All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our last guest on the show today is Carl Finnemore.
He's a machinist, local lodge, 1781 delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, AFL-CIO, and he apparently knows his way around Egyptian politics really well.
He's got this piece at counterpunch.org, military orchestrates Egypt's presidential elections.
As always, America's counter-revolution to the Arab Spring plays a part in this.
There's a hell of a lot more going on than that as well.
Welcome to the show, Carl.
How are you doing?
Good, good.
Thank you.
Let me mention too, Carl's website is carlfinnemore.wordpress.com.carlfinnemore.wordpress.com.
All right.
And so I guess, first of all, you make a very important point kind of right off the bat here that the military of Egypt is, well, it's one hell of a standing army and it controls a huge proportion of the Egyptian economy and so therefore it has a lot more weight than might come across in news reports or something like that, like it's just the military.
It's really kind of everything like the PLA in China, something like that.
Can you describe for us the extent to which, or maybe, you know, give us some examples, that kind of thing, how exactly that works?
Well, it's called the militarization of the economy, popularly known in Egypt.
And, and what it really means is that the Egyptian military, much like Caesar used to give land to his retired generals in Gaul or some other conquered area, that's what happens in Egypt.
Upon their retirement or early discharge, they are given chunks of the economy and all these are state secrets.
They've never, ever been revealed publicly by, and they not, neither will they be revealed publicly through parliament or whoever is elected president.
The army has made that absolutely clear.
But there's been media investigations and academic investigations, Carnegie Institute, Cairo University, and various consulates and the figures that are bandied about is that the military owns anywhere from 15% to a whopping 30% of the Egyptian economy of $183 billion a year GNP.
Now the army is already the largest in the Arab world, about a half a million, just shy of that active duty.
And then another half a million on reserve mandatory service in Egypt for everyone under 30.
But this just lends it even more power and stake in what happens in that country.
And that's why I say that nothing will happen in that country without the military being in control.
And they might be backstage where they were with Mubarak and they prefer to be backstage.
They don't like the spotlight on them, but they are never going to relinquish their control.
When you have a revolution in Egypt, you will know it because those factories will be taken from the military and the economy returned to the people.
Yeah.
Well, as if they ever really owned it, right?
Yeah.
They just took it.
And that they were in competition with Mubarak's son.
There's a little competition there between the corrupt entities.
Who was more corrupt?
The army, the military or Mubarak's son?
Well, now, yeah, they talked a couple of years ago about trying to groom him to be the replacement, but that pretty obviously was a lead balloon, right?
Yeah.
Well, the army didn't like Gamal.
He was so corrupt.
He was being groomed by Mubarak and Mubarak gave the army more power, more influence, more factories, more land to try to buy them off to support his son.
In the meantime, his son was accumulating more property, denationalizing it, and then left over from the Nasser period, denationalizing a lot of the land, a lot of the factories, and then selling it to his European partners at far below market rate.
And that jeopardized, in the long run, from the army's point of view, their property.
They didn't want to see it be sold to Europeans.
They wanted to hold on to it.
And they were always fearful that Gamal was so thirsty for power that he would encroach on their share of the economy.
So they didn't really feel bad about getting rid of Mubarak or Gamal when the time came.
Well, now, so, okay, the people and their different factions and different parties, they're trying to have their influence.
It's been, what, a year and a half, really?
Almost since the fall of Mubarak, they've had their parliamentary elections.
They're working now on choosing their president.
And I guess, you know, I could definitely see the point that it's just, you know, shiny on the surface when McClatchy Newspapers, for example, is saying, wow, the outcome of this Egyptian presidential election is actually uncertain.
This is not some bogus Mubarak or Saddam Hussein-like pretended election, like the one Hillary Clinton just threw in Yemen, for example, where only one guy's on the ballot.
This is actually a real thing here.
You're saying, well, yeah, but so what?
Because they're not the ones with the power.
But I guess my real question is, does this even really count as much progress or is this just so much window dressing?
Maybe a bit of a pressure valve let off, but all other things stay the same.
Well, things will essentially stay the same, except after Mubarak left, there has been tremendous democratic opening where people can speak their mind more freely.
They can engage in political dialogue and discussion and organization more freely than ever before.
But the parties that are funded and have come to the surface and who are legalized, really the major ones, the top four that are contending for this, a couple of leftovers from Mubarak and then a couple of Islamist candidates are among those four.
They really will enact no change.
And meanwhile, though, the workers movement, which is conducting hundreds and hundreds of strikes every year, substantial victories are being won at the factories, at the government workers, transport workers, bus drivers, airport workers, Suez Canal workers, just hundreds of strikes are taking place.
And they're being victorious to a large degree because the people have more power where they work, where they have less power is on the national stage, where the army and the well-funded four or five top political parties that have been recently reformed and funded by the old elite, they have more power on the national political stage.
So the real power in Egypt, the youth, which are 60 percent of the population is under 30 years of age.
They're 85 percent of the unemployed.
They led the revolution with the workers.
Workers led the largest general strike in Egyptian history four days before Mubarak was pushed out.
That's what really led him to just the army to just say, we got to get rid of this guy.
And the cops, the secret police started tearing off their uniforms and disappearing when Egypt was just essentially shut down.
Well, that strike wave has continued here and there, different places, and they've won games, but they're not organized, as I said, just to repeat, on a national stage.
So it's not going to be reflected in this election.
So to answer your question, there have been democratic changes that are enormously important, but that has not been reflected in this election.
Those games are not reflected in who are the major contenders in this election.
Strikers are still harassed, jailed, sometimes killed.
Independent trade unions are not constitutionally legal yet.
And so and the youth are harassed when they demonstrate, too.
But there's more space, there's more space.
All right, well, when we get back from this break, we'll be talking more with Carl Thinamore from counterpunch.org about America's role in this and the state of Egyptian politics at the beginning of the summer 2012.
Hang tight.
All right, welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Carl Thinamore about politics over there in Egypt during this presidential election.
When is it anyway?
Tomorrow?
The next day?
It's happening today and tomorrow and then there'll be a runoff if likely no one wins 50 percent in June, late June, June 21st, there'll be the final runoff.
And then the military says it'll hand over power, which is just a formality, as I say, real power will remain with the military.
Right, yeah, like when Paul Bremer turned over sovereignty to all the way back in 2004.
Remember that?
Right, right.
The United States isn't getting, you know, the United States is very flexible, the State Department.
They'll work with anybody, Mubarak, anybody, as long as things stay the same.
Well, you know what?
Can you tell me or do you know who can tell me what is the CIA's relationship, the State Department's relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood at this point?
Because, of course, they're old friends going back to the days when the British handed them off to us, you know, like in Robert Dreyfuss's book, Devil's Game.
Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is...
But it's been a while, so I don't know, like, you know, whether they're still all getting along great or what?
Yeah, they're 84 years old.
They've had a mixed history with the powers that be.
They've been imprisoned at times.
And then, for instance, Sadat, beginning in 1970, released the Muslim Brotherhood so that he would attack the leftists and the Nasserites, which began the denationalization campaign to introduce neoliberal economic policies, which privatized most of Egypt.
He used the Muslim Brotherhood and masked the attacks on the secularists, the leftists, the socialists, the trade unionists, Nasserites.
He used religion.
And he famously said in 1980, Sadat, President Sadat, he said, I am a Muslim president in a Muslim country, and changed the identity of the Egyptian people from an Arab identity, a pan-Arab identity, a very nationalist identity, where everyone, you know, Coptics, everybody would be together, Christians, Muslims, atheists, secularists, to a Muslim identity.
And that was very destructive.
So the Muslim Brotherhood was used for that.
Then they were imprisoned again.
Now they've been used again.
When Mubarak fell, all their exiles were invited back, and a partnership was made because they were the only mass-based organization that had any credibility to support the military after Mubarak.
All the other institutions, Mubarak's party was outlawed, his trade union was in disarray, the parliament was dissolved, the constitution suspended, the police had run away, national security forces were disappeared.
There was nothing left.
So the Muslim Brotherhood was strategic right after Mubarak fell, when they gave their support to the military against the protesters, and the State Department met with them openly in Washington, D.C., at that time.
However, when John Kerry just came to Cairo a couple of weeks ago, he only met with one presidential candidate, and that was Amir Moussa, who is the State Department's latest presidential favorite, most people believe.
He's the ex-Arab League, 76-year-old ex-Arab League head, and also former foreign minister, so he's got a lot of credentials that'll lend stability to the situation.
They're trying to get rid of...
They're not leaning on the Muslim Brotherhood as much as they were.
They're going towards more classical, elite politicians to lean on.
Well, you know, I don't know how closely they may be working with them, but they sure seem to be on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria right now, for example.
Oh, well, you know, they use religion throughout the region.
I mean, most particularly, you can look at in Saudi Arabia, which gives money, gives millions of dollars a year to the Egyptian Brotherhood.
And they just lean on religion.
As I said, Sadat did, where he leaned on the faith, the Muslim faith, in order to introduce policies, his own economic imperial-type policies of selling off Egypt's land to the highest bidder and properties.
And the Muslim Brotherhood has a couple of candidates in this race, and they're all free market, you know, neoliberal.
Well, you know, it did seem like, and I could be wrong about this, but, you know, when this all happened in the first place, they were so clumsy about it, they just pretty much put it right on the front page of The New York Times that, well, I guess since we can't keep Mubarak, we would rather, we're going to go ahead and go with our number two choice is Omar Suleiman, the head of the secret torture police, and we'll have him be our guy.
And then he announced he was running for president a few weeks ago, but he was on the list of the banned.
And I wondered whether that was, did you think that was the military pushing back against American influence a bit there, or am I reading into that wrong?
Well, there's a couple of ways to look at that.
There have been about a half a dozen candidates from the old regime that have been banned.
And what that was is there's a, the military authorities put through, because of mass popular pressure, a rule that said you couldn't run for president if you were part of Mubarak's regime cabinet for, I think, the last 10 years.
So Suleiman and other people were dismissed because of that.
But there is one candidate on the ballot who might win, who was the prime minister of Mubarak.
And somehow he evaded that.
He's getting lots of support, Shatik.
He's one of the top four contenders.
So some people think that what happened was that the army floated these candidates, put them out there.
Obviously, they had blood on their hands.
They were stained with corruption.
They floated those candidates and then withdrew them, you know, as a ruse in order to introduce some more milder versions of the same type of candidate, which is what you've got now.
You've got, you know, Mubarak regime holdovers that have been photoshopped, cleaned up.
The next mustache in line, that's Greg Palastal.
You know, they give him a little facelift.
They're not as notorious as Suleiman, but they're of the same type, same brand.
But, you know, the military, you know, it's so wealthy, there's so much money.
It just gave a billion dollars to the budget.
Now, what army in the world can just hand over a check for a billion dollars to the budget?
And that's why they're the ones just keeping the treasury.
That's funny.
The U.S. gives one point three billion.
That's really peanuts to them.
What they share in common with the U.S. is they know the U.S. will back their regime against any any revolution.
Yeah.
And that's what the Saudi princes know, too.
That's you keep the oil flowing, we'll keep you in power.
That's why they gave the Saudi regime the green light to go into Bahrain right after Egypt, after saying, oh, we support the Egyptian revolution.
They gave the green light.
And yet what interest do we have in Egypt?
Because they don't even have much oil if they have any at all.
It's only what's America's interest in Egypt other than bribing them to pretend to not hate Israel.
Right.
Well, Egypt is the largest country in the Arab world with one hundred and eighty million, and it's the cultural center and the political center.
So and plus, it's right there by the Suez Canal and strategically linked to what goes on in Israel.
And of course, Israel can always be counted on to do whatever the State Department wants, sometimes more than what the State Department wants.
I mean, it's the barking dog of the U.S. interest in the Middle East.
And there's a lot of clamor in Egypt to break with that on the street level.
People are horrified by the fact Palestinians have lived in these refugee camps since 1948, the longest refugees the world has ever known.
So, yeah, by the way, how big of an issue is Gaza in this election?
Is it one at all?
No, they every single candidate has skirted the issue and said it has to be reevaluated without compromising the Camp David Accords.
Right.
No one will seem to be very frustrated by that.
Or is it not really that big of an issue this time?
It's it's this issue is under the surface.
Young people, students are very concerned about it.
But the economy is such an overriding issue.
Right.
And I wanted to ask you this, too.
Is it the depreciation of the currency is that what's going on is that they they're used to living on a dollar a day, but now it only buys 50 cents, that kind of thing?
Well, it's just that actually the candidates are announcing 50 percent of the people live below the poverty line, used to be 40 percent of two dollars a day.
And it's it's just that the way the differentiation of wealth, the things that people are accustomed to in this country with the Occupy movement that have raised the same issues, same issues there.
There's no trade union rights to speak of.
The minimum wage has just been raised because one of the top labor lawyers went to court, wasn't done by Parliament.
Parliament did nothing since November on any reform.
But a court suit raised the minimum wage to one hundred and fifteen dollars a month.
As that was like thirty five dollars a month, it used to be for twenty nine years under Mubarak, it was thirty five dollars a month and it didn't even apply to private sector workers.
It was only government workers now, at least that applies to everybody except the tens of millions of the, you know, people who are vendors.
You know, when you go to these poor countries, you see street vendors.
Well, that's what is throughout the Middle East.
And those are the discouraged people who live on two dollars a day and the minimum wage doesn't apply to them at all.
So they're very discouraged.
Well, it was said at least at the time of the beginning of the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt, back in the beginning of last year, that they had to depreciate their currency and that really it was the American central bank's fault.
They had had to inflate the American currency in order to pay for the terror war, particularly the Iraq war, which cost, you know, between three and five trillion dollars.
They couldn't just raise taxes for that.
They had to basically, you know, print money to buy the debt in order to finance the thing.
And so then all the other countries in the world, Tunisia and Egypt included, they have to kind of match that inflation rate in order to keep the trade balance is the same, that kind of thing.
And when you have so many people who live on the margin as it is, you push them right off with a policy like that, which at least, you know, the way I understood it made this all part of the consequence of taking advantage of September 11th and going and having this worldwide war against a feeling instead of a very limited war against al Qaeda, et cetera, et cetera.
Right.
Well, those factors, I'm sure, are in play.
I do know that the tax structure that they charge foreign investors and the one percent of Egypt is similar to what is charged here, very low.
And the budget suffers from that and suffers also from the fact that, as I explained, that the property in Egypt is being sold off to the highest bidder.
And including a bunch of foreigners.
Yeah.
And under market value, because then the Mubarak family or whoever was doing it at the time would get bribes, obviously, under the table.
So all that has meant that the people and then there's contract labor.
There's no real worker rights.
There's no law establishing worker rights yet.
Whatever the workers have won, the minimum wage and other things that then because they've struck and shut down their individual factory and they won't go back to work unless you pay them.
But it hasn't been generalized nationally.
It hasn't been legalized nationally.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that's been proven true, though, is that the people in Tahrir Square, Tahrir Square, they've shown that they have understood really from the beginning that this is going to be a long, hard slog.
That it was not a matter of just getting rid of Mubarak, but a matter of, you know, overthrowing their whole government system, starting with him, which is, hey, that was a great start.
You got to admit, you know, getting rid of him.
But they know that there's an uphill battle and they don't seem to be given up at all and, you know, seem to be waging this fight on a great many fronts.
As you said, they've had to I don't know if they really got rid of the emergency law, but they've had to vastly scale back its implementation.
People actually have something approaching freedom of speech and political discussion in the society, something that was unthinkable just a couple of years ago.
Right.
That's a very good point.
And that's the point your listeners should understand.
With all the difficulties I'm describing, the youth, the 60 percent of the population that's under 30 years of age, 85 percent unemployed, as I said, they have not been defeated.
They have not been crushed.
They've been set back.
They've been targeted for repression.
And the same is true of workers who are now forming independent unions of two million.
They're still not organized on the national stages very well, as I described.
But neither of them, the workers.
Or the students, which comprise the overwhelming majority of the population, have been defeated, they still are in the battle and they're overwhelmed.
Organizationally, by greater power.
And but they are still at the street level taking the, you know, step by step for a longer course battle, as you've described.
But I should say one other thing on that.
They do recognize that probably a great bulk of the population is exhausted.
You can't just keep protesting, having police repression against you constantly.
It exhausts the population when they're overwhelmed by the economy, you know, plunging further downward.
So that's why ordinary people we know from our own experience here and struggle.
Ordinary people want peace.
They want tranquility.
They want an easy fix.
And that's why they're rushing to the polls today and tomorrow for an easy fix solution.
Elect somebody who will make all the problems go away.
And that's naive, but it's understandable.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we'll see, you know, how quickly their illusions are shattered and they get back to work.
You know, we've seen here sometimes it can be real hard to get people to admit they fell for it.
But yeah, we got our own election problems, you know.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Nothing much changes.
Well, there's you know, I'm Italian and my family had me read a book about Garibaldi and one of the princes who joined Garibaldi had to counsel his peers.
He said, hey, we should all join Garibaldi.
They go, why?
It's against our class interest for princes to join Garibaldi unifying Italy.
And he said, if you want things to stay the same, everything must change.
And I always thought that was very profound, you know, and that's what is happening with the military.
They'll be willing and the U.S. will be willing to change everything post Mubarak.
They'll change it.
But it's cosmetic.
It's in order so that everything really stays the same.
But it fools people.
These cosmetic democratizing the post Mubarak world with a thin gloss that paints over the real underlying power structure that has remained in power.
And the youth and the workers understand that.
Yep.
All right.
Well, I already kept away over time.
I better let you go.
But I want to thank you again very much for your time on the show today, Carl.
It's been great.
OK, Scott.
All right.
That is Carl Finnemore.
He is a machinist, local law of 1781 delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council, the AFL-CIO.
And he has written this great article at counterpunch.org.
Military orchestrates Egypt's presidential elections.
That's it for the show.
Thanks for listening.
Everybody see you tomorrow.
