lupercal wrote:Inequality In America Is Worse Than In Egypt, Tunisia Or Yemen...And inequality in the U.S. has soared in the last couple of years, since the Gini Coefficient was last calculated, so it is undoubtedly currently much higher.
So why are Egyptians rioting, while the Americans are complacent?http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2011/01/ ... an-in.html.........................................
Yes, so why
are Egyptians rioting? Maybe because they're paid to, like this little feller?
Freedom (for banksters, bombsters and BP) is on the march!
Can you actually answer the question? What would a genuinely democratic movement look like? What would a genuine world-historical moment look like?
To attempt to deal with this seriously, you're full of self-important condescension: you imply that the only way to take a world-historical political movement in the ex-colonized world seriously is to see an exactly identical contemporaneous movement in the US (and presumably Israel and the UK, homes of your other bete noires).
To start, China, Brazil and Mexico all have greater income disparity than the US. Mexico and Brazil are facing ongoing structural political turmoil as the drug industry fills the gaps the legitimate state and economy fail to address, see, e.g., the recent campaigns in the faevelas. I think the simple fact that you can describe armed gov't action on its own streets as a campaign should indicate something. In China, union protests have been massive and ongoing as well as suppressed violently but largely quietly--the CCP doesn't want to admit it serves bourgeois interests and the anglosphere press refuses to acknowledge that workers have rights, and prefered to focus on the much smaller Falun Gong crap, which has fallen by the wayside.
on edit, cross-posted: China blocks "Egypt" from all search engines under its auspices, according to Falun Gong's
Epoch Times.
So suggesting that b/c the US isn't in turmoil despite greater inequality doesn't work--because in nations with even greater inequality, there is substantial upheaval.
Likewise maybe you didn't realize it, but there's protests outside the UN building, you know, in New York, and the Egyptian embassy in DC. You know, like, in America.
And you seem a little ignorant on the issue of banking:
SUBJECT: SENATOR LIEBERMAN’S FEBRUARY 17 MEETING WITH GAMAL MUBARAK
...Gamal, a former international banker, opined that the U.S. needed to “shock” its financial system back to health, and said that Egypt -- which had so far escaped much of the pain of the global economic crisis -- was preparing to face tough economic times ahead. The Ambassador, Senator Lieberman’s foreign policy adviser, and the ECPO MinCouns as note taker were also present. End summary.
http://213.251.145.96/cable/2009/02/09CAIRO326.htmlGee, I wonder if "shock" means higher interest rates, drastically cut spending and raised taxes, you know, deflationary policy to assuage bondholders. The CIA must have put that there!
