Follow the Money 0
At Asia Times, Juan Cole looks at the “Arab spring” in the light of economics, arguing forcefully that the economic causes of rebellions in North Africa and the Mediterranean rim have been under reported.
Here’s a bit:
(snip)
In the global South, countries that gained their independence from European colonialism after World War II tended to create large public sectors as part of the process of industrialization. Often, living standards improved as a result, but by the 1970s, such developing economies were generally experiencing a leveling-off of growth. This happened just as neo-liberalism became ascendant in Washington, Paris, and London . . . .
Egypt and Tunisia, to take two countries in the spotlight for sparking the Arab Spring, were successfully pressured in the 1990s to privatize their relatively large public sectors. Moving public resources into the private sector created an almost endless range of opportunities for staggering levels of corruption on the part of the ruling families of autocrats Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunis and Hosni Mubarak in Cairo. International banks, central banks, and emerging local private banks aided and abetted their agenda.
Not that we’ve seen any such corruption and opportunism on our own shores in the last 30 years.
Crashing credit default swaps, Batman, good heavens no.
