individual country to go into libya. no cowboy shit. remember iraq? bad idea. bad bad idea.

nation-states are done for.
situations like this simply show it.

aceventura3 · 02-23-2011, 11:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

i know.....let's let capitalism solve the problem....

Not about what I would do, you've suggested that something needs to be done.

Quote:

actually, this is a consistent problem with transnational organizations, moving from saying tsk tsk tsk to actually doing anything.

there are reports that nato has warned kadhafi to use restraint. i haven't seen anything else about it. in this case, if the situation escalates, i wouldn't object to nato intervening to effectively depose kadhafi.

Intervening how?

Quote:

the e.u. is handwringing a lot...on the one hand tsk tsk violence is bad but on the other, led by italy, starting to freak out about refugee flow potentials.

the security council hasn't managed to put together a resolution even. so none of the related transnational agencies (in a loose sense, from peacekeeping forces to the international court) can do anything.

the united states has apparently been waiting to say much until a ferry with us citizens reaches malta.

it would be a bad bad idea for any individual country to go into libya. no cowboy shit. remember iraq? bad idea. bad bad idea.

nation-states are done for.
situations like this simply show it.

So after all that what is your answer? Or, did I miss it? Remember I am an uniformed simpleton who lives in a imaginary world - perhaps it is too complicated, right?

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 11:46 AM

ace, the thread isn't about you, remember? stop whining.

and if you actually read the post, i said that in this situation i would not oppose a nato intervention to depose kadhafi. give way to peace-keeping forces to prevent anarchy and put into place some kind of transitional structure.

a nation-state intervention would be a catastrophic idea because it would legitimate in power what it was sent to depose.

here's some gruesome footage from libya. the headline translates:

Soldiers executed after refusing orders to kill civilians in Libya.

YouTube - ‫???? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ?????‬&lrm;

it's no joke, what's happening.

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 02:07 PM

and this to dispense with the simple-minded bloomberg-bromides about the miracles of neo-liberalism.

what bloomberg prescribes for egypt is exactly the ideology that enabled mubarak and his pals to plunder egypt....

but read on...

Quote:

To describe blatant exploitation of the political system for personal gain as corruption misses the forest for the trees. Such exploitation is surely an outrage against Egyptian citizens, but calling it corruption suggests that the problem amounts to aberrant behavior from a system that would otherwise function smoothly. If this were the case then the crimes of the Mubarak regime could be attributed simply to bad character: change the people and the problems go away. But the real problem with the regime was not necessarily that high-ranking members of the government were thieves in an ordinary sense. They did not necessarily steal directly from the treasury. Rather they were enriched through a conflation of politics and business under the guise of privatization. This was less a violation of the system than business as usual. Mubarak’s Egypt, in a nutshell, was a quintessential neoliberal state.

Although neoliberalism is now a commonly used term, it is still worth pausing a moment and think about what it means. In his Brief History of Neoliberalism[1] social geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them. Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions. The market becomes an end in an of itself, and since the only legitimate function of states is to defend markets and expand them into new spheres, democracy is a potential problem insofar as people might vote for political and economic choices that impede the unfettered operation of markets, or that reserve spheres of human endeavor (education, for example, or health care) from the logic of markets. Hence a pure neoliberal state would philosophically be empowered to defend markets even from its own citizens. As an ideology neoliberalism is as utopian as communism. The application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did.

Two observations about Egypt’s history as a neoliberal state are in order. First, Mubarak’s Egypt was considered to be at the forefront of instituting neoliberal policies in the Middle East (not un-coincidentally, so was Ben Ali’s Tunisia). Secondly, the reality of Egypt’s political economy during the Mubarak era was very different than the rhetoric, as was the case in every other neoliberal state from Chile to Indonesia. Political scientist Timothy Mitchell published a revealing essay about Egypt’s brand of neoliberalism in Rule of Experts[2] (the chapter titled “Dreamland” — named after a housing development built by Ahmad Bahgat, one of the Mubarak cronies now discredited by the fall of the regime; a version of this was also published in Merip). The gist of Mitchell’s portrait of Egyptian neoliberalism was that while Egypt was lauded by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund as a beacon of free-market success, the standard tools for measuring economies gave a grossly inadequate picture of the Egyptian economy. In reality the unfettering of markets and agenda of privatization were applied unevenly at best. The only people for whom Egyptian neoliberalism worked “by the book” were the most vulnerable members of society, and their experience with neoliberalism was not a pretty picture. Organized labor was fiercely suppressed. The public education and the health care systems were gutted by a combination of neglect and privatization. Much of the population suffered stagnant or falling wages relative to inflation. Official unemployment was estimated at approximately 9.4% last year (and much higher for the youth who spearheaded the January 25th Revolution), and about 20% of the population is said to live below a poverty line defined as $2 per day per person.

For the wealthy, the rules were very different. Egypt did not so much shrink its public sector, as neoliberal doctrine would have it, as it reallocated public resources for the benefit of a small and already affluent elite. Privatization provided windfalls for politically well-connected individuals who could purchase state-owned assets for much less than their market value, or monopolize rents from such diverse sources as tourism and foreign aid. Huge proportions of the profits made by companies that supplied basic construction materials like steel and cement came from government contracts, a proportion of which in turn were related to aid from foreign governments. Most importantly, the very limited function for the state recommended by neoliberal doctrine in the abstract was turned on its head in reality. In Mubarak’s Egypt business and government were so tightly intertwined that it was often difficult for an outside observer to tease them apart. Since political connections were the surest route to astronomical profits, businessmen had powerful incentives to buy political office in the phony elections run by the ruling National Democratic Party. Whatever competition there was for seats in the Peoples’ Assembly and Consultative Council took place mainly within the NDP. Non-NDP representation in parliament by opposition parties was strictly a matter of the political calculations made for a given elections: let in a few independent candidates known to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood in 2005 (and set off tremors of fear in Washington); dictate total NDP domination in 2010 (and clear the path for an expected new round of distributing public assets to “private” investors).[3]

The Revolution Against Neoliberalism

and lest you imagine that this neo-liberal fiasco was restricted to egypt, read this:

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics

about the american financial oligarchy that consolidated its power and looted the store while talking blah blah blah about markety capitalism.

it's horseshit, ace darling.

horseshit.

Seaver · 02-23-2011, 03:11 PM

I'd love to see Obama park a Carrier outside of Libya and simply say any aircraft that takes off from here-forward will be immediately shot down.

We can shoot well outside of anti-ship/air missile range, and provide at least a little assistance to the protesters.

Charlatan · 02-23-2011, 04:47 PM

A no-fly zone over Libya would certainly be a step in the right direction. But I agree with roachboy that the US cannot go this alone. It needs to be a collective response and, preferably, not run by the US.

roachboy · 02-23-2011, 04:51 PM

even though i am sympathetic to that idea, i think it'd be a Huge Mistake for the united states to act unilaterally if only because (a) the lockerbie affair and bombings of tripoli that followed it---the "museum of strength" that ghadhafi appeared before with his cute umbrella, was made from the residence of his that was bombed by the united states---this set up a us (me) against the Big Evil legitimation that ghadafi has not hesitated to use since AND (b) because of the iraq debacle (thanks george) has created an association between the discourse of democracy and american invasion.....and also (c) it's kind of hard for me to imagine how making that move could be the only one given the (apparently true) bringing in of heavily armed mercenaries from chad and niger and nigeria....i can't imagine that the us (or anyone) could simply park a carrier and not find themselves more or less compelled to intervene on the ground to stop the carnage.

because carnage there is, seemingly.
among the more shocking/dramatic eye-witness reports is here, in french sadly:

Libye : "C'était un carnage absolu", actualité Monde : Le Point

among other things he provides an estimate of at least 2000 people killed at benghazi and extensive use of mercenaries to do it. he describes the mercenaries as very heavily armed as "killing machines"---confronting largely unarmed civilians (that's been changing, especially in benghazi). the mitigating thing with what he says in the article is that it's clear he was entirely freaked out by what he experienced (justifiably so) so the account has a phantasmagoric quality to it.

but it's pretty amazing nonetheless. worth dusting off the french for.

dlish · 02-23-2011, 07:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

here's some gruesome footage from libya. the headline translates:

Soldiers executed after refusing orders to kill civilians in Libya.

YouTube - ‫???? ?? ??????? ?? ??? ????? ??????? ???? ?????? ?????‬&lrm;

it's no joke, what's happening.

to be fair to the argument, till now Al Jazeera is still reporting that they do not know whether those people in the video are libyan army soldiers who refused to kill civilians and were summarily executed, or whether they are captured libyan army killed by the protesters.

roachboy · 02-24-2011, 05:05 AM

dlish...thanks. interesting....

i didn't go through al jaz for that clip.

i got to it either by way of the guardian----which likely posted the caveat along with it (so i overlooked it)----or through the "we are all khaled said" group on facebook, which has been posting a ton of video and other information from libya. the upside is that the information stream exists. the downside is that the sense of complication in terms of sourcing and interpretation are presented in 420 characters or less.

information is still fragmentary.

speaking of which there were lots of reports of checkpoints that folk trying to get out of libya passed through at which cellphone photographs/sim cards were being erased, video and computers with image of massacre etc. confiscated. information fragmentation is apparently gadhafi's friend.

on the other hand, information transparency is nowhere available.

roachboy · 02-24-2011, 08:08 AM

this is a really interesting article from electronic intifada that to some extent explains the peculiar turn(s) that gadhafi's speeches have taken in their attempts to frame the revolt:

ei: Libya's tragedy, Gaddafi's farce

meanwhile, perhaps the saudi's attempts to buy off the population won't work out.

1.59pm - Saudi Arabia: Leading Saudi intellectuals have urged the monarchy to make far-reaching political and social reforms. They say that Arab rulers should derive a lesson from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and listen to the voice of disenchanted young people. The group includes renowned Islamic scholars, a female academic, a poet and a former diplomat. King Abdullah, who returned home after a three-month medical absence, yesterday unveiled benefits for Saudis worth £23bn in an apparent attempt to insulate the world's leading oil exporter. The measures announced by state media include pay rises to offset inflation, unemployment benefits and affordable housing.

Libya in turmoil - live updates | World news | guardian.co.uk

Baraka_Guru · 02-24-2011, 08:30 AM

I was reading about the odd situation in Saudi Arabia. Maybe it was through this thread somewhere. Isn't it the case that the King and all the heirs are all advanced geriatrics and aren't likely long for the world?

Also the situation is different in that there are no bones about the political structure. It's an absolute monarchy. You don't vote for the king. There are no elections, let alone rigged elections as pretense. Though I'm largely ignorant of Saudi politics and society. There is some voting, yes? On the municipal level? Is it like the Chinese structure in that the top-level is essentially handpicked, but the local levels are somewhat (or maybe not at all, really) chosen by the people?

mixedmedia · 02-24-2011, 08:54 AM

I'm sure it's not lost on anyone. The irony that some of these ME/N African countries are giving to their citizens what our lawmakers are trying to take away from us hand over fist.

It's disorienting, dismaying, discouraging. All the major disses.

Baraka_Guru · 02-24-2011, 09:54 AM

The position of the Obama administration and that of other governing bodies has become more clear in Obama's recent speech:

YouTube - President Obama on the Situation in Libya

I suppose at this time it's a matter of whether anything tangible takes shape or whether it will be needed. And, of course, whether it will be enough, and whether it will be soon enough.

roachboy · 02-24-2011, 11:00 AM

here's some (very basic) information about the saudi political system:

The Political System of Saudi Arabia - Helen Ziegler

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...k/geos/sa.html

this from the financial times on king abdullah's attempt to head off opposition by paying it off:

Quote:

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article - FT.com / Middle East & North Africa - Saudi?s $36bn bid to beat unrest

Saudi’s $36bn bid to beat unrest

By Abeer Allam in Washington, Heba Saleh in Cairo and Jack Farchy and Javier Blas in London

Published: February 23 2011 16:21 | Last updated: February 23 2011 18:37

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced financial support measures, worth an estimated SR135bn ($36bn), in a bid to avert the kind of popular unrest that has toppled leaders across the region and is now closing in on Libya’s Muammer Gaddafi.

The measures include a 15 per cent salary rise for public employees to offset inflation, reprieves for imprisoned debtors, and financial aid for students and the unemployed.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
In depth: Middle East protests - Feb-16
Interactive: Mapping Middle East unrest - Feb-21
Editorial: EU - the feeble monster - Feb-23
Bahrain opposition press royal family - Feb-23
MPs resign from Saleh party in Yemen - Feb-23
Energy Source: Reasons for oil not to hit $150 - Feb-23

Saudi Arabia’s ruling family has thus far been spared the type of popular discontent that has toppled presidents in Tunisia and Egypt and brought Libya to the brink of civil war.

The announcement of the Saudi relief measures coincided with King Abdullah’s return to the country after three months. He had been abroad for medical treatment. Among those on hand to greet him was King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa of neighbouring Bahrain, which is struggling to contain a surging opposition movement.

The cash-rich Saudi government has pledged to spend $400bn by the end of 2014 to improve education, infrastructure and healthcare. “The king is trying to create wider trickle- down of wealth in the shape of social welfare,’’ said John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi. “The budget can handle that, but it is an aspirin to ease medium-term pain, not a solution for the long-term housing, and unemployment issue.”

Despite a prolonged economic surge, unemployment has remained above 10 per cent and is cited by government officials as one of their primary concerns.

Critics said the sweeteners did not address the Saudi public’s political aspirations. Protests, political parties and labour unions are banned in the conservative kingdom. “We need a new higher education minister, a new health minister, reform of the judiciary and codified laws - not hand-outs,’’ said Turki Al-Balaa, a 34 year-old businessmen.

“We want real change. This will be the only guarantee of security of the kingdom,’’ added Hassan al-Mustafa, one of 40 Saudi rights activists and journalists who signed an open letter requesting an elected parliament, more rights for women and enhanced anti-corruption measures.“A constitutional monarchy closer to the Kuwaiti model is not an impossible target to achieve right now.”

Reformists including Prince Talal bin Abdelaziz, the king’s half brother, have called for similar reforms. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy ruled by consensus among the royal family and in alliance with an austere religious establishment that preaches obedience to the king. The country’s leading clerics have warned against the “evils” of the regional unrest which they say were incited by foreigners to foment instability in Muslim countries.

Hundreds of people have signed up to a Facebook campaign calling for a “day of rage” across Saudi Arabia on March 11, although it is not clear if any protests will materialise. Analysts said the late date suggested that activists wanted to give the government time to introduce reforms, and not a real desire to take to the streets.

“We don’t want money,” a female student from Jeddah said on her Twitter feed. “I want to know that I’ll be protected under a written constitution for the rest of my short life.”

A lawyer wrote that the Saudi people seek “dignity, reform, freedom of expression, transparency, justice, respect, wise governance, not grants

FT.com / Middle East & North Africa - Saudi?s $36bn bid to beat unrest

another neo-liberal state.

roachboy · 02-25-2011, 01:03 PM

there's pretty clearly a cloud of vapor developing around the general idea of doing something to stem the bloodshed in libya, and that for any number of reasons including the fact that there are chemical and biological weapons. sold by champions of freedom like the united states, of course. there's a cloud of vapor but no agreement about what should happen or the institutional frame through which whatever ends up getting agreed to, assuming something does, should happen. and so there we are.

this is a moderate-seeming article....but i wonder if the suggestion that the obama administration work with the un and/or arab league would meet with opposition from the conservative wing of the american political oligarchy....

Quote:

Taking sides is Obama’s best move

By Mark Malloch Brown

Published: February 24 2011 23:17 | Last updated: February 24 2011 23:17

In 2002 I authorised publication with the apparently inoffensive title of The Arab Human Development Report. Within days of its release, a million copies of the Arabic language edition had been downloaded, and the new al-Jazeera television channel was debating it endlessly. Shortly afterwards, a closed door ministerial meeting of the Arab League condemned its calls for democracy, women’s rights and secular education – and its warnings about the region’s stagnation and youth unemployment. The region was becalmed, even as democratisation and economic
swept through so much of the rest of the world.

My career, first as a political adviser to insurgent democratic oppositions and then mediating various revolutions from the top ranks of the UN, leads me to three lessons at this point in the Arab world’s tsunami. First, it should have happened sooner. Second, it did not because countries such as Libya and Egypt were security states that allowed no opposition to grow. This will now be a handicap. Third, the US will have a much bigger, although uneven, role in steering these countries through their current conflict, and then transition, than is fashionable to acknowledge.

When I found myself up against these angry Arab League ministers it was as head of the UN’s development arm. Our report had been written by a group of Arab policy experts, so we were free of the charge of western meddling. Leading a multibillion dollar development agency, I nevertheless despaired of making any difference in the Arab region unless we could stimulate an intellectual revolution. People were locked into a serfdom of ideas and politics that shackled their national life.

So the events of recent weeks are a cause to celebrate. This really is an Arab spring. But, at best, it is only the beginning of a liberation of minds and people. In Tunisia and Egypt, decades of suppressed workers’ rights and societal inequalities are bursting to the surface. Transitional rulers may soon fall back into old habits, preferring stability over democratic chaos. After all, as big economic stakeholders in the old order, Egyptian generals have a lot to lose from democracy. This backlash may, in Bahrain, lead to a compromise where there is a coup inside the royal family rather than a full transition to democracy.

Concerns will grow about whether new regimes in Egypt and elsewhere will harm relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia and the US. Yet my experience is that relations abroad usually remain largely unchanged following such events. When Cory Aquino pushed President Ferdinand Marcos out of power in the Philippines in 1986, she threatened to throw out American military bases. The outcome was much more incremental: a mutually agreed reduction in the US presence that served both governments well.

Egypt will still want to triangulate relations with Israel and Palestine, the army will retain a powerful say and the US will probably continue to be the critical non-regional ally, even if a democratic Egyptian government employs stroppier rhetoric. The huge gain will be that a democratic government may be able to take risks for peace that its authoritarian precursor never could. After all, it will have a popular mandate.

It is a different story, however, on the domestic front. Here the risk is not Iran in 1979, but the Philippines in 1986, Latin America throughout the 1980s or eastern Europe in 1989. In most of these cases the eventual democratic governments proved initially weak, and in most cases unable to drive through the economic reforms that could have brought relief to those who had voted for them.

The reason for this was that a collection of workers, social activists, economic liberals, and those on the way out politically, combined to throw out what they knew they opposed – be it Mr Marcos, various ageing Latin American leaders or jowly communist apparatchiks. Once that was achieved, their agreement simply melted away. They knew what they were against, but not what they were for.

The final mixed lesson for the region is that, for all the talk of America’s best years being behind it, this crisis in some ways reaffirms how Washington’s role is as important as it has been in every democratic revolution of the past 30 years. Its reputation may not be high with the protesters, but the US ability to tell a Bahraini or Egyptian regime when it is time to leave, and to then help steer the transition, remains unparalleled.

The great exceptions are Libya, and should the protests take greater hold, Syria and Iran. Here the American writ evidently does not run. Yet leadership now devolves very directly on President Barack Obama to do two things much of Washington will resist. What he tried to do, in his Cairo speech six months into his administration, is now in reach. He can begin to detoxify America’s brand by putting it on the side of democratic change. For America’s existing allies in the region, that means helping to usher them out even when their successors are something of a gamble. But with regimes such as Libya’s Colonel Muammer Gaddafi, it means the painful (and for the US Congress controversial) process of working through the despised UN and Arab League, to build a new, legitimate multilateral consensus to isolate him and pressure him into conceding.

It is one of those global moments when a US president has to take sides. When in doubt, or when pushed back by Congress or his own State department, he should think of the courage of the Libyan protesters, and the aspirations of a generation of young Arabs who have made this moment possible.

The writer is a former international political consultant, former UN deputy secretary-general and author of The Unfinished Global Revolution

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Taking sides is Obama?s best move

a quite interesting piece, too long to paste up (even i have limits) about the relation of the farce that is the "War on Terror" to direct military/police support from the west of the types of governments that are getting blown down...

Anti-terrorism and uprisings - Features - Al Jazeera English

you know:

British government approved sale of crowd control equipment to Libya | World news | The Guardian

and more generally:

Arms trade | World news | guardian.co.uk

aceventura3 · 02-25-2011, 02:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

and this to dispense with the simple-minded bloomberg-bromides about the miracles of neo-liberalism.

what bloomberg prescribes for egypt is exactly the ideology that enabled mubarak and his pals to plunder egypt....

but read on...

The Revolution Against Neoliberalism

and lest you imagine that this neo-liberal fiasco was restricted to egypt, read this:

Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? | Rolling Stone Politics

about the american financial oligarchy that consolidated its power and looted the store while talking blah blah blah about markety capitalism.

it's horseshit, ace darling.

horseshit.

Can you go on record and state that anything less than unconditional equal rights for women in the ME is unacceptable?

Can you go on record and state than anything less than unconditional rights to life, liberty - and the means of acquiring and possessing property, pursuing and obtaining happiness, and safety in the ME is unacceptable?

I will stop there and simply ask do you know what the implication of your response is, regardless of how you answer?

But, I am pretty sure it is too complicated for simple and direct response.

---------- Post added at 10:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:30 PM ----------

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

there's pretty clearly a cloud of vapor developing around the general idea of doing something to stem the bloodshed in libya, and that for any number of reasons including the fact that there are chemical and biological weapons.

Now wait a minute...Saddam Husein actually used chemical weapons to kill thousands among other things and you did not stand with the Bush administration when they wanted to remove Saddam from power....what is the difference in your stance now and your stance then?

Seaver · 02-27-2011, 07:14 AM

Honestly I hope Saudi Arabia stays the way it is. That is one country that if given democracy would go balls-crazy.... their population honestly scares me.

dlish · 02-27-2011, 08:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Seaver

Honestly I hope Saudi Arabia stays the way it is. That is one country that if given democracy would go balls-crazy.... their population honestly scares me.

this comment would be funny if it wasnt scary. I'd love to hear what you think about this and why.

as much as you could push for democracy in saudi, even if it hit them in the head, i dont think they'd be able to see it.

FYI - last week kuwait offered all citizens a year of free food as well as all utility bills paid. At least they'll stave off a revolution for at least a year before it's people wake up again.

Oman - 2 people killed in the Sultanate today as part of protests against its rulers.. its coming closer to here....nothing to report here yet except for murmurs of a protest. here the population is quite happy, well off and paid enough to keep them from protesting. Although i could be wrong... i've been wrong in the past...

Willravel · 02-27-2011, 10:50 AM

Apparently the people of Saudi Arabia, for whatever reason, don't deserve the right to self-determination. They're scary, after all.

Walt · 02-27-2011, 02:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

I'm sure it's not lost on anyone. The irony that some of these ME/N African countries are giving to their citizens what our lawmakers are trying to take away from us hand over fist.

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

nation-states are done for. situations like this simply show it.

I don't follow. Please explain.

02-22-2011, 09:05 AM	#283 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	I don't see it, ace. Thinking in absolutes doesn't conjure images of impressionism. What is impressionistic about your thinking, however, is that although your big-picture ideas are clear (albeit disagreeable), upon closer examination, they tend to become a confused muddle. Thinking in absolutes tends to remove context and ignore unavoidable factors and influences. I've asked you to elucidate, and you've instead bewildered. It would seem we've come across another non-starter. Enjoy your theories. __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

02-22-2011, 12:16 PM	#287 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	ace, you missed my point. You think of your way of thinking as the opposite the way it is, and you think of my way as the opposite the way it is. I'm now thoroughly convinced that you have no interest in pursuing any line of thinking outside of your own pristine theories. You seem to refuse to look at situations within the context of reality, which includes a level of multiplicity that you avoid to even acknowledge. I normally welcome attempts at having a discussion with you. However, this time you've outdone yourself by mischaracterizing both you and me. For example, you don't even understand the level at which I agree with you, nor the level at which I disagree with you, in your theories. And yet you continue to make assumptions and continue to muddy the waters. I don't even know your position on the topic, really. I heard something about Maslow and free-market capitalism. Beyond that, I don't know what you mean to say beyond "people don't like to starve and generally like capitalism." You haven't really applied any of that theoretical stock to anything real. And now you've gone ahead and assumed I don't know what you're talking about—that I can't understand conceptually or logically—which is false. I know exactly what you're talking about. Half of it is bullshit, the other half irrelevant. __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 02-22-2011 at 12:20 PM..

02-22-2011, 02:11 PM	#290 (permalink)
aceventura3 Junkie Location: Ventura County	Hey Roach, Unconditional rights for women in the ME is complicated, right? I don't understand the real issues, right? It's just Ace and his "black and white" imaginary world right? Or as DC would say i don't understand that women may have to compromise for the good of the formation of a new government. Or as Baraka might suggest, unconditional rights for women in the ME is just a concept. Oh, sorry for yet another tangent from what is really important, let's get back to the real world after all no one really wants that in the ME. __________________ "Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch." "It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions on vegetarianism while the wolf is of a different opinion." "If you live among wolves you have to act like one." "A lady screams at the mouse but smiles at the wolf. A gentleman is a wolf who sends flowers."

02-22-2011, 03:47 PM	#291 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	So I guess it's safe to say, at least, that the shit is currently hitting the fan in Libya. A couple of tidbits from the interior minister, Abdel Fattah Younes, who has resigned: "The Libyan people have suffered too long. We have so much oil, the people could have lived as in a 5 star hotel." "Gaddafi's speech was very clear to any one who has a brain. He is nervous, he is stubborn. He may commit suicide." Also, in other developments, the Canadian government has finally condemned Gadhafi, and has begun the planning and process of extracting Canadians from the country: Ottawa condemns Gadhafi, plans evacuation - The Globe and Mail Also, have a look at an interesting infographic regarding Libya and Gadhafi's influence in Africa, and the implications of it vapourizing: Gadhafi's influence on Africa - The Globe and Mail __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

02-22-2011, 05:08 PM	#292 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	Sorry Ace, I enjoy political discussions a great deal... but I honestly feel I'm done with your conversations here. I don't feel you're adding to the discussion as it's not pertinent to realities on the ground. I find Libya very interesting. Reports of the Air Force bombing protesters I was initially skeptical of, resulted in Air Force Pilots defecting as they refused orders to bomb their own civilians and feared execution from their own officers. I've also read about tanks firing on protesters and even some tanks defecting to the other side. __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

02-22-2011, 09:03 PM	#294 (permalink)
dlish Currently sour but formerly Dlishs Super Moderator Location: Australia/UAE	malta adds two planes to their air fleet. sweet! i cant imagine what malta was thinking when these guys first showed up on the radar heading towards it from libya. __________________ An injustice anywhere, is an injustice everywhere I always sign my facebook comments with ()()===========(}. Does that make me gay? - Filthy

02-22-2011, 09:42 PM	#295 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Armed Forces of Malta: "AFM to unidentified crafts, identify yourselves and your intentions." Defectors: "Defecting from Libya." Armed Forces of Malta: "I... wait, what? Frank? Frank, is that you? This isn't funny, Frank." Defectors: "No joke, we're defecting." Armed Forces of Malta: "John? Come on, John, I have an important job!" Defectors: "DUDE, WE'RE SERIOUSLY DEFECTING!!" Armed Forces of Malta: "DUDE, CAPS IS ON" Defectors: "Oh, sorry. But yeah, totally defecting."

02-23-2011, 10:11 AM	#299 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	there are reports that kadhafi is already using the military to attack opposition actions. well, the interior security forces as he has apparently been afraid of a military coup since he came to power via a military coup in 1969 so has worked to keep the military weak...libya is controlled by the interior security forces that overlap with effectively private militias----you know, the kind of feudal arrangement that would result in a lot of place as the logical outcome of taking conservative paranoia about the state seriously there are reports of military jets being used. there are reports that there are naval vessels in position off tripoli that may be used to bombard the city. so no, there's no reason to worry too much about what might happen. the international community has a great track record of not knowing what to do when massacres present themselves: Rwanda: Why the international community looked away \| World \| Deutsche Welle \| 07.04.2009 much better to sit around and watch people get massacred and complain about how o so terrible it all is. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

02-23-2011, 11:16 AM	#301 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i know.....let's let capitalism solve the problem.... actually, this is a consistent problem with transnational organizations, moving from saying tsk tsk tsk to actually doing anything. there are reports that nato has warned kadhafi to use restraint. i haven't seen anything else about it. in this case, if the situation escalates, i wouldn't object to nato intervening to effectively depose kadhafi. the e.u. is handwringing a lot...on the one hand tsk tsk violence is bad but on the other, led by italy, starting to freak out about refugee flow potentials. the security council hasn't managed to put together a resolution even. so none of the related transnational agencies (in a loose sense, from peacekeeping forces to the international court) can do anything. the united states has apparently been waiting to say much until a ferry with us citizens reaches malta. it would be a bad bad idea for any individual country to go into libya. no cowboy shit. remember iraq? bad idea. bad bad idea. nation-states are done for. situations like this simply show it. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

02-23-2011, 03:11 PM	#305 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	I'd love to see Obama park a Carrier outside of Libya and simply say any aircraft that takes off from here-forward will be immediately shot down. We can shoot well outside of anti-ship/air missile range, and provide at least a little assistance to the protesters. __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

02-23-2011, 04:47 PM	#306 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	A no-fly zone over Libya would certainly be a step in the right direction. But I agree with roachboy that the US cannot go this alone. It needs to be a collective response and, preferably, not run by the US. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

02-23-2011, 04:51 PM	#307 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	even though i am sympathetic to that idea, i think it'd be a Huge Mistake for the united states to act unilaterally if only because (a) the lockerbie affair and bombings of tripoli that followed it---the "museum of strength" that ghadhafi appeared before with his cute umbrella, was made from the residence of his that was bombed by the united states---this set up a us (me) against the Big Evil legitimation that ghadafi has not hesitated to use since AND (b) because of the iraq debacle (thanks george) has created an association between the discourse of democracy and american invasion.....and also (c) it's kind of hard for me to imagine how making that move could be the only one given the (apparently true) bringing in of heavily armed mercenaries from chad and niger and nigeria....i can't imagine that the us (or anyone) could simply park a carrier and not find themselves more or less compelled to intervene on the ground to stop the carnage. because carnage there is, seemingly. among the more shocking/dramatic eye-witness reports is here, in french sadly: Libye : "C'était un carnage absolu", actualité Monde : Le Point among other things he provides an estimate of at least 2000 people killed at benghazi and extensive use of mercenaries to do it. he describes the mercenaries as very heavily armed as "killing machines"---confronting largely unarmed civilians (that's been changing, especially in benghazi). the mitigating thing with what he says in the article is that it's clear he was entirely freaked out by what he experienced (justifiably so) so the account has a phantasmagoric quality to it. but it's pretty amazing nonetheless. worth dusting off the french for. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

02-24-2011, 05:05 AM	#309 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	dlish...thanks. interesting.... i didn't go through al jaz for that clip. i got to it either by way of the guardian----which likely posted the caveat along with it (so i overlooked it)----or through the "we are all khaled said" group on facebook, which has been posting a ton of video and other information from libya. the upside is that the information stream exists. the downside is that the sense of complication in terms of sourcing and interpretation are presented in 420 characters or less. information is still fragmentary. speaking of which there were lots of reports of checkpoints that folk trying to get out of libya passed through at which cellphone photographs/sim cards were being erased, video and computers with image of massacre etc. confiscated. information fragmentation is apparently gadhafi's friend. on the other hand, information transparency is nowhere available. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

02-24-2011, 08:08 AM	#310 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	this is a really interesting article from electronic intifada that to some extent explains the peculiar turn(s) that gadhafi's speeches have taken in their attempts to frame the revolt: ei: Libya's tragedy, Gaddafi's farce meanwhile, perhaps the saudi's attempts to buy off the population won't work out. 1.59pm - Saudi Arabia: Leading Saudi intellectuals have urged the monarchy to make far-reaching political and social reforms. They say that Arab rulers should derive a lesson from the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya and listen to the voice of disenchanted young people. The group includes renowned Islamic scholars, a female academic, a poet and a former diplomat. King Abdullah, who returned home after a three-month medical absence, yesterday unveiled benefits for Saudis worth £23bn in an apparent attempt to insulate the world's leading oil exporter. The measures announced by state media include pay rises to offset inflation, unemployment benefits and affordable housing. Libya in turmoil - live updates \| World news \| guardian.co.uk __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

02-24-2011, 08:30 AM	#311 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	I was reading about the odd situation in Saudi Arabia. Maybe it was through this thread somewhere. Isn't it the case that the King and all the heirs are all advanced geriatrics and aren't likely long for the world? Also the situation is different in that there are no bones about the political structure. It's an absolute monarchy. You don't vote for the king. There are no elections, let alone rigged elections as pretense. Though I'm largely ignorant of Saudi politics and society. There is some voting, yes? On the municipal level? Is it like the Chinese structure in that the top-level is essentially handpicked, but the local levels are somewhat (or maybe not at all, really) chosen by the people? __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

02-24-2011, 08:54 AM	#312 (permalink)
mixedmedia has all her shots. Location: Florida	I'm sure it's not lost on anyone. The irony that some of these ME/N African countries are giving to their citizens what our lawmakers are trying to take away from us hand over fist. It's disorienting, dismaying, discouraging. All the major disses. __________________ Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

02-27-2011, 07:14 AM	#317 (permalink)
Seaver Junkie Location: Fort Worth, TX	Honestly I hope Saudi Arabia stays the way it is. That is one country that if given democracy would go balls-crazy.... their population honestly scares me. __________________ "Smite the rocks with the rod of knowledge, and fountains of unstinted wealth will gush forth." - Ashbel Smith as he laid the first cornerstone of the University of Texas

02-27-2011, 10:50 AM	#319 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Apparently the people of Saudi Arabia, for whatever reason, don't deserve the right to self-determination. They're scary, after all.