DropEgyptsDebt

“As momentous as the current security and political restructuring challenges may be, it is absolutely critical that the transition authorities … place a high priority on deepening and accelerating structural economic reforms … transition and subsequent governments must articulate a credible medium-term reform and stabilization framework … [and] need to focus on creating the legal and institutional environment for fostering entrepreneurship, investment, and market-driven growth.”

The IIF went on to bluntly identify this acceleration of structural adjustment as the “context” in which aid to Egypt would be provided

designed to ensure greater legitimacy for neoliberalism

By limiting democracy to the ‘political’ sphere and expanding the notion of freedom to include ‘markets’, they obfuscate the necessary relations of power within the market, and explicitly block the ability of states to determine the use, ownership and distribution of their economic resources. Democratic control of the economy is thus precluded as a violation of ‘good governance’.

In the case of Egypt, the discourse of institutional reform has allowed neoliberal structural adjustment to be presented not just as a technocratic necessity – but as the actual fulfillment of the demands innervating the uprisings

emphasized by US and European spokespeople over the last weeks: this was not a revolt against several decades of neoliberalism – but rather a movement against an intrusive state that had obstructed the pursuit of individual self-interest through the market

Perhaps the starkest example of this discursive shift was the statement made by World Bank President Robert Zoellick at the opening of a World Bank meeting on the Middle East in mid-April. Referring to Mohammed Bouazizi, the young peddler from a Tunisian market place who set himself on fire and became the catalyst for the uprising in Tunisia, Zoellick remarked “the key point I have also been emphasizing and I emphasized in this speech is that it is not just a question of money. It is a question of policy … keep in mind, the late Mr. Bouazizi was basically driven to burn himself alive because he was harassed with red tape … one starting point is to quit harassing those people and let them have a chance to start some small businesses.”  

Western loans act to extract wealth from Egypt’s poor and redistribute it to the richest banks in North America and Europe.

Contrary to what has been widely reported in the media, this was not a forgiveness of Egypt’s debt. It is actually a debt-swap – a promise to reduce Egypt’s debt service by $1 billion, provided that money is used in a manner in which the US government approves.

dependent upon a continuous stream of new loans in order to service previously accumulated long-term debt

A PPP is a means of encouraging the outsourcing of previously state-run utilities and services to private companies

“a useful phrase because it avoids the inflammatory effect of “privatization” on those ideologically opposed

“The EBRD was created in 1991 to promote democracy and market economy, and the historic developments in Egypt strike a deep chord at this bank."

A research institute that tracks the activity of the EBRD, Bank Watch, noted in 2008 that a country cannot achieve top marks in the EBRD assessment without the implementation of PPPs in the water and road sectors.

The current Egyptian government has given its open consent to this process

“the current transition government remains committed to the open market approach, which Egypt will further pursue at an accelerated rate following upcoming election.”

orderly

democracy has not solved the most pressing of our own social contradictions, they have become worse.

it is very hard to keep

But for a democratic surplus, that is, and the procedural rights and freedoms South Africans enjoy, such as assembly and to vote for whom we choose among contesting elites. It is the absence of an out-and-out dictator, it seems, that keeps South Africa’s poor and discontented in their place.

an actual, not merely branded by a well-meaning Al Jazeera, ‘day of rage’.

A riot releases a qualitatively different element of political alchemy. It makes no demand. It constitutes itself as power rather than asking for stuff from the state. People in this mode have a burst to them that ranks and ranks of police cannot hold.

The top two of these historically are bread prices and repression. It seems that Arab politics has added a third distinct motive to revolt, one flowing from the form of state that has arisen in a privatized, globalised, late capitalist and kleptocractic era

Egypt is also an example of a country that decolonized very early and whose nationalist leaders enjoyed much prestige for their role in winning independence and keeping sovereignty. These struggle credentials and symbologies, such as they are, do not last

A second wave of post-nationalist, Arab liberation struggles are patently taking place now with a coherent and infectious set of ideas informing them.