The Shock Doctrine Comes to Egypt
by David Atkins
The powers that be don't really care whom they do business with: fascist dictators, revolutionaries, Islamists, it doesn't matter. What matters is that nations pry open the riches of their people to be sold to the highest corporate bidder while their citizens work for the lowest possible wages.
It's already happening in Egypt, where Morsi and his merry band of conservative religious radicals are implementing shock doctrine "free market" reforms:
Hamdeen Sabahi was the most popular leader in the fight against Egypt’s new Islamist-backed constitution. Now he is preparing for his next battle: against Islamist leaders’ plans for Western-style free-market reforms.
Do not listen to your allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Sabahi said he warned President Mohamed Morsi, of the Brotherhood’s political arm, in a private meeting a few weeks ago. “Because the Brotherhood’s economic and social thought is the same as Mubarak’s: the law of the markets,” Mr. Sabahi said he had told Mr. Morsi, referring to Hosni Mubarak, the former president. “You will just make the poor poorer, and they will be angry with you just as they were with Mubarak.”
Mr. Sabahi, 58, a leftist in the style of another former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, frightens most economists. He is an outspoken opponent of free-market economic moves in general as well as of a pending $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund that economists say is urgently needed to avert a catastrophic currency collapse.
The IMF has been used a tool of pure evil for the last forty years in destroying the economies of developing nations to benefit the corporate elite, and there's no reason to believe that the IMF's offer to Egypt is any different.
In the end Morsi will get support from the international community just as Yeltsin did and countless other corrupt "free market" reformers before him. These people don't much care if they deal with the left or the right, dictators or liberators, so long as they get the only thing that matters to them.
Just skip to the 8-minute mark of this James Bond clip and that'll give you a good idea of how the IMF and their friends deal with supposedly sovereign national governments and their leaders (the entire plot of Quantum of Solace having been beautifully based on Naomi Klein's work):
.
.