How far from Mu*barak to Barack?

Saturday, February 12, 2011 at 12:02PM
Skeptic in Middle Class, Politics

After 18 days of massive street demonstrations, yesterday Egyptian president Mubarak abdicated and left the military in charge. Political power has long been highly concentrated in the hands of Egyptian elites, and the young, middle class, and working class demonstrators used the only political tools apparently available to them. Meanwhile, elites in America are consolidating their political power with their economic power, leaving non-elite Americans more and more impotent to make government respond to popular will. As just one example, here's somthing 86% of Americans agree on but our elites are blocking.

Bob Herbert raises the question whether non-elite Americans now have, or soon will have, only Egyptian-type remedies. If so, I doubt that Americans, who are accustomed to thinking they are entitled to effective popular control over their governments and who took to the streets in the Great Depression and during the 1960s, will wait as long as the Egyptians did. Maybe the widespread extreme rhetoric we decry as "uncivil" and harmful to the political process accurately reflects increasing acceptance of extreme ideas. 

From Herbert's op ed:

As the throngs celebrated in Cairo, I couldn't help wondering about what is happening to democracy here in the United States. I think it's on the ropes. We're in serious danger of becoming a democracy in name only.

While millions of ordinary Americans are struggling with unemployment and declining standards of living, the levers of real power have been all but completely commandeered by the financial and corporate elite. It doesn't really matter what ordinary people want. The wealthy call the tune, and the politicians dance.

. . . .

In an Op-Ed article in The Times at the end of January, Senator John Kerry said that the Egyptian people "have made clear they will settle for nothing less than greater democracy and more economic opportunities." Americans are being asked to swallow exactly the opposite. In the mad rush to privatization over the past few decades, democracy itself was put up for sale, and the rich were the only ones who could afford it.

. . . .

As Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson wrote in their book, "Winner-Take-All Politics": "Step by step and debate by debate, America's public officials have rewritten the rules of American politics and the American economy in ways that have benefited the few at the expense of the many."

. . . .

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that's a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. "If there is going to be change," he said, "real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves."

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* "The word "mu" is actually from Chinese, meaning "nothing"; it is used in mainstream Japanese in that sense."

Article originally appeared on realitybase (http://www.realitybase.org/).