Vital Concerns for the World: Reason for hope in Egypt and other Arab dictatorships? I'm not as sure as Al Jazeera

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Reason for hope in Egypt and other Arab dictatorships? I'm not as sure as Al Jazeera

I am impressed that Larbi Sadiki of Al Jazeera is so confident that Mubarak has been defeated. I wish I shared his enthusiasm. We'll see.

Inception: Dreams of revolution
The idea of democratisation planted in Egyptian minds is beyond containment, yet Mubarak continues to resist.
Larbi Sadiki Last Modified: 02 Feb 2011 10:05 GMT

The realist terminology of the 'domino effect' does not capture the agency that Arabs are today assuming to unseat Arab hegemons, from Cairo to Sana'a.

This agency is unshackling itself from a threefold dynamic: the fear of the Arab police state; Orientalist constructions demoting Arab agency; and Euro-American democratisation theorists' obsession with structure, culture and top-down institution-building.

Similarly, this agency stumbles upon the structures of a world order driven by self-interest and impervious to the dreams of millions of Arabs to be free.

A precedent has been set in Tunisia, and Egypt is on the move. Whilst the challenges are awesome, the seeds for planting democratic dreams have begun by the display of people's power in Tunisia.

Planting a dream

"Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate," said Dom Cobb, played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Christopher Nolan's Inception.

And thus spoke the Tunisian people, ousting their dictator and unleashing shockwaves whose political reverberations will be felt for a long time. Today Nolan's leitmotif of inception has a powerful resonance in the Arab world.

The Tunisian flag showing in the riots witnessed by many Arab cities manifest both inspiration and admiration. But more importantly, Tunisia is a dream come true. The dictator who was once fearsome and thought to be invincible fell and fled rapidly.

From Tunis to Cairo, "people's power" represents a watershed, an Inception in the making. It now serves as a fount of democratic streams with a fierce and determined thirst for self-governance by the oppressed across the Arab geography.

[Click on the title above for a link to the original article in full.]

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A major source of the American debt problem

Notable Concerns

"Not one has taken responsibility for the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S. history." Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rica, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith.
The crash of September 2008 brought the largest bankruptcies in world history, pushing more than 30 million people into unemployment and bringing many countries to the edge of insolvency. AlJazeera 10/15/11
GE, America's largest corporation, paid no taxes last year even though it made 5.1 billion dollars profit in the country [and even more outside the country] [source: same as below]
In 2009 the richest 5% held 63.5% of American wealth; the bottom 80% controlled 12.8%. [source: same as below]
Between 2000 and 2007 the richest 10% in America benefited from all of the average growth in the period. In the post WW II period the top 10% benefited from only one third of the growth, the bottom 90% benefiting from the rest of the growth. [Economic Policy Institute, cited by Bob Herbert, NYT 3/26/11]
In 2010 a "premier" investment bank paid each of its 26,000 employees an average of $370,000. [Bill Gross Pimco Investment Outlook Feb, 2011.]
In 2005, one-quarter of the corporations in America making a trillion dolars in revenue paid no taxes.
The 833% Medical Insurance Ripoff: Medicare charges 3% for service; the health insurance companies in Missouri charge 25% for services
The richest 1 percent of Americans have more net worth than the bottom 90 percent.
The richest 1 percent of Americans receive more income than the bottom 50%. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/dec/10/bernie-s/bernie-sanders-viral-speech-says-top-1$ >