The dawn must come.

The dawn must come.

Thursday 26 January 2012

It's alive.

By: Ahmed EL NAHAS, Castelfiorentino January 26th 2012.

The photos you find herebelow designed a smile of pride and hope over that tired aging face of mine.. It's conforting to know that the Egyptians are committed to maintain the heat under the boiling pot of their "Revolution".. A revolution that the rest of the world considers a "Rebellious Upsrising"!

I know for sure that a "Coalition" is being silently concretised to unite together all the "Conservative" movements and political forces into a single front; guided by the Military Institution and attracting into its centrifugal acceleration profiteers and benefiaciaries, from new political amateur formations to other smaller parties, from subservient media to hired thugs, along with an internal security forces eager to regain its ferocity of iron hand control, all binded together to keep holding-on to a "parasitical survival", which is by the way a lot easier than taking a stand and uphold it at any cost and by any mean. All of that under the close supervisory observation of "International Interests".

I won't make it long because you know by now the true meaning of what's really going on..
Pray with me for the martyres, remember and never forget them or their sacrifices, and have my best wishes for a better tomorrow.

Pass On The Word.


The motto of the revival: "Bread, Freedom and Social Justice"



Cairo Tahrir Square the morning of January 25th 2012 at 10:00hrs.



The historical symbol of Cairo: Kasr El Nile bridge yesterday close to mid-day as new participants couldn't reach the already saturated Tahrir Square.


Tuesday 24 January 2012

'In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution'

Hello friends,
In the occasion of celebrating the first year of a new born revolution, I bring you textually the e-mail received from Raimy Rosenduft a US friend.

Da: Raimy Rosenduft  rrosenduft@bltomato.com

A: haali.oracle@gmail.com
Data: 24 gennaio 2012 01:39
Oggetto: HBO2 Presents - 'In Tahrir Square: 18 Days of Egypt's Unfinished Revolution'


Hello The Oracle Editor,

This Wednesday, January 25th HBO2 presents the IN TAHRIR SQUARE: 18 DAYS OF EGYPT'S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION. I thought this incredible film would resonate with your audience and provide compelling content for your site.

They took over a city square and in 18 days brought down a regime that had ruled for 30 years. Emmy-winning documentary filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill were on the scene in Cairo, capturing the sights, sounds and passion of a modern-day revolution. IN TAHRIR SQUARE: 18 DAYS OF EGYPT’S UNFINISHED REVOLUTION brings viewers into the streets of Cairo to experience first-hand what began as a small, peaceful demonstration and quickly grew into a revolutionary movement that would force the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.

We have key art, stills, press release, and a trailer for you to use:

Feel free to share any of these assets, but please note that this site was designed specifically for webmasters.

**If you're able to share any of this great content, please submit your links at the URL below, to be entered into our bi-weekly giveaway!

This exclusive HBO2 documentary debuts WEDNESDAY JAN. 25 (8:00-8:45 p.m. ET/PT).


Feel free to contact me with any questions.

Happy Posting!
Raimy N. Rosenduft
Manager, Social Media | BLT & Associates
6430 Sunset Blvd | Los Angeles, CA 90028
Email: rrosenduft@bltomato.com

Well remeber, celebrate, pray and mourn the martyrs.. Never forget.
Pass On The Word.

Monday 23 January 2012

NATO’s "Drug For Food" Program.

By: Ahmed EL NAHAS, Montopoli January 22nd 2012.
The moment you finish reading the following document, your mind would certainly become filled with questions that need immediate accurate answers.. Especially now. Some of the questions crossing my mind were:
If American policy and that of NATO financed their war games, to control the world, using drug revenues to corrupt governments, what was Egypt’s share of all that scam?
Were our ‘respectable’ Blue Suits, partners and associates in the Egyptian-American Business Chamber, involved somehow?
Was drug money the bulk of the loans granted to Egypt by International Financial and Monetary institutions?
Who, in various previous administrations, knew?
Knowing that  (a) Mubarak, Hussein Salem and others were partners in a CIA company for weapons trafficking to different destinations through late seventies and early eighties; and (b) Mubarak Jr. right after graduation was appointed in an International Financial Bank in charge of redirecting (reselling) several 3rd world countries debts, including those of Egypt; how deep were that family involved in laundering dirt money?
If the answers to such interrogatives find their way to the light, will justice ever be served?
Enjoy reading, and
Pass On The Word.
>>>>><<<<<<

Afghanistan: Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration.
by Peter Dale Scott(*)
According to Peter Dale Scott, there is no point in deploring the expansion of drug production in Afghanistan and the heroin epidemic gripping great parts of the world. Conclusions must be drawn from the established facts: the Taliban eradicated poppy cultivation; NATO promoted it; drug money corrupted the Karzai government but it is especially inside U.S. institutions that drug corruption is rife. Therefore, the solution does not lie with Kabul but with Washington.
NATO curbs Poppy cultivation by the insurgents while protecting that of its allies.
Alfred McCoy’s important new article for TomDispatch (March 30, 2010) deserves to mobilize Congress for a serious revaluation of America’s ill-considered military venture in Afghanistan. The answer to the question he poses in his title: “Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State?” is amply shown by his impressive essay to be a resounding : No! . . . not until there is fundamental change in the goals and strategies, both of Washington and of Kabul.
He amply documents that:
·         the Afghan state of Hamid Karzai is a corrupt narco-state, to which Afghans are forced to pay bribes each year $2.5 billion, a quarter of the nation’s economy;
·         the Afghan economy is a narco-economy: in 2007 Afghanistan produced 8,200tons of opium, a remarkable 53% of the country’s GDP and 93% of global heroin supply.

Map of Afghanistan showing major poppy fields and intensity of conflict 2007-08.
Military options for dealing with the problem are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive: McCoy argues that the best hope lies in reconstructing the Afghan countryside until food crops become a viable alternative to opium, a process that could take ten or fifteen years, or longer. (I shall argue later for an interim solution: licensing Afghanistan with the International Narcotics Board to sell its opium legally.)
Perhaps McCoy’s most telling argument is that in Colombia cocaine at its peak represented only about 3 percent of the national economy, yet both the FARC guerillas and the right-wing death squads, both amply funded by drugs, still continue to flourish in that country. To simply eradicate drugs, without first preparing for a substitute Afghan agriculture, would impose intolerable strains on an already ravaged rural society whose only significant income flow at this time derives from opium. One has only to look at the collapse of the Taliban in 2001, after a draconian Taliban-led reduction in Afghan drug production (from 4600 tons to 185 tons) left the country a hollow shell.
On its face, McCoy’s arguments would appear to be incontrovertible, and should, in a rational society, lead to a serious debate followed by a major change in America’s current military policy. McCoy has presented his case with considerable tact and diplomacy, to facilitate such a result.
The CIA’s Historic Responsibility for Global Drug Trafficking.
Unfortunately, there are important reasons why such a positive outcome is unlikely any time soon. There are many reasons for this, but among them are some unpleasant realities which McCoy has either avoided or downplayed in his otherwise brilliant essay, and which have to be confronted if we will ever begin to implement sensible strategies in Afghanistan.
The first reality is that the extent of CIA involvement in and responsibility for the global drug traffic is a topic off limits for serious questioning in policy circles, electoral campaigns, and the mainstream media. Those who have challenged this taboo, like the journalist Gary Webb, have often seen their careers destroyed in consequence.
Since Alfred McCoy has done more than anyone else to heighten public awareness of CIA responsibility for drug trafficking in American war zones, I feel awkward about suggesting that he downplays it in his recent essay. True, he acknowledges that “Opium first emerged as a key force in Afghan politics during the CIA covert war against the Soviets,” and he adds that “the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region”.
But in a very strange sentence, McCoy suggests that the CIA was passively ‘drawn into’ drug alliances in the course of combating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the years 1979-88, whereas in fact the CIA clearly helped ‘create’ them precisely to fight the Soviets: "In one of history’s ironic accidents, the southern reach of communist China and the Soviet Union had coincided with Asia’s opium zone along this same mountain rim, drawing the CIA into ambiguous alliances with the region’s highland warlords."
There was no such “accident” in Afghanistan, where the first local drug lords on an international scale, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abu Rasul Sayyaf, were in fact launched internationally as a result of massive and ill-advised assistance from the CIA, in conjunction with the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. While other local resistance forces were accorded second-class status, these two clients of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, precisely because they lacked local support, pioneered the use of opium and heroin to build up their fighting power and financial resources. Both, moreover, became agents of salafist extremism, attacking the indigenous Sufi-influenced Islam of Afghanistan. And ultimately both became sponsors of al Qaeda.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar

Eventually the United States and its allies gave Hekmatyar, who for a time became arguably the   world’s leading drug trafficker, more than $1 billion in armaments. This was more than any other CIA client has ever received, before or since 
CIA involvement in the drug trade hardly began with its involvement in the Soviet-Afghan war. To a certain degree, the CIA’s responsibility for the present dominant role of Afghanistan in the global heroin traffic merely replicated what had happened earlier in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers.
One cannot talk of “ironic accidents” here either. McCoy himself has shown how, in all of these countries, the CIA not only tolerated but assisted the growth of drug-financed anti-Communist assets, to offset the danger of Communist Chinese penetration into Southeast Asia. As in Afghanistan today CIA assistance helped turn the Golden Triangle, from the 1940s to the 1970s, into a leading source for the world’s opium.

Abdul Rasul Sayyaf

In this same period the CIA recruited assets along the smuggling routes of the Asian opium traffic as well, in countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, Italy, France, Cuba, Honduras, and Mexico. These assets have included government officials like Manuel Noriega of Panama or Vladimiro Montesinos of Peru, often senior figures in CIA-assisted police and intelligence services. But they have also included insurrectionary movements, ranging from the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s to (according to Robert Baer and Seymour Hersh) the al Qaeda-linked Jundallah; trained in Pakistan, and operating today in Iran and Baluchistan.
The Karzai Government, not the Taliban, Dominate the Afghan Dope Economy.
Perhaps the best example of such CIA influence via drug traffickers today is in Afghanistan itself, where those accused of drug trafficking include President Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai (an active CIA asset), and Abdul Rashid Dostum (a former CIA asset). The drug corruption of the Afghan government must be attributed at least in part to the U.S. and CIA decision in 2001 to launch an invasion with the support of the Northern Alliance, a movement that Washington knew to be drug-corrupted.
The CIA cite, updated in 2008 states “Most Southwest Asian heroin flows overland through Iran and Turkey to Europe via the Balkans.” But in fact drugs also flow through the states of the former Soviet Union, and through Pakistan and Dubai.
In this way the U.S. consciously recreated in Afghanistan the situation it had created earlier in Vietnam. There too  (like Ahmed Wali Karzai a half century later) the president’s brother, Ngo dinh Nhu, used drugs to finance a private network that was used to rig an election for Ngo dinh Diem. (Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997).
Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, has pointed out the unlikelihood of a counterinsurgency program succeeding when that program is in support of a local government that is flagrantly dysfunctional and corrupt.
Thus I take issue with McCoy when he, echoing the mainstream U.S. media, depicts the Afghan drug economy as one dominated by the Taliban. (In McCoy’s words, “If the insurgents capture that illicit economy, as the Taliban have done, then the task becomes little short of insurmountable.”) The Taliban’s share of the Afghan opium economy is variously estimated from $90 to $400 million. But the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that the total Afghan annual earnings from opium and heroin are in the order of from $2.8 to $3.4 billion.
Clearly the Taliban have not “captured” this economy, of which the largest share by far is controlled by supporters of the Karzai government. In 2006 a report to the World Bank argued that “at the top level, around 25-30 key traffickers, the majority of them in southern Afghanistan, control major transactions and transfers, working closely with sponsors in top government and political positions”.
In 2007 the ‘London Daily Mail’ reported that "the four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government."
The American media have confronted neither this basic fact nor the way in which it has distorted America’s opium and war policies in Afghanistan. The Obama administration appears to have shifted away from the ill-advised eradication programs of the Bush era, which are certain to lose the hearts and minds of the peasantry. It has moved instead towards a policy of selective interdiction of the traffic, explicitly limited to attacks on drug traffickers who are supporting the insurgents.
This policy may or may not be effective in weakening the Taliban. But to target what constitutes about a tenth of the total traffic will clearly never end Afghanistan’s current status as the world’s number one narco-state. Nor will it end the current world post-1980s heroin epidemic, which has created five million addicts in Pakistan, over two million addicts inside Russia, eight hundred thousand addicts in America, over fifteen million addicts in the world, and one million addicts inside Afghanistan itself.
The Obama government’s policy of selective interdiction also helps explain its reluctance to consider the most reasonable and humane solution to the world’s Afghan heroin epidemic. This is the “Poppy for Medicine” initiative of the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS, formerly known as The Senlis Council): to establish a trial licensing scheme, allowing farmers to sell their opium for the production of much-needed essential medicines such as morphine and codeine.
The proposal has received support from the European Parliament and in Canada; but it has come under heavy attack in the United States, chiefly on the grounds that it might well lead to an increase in opium production. It would however provide a short-term answer to the heroin epidemic that is devastating Europe and Russia; something not achieved by McCoy’s long-term alternative of crop substitution over ten or fifteen years, still less by the current Obama administration’s program of selective elimination of opium supplies.
An unspoken consequence of the “Poppy for Medicine” initiative would be to shrink the illicit drug proceeds that are helping to support the Karzai government. Whether for this reason, or simply because anything that smacks of legalizing drugs is a tabooed subject in Washington, the poppy for medicine initiative is unlikely to be endorsed by the Obama administration.
Afghan Heroin and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection.
There is another important paragraph where McCoy, I think misleadingly, focuses attention on Afghanistan, rather than America itself, as the locus of the problem:
At a drug conference in Kabul this month, the head of Russia’s Federal Narcotics Service estimated the value of Afghanistan’s current opium crop at $65 billion. Only $500 million of that vast sum goes to Afghanistan’s farmers, $300 million to the Taliban guerrillas, and the $64 billion balance "to the drug mafia," leaving ample funds to corrupt the Karzai government (emphasis added) in a nation whose total GDP is only $10 billion.
What this paragraph omits is the pertinent fact that, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, only 5 or 6 percent of that $65 billion, or from $2.8 to $3.4 billion, stays inside Afghanistan itself. An estimated 80 percent of the earnings from the drug trade are derived from the countries of consumption: in this case, Russia, Europe, and America. Thus we should not think for a moment that the only government corrupted by the Afghan drug trade is the country of origin. Everywhere the traffic has become substantial, even if only in transit, it has survived through protection, which in other words means corruption.
There is no evidence to suggest that drug money from the CIA’s trafficker assets fattened the financial accounts of the CIA itself, or of its officers. But the CIA profited indirectly from the drug traffic, and developed over the years a close relationship with it. The CIA’s off-the-books war in Laos was one extreme case where it fought a war, using as its chief assets the Royal Laotian Army of General Ouane Rattikone and the Hmong Army of General Vang Pao, which were, in large part, drug-financed. The CIA’s massive Afghanistan operation in the 1980s was another example of a war that was in part drug-financed.
Protection for Drug Trafficking in America.
Thus it is not surprising that the U.S. Government, following the lead of the CIA, has over the years become a protector of drug traffickers against criminal prosecution in this country. For example both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,” on matters of “terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence”. When Associate Attorney General Lowell Jensen refused to proceed with Nazar’s indictment, the San Diego U.S. Attorney, William Kennedy, publicly exposed his intervention. For this he was promptly fired.
A recent spectacular example of CIA drug involvement was the case of the CIA’s Venezuelan asset General Ramon Guillen Davila. As I write in my forthcoming book, ‘Fueling America’s War Machine’, quoting from San Diego Union, 3/26/82; "General Ramon Guillen Davila, chief of a CIA-created anti-drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the ‘New York Times’, "The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." Time magazine reported that a single shipment amounted to 998 pounds, following earlier ones “totaling nearly 2,000 pounds.” According to the ‘Wall Street Journal’: “the total amount of drugs smuggled by Gen. Guillen may have been more than 22 tons."
But the United States never asked for Guillen’s extradition from Venezuela to stand trial; and in 2007, when he was arrested in Venezuela for plotting to assassinate President Hugo Chavez, his indictment was still sealed in Miami. Meanwhile, CIA officer Mark McFarlin, whom DEA Chief Bonner had also wished to indict, was never indicted at all; he merely resigned.
Nothing in short happened to the principals in this case, which probably only surfaced in the media because of the social unrest generated in the same period by Gary Webb’s stories in the ‘San Jose Mercury’ about the CIA, Contras, and cocaine.
Banks and Drug Money Laundering.
Other institutions with a direct stake in the international drug traffic include major banks, which make loans to countries like Colombia and Mexico knowing full well that drug flows will help underwrite those loans’ repayment. A number of our biggest banks, including Citibank, Bank of New York, and Bank of Boston, have been identified as money laundering conduits, yet never have faced penalties serious enough to change their behavior. In short, United States involvement in the international drug traffic links the CIA, major financial interests, and criminal interests in this country and abroad.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, has said that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the ‘London Observer’, Costa said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that “a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result”, Costa said “evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor," he said.
A striking example of drug clout in Washington was the influence exercised in the 1980s by the drug money-laundering Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). As I report in my book, among the highly-placed recipients of largesse from BCCI, its owners, and its affiliates, were Ronald Reagan’s Treasury Secretary James Baker, who declined to investigate BCCI; and Democratic Senator Joseph Biden and Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which declined to investigate BCCI.
In the end it was not Washington that first moved to terminate the banking activities in America of BCCI and its illegal U.S. subsidiaries; it was the determined activity of two outsiders: Washington lawyer Jack Blum and Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
Conclusion: The Source of the Global Drug problem is not Kabul, but Washington.
I understand why McCoy, in his desire to change an ill-fated policy, is more decorous than I am in acknowledging the extent to which powerful American institutions (government, intelligence and finance) and not just the Karzai government, have been corrupted by the pervasive international drug traffic. But I believe that his tactfulness will prove counter-productive. The biggest source of the global drug problem is not in Kabul, but in Washington. To change this scandal will require the airing of facts which McCoy, in this essay, is reluctant to address.
In his magisterial work, The Politics of Heroin, McCoy tells the story of Carter=E2=80=99s White House drug advisor David Musto. In 1980 Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”
Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a ‘New York Times’ op-ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen”.
Musto hoped that he could achieve a change of policy by going public with a sensible warning about a disastrous drug-assisted adventure in Afghanistan. But his wise words were powerless against the relentless determination of what I have called the U.S. war machine in our government and political economy. I fear that McCoy’s sensible message, by being decorous precisely where it is now necessary to be outspoken, will suffer the same fate.

_________________________________________________________________________________
(*)Former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Peter Dale Scott is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His latest book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan, Rowman Littlefield.

References:
·         Scott, The Road to 9/11.
·         Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, July 7, 2008.
·         New York Times, October 27, 2009.
·         Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden.
·         Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997).
·         Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan”.
·         London Daily Mail; July 21, 2007.
·         James Risen, “U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban”, New York Times.
·         Corey Flintoff, “Combating Afghanistan’s Opium Problem Through Legalization”.
·         CBS News April 1, 2010.
·         Cables from Mexico City FBI Legal Attaché Gordon McGinley to Justice Department.
·         CBS News Transcripts, 60 MINUTES, November 21, 1993.
·         Wall Street Journal, November 22, 1996.
·         Chris Carlson, “Is The CIA Trying to Kill Venezuela’s Hugo Chàvez?” Global Economy.
·         Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack.
·         Jonathan Beaty and S.C. Gwynne, The Outlaw Bank.
·         Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI.
·         Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin.

·         David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980.

At the start of the U.S. offensive in 2001, according to Ahmed Rashid, “The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies”.
Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), quoting from Ahmed Rashid’s: Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia [New York: Viking, 2008].

Saturday 21 January 2012

Recalling some sense.

We're getting closer to the first anniversary of the people's "Revolution", that was brutally overtaken by a silent "Coup-d'ètat" reducing it to a mere "Rebellion".
That's why I need to remind myself, and you, of some fundamental necessaties to requalify it once again a revolution and to bring forward the merited results paid in advance in blood.
I am bringing here parts of my previously posted articles:
  • "Practicing Active Opposition".. A Gift or a Right? - posted on June 29th 2010.
  • "Semper Fidelis" - posted on December 24th 2011.
Free opposition, being an undisputed constituent of pluralism in a democracy, is not a gift (carrot). It is a “Right” to be won by “Any” necessary mean, and then safely treasured by “All” means.

 Practicing Active Opposition” .. A Gift or a Right?
By Ahmed El Nahas, Tuesday June 29th 2010.

I watched with admiration Mr. Ibrahim ISSA’s interview to H.E. Dr. EL Baradei, which brought me to write down the next few lines hoping to draw attention to a well known yet unobserved and totally neglected political concept.

Knowing that true democratic practices, though protected by constitutional mechanisms, are founded on
transparency, free information, obedient submission of ALL” citizens to the law, and most of all are based
on an irrevocable and confirmed set of norms and regulations enabling a mature and responsible opposition to actively participate in the nation’s institutional functions, as a tool of the salutary regeneration of the nation’s political class, and transitional rotation of ruling among different political and social currents, whose choices of “MEANS” may differ, but their strategic “AIMS” remain the same.

The caricaturist “free speech” granted by the “Land Lord” to a tamed and enslaved opposition, is a
joke that only HE is loudly laughing about, while the rest of us, all of us at all levels, are paying the
consequences of such laughs (hereditary rotation of power, rape of the constitution, installment of corruption as a system, weaken the economy through continuous and unjustified debts dictated by the IMF to break our
bones and control our resources…etc..)!

History taught us that free opposition, being an undisputed constituent of pluralism in a democracy, is not a gift (carrot). It is a “Right” to be won by “Any” necessary mean, and then safely treasured by “All” means.

In a country like ours, opposition would be valid and effective only when: “a person, or a group of persons, is/are charismatic, able and resilient enough to embrace together under the same banner all opposition fractions and currents (from the grass root and upwards), in a unique and united main stream, in total harmony and respect of each others thoughts, beliefs, and political orientations. Thus forming a single solid block to safely represent an alternative majority, strong enough to present a new agenda acceptable nationally and internationally”.
(I’m not talking about political groups only, but the free opposition should also include civilian movements, syndicates, unions, students, bloggers… and so on).

Only then the weigh of such opposition would gain a cutting edge to impose change through a
predetermined transitional period, which could and may be violent, but will lead to the supreme and
ultimate common goal: “a guaranteed lawful and dynamic practice of Democracy, in a free country where the Constitution is the one and only guarantor for good governance, being the Vigilant Custodian for Rights and Justice”.
------------------------------------------------
If we are celebrating the first year of an intifada style “Rebellion” that overthrew a Dictator and his gang from the helm, then we have earned ourselves every right to  sing and dance.. But if the case is to commemorate the burial of the people’s “Revolution” together with their hopes and dreams for a home (State) under democratic rule (System) whereby everyone is safely free to express his ideas and to chose his governors, where all citizens are being securely protected by a loyal institution (Military Establishment), and where all are governed by a strongly respected and well defended constitution; then our tears and prayers will not be sufficient to clean and wipe out our shame for letting the blood of our brothers and sisters be so generously spilt in vain before a Military Salute and a press release.
------------------------------------------------

Will this coming January 25th be an exchange of "Congratulations" or "Condolences"?

Pass On The Word.


Friday 13 January 2012

SAPs forever.

By: Ahmed M. EL NAHAS – Montopoli, January the 8° 2012.

“In the course of the coming week, the Egyptian Government is due to negotiate with the IMF -International Monetary Fund - terms for a new loan amounting to 3 Billion Dollars”.
These two lines scrolled lately on the  monitors of the major news agencies, and became part of the Economic News chapter incorporated within some TV news. Do we know what that really means? If the Egyptian deficit has reached over 182 Billion Egyptian Pounds, what could be the real urgent need to tie our necks, wrists, arms and legs to an insignificant new financing topped by new interests, when we can’t already honour the previous loans interests’ rates?
Citizens around the world like you and me, especially in the “Third World”, are being educated - through programmed media tools (films, TV series, conferences, newspapers, concerts, news agencies…etc.) - that either the IMF or the World Bank, being the dominating financial institutions in present times, are officially manifesting a culture and interest geared towards the implementation of a “Poverty Reduction Strategy” on a worldwide scale; and are being falsely promoted as UN organizations. But we know for certain that both are entirely USA establishments acting according to the guidelines preset by the “Federal Reserve” and the market trends set by the “NYSE”.
So, the IMF and the WB, being two American institutions, were chartered upon the principles of the “Bretton Woods” accords to promote and protect solely the interests of the USA worldwide in order to give the USA the upper hand in negotiating terms and conditions to obtain the benefits it seeks from any nation, either being natural resources, logistical support, or merely a favourable vote in the “Security Council” or the “General Assembly”, or even in other regional or continental representations.
A plain and simple organised “Twisting Arms” technique using the only powerful mean human mind has ever conceived: Money. Through financing needy countries, by short and mid-term loans, in their turn bearing complicated interest rates scheme grids. While knowing far ahead in anticipation that those countries will never be able to honour such “royalties” unless granted new loans; hence the need of the “Structural Adjustments Programs” as pre-conditions for approving the loans, scheduling their interests, and granting new loans to cover the overdue. Now we know that the system was set to weaken such nations depriving them from sovereignty, wealth and resources.
We’ve been under that burden for too long time, and we have seen the results: in the flagrant loss of Sovereignty; in the Selling-Off the Public thing and the villainous Squandering of Public Wealth in the name of an unleashed Privatisation; in the systematic impoverishment of the Agriculture, as well as our Health, because these said SAPs imposed the use of certain fertilisers and pesticides which damaged the land and infected the water bodies thus affecting the entire natural cycle; in the ever deteriorating Education. The list is long and it features on top “Corruption, Incompetence and Ignorance” as a common denominator in that silly equation.
Will we ever be able to learn from our past mistakes like any normal responsible beings? When are we going to stand up and explain to the governing bodies the need for a “National Resources Based Economy” instead of that monstrous “Monetary Based Economy”?
It is important to deepen our understanding about the International Monetary Fund & the World Bank’s  Structural Adjustments Programmes, in order to ascertain the nature of their functions, and find out whether they are a “Tool for development, or a Mean of control”?
“Structural adjustment policies are just one of the mechanisms whereby inequality, inequity and poverty has been structured into laws and institutions on a global scale”.
Some of the “Standard” pre-conditions imposed by any Structural Adjustments Program can include:
Ø  Cutting expenditures, also known as Austerity. And that is mainly in the areas of education, health, agriculture, defense, scientific research;
Ø  Focusing economic output on direct export and resource extraction,  
Ø  Devaluation of currencies,
Ø  Trade   liberalization, or lifting import and export restrictions,
Ø  Increasing the stability of investment (by supplementing foreign direct investment with the opening of domestic stock  markets),
Ø  Balancing budgets and  not overspending,
Ø  Removing price controls and state subsidies,
Ø  Privatization or divestiture of all or part of state-owned enterprises,
Ø  Enhancing the rights of foreign investors vis-a-vis national laws,
Ø  Improving governance and fighting corruption.
In practice these terms/conditions are the secret arm by which the unscrupulous major international financial institutions are handling our destinies. Because by the end of the day it will not be the Government Officials or the Ministers, Parliamentary Delegates and Senators, Political Parties, Major Newspapers or wealthy profiteering business class who will foot the bill, they all are well paid and are not risking any kind of pay cuts or income reduction, on the contrary each will seek his part of the coming pie.
It is going to be us. It always have been at our expenses. We the simple innocent honest ordinary citizens; whom our specie is shrinking day after day and are condemned to turn into the helpless and hopeless minority! Who else will absorb the devastating outcome of continuous inflations and currency devaluations ordered by those SAPs? Those resulting from accumulated overdue loans topped by interests that someone, because there is always this someone, with confident deep serene voice who kept explaining, day and night, how urgent the loans were needed. To feed the poor or cover the naked? Not at all, they were urgently needed to finance “Privatisations!!?
Remember that word: “Privatisation, the synonym of dismembering the State and depriving it from its major assets. Because it is going to be, among other new conditions, the corner stone of next week’s negotiations to force our esteemed “National Rescue Government” to tighten OUR waist-belts so that we stop thinking beyond securing tonight’s dinner, while they would carry on with their “All Is Well” and “Business as Usual”.
Pass On The Word.