For some reason, the United States media and the Obama Administration find that it is a good thing when mass mobs of humans go and protest, march, and create riots with civil unrest, and violence with local police forces. The reality is we wouldn’t allow that in our own country, so it’s hard to say why we are promoting it in another. When it comes to nations like Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Bolivia, or Venezuela it might make sense for national interests.
However, if we really want stability and peace in the world that’s the last thing we should be promoting on the African continent, or in the Middle East. Most of the people in the Middle East who are rioting in their “day of rage” protests are not all that peaceful and they are doing so because they want higher wages, more money spent on social causes, and lower prices for their necessities such as food. When the price of wheat went up 70% in the last year that caused civil unrest in many countries because the price of bread also increased, but why did that happen?
Well, the price of wheat went up because Russia decided it would not export its wheat after the fires they had, because they didn’t have enough in their own country. In the United States we have planted a lot of corn for biofuel, which takes land, water, and resources away from agriculture for food. Also it’s very hard to get our extra wheat to the world markets quickly and into the hands of those that normally buy their wheat from other markets in the world when they’ve set up their distribution channels a different way. Further, when the world price goes up and scarcity sets in, it’s too late.
Of course, that is only one problem they had in Egypt, there were many more and they all came due about the same time. For US diplomatic officials, the CIA, and the State Department to tell our citizens that they had no idea that Egypt or other nation-states were going to have such a terrible problem is complete nonsense. They saw it coming a mile away (Wall Street and Chicago Commodity Market surely did) and things were getting progressively worse.
What may people don’t understand is many of the free market changes which were made by the President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarek over the last decade have been quite good for their economy. They provided higher-paying jobs, more tourism, and some real industries.
In fact, hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign capital has been invested into their manufacturing sectors there. Therefore raising wages, more jobs, and it was helping the people come out of poverty. Of course with all the civil unrest, all is lost. There is now in its place; class warfare, and if you are wealthy from running a business, you are considered evil by the very people who demand higher wages, jobs, lower taxes, free food, and more social spending. You can’t have one without the other.
What happened could be considered anarchy, and a socialist movement. Some people might say “Power to the People,” but for the people to have real power they need to have real jobs, real lives, and real opportunity – unfortunately all that has now been destroyed.
There was an interesting article the Wall Street Journal on March 31, 2011, titled “Cairo Revolution Finds New Target: Free-Market” by Yaroslav Trofimov and Matt Bradely – in this article they stated that The Muslim Brotherhood and other groups with political influence were attacking the very free markets and free enterprise system which has brought in Egypt economy is far, something the US should be supporting.
Thus, it’s all downhill from here. What transpired should not inspire, because what has happened is disgusting, anti-capitalist, and will hurt real people and end up economically enslaving another future generation – thanks for nothing!? Indeed I hope you please consider all this.
