We Need to Talk About Prince Bandar

Chemical Weapons, False Flags and the Saudis' Hard Line
by PETER LEE


In the back and forth about Syria, there is surprisingly little discussion about Saudi Arabia’s Prince Bandar.

Even though Bandar apparently took over the Saudi covert account last year and has driven the Kingdom’s hard line against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria.

It’s also clear that Saudi Arabia has slipped the leash and is no longer a cooperative US ally. The general narrative is that the Saudis got disgusted and disillusioned by the Obama administration’s dithering in Egypt.

Maybe it wasn’t just dithering. Maybe the Obama administration was consistently supportive of civilian rule and insufficiently sedulous in the attention it paid to the Egyptian army and its role in assuring the institutional continuity (ahem) and stability of Egyptian political life.

It is also possible that the Saudis finally decided that it would not try to paper over the disagreements between the US and the KSA over persistent US support for the Morsi regime, especially since the Saudi government was determined to overwhelm US attempts to control the Egyptian military through withholding the US aid package of $1.2 billion by “flooding the zone” with a promise of $12 billion from Riyadh.

So a clean break was marked by a coup, a defiant massacre of America’s preferred political partners in Egypt, and orchestration of a vociferous and extremely public anti-US PR campaign that has made the Obama administration’s name mud in pro-coup activist circles.

My thoughts returned to Prince Bandar on the occasion of a piece on Kevin Drum’s blog about President Obama’s miserable Syrian options.

In a previous post I speculated that the Syrian gas attack might have been a false flag attack designed to force the Obama administration to intervene in Syria.

At the time I wasn’t aware of the reporting on Prince Bandar’s extensive involvement in Saudi Arabia’s Syria project, so I coyly referred to the hypothetical visitor as “Prince B—“. But based on Mour Malas’ August 25 piece in the Wall Street Journal—including the revelation that Saudi Arabia had already been trying to push the Obama administration over the chemical weapons red line several months ago—we can certainly fill in the blanks and speculate about Prince Bandar’s possible role in a false flag attack:

That winter, the Saudis also started trying to convince Western governments that Mr. Assad had crossed what President Barack Obama a year ago called a “red line”: the use of chemical weapons. Arab diplomats say Saudi agents flew an injured Syrian to Britain, where tests showed sarin gas exposure. Prince Bandar’s spy service, which concluded in February that Mr. Assad was using chemical weapons, relayed evidence to the U.S., which reached a similar conclusion four months later. The Assad regime denies using such weapons.

According to Malas, Saudi Arabia has also been repeatedly telling the Obama administration its stature in the Middle East is toast unless it acts firmly on Syria.

Connoisseurs of US Congressional diplomacy will also be pleased to know that Senator John McCain, who has been all over the airwaves pushing for a US response of regime-change dimensions and not a symbolic slap on the wrist, is hand-in-glove with Prince Bandar.

Anyway, as cited by Kevin Drum, Malas’ most recent piece fills in (boldface by Drum) some of the blanks, making the case that President Obama’s rather more genuine dithering on Syria resulted from the unwillingness to knock down the Assad regime until the U.S. and Syrian opposition moderates had gotten their act together and could field a plausible team to handle New Syria transition and governance.

The delay, in part, reflects a broader U.S. approach rarely discussed publicly but that underpins its decision-making, according to former and current U.S. officials: The Obama administration doesn’t want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests than the current stalemate.

….The administration’s view can also be seen in White House planning for limited airstrikes—now awaiting congressional review—to punish Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for his alleged use of chemical weapons. Pentagon planners were instructed not to offer strike options that could help drive Mr. Assad from power: “The big concern is the wrong groups in the opposition would be able to take advantage of it,” a senior military officer said. The CIA declined to comment.

….Many rebel commanders say the aim of U.S. policy in Syria appears to be a prolonged stalemate that would buy the U.S. and its allies more time to empower moderates and choose whom to support….Israeli officials have told their American counterparts they would be happy to see its enemies Iran, the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah and al Qaeda militants fight until they are weakened.

“Slow and steady” is manifestly not the strategy that Prince Bandar prefers in Syria. Given the dysfunction of the Syrian overseas opposition—as opposed to the murderous efficiency of the distinctly non-democratic jihadis—one can’t really blame him.

The Geneva peace talks, by the way—which embodied the US hopes of some kind of negotiated transition involving the Syrian opposition democratic goodniks—are not going ahead, thanks to the gas attack.

As the Russian media reported:

Earlier on Monday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the timing of the chemical attack “suited” the opposition, “who obviously do not want to negotiate peacefully”, instead they want to “sabotage” the talks.

“Why go to a conference if you believe that the regime’s infrastructure will all be destroyed anyway by allies, and then you can just march into Damascus unopposed, and take control?” said the official in Moscow.

Good question.

Anyway, Prince Bandar has been very active on the Syrian brief. He arranged the high profile shipment of arms to the rebels out of Croatia and also—according to disputed but plausible reports—unsuccessfully cajoled/threatened Vladimir Putin to drop Assad by promising that Saudi Arabia could in return deliver a) support for Russia’s gas export ambitions and b) hold in check the Chechen rebels who otherwise might do awful, awful things to Putin’s Olympics in Sochi.

Inevitably, there are also mumblings linking Saudi Arabia to the supply of sarin gas to the rebels.

Now, thanks to President Obama’s injudicious red line/chem munitions remark, he’s being forced to make a choice, to “get off the fence”.

Well, maybe the choice has been made for him. Maybe he got pushed off the fence. By Prince Bandar.

I think we are creeping closer to confirmation of the hypothesis I’ve been advancing since November of last year: that Saudi Arabia had not only decided to push the Qatar-backed Muslim Brotherhood out of the leadership of the Syrian opposition (something which has subsequently been confirmed and reconfirmed), but that the Saudi strategy for Syria involved regime collapse first, rejecting the strategy of cutting a deal with Assad to get him to the bargaining table after prolonged bleeding for some kind of negotiated capitulation and a democratic transition.

Anyway, in the proxy war for Syria it looks like we now have a debate between the rather conflicted but intensely risk-averse and regime-transition fixated Obama administration and Saudi Arabia + John McCain’s regime collapse advocacy.

And everybody’s waiting for Israel—which is uncomfortable with a jihadi-led insurrection but probably feels that clout and initiative are slipping out of President Obama’s fingers—to get off its fence and either push for a strike, a big strike, or nothing at all.

Wonder how that will work out.

In any case, if we’re talking about Syria, we need to talk about Prince Bandar.

The Meaning of Occupy

Revealing the Failure of 21st Century U.S. Capitalism
by PETER BOHMER

The Occupy movement in the United States is part of a global upsurge that began in Tunisia in late 2010, spread to Egypt and the Middle East, Wisconsin, Chile, Spain, Greece, Wall Street and the rest of the United States and now Quebec. I focus on the United States, particularly the Pacific Northwest where I have been an active participant.

I would like to acknowledge the moment. So often, we are alienated, or apathetic to the economic and social injustices taking place. This is a hopeful period when resistance and uprising in one place have resonated and spread. In the United States, we are living in a period of obscene inequality of income and wealth, a broken economic and political system that needs to be transformed not patched up. The income of the top 1% today is 42 times the bottom 90%, three times greater than the already high income inequality of 1979. 50 million people do not have health insurance, 1 in 3 are poor or near poor. Millions have lost their homes. Over 2 million people are in prison, disproportionately Black and Latino.

Over 20 million are unemployed; the rate for Blacks is twice that of whites. According to the New York Times of June 6th, 2012, of those who graduated from high school between 2009 and the present and who are not in college full time, one in six have full time jobs. For recent college graduates it’s not as bad but there is an ongoing crisis of unemployment and underemployment. The unemployment rate for young adults in Egypt, Spain, Greece and Portugal is even worse and has been an important factor in their uprisings. Whether we are living in a full-fledged global economic crisis is debatable, but the much higher than normal rates of unemployment is striking. The ongoing high unemployment rates and poor job prospects with high levels of student debt are an important factor in the participation and support for the Occupy Movement.

There was significant participation of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan in the physical occupation of public space, Occupy, Olympia, Seattle and Portland, which peaked in October and early November 2011 and were closed down by various police forces over the next month. Most of the vets participating couldn’t find jobs and many were suffering from PTSD, often undiagnosed —another symptom of our imperialist system and poorly functioning health-care system.

The majority of the people who lived in tents at the Occupy Olympia site lacked access to health care, regular jobs and housing. Many had felony convictions, a testament to the U.S. having the highest prison rate in the world. Felons are openly discriminated against in getting jobs, housing, and higher education (see Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow.)

Those active in the Occupy Movement were motivated by unemployment and housing foreclosures, by the growing inequality of income and wealth, by the corporate domination of our daily lives, and corporate control of the government. There is a lot of anger at the decline in the social safety net, the bailout of banks and not people, and the “Citizens United” Supreme Court decision.

The Occupy Movement has forced public discussion and debate of these issues. Growing numbers, particularly young people, have begun to feel that they can and should act, that their actions matter. Through actions and media attention and by resonating with the lived experiences of the “99%”, the Occupy Movement has brought the economic and political crisis out of the closet.

By economic crisis, I do not necessarily mean a full-blown economic crisis in the Marxist sense. Even if profits are up; the economy is not working for working people and the unemployed. By political crisis I do not mean we are in a possible revolutionary situation, such as Greece, but rather there is a rapid loss of legitimacy of the Democrats and Republicans, of the Supreme Court and a growing awareness of the ongoing destruction of democracy and the growing surveillance state.

Prefigurative Movements

Among activists in the Occupy Movement, a very popular ideology is anarchist, although increasingly an anarchism not hostile to Marxism. I agree with Grubajic and Lynd in Wobblies and Zapatistas, that we need to end the sectarianism and division between anarchists, Marxists and participatory socialists. Although, I would not call the Occupy Movement as a whole, anti-capitalist, many of the participants identify that way. In Seattle, on May Day, 2012, there was an overtly anti-capitalist march, organized by Occupy Seattle, of 800 people.

A priority in the occupations has been meeting the needs of poor people for medical care, housing, food, security and safety, and community and political discussion and education. There was a serious effort by activists to provide these services on-site and to encourage the active participation of the residents of the occupation. These actions show the failure of the current capitalist system to provide for human needs; its discarding of poor people. We made visible the human costs of the U.S. political economy.

A community and democratic structure, although somewhat chaotic and imperfect and with few resources, provided a place for people to live, to learn, and be secure. There has been the development of community in the Occupy Movement; meaningful discussions between people who usually don’t talk to each other, of people looking out for each other. There were problems of limited and difficult communication between activists, mainly students or college educated, with the homeless, but it’s a beginning.

There were fights and drug problems, and problems of male dominance and sexual violence. Nonetheless, I disagree with the commonly held point of view that the Occupy Movement has been weakened by the large participation of homeless people. They are “the canary in the coal mine”. Over time, many identified as protesters.

Although imperfect, this is a concrete demonstration on a small scale of key values of a participatory socialist system. The meeting of basic human needs was a priority of the occupations and was universally understood as a human right. There was discussion of how to move from a makeshift medical tent on-site to the development of a fully functioning and accessible free health clinic. There was sharing of tents and clothing and resources.

There has been an emphasis on direct democracy, encouraging all voices to be heard with consensus decision-making. While this sometimes led to the general assembly being unable to reach decisions, it reflected a key value of the occupiers, of participatory democracy, and horizontal and non-hierarchical decision making. There was a rotation of tasks and facilitators at meetings. There was an emphasis on building an alternative community, ourselves. There was less emphasis on demanding resources from the state. Many participants believe in building a new society with a different economy, politics, culture, and interpersonal relationships–by having these alternative small communities spread until they became a new society.

Limitations

By the time of the December, 2011 police raid, participation at Olympia, Occupy had declined. The wet and cold weather was a major cause as was the large time commitment. Since then the Occupy Movement has not been able to regain its momentum. The lack of structure is a factor as is the lack of a clear strategic way to move forward. Should there be physical occupations of public or private space; or campaigns around specific demands, e.g., stopping housing foreclosures; or direct action and/or demonstration, such as mobilizations against the G-8 in Chicago in May, 2012, or at the upcoming Democratic and Republican Convention? None of these tactics have garnered much enthusiasm or active participation. The anger and awareness about the systemic failures of our system continue as does a growing anti-capitalist consciousness, but there is a lull in activism.

A major problem has been how to build a movement that unites the 99% while simultaneously making central the concerns of the most oppressed–by not having our only talking point be the excess wealth and power of the 1%. How do we build a movement that includes immigrant rights, environmental justice, racial justice, LGBT and reproductive/women rights, anti-war and global justice? Most participants in Occupy are sympathetic to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and against U.S. wars; but these have not been principles nor put forth as demands. A major challenge of Occupy is how to be simultaneously broad, inclusive and principled.

A common criticism has been there have been no demands, especially at a national level. Given the divergence of ideologies– many flavors of reformism and of left radicalism– making demands has been difficult and not desirable at this early stage of the movement. There is a need as this movement develops for demands for non-reformist reforms (see Gorz, Strategy for Labor) to emerge, that campaigns can be built around, where there is national coordination and excitement and passion Full employment with living wage jobs is a possible demand.

In fall, 2011, the Occupy Movement in the U.S. broke through feelings of powerlessness. Six months later, this movement is weaker although the movement against neoliberalism and austerity in Greece and Quebec is growing and powerful. New activists have learned organizing skills and have deepened their political understanding. Stay tuned for the next chapter.

End of the pro-democracy pretense

By Glenn Greenwald
Monday, Jan 2, 2012 - Salon.com

 

Media coverage of the Arab Spring somehow depicted the U.S. as sympathetic to and supportive of the democratic protesters notwithstanding the nation’s decades-long financial and military support for most of the targeted despots. That’s because a central staple of American domestic propaganda about its foreign policy is that the nation is “pro-democracy” — that’s the banner under which Americans wars are typically prettified — even though “democracy” in this regard really means “a government which serves American interests regardless of how their power is acquired,” while “despot” means “a government which defies American orders even if they’re democratically elected.”

It’s always preferable when pretenses of this sort are dropped — the ugly truth is better than pretty lies — and the events in the Arab world have forced the explicit relinquishment of this pro-democracy conceit. That’s because one of the prime aims of America’s support for Arab dictators has been to ensure that the actual views and beliefs of those nations’ populations remain suppressed, because those views are often so antithetical to the perceived national interests of the U.S. government. The last thing the U.S. government has wanted (or wants now) is actual democracy in the Arab world, in large part because democracy will enable the populations’ beliefs — driven by high levels of anti-American sentiment and opposition to Israeli actions – to be empowered rather than ignored.

So acute is this contradiction — between professed support for Arab democracy and the fear of what it will produce — that America’s Foreign Policy Community is now dropping the pro-freedom charade and talking openly (albeit euphemistically) about the need to oppose Arab democracy. Here is Jon Alterman, the director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a very typical member of the National Security priesthood, writing on Friday in The New York Times about Egyptian elections (via As’ad AbuKhali):

Many in Israel and America, and even some in Egypt, fear that the elections will produce an Islamist-led government that will tear up the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, turn hostile to the United States, openly support Hamas and transform Egypt into a theocracy that oppresses women, Christians and secular Muslims.

They see little prospect for more liberal voices to prevail, and view military dictatorship as a preferable outcome.

American interests, however, call for a different outcome, one that finds a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians. We do not want any one side to vanquish or silence the other. And with lopsided early election results, it is especially important that the outcome not drive away Egypt’s educated liberal elite, whose economic connections and know-how will be vital for attracting investment and creating jobs.

Our instinct is to search for the clarity we saw in last winter’s televised celebrations. However, what Egyptians, and Americans, need is something murkier — not a victory, but an accommodation.

I love this passage both for its candor and for what it lamely attempts to obfuscate. Why should “American interests” determine the type of government Egypt has? That it should is simply embedded as an implicit, unstated assumption in Alterman’s advocacy. That’s because the right of the U.S. to dictate how other nations are governed is one of the central, unchallenged precepts of the American Foreign Policy Community’s dogma and it thus needs no defense or even explicit acknowledgment. It simply is. It’s an inherent imperial right.

But Alterman here is expressly admitting the reality that most media accounts ignore: that the U.S. does not, in fact, want democracy in Egypt. It fears it. That’s because public opinion polls show overwhelming opposition among the Egyptian populace to the policies which the U.S. (for better or worse) wants to foist on that country: animus toward Iran, preservation of the peace agreement with Israel, ongoing indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, and subservience to U.S. goals. Indeed, according to the 2011 Pew finding, “nearly eight-in-ten Egyptians have an unfavorable opinion of the U.S.” That tracks opinion in the Arab world generally, where the two nations perceived as the biggest threat are — by far — the U.S. and Israel (not Iran), and the three most admired foreign leaders are Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, followed by Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinijad.

But even more significant is Egyptian public opinion specifically on the issue of greatest concern for American (and Israeli) foreign policy officials: a nuclear Iran. A 2010 Brookings/University of Maryland/Zogby poll found vast, overwhelming Egyptian support for the view that Iran has the right to have a nuclear weapon, and for the view that a nuclear Iran would be a net positive for the region. That, too, tracks general public opinion in the Arab world, which supports Iran’s right to have nuclear weapons. In light of these facts, does anyone believe that the U.S. government and its pool of experts that exist to justify what it does — the Foreign Policy Community — have even a slight interest in actual democracy in Egypt specifically or the Arab world generally?

Of course not. As Noam Chomsky put it recently: “The U.S. and its Western allies are sure to do whatever they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world” because “if public opinion were to influence policy, the U.S. not only would not control the region, but would be expelled from it.” That’s why Alterman is urging what he delicately calls “a balance — however uneasy — between the military authorities and Egypt’s new politicians” – meaning: ensuring the ability of the Egyptian military to prevent the country’s democratically elected leaders (“Egypt’s new politicians”) from implementing the will of the citizenry. The fear of (and desire to stop) Arab democracy has been openly expressed for some time by many American neocons and even Benjamin Netanyahu; that it is now spilling over into America’s mainstream Foreign Policy experts is telling indeed.

In calling for a force to constrain democratic rule, Alterman doesn’t mean here the kind of Constitutional protections that exist in the U.S. to safeguard (in theory) minorities from the tyranny of majority rule, at least not primarily. Those are legitimate issues balancing democracy and minority rights — for the Egyptians to resolve. What Alterman advocates is a bulwark against the ability of the Egyptian people to free themselves of military rule, choose their own government, and decide their own fate. He wants democracy to exist in Egypt to extend only to the point where Egyptians “choose” to do what the U.S. wants them to do and to end at the point where they want to do something different (in that regard, his vision for “freedom” in Egypt is not unlike what many “freedoms” have come to mean in the U.S.: you can exercise them provided they do not contradict the interests of the U.S. Government). Thus, Alterman announces, in Egypt we must avoid the “clarity” of democracy in favor of something “murkier.”

Even if you’re indifferent to the moral questions involved in actively trying to impede democracy in Egypt — suppose you’re a hard-core adherent of Henry Kissinger and realpolitik and want to the U.S. to act only to advance its interests without regard to moral and ethical questions – the foolishness of this approach is manifest. It’s what the U.S. has been doing, so disastrously, in that part of the world for decades: feigning support for democracy while working against it.

The Obama administration paid pretty lip service to the Egyptian revolution but then worked to install Mubarak’s chief torturer Omar Suleiman in power, who, for obvious reasons, is viewed with great disfavor among Egyptians. That propaganda ruse fooled one of its chief targets (the American electorate) but failed miserably among Egyptians, who knew exactly what the U.S. was up to. As a result, Egyptians now view the U.S. even more unfavorably than they did during the Bush years, while “more Egyptians — 64 percent — said they had low or no confidence in President Obama in 2011 than they did last year, up five percentage points.”

Nothing will ensure ongoing anti-American sentiment in Egypt (and the Muslim world generally) than following the approach prescribed by Alterman of working actively to impede democracy. Egyptians yearn for democracy and will scorn those who impede it. That they continue so bravely to protest in the streets even with Mubarak gone is dispositive proof of that fact, but for those who want empirical data: in the 2011 Pew poll, 71% of Egyptians say “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government,” while only 17″% say that “in some circumstances, a nondemocratic government can be preferable.” In other words, the vast majority of Egyptians do not want Alterman’s “murkier” framework where military rule “balances” democracy; they want democracy. In this extremely informative analysis of the current situation in Egypt, Issandr El Amrani notes: “The military’s claim to be guardian of the revolution has been weakening since soon after Mubarak was toppled.” While the U.S. Government can trick Americans into believing that the U.S. is on the side of Freedom and Democracy even as it works against it, it cannot fool the citizens in those nations it seeks to suppress.

Alterman claims that he wants to impede Egyptian democracy in the name of “what Egyptians, and Americans, need” — right: because Jon Alterman and his fellow denizens in America’s National Security priesthood want only what’s best for The Egyptian People, and that means preventing them from living autonomously. But one need not even bother with that pretense to see the huge deficiency in this approach. Having the U.S. impede democracy in Egypt no more fulfills what “Americans need” than it does what “Egyptians need.” It’s a self-perpetuating, self-inflicted dilemma: the more the U.S. impedes democracy in other nations, the more it is disliked in those nations, which in turn means it needs even more to impede democracy in those nations, etc. ad infinitum. This is exactly the behavior (along with blind support for the actions of the Israeli government) that has led to such vast anti-American sentiment (which in turn is what fuels Terrorism and support for it).

It’s just extraordinary how our nation’s Foreign Policy Experts never learn the lesson. Either that, or they view anti-American sentiment in that part of the world as an agenda-enabling positive. It’s hard to know which is worse.

* * * * *

Speaking of propaganda and the meaning of “democracy”: The Washington Post today has the latest installment of increasingly pure fear-mongering media accounts about Iran (this from the NYT last week — “Clock Ticking for West to Act on Iranian Nuclear Program” — was a remarkable escalation). Today’s Post article mindlessly echoes neocon fantasies about a growing Persian menace in Latin America, frighteningly close to America’s borders!  Without an ounce of skepticism or balance, it quotes a GOP Congresswoman complaining that Iran has found “willing partners in the region’s anti-American despots,” and then ominously warns:

Former U.S. intelligence officials say the presence of Quds Force officers and other military personnel in diplomatic missions enhances Iran’s ability to carry out covert activities, sometimes in conjunction with members of the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group that operates extensive networks in Latin America and maintains ties with drug cartels. U.S. officials say the Quds Force was behind the alleged plot to hire Mexican drug gangs to assassinate a Saudi diplomat in Washington.

“For Iran to be so active in Venezuela and for the Quds Force to be there can only suggest Iran is serious about asymmetrical force projection into our neck of the woods. If Israel bombs Iran, we may well see retaliatory strikes aimed at U.S. interests coming from these Quds Force guys in South America,” said Art Keller, a former case officer with the CIA’s counterproliferation division.

Leaving aside the fact that this Quds-Force/Mexican-drug-cartel/Saudi-Ambassador assassination plot was so facially absurd as to be laughable, and further leaving aside that these neocon fantasies of Hezbollah running wild in Latin America have been clearly debunked, and further leaving aside that the Post article does little more than identify commercial transactions between Iran and these nations, consider who are the region’s “anti-American despots” whom Iran is threateningly befriending.

The Post explains that Iran has now “opened six new missions there — in Colombia, Nicaragua, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay and Bolivia — and has expanded embassies in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela”; Iran’s President, the article informs us, is now embarking on a trip to Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. Other than Cuba, all of those nations are governed by democratically elected leaders. But many of them periodically defy American dictates and act against American interests; they are thus magically transformed into “despots.” By contrast, try to find any high-level American official using such a term to describe, say, America’s close friends ruling Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. That is what is meant by “democracy” and “freedom” and “despots” when used in establishment American foreign policy discussions.

TIME Magazine's Person of the Year: The Protester

(OMG, I've never been a person of the year, before!--jef)

Naturally this has the right wingers over at Fox terribly upset with everyone from the crew at Fox & Friends, to Megyn Kelly and her guest Chris Plante and Eric Bolling during their show that filled Glenn Beck's former time slot, The Five going on the attack and using the opportunity to call the protesters every name in the book.

It was nice seeing Jesse LaGreca (on the Ed Schultz Show on MSNBC) have another opportunity to push back against the media narrative we've seen from the likes of Fox and their protection of the richest among us and to weigh in on what he thought the exposure from Time Magazine might mean for the movement and how they've managed to change the narrative in the country for the most part where income disparity is now a part of our national conversation. ~ Crooks & Liars

~*~*~*~

The Protester
Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2011

By Kurt Andersen

Once upon a time, when major news events were chronicled strictly by professionals and printed on paper or transmitted through the air by the few for the masses, protesters were prime makers of history. Back then, when citizen multitudes took to the streets without weapons to declare themselves opposed, it was the very definition of news — vivid, important, often consequential. In the 1960s in America they marched for civil rights and against the Vietnam War; in the '70s, they rose up in Iran and Portugal; in the '80s, they spoke out against nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Europe, against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, against communist tyranny in Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe. Protest was the natural continuation of politics by other means.

And then came the End of History, summed up by Francis Fukuyama's influential 1989 essay declaring that mankind had arrived at the "end point of ... ideological evolution" in globally triumphant "Western liberalism." The two decades beginning in 1991 witnessed the greatest rise in living standards that the world has ever known. Credit was easy, complacency and apathy were rife, and street protests looked like pointless emotional sideshows — obsolete, quaint, the equivalent of cavalry to mid-20th-century war. The rare large demonstrations in the rich world seemed ineffectual and irrelevant.

There were a few exceptions, like the protests that, along with sanctions, helped end apartheid in South Africa in 1994. But for young people, radical critiques and protests against the system were mostly confined to pop-culture fantasy: Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" was a song on a platinum-selling album, Rage Against the Machine was a platinum-selling band, and the beloved brave rebels fighting the all-encompassing global oppressors were just a bunch of characters in The Matrix.

"Massive and effective street protest" was a global oxymoron until — suddenly, shockingly — starting exactly a year ago, it became the defining trope of our times. And the protester once again became a maker of history.

Prelude to the Revolutions

It began in Tunisia, where the dictator's power grabbing and high living crossed a line of shamelessness, and a commonplace bit of government callousness against an ordinary citizen — a 26-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi — became the final straw. Bouazizi lived in the charmless Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, 125 miles south of Tunis. On a Friday morning almost exactly a year ago, he set out for work, selling produce from a cart. Police had hassled Bouazizi routinely for years, his family says, fining him, making him jump through bureaucratic hoops. On Dec. 17, 2010, a cop started giving him grief yet again. She confiscated his scale and allegedly slapped him. He walked straight to the provincial-capital building to complain and got no response. At the gate, he drenched himself in paint thinner and lit a match.

"My son set himself on fire for dignity," Mannoubia Bouazizi told me when I visited her.

"In Tunisia," added her 16-year-old daughter Basma, "dignity is more important than bread."

In Egypt the incitements were a preposterously fraudulent 2010 national election and, as in Tunisia, a not uncommon act of unforgivable brutality by security agents. In the U.S., three acute and overlapping money crises — tanked economy, systemic financial recklessness, gigantic public debt — along with ongoing revelations of double dealing by banks, new state laws making certain public-employee-union demands illegal and the refusal of Congress to consider even slightly higher taxes on the very highest incomes mobilized Occupy Wall Street and its millions of supporters. In Russia it was the realization that another six (or 12) years of Vladimir Putin might not lead to greater prosperity and democratic normality.

In Sidi Bouzid and Tunis, in Alexandria and Cairo; in Arab cities and towns across the 6,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic Ocean; in Madrid and Athens and London and Tel Aviv; in Mexico and India and Chile, where citizens mobilized against crime and corruption; in New York and Moscow and dozens of other U.S. and Russian cities, the loathing and anger at governments and their cronies became uncontainable and fed on itself.

The stakes are very different in different places. In North America and most of Europe, there are no dictators, and dissidents don't get tortured. Any day that Tunisians, Egyptians or Syrians occupy streets and squares, they know that some of them might be beaten or shot, not just pepper-sprayed or flex-cuffed. The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City. "I think other parts of the world," says Frank Castro, 53, a Teamster who drives a cement mixer for a living and helped occupy Oakland, Calif., "have more balls than we do."

In Egypt and Tunisia, I talked with revolutionaries who were M.B.A.s, physicians and filmmakers as well as the young daughters of a provincial olive picker and a supergeeky 29-year-old Muslim Brotherhood member carrying a Tigger notebook. The Occupy movement in the U.S. was set in motion by a couple of magazine editors — a 69-year-old Canadian, a 29-year-old African American — and a 50-year-old anthropologist, but airline pilots and grandmas and shop clerks and dishwashers have been part of the throngs.

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats. Two decades after the final failure and abandonment of communism, they believe they're experiencing the failure of hell-bent megascaled crony hypercapitalism and pine for some third way, a new social contract.

During the bubble years, perhaps, there was enough money trickling down to keep them happyish, but now the unending financial crisis and economic stagnation make them feel like suckers. This year, instead of plugging in the headphones, entering an Internet-induced fugue state and quietly giving in to hopelessness, they used the Internet to find one another and take to the streets to insist on fairness and (in the Arab world) freedom.

All over the world they are criticized by old-schoolers for lacking prefab ideological consistency, which the protesters in turn see as a feature rather than a bug. Miral Brinjy, a 27-year-old blogger and TV-news producer who grew up in Saudi Arabia and arrived in Tahrir Square on the first day of protests 11 months ago, doesn't presume to have a precise picture of the new Egyptian government and society she envisions, but as she told me in Cairo last month, "I know what I don't want."

In each place, discontent that had been simmering for years got turned up to a boil. There were foreshadowings. In the U.S., the Obama campaign was in part a feel-good protest movement that galvanized young people, and then its shocking success and the Wall Street bailout produced an angry and shockingly successful populist protest movement in the Tea Party, which has far outlasted its expected shelf life. In 2009, after the regime in Tehran denied the antiregime election results, millions of Iranians, especially young ones, protested for weeks. The Web and social media were key tactical tools in all three instances. But they seemed at the time to be one-offs, not prefaces to an epochal turn of history's wheel.

The Iranian regime's suppression of the Green Revolution must have reassured the dictators and monarchs in the Arab Middle East and North Africa and, you'd think, dispirited would-be democratic freedom fighters in those countries. The global spread of liberty hit a plateau a dozen years earlier, according to the international monitoring organization Freedom House. And the Middle East and North Africa remained the world's tyranny belt: at the end of 2010, Freedom House declared three-fourths of the Arab countries "not free" — including Tunisia and Egypt. In Arab countries, the prosperity of the past decade — Egypt's economy grew by 5% and more, even during the recession — was not widely shared; rising expectations that go unfulfilled are sociology's classic explanation for protest. For a critical mass of people from Cairo to Madrid to Oakland, prospects for personal success — for the good life at the End of History that they'd been promised — suddenly looked very grim. They were fed up, and the frustration and anger exploded after the regimes overreached.

In short, 2011 was unlike any year since 1989 — but more extraordinary, more global, more democratic, since in '89 the regime disintegrations were all the result of a single disintegration at headquarters, one big switch pulled in Moscow that cut off the power throughout the system. So 2011 was unlike any year since 1968 — but more consequential because more protesters have more skin in the game. Their protests weren't part of a countercultural pageant, as in '68, and rapidly morphed into full-fledged rebellions, bringing down regimes and immediately changing the course of history. It was, in other words, unlike anything in any of our lifetimes, probably unlike any year since 1848, when one street protest in Paris blossomed into a three-day revolution that turned a monarchy into a republican democracy and then — within weeks, thanks in part to new technologies (telegraphy, railroads, rotary printing presses) — inspired an unstoppable cascade of protest and insurrection in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Venice and dozens of other places across Europe, as well as a huge peaceful demonstration of democratic solidarity in New York that marched down Broadway and occupied a public park a few blocks north of Wall Street. How perfect that the German word Zeitgeist was transplanted into English in that unprecedented, uncanny year of insurrection.

During the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, just as the French colonialists were about to lose to the communist revolutionaries and leave Indochina, President Dwight Eisenhower held a news conference. "You have a row of dominoes set up," he said, positing Vietnam as the domino between fallen China and North Korea and the rest of Asia. "You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly." But in 1975, after the communists won in Vietnam and Cambodia, no other countries followed, and the domino theory of contagious national-liberation movements was discredited forever.

Forever, until now. This is how the dominoes fell in 2011 — and these are some of the people who pushed them.

The Year of Protests

The fire didn't kill Mohamed Bouazizi right away. Passersby doused the flames and took him to the hospital. He was still alive, barely.

That afternoon, other produce sellers and townspeople joined the Bouazizis in protest outside the governorate. A cousin posted a video of the demonstration. Word spread thanks to al-Jazeera and the Internet — a third of all Tunisians use the Internet, and three-quarters of those have Facebook accounts — inspiring protests in other towns and cities. After Bouazizi died on Jan. 4, the protests reached a critical mass, and more than a dozen protesters around the country were killed by police. "I'd watch TV," Basma Bouazizi told me, "and say, 'God, the Tunisian people have woken up!' "

Spontaneous protests? In 2011? In an Arab police state? Heroic, hopeless, doomed. Three weeks in, the nearly universal presumption about the protests' implications was summed up in the Economist's first report: "Tunisia's troubles are unlikely to unseat the 74-year-old president or even to jolt his model of autocracy."

Lina Ben Mhenni, 28, a linguistics teacher at Tunis University, had been blogging for a few years about Tunisian censorship and election rigging under the name "A Tunisian Girl." She went to the town of Regueb, 25 miles from Sidi Bouzid, to photograph a young protester who had been shot dead and uploaded the image. "On that day I lost my fear completely," she says. "I was ready for anything, even death." By the end of the week, she was back in Tunis, protesting outside the old white stucco casbah that served as the seat of government. So was Hilme al-Manahe, 23, an unemployed baker. His mother, Sayda al-Manahe, says Bouazizi's self-immolation had galvanized Hilme. "He used to say, 'This poor man — I can understand why he did that. He just wanted to earn a living. His story is like my story, which is like my friend's story.'"

"I would tell him," Sayda says, "Be quiet, sit down, and don't even think about getting involved in this." But on Jan. 13 he went to the demonstration in Tunis. He had just recorded a friend with his cell phone when a bullet, presumably fired by a police sniper, pierced his heart.

The next morning, Majdi Calboussi, a middle-class 29-year-old software developer and antiregime blogger, was there recording the protests and the police with his BlackBerry. "People started to say, 'Ben Ali, dégage' " ("Get out, Ben Ali"). He uploaded his video to Twitter, and it got half a million views in a day. Hours later, President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali flew to exile in Saudi Arabia. After just four weeks, the protesters had won. And the next domino was struck.

Among all the Egyptians I met, there is absolute agreement about one thing: Tunisia was the spark of their revolution. "It wouldn't have happened without them," says Shady el-Ghazali Harb, a 32-year-old surgeon who was one of 13 main leaders in Tahrir Square. The lessons of Tunisia weren't just inspirational; they were practical. "This was like a user's manual in how to topple a regime peacefully," says Wael Nawara, 50, a Web entrepreneur and longtime opposition political activist. In January, Tunisians "sent us a lot of information," says Ahmed Maher, a Cairo civil engineer and one of Egypt's most prominent activists, "like use vinegar and onion" — near one's face, for the tear gas — "and how to stop a tank. They sent us this advice, and we used it."

The Egyptians had their own Mohamed Bouazizi: an underemployed middle-class 28-year-old named Khaled Said. One day last year, after apparently hacking a police officer's cell phone and lifting a video of officers displaying drugs and stacks of cash, he was arrested and beaten to death. Wael Ghonim, then a 29-year-old Google executive, created a Facebook page called We Are All Khaled Said to memorialize him. It went viral, and in January, Ghonim returned from Dubai to Egypt to help plan a protest set for Jan. 25: a "day of rage" in Tahrir Square. Maher and other activists were invited to collaborate. They met online and face to face to work out the details. Brinjy told me she "was terrified. I thought we'd try but run away if necessary. Then we ran into huge crowds heading to Tahrir, and I knew it was going to be big."

"From the start I thought it would succeed," 29-year-old filmmaker Mohammed Ramadan says. "In my whole life I'd never seen protests like that. Girls! Some wore hijabs, some didn't, Christians, Muslims — I'd never seen that." The Muslim Brotherhood hadn't endorsed the protest, but Khaled Tantawy, a 34-year-old Brotherhood apparatchik, came anyway. He also was struck by the diversity. "I saw all these different and surprising kinds of people protesting and thought, Wow, this can happen."

That night it happened. "The surprise," according to Mohamed el-Beltagy, a member of the Brotherhood who went to Tahrir unofficially, "was that there was a new generation who could break the fear barrier. At midnight, when the [police's] violent clearing of the square happened and the protesters didn't run away and go home, I knew it was a revolution."

The regime's violent response surprised no one. As in Tunisia, when the crackdown escalated — from tear gas to rubber bullets to real bullets, to Ghonim's detention for the duration, to a nationwide shutdown of Internet connections, to armed camel riders rampaging through Tahrir — so did the number of protesters in Cairo and all over the country. At least 4.5 million Egyptians protested during those three weeks — in other words, 8% of the population over 14.

Hisham Kassem, a prominent 52-year-old independent journalist and publisher, had never been part of a street protest before. He is bracingly clear-eyed, a stiff-necked curmudgeon. On Jan. 28 he was teargassed and, he told me, still sounding amazed 10 months later, threw rocks at police. "I saw people shot next to me." When he returned on "the day of the camel attack, it was war — I almost got mauled to death by the thugs." And another day when he arrived at Tahrir, "This kid asked for my ID: 'Whose side are you on?' I said, 'What the hell do you mean?' " But then and there on the edge of Liberation Square, he had an epiphany: he may have been a longtime pro-democracy VIP, but this was now democracy. "I felt a strange acceptance," he says. "I didn't begrudge them."

By then the army had announced, "Your armed forces, who are aware of the legitimacy of your demands ... will not resort to use of force." President Hosni Mubarak was finished — "Please go," a Tahrir protest sign urged, "because I want to take a shower" — but it took 11 more days for Mubarak to pass through denial, anger, bargaining and presumably depression to arrive at the acceptance stage. "The day Mubarak stepped down," says Abdo Kassem, 25, an unemployed Cairene who'd never been politically active until he followed the Facebook protest instructions last January, "I was crying. For me, that was like bringing down a fake god."

Millions protest. Armies stand down. Dictators leave. Impossible fantasies two months earlier — now they were coming true. The "days of rage" meme and democratic dream had achieved breathtaking momentum, spreading not just to the softer monarchical dictatorships — Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco — but also to Yemen, Algeria and the hardcore police states Syria and Libya.

In the spring, they spread to Europe. On May 15, tens of thousands marched to Madrid's Puerta del Sol plaza, along with tens of thousands more in dozens of other cities, united by slogans like "We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers." They were frustrated by unemployment, a lack of opportunity and politics headed nowhere. They called themselves Los Indignados, the Outraged.

Spain's one-day march turned into a months-long self-governing encampment — one of the new defining characteristics of 2011's brand of communal resistance. Throughout the country, about 6 million out of a population of 46 million participated in Indignados protests. Among those in Madrid was Olmo Gálvez, 31, an Internet entrepreneur just back from three years working in China and new to politics. He'd helped set up social-media networks for the protest. "It was marvelous to see people become the actors in their own lives," he says. "You could watch them breaking out of their passivity."

Ten days after the Madrid protests began, the contagion spread to Greece. George Anastasopoulos, 36, has a Ph.D. in sociology but earns his living as a DJ. "That first Sunday when we saw 100,000 people show up, we were overwhelmed," he says of the Athenians' camp in Syntagma Square, in sight of Parliament. "And then the second Sunday, 500,000 people showed up. That enthused us so much, and we started dreaming really big."

"Our protests," says Christina Lardikou, a 31-year-old Athenian who works in fashion, "all started from the Indignados." But they drew from other inspirations too. Among the chants in the birthplace of democracy last spring were "Yes we can!" And Anastasopoulos has kept a banner reading "Let freedom ring" — that is, a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. quoting "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

The Greek protests continued for more than a month, until just about the time 150 young Israeli protesters started pitching tents in the median of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The grievance package was familiar: good jobs too scarce, cost of living too high, politicians corrupt, only the well-connected rich getting richer. Soon there were 100 such encampments all over Israel, in working-class towns as well as yuppievilles. For a finale in early September, an estimated 400,000 of the country's 7.7 million citizens marched, chanting, "The people demand social justice!" When the Egyptian revolutionary leader el-Ghazali Harb told me how pleased he was that Tahrir Square had inspired copycat protests all over the world, I asked if his pride extended to Israel. He laughed and said, "I will say we were happy about that as well."

In early August, after police in London shot and killed a young black man they were arresting, riots broke out all over England. Naturally, the rioters' instantly resorting to violence attracted little sympathy. Yet a new, three-month study by the Guardian and the London School of Economics concluded that these rioters were also protesters, motivated by anger about poverty, unemployment and inequality as well as overaggressive policing.

Back in Madrid, the protesters recognized the diminishing returns of this protest phase and started to decamp. By July, Gálvez says, they heard that Occupy Wall Street was going to happen. Online, the Indignados started explaining to the Americans how it's done.

Since 1989 the earnest, zany little bimonthly Adbusters — "an ad-free international magazine for activists fighting to change the way information flows and meaning is produced in our society" — had been preaching to its choir. In July the editors ran a full-page photo-illustration of a barefoot ballerina posed atop Wall Street's Charging Bull statue — in the background were gas-masked insurgents in a tear-gas fog — along with four lines of copy: "What is our one demand? #occupywallstreet September 17th. Bring tent." Adbusters also sent out an e-mail — "America needs its own Tahrir" — and on Independence Day urged on its smallish cadre of Twitter followers:

"Dear Americans, this July 4th dream of insurrection against corporate rule."

If you tweet it, they will come.

At the end of July, in an office in New York's financial district, the proto-Occupiers met with some veterans of the protests in Spain, Greece and North Africa. To figure out what "Occupy Wall Street" might mean, they reconvened two days later at a come-one-come-all meeting — outdoors, for hours, in a park near that charging bronze bull, amid the thousands of unwitting passersby on an ordinary Wall Street workday.

David Graeber, 50, a prominent anthropology scholar and soft-spoken pro-anarchism activist, showed up. Some standard leftists were pushing for a standard rally making a standard demand — no cutbacks in government social spending. Slowly but surely, Graeber and a pal, 32-year-old Greek émigré artist Georgia Sagri, nudged the group to a fresh vision: a long-term encampment in a public space, an improvised democratic protest village without preappointed leaders, committed to a general critique — the U.S. economy is broken, politics is corrupted by big money — but with no immediate call for specific legislative or executive action. It was also Graeber, a lifelong hater of corporate smoke and mirrors, who coined the movement's ingenious slogan, "We are the 99%."

Until late September, 99% of New Yorkers had never heard of Zuccotti Park, a privately owned public plaza tucked between the Federal Reserve Bank and the World Trade Center site. On the last Saturday of the summer — sunny, mid-60s, perfect — a couple thousand people showed up, a hundred slept overnight, and the occupation was on. It seemed as though the world would little note nor long remember it. On the third day, the first arrests — of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks in violation of an antique New York anti-insurrection statute — got scant attention.

It was through my Twitter feed that I started noticing that something was going on in my city. The following weekend, I watched the YouTube video of a New York police deputy inspector casually pepper-spraying some random female protesters. A few days later, my 24-year-old nephew, Daniel Thorson, e-mailed from his small town in western New York: he was coming down to occupy Wall Street, and could he stay with us in Brooklyn?

At Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Daniel was a philosophy major, lived in a frat house, volunteered for the Obama campaign and co-founded his campus's chapter of the nonpartisan Americans for Informed Democracy. Since graduating, he's held various minimum-wage and unpaid jobs and has grown deeply disappointed by how little the Obama Administration has been able to accomplish. In September he was stunned by the breadth and depth of the chatter on his Twitter and Facebook feeds about Occupy Wall Street and decided he wanted to be part of it.

As soon as he arrived at Zuccotti Park, he went to the information desk. "It was staffed by someone who wasn't very articulate," he told me, "who wasn't the face of what I thought this should be." He offered to pitch in and thus became a member of the information working group. He helped guide the general assemblies, OWS's daily town meetings, reveling in the process of debating and deciding. To me it sounded like being a facilitator at a corporate management retreat — except outdoors, with everyone voting by means of kooky hand signals and making sure the anarchists are heard. Even if I were a 24-year-old idealist, I told Daniel, I would have zero patience for the process. He'd get annoyed from time to time by "craziness, by a sense of entitlement, anger, resentment," he said. "But there are jerks in every organization, no matter how 'pure' the organization."

After my wife and I kicked him out of our house — three weeks seemed like a fulfillment of avuncular duty — Daniel slept at the park most nights. At around 1 a.m. on the final night of the encampment in November, he was at a friend's apartment when he got a text message — police en route, eviction imminent. He rushed downtown, but new police barricades kept him and other protesters a block away up Broadway. They were ordered to scram, most of them refused, the pepper spray came out, and the police announced they'd be arrested if they didn't leave the sidewalk. Daniel spent 38 hours in custody, charged with resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and obstructing governmental administration.

I found out about his arrest and release — via e-mail and a Facebook status update — in Cairo, as I walked through Tahrir Square during the first of the recent, huge anti-junta protests. My interpreter, a young Jordanian immigrant to Egypt, was excited about Occupy Wall Street. "It's going viral," he said. "I know it's now like in 80 countries."

And in cities all over the U.S., of course, with all kinds of people protesting. Among the thousands occupying Oakland was Arthur Chen, 60, a family-practice physician. For him, "the expression of outrage was very on target with our current economic crisis and the way it's impacting the 99%," especially his low-income and uninsured patients. During his first day occupying Oakland, Chen remembers, "one of the announcers said, 'You're going to hear some things that you may totally disagree with.' I chuckled, and then I thought, 'This generation really is about inclusiveness and transparency.' It was very moving."

In Cairo, meanwhile, there was Ahmed Harara, 31, a dentist who lost sight in both eyes to rubber bullets in Tahrir on two separate occasions — in January and November, when he returned for the anti-junta protests. What was the most memorable day of his whole annus mirabilis cum horribilis? "Actually," he said, "there are two days — the 28th of January here in Egypt and the day when Americans occupied Wall Street. Because here in Egypt, we raised the slogan of social justice, and I see that Americans need it and did that too."

The Beginning of History

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh!

times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding

ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

—William Wordsworth, "The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement"

Aftermaths are never as splendid as uprisings. Solidarity has a short half-life. Democracy is messy and hard, and votes may not go your way. Freedom doesn't appear all at once. Just off Tahrir, when a couple of us were taking pictures of a graffiti about a blogger the army had imprisoned, a scowling secret policeman appeared and waved us away. We were unwanted tourists at the revolution.

Globalization and going viral have been the catchphrases of the networked 21st century. But until now the former has mainly referred to a fluid worldwide economy managed by important people, and the latter has mostly meant cute-animal videos and songs by nobodies. This year, do-it-yourself democratic politics became globalized, and real live protest went massively viral. But as they've rejuvenated and enlarged the idea of democracy, the protesters, and the rest of us, are discovering that democracy is difficult and sometimes a little scary. Because deciding what you don't want is a lot easier than deciding and implementing what you do want, and once everybody has a say, everybody has a say. No one knows how the revolutions will play out: A bumpy road to stable democracy, as in America two centuries ago? Radicals' taking over, as in France just after the bliss and very heaven? Or quick counterrevolution, as in France 60 years later? The mostly liberal, secular young people who made the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt last winter have been subordinated, if not sidelined, by better-disciplined political organizations. And they all agree it's partly their own fault, a function of naiveté about the realities of democratic politics.

"The only good thing Mubarak did," activist Mahmoud Adel Elhetta told me, "was unite us." Mahmoud Salem, 30, who blogs and tweets under the name Sandmonkey — and who has an American B.A. and M.B.A. and works in business development for clients like Coca-Cola — told me he "had the hubris of youth. It was utopia that immediately descended into chaos." He lost his election for a parliamentary seat representing a wealthy Cairo district two weeks ago. "We failed," says el-Ghazali Harb, the surgeon-revolutionary. "What made the revolution happen is the youth. We handed it back to the seniors. We didn't trust ourselves."

In both Egypt and Tunisia, the freely elected new parliaments will be dominated by Islamists — sweet-talking moderates who secularists worry won't stay that way. But as Tantawy of the Muslim Brotherhood told me, "It's not just liberals vs. the Brotherhood now. The Islamists disagree among themselves." To me, the mainstream Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia don't appear much more fanatically religious than, say, Pat Robertson–esque Evangelicals in the U.S., and unlike the Republican hard-liners, they sound committed to a national consensus that includes secular liberals. "Democracy is a new culture, and we have to get used to it," says Abdelhamid Jlassi, a Tunisian Islamist leader who spent 17 years as a political prisoner. "Now we have to get used to being hit by eggs."

And the secular revolutionaries remain hopeful that they will not turn out to have been useful idiots to new oppressors. Shadi Taha is a U.S.-educated civil engineer and major liberal Egyptian party official who's running for parliament on a coalition slate with Muslim Brothers. "I don't agree with some of their things," he told me, "but in the 1980s, before they got into politics, they were as crazy as the Salafis" — the fundamentalists who are winning a quarter of the current parliamentary vote. He thinks democratic politics has an inherently moderating effect. Even Tunis University professor Dalenda Largueche, a feminist who could barely contain her horror at ascendant Islamism when we spoke, can eke out some hope. "They want to change Tunisia according to their vision," she says, "but Tunisia will change them." The secularists have a founding-fathers-and-mothers faith in freedom and democracy that is stirring: there's no going back to tyranny, they're sure. "In the end," Wael Nawara says, "things will turn out all right, because the relationship between people and authority in Egypt has changed forever. People discovered that they can change and stop authority from going too far. That self-discovery changes everything. They learned they can replace a ruler. That's the revolution."

Yet there is, for now, a self-sabotaging catch-22 operating among protesters all over the world. All the protests have been against systemic status quos. That has been their great strength. "If it was politicians who had led the movement," Jlassi says of the Tunisian revolution, "it wouldn't have succeeded, whereas the youths, who were unaffiliated, could appeal to everyone." But because even free politics can be inherently unclean, the youth and other liberals don't yet have the stomach for democratic hardball. Will the moral high ground keep working for them? It would be pretty to think so. U.S. Occupiers lack faith in the occupant of the Oval Office and aren't entirely thrilled with their labor-union allies, and the indie generations' need for absolute consensus can devolve into a feckless Bartlebyism — passive resistance, preferring not to.

Ditto in Europe and the Arab countries. In Tunisia, says Lina Ben Mhenni, "we didn't complete the revolution. We got rid of the dictator. Maybe the mistake that we made was that most of us rejected the idea of entering political life." Absent dictatorships to overthrow, idealistic purity can carry a high political price, and if you leave the dull but essential business of governing to the squares and grownups, you lose.

On the other hand, one of the unequivocal generational virtues of these movements has been their use of the Internet and social media. Two years ago, scholars Nicholas Christakis (Harvard) and James Fowler (University of California, San Diego) published Connected, a groundbreaking study of social networks, which they summarize as "how your friends' friends' friends affect everything you feel, think and do." The protests of the past 12 months look like a spectacular worldwide confirmation of those findings.

Calling the Arab uprisings Facebook and YouTube and Twitter revolutions is not, it turns out, just glib, wishful American overstatement. In the Middle East and North Africa, in Spain and Greece and New York, social media and smart phones did not replace face-to-face social bonds and confrontation but helped enable and turbocharge them, allowing protesters to mobilize more nimbly and communicate with one another and the wider world more effectively than ever before. And in police states with high Internet penetration — Ben Ali's Tunisia, Mubarak's Egypt, Bashar Assad's Syria — a critical mass of cell-phone video recorders plus YouTube plus Facebook plus Twitter really did become an indigenous free press. Throughout the Middle East and North Africa, new media and blogger are now quasi synonyms for protest and protester.

And then there was the Arab Spring's other essential, not-quite-as-new media form — independent 24-hour TV news. When I asked the Islamist Jlassi why the revolution had not happened a decade earlier in Tunisia, he instantly answered, "Al-Jazeera and the Internet were the differences, especially al-Jazeera — everybody watches TV."

So America's great 21st century contribution to fomenting freedom abroad was not imposing it militarily but enabling it technologically, as an epiphenomenon of globalization. And for a second act, globalization returned the favor, turning democratic uprisings in developing countries into inspirational exports for the rich world. "We were on the receiving side," Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa told me, "and now we are on the sending side. We have contributed to this global movement for change. There's a new spirit. The grassroots are revolting — young people on Wall Street and young people in Europe."

Ever since modern republican democracy was invented, astonishing protests and uprisings have spiked and spread once every half-century or so: the revolutions in America and France and Haiti; the revolutions of 1848; the revolutions of the 1910s (Russia, Germany, Ireland, Turkey, Egypt, Mexico); the postwar wave of worldwide revolt (the movements toward decolonization, Cuba, Hungary, American civil rights, countercultural militancy in America and Europe). It happens almost like clockwork, yet each time people are freshly shocked and bedoozled. So here we are again. History isn't a very precise guide to how long it might persist this time. In 1848 the revolutionary moment was explosive but lasted only a year, extinguished by both dictatorial and democratic counterrevolutions. The revolutionary dream hatched around 1960, however, was still powerfully contagious a decade later.

The nonleader leaders of Occupy are using the winter to build an organization and enlist new protesters for the next phase. They have shifted the national conversation. As Politico recently reported, the Nexis news-media database now registers almost 500 mentions of "inequality" each week; the week before Occupy Wall Street started, there were only 91. But what would count, a few years hence, as success? According to gung-ho Adbusters editors Kalle Lasn and Micah White, it's already "the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era." Yet it took a decade to get from the Montgomery bus boycott to the federal civil rights acts, which were just the end of the beginning.

The wisest Occupiers understand that these are very early days. But as long as government in Washington — like government in Europe — remains paralyzed, I don't see the Occupiers and Indignados giving up or losing traction or protest ceasing to be the defining political mode. After all, the Tea Party protests subsided only after Tea Partyers achieved real power in 2010 by becoming the tail wagging the Republican Party dog. When radical populist movements achieve big-time momentum and attention, they don't tend to stand down until they get some satisfaction.

Protesters are ready to rumble in Egypt and Tunisia if democracy and freedom seem too compromised. Emboldened protesters may yet sweep away regimes in places like Jordan and Yemen. In Libya, a bloody revolution, assisted by NATO, brought down the 42-year-old regime of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. The protorevolution is still under way in Syria, where thousands of protesters have been killed.

And in Russia, the recipe for surprising protest circa 2011 — pseudodemocratic-regime overreach, high Internet use, robust new media and suddenly galvanized middle-class youth — is being baked and served. On Dec. 5, after Putin's party, United Russia, did badly in parliamentary elections despite apparent ballot-box stuffing, more than 5,000 Muscovites gathered to chant, "Russia without Putin!" and called for his arrest. It was the largest Russian antiregime protest of the 21st century — and just as in Tunis and Madrid and New York City, nobody saw it coming.

These Russian protesters are a new breed, not just nostalgic old communist grandmas or bullyboy nationalists but yuppies, students, the best and brightest. "So this is what they look like," said Oleg Orlov, the 58-year-old head of Russia's main human-rights organization, as he scanned the square at Chistye Prudy the night of Dec. 5. "I've never seen them at rallies before, at least not in such enormous numbers. It's incredible."

Alexei Navalny, the blogger who coined a new United Russia moniker — "the party of crooks and thieves" — addressed the protesters. "They can laugh and call us microbloggers. They can call us the hamsters of the Internet. Fine. I am an Internet hamster. But I know they are afraid of us." The protesters cheered. And then 300 of them and Navalny were arrested. The next night in Triumfalnaya Square, protesters returned, and 600 were arrested. A Putin spokesman declared that "unsanctioned demonstrations must be stopped."

On Dec. 10, five days after the first protest, tens of thousands gathered in Moscow in the largest demonstration since just after the fall of communism. There were simultaneous protests in dozens of other cities all over Russia. A letter written by Navalny from his Moscow jail cell was read to the crowd. "It's impossible to beat and arrest hundreds of thousands, millions. We are not cattle or slaves. We have voices and votes, and we have the power to uphold them." An even bigger protest is scheduled for Dec. 24.

They are protesting corruption and the lack of real freedom and true democracy. Because Russia, like most of the world, has not quite totally arrived at the end of history.

Walk like an Egyptian

The Year of Living Dangerously

 (Bizarre govt statistics fact for your collection: 

did you know that when the govt measures inflation, food prices and energy costs are not factored into the statistic? I first learned it a couple of years ago, and it's yet another way the govt hides bad news. Leaving out the two most volatile categories where price increases happen regularly. So, inflation numbers never include food prices which are currently setting record highs, or energy so those rising gas prices don't figure into it either. Nice, huh?--jef)


A New World
By CHARLES R. LARSON

Already the week is shaping up as a time when even slow learners will finally begin to understand reality. This is the week when things get out of control—a deadly precursor of the rest of the year. Not just overseas, where Middle Eastern governments appear to be changing their tactics and their responses hourly, but also back here in the United States where our own mini-revolution will be firmly entrenched in our future debates about the country's priorities, especially the national debt.

In the Middle East and North Africa, first in Tunisia and in Egypt and now major upheavals and barbarities in Libya and Bahrain. The first two waves. Algeria, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen are lined up behind. Protesters are not going to give up until their governments are either ousted or major changes are made. But those five countries are only the third wave before the next arrives: Iran, Kuwait, possibly even Saudi Arabia, as the ground literally shifts under the governments in control. And the worst possibility for the Middle East? Sunnis and Shiites fighting it out for control of their religion. Given the indications of the past weeks, there are other areas that will be included in the unrest: Ivory Coast, Djibouti, and China, the last already quaking and incarcerating dissidents in huge numbers. Should Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistan, and North Korea be added to the list? Even Zimbabwe?

Here at home, two big changes loom this week. First, with Congress in recess, Tea Party novices will get increasingly hyped up by their base. When they return to Washington, their inflexibility in demanding what they want will be even more myopic. They're right that the deficit must be addressed; they're simply wrong about the way they want to tackle it. The poor and the unemployed cannot continue to bear the burden of the tax cuts, but how do you convince Republicans to show any concern for those at the bottom and that an increase in taxes is part of the calculus? The deficit fight will be ugly and brutal with no winners, and many losers.

Worse, by the end of this year, inflation will impact on everyone, but the government will continue to mask it since it will mostly be with food and energy, not included in the measure of core inflation. (Hula hoops and joy buzzers will remain at their current prices, so the argument will be that inflation is non-existent.) Current ten-year treasury rates are 3.39 percent. That may not even budge because at this ridiculously low rate, interest payments are already $207 billion dollars a year. Imagine the rate moving up significantly. Some of us are old enough to remember when the ten-year rate hit 15 percent in 1981, but we can't even get to half of that without being in deep trouble.

Simultaneously here at home, as states struggle to balance their budgets—again, with draconian cuts and attempts to eliminate collective bargaining—the protests will continue on our doorsteps. It's no surprise that we discovered last week that it was the Koch brothers—good old Charles and David, always thinking about themselves—who helped fund Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's successful election. Big Money, brought to you by the Supreme Court. My gut tells me that things will get ugly here, too, until all the behind-the-scene influences are revealed.

Imagine being President Obama during these times. For decades, the United States has supported every vile dictator in the world and now payback has begun. Pity poor Hillary Clinton who has to deal with this. As the Onion wrote two years ago: black man rewarded with the worst job in the world. Obama's got only a brief time to begin siding with the protesters—both overseas and in the United States. Then there are the Limbaughs and the McConnells out there who publicly pray that the President will fail. That's genuine patriotism—hoping that your elected leaders will fail—or worse.

Tighten your seat belts. This is going to be a roller-coaster ride for everyone, particularly for those of us who believe the United States as we've known it—not in recent years, when greed and self-interest have led the fray, but the America of hope, expectation and humanity and Obama's vision—is worth restoring.

It's an entirely new world out there, driven by new media, provoking rapid change. By the end of 2011, we're all going to be living in a different world.

Why Did Egyptians Succeed, Where Americans Fail?

Overthrowing the Invincible 
By ERIC WALBERG

Western media always welcomes the overthrow of a dictator -- great headline news -- but this instance was greeted with less than euphoria by Western -- especially American -- leaders, who tried to soft-peddle it much as did official Egyptian media till the leader fled the palace. Egypt's president Hosni Mubarak was a generously paid ally for the US in its Middle East policy of protecting Israel, and the hesitancy of the Western -- especially US -- governments in supporting fully what should have been a poster-child of much-touted US ideals was both frustrating and highly instructive.

Canadian government support for Mubarak was even more staunch until vice-president Omar Suleiman's 20 second resignation speech 11 February, clearly written with a metaphorical gun to one or both of their heads. This craven loyalty to an autocrat reviled by his people was the US-Israeli preferred solution. Much better to cool the passionate revolutionaries, allow the system, so beneficial to Israel, to adjust and survive.

But perhaps more important, much better to continue Egypt's state-of-emergency laws that allow the regime to keep Israel critics and devout Muslims under raps, and just as important, allow the US to "render" undesirable Muslims there to be tortured. Imagine if the records of these renditions over the past decade by the US (and Canada) to Egypt were to come to light, falling into the hands of the revolutionaries, much like Britain's secret treaties in WWI fell into the Bolsheviks' hands?

"They're not going to put the toothpaste back in the tube," quipped Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper glumly. He could well be articulating -- in his own tasteless way -- the sentiments of the Egyptian military establishment, which had no use for a Mubarak dynasty and sided with the rebels, though at a considerable cost. Those now in power, nominally headed by Minister of Defence and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces Mohammed Tantawi, must push determined demonstrators out of Tahrir Square, get people back to work, shut down further strikes, and keep their US military advisers (not to mention the US president himself) assured that the centrepiece of Egyptian foreign policy remains in place. Truly a messy task.

 

It is hard to believe now that just a few weeks ago, Mubarak was invincible, his visage gracing at least one page in every newspaper every day, meeting with some Western leader, posing with Israeli notables, confident that he was in control of his desert ship-of-state. After the initial euphoria, and as evidence of his misrule and the perilous state that he left Egypt in pours out of newly liberated media, people are overwhelmed, irritable and depressed. People have undergone a wrenching shift in their thinking in the past three weeks.

Iranian leaders note the eerie coincidence with their own revolution of 11 February 1979 overthrowing the shah (1941-79). A national holiday, more than half the population of Iran was out on the streets celebrating along with Egyptians when Mubarak finally resigned last Friday evening. US commentators prefer to compare the revolution to the overthrow of Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos (1965-87) and Indonesian president Suharto (1968-98). They even suggest it could lead to another Iranian revolution. 

Despite the many differences, Iran and Indonesia are the closest parallels: an anti-colonial revolt against a repressive pseudo-Muslim autocrat whose corruption and nepotism undid him. Those revolts triumphed when the army and police gave up supporting the US-backed leader, much as Egypt's security apparatus did. The long repressed Muslim Brotherhood is the Sunni equivalent of the Iranian clerics. Even if the US can steer Egypt into the secular Indonesian model, it will still have to come to terms with the fact that Indonesia does not recognise Israel, that any future Egyptian government will almost surely renegotiate the 1979 peace agreement with Israel.

It seems that Egypt's suffering and oppression are something alien to Western experience. But this is far from the truth. As the fervour spread like wildfire during the first few weeks, I recalled how the leftist community in Toronto is just as self-righteous and eager for change, how neoliberalism has left Canadian society with yawning income disparities not much different than those of Egypt. The most obvious difference being that the general standard of living in Canada is higher and the middle class (still) more numerous. But the very idea of such a spectacular event as happened here to address issues of social justice is impossible to imagine there or in the US.

It struck me that the most stark and instructive parallel is not with Indonesia or Iran, but between pre-revolution Egypt and the current US, which, like Egypt, has reached the end of the same gruelling 30-year neoliberal road that Egypt did under Mubarak's reign, jettisoning any pretense of a just society. The coincidences abound: both the US and Egypt began their ill-fated journeys in that very 1981, with the ascendancy of US president Ronald Reagan and the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar El-Sadat, though El-Sadat had actually pre-empted Reaganomics with his infitah, dismantling of much of Egypt's socialism. 

Each US presidency since then has either embraced or been pressured by the exigencies of capitalism and electoral democracy to enact greater and great tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, meanwhile cutting social services and increasing spending on so-called defense. Each "new" government has regularly flouted the consensus of the electorate on all major issues, from the environment, social services, jobs, to weapons production, invasions, drug laws and the Cubas and Irans which in defiance dare to flout the empire. 

Income disparity is arguably the strongest impulse to revolt. As measured by the Gini coefficient (0 is perfect equality) Egypt stands in a far better light at .34 than the US .45 (Canada is .32).

So why did Egyptians succeed spectacularly where Americans -- in even greater need of a revolution -- fail spectacularly?

Egyptians seem to be much more politically astute than their American counterparts, more willing to admit that their leaders take bribes, lie, follow policies dictated by business or lobbies and which counter public opinion. 

But the key to understanding why a revolution like Egypt's is impossible in the US is the fact that, unlike Egypt's army (composed mostly of conscripts), the US has a mercenary (excuse me, professional) army, which would have little compunction to fire on any group threatening the sanctity of the political establishment. Conscription is a vital brick in building a democratic society, a safeguard allowing the society to be dismantled if it turns into a jail or a brothel, a brick which has been lost to the US and its satellites. A brick that Egyptian protesters used to telling effect.

Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people "have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities". So what are Egypt's prospects of creating a thriving democracy? They would be wise to listen to Kerry and to observe the US system, though not to copy it but on the contrary to learn from its sorry state.

Why would Americans expect a president to be fair and hear them when he must raise a billion dollars from corporations to outspend his equally compromised rival in elections? New York Times analyst Bob Herbert looked enviously at Egyptians' longing for democracy, comparing the US political system to a "perversion of democracy", bemoaning that at the very moment Egyptians are discovering it, "Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away."

And yet Americans blissfully pledge their allegiance, weep on 4 July and during presidential inaugurations, despite the unassailable evidence of the injustices both domestically and abroad of the system they live under. Egyptians, though just as nationalistic, were able to see through the facade of their pseudo-democracy and rise up to overthrow the guilty parties. They are the heroes of all true democrats in the world. The few people particularly in North America who see through their own quite transparent political facade can only look on wistfully.

What became the anthem of the revolution — "Why?" by Mohamed Munir — was written, presciently, a month before the 25 January spark that burned away (let's hope) much of the chaff accumulated during 30 years of neoliberal "reforms". He cries out to his homeland like a spurned lover who vows to take his country back from the usurpers:

If love of you was my choice
My heart would long ago have changed you for another
But I vow I will continue to change your life for the better
Till you are content with me.

How different from the equivalent American song — Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA — self-pitying and hopeless in this, the world's sole superpower:

You end up like a dog that's been beat too much
'Till you spend half your life just covering up...