From: Erooth Mohamed <ekunhan@gmail.com>
Date: 2011/2/14
Subject: [bangla-vision] Mubarak Myster: In Egypt, In Germany, In Coma? The Tragedy of Mubarak; Defeated Mubarak adjusts to solitary life; Anatomy of a revolution; Meet the young Egyptian activists who started it all; When Democracy Weakens; Al Jazeera's Incredible Web Activ
Mubarak Mystery: In Egypt, In Germany, In Coma?
A screenshot from the last time Hosni Mubarak was seen in public late last week.
(Credit: CBS)
The Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm reported Sunday that Mubarak had slipped into a coma. The paper repeated rumors that the 83-year-old former head-of-state also fainted twice during his infamous I-won't-quit speech last week, delivered just a day before he did indeed step down.
Another report, from an Israeli French-language magazine named JSS News, claims that Mubarak was on death's door in a hospital in Baden, Germany. Mubarak has long been rumored to be suffering from cancer, and JSS News claims that he is already in the terminal phase of his cancer suffering.
Despite these rumors, an Obama administration official told a reporter at the Washington Post Sunday they believed he was actually in the seaside resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh, where he has long had a private residence. Egypt's prime minister also supported this report.
Complete Coverage: Anger in the Arab World
Still, several locals in Sharm el-Sheikh also told the Post they believe that, while he did immediately flee for the resort town after resigning, he quickly boarded a plane for Abu Dhabi and then continued on to Germany.
For their part, the Germans call this theory nonsense.
"He's not in Germany, and he's not on his way," Steffen Seibert, the chief spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said Sunday night, according to the Post. "This is a new round of rumors. There is absolutely no information that we have about this, and it would require him a visa to come here. So presumably we would know."
If Mubarak is indeed gravely ill, there is still uncertainty about how he would pay for medical treatment.
Widely rumored to have accumulated billions of dollars in personal wealth during his presidency, Switzerland announced after Mubarak stepped down that it had frozen his and his family's assets in their banks.
+++++
Ousted President Hosni Mubarak went into a coma on Saturday at his residence in Sharm al-Sheikh, according to well-informed sources.
Mubarak flew to the Red Sea resort town on Thursday with his immediate family following his final speech, in which he handed over executive authority to former Vice-President Omar Suleiman.
The same sources said that Mubarak was currently receiving medical treatment but that no decision had yet been made on whether to transfer the 83-year-old former head-of-state to hospital.
Rumors had circulated earlier that Mubarak had fainted twice while recording his final speech, which was broadcast on state television on Thursday evening.
Translated from the Arabic Edition.
Mubarak in Coma
by TheTotalCollapse.com on February 13, 2011
A Bahraini newspaper said the "center" Bahrain yesterday, Saturday, the health status of former President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak has deteriorated in the past few hours. The newspaper quoted sources as saying that "it close to Mubarak," It is in a coma in full.
The newspaper pointed out that Mubarak's health point of view I also deteriorated yesterday, where he was fainting twice while recording his speech, which delegated the powers to his deputy, Omar Suleiman
Iran English radio stated that the ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is suffering serious health problems and has reportedly fallen into a coma.
According to the Bahraini daily al-Wasat, quoting sources close to the Mubarak family, he said the former president had fainted twice before his last speech.
Sources said Mubarak's condition was the reason his much anticipated speech on Thursday was delayed.
The US stooge, on Friday stepped down –after 30 years of iron-fist reign of terror –and handed power to the Egyptian army after 18 days of mass demonstrations against his regime.
Meantime, according to a report in the Egyptian newspaper al-Masr al-Youm, Sunday Mubarak was in Baden, Germany, for medical treatment.
The newspaper said that he had earlier traveled to his residence in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm ash-Sheikh resort town on board one of his private jets.
The Examiner reports: We have learned through foreign sources that Hosni Mubarak was flown this morning to a Baden hospital in Germany after falling into a coma. The report was confirmed this morning by Bahrain daily Al Wasat who indicated that just prior to leaving for his resort in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Mubarak became comatose.
Apparently, prior to delivering his last speech on national Egyptian television, we also learned that Mubarak had fainted. This is the explanation given for the delay between the announcement of his anticipated speech and his actual appearance several hours later.
His fragile state of health was also cited as the reason for which the army did not insist that he leave earlier.
Beginning on January 25th, 2011, Egypt witnessed massive popular protests calling for the end of its dictatorship regime, starting with the resignation of Mubarak.
Last year, we reported that Hosni Mubarak had been hospitalized in Germany for gall bladder surgery, but it was also revealed that the Egyptian President suffered from terminal cancer.
The Tragedy of Mubarak
The Egyptian president had ruled for decades. Then his grandson died, and the unraveling began.
SourceFormer Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in October 1984 in Paris during an official visit.
The night before he finally stepped down as Egypt's president, the protesters in Tahrir Square heard Hosni Mubarak deliver his final address as their head of state. "A speech from a father to his sons and daughters," he called it, and like many of his orations in the past, it was filled with lies, although he may have believed some of these himself. He would stay as president until September, he promised, because the country needed him for a transition to democracy. This, after three decades of autocracy. The hundreds of thousands gathered in the square wanted to hear him say only one word: "Goodbye." Amid their screams of fury, one woman could be heard shouting into a phone, "People are sick of the soap opera!"
The protesters had reason to be weary of the president's final, delusional public performance. But there was another long drama coming to an end that night, mostly out of public view—a personal story that helps to explain the president whose stubborn incomprehension of his "sons and daughters" dragged Egypt so close to ruin. Former U.S. ambassador to Egypt Daniel Kurtzer has called it the "tragedy" of the Mubaraks. As Kurtzer says of the Egyptian president, "He really did feel he was the only one holding the dike"—as if beyond Mubarak lay the deluge.
Mubarak's fall is not a story like the one that unfolded in Tunisia, of a dictator and his kin trying to take their country for all it was worth. Although there have been widely reported but poorly substantiated allegations of a $40 billion to $70 billion fortune amassed by the Mubarak family, few diplomats in Egypt find those tales even remotely credible. "Compared to other kleptocracies, I don't think the Mubaraks rank all that high," says one Western envoy in Cairo, asking not to be named on a subject that remains highly sensitive. "There has been corruption, [but] as far as I know it's never been personally attached to the president and Mrs. Mubarak. They don't live an elaborate lifestyle."
Gallery: The Agony and the Ecstasy
The Agony and the EcstasyOn the contrary, vanity more than venality was the problem at the top in Egypt. Despite the uprising of millions of people in Egypt's streets, despite their ringing condemnations of secret-police tactics and torture, the Mubarak family remained convinced that everything the president had done was for the country's own good. "We're gone. We're leaving," the deeply depressed first lady, Suzanne Mubarak, told one of her confidantes as the crisis worsened last week. "We've done our best."
The man at the heart of the story, the patriarch, had never imagined he would hold the presidency—and when that came true, he couldn't imagine it ending. As commander of the Egyptian Air Force, he had been a hero of the 1973 war against Israel, so when President Anwar Sadat summoned him to the palace in 1975, he thought maybe he was going to be rewarded with a diplomatic post, but no more than that. (Friends say Suzanne told him to try to get a nice one in Europe.) Instead, Sadat named him vice president. And on Oct. 6, 1981, as Sadat and Mubarak sat side by side watching a military parade, radical Islamists opened fire, killing Sadat and making Mubarak the most powerful man in the land. Egypt was a different country in those days, one where the government's lies to the people went unquestioned and the police routinely intimidated the public into submission. The only television was state television, and the primary contact with the outside world was via sketchy phone lines. Some international calls had to be booked days in advance. As Mubarak's reaction to the protests made clear, he failed to understand how the country had changed in 30 years.
His partner in the family tragedy was Suzanne Mubarak, the daughter of a Welsh nurse and an Egyptian doctor, who married Hosni when he was a young Air Force flight instructor and she was only 17. By the time she was in her late 30s, when her boys were teenagers and her husband was vice president, she set about reinventing herself as a social activist in Egypt and on the international stage. "Suzanne is 10 times smarter than her husband," says Barbara Ibrahim of the Civic Engagement Center at the American University of Cairo. "She's got nuance, she's got sophistication." As Egypt's first lady she helped to bring dozens of nongovernmental organizations to the country to try to improve Egyptian life. More than her husband and more than his inner circle of intelligence officers and military men, Suzanne had a sense of the world outside the palace.
But she also had ambitions within it. None too secretly, Suzanne guided the fortunes of her children and grandchildren, looking to establish a political dynasty that might endure for generations. The older son, Alaa, is a businessman who prefers soccer to the game of politics—a fact that has brought him occasional surges of popularity over the years as a big-name, big-mouthed fan of Egypt's national team. The younger son, the handsome, aloof Gamal, was for years the apparently anointed but undeclared heir to the presidential palace. When writing about his rise, British tabloids never failed to mention the pharaohs' ancient dynasties. Gamal himself, half-joking with friends and acquaintances even as he ritualistically denied presidential aspirations, preferred to speak of the Kennedys, the Bushes, and the Clintons.
But in the spring of 2009, the family's plans and strategies unraveled. The turning point came with the death of a child.
As the year opened, the 80-year-old Mubarak appeared firmly in control. America had a new president, Barack Obama, but Mubarak knew about U.S. presidents. He had seen four of them come and go, every one convinced that Mubarak was the only man in Egypt who could keep the biggest population in the Arab world quiet, extremists at bay, and his Army at peace with Israel. Even after the Bush administration's brief push to democratize the Arab world, Egypt's seemingly eternal president looked as solid as the Sphinx.
The old man's great joy in life—what put a smile on that stony face and kept him going—was his 12-year-old grandson, Mohamed, the first-born son of Alaa. A dark-haired, dark-eyed charmer, Mohamed often appeared with the president in official palace photographs. The cover of Hosni Mubarak's official biography showed him seated with toddling Mohamed, about 2, standing in front of him. Another palace picture showed the well-groomed little Mohamed a few years later talking on the phone as if playing president. At soccer matches he sat at his grandfather's side. In mid-May of 2009, the boy spent the weekend with gidu Hosni (grandfather Hosni) and grandmama Suzanne, as he had done many times before. But when Mohamed went home to his parents the next day, he started to complain of a pain in his head. And then he slipped into a coma.
Mohamed died a few days later in a Paris hospital, reportedly from a cerebral hemorrhage. The devastated Egyptian president canceled a planned trip to visit Obama in Washington and could not even bring himself to attend Mohamed's funeral. When Obama flew to Cairo a few days later to deliver a landmark speech to the Arab and Muslim world, Mubarak did not attend. And the Egyptian people, as sentimental as any on earth, regarded their president's heartbreak with deep sympathy. Israeli journalist Smadar Peri remembers people in Egypt's streets clamoring to speak with reporters, wishing only to express their condolences. "We are one family, and Mubarak is everyone's father," they told her.
"That was a moment of glory," a close friend of the Mubarak family recalls. "If the president had stepped down, people would have begged him to stay." But Mubarak did not step down. Amid speculation that he was losing his grip, that he was literally dying of a broken heart, he stayed. Peri, who interviewed Mubarak a few weeks later, told me afterward that he had lost none of his mental capacity, but that the spark behind his eyes was gone. He no longer enjoyed his work or his position or his future, but he held on anyway. It was then, as much as last week, that he first failed to see a way out. He had come to believe that no one could replace him, not even Gamal.
The president's younger son had spent nearly a decade studying the art of politics in his father's ruling National Democratic Party ever since returning from London, where he had worked for Bank of America and then run his own company, Medinvest. He imported organizational ideas and administrative techniques from abroad, especially from Britain's Labour Party. ("Tony Blair has taken more vacations in Egypt than God," a friend of the family notes in passing.)
The scheme might have worked except for one thing: Gamal was not a politician. "Gamal is a nerd," says Ziad Aly, a mobile-communications entrepreneur and an old schoolmate of the Mubarak boys from the American University in Cairo. "He was a very clever type of 4.0 student. And he continued to be clever all his life. He reads a lot. He learns a lot. And Gamal was a good investment banker. He was always at it."
For all his technocratic brilliance, however, Gamal desperately lacks any hint of a common touch. "I think he's sometimes misconstrued as arrogant, and I don't think he is," says Aly, who joined the protests against the regime in recent weeks. "But Gamal has a huge problem, which is communication. He is not charismatic; he doesn't come across as a person who is good with people. So he was looked at as maybe well educated, maybe young, maybe a nice picture for the country—but he's not close to us. He's very alienated. So he cannot actually rule or lead."
Even so, many of Egypt's best and brightest businessmen gathered around Gamal's standard. Some profited mightily from the association, while others set out to modernize an economy still weighed down by policies dating back to the "Arab socialism" of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Some did both, and several were brought into the government. Liberalization, privatization, and modern telecommunications began to transform the business landscape. Sales of what had been government land and the construction of hotel and condo developments created a vast and lucrative Riviera on the Red Sea that, in turn, created enormous fortunes. Foreign direct investment increased dramatically at first, and until last year the economy was growing by 6 to 7 percent. But the new money also created a new class of super-rich Egyptians. It stoked resentment among tens of millions of people living on the edge of survival, among the young and educated who still could find no jobs—and among the military and secret-police establishment that was, for all the government's new business-friendly technocratic veneer, the real foundation of Mubarak's regime.
Resentment grew against Gamal and his new ways of doing things. A longtime member of the younger Mubarak's circle likens the situation to a factory run by an old man who knows how everything works and wants to keep things that way, no matter how badly the operation needs updating. The old man's son comes home from college full of bright ideas about newfangled machines and processes, but they're expensive and delicate and hard to maintain, and start breaking down. "That is the way the old guard around the president saw Gamal's people," says the businessman. "I think that's the way the president saw them."
A tight group of advisers around President Mubarak worked hard to limit his vision of the world. The most notorious was the longtime minister of information (of course), Safwat Sharif. The story always told about him sotto voce, whether true or not, was that he worked his way up through the security services filming people in love nests. Certainly he was known in government circles as the man who made it his business to keep dossiers full of damaging material about anyone and everyone who might be a threat to Mubarak or, indeed, to himself. "He was like J. Edgar Hoover in that way," says one close friend of the Mubarak family, referring to the political extortions of the man who once headed the FBI. "He had the files." Supposed crimes were prosecuted not when they occurred, or when they were discovered, but when the prosecutions would be useful to neutralize opponents or undermine critics.
Nobody wanted to go up against that inner circle, and few in the government dared. But Suzanne Mubarak sometimes tried. Moved by her conscience and an awareness of global attention, for instance, the first lady campaigned forcefully against female genital mutilation, a practice extremely common and widely accepted in Egypt. It's not the kind of issue the men around Mubarak liked to see raised, but Suzanne "had the courage to speak out publicly and to get this criminalized," says Barbara Ibrahim. "She chose her battles with the security regime."
One of the most difficult battles involved Ibrahim's own husband, academic Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who had been Suzanne Mubarak's thesis supervisor at American University in Cairo when she went for her master's degree in 1980. Later, when she was first lady, he wrote speeches for her at her staff's request. But by 2000, Saad Eddin was becoming a problem for the government. Gamal had come back from London, and Saad Eddin wrote a critical piece accusing the first family of planning a dynasty—a gomlukia, as he called it, combining the Arabic words for republic and monarchy. With funding from the European Union he had also trained election observers, a move the Mubarak government decided to interpret as foreign interference in Egypt's affairs. And then Saad Eddin, sitting with friends at the Greek Club in Cairo, told some off-color jokes about the president. Someone taped them and took them to Mubarak, apparently telling him, "This is the way your wife's friend talks about you." Saad Eddin spent the next three years in jail, emerging disabled because of inadequate medical care for a nerve inflammation. He now lives in exile. "I know [Suzanne Mubarak] tried at one point to intercede on Saad's behalf," says Barbara, "and she was told it was none of her business."
By the spring of 2010, as the Egyptians began to look ahead to year-end parliamentary elections and a presidential election in 2011, Gamal's star was on the wane, even among many of his business associates. One evening some of the country's wealthier businessmen spoke of the country's future as we sat together at a bar in Cairo's Four Seasons Hotel. The president had just undergone gallbladder surgery at the time, and their expectation—their hope, even—was that Mubarak would be healthy enough to run again. If not, they envisioned him allowing intelligence chief Omar Suleiman to run in his place. They had no plan C. Mubarak and his family had created a power elite as lacking in imagination as they themselves had become.
Millions of other Egyptians suffer from no such handicap, and they want a country that works differently. When steel tycoon and ruling-party boss Ahmed Ezz eliminated almost all opposition candidates in the wildly fraudulent parliamentary elections at the end of last year, the public's anger mounted. And in mid-January, when Tunisians brought down their country's dictator, Egyptians began their own unprecedented push to do likewise.
As a weakened Mubarak leaned more on his Army to save him, the generals' first targets were the "businessmen" in the cabinet. Gamal's allies were forced out. Several were threatened with prosecution. The old guard had won its first victory. Then the president himself stood down. The old guard was in charge again. The fact will register on ordinary Egyptians soon enough. Another soap opera—or another tragedy—may begin. But this one won't be called The Mubaraks.
Christopher Dickey is also the author most recently of Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force—The NYPD, chosen by The New York Times as a notable book of 2009.
Defeated Mubarak adjusts to solitary life in Sharm el-Sheikh
High security at former Egyptian leader's home amid calls for international action to freeze Mubarak family assets
- Harriet Sherwood
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 February 2011
At the end of a palm-lined drive in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, guarded by dozens of armed security officers and sniffer dogs, a defeated ex-president was this weekend contemplating his past, his present and his future.
After steering the destiny of 80 million Egyptians for 30 years, Hosni Mubarak could now gaze out over the blue waters of the Red Sea and consider how and where to spend his remaining days.
The Mubarak villa is not the grandest in the neighbourhood, nor as flamboyant as the nearby home of Bakr bin Laden, Osama's half-brother and scion of the Saudi construction clan.
The entrance to the former leader's compound, next to the lush golf resort of Jolie Ville, has no nameplate but was easily identified by the security detail.
A checkpoint leading to the resort was manned by surly plainclothes officers, inspecting passports and asking questions before allowing cars to pass.
At the entrance to the Mubarak compound, a thick-set officer wearing jeans and sweatshirt, a pistol holstered at his waist, confirmed the 82-year-old was at home. Then, perhaps fearing he had said too much, reduced his responses to one or two words.
Would Mr Mubarak like to speak to the press? "No." Was his family with him? "No comment." Was he receiving visitors? "No comment." Could I take a photograph? "No." Could I hang around for a bit? "No."
A pick-up truck with a box of bottled water was waved past the first barrier. A few yards on, an official ran a mirror underneath the chassis and a large Alsatian dog sniffed around its wheels.
Then it was the Guardian's turn to answer questions. Name, nationality, media organisation, hotel. Two security officers simultaneously relayed the information down their phones. Time to leave: Egypt may be liberated from tyranny but there was a chance the message hadn't got through to Sharm el-Sheikh.
As Mubarak considers his options, there were growing calls for a full investigation of his family's wealth. The true value of the Mubaraks' fortune remains unknown. US officials dismissed a rumour that the family is worth up to $70 billion as a wild exaggeration, telling the New York Times that the true figure was between $2 billion to $3 billion.
Britain's business minister, Vince Cable, called for international action to track down the Mubarak family's assets around the world. "I was not aware that he had enormous assets here, but there clearly needs to be a concerted international action on this," Cable said.
"There is no point one government acting in isolation, but certainly we need to look at it. It depends also whether his funds are illegally or improperly obtained."
The Swiss government has frozen the ousted president's assets, but there was speculation over the weekend that much of the money may already have been moved. A spokesman for Britain's Serious Fraud Office said it was tracking down assets linked to Mubarak in Britain in case there was a request for them to be seized, which could come from Egypt, the United Nations or the European Union. "We are identifying where such assets might be in the event that we are asked to take action," the spokesman said.
Sharm el Sheikh – normally thronged with tourists seeking winter sunshine and superlative diving – was near-deserted this weekend. Hotel foyers echoed, roads were almost devoid of traffic, many shop doors were closed and locked. Resort hotels offered heavily discounted prices.
The Cooke family, from Abbotsbury, Dorset, on their fifth holiday in Sharm, were relaxed about the protests hundreds of miles to the north. "If there were student riots in London, you wouldn't worry if you were in Cornwall, would you?" Maureen Cooke, 53, said. "They don't want any trouble here – they depend on tourism."In the Queen Vic pub, draped with Union flags, in Soho Square, Sharon and Paul Stone from Exeter were the only customers. The Egyptian protesters, Sharon said, had "got what they wanted, and good on 'em". The couple was delighted with their first holiday to Egypt and were planning to return with their children and grandchild within a couple of months.
"It's lovely, totally relaxed," said Paul, sipping a beer in the afternoon sun. "There are no Germans and no Russians. We've noticed a lot of police and guards on hotels, but we don't feel at all uneasy."
The opulence of Sharm's multi-star hotels is in stark contrast to the poverty and deprivation in most of the country. But hotel workers' wages are low, and few tourists venture beyond resort restaurants and bars to pump money into the local economy.
Unlike the euphoria of Cairo's Tahrir Square, the atmosphere in Sharm, where no protests took place in the 18 days before Mubarak's resignation, was subdued. "We are very sad to see him go," said Nasser, a concierge in a smart, beach-front hotel. "He was a good man. And now those of us who are sad have to keep quiet."
Anatomy of a revolution: Meet the young Egyptian activists who started it all
Here's a full breakdown of the Egyptian protests, explanations of the moving parts, and profiles of the activists
April 6 Youth Movement
Name: April 6 Youth Movement
Known Members and Leaders: Ahmed Salah, co-founder; Ahmed Maher, co-founder
Role in Revolution: Organizers -- arguably the most organized youth movement in Egypt at the moment
This grass-roots opposition movement began as a Facebook group that accumulated more than 90,000 members and played the role of catalyst in Egypt over the past three years. Originally conceived in 2008, the movement broke away from the Kefaya ("Enough") opposition group and organized a national strike on April 6 in support of industrial workers who had already launched a work stoppage in the town of Mahalia al-Kubra. Subsequently, the group developed a modus operandi based on Iran's Green Movement and developed a manual on protest methods that culled lessons from their Persian compatriots.
The movement called for the Day of Anger protests on Jan. 25 that launched the Egyptian uprising three weeks ago. The BBC called the group the main organizing force behind the original protests. Since then, the April 6 Youth Movement continued to rail against the Mubarak regime, calling on all Egyptians to "take to the streets and keep going until the demands of the Egyptian people have been met."
Op-Ed Columnist
When Democracy Weakens
By BOB HERBERT
Published: February 11, 2011
As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn't help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it's on the ropes. We're in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Bob Herbert
While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn't really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.
So what we get in this democracy of ours are astounding and increasingly obscene tax breaks and other windfall benefits for the wealthiest, while the bought-and-paid-for politicians hack away at essential public services and the social safety net, saying we can't afford them. One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage assault from nearly all quarters.
The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the president's re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash won't be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They'll be genuflecting before the very rich.
In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people "have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities." Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.
The corporate and financial elites threw astounding sums of money into campaign contributions and high-priced lobbyists and think tanks and media buys and anything else they could think of. They wined and dined powerful leaders of both parties. They flew them on private jets and wooed them with golf outings and lavish vacations and gave them high-paying jobs as lobbyists the moment they left the government. All that money was well spent. The investments paid off big time.
As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics": "Step by step and debate by debate, America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."
As if the corporate stranglehold on American democracy were not tight enough, the Supreme Court strengthened it immeasurably with its Citizens United decision, which greatly enhanced the already overwhelming power of corporate money in politics. Ordinary Americans have no real access to the corridors of power, but you can bet your last Lotto ticket that your elected officials are listening when the corporate money speaks.
When the game is rigged in your favor, you win. So despite the worst economic downturn since the Depression, the big corporations are sitting on mountains of cash, the stock markets are up and all is well among the plutocrats. The endlessly egregious Koch brothers, David and Charles, are worth an estimated $35 billion. Yet they seem to feel as though society has treated them unfairly.
As Jane Mayer pointed out in her celebrated New Yorker article, "The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry — especially environmental regulation." (A good hard look at their air-pollution record would make you sick.)
It's a perversion of democracy, indeed, when individuals like the Kochs have so much clout while the many millions of ordinary Americans have so little. What the Kochs want is coming to pass. Extend the tax cuts for the rich? No problem. Cut services to the poor, the sick, the young and the disabled? Check. Can we get you anything else, gentlemen?
The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that's a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.
I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. "If there is going to be change," he said, "real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves."
I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.
Check Out Al Jazeera's Incredible Web Activity On The Day Mubarak Resigned
The Egyptian revolution provided an incredible boost to Doha-based Al Jazeera, which provided coverage of the event like no other network.
Betaworks' John Borthwick has published some awesome traffic graphs from Al Jazeera's website (they use Chartbeat to monitor traffic), which show just how active the site became as events built up to Mubarak's resignation.
The first just shows the basic spike/numbers:
| Image: John Borthwick |
What's particularly cool is zooming in on one article, and seeing where traffic is coming from. Not surprisingly, "social" traffic (twitter and such) is just huge.
| Image: John Borthwick |
قصة احد الفراعنة
The Story...
القصة...
انَّ فِرْعَوْنَ عَلا فِي الأَرْضِ
Surely Firon exalted himself in the land...
Quran 28:4
Summary Of the story!
!ملخص القصة
إِنَّهُ كَانَ مِنَ المُفْسِدِينَ
Surely he was one of the mischief makers.
Quran 28:4
End Of the story!
!نهاية القصة
11.02.2011
!العبرة من الحكاية
a respite(temporary delay) till a day when eyes will stare (in horror),
انشر تؤجر
get rewarded
Insha Allah!
From: raja chemayel <chemayelraja@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 3:46 PM
Subject: Day two..............five generals replace the one.
To:
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Palash Biswas
Pl Read:
http://nandigramunited-banga.blogspot.com/
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