Push Comes to Shove - Tehrir on Wall Street

Yes…I know I have not posted in a long while.  Two things have blocked my way – the first of which is arriving at a new post in Central Asia (otherwise known as the 12^th Century) and the second – there is simply too much going on.  And, yes – I intend to continue with the view and post that we are now part of a multi-polar, pre-1945 world.

Then there is the Occupy Wall Street movement which took a cue from Europe and has gone viral world-wide.  It is a good sign, but I would suggest that the inspiration is drawn from the frustration and anger that resulted in the Arab Spring which began in Tunis and quickly spread to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and Libya.  In other words, almost every country in the Arab world with a long history of the elite taking and everyone else giving.

The results have been dramatic, if not the least from a foreign policy point of view.  The street demonstrations have altered the political dynamics in the Middle East with a ripple effect stretching from Moscow to Washington.  Ankara is aggressively pursuing what it rightly sees as a huge opening to extend its influence and project its soft (and perhaps hard) power.  Washington is learning that the regional governments are not so quick to follow its lead and Moscow and Beijing simply don’t want this sort of thing spreading – hence their veto of sanctions against Syria.  But now, many of the same dynamics that sparked the revolts against the establishment in the Middle East have ended up on Wall Street.  Good.

Unlike the tea party clique which is funded and supported by industrialists, banksters and the right wing noise machine in the US, the OWS movement is founded on middle class frustration and anger at those who game the system, refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, expect taxpayer funding to save them from their own gross mistakes and in general suck the country dry creating an ever widening gap between the wealthy and everyone else.   The movement reflects the frustration of ordinary citizens in Europe who despise the IMF and its policy of beggaring the general population with the only solution to the Eurozone crisis it has in its bag of tricks – cuts in spending (a sublimely idiotic way of addressing a low growth problem).  The bureaucracy in Brussels has not come up with a single plan that does not hurt the ordinary person on the street.

The status quo of government run by the banks, Wall Street traders, and industrialists like the Koch brothers is no longer functioning. It is debilitating Europe and America, leaving the playing field to others, China in particular, to do as they please both economically and politically.

Back in my law school days, the son of my professor in real estate law wrote (perhaps self-published) a book titled “When Push comes to Shove”.  It was largely devoted to the then disaster known as Vietnam but targeted those elites who got the US mired into that particular civil war and concluded that those elites weren’t listening.  Some severe shoving was in order.  That has and is happening in the Middle East.  In the US it may only be beginning, but one can only hope that the movement becomes strong enough to topple the old order – one way or another.  Push comes to Shove.

Libya - No more headlines

Muhammar Qaddafi is encircled and under siege in Sirte and is now calling for one of the always possible scenarios to be implemented – guerilla war.    Effecting this scenario may well be problematic as it is unlikely he will escape the coming assault on Sirte.  The regime is dead – an internal revolution succeeded but only with the help of foreign intervention.  That’s important to remember, because otherwise this would have been a long and likely losing struggle.  Qadaffi has been in control for over 40 years and didn’t keep his power by being stupid or reluctance to do whatever was necessary to retain power.

Now that the fighting has narrowed to small pockets of resistance by Qaddafi loyalists, questions can be raised that have previously been dismissed.

Consider this.

Libya has nearly 45 billion barrels of oil reserves, 3.4 percent of the world’s known supply. Natural gas reserves are estimated at near 55 trillion cubic feet.

Most of Libya’s oil exports went to Italy – 32 percent of foreign sales as of 2009. The majority of the rest went to Germany, France, Spain and China (no veto of the no-fly zone imposition).

All existing contract will remain active, begging the question of the extent of modifications.  Who will get the new exploration and extraction licenses? ENI (Italy) or Total (France).

Will the existing contracts be modified from their current 90/10 revenue split between Libya and the companies? Tipping the balance is expensive.

How is it that a listed terrorist organization gets to be a freedom fighter group and whose head commands the Tripoli Military Council?  Change of name – change of status.

The Arab Spring, of which Libya was made a part, has been astonishingly lucrative. For weapons sales.

In the five months ending in June, the UK sold arms to Arab governments amounting to 30.5 million sterling, according the The Times – a 30% increase.  Germany, that bastion of peace which refused to take part in the naval blockade of Libya, nevertheless inked a contract with the Saudi’s (whose military crushed the Bahrain demonstrations by Shiites) for a division’s worth of high end tanks tagged at 1.5 billion euro only to be heavily trumped by the US - $60 billion of aircraft to Saudi Arabia over a 20 year period. This is only in the Arab Spring period – care to guess about the past ten years?

There is nothing wrong with disposing of people like Qadaffi and I support it.  But the media, as usual, has played the useful idiot and parrots the talking points of the protagonists while studiously avoiding the hypocrisy.  This is not a judgment.  It is important to make sure that events are not seen in isolation from other, important factors nor should decisions to act or not be viewed in black and white even if the short attention span or relative ignorance of populations demand simplistic analysis.