The dear leader of North Korea has died, long live the dear leader. Like the dear before him, the new dear was followed to the seat of power by the newest of the dears. And like the first (call him grandfather), the second (call him father) was given a hell of a funeral lest the third (call him son) forget from where his wisdom springs and how it gushes a fountain of pure knowledge that ought to be used to protect the nation and all those inside it but nothing else. Thus, all the people of North Korea, young and old, men and women, invaded the streets of their cities and villages even before the funeral was held, and they poured their expressions of grief in public to let everyone know that they are not skimping on the intensity of their love for the departed even though he had departed and could no longer protect them from the enemy they dread, or shower them with the wisdom they used to long for, used to receive in abundance and were forced to swallow on an empty stomach.
Then came the day of the majestic funeral when only the women were supposed to express their grief in public by shedding a tear or two, by wailing a shriek or a few. And this was supposed to happen while the men were instructed to pretend to keep the women from throwing themselves at the funerary procession. But something at this level must have gone wrong inside the lines of communication because a number of sissy-like men -- including one high ranking officer of the army with decorations to prove it -- were seen to go out of control and cry openly like did the women. And this was a development that was contrary to the plan by which the men were instructed to look stoic and act accordingly. Thus, you must draw the conclusion that even the dearest of the dead cannot always count on things being done according to plan when they seek to rest in peace and try to enjoy the good afterlife they believe is owed to them for eternity and beyond.
Now, my friends (notice that I dare not yet say dear friends), guess where you can expect to see a striking parallel to this disgustingly entertaining spectacle. You guessed it; you will find it in the Congress of the United States of America and in other forums each time that the Netanyahu of Israel feels he is about to depart this world in a political sense, and thus decides to pull a farcical event during which the American Congress of pimps and prostitutes, madams and gigolos are instructed to emulate the women of North Korea -- not by crying their grief, but crying out their joy as they repeatedly jump to their feet and give the almost departed a life-renewing standing ovation. This sort of thing has happened in a series of second chances that the American politicos have given the Netanyahu; an event that bores the civilized world to death but not the American media types and their sidekicks of the think tank concoction who get tickled to a state of heightened orgasm at the thought that a foreigner is appreciated in their country more than the President of their own republic will ever dream to be. You may lament that the spectacle is shocking to the extreme but it is true to the letter!
And the most disgusting of the comical performances comes about when members of the Congress jump to their feet not once or twice but twenty nine times during a speech of the guest that lasts much less than it takes to conduct a public funeral in North Korea. And you know that the jumping happens on cue because professional clowns of the jack-in-the-box type are hired on these occasions, and they are planted throughout the chamber where the speech is given. They start the ball rolling every time that something is said which suits the Jewish causes, by jumping to their feet where they maintain the applause till the rest of the crowd in the chamber of fools joins them by standing in turn and clapping like a bunch of empty headed puppets with strings attached to their clapping hands. Yes, you may claim that this would be an artificially provoked standing ovation forced on the retarded whores of the American Congress by an elaborate ruse of the Jewish lobby but, in fact, nobody cares what the spectacle represents because in the end, a whore is a whore is a whore whether he is a male whore or a female one; whether he is artificially motivated by forces that come from without or naturally animated by forces that come from within.
And this is why my dear friends (I now say dear friends); this is why I dare say the following, and say it loudly so that everyone may hear me loudly and hear me clearly: Eat your dead hearts out, dear leaders of North Korea, Netanyahu the Jew is here to beat you at your own game, something he can do hands down, you will see. It is not only that he can stand alone in the lobby of the US Congress in his capacity as the unofficial stud in the business of screwing the American political class; he also stands as the official pisser who serves the rugs at the White House. And this is something he does in competition with the one named Bo who is known to have been neutered to give the Netanyahu the edge he always demands when he gets involved in similar situations. May the best dog win the rug pissing contest. I bet on the Netanyahu.
The question to ask now is this: What secret does Netanyahu possess which makes it possible for him to control the Congress of the American nation the way that the North Korean brass control the grieving women of their nation? The answer is that fear is the potent weapon used by evil men everywhere to control the emotional state of other people, be they a wife, a congress, a male whore or a country in decline. Such men do not care whether the expressed emotions are real or they are fake; they only want to make sure that the emotions are displayed in public so as to impress everyone who may be near or may be far because they know that the practice is contagious and liable to spread like wildfire. And spreading the practice is the effect that these people hunger to see happen when and where it can happen.
And there is a reason why these people want to see the sickly effect take hold and spread. It is that they begin their careers with very little clout by which to threaten the few people around them who may refuse to submit to their will. If they manage to score a first success by coercing a handful of them just enough to make them bend to their will, the evil ones use the example thus established to impress the next group of people and get them to bend likewise. If the evil ones succeed in the second instance to have someone bend to their will yet again, they realize that they have started a contagious trend. They seek to have it repeated as many times as they can, and have it spread like wildfire. From here on, they let the fire of their coercive methods eat through the dried up brushes of a frightened society, having developed in their own heads the notion that they have achieved the status of a God, one who is worthy to have his ring kissed by an adoring crowd of genuflecting prostitutes, be they of the American congressional type or any type you may find in a gutter of the same low level.
So then, how did the Jewish leaders get to convince the American political class to hand the nation over to them on a silver platter like seems to be the case? The short answer is that they employed in the past -- and they still do -- a big demonic scheme of little satanic tricks to play out their never ending games. A favorite strategy they often used has been to incite successive American administrations to do the things that the Jewish leaders know will create a conflict between America and someone else. When the conflict erupts, it automatically creates the opportunity for them to be consulted on the subject which is what allows them to take ownership of it, something they gladly do while pretending to be experts on everything. When they have the thing securely in their pocket, they take the time to make it work for the benefit of Israel and the other Jewish causes. And because there is little in this world that is not a zero sum game, what Israel and the Jews gain always comes at the expense of everyone else especially America, their generous and very naive benefactor.
What the Jewish leaders incite the Americans to do can be something as small as to insert an offensive expression in a speech that is slated to be given by the President or by someone of high stature, or it can be the implementation of a measure that is as big as the historical debacle of the Aswan dam. This was the time when the Jews had incited the Americans to pressure the World Bank to withdraw the financing of the dam and the hydroelectric station at Aswan, an act that was so hurtful to the Egyptian economy and to the progress of the nation, it triggered consequences of a magnitude that may never be fully assessed. What can be said, however, now that six decades have passed is that the event was the most pivotal in the modern history of the Middle East in the sense that the course of history was changed on that day. Things turned badly for many of those involved but most of all for America which is still paying for this act of utter stupidity and will continue to pay for a long time to come. It is generally acknowledged that one consequence has been the end of the British empire; it may someday be seen that the idea of Pax Americana never took hold as a consequence of that foolish act.
And because the genius of the Jewish leaders is that they always manage to get you to do it to yourself, you find it difficult to admit that you have been conned, let alone hurt as a result of listening to them and gladly taking their advice. Thus, instead of protesting what happened to you, or instead of calling on the Jew to account for his bad advice and his unsolicited incitement, you hide your shame by keeping quiet and licking your wounds in silence. You do this to put the matter behind you and forget that something of the sort has happened at all. You do it as an individual, you do it as an institution and you do it as a nation. The result is that the Jew gets away with it and he continues to do what he has been doing without a push back from someone. He thus proves to young Americans that the Jew is so special, he is never called upon to account for his behavior no matter how badly he behaves.
The ultimate consequence of this sickly-looking state of affairs has been that several generations of Americans have now grown with the belief that the natural order of things is that the Jew remains supreme and beyond reproach no matter what he does. Thus, while the Jewish incitement in America may cause a foreign country some damage, this is something that is usually repaired when enough effort is put into it and enough time has passed, something that can be seen to have happened in the case of the Aswan project. But what remains irreparable in this saga is the damage that is caused to America because what happens here is the worst that you can imagine. What happens, in fact, is the piling up of a cumulative damage that goes on generation after generation. It is a damage that has already taken America from the status of superpower to that of a failed state or something close to it with no promising end in sight or a prayer.
With all this, believe it or not, America may yet extend a hand to help the North Korean people get out of their predicament but there is little that North Korea can do to help the American people get out of their predicament except for the Korean people to offer themselves as an example to show America and the world what damage a dictatorial rule can inflict on the psyche of a people, be it the rule of one man, one family or one supremacist ideology.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thursday, December 8, 2011
A Christmas Fantasy From Outer Space
The people at NASA have said that looking out into space, they discovered a planet resembling Earth so closely that it can sustain life. Well, let me tell you something, my friends, this is not the whole story because the truth is that NASA has known about this planet for a number of years now. It knows for certain that life does exist on it, and knows what sort of life it is because what is out there has come from here. Yes, what happened was that real people – earthlings like you and me -- were sent on a secret voyage of discovery when the warp engine was developed and a starship was built.
The people from Earth settled on the new planet and called for more people to go there taking with them tools, construction machines and transportation equipment. NASA and the US government informed a number of other nations what was happening, and they all agreed to keep the project secret for a while. Upon this, a number of expeditions were sent to the new planet with people from several places on Earth. They built villages in several locations and connected them with a network of roads and highways. They built an electric grid to take power to the villages, some of which had grown to become towns. They also installed an electronic highway to transport digital and audio-visual signals to every location where people live.
They grow the food, exploit the quarries and mine the grounds for metals and minerals. They have established a number of light manufacturing industries and some heavy ones too, including the making of spare parts for the machines and the equipment they brought from Earth. After a while, the elders in charge of the Planet determined that they had what it takes to erect an auto assembly plant and so they did. They put one up for which they designed a car and made it nicely suited for the Planet's terrain and atmosphere. They hired young workers and got the old assemblers from Earth to teach them how to assemble cars. The Elders in charge then ordered the modification of the factories that were making spare parts to now make parts for the car and feed the assembly plant with parts.
While doing all this, the people also managed to establish a central bank and started to print a currency they call the dollar which they back with gold at the fixed rate of 100 dollars per gram of gold. But given that they lived for a time on spaceships and in settlements where the daily routine was planned and executed by specialists, few of them – especially the younger ones -- had seen money, had felt the necessity to fend for themselves or had the experience of wheeling and dealing with other people. For these reasons and a few other ones, the Elders decided at a meeting of the Council of Elders to educate the public as to the ways and the merits of the free market system which they decided will only be implemented gradually. The Elders chose this method over the one suggested by someone whose idea was to administer the “shock therapy” that was tried on Earth and was proven to be a failure. In fact, the approach would have forced a system on a people that was not ready for it, the way that things were done in Russia when the Soviet regime was overthrown.
In fact, the reason for the voyage of discovery in the first place was that Ronald Reagan, the American President at the time, had predicted that the Soviet Union will soon be out of its misery because his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- better known as “Star Wars” -- was going to work like a charm and force the Soviets to surrender. As it turned out, SDI did not work but the Soviet Union collapsed anyway. Something else happened in the meantime, however, as a result of the activities associated with SDI. It is that the scientists working on it discovered the secret of the warp engine by a lucky accident and were able to build a prototype that worked. This gave the Americans the idea of rounding up the Soviet leaders and sending them to a far away planet where they could not contaminate Earth with their screwy communist ideas.
None of that happened, of course. Instead, Russia struggled and failed more often than not to become as capitalist as the green dollar bill while “Red China” stayed as politically red as ever but managed to turn itself into an economic giant that is forever preoccupied at covering itself with America's green bills. Then came the fateful year of 2008 when the whole system collapsed under its own weight and proved to be as fake as a three-dollar bill. And this made it so that no economic system could be trusted to deliver the good life on a sustained basis.
For this reason among the other reasons, the Elders on the new planet decided to experiment with a system they will develop as they go. They said that for now, each working person will be paid an amount of money proportionate to the value of the work they do during the week. To this end, the central bank will open a number of branches, each of which will have a regular staff that includes a person they call “wage and salary officer” whose job will be to liaise with the business owners that keep an account with the branch. The officers and the business owners will meet from time to time to review and to set a monetary value for the work done by each class of workers below the managerial level, be they blue collar workers or white collar ones. Thus, having a wage level and a salary level set for each class of employees, the timekeepers and the bookkeepers in every company will do the math each week and issue the checks.
The Council of Elders also decided that the launch of the auto plant should mark the start of the Planet's industrial age and be the point at which they will begin to introduce changes to the system of governance. The aim will be to alter the culture and get the Planet closer to having a true democracy not a fake one, and to install an economic system that is free for everyone not only for the charlatans. The Elders met several more times and took up the business of writing down the principles that will guide the wage and salary officers when they sit with the business owners to determine the pay level of the various workers. They also wrote down the principles that will guide the heads of enterprises when they negotiate a compensation package with an applicant that seeks a position at the managerial level.
The Elders then discussed the overhauling of the system of financial institutions, and this is where the background of each of them played a role in determining how the discussion proceeded. Among the group, some were chief executive officers (CEOs) on Earth, some were bank managers and some were blue collar industrial workers. The focus of the discussion narrowed down to the definition of the role that ought to be played by the financial institutions. In this regard, the Elders decided that the central bank will divest itself of its branches so that the latter may go their separate ways and become a stand alone institution or merge with other institutions thus become the sort of bank they want to be. For example, they could turn themselves into a credit union, a small local bank, a household finance or an investment bank. And if they wanted, they could offer new services such as insurance or brokerage or anything financial.
This done, the Elders began an abstract philosophical discussion that touched on several subjects. They discussed the wage gap that existed in some places on Earth between the pay levels of those who determined their own compensation package and the pay levels of those whose income was set by someone else. They also discussed the subject of the gap that existed between the pay of the CEOs who run the financial institutions and the pay of their underlings. And they discussed a sticking point that took time to exhaust: the pay gap that existed between the auto assemblers and the CEOs of the financial institutions. To illustrate this last point, an elderly gentleman told of his own experience on Earth, a story that set the tone as to how the rest of the discussion proceeded.
He said he dropped out of high school. He started to work at the age of 16 as a material handler in a factory that made car parts where he stayed for two years and learned a great deal about many industrial processes as well as life itself and what it takes to make it a success. He then worked for a car assembly plant where he assembled cars by day and went to school by night. Twelve years later he had been promoted to plant manager overseeing 3,000 workers, and had become the holder of a master's degree in business administration. He left the car assembly plant to work for an investment bank where he was promoted several times over the years to attain the position of CEO.
Betrayed by the hint of a guilty feeling, he told his fellow Elders with a heartfelt sadness that was evident in his voice about the time when he made 180 million dollars a year in salary, bonuses and perks for making not one decision that his secretary could not have made in her sleep. And he revealed that this sum of money was equal to the wages paid to the 3,000 workers at the car assembly plant when these people were making 60,000 dollars a year. And he went on to say that this was not the whole story because what happened after that was that the wages of these people were cut in half, a move that management asked for and the workers accepted to save the plant from bankruptcy and save the jobs because the plant was burning money faster than it was taking in. More than ever, he felt that a situation like this was so grotesque, it must never be allowed to happen on this Planet. By the time he was finished telling the story, the other Elders had adopted him in their hearts as their eminent Elder Statesman.
But how to prevent something like this from happening and still move toward the free market system that everyone agreed must be adopted? His answer was that given the nature of their society, it will be a while before a situation like this developed here. Thus, they had enough time to think about and to adopt a Constitution that will set the right balance between the work of the invisible hand of the marketplace and the heavy hand of the law. To this end, he put on the table a number of points which he invited them to think about and debate for as long as they needed to.
First, he said, we must accept that human beings will never devise a system so flawless that it can never fail. Second, because of that, it must be recognized that a Constitution is never a perfect document despite the adoption of amendments meant to improve on it. Third, it must be understood that the invisible hand of the marketplace is not a supernatural occurrence operating in a vacuum. Rather, it is a phenomenon that takes place inside the imperfect system we devise for it. Fourth, it should be possible to suspend any provision of the Constitution without having to amend it if and when a case comes up that may not be illegal but that the public regards as being grossly unfair. Fifth, when such a case comes up, a referendum will be called and voted on. If passed, the decision becomes a law to apply only in this one case without ever becoming a precedent to guide future cases.
To incorporate the philosophy of fairness into the culture, the Elders realized that they must start to ingrain into the consciousness of the population a number of principles. The most important of these being that if an individual is found to receive an income beyond what is reasonable, it does not mean that this person is above everyone else or that the situation cannot be changed. Rather, it should be viewed as a signal that the system has failed precisely because it was devised by human beings who are themselves imperfect and prone to failure. The natural thing to do under the circumstance is not to say that the invisible hand of the marketplace cannot be contradicted but to take the necessary measures that will allow reason to triumph over dogma and thus reverse the situation.
The Elders then shifted their attention to the fiscal and monetary principles that will guide the Planet to the future they had envisaged for it. After long debates, they reached a number of principles which they wrote down. First, in order to give everyone the chance to start their own enterprise, credit must remain easy at all time regardless of the inflationary pressures that may be evident. Second, to diminish the probability that inflation will rise, money will be lent only to the producers of goods or services, and to the consuming public. Third, although speculation will not be criminalized, it will be illegal to borrow money for the purpose. Measures will be introduced to detect such activities and prosecute the culpable. Fourth, if inflation rises anyway, money will be drained from the system by raising the taxes and not the interest rates. Fifth, those who are deemed to be a credit risk will not have to pay a higher interest rate when they borrow money. However, they may be asked to make higher payments at the beginning. But as long as they do not default, the payments they make will be reduced month after month so that when the loan is paid out, it would have cost them no more than anyone else.
When a number of years had passed and the system proved to work well on that far away Planet, the people on Earth asked for details with the view of duplicating it here. This is why NASA decided that the time had come to break to the world the news that a life sustaining planet existed out there. But this is not where the big drama is unfolding. It so happened that during the exchange of messages between Earth and the new Planet, it was determined that as long as America had the system, the Congress and the political class that it has, nothing good will come out of the attempt to duplicate the system here. For this reason, it was decided to round up the members of Congress and send them into a hellish sort of exile the way that the Reagan people wanted to do with the Soviet leaders.
Upon hearing this, the Elders of the Planet told of the moon around their planet that is about to leave its orbit and crash into the sun. They suggested tongue-in-cheek that maybe the moon could be packed with members of the Congress and the rest of them to then send them tumbling into a place as hot as hell itself. But on second thought, it was decided that because this is the Christmas season when people are supposed to be good to each other, it will be enough to pick one person to represent the entire political class of America, and send him alone to that hellish fate.
They studied the record and came up with the name of the GOP presidential wannabe Rick Perry who said the most outrageous thing so far. He said that the current President, Barack Obama had declared war on the Christian religion (including Christmas) when in fact, he was the one to sell his soul to the Jewish organizations like a shameless low life, criminally insane male hooker. These were the organizations that severely damaged Christmas, that plotted to kill it and that worked to replace it with Hanukah and the Festival of Lights when they were caught red handed and stopped at the last minute. I know this to be true because I was the one that stopped them.
Here is what happened. Some time during the mid-Nineties, it came to my attention a month or so before Christmas that building on the Bertolt Brecht play 'The Rise of Arturo Ui' in which a character said something to the effect that: The bastard may have been dealt with but the bitch that bore him is hot again, the Jewish organizations were preparing to blanket North America with the notion that: Something evil is lurking in the belly of the bitch on her way to Bethlehem. They wanted to signal by this campaign their extreme dislike of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus whose crucifixion has been causing them suffering for two thousand years.
The Jewish organizations were preparing this campaign while stressing in every way they could the need to do away with the word Christmas and to replace it with the word holiday. They also fought to ban the representation of Christian motifs in public places, especial baby Jesus, the holy family, the nativity scenes and the Christmas tree. And while savagely attacking those Christian symbols in every way they could, the Jewish organizations lobbied the US Congress to press the post office to issue a stamp bearing the menorah so as to celebrate the Jewish symbol which they were now associating with the Festival of Lights.
Upon learning of this plot, I alerted the world as to what was happening, and the Jewish organizations stopped doing what they were doing. But since these characters never drop for ever the evil they take up once, they changed their tactic and possessed the body of Rick Perry like a devil would do. And they got him to mouth their evil pronouncements for them.
There are those who say only a fire as hot as the sun will exorcise the evil spirits out of Rick Perry's body. If we put him on that moon and we let him crash into the sun, he may perish for ever or he may be set free of their hold on him. All we can do now is pray for him while they prey on him.
Time for me to take a vacation. Merry Christmas everyone and a happy New Year. See you next year.
The people from Earth settled on the new planet and called for more people to go there taking with them tools, construction machines and transportation equipment. NASA and the US government informed a number of other nations what was happening, and they all agreed to keep the project secret for a while. Upon this, a number of expeditions were sent to the new planet with people from several places on Earth. They built villages in several locations and connected them with a network of roads and highways. They built an electric grid to take power to the villages, some of which had grown to become towns. They also installed an electronic highway to transport digital and audio-visual signals to every location where people live.
They grow the food, exploit the quarries and mine the grounds for metals and minerals. They have established a number of light manufacturing industries and some heavy ones too, including the making of spare parts for the machines and the equipment they brought from Earth. After a while, the elders in charge of the Planet determined that they had what it takes to erect an auto assembly plant and so they did. They put one up for which they designed a car and made it nicely suited for the Planet's terrain and atmosphere. They hired young workers and got the old assemblers from Earth to teach them how to assemble cars. The Elders in charge then ordered the modification of the factories that were making spare parts to now make parts for the car and feed the assembly plant with parts.
While doing all this, the people also managed to establish a central bank and started to print a currency they call the dollar which they back with gold at the fixed rate of 100 dollars per gram of gold. But given that they lived for a time on spaceships and in settlements where the daily routine was planned and executed by specialists, few of them – especially the younger ones -- had seen money, had felt the necessity to fend for themselves or had the experience of wheeling and dealing with other people. For these reasons and a few other ones, the Elders decided at a meeting of the Council of Elders to educate the public as to the ways and the merits of the free market system which they decided will only be implemented gradually. The Elders chose this method over the one suggested by someone whose idea was to administer the “shock therapy” that was tried on Earth and was proven to be a failure. In fact, the approach would have forced a system on a people that was not ready for it, the way that things were done in Russia when the Soviet regime was overthrown.
In fact, the reason for the voyage of discovery in the first place was that Ronald Reagan, the American President at the time, had predicted that the Soviet Union will soon be out of its misery because his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) -- better known as “Star Wars” -- was going to work like a charm and force the Soviets to surrender. As it turned out, SDI did not work but the Soviet Union collapsed anyway. Something else happened in the meantime, however, as a result of the activities associated with SDI. It is that the scientists working on it discovered the secret of the warp engine by a lucky accident and were able to build a prototype that worked. This gave the Americans the idea of rounding up the Soviet leaders and sending them to a far away planet where they could not contaminate Earth with their screwy communist ideas.
None of that happened, of course. Instead, Russia struggled and failed more often than not to become as capitalist as the green dollar bill while “Red China” stayed as politically red as ever but managed to turn itself into an economic giant that is forever preoccupied at covering itself with America's green bills. Then came the fateful year of 2008 when the whole system collapsed under its own weight and proved to be as fake as a three-dollar bill. And this made it so that no economic system could be trusted to deliver the good life on a sustained basis.
For this reason among the other reasons, the Elders on the new planet decided to experiment with a system they will develop as they go. They said that for now, each working person will be paid an amount of money proportionate to the value of the work they do during the week. To this end, the central bank will open a number of branches, each of which will have a regular staff that includes a person they call “wage and salary officer” whose job will be to liaise with the business owners that keep an account with the branch. The officers and the business owners will meet from time to time to review and to set a monetary value for the work done by each class of workers below the managerial level, be they blue collar workers or white collar ones. Thus, having a wage level and a salary level set for each class of employees, the timekeepers and the bookkeepers in every company will do the math each week and issue the checks.
The Council of Elders also decided that the launch of the auto plant should mark the start of the Planet's industrial age and be the point at which they will begin to introduce changes to the system of governance. The aim will be to alter the culture and get the Planet closer to having a true democracy not a fake one, and to install an economic system that is free for everyone not only for the charlatans. The Elders met several more times and took up the business of writing down the principles that will guide the wage and salary officers when they sit with the business owners to determine the pay level of the various workers. They also wrote down the principles that will guide the heads of enterprises when they negotiate a compensation package with an applicant that seeks a position at the managerial level.
The Elders then discussed the overhauling of the system of financial institutions, and this is where the background of each of them played a role in determining how the discussion proceeded. Among the group, some were chief executive officers (CEOs) on Earth, some were bank managers and some were blue collar industrial workers. The focus of the discussion narrowed down to the definition of the role that ought to be played by the financial institutions. In this regard, the Elders decided that the central bank will divest itself of its branches so that the latter may go their separate ways and become a stand alone institution or merge with other institutions thus become the sort of bank they want to be. For example, they could turn themselves into a credit union, a small local bank, a household finance or an investment bank. And if they wanted, they could offer new services such as insurance or brokerage or anything financial.
This done, the Elders began an abstract philosophical discussion that touched on several subjects. They discussed the wage gap that existed in some places on Earth between the pay levels of those who determined their own compensation package and the pay levels of those whose income was set by someone else. They also discussed the subject of the gap that existed between the pay of the CEOs who run the financial institutions and the pay of their underlings. And they discussed a sticking point that took time to exhaust: the pay gap that existed between the auto assemblers and the CEOs of the financial institutions. To illustrate this last point, an elderly gentleman told of his own experience on Earth, a story that set the tone as to how the rest of the discussion proceeded.
He said he dropped out of high school. He started to work at the age of 16 as a material handler in a factory that made car parts where he stayed for two years and learned a great deal about many industrial processes as well as life itself and what it takes to make it a success. He then worked for a car assembly plant where he assembled cars by day and went to school by night. Twelve years later he had been promoted to plant manager overseeing 3,000 workers, and had become the holder of a master's degree in business administration. He left the car assembly plant to work for an investment bank where he was promoted several times over the years to attain the position of CEO.
Betrayed by the hint of a guilty feeling, he told his fellow Elders with a heartfelt sadness that was evident in his voice about the time when he made 180 million dollars a year in salary, bonuses and perks for making not one decision that his secretary could not have made in her sleep. And he revealed that this sum of money was equal to the wages paid to the 3,000 workers at the car assembly plant when these people were making 60,000 dollars a year. And he went on to say that this was not the whole story because what happened after that was that the wages of these people were cut in half, a move that management asked for and the workers accepted to save the plant from bankruptcy and save the jobs because the plant was burning money faster than it was taking in. More than ever, he felt that a situation like this was so grotesque, it must never be allowed to happen on this Planet. By the time he was finished telling the story, the other Elders had adopted him in their hearts as their eminent Elder Statesman.
But how to prevent something like this from happening and still move toward the free market system that everyone agreed must be adopted? His answer was that given the nature of their society, it will be a while before a situation like this developed here. Thus, they had enough time to think about and to adopt a Constitution that will set the right balance between the work of the invisible hand of the marketplace and the heavy hand of the law. To this end, he put on the table a number of points which he invited them to think about and debate for as long as they needed to.
First, he said, we must accept that human beings will never devise a system so flawless that it can never fail. Second, because of that, it must be recognized that a Constitution is never a perfect document despite the adoption of amendments meant to improve on it. Third, it must be understood that the invisible hand of the marketplace is not a supernatural occurrence operating in a vacuum. Rather, it is a phenomenon that takes place inside the imperfect system we devise for it. Fourth, it should be possible to suspend any provision of the Constitution without having to amend it if and when a case comes up that may not be illegal but that the public regards as being grossly unfair. Fifth, when such a case comes up, a referendum will be called and voted on. If passed, the decision becomes a law to apply only in this one case without ever becoming a precedent to guide future cases.
To incorporate the philosophy of fairness into the culture, the Elders realized that they must start to ingrain into the consciousness of the population a number of principles. The most important of these being that if an individual is found to receive an income beyond what is reasonable, it does not mean that this person is above everyone else or that the situation cannot be changed. Rather, it should be viewed as a signal that the system has failed precisely because it was devised by human beings who are themselves imperfect and prone to failure. The natural thing to do under the circumstance is not to say that the invisible hand of the marketplace cannot be contradicted but to take the necessary measures that will allow reason to triumph over dogma and thus reverse the situation.
The Elders then shifted their attention to the fiscal and monetary principles that will guide the Planet to the future they had envisaged for it. After long debates, they reached a number of principles which they wrote down. First, in order to give everyone the chance to start their own enterprise, credit must remain easy at all time regardless of the inflationary pressures that may be evident. Second, to diminish the probability that inflation will rise, money will be lent only to the producers of goods or services, and to the consuming public. Third, although speculation will not be criminalized, it will be illegal to borrow money for the purpose. Measures will be introduced to detect such activities and prosecute the culpable. Fourth, if inflation rises anyway, money will be drained from the system by raising the taxes and not the interest rates. Fifth, those who are deemed to be a credit risk will not have to pay a higher interest rate when they borrow money. However, they may be asked to make higher payments at the beginning. But as long as they do not default, the payments they make will be reduced month after month so that when the loan is paid out, it would have cost them no more than anyone else.
When a number of years had passed and the system proved to work well on that far away Planet, the people on Earth asked for details with the view of duplicating it here. This is why NASA decided that the time had come to break to the world the news that a life sustaining planet existed out there. But this is not where the big drama is unfolding. It so happened that during the exchange of messages between Earth and the new Planet, it was determined that as long as America had the system, the Congress and the political class that it has, nothing good will come out of the attempt to duplicate the system here. For this reason, it was decided to round up the members of Congress and send them into a hellish sort of exile the way that the Reagan people wanted to do with the Soviet leaders.
Upon hearing this, the Elders of the Planet told of the moon around their planet that is about to leave its orbit and crash into the sun. They suggested tongue-in-cheek that maybe the moon could be packed with members of the Congress and the rest of them to then send them tumbling into a place as hot as hell itself. But on second thought, it was decided that because this is the Christmas season when people are supposed to be good to each other, it will be enough to pick one person to represent the entire political class of America, and send him alone to that hellish fate.
They studied the record and came up with the name of the GOP presidential wannabe Rick Perry who said the most outrageous thing so far. He said that the current President, Barack Obama had declared war on the Christian religion (including Christmas) when in fact, he was the one to sell his soul to the Jewish organizations like a shameless low life, criminally insane male hooker. These were the organizations that severely damaged Christmas, that plotted to kill it and that worked to replace it with Hanukah and the Festival of Lights when they were caught red handed and stopped at the last minute. I know this to be true because I was the one that stopped them.
Here is what happened. Some time during the mid-Nineties, it came to my attention a month or so before Christmas that building on the Bertolt Brecht play 'The Rise of Arturo Ui' in which a character said something to the effect that: The bastard may have been dealt with but the bitch that bore him is hot again, the Jewish organizations were preparing to blanket North America with the notion that: Something evil is lurking in the belly of the bitch on her way to Bethlehem. They wanted to signal by this campaign their extreme dislike of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus whose crucifixion has been causing them suffering for two thousand years.
The Jewish organizations were preparing this campaign while stressing in every way they could the need to do away with the word Christmas and to replace it with the word holiday. They also fought to ban the representation of Christian motifs in public places, especial baby Jesus, the holy family, the nativity scenes and the Christmas tree. And while savagely attacking those Christian symbols in every way they could, the Jewish organizations lobbied the US Congress to press the post office to issue a stamp bearing the menorah so as to celebrate the Jewish symbol which they were now associating with the Festival of Lights.
Upon learning of this plot, I alerted the world as to what was happening, and the Jewish organizations stopped doing what they were doing. But since these characters never drop for ever the evil they take up once, they changed their tactic and possessed the body of Rick Perry like a devil would do. And they got him to mouth their evil pronouncements for them.
There are those who say only a fire as hot as the sun will exorcise the evil spirits out of Rick Perry's body. If we put him on that moon and we let him crash into the sun, he may perish for ever or he may be set free of their hold on him. All we can do now is pray for him while they prey on him.
Time for me to take a vacation. Merry Christmas everyone and a happy New Year. See you next year.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The Economy Of Egypt In Perspective
Another piece on the Egyptian economy and another apparent paradox that seems unsolvable. This time the article came under the title: “The Economic Threat to Egypt's Stability” and the subtitle; “Getting the economy back on its feet is as important for security as transferring power to civilian leadership.” Written by Dalibor Rohac, the article was published in the Wall Street Journal on December 6, 2011.
The two pieces of information that get you thinking are the following. First, there is this: “The country's debt-to-GDP ratio is close to 80%”. And then there is this: “The elephant in the room is ... the military, which controls … 40% of Egypt's economy...” Well, what is known at this time is that the economy of Egypt is humming at the yearly rate of 1.5 trillion Egyptian Pounds (EP). The debt being 80% of this value, it amounts to 1.2 trillion EP. But if the military -- which is supposed to be the invisible elephant in the room -- represents 40% of the economy, it means that the 1.5 trillion value represents only 60% of the “real” economy. In turn, this means that the economy comes up to 2.5 trillion EP. If this is the case, then the 1.2 trillion debt comes to only 48% of the GDP; a far cry from the 80% mentioned earlier. But what is going on that would create a discrepancy like this?
This is a simple question that merits a simple answer. It is this: “When it comes to evaluating the wealth of nations, everything is done wrong.” If it were not, we would not be in the situation we are today, a situation where we are hit by a surprise each and every day. Who but a lunatic would have dared to predict a decade ago that a good part of Europe will be teetering on bankruptcy or that the Chinese will be buying more cars than the Americans? Yes, there is wisdom in the saying: “Figures do not lie but liars can figure.” And when on top of this, the liars you listen to and rely upon don't even know what they are lying about, you find yourself swimming in a pool that has become a big mess. And what can be bigger than America's indebtedness to China, its new arch-rival, and like the situation in Europe?
Money may or may not be at the root of all evil like goes a famous saying. But when it comes to evaluating the wealth of nations and you base the evaluation on the output of a country as measured by money, you definitely go to the root of the erroneous findings that you will be making, and the root of the bad conclusions that you will be reaching. And there are reasons for this; it is that when (a) you have several markets, each of which changes its “fair value” by the very transactions that take place within it; when (b) the transactions that take place do so based on the law of “supply and demand”; and when (c) you “mark to market” what you believe is the output of the nation you are evaluating -- you are bound to make the mistakes that will hurt you more than anyone else because you will be the one to use the false information, and make decisions based on that.
Let us take an example to see what all of this means. Like everywhere else in the world, the value of Egypt's currency as compared to the other currencies is determined in the local markets by the people who have a stake exchanging currencies. But who in Egypt has a stake exchanging the Pound with other currencies back and forth? Well, the people who buy goods or services from abroad do exchange the Pound for say, the American dollar given that the latter is the most liquid currency in the world. On the other hand, the people in Egypt who sell goods or services abroad and get paid in dollars, do exchange the latter for Egyptian pounds. And of course, there is the Central Bank of Egypt whose mandate is to maintain price stability for the goods and services produced locally as well as those which are imported because they too have an impact on the local prices. Hence the need to maintain the exchange rate between the currencies as stable as possible which is what the Central Bank does by buying and selling the Dollar; i.e. by artificially manipulating the supply-demand equation.
This is simple enough but who are the Egyptians that buy goods or services from abroad? They are mostly the importers of raw material that Egypt does not produce enough of. They are the base metals and some food staples such as wheat and sugar. The country also imports high end production machinery for its factories as well as sophisticated equipment for its hospitals and laboratories. And although Egypt has the potential to build enough cars to satisfy the local market and export some, it imports twice as many cars as it produces and exports almost none. The reason is competition from abroad and policies that were put in place long ago. All in all, the price tab for these imports comes up to 60 billion dollars a year.
As to the exports, Egypt receives a great deal of money from services it exports such as tourism, the Suez Canal, the Suez-Mediterranean (SUMED) pipeline and the remittance from expatriates. It also exports agricultural products, processed foods, medicine, some metals and minerals, manufactured goods such as car parts (but not fully assembled cars), textiles, furniture, appliances, electronic equipment and a great deal of petrochemical products such as plastics, fertilizers and insecticides. All in all, the price tab for these exports comes up to a little more than 60 billion dollars a year. And this gives the country a small surplus which allows it to build up a reserve of foreign currencies.
If we ignore the inflow and the outflow of capital, we see that because there is a rough balance between the imports and the exports, the Central Bank of Egypt does not have much of a problem keeping the value of the EP stable in relation to the dollar. But then, what should be the real value of the EP? It is currently valued at about 6 pounds to the dollar or a little under 17 cents. Is this a fair value or is it unfair? Whatever the answer to this question, it is here that you open a Pandora's box from which you can pull any myth you desire. But there is the reality that to determine a rate of exchange between two currencies, you must have a point of reference against which the two are compared. That is, you need a mark-to-market operation that can be applied equally to both currencies. And it is here where the problem begins.
Look how things work out. If you are an Egyptian living and working in Egypt, you can buy an average condominium apartment for 150,000 EP. If you are an American living and working in America, you can buy a similar apartment for 150,000 dollars. You determine that the fair value for the Egyptian Pound should be parity. That is, one EP should be exchanged for one dollar. You now look at something else: In Egypt, you buy a loaf of pita bread for one piaster which is a hundredth of an EP or 0.17 US pennies. In America, you would pay at least 17 cents for a similar loaf. And this puts the value of the EP at 17 dollars believe it or not. So now, you look at yet another example: In Egypt you buy a car for 150,000 pounds whereas in America you would pay 25,000 dollars for a similar car which puts the exchange rate at 6 EP for a dollar; the value that is currently set by the market. And you ask yourself: which is the real EP? Is it the one that exchanges for 17 cents? Or the one that exchanges for a dollar, or the one that exchanges for 17 dollars?
How does all this help us understand what is happening in Egypt, and help us determine what might unfold in the current circumstances as compared to what Dalibor Rohac says might happen? In fact, he takes up three points. The first is the balance of payment which he says has come close to a crisis. The second is the debt-to-GDP ratio which he says is getting worse as shown by a deficit that will reach 9% of GDP. And this is happening, he says, because of a system of subsidies that is neither sustainable nor fair. And the third point he brings out is the matter of the military's control of a large chunk of the economy.
We can simplify the matter considerably when we view an emerging economy such as that of Egypt as being made of two parts. There is the part that functions as if the rest of the world did not exist; and we call it the internal economy. It can be stagnating or it can be growing organically as if it were experiencing an industrial revolution of its own. It has a currency that is divorced from the rest of the world, one whose value is determined in relation to the amount of the locally produced goods and services that the currency can buy. The other part of the economy is the business which is transacted in foreign currencies; and we call it the external economy. As long as the inflow and the outflow of foreign currencies remain in balance, there will be no spillage between the two parts. But if not, the internal economy will be impacted by the external economy. However, the smaller the population of the country, the more that the external economy will affect the internal one. A small surplus or deficit will swing the economy considerably one way or the other.
Because Egypt has a large population, a drop in the inflow of foreign currencies will have a small impact on the country's ability to grow the internal economy. When this happens, Egypt may have to postpone buying some of the equipment it usually buys or it may have to curtail the importation of foreign cars for a while but this will do little to dampen the economic activity of the nation. Thus, the GDP can still grow at a clip that prompted Rohac to write the following: “Before the revolution … the IMF once called Egypt an 'emerging success story' for its impressive growth rates.” When things stabilize in Egypt, that performance can be repeated.
Also, if we believe that the debt-to-GDP ratio is smaller than the purported 80% which is most probably the case, and if the country will go back to the high growth rate it used to score which will most probably happen, then the problem of subsidies will become manageable as it has been managed for several decades.
A revolution is a tough period for a country to go through. Egypt is going through one now. But this is a country that has been around since the beginning of recorded history. It lived through all sorts of hardships and survived them all, coming out of each of them stronger and more resilient than ever before. Egypt will do so again; I am confident of that.
The two pieces of information that get you thinking are the following. First, there is this: “The country's debt-to-GDP ratio is close to 80%”. And then there is this: “The elephant in the room is ... the military, which controls … 40% of Egypt's economy...” Well, what is known at this time is that the economy of Egypt is humming at the yearly rate of 1.5 trillion Egyptian Pounds (EP). The debt being 80% of this value, it amounts to 1.2 trillion EP. But if the military -- which is supposed to be the invisible elephant in the room -- represents 40% of the economy, it means that the 1.5 trillion value represents only 60% of the “real” economy. In turn, this means that the economy comes up to 2.5 trillion EP. If this is the case, then the 1.2 trillion debt comes to only 48% of the GDP; a far cry from the 80% mentioned earlier. But what is going on that would create a discrepancy like this?
This is a simple question that merits a simple answer. It is this: “When it comes to evaluating the wealth of nations, everything is done wrong.” If it were not, we would not be in the situation we are today, a situation where we are hit by a surprise each and every day. Who but a lunatic would have dared to predict a decade ago that a good part of Europe will be teetering on bankruptcy or that the Chinese will be buying more cars than the Americans? Yes, there is wisdom in the saying: “Figures do not lie but liars can figure.” And when on top of this, the liars you listen to and rely upon don't even know what they are lying about, you find yourself swimming in a pool that has become a big mess. And what can be bigger than America's indebtedness to China, its new arch-rival, and like the situation in Europe?
Money may or may not be at the root of all evil like goes a famous saying. But when it comes to evaluating the wealth of nations and you base the evaluation on the output of a country as measured by money, you definitely go to the root of the erroneous findings that you will be making, and the root of the bad conclusions that you will be reaching. And there are reasons for this; it is that when (a) you have several markets, each of which changes its “fair value” by the very transactions that take place within it; when (b) the transactions that take place do so based on the law of “supply and demand”; and when (c) you “mark to market” what you believe is the output of the nation you are evaluating -- you are bound to make the mistakes that will hurt you more than anyone else because you will be the one to use the false information, and make decisions based on that.
Let us take an example to see what all of this means. Like everywhere else in the world, the value of Egypt's currency as compared to the other currencies is determined in the local markets by the people who have a stake exchanging currencies. But who in Egypt has a stake exchanging the Pound with other currencies back and forth? Well, the people who buy goods or services from abroad do exchange the Pound for say, the American dollar given that the latter is the most liquid currency in the world. On the other hand, the people in Egypt who sell goods or services abroad and get paid in dollars, do exchange the latter for Egyptian pounds. And of course, there is the Central Bank of Egypt whose mandate is to maintain price stability for the goods and services produced locally as well as those which are imported because they too have an impact on the local prices. Hence the need to maintain the exchange rate between the currencies as stable as possible which is what the Central Bank does by buying and selling the Dollar; i.e. by artificially manipulating the supply-demand equation.
This is simple enough but who are the Egyptians that buy goods or services from abroad? They are mostly the importers of raw material that Egypt does not produce enough of. They are the base metals and some food staples such as wheat and sugar. The country also imports high end production machinery for its factories as well as sophisticated equipment for its hospitals and laboratories. And although Egypt has the potential to build enough cars to satisfy the local market and export some, it imports twice as many cars as it produces and exports almost none. The reason is competition from abroad and policies that were put in place long ago. All in all, the price tab for these imports comes up to 60 billion dollars a year.
As to the exports, Egypt receives a great deal of money from services it exports such as tourism, the Suez Canal, the Suez-Mediterranean (SUMED) pipeline and the remittance from expatriates. It also exports agricultural products, processed foods, medicine, some metals and minerals, manufactured goods such as car parts (but not fully assembled cars), textiles, furniture, appliances, electronic equipment and a great deal of petrochemical products such as plastics, fertilizers and insecticides. All in all, the price tab for these exports comes up to a little more than 60 billion dollars a year. And this gives the country a small surplus which allows it to build up a reserve of foreign currencies.
If we ignore the inflow and the outflow of capital, we see that because there is a rough balance between the imports and the exports, the Central Bank of Egypt does not have much of a problem keeping the value of the EP stable in relation to the dollar. But then, what should be the real value of the EP? It is currently valued at about 6 pounds to the dollar or a little under 17 cents. Is this a fair value or is it unfair? Whatever the answer to this question, it is here that you open a Pandora's box from which you can pull any myth you desire. But there is the reality that to determine a rate of exchange between two currencies, you must have a point of reference against which the two are compared. That is, you need a mark-to-market operation that can be applied equally to both currencies. And it is here where the problem begins.
Look how things work out. If you are an Egyptian living and working in Egypt, you can buy an average condominium apartment for 150,000 EP. If you are an American living and working in America, you can buy a similar apartment for 150,000 dollars. You determine that the fair value for the Egyptian Pound should be parity. That is, one EP should be exchanged for one dollar. You now look at something else: In Egypt, you buy a loaf of pita bread for one piaster which is a hundredth of an EP or 0.17 US pennies. In America, you would pay at least 17 cents for a similar loaf. And this puts the value of the EP at 17 dollars believe it or not. So now, you look at yet another example: In Egypt you buy a car for 150,000 pounds whereas in America you would pay 25,000 dollars for a similar car which puts the exchange rate at 6 EP for a dollar; the value that is currently set by the market. And you ask yourself: which is the real EP? Is it the one that exchanges for 17 cents? Or the one that exchanges for a dollar, or the one that exchanges for 17 dollars?
How does all this help us understand what is happening in Egypt, and help us determine what might unfold in the current circumstances as compared to what Dalibor Rohac says might happen? In fact, he takes up three points. The first is the balance of payment which he says has come close to a crisis. The second is the debt-to-GDP ratio which he says is getting worse as shown by a deficit that will reach 9% of GDP. And this is happening, he says, because of a system of subsidies that is neither sustainable nor fair. And the third point he brings out is the matter of the military's control of a large chunk of the economy.
We can simplify the matter considerably when we view an emerging economy such as that of Egypt as being made of two parts. There is the part that functions as if the rest of the world did not exist; and we call it the internal economy. It can be stagnating or it can be growing organically as if it were experiencing an industrial revolution of its own. It has a currency that is divorced from the rest of the world, one whose value is determined in relation to the amount of the locally produced goods and services that the currency can buy. The other part of the economy is the business which is transacted in foreign currencies; and we call it the external economy. As long as the inflow and the outflow of foreign currencies remain in balance, there will be no spillage between the two parts. But if not, the internal economy will be impacted by the external economy. However, the smaller the population of the country, the more that the external economy will affect the internal one. A small surplus or deficit will swing the economy considerably one way or the other.
Because Egypt has a large population, a drop in the inflow of foreign currencies will have a small impact on the country's ability to grow the internal economy. When this happens, Egypt may have to postpone buying some of the equipment it usually buys or it may have to curtail the importation of foreign cars for a while but this will do little to dampen the economic activity of the nation. Thus, the GDP can still grow at a clip that prompted Rohac to write the following: “Before the revolution … the IMF once called Egypt an 'emerging success story' for its impressive growth rates.” When things stabilize in Egypt, that performance can be repeated.
Also, if we believe that the debt-to-GDP ratio is smaller than the purported 80% which is most probably the case, and if the country will go back to the high growth rate it used to score which will most probably happen, then the problem of subsidies will become manageable as it has been managed for several decades.
A revolution is a tough period for a country to go through. Egypt is going through one now. But this is a country that has been around since the beginning of recorded history. It lived through all sorts of hardships and survived them all, coming out of each of them stronger and more resilient than ever before. Egypt will do so again; I am confident of that.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Eunuchs On The Prowl Seeking An Orgasm
In a piece that was published in the New York Times on November 30, 2011 under the title: “U.S. Policy on Egypt Needs a Big Shift”, Marc Lynch and Steven Cook make themselves look like two desperate eunuchs bursting out the door and going on the prowl to look for something – anything at all -- that will give them an orgasm the way things used to be prior to their castration. But who are these people and what do they do exactly as they search for the fabled orgasmic experience? Well, these two and others like them are a subset among a set of people who make a good living teaching about foreign affairs in the colleges and the universities. In addition to their teaching duties, the members of the subset seek to give advice to the government on how it should conduct its foreign policy. To do this, they engage in extra-curricular activities such as writing in the various publications that open their pages to them, and by speaking on the radio, on television and in the halls where they are sometimes invited to speak to a live audience.
Now called pundits and talking heads, these people were originally spurred to come down their ivory towers by a Vietnam War that was going from bad to worse, especially the so-called “Pentagon Speak” that confused the public and got it to ask for someone trustworthy to come and explain in simple language what was happening to them and to their society. The pundits came out of their hiding places and did a satisfactory job explaining the unexplained. The Watergate Scandal then broke and these people received a shot in the arm that made them indispensable to the media outlets. Thus, they became a permanent feature of the landscape where they remained for three decades before their profile was suddenly raised to a much higher level. It is that they gathered power and influence by advising Uncle Sam to turn himself into a swaggering stud as if endowed with an elephant size golden tool; and waving it like a threatening sword at a world that was increasingly becoming insolent and disobedient.
To a public that was told it should feel humiliated by the defeat in Vietnam, this was a welcome display of America's rising power and influence in the world. But when the country's back was broken in Iraq, the American people began to realize that the advice had come from the Jewish organizations whose interest was to serve Israel at the expense of their country. The people of America then turned against the media that brought them the advisers of bad advice, and this is how the pundits and the talking heads were made to bear the cross of America's second defeat. Castrated, they were made to relinquish their golden tool, and could not even replace it with a wooden piece; and so they wore the mantle of has-been stud. This is how they became the eunuchs who lost the ability to have the orgasm they used to enjoy. And this is why they are going out on the prowl trying to regain their lost glory and the pleasure that goes with it.
What they do more than anything else, however, is justify their existence by warning of an upcoming apocalypse that never comes, then advise the US government on how to avoid it. This is what you see Lynch and Cook do in the first paragraph of their article: “Washington should not be fooled by the peace that has returned to Egyptian streets.” But how is Washington fooled? Here is how they say things are happening: “The U.S. State Department ... has called on S.C.A.F. [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] to transfer power … That is a good start, but is not enough.” But why is it not enough? This is how they respond: “Egypt's military rulers clearly believe that...” Wow! Did you get this, my friend? The two authors are Americans who could not tell you what goes on inside the head of their American compatriots in Washington yet, they “clearly” see what goes on inside the head of Egypt's leaders. What pompous assholes, these things are!
As if there is not enough pomposity in the claim that they figured out Egypt's rulers, they now tell you they figured out what the entire Egyptian population will do in the future. Here is how they accomplish this: “The violence last week … has created the conditions under which even small problems and challenges can spark massive instability. And has shown that Washington's ... approach to Egypt … must change.” Thus, they tell what the people of Egypt will do and they use this to say that America's attitude toward Egypt must change to avoid a looming apocalypse. This means they are advocating the remake of Uncle Sam's golden tool to wield it again like a threatening sword. And this is how they hope to shed the cross of defeat and start once again to enjoy the orgasmic experience of being influential.
They want this so badly, in fact, that they use both reverse psychology and forward psychology to goad the Obama administration to listen to them. Look at the supreme craftiness they employ in this passage: “...the Obama administration has done better … than most critics recognize … [Its] approach … worked, but it has lowered America's status in the eyes of many Egyptians.” What they hope to accomplish here is to make the government practice world diplomacy in the open so that they can participate in the process and highjack it by the sheer weight of their numbers and by their ability to hound the administration to go the way they choose for it. Their secret desire is to duplicate what the Congress has done when it snatched foreign policy from the hands of the executive branch, turning it into a tool to sell America short and boost the interests of Israel.
Lynch and Cook continue to play the double-edged psychological game. This time, they do it this way: “Until this week, arguments could be made either way on the balance between private influence and public pressure ... The U.S. was virtually silent as ... U.S.-made tear gas bombarded Tahrir Square. Only after a few days did it muster a demand for restraint ... Washington has toughened its language in recent days ... But few Egyptians even noticed ...This cautious ... response has done ... damage to ... Obama’s ... efforts to place the United States on the side of Arabs who want ... democratic societies. It is time for ... Obama ... to rise to the moment ... and shift its focus.”
Do you now see the problem that prompted our friends to act? It was the Egyptian people who did not “even notice” what must have been too subtle for them to notice. The moral of this story is that things must be made much clearer for the Egyptians to notice -- like perhaps hitting them on the head with a two-by-four. But in case this will not be sufficient to convince the administration to do things differently, Lynch and Cook resort to the use of the old style twisting of the arm. That is, they invoke the power of the precedent. It should be said that in America where the Common Law is practiced, the precedent has a quasi-judicial force even when it is invoked in matters that have nothing to do with the law. Thus, when the authors say: “The events of the last week … are not the only compelling reason for a policy change,” they signal that they have an argument with the force of law to throw in Obama's face. And here is that infamous argument unedited:
“The administration has articulated a new standard of legitimacy in its responses to Libya and Syria, among other countries, that leaders who use violence against their own people forfeit their standing to rule. Although Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and his officers are hardly in the same category as Muammar el-Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, the same standard should apply to Egypt.”
Now that our two authors have put their foot down, they feel that the time has come to tell in a nutshell what exactly they want the President to do. This is how they tell it: “The Obama administration's response should begin with a clear, public presidential statement … Washington should put the Egyptian military … on notice … [what] is unacceptable.” There is no mincing of the words here because the authors gave themselves the authority to speak with authority as to what presidential statement the president must issue – in public this time, of course. Understand this? In public this time. And what the presidential statement must contain is a notice to the Egyptian military as to what is acceptable and what is not. Get it, Obama? You have your marching orders, now march.
These people believe they have so much under their belt already that they feel confident enough and feel not the least bit ashamed to openly ask for something that is already happening all by itself; their intent being to take credit for what someone else has achieved. Look what these characters have written: “In addition, Washington should now throw its weight behind early presidential elections, a demand shared by virtually all Egyptian political forces and which the S.C.A.F. recently agreed to under pressure.” And of course, the menu of demands extends well beyond these points, but who wants to waste time reading them anyway? Not me.
By the time you have accomplished all this on paper and have it in your head also, you feel you are as good as a god, and so you behave like one. How you do that, you ask? Well, you pretend to yourself that the Egyptian people who did the revolution did not rely on themselves alone when they acted. This gives you the right to take the revolution to its ultimate conclusion, which authorizes you to get involved and commandeer it to where you feel it ought to go. How do you do that, you ask? Well, our two characters knew how to do it. Like two shameless dogs having sex in public, they wrote the following to end a piece of trash they believe is an article worth publishing in a prestigious publication:
“Egypt is now entering months of elections that hold out the promise of delivering the democratic system that Egyptians want and deserve. Now is the time for Washington to push Egypt’s military leaders to make the political changes needed to deliver on that hope.”
But will one of these two or both get the orgasm they have been seeking? I don't care. Do you?
Now called pundits and talking heads, these people were originally spurred to come down their ivory towers by a Vietnam War that was going from bad to worse, especially the so-called “Pentagon Speak” that confused the public and got it to ask for someone trustworthy to come and explain in simple language what was happening to them and to their society. The pundits came out of their hiding places and did a satisfactory job explaining the unexplained. The Watergate Scandal then broke and these people received a shot in the arm that made them indispensable to the media outlets. Thus, they became a permanent feature of the landscape where they remained for three decades before their profile was suddenly raised to a much higher level. It is that they gathered power and influence by advising Uncle Sam to turn himself into a swaggering stud as if endowed with an elephant size golden tool; and waving it like a threatening sword at a world that was increasingly becoming insolent and disobedient.
To a public that was told it should feel humiliated by the defeat in Vietnam, this was a welcome display of America's rising power and influence in the world. But when the country's back was broken in Iraq, the American people began to realize that the advice had come from the Jewish organizations whose interest was to serve Israel at the expense of their country. The people of America then turned against the media that brought them the advisers of bad advice, and this is how the pundits and the talking heads were made to bear the cross of America's second defeat. Castrated, they were made to relinquish their golden tool, and could not even replace it with a wooden piece; and so they wore the mantle of has-been stud. This is how they became the eunuchs who lost the ability to have the orgasm they used to enjoy. And this is why they are going out on the prowl trying to regain their lost glory and the pleasure that goes with it.
What they do more than anything else, however, is justify their existence by warning of an upcoming apocalypse that never comes, then advise the US government on how to avoid it. This is what you see Lynch and Cook do in the first paragraph of their article: “Washington should not be fooled by the peace that has returned to Egyptian streets.” But how is Washington fooled? Here is how they say things are happening: “The U.S. State Department ... has called on S.C.A.F. [Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] to transfer power … That is a good start, but is not enough.” But why is it not enough? This is how they respond: “Egypt's military rulers clearly believe that...” Wow! Did you get this, my friend? The two authors are Americans who could not tell you what goes on inside the head of their American compatriots in Washington yet, they “clearly” see what goes on inside the head of Egypt's leaders. What pompous assholes, these things are!
As if there is not enough pomposity in the claim that they figured out Egypt's rulers, they now tell you they figured out what the entire Egyptian population will do in the future. Here is how they accomplish this: “The violence last week … has created the conditions under which even small problems and challenges can spark massive instability. And has shown that Washington's ... approach to Egypt … must change.” Thus, they tell what the people of Egypt will do and they use this to say that America's attitude toward Egypt must change to avoid a looming apocalypse. This means they are advocating the remake of Uncle Sam's golden tool to wield it again like a threatening sword. And this is how they hope to shed the cross of defeat and start once again to enjoy the orgasmic experience of being influential.
They want this so badly, in fact, that they use both reverse psychology and forward psychology to goad the Obama administration to listen to them. Look at the supreme craftiness they employ in this passage: “...the Obama administration has done better … than most critics recognize … [Its] approach … worked, but it has lowered America's status in the eyes of many Egyptians.” What they hope to accomplish here is to make the government practice world diplomacy in the open so that they can participate in the process and highjack it by the sheer weight of their numbers and by their ability to hound the administration to go the way they choose for it. Their secret desire is to duplicate what the Congress has done when it snatched foreign policy from the hands of the executive branch, turning it into a tool to sell America short and boost the interests of Israel.
Lynch and Cook continue to play the double-edged psychological game. This time, they do it this way: “Until this week, arguments could be made either way on the balance between private influence and public pressure ... The U.S. was virtually silent as ... U.S.-made tear gas bombarded Tahrir Square. Only after a few days did it muster a demand for restraint ... Washington has toughened its language in recent days ... But few Egyptians even noticed ...This cautious ... response has done ... damage to ... Obama’s ... efforts to place the United States on the side of Arabs who want ... democratic societies. It is time for ... Obama ... to rise to the moment ... and shift its focus.”
Do you now see the problem that prompted our friends to act? It was the Egyptian people who did not “even notice” what must have been too subtle for them to notice. The moral of this story is that things must be made much clearer for the Egyptians to notice -- like perhaps hitting them on the head with a two-by-four. But in case this will not be sufficient to convince the administration to do things differently, Lynch and Cook resort to the use of the old style twisting of the arm. That is, they invoke the power of the precedent. It should be said that in America where the Common Law is practiced, the precedent has a quasi-judicial force even when it is invoked in matters that have nothing to do with the law. Thus, when the authors say: “The events of the last week … are not the only compelling reason for a policy change,” they signal that they have an argument with the force of law to throw in Obama's face. And here is that infamous argument unedited:
“The administration has articulated a new standard of legitimacy in its responses to Libya and Syria, among other countries, that leaders who use violence against their own people forfeit their standing to rule. Although Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi and his officers are hardly in the same category as Muammar el-Qaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, the same standard should apply to Egypt.”
Now that our two authors have put their foot down, they feel that the time has come to tell in a nutshell what exactly they want the President to do. This is how they tell it: “The Obama administration's response should begin with a clear, public presidential statement … Washington should put the Egyptian military … on notice … [what] is unacceptable.” There is no mincing of the words here because the authors gave themselves the authority to speak with authority as to what presidential statement the president must issue – in public this time, of course. Understand this? In public this time. And what the presidential statement must contain is a notice to the Egyptian military as to what is acceptable and what is not. Get it, Obama? You have your marching orders, now march.
These people believe they have so much under their belt already that they feel confident enough and feel not the least bit ashamed to openly ask for something that is already happening all by itself; their intent being to take credit for what someone else has achieved. Look what these characters have written: “In addition, Washington should now throw its weight behind early presidential elections, a demand shared by virtually all Egyptian political forces and which the S.C.A.F. recently agreed to under pressure.” And of course, the menu of demands extends well beyond these points, but who wants to waste time reading them anyway? Not me.
By the time you have accomplished all this on paper and have it in your head also, you feel you are as good as a god, and so you behave like one. How you do that, you ask? Well, you pretend to yourself that the Egyptian people who did the revolution did not rely on themselves alone when they acted. This gives you the right to take the revolution to its ultimate conclusion, which authorizes you to get involved and commandeer it to where you feel it ought to go. How do you do that, you ask? Well, our two characters knew how to do it. Like two shameless dogs having sex in public, they wrote the following to end a piece of trash they believe is an article worth publishing in a prestigious publication:
“Egypt is now entering months of elections that hold out the promise of delivering the democratic system that Egyptians want and deserve. Now is the time for Washington to push Egypt’s military leaders to make the political changes needed to deliver on that hope.”
But will one of these two or both get the orgasm they have been seeking? I don't care. Do you?
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Clichés And Stereotypes That Refuse To Die
Fouad Ajami has tried for years to interpret the Arab World to his English readers but has, in my view, failed deplorably. I thought I knew the reason why but am now more confused than ever because he is offering a reason of his own, one that differs markedly from what I thought. He says: “Egyptian history plays tricks with its interpreters.” Yes, my friend, he is blaming it on Egypt. He does this in an article he published in the Wall Street Journal on November 29, 2011 under the title: “Egypt and the Fruits of the Pharaohs” and the subtitle: “The disorder in Cairo is not the result of democracy but rather of a half-century of authoritarianism.” But Egypt is not the entire Arab world, so how can he single out one country and be correct? Could it be that he is wrong today the way that he has been wrong all those years? It seems we have a conundrum here; so let us probe into it.
Right after he accuses history of trickery, Ajami calls Egypt: “This ancient society” then talks about: “Egypt's peasant society” which prompts you to wonder if he believes Egypt has been a peasant society throughout its history -- the ancient part and the modern part of a very long history. If this is what he believes, I have news for him: It is generally accepted that even if the industrial age did not officially start until 250 years ago, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution was put in place nearly 5,000 years ago. This happened the moment that industrial production in the style of the assembly line was launched to manufacture the thousands upon thousands of blocks of granite that were assembled into pyramids – those that have been discovered already and those that are buried under the sand waiting to be discovered.
Ajami then goes on to say that Egypt: “...has been prone to violent upheavals. Order has often hung by a thread, as a proud people alternate between submission and rebellion … We are now in the midst of one of these alternations.” And he says this without giving a single example from the past to illustrate his point. But if you feel uneasy about the way that he came to this conclusion, you also feel intrigued enough by the premise of his thesis that you look forward to seeing it expanded. Sadly, however, he disappoints you when he fails to do so. In fact, instead of elucidating the point that could have merit, he relies on the warn out method of recycling old clichés and stereotypes; most of which are patently false, even libelous.
After that, he takes a few paragraphs to make it sound like Egypt's revolution is different from all the others in consequence of: “...a half-century of authoritarianism. The [current] lawlessness issue out of the lawlessness of the former regime. As crony capitalism had its way ... the officer corps, had to be given its share of the loot.” And this is where you despair because you see that not only he failed to elucidate ideas of his own, he is also borrowing a style of writing that aims to criticize Egypt for doing on a small scale the bad things that other countries do on a much larger scale. And this is an approach that has always been used by the propaganda machine in charge of attacking Egypt. In this instance, Ajami tries to convince the readers that crony capitalism is an Egyptian peculiarity, a system of economics that exists nowhere else.
Even with all this, and for a brief moment, you still want to forgive the man because you think that perhaps he is too busy watching the political developments in the Middle East to check on the economies of the other regions in the world where crony capitalism flourishes in places like the good old USA, the BRIC nations and many other places where their crony capitalism makes that of Egypt look like a socialist utopia. But Ajami surprises you by taking an entire paragraph to mention a few economic numbers that add to your puzzlement. More will be said about this in a moment but first, notice that he goes from that paragraph to the next where he says the following: “This is not the legacy of Tahrir Square but of the 1952 military coup … Nasser … Sadat … Mubarak had … secured obedience through a defective command economy riddled with cronyism.” And this is where he blows your mind. It is that you have a hard time trying to reconcile the idea of a crony command economy and a crony capitalism coexisting in one place at the same time.
We now look at the paragraph where he mentions those economic numbers. He says this: “...Egypt was living dangerously, running through its financial reserves at an alarming rate. Tourism, 10% of GDP, has ground to a halt ,,, the country has wheat reserves of around six months, and cooking oil, sugar and rice supplies that can only see the country through another three months.” Well, let me begin by discussing the matter of food reserves. First, Egypt is an exporter of rice, so I fail to see why it is on this list at all. Second, no country in the world is self sufficient in everything, and neither is Egypt. While the country exports rice, fruits, vegetables, seafood, spices, cut flowers and cotton, it only produces 60% to 80% of the wheat, cooking oil and sugar it consumes, and thus needs to import the balance of these staples.
The record also shows that during some years, Egypt bought more food than it sold; and there were years when it sold more than it bought. In general, however, the country has scored a trade surplus year after year, and this is how it was able to build up a reserve of foreign currencies. The purpose of having such reserves in Egypt and elsewhere is to use them when the country is hit with unexpected hard times, and having a revolution certainly qualifies as being hard times. This is why the country's currency reserves were seen to diminish for a while before they stabilized. In fact, nothing of what happened here is spectacularly out of the ordinary except for what goes on inside the head of the people who wish it was otherwise -- whatever their motives may be.
And like everyone else, Egypt has silos and warehouses where agricultural products are stored. These places are closely monitored; and a report is issued on a monthly basis indicating how much of what they hold is left in them, how much of it is on order from local suppliers and from abroad, how much is on ships sailing toward the country and on ships at the harbor being unloaded. And there is here a point that everyone who writes about economic matters needs to know even if they only write about them in passing. It is this: To have reserves of a commodity for 3 months is ample; to have reserves for 6 months is huge. In fact, this was the first time that Egypt's reserve in wheat had reached the 6 months level. The revelation was a reassuring piece of information not a cause for alarm like Ajami has tried to make it sound.
Let me now take up the subject of tourism and the contribution that the industry makes to the GDP of the country. I begin with this question: Do you believe that someone going through a leisurely day, spending all their time sightseeing and consuming food and drinks, can create 8 times as much economic activity as when they work to produce goods or services that other people would buy? If you answered no, you are on your way to understanding why it is that to say tourism represents 10% of Egypt's economy is to talk rubbish. To see this clearly, you only need simple mathematics and you will understand the example below where I use round figures to make things easy.
The number of foreign tourists who visited Egypt in the last full year before the revolution of 2011 was about 12 million tourists, each of which stayed an average of 10 days in the country. This comes to 120 million person/days which you divide by the 365 days of the year to find that on any given day, there were about 330,000 tourists staying in Egypt. Each day a batch of 33,000 new ones came into the country while 33,000 others left, having stayed in the country for 10 days. These people do sightseeing, eating, drinking and maybe shop for souvenirs also. If you say that these activities represent 10% of the country's economy, it means that 10 times as many tourists or 3.3 million of them being in the country at any time, would create as much economic activity as the entire workforce of Egypt which happens to number 27 million people.
What you do now is divide 27 million by 3.3 million to get the ratio 8, an important number. What it means is that a tourist doing nothing more than eat, drink and be merry creates as much economic activity as 8 working people who may be in the field producing food and cotton, or in the desert mining metals and minerals, or in the factories producing cars and home appliances, or in commercial buildings running a bank or running an insurance company -- and so on and so forth a few million times. Well, my friend, if there exists a place in this world where consumption creates 8 times as much economic activity as production, we should all go there and solve our economic problems once and for all. Alas, there is no place like this anywhere because this is only an optical illusion that was created by people who do not know what they are talking about.
In addition to that -- in case you haven't noticed -- I neglected to take into account the activities generated by the 84 million Egyptians who are the country's consumers. Along with the 330,000 tourists, they too eat, drink and shop for the goods and services produced by the 27 million in the workforce. In reality, therefore, we have here not one ratio but two of them. There is the ratio of 8 we know about, and there is the ratio of 25.5 which you obtain when you divide 84 million by 3.3 million. This means that one consuming tourist generates as much as 8 working people and 25.5 local consumers put together. And what all this adds up to is that we have here what looks like a paradox but really is not. In fact, this is only an apparent discrepancy that can easily be explained. However, this is something that will have to be done in another context at another time.
So then, if you are Fouad Ajami, what do you do after you've made miracles and created optical illusions rivaling the legendary Fantasy Island? Why, there is only one thing to do; you speculate about the gloomy times that promise to mar the future of Egypt. And here is how our esteemed author does it: “The way out of Egypt's impasse is a flawed electoral process … A staggered election … began … and despite expected fraud and intimidation...” By now you are just about ready to give up reading, waiting only for the coup de grace to come and finish off the adventure you started when you chose to read the article. But as surely as there is a Wall Street Journal willing to publish fantasy under the rubric of reality, Fouad Ajami obliges and delivers the coup de grace you have been waiting for.
And here is how he does that. He begins by telling you something that sounds important: “Revolutions always return to their moments and places of brilliance and clarity.” Oh what a nice surprise, you say to yourself, because you always wanted to know if there was something brilliant or clear about a revolution. But expecting him to redeem himself and to brighten your day, you find him saying this instead: “...the protesters returned to Tahrir Square, and in confrontations with the police, 40 people were killed and untold hundreds were wounded.” And this is where you let out a scream of horror that shakes the buildings all around you. And you follow the scream with this puzzled question: Did he just describe as brilliant and clear the death of 40 people and the wounding of hundreds of others? You give up. You don't know what to think anymore except that this man did not brighten your day. He did something else instead; something so horrifying it cannot be described with words.
From there, Ajami goes on to mention a few selected passages out of Egypt's modern history with the purpose of frightening the readers about a political party called the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is an idea that has generated a great deal of fuss in America; fuss that is fed with clichés and stereotypes, themselves concocted to maintain the relationship between Christianity and Islam in a state of perpetual agony. This is how the aim of the Jewish organizations are served, and this is how the ambition of their leaders are fulfilled.
What Fouad Ajami is doing is not interpret the Arab World to English audiences; what he does is enforce the distorted picture that those audiences have of the Arabs. Whether he does what he does deliberately or does it inadvertently is not important because if he didn't know it then, he knows it now and he is not changing.
Right after he accuses history of trickery, Ajami calls Egypt: “This ancient society” then talks about: “Egypt's peasant society” which prompts you to wonder if he believes Egypt has been a peasant society throughout its history -- the ancient part and the modern part of a very long history. If this is what he believes, I have news for him: It is generally accepted that even if the industrial age did not officially start until 250 years ago, the backbone of the Industrial Revolution was put in place nearly 5,000 years ago. This happened the moment that industrial production in the style of the assembly line was launched to manufacture the thousands upon thousands of blocks of granite that were assembled into pyramids – those that have been discovered already and those that are buried under the sand waiting to be discovered.
Ajami then goes on to say that Egypt: “...has been prone to violent upheavals. Order has often hung by a thread, as a proud people alternate between submission and rebellion … We are now in the midst of one of these alternations.” And he says this without giving a single example from the past to illustrate his point. But if you feel uneasy about the way that he came to this conclusion, you also feel intrigued enough by the premise of his thesis that you look forward to seeing it expanded. Sadly, however, he disappoints you when he fails to do so. In fact, instead of elucidating the point that could have merit, he relies on the warn out method of recycling old clichés and stereotypes; most of which are patently false, even libelous.
After that, he takes a few paragraphs to make it sound like Egypt's revolution is different from all the others in consequence of: “...a half-century of authoritarianism. The [current] lawlessness issue out of the lawlessness of the former regime. As crony capitalism had its way ... the officer corps, had to be given its share of the loot.” And this is where you despair because you see that not only he failed to elucidate ideas of his own, he is also borrowing a style of writing that aims to criticize Egypt for doing on a small scale the bad things that other countries do on a much larger scale. And this is an approach that has always been used by the propaganda machine in charge of attacking Egypt. In this instance, Ajami tries to convince the readers that crony capitalism is an Egyptian peculiarity, a system of economics that exists nowhere else.
Even with all this, and for a brief moment, you still want to forgive the man because you think that perhaps he is too busy watching the political developments in the Middle East to check on the economies of the other regions in the world where crony capitalism flourishes in places like the good old USA, the BRIC nations and many other places where their crony capitalism makes that of Egypt look like a socialist utopia. But Ajami surprises you by taking an entire paragraph to mention a few economic numbers that add to your puzzlement. More will be said about this in a moment but first, notice that he goes from that paragraph to the next where he says the following: “This is not the legacy of Tahrir Square but of the 1952 military coup … Nasser … Sadat … Mubarak had … secured obedience through a defective command economy riddled with cronyism.” And this is where he blows your mind. It is that you have a hard time trying to reconcile the idea of a crony command economy and a crony capitalism coexisting in one place at the same time.
We now look at the paragraph where he mentions those economic numbers. He says this: “...Egypt was living dangerously, running through its financial reserves at an alarming rate. Tourism, 10% of GDP, has ground to a halt ,,, the country has wheat reserves of around six months, and cooking oil, sugar and rice supplies that can only see the country through another three months.” Well, let me begin by discussing the matter of food reserves. First, Egypt is an exporter of rice, so I fail to see why it is on this list at all. Second, no country in the world is self sufficient in everything, and neither is Egypt. While the country exports rice, fruits, vegetables, seafood, spices, cut flowers and cotton, it only produces 60% to 80% of the wheat, cooking oil and sugar it consumes, and thus needs to import the balance of these staples.
The record also shows that during some years, Egypt bought more food than it sold; and there were years when it sold more than it bought. In general, however, the country has scored a trade surplus year after year, and this is how it was able to build up a reserve of foreign currencies. The purpose of having such reserves in Egypt and elsewhere is to use them when the country is hit with unexpected hard times, and having a revolution certainly qualifies as being hard times. This is why the country's currency reserves were seen to diminish for a while before they stabilized. In fact, nothing of what happened here is spectacularly out of the ordinary except for what goes on inside the head of the people who wish it was otherwise -- whatever their motives may be.
And like everyone else, Egypt has silos and warehouses where agricultural products are stored. These places are closely monitored; and a report is issued on a monthly basis indicating how much of what they hold is left in them, how much of it is on order from local suppliers and from abroad, how much is on ships sailing toward the country and on ships at the harbor being unloaded. And there is here a point that everyone who writes about economic matters needs to know even if they only write about them in passing. It is this: To have reserves of a commodity for 3 months is ample; to have reserves for 6 months is huge. In fact, this was the first time that Egypt's reserve in wheat had reached the 6 months level. The revelation was a reassuring piece of information not a cause for alarm like Ajami has tried to make it sound.
Let me now take up the subject of tourism and the contribution that the industry makes to the GDP of the country. I begin with this question: Do you believe that someone going through a leisurely day, spending all their time sightseeing and consuming food and drinks, can create 8 times as much economic activity as when they work to produce goods or services that other people would buy? If you answered no, you are on your way to understanding why it is that to say tourism represents 10% of Egypt's economy is to talk rubbish. To see this clearly, you only need simple mathematics and you will understand the example below where I use round figures to make things easy.
The number of foreign tourists who visited Egypt in the last full year before the revolution of 2011 was about 12 million tourists, each of which stayed an average of 10 days in the country. This comes to 120 million person/days which you divide by the 365 days of the year to find that on any given day, there were about 330,000 tourists staying in Egypt. Each day a batch of 33,000 new ones came into the country while 33,000 others left, having stayed in the country for 10 days. These people do sightseeing, eating, drinking and maybe shop for souvenirs also. If you say that these activities represent 10% of the country's economy, it means that 10 times as many tourists or 3.3 million of them being in the country at any time, would create as much economic activity as the entire workforce of Egypt which happens to number 27 million people.
What you do now is divide 27 million by 3.3 million to get the ratio 8, an important number. What it means is that a tourist doing nothing more than eat, drink and be merry creates as much economic activity as 8 working people who may be in the field producing food and cotton, or in the desert mining metals and minerals, or in the factories producing cars and home appliances, or in commercial buildings running a bank or running an insurance company -- and so on and so forth a few million times. Well, my friend, if there exists a place in this world where consumption creates 8 times as much economic activity as production, we should all go there and solve our economic problems once and for all. Alas, there is no place like this anywhere because this is only an optical illusion that was created by people who do not know what they are talking about.
In addition to that -- in case you haven't noticed -- I neglected to take into account the activities generated by the 84 million Egyptians who are the country's consumers. Along with the 330,000 tourists, they too eat, drink and shop for the goods and services produced by the 27 million in the workforce. In reality, therefore, we have here not one ratio but two of them. There is the ratio of 8 we know about, and there is the ratio of 25.5 which you obtain when you divide 84 million by 3.3 million. This means that one consuming tourist generates as much as 8 working people and 25.5 local consumers put together. And what all this adds up to is that we have here what looks like a paradox but really is not. In fact, this is only an apparent discrepancy that can easily be explained. However, this is something that will have to be done in another context at another time.
So then, if you are Fouad Ajami, what do you do after you've made miracles and created optical illusions rivaling the legendary Fantasy Island? Why, there is only one thing to do; you speculate about the gloomy times that promise to mar the future of Egypt. And here is how our esteemed author does it: “The way out of Egypt's impasse is a flawed electoral process … A staggered election … began … and despite expected fraud and intimidation...” By now you are just about ready to give up reading, waiting only for the coup de grace to come and finish off the adventure you started when you chose to read the article. But as surely as there is a Wall Street Journal willing to publish fantasy under the rubric of reality, Fouad Ajami obliges and delivers the coup de grace you have been waiting for.
And here is how he does that. He begins by telling you something that sounds important: “Revolutions always return to their moments and places of brilliance and clarity.” Oh what a nice surprise, you say to yourself, because you always wanted to know if there was something brilliant or clear about a revolution. But expecting him to redeem himself and to brighten your day, you find him saying this instead: “...the protesters returned to Tahrir Square, and in confrontations with the police, 40 people were killed and untold hundreds were wounded.” And this is where you let out a scream of horror that shakes the buildings all around you. And you follow the scream with this puzzled question: Did he just describe as brilliant and clear the death of 40 people and the wounding of hundreds of others? You give up. You don't know what to think anymore except that this man did not brighten your day. He did something else instead; something so horrifying it cannot be described with words.
From there, Ajami goes on to mention a few selected passages out of Egypt's modern history with the purpose of frightening the readers about a political party called the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is an idea that has generated a great deal of fuss in America; fuss that is fed with clichés and stereotypes, themselves concocted to maintain the relationship between Christianity and Islam in a state of perpetual agony. This is how the aim of the Jewish organizations are served, and this is how the ambition of their leaders are fulfilled.
What Fouad Ajami is doing is not interpret the Arab World to English audiences; what he does is enforce the distorted picture that those audiences have of the Arabs. Whether he does what he does deliberately or does it inadvertently is not important because if he didn't know it then, he knows it now and he is not changing.
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