Trajan
conscientia mille testes
Agree or Not?How much more Wall Street are you prepared to swallow, Bitch?
"Why has the Egyptian state lost its legitimacy?
"Max Weber distinguished between power and authority. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, and the Egyptian state still has plenty of those.
"But Weber defines authority as the likelihood that a command will be obeyed.
"Leaders who have authority do not have to shoot people. The Mubarak regime has had to shoot over 100 people in the past few days, and wound more.
"Literally hundreds of thousands of people have ignored Mubarak’s command that they observe night time curfews.
"He has lost his authority."
So have you.
Informed Comment
Cole....for god sakes....
"From 1970, Anwar El Sadat took Egyptian in a new direction, opening up the economy and openly siding with the new multi-millionaire contracting class. It in turn was eager for European and American investment.
"Tired of the fruitless Arab-Israeli wars, the Egyptian public was largely supportive of Sadat’s 1978 peace deal with Israel, which ended the cycle of wars with that country and opened the way for the building up of the Egyptian tourist industy and Western investment in it, as well as American and European aid.
"Egypt was moving to the Right.
"But whereas Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970, from 1970 to 2000 there was no real development in the country.
"Part of the problem was demographic. If the population grows 3 percent a year and the economy grows 3 percent a year, the per capita increase is zero.
"Since about 1850, Egypt and most other Middle Eastern countries have been having a (mysterious) population boom.
"The ever-increasing population also increasingly crowded into the cities, which typically offer high wages than rural work does, even in the marginal economy (e.g. selling matches). Nearly half the country now lives in cities, and even many villages have become ‘suburbs’ of vast metropolises."
Is there something you know about Egypt that Juan Cole doesn't?
Informed Comment
"But whereas Abdel Nasser’s socialist policies had led to a doubling of the average real wage in Egypt 1960-1970,
please george, Chavez attempted do and got partly there by performing the same socialist policies, and where is he now? Sadat was never the big western savior they make of him either.
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