If you flip on the news to see the unrest gripping Egypt, you'll be told that the Egyptian people want democracy and that is the fuel for the widespread protests. However, as Danny Schechter pointed out yesterday on AlterNet, the people have been oppressed for nearly 30 years. Why has the fuse been lit now?
This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.I urge you to read the entire article. It is very enlightening -- particularly since the mainstream American media is loathe to point out what is truly going on here.
It is about how the solutions for the world financial crisis that the Ceos and Big pols are massaging in a posh conference center in snowy Davos Switzerland have turned into a global economic catastrophe in the streets of Cairo, the current ground zero of a certain to spread wave of international unrest.
Yes, the tens of thousands in the streets demanding the ouster of the cruel Mubarek regime are there now pressing for their right to make a political choice but they are being driven by an economic disaster that has sent unemployment skyrocketing and food prices climbing.
People are out in the streets not just to meet but by their need to eat.
As Nouriel Roubini who was among the first to predict the financial crisis while others were pooh-poohing him as “Dr Doom” says, don’t just look at the crowds in Cairo but what is motivating them now, after years of silence and repression.
He says that the dramatic rise in energy and food prices has become a major global threat and a leading factor that has gone largely unreported in the coverage of events in Egypt.
"What has happened in Tunisia, is happening right now in Egypt, but also riots in Morocco, Algeria and Pakistan, are related not only to high unemployment rates and to income and wealth inequality, but also to this very sharp rise in food and commodity prices," Roubini said.
Prices in Egypt are up 17% because of a worldwide surge in commodity prices that has many factors but speculation on Wall Street and big banks is a key one...
Good article, thanks. I'd guess Americans aren't rioting because the pinch isn't enough. We won't do it over gas prices, for God's sake. I think deep down we all recognize that driving is more of a luxury than anything, even if we depend on the car to get to work and everywhere else. But food, well, it's still relatively cheap, and only a small part of expenses.
ReplyDeleteBut I bet the media plays its part, as well as our fractured society. We aren't community oriented much anymore. Many live in subdivisions whose residents have nothing in common but that they live near each other. And everyone, subdivisions and elsewhere, retreats after work to their individual homes, to watch TV alone with only one's family. There's little in the way of "public gathering places" and even there, like coffee shops, people are often on their computers or self isolating.
But that's all pretty precarious. If things get bad enough, the quiet, individual grumblings that one can hear in diners and living rooms across the nation will really coalesce. A big power outage, or inability to heat one's home from skyrocketing heating costs, shit, even just a continuation of increasing unemployment... eventually there is a tipping point. I often think lowly of my fellow Americans but I know it really wouldn't take much to crack the veneer of servility. We still maintain the democratic ethic and the high minded ideals of our nation's founding, in theory if not in practice, as we've been so long drugged and distracted and isolated by the shiny technologies and competitive American Dream. I don't think things will turn out terribly, and certainly not like a cutthroat neighbor against neighbor that many a survivalist prophesizes. Deep down we know the problem is the disgusting scum at the top of this melting pot.