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Continue reading …More details on Wisner’s possible conflict of interest, but it’s the least of the challenges facing the Obama administration As I indicated yesterday , the idea that just because diplomat Frank Wisner worked for the Patton Boggs law firm, that didn’t necessarily mean that he was personally involved in working on matters related to Egypt. Now comes this from Justin Elliott in Salon : “The law firm of Frank Wisner, who was the Obama administration’s special envoy to Egpyt last week, is denying that Wisner ever worked for the Egyptian government, which has been a client of the firm, Patton Boggs. “The denial comes after journalist Robert Fisk, writing in the UK Independent, accused Wisner of a conflict of interest because Patton Boggs has, according to its website , worked for the ‘the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government’s behalf in Europe and the US.’ “But Ed Newberry, managing partner at Patton Boggs, told Salon today that the firm ‘represented the Egyptian government in the past – in the mid 1990s’. He said the firm also handled ‘a very small legal matter’ for the Egyptian embassy in Washington last year, but that Wisner did not work on that case. Newberry said that matter generated fees of less than $10,000. Just thought you would want to know. Wisner still went off-message, but evidently for his own reasons. Meanwhile, we have entered the second phase of this revolution, at least from a US perspective, in which Washington now has no choice but to get deeply involved in pressing for reform that may or may not happen under Omar Suleiman. From the New York Times : “Administration officials say that in recent days, Vice President Joseph R Biden Jr – who has a long relationship with Mr Suleiman from his days on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – has been pressing Mr Suleiman for a clear road map of democratic reforms, linked to a timetable. “But among the protesters and opposition groups in Egypt, there is deep scepticism that Washington is demanding enough of Mr Suleiman. “The administration sought amendments to the Egyptian constitution to legalise political parties, termination of one-party rule, and the end of extralegal efforts to lock up government opponents and regulate the media. But much of the opposition considers the constitution fatally flawed, and is calling for an entirely new document on which to base a more democratic Egypt. “Similarly, a meeting with opposition groups on Sunday led by Mr Suleiman was seen by many Egyptian activists as nothing more than political theatre that yielded no concrete steps toward reform. In a statement afterward – characterised by opposition figures as propaganda – Mr Suleiman offered some of what the administration sought, but left himself a lot of wiggle room.” This is going to be awfully difficult. Egypt Obama administration United States Middle East US foreign policy Hosni Mubarak Michael Tomasky guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Romania’s witches better make sure they own top-of-the-line crystal balls: The country is considering a new law that would require witches to get a permit—and make it possible to fine or even imprison one whose prediction turns out to be false. Witches, predictably, are none too pleased. “What about…
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The president acquiesed a phase-out of the 1952 land reform, forcing millions of people off ‘their’ land Hernando de Soto’s opinion piece in the 3 February Wall Street Journal rightly points out: “Egypt’s legal institutions fail the majority of the people. Due to burdensome, discriminatory and just plain bad laws …” Egyptians are marginalised and can’t operate and expand their businesses. He concludes that they “can do little to improve their lives”. All this is true. But it is also true and important that Egypt is still a rural society. More than half (57%) of Egyptians live in the countryside. And in the countryside, President Hosni Mubarak’s track record with regard to empowering his subjects is abysmal. Under Mubarak’s watch, one in ten Egyptians lost their farms. Almost two decades ago, families who had been self-sustaining farmers became landless sharecroppers or migrant labourers with a stroke of Mubarak’s pen. The history books are punctuated by the grievances of those who lack secure and stable rights to land. They have sparked many of the civil upheavals of the past hundred years, such as the ones that brought revolutionary regimes to power in Russia in 1917 and China in 1949 . And a special and poignant sub-class of these conflicts (including the Mexican revolution and the Algerian war of independence ) involved the grievances of those who thought they had secure rights to land only to have that land snatched away with the connivance of the regime in power. And that’s just what happened in Mubarak’s Egypt. In 1952, Egypt went from one authoritarian regime to another – from a corrupt monarchy to a military regime. At the time, land ownership was highly centralised. Forty-four percent of rural inhabitants were landless. And the top 1% of the population owned more than one-third of the land. In that overwhelmingly agrarian society, the first and most important economic reform carried out by the new regime was the 1952 land reform : some of the landless poor became full landowners, but the biggest part of the reform was the creation of “registered tenancy”, which gave the large population of insecure sharecroppers perpetually secure rights to the land they were farming, with much lower, fixed rent payments. If the land was sold by the owner for non-agricultural purposes, the registered tenant was to receive half the proceeds. For most practical purposes, the registered tenants, from that time onward, functioned as though they were the owners of the lands they farmed. And so things continued, through the successor regime of Anwar Sadat, and into that of Mubarak. Meanwhile, most of the landlords moved to the cities and developed other sources of income. When Landesa (then called the Rural Development Institute) carried out fieldwork in Egypt in the 1980s, we urged the then minister of agriculture Youssef Wally that the government should buy out the landlords and confer full, formal ownership on the registered tenants. We feared the old owners might, at some time, gain the capacity to reverse the reform, even decades later. But we found no support in the Mubarak government. Soon, our fears came to pass. In 1992, with little fanfare, and Mubarak’s acquiescence, the legislature adopted a five-year phase-out of the registered tenancy provisions of the land-reform law, beginning with an immediate tripling of rent. By 1997, tenants would once again be as they had been under the old monarchy: they could be evicted at the landlord’s pleasure, and were subject to any rent the landlord wished to charge. Between 1992 and 1997, that is precisely what happened. About 1 million heads of tenant households (about 6 million people, or close to one in ten Egyptians) went from being secure, moderately prosperous farmers, who enjoyed owner-like status and paid a low fixed rent, to being traditional insecure sharecroppers. Subsequent research by specialists in Egyptian agriculture found that this policy reversal caused widespread eviction of former registered tenants, increased rural poverty and indebtedness, and spurred an increase in urban migration by the young. Average rents eventually quadrupled. Like their city cousins, Egypt’s rural landless see no way to improve their lives, save for one – bring down the man who took their land and their livelihood: Mubarak. Roy Prosterman is founder and chairman emeritus of Landesa/Rural Development Institute, and emeritus professor of law at the University of Washington, Seattle Egypt Middle East Hosni Mubarak Land rights guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …President Obama’s proposed budget is expected to call for the first increase in unemployment taxes since 1983. Employers would, as of 2014, have to pay taxes on $15,000-worth of wages, up from the current $7,000, the Wall Street Journal reports. The move would give states a way to…
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Arabs across the region are ready for life after the autocrats. If the west remains reticent, they will look elsewhere for support The protests in Cairo are now in their third week, and despite everything that has happened in the furious, violent yet ultimately hopeful 15 days in the Egyptian capital, the bond between President Mubarak’s regime and his western allies, the US in particular, appears if anything to be strengthening. Of course, old habits and instincts forged over three decades of mutual strategic interests are not going to crumble overnight. President Obama and Senator John McCain have both been at pains to stress how Mubarak has been a friend to the US and an ally on the questions of Israel-Palestine and Islamist movements. Now, after days of policy being made on the hoof – one minute saying Egypt was stable, and the next calling for change – Washington seems to think that they and Mubarak are out of the woods. As a western journalist who’s lived and reported from the region, the world view and belief that goes into forging this notion is perhaps the most shocking aspect of this whole crisis. The reason is the stark and utterly different ways in which the anti-regime protests in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen are perceived and analysed in the Arab world and in the west. We may all be watching the same live pictures from Tahrir Square or downtown Tunis but they are seen to mean two entirely different things. In every corner of the Arab world there is the open appreciation that this is a moment in which the world has changed. The Arab governing consensus of the last 50 years is shattered and there is no going back – regardless of what formula, compromise or brokered timeframe is arrived at for “a managed transition”, to use the oft-repeated diplomatic euphemism of the moment. And yet switch on most mainstream western TV channels or open the newspapers and there is still a lot of umming and aahhing: will the Muslim Brotherhood come to power? What about stability in the region? How should the west now deal with rulers who were for so long its allies? How should the west help to bring about transitional bodies, etc … It sometimes seems that it’s not just the autocrats who aren’t getting the message of “GAME OVER”; many western governments and analysts don’t seem to get it either. Hindsight is a wonderful thing at such moments, yet you would be hard pressed to find many people who have lived and worked in the Middle East as journalists, diplomats or businessmen for any length of time in the past three decades who would be completely surprised at the social and demographic changes that have produced this political convulsion. The revolutions taking place now in the Arab world, and those that will inevitably happen in the coming months and years have been 30 years in the making. The Arab world has been undergoing irreversible social change in this period that the west and Arab rulers just ignored. One incredible statistic sums this up: two-thirds of the 350 million people in the Arab world are under 35. This is a new generation that does not see its own society and the world in the same way that many in the west do. I was in Tunisia during the overthrow of Ben Ali and western analysts were telling me that Tunisia was a one-off and that a country such as Egypt was completely different, with a too-strong security apparatus. Now, analysts are saying that the Egyptian example simply cannot happen in Yemen (because the society is too tribal), that it can’t happen in Syria because Bashar al-Assad is not as reviled as Mubarak, and so on. This generation of young Arabs have grown up in a period where an independent, brave and global Arab media has developed. They are all able to see and empathise with each other’s lives: Egyptians know how Jordanians live, Yemenis know how Algerians feel. That wasn’t true 20 years ago. Young Arabs see the repression, corruption, dashed aspirations and youth culture that is emerging from Iraq to Morocco – and what’s more they are able to communicate about it. These aspirations, demands and ambitions are universal. They all watch Arab Pop Idol, they all follow their own hip-hop artists rapping about poverty and corruption … and yes, they’re all on Facebook. Globalisation has also meant that millions of Arabs from places such as Syria, Egypt, Algeria have migrated, worked and experienced life abroad, and they have seen things they want to have back in their own homelands. This isn’t just about the buzzwords of democracy, human rights and free and fair elections. It is about hard-nosed calculations of where our interests in the Middle East lie in the next 30 years. Make no mistake, while this new emerging generation in the Arab world aspires to the western ideal of an open and free life, they have grown up in societies and economies where slowly but tangibly, countries such as Russia, India, South Africa and most prominently China are starting to do business and woo the young entrepreneurs, bureaucrats and diplomats of the Arab world. A question that has been asked in a whisper around the Middle East in the past five years has been: why always wait around for the west when we have the Chinese knocking on our doors, who don’t make us jump through one hoop after another. Just look at where China has got a foothold recently – it’s an oil producer in Iraq and Sudan, it has huge interests in Iran and it’s heavily engaged and drilling for oil in Ethiopia. I’ve even met Chinese businesspeople and technicians in northern Pakistan, and on a beach on the Red Sea in northern Somalia, barely three hours’ sail from Yemen. China is gaining firm footholds in the region, and will continue to do so unless we realise that the game is completely and utterly over for those leaders we have relied on for the past 30 years. This new generation will not forgive us for continuing to hanker after aged autocrats whose time is clearly up, instead of going after this new generation who will rule this region. From the Arab perspective, it sometimes looks and feels like the US and its European allies are losing their Middle East hegemony in a fit of absentmindedness. William Hague is right to be one of the first (if not the first) foreign ministers of a major western power to go to Tunis and meet the still embryonic government taking over from the Ben Ali regime. But it’s not just about making these gestures after the event – the whole Arab world has to know that we too are now looking towards the region’s future, rather than trying to shore up its past. Our interest now is to be seen as being a committed friend and supporter of the aspirational movement that is emerging on the streets of Arab capitals. If we drag our feet or seem reticent, we will lose credibility and currency with the new rulers that will undoubtedly emerge in the coming months and years. The strategic cost to us by dithering will be seismic in the long run – and to the benefit of countries like China. Egypt Middle East Tunisia Protest United States US foreign policy Rageh Omaar guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Before she allegedly shot her teenage son and daughter in the head for being “mouthy,” Julie Schenecker detailed her plans with pen and paper. Referencing Florida’s three-day waiting period to take home a firearm, Schenecker chillingly wrote in a note that it would “delay the massacre,” reports the St. Petersburg…
Continue reading …The field of GOP presidential candidates for 2012 may not be so great , but the VP field is getting the right energized. A wealth of new Congress members and governors has Republicans buzzing over potential veeps like Marco Rubio , Bobby Jindal and Kelly Ayotte , Politico reports. Where the potential presidential…
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