The wrong Mubarak quits. Soon the right one will go
Protesters in Tahrir Square are right to be sceptical despite the apparent
shake-up in Egypt's ruling party
By Robert Fisk
Independent.co/UK: 6 February, 2011
The old man is going. The resignation last night of the leadership of the
ruling Egyptian National Democratic Party - including Hosni Mubarak's son
Gamal - will not appease those who want to claw the President down. But they
will get their blood. The whole vast edifice of power which the NDP
represented in Egypt is now a mere shell, a propaganda poster with nothing
behind it.
The sight of Mubarak's delusory new Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq telling
Egyptians yesterday that things were "returning to normal" was enough to
prove to the protesters in Tahrir Square - 12 days into their mass demand
for the exile of the man who has ruled the country for 30 years - that the
regime was made of cardboard. When the head of the army's central command
personally pleaded with the tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators
in the square to go home, they simply howled him down.
In his novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez outlines
the behaviour of a dictator under threat and his psychology of total denial.
In his glory days, the autocrat believes he is a national hero. Faced with
rebellion, he blames "foreign hands" and "hidden agendas" for this
inexplicable revolt against his benevolent but absolute rule. Those
fomenting the insurrection are "used and manipulated by foreign powers who
hate our country". Then - and here I use a precis of Marquez by the great
Egyptian author Alaa Al-Aswany - "the dictator tries to test the limits of
the engine, by doing everything except what he should do. He becomes
dangerous. After that, he agrees to do anything they want him to do. Then he
goes away".
***
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/opinion/08herbert.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212
A Terrible Divide
Bob Herbert
NY Times Op-Ed: February 8, 2010
The Ronald Reagan crowd loved to talk about morning in America. For millions
of individuals and families, perhaps the majority, it's more like twilight -
with nighttime coming on fast.
Look out the window. More and more Americans are being left behind in an
economy that is being divided ever more starkly between the haves and the
have-nots. Not only are millions of people jobless and millions more
underemployed, but more and more of the so-called fringe benefits and public
services that help make life livable, or even bearable, in a modern society
are being put to the torch.
Employer-based pensions, paid vacations, health benefits and the like are
going the way of phone booths and VCRs. As poverty increases and reliable
employment becomes less and less the norm, the dwindling number of workers
with any sort of job security or guaranteed pensions (think teachers and
other modestly compensated public employees) are being viewed with
increasing contempt. How dare they enjoy a modicum of economic comfort?
It turns out that a lot of those jobs were never so secure, after all. As
the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities tells us:
"At least 44 states and the District of Columbia have reduced overall wages
paid to state workers by laying off workers, requiring them to take unpaid
leave (furloughs), freezing hew hires, or similar actions. State and local
governments have eliminated 407,000 jobs since August 2008, federal data
show."
We have not faced up to the scale of the economic crisis that still
confronts the United States.
Standards of living for the people on the wrong side of the economic divide
are being ratcheted lower and will remain that way for many years to come.
Forget the fairy tales being spun by politicians in both parties - that
somehow they can impose service cuts that are drastic enough to bring
federal and local budgets into balance while at the same time developing
economic growth strong enough to support a robust middle class. It would
take a Bernie Madoff to do that.
In the real world, schools and libraries are being closed and other
educational services are being curtailed. Police officers are being fired.
Access to health services for poor families is being restricted. "At least
29 states and the District of Columbia," according to the budget center,
"are cutting medical, rehabilitative, home care, or other services needed by
low-income people who are elderly or have disabilities, or are significantly
increasing the cost of these services."
For a variety of reasons, there are not enough tax revenues being generated
to pay for the basic public services that one would expect in an advanced
country like the United States. The rich are not shouldering their fair
share of the tax burden. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to
consume an insane amount of revenue. And there are not enough jobs available
at decent enough pay to ease some of the demand for public services while at
the same time increasing the amount of taxes paid by ordinary workers.
The U.S. cannot cut its way out of this crisis. Instead of trying to figure
out how to keep 4-year-olds out of pre-kindergarten classes, or how to
withhold life-saving treatments from Medicaid recipients, or how to cheat
the elderly out of their Social Security, the nation's leaders should be
trying seriously to figure out what to do about the future of the American
work force.
Enormous numbers of workers are in grave danger of being left behind
permanently. Businesses have figured out how to prosper without putting the
unemployed back to work in jobs that pay well and offer decent benefits.
Corporate profits and the stock markets are way up. Businesses are sitting
atop mountains of cash. Put people back to work? Forget about it. Has anyone
bothered to notice that much of those profits are the result of aggressive
payroll-cutting - companies making do with fewer, less well-paid and
harder-working employees?
For American corporations, the action is increasingly elsewhere. Their
interests are not the same as those of workers, or the country as a whole.
As Harold Meyerson put it in The American Prospect: "Our corporations don't
need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products,
increasingly, come from abroad as well."
American workers are in a world of hurt. Anyone who thinks that politicians
can improve this sorry state of affairs by hacking away at Social Security,
Medicare and the public schools are great candidates for involuntary
commitment.
New ideas on a grand scale are needed. The United States can't thrive with
so many of its citizens condemned to shrunken standards of living because
they can't find adequate employment. Long-term joblessness is a recipe for
societal destabilization. It should not be tolerated in a country with as
much wealth as the United States. It's destructive, and it's wrong.
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