Demands of Middle Eastern Protesters

The "Arab Spring" has a chance to really last if the protesters formulate and demand a coherent anti-imperialist and mainly economic developmental program





Some have compared the CIA backed Middle Eastern protests to the failed wave of liberal uprising around Europe in 1848. That description however may only apply to the protests against the regional monarchies and not the Arab republics.

This Pragmatist article from May of 2009 (forgive this early piece for its pro-US imperialist tone in some parts) analyzes political currents of some of the key countries and concludes that the region is similar to pre-WW1 Europe:

"The Muslim world is where Europe was in 1850-1900. Their brief "Napoleonic period" was the combination of Western world's brief occupation and Nasser's efforts. This introduced some of the wealthier Muslims to liberal values. As of today, Muslim liberals are slowly wrestling away social influence from blatant coalition of clergy, oligarchs, sub-national ethnic/tribal leadership, and Western educated authoritarian playboy aristocracy. Only these liberals provide genuine source of nationalism. They are the ones that have a real sense of moral indignation at poverty and their country's backwardness. The liberals want majority of their countrymen to be represented in broadly legitimate government, united, and have the modernization that unified national action can bring."

Genuine nationalism for most of the Muslim world is not yet possible. Large swaths of the population don't really have united societies or legitimate governments to really fight and root for. The clergy still effectively competes with state governments for people's affections. Sub-national affiliations are also very strong still. Influence of supra-national church and sub-national factions will decline as long as literacy continues to spread and college education becomes more widely available."

It was concluded that some parts of the region are now ready to begin engaging in genuine nationalism (bottom up nationalism versus top down Nasserist/Baath party efforts) and that this is dangerous within current international set up.

"It is very possible that citizens of the Middle East will become as willing to die for their artificial new countries as an average Frenchman or German was in the trenches of WW1." (The recent Robert Gates outburst that NATO cannot break the spine of western Libya betrays genuine amazement at the degree of nationalistic consolidation that Gaddafi achieved via his unifying and psychologically enriching Kaiser-esque rule)

Egypt, being at the forefront of this process, is key to the whole region. To try to avert possibilities of mass violence that genuine nationalism can unleash it was suggested that:

"United States can start promoting EU style pan-Arabism to skip the national step altogether. Free trade, common currency, and a loose confederate structure can go a long way towards confusing and splitting the energies of future Middle Eastern nationalists."

Many ethnic groups around the world have successfully skipped a nationalistic period so this is definitely doable. It appears United States is now following the advice of this magazine but perhaps for the wrong reasons (either to create exploitable chaos and deny the area to Chinese and Russians OR to eventually release pan-Arab unification energies as a bulwark against growth in Iranian influence [SCO connected country]).

If the Arab liberal protesters (children of well to do families) do not want their movements to be hijacked by the Western financial oligarchies, if they don't want to become a socioeconomic Trojan horse, then they will need a list of economic demands and not just political ones.

What can such a list look like?

1) A developmental national state owned bank that can provide large quantities of credit for infrastructure projects that bring employment to the "youth bulge"

2) Nationalization or 50%+1 control (Putin style) of key strategic heavy industries and using the profits to create solid safety nets

3) A legal framework to break the power of the landlords and to have housing cooperatives (individual tenants have shares of ownership in the housing complex, are collectively the landlord, and decide on apartment building management democratically)

4) Expulsion of Western military presence, of foreign banks (via regulation on speculators), and of parasitic structures like the IMF

5) A policy of neutrality concerning doing business with the West, Iran, China, etc.

6) A legal framework to deny corporations personhood and rights. Requiring foreign corporations to directly invest, share technologies, and find domestic partners if they want to do business (China/Russia style)

7) A legal framework for more horizontal, co-operative, and democratic corporate structures. Demand for democracy should extend to the workplace

8) Separation of church and state, separation of military and state, and separation of foreign interests and state

9) Peaceful pursuit of nuclear energy to power up agricultural projects, mass transportation projects, and other infrastructure

10) The right to unions and jump starting unionization via state help (to make sure private oligarchic interests don't overflow into the vacuum being left by the receding state power)

11) Shelter, food, medicine, and college education as a basic human right (tapping into psychological need to not only emulate aspects of other countries but to advance planetary socioeconomics via a uniquely Arab contribution)

That will definitely stick it to the tyrants. CNN, BBC, and other corporate puppets like British intelligence connected Al-Jazeera will be sure to change their tone in a heartbeat if such human centric demands are made. Maybe one of the demands should be total ban on garbage like CNN.

Many other economic demands can be added based on locality's preference. The Arab elites should be overflooded with tangible economic goals so they can do their usual meeting halfway song and dance routine.

To conclude, Western efforts to amplify and redirect genuine expressions of indigenous discontent can in turn be redirected once more via an economic program that is hostile to neoliberalism. Then we'll really see an "Arab Spring".

Egypt Protests and United States

Starting a chain reaction via Egypt may backfire on Washington as the dollar and US treasuries are not outcompeting the eurozone and gold. Investor capital and revolutionary fervor may not flow where desired.


In June of 2009, I hypothesized that Obama's speech at Cairo university was an opening shot towards an effort to destabilize the Middle East. Such a move would serve not only to deny the area to Chinese and Russians as US turns inward and spends next 10-20 years economically reorganizing (harder for influence of major players to expand into a region engulfed by chaos) but it would potentially allow such reorganization. That is of course due to chaos supposedly bolstering the image of US as a fortress of investment safety via propping up the worth of US bonds and the dominance of the dollar as reserve currency. In theory, this in turn would allow continuation of funding for US dominated imperial framework. When you owe money in a reserve currency that you print and have the muscle to wage inflationary currency wars, such an insane strategy may even appear sensible at first glance.

Since the Cairo speech, US has also tried to destabilize the Eurozone via informational warfare and by using its best tools for such tasks, the credit rating agency attack dogs. Obviously there is no point in creating chaos along swaths of the globe if capital moves to competing areas of perceived safety. It is no surprise that as thousands of people went into the streets of Cairo, Standard & Poor's downgraded Japan's credit rating from AA to AA-. Today, 01/28/11, we saw a typical reaction of the dollar and US treasuries gaining as investors moved out of a relatively strong regional stock market in Egypt (that sparked sell offs in stock markets around the world) and into US treasuries. The biggest mouthpiece of the American oligarchy, the New York Times, had the timing to chip in about the Eurozone not being a good place to move one's money. American elites saw how the stock market implosions around the world in 2008 had fed the US bond market. Considering the desperate measures of quantitative easing and the federal reserve now being the biggest buyer of US debt, nothing is off the table to allow debt based funding to continue a while longer.

However, there are signs that US is not getting the timing right with its full spectrum chaos stirring. At the same time as the Tunisian revolt occurred (its people greatly helped and inspired by a wiki"leak" of US being against the former Tunisian dictator), the Euro was fighting off an incredible amount of concentrated short positions against it. Those shorting it lost and had to buy back the Euro making it rise against the dollar even quicker just as Egyptians were catching the Tunisian fever. Therefore, today's violence on the streets of Egypt (with corresponding pressure on Mubarak by the White House) occurred when not all of dollar's competitors were suppressed.

Interestingly enough, throughout January, gold and silver backed ETFs experienced a massive sell off (even as physical demand remained at an all time high) thus driving down the price of precious metals in a way that couldn't be done by shorting any longer. It is possible that even with the history of major financial structures shorting and thus suppressing the price of precious metals, the ETF sell off was just innocently due to paper holders moving into physical. Having said that, the timing is very suspicious for dollar dominated Wall Street players to be dumping gold/silver backed paper and lowering the market price just as the euro and 2 fire starter nations were being pressured as well.

Egyptian unrest was a mixed bag with dollar edging higher but gold/silver and other commodities like oil spiking up even faster. Since buying commodities currently works as a de facto bet against the future of the dollar, Washington seems to have lost with both the timing (Euro not being down and out as Cairo was burning) and commodities continuing to be seen as competitors to the dollar as a safety destination.

It is rather hilarious how smug the US political and financial class is, thinking that they can stir social unrest abroad and be immune from it at home. Gorbachev also actually seemed to have thought that he'd manage to remain in control if hardliners in satellite nations were overthrown and perestroika minded leaderships took over in their place. The sheer pathological arrogance and hypocrisy of the Obama administration (note how protesters were dispelled near G20 meeting in Pittsburgh) has no limits. Egyptians and Tunisians are protesting the same exact things that Americans are suffering from. There is little guarantee that in the future, Tunis or Cairo will not dump the dollar completely and move into the orbit of Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing.

The good news is that China and Russia are now acting as stabilizers and firemen. Throughout 2010, every time the US based credit rating agencies attacked the vulnerable Euro states, China seemed to step in and help Europe out. They invested heavily in Greece and recently began to launder their dollars by buying Spanish debt. People's Daily, the official mouthpiece of Chinese communist party, kept reaffirming the importance and health of the E.U. We also had a tit for tat move of a Chinese credit rating agency downgrading US credit rating in November, claiming 'that the U.S. government's solvency is "on the brink of collapse"'. Additionally, Russian Federation's prime minister Putin went as far as saying Russia may adopt the euro in the future.

Next few weeks will definitely be interesting. US propaganda organs are now saturating with Egypt coverage. Maybe they can attach some spiffy color to the unrest as well. I will leave with a quote from the above mentioned Cairo speech article:

"If Obama is able to utilize human rights pressure and universalist respect to destabilize Egypt, the potential chain reaction would keep Muslims busy for a while while US deals with its economic depression. By pressuring Israel and stagnant Arab Republican governments on human rights, it is theoretically possible to cheaply accomplish a chain reaction of liberalization that Bush tried to do by force. The splash damage can conceivably reach Iranian and Syrian middle classes as well."