Category Archives: Foreign Aid

UPDATED: Morsi, The Military: Egypt Is A Hot Mess (The Size of Discontent)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Islam, Middle East

There are perhaps two not entirely unhappy conclusions to take away from the events underway in Cairo, Egypt. This week’s WND column, “Independence And The Declaration of Secession,” lamented that America has become a nation “of deracinated, fragmented and demoralized people, managed to their detriment by a despotic State.” (Updated here.)

The Egyptians, on the other hand, still have a redeeming quality, and it is a profound contempt for power. “Son of 60 dogs” is an Egyptian expression for a political master. This quality should serve them well.

The other thing I took away from listening to the more enlightened Egyptians of Tahrir Square is that many want what Americans once had thanks to their founders. Modern secular Egyptians are articulating a wish for a republic that safeguards minority rights, and not for a raw democracy in which those rights are subject to the whims and wishes of the majority, and where few are the issues that are not adjudicated by a national majority.

Moreover, while Americans have a hard time understanding the difference between a democracy and a republic, I get the impression that some Egyptians are hip to these distinctions.

Those who’ve been misled into believing that Morsi is not democratically legit, for what that’s worth, ought to be reminded that the Democratic Alliance for Egypt, “a coalition of political parties,” the largest party of which was the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party,” won the 2011-2012 election with 37.5% of the vote.

The runner-up was the Islamist Bloc, the “second largest political bloc in the parliament.” It was even more devout than The Brotherhood. It won 27.8% of the vote.

The nature of democracy and humanity is such that it is quite possible that their former supporters no longer back these parties. These supporters have realized, as Benjamin Barber put it, that “politics has become what politicians do; what citizens do (when they do anything) is to vote for politicians”:

It is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and paltry policy-making anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends.

Economic Policy Journal (EPJ) quotes Ron Paul’s on the Egyptian mess:

“A military coup in Egypt yesterday resulted in the removal and imprisonment of the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a closure of media outlets sympathetic to him, the house arrest of his advisors, and the suspension of the constitution. The military that overthrew Morsi is the main recipient of the $1.3 billion yearly US aid package to Egypt. You could say that the US ‘owns’ the Egyptian military that just overthrew its democratically-elected leader. The hypocrisy of the US administration on these events in Egypt is stunning …”

“Let’s review US policy toward Egypt to see the foolish hypocrisy of the government’s interventionism,” write Paul:

“First the US props up the unelected Hosni Mubarak for decades, spending tens of billions of dollars to keep him in power. Then the US provides assistance to those who in 2011 successfully overthrew Mubarak. Then the US demands an election. The Egyptians held an election that was deemed free and fair and shortly afterward the US-funded military overthrows the elected president. Then the US government warns the military that it needs to restore democracy – the very democracy that was destroyed by military coup! All the while the US government will not allow itself to utter the word “coup” when discussing what happened in Egypt yesterday because it would mean they might have to stop sending all those billions of dollars to Egypt. ”

UPDATE (7/8): We now have some idea of the size of Egyptian discontent: “22 million …—a large number considering Egypt’s estimated population of 93 million people.” We got those numbers from revelation of a “signature-gathering campaign called ‘Tamarod’ or ‘Rebel.'”

I will write more, however, on western delusions of representation (my book already does this http://www.ilanamercer.com/newsite/into-the-cannibals-pot.php) in a future post. Suffice it to say that the Egyptians have a better idea than we in the West of how to remove their rulers. Game. Set. Match, Egyptian people.

Low-Wattage US President Clueless About Rolling Blackouts In South Africa

Affirmative Action, Africa, Foreign Aid, Free Markets, Regulation, Science, South-Africa, Technology

Our low-wattage president, Barack Obama, is clueless about the reasons for “rolling blackouts”—“’load shedding’ is the local euphemism,” in South Africa, where, since “freedom,” the electrical grid has been degraded at every level: generation, transmission, and distribution. Distribution is now entrusted to the local, increasingly inept, authorities.

Dumbo has pledged to borrow some more from China, $7 billion to be precise, “to help combat frequent power blackouts in sub-Saharan Africa.”

You’ll find explanations to some of the problems in Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa (pages 99-100):

…pylons and poles are routinely flattened, stolen, and then smelted. Indeed, blackouts and blowouts are intricately connected to the breakdown of law and order. “Up to 100 miles of cables may be going missing every year, destined for markets such as China and India where booming economies have created insatiable demand for copper and aluminum,”[26] reports Britain’s Daily Telegraph. “The result has been entire suburbs plunged into darkness, thousands of train passengers stranded, and frequent chaos on the roads as traffic lights fail.”[27]
As The New York Times saw it, “[t]he country’s power company unfathomably ran out of electricity and rationed supply.”[28] (My emphasis.) Not quite. I’ve lived through Highveld thunder storms and Cape, South-Easter, gale-force winds. Few and far between were the blackouts. (I purchased a generator in the U.S., after experiencing my first three-day power outage.) No, Eskom, the utility that supplied most of the electricity consumed on the African continent, did not run out of juice. It just ran out of experienced, skilled engineers, expunged pursuant to BEE. “‘No white male appointments for the rest of the financial year,”[29] reads an Eskom Human Resources memo, circulated in January of 2008, and uncovered by the Carte Blanche investigative television program. The same supple thinking went into destroying the steady supply of coal to the electricity companies. Bound by BEE policies, whereby supplies must be purchased from black firms first, Eskom began buying coal from the spot market. Buyers were to descend down the BEE procurement pyramid as follows: buy spot coal first from black women-owned suppliers, then from small black suppliers, next were large black suppliers, and only after all these options had been exhausted (or darkness descended; whatever came first), from “other” suppliers. The result was an expensive and unreliable coal supply, which contributed to the pervasive power failures.[30]

Ideally, the power grid ought to be privatized:

Unlike private firms, state-mediated utilities need not respond to profit and loss signals. So long as they have taxpayer funds to make good their errors, these hydra-headed creatures have the option to produce at a loss. Thus, in a market in which the state has a hand, prices will never fully convey the information they relay in an unhampered market, and will invariably fail in guiding producers to meet consumer demand. Electricity is best entrusted to fully free markets. Only private enterprise raises initial capital voluntarily and applies careful entrepreneurial forethought to all endeavors. Left to their devices, entrepreneurs will, in the long run and in response to price signals, build more capacity—electricity-generating plants—and prices will inevitably fall. Only entrepreneurs in competition with one another have the incentive to satisfy the customer, on whom they depend for their very survival.

From “HOW NOT TO ‘PRIVATIZE’ THE POWER GRID.”

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Israel Can Do Without Thief-In-Chief

Barack Obama, Elections, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Military, Palestinian Authority

A transfer of funds via wire is faster than a good-will state visit. So brazen is Barack Hussein Obama about using the people’s purse to feather his own nest—that he doesn’t even bother with appearances. To upstage Mitt Romney’s campaign stop in Israel,

Obama is authorizing an additional $70 million in military assistance to [that country].
The official says the funds will go to help Israel expand production of a short-range rocket defense system. The system, called Iron Dome, helps Israel defend itself against rocket attacks.

(Politico)

Chicago politics? Make that DC as usual.

The American Founding Fathers believed that politicians had no right to be benevolent with funds belonging to the people.

From “Is Ron Paul Good For Israel?”:

HE WHO PAYS THE PIPER CALLS THE TUNE. For foreign aid, Israeli leaders have been forced to subordinate their country’s national interests to Washington’s whims. This is bad for both allies. Those of us who want the U.S. to stay solvent—and out of the affairs of others—recognize that sovereign nation-states that resist, not enable, our imperial impulses, are the best hindrance to hegemonic overreach. Patriots for a sane U.S. foreign policy ought to encourage all America’s friends, especially Israel, to push back and do what is in their national interest, not ours.

There’s something else that might surprise Americans, who’ve been convinced that unless they intervene to assist, Israel won’t make it. Israel’s doing alright. Relatively speaking, its economy is better than that of the US.

The crazies are threatening it on the north (Lebanon & Syria), the south (the lovely Egyptian revolutionaries), and the east (the Palestinian Authority, Jordan and beyond), but, as the US and most of Europe decline, Israel’s economy flourishes. Here are Israel’s fiscal fundamentals, courtesy of Bloomberg.com:

• GDP growth of 4.8 percent this year
• A raised credit rating of A+
• Very low unemployment
• “60 companies traded on the Nasdaq Stock Market, the most of any nation outside North America after China.”
• “The largest number of startup companies per capita in the world.”
• A ranking of “third in terms of projected growth this year among MSCI’s list of 24 developed economies, after 6 percent for Hong Kong and 5.3 percent for Singapore, according to the IMF.”
• “Israel’s exports are high-added value exports like informatics and technology”: This means the stuff the Israelis make adds real value and jobs, unlike Obama’s state-manufactured jobs, which result from moving money around.

SADLY, that thing we in the US celebrate and anticipate—the Arab spring—threatens commence, innovation and economic prosperity in the region’s most productive oasis.

On the military front, Israel doesn’t need American assistance with rocket-deflection technology. The Israelis (a contractor called Rafael and the US-based Raytheon) vastly improved upon the American patriot missile system that misfired so badly at Dhahran.

At the time, the Israelis had already identified the problem and informed the US Army and the PATRIOT Project Office (the software manufacturer) on February 11, 1991, but no upgrade was present at the time.[citation needed] As a stopgap measure, the Israelis recommended rebooting the system’s computers regularly, however, Army officials did not understand how often they needed to do so. The manufacturer supplied updated software to the Army on February 26, the day after the Scud struck the Army barracks.

(Wikipedia)

To remedy the problem, the Israelis developed,

David’s Sling, expected to have a longer range than the Patriot and also to one day replace the Hawk surface-to-air missile systems in air defense missions.

As for a system designed to stop short-range rockets; the Israelis have that covered too. They’ve had to. How else do you live (and prosper) near the oasis known as Gaza?

My in-house wireless expert tells me that to deflect short range, small, fast-moving rockets, the RF radar tracking system of the Iron Dome is already “impressive.”

Israel is good to go.

From Bagram In Bondage

Barack Obama, Foreign Aid, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism, War, Welfare

Windy and insubstantial is the kindest thing an honest newsman might say about the gimmick that is the Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed today by Barack Obama in Afghanistan. The president snuck into that US satrapy in secret. Had his intended “benevolence” toward the poor Pashtuns of Afghanistan been made public—the same people would have tried to blow Air Force One out of the sky.

“Afghanistan has a friend and a partner in the United States,” Obama said before he and Afghan President Hamid Karzai signed the Strategic Partnership Agreement outlining cooperation between their countries once the U.S.-led international force withdraws in 2014. … “There will be difficult days ahead, but as we move forward in our transition, I’m confident that Afghan forces will grow stronger; the Afghan people will take control of their future,” Obama said.

(CNN)

Blah, blah, blah.

Stripped of the baffle-gab, the agreement from Bagram amounts to this: Even when U.S. forces in Afghanistan are reduced considerably, they will still maintain the necessary meaty presence.

Oops, I meant to say the “enduring partnership,” which would, ostensibly, “prevent the Taliban from waiting until the U.S. withdrawal to try to regain power.”

Essentially we’re paying to keep in power the authoritarian protectorate we’ve helped establish, headed by the puppet we appoint, all of whom are hated by the Pashtun majority.

Afghanistan was the war Obama could call his own. He increased America’s presence there from 30,000 troops to 90,000, and thus earned his commander-in-chief credentials. Electability in fin de siècle America hinges on projecting strength around the world—an American leader has to aspire to protect borders and people not his own. Obama needed a war he could call his own. Afghanistan served his purposes.

And he intends on keeping Afghanistan on America’s welfare rolls. Afghanistan’s GDP approximates the foreign aid it receives annually, and you know who supplies the lion’s share of that “GDP”? Counterfeiter-in Chief, Ben Bernanke and the US printing press.

At the expense of the American taxpayer.

It goes without saying that Republicans like Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, the three blind neoconservative mice, are elated about the signing of the “Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) with President Karzai,” as it “will allow the United States military to operate in Afghanistan, though without permanent bases.”

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