Sunday, January 22: Egypt's Financial Woes
In lieu of a top story that’s time-sensitive, here’s a really great in-depth read on why Egypt is financially cruising for a bruising. In the past three months, the Egyptian pound has taken a beating, foreign currency is increasingly unavailable for importers and the cost of living is jumping. Barring a revolution and change in regime, Egypt is facing bankruptcy and a failure of the state’s ability to provide basic services for its citizens.
It’s hard to be surprised given the way the Sisi regime has governed. This is what happens when every avenue of financial opportunity in a country runs through the military. Today the military operates and often dominates every sector of Egyptian economic life, including the media, entertainment, food, hospitality, construction and any other conceivable avenue of making money. The result is that there is no private sector to speak of. The only competition is with the government, and that’s no competition at all.
Meanwhile, the military has focused their efforts and energies on a combination of violent civilian repression and gargantuan mega-projects with no discernible impact on economic growth. For example the new “Administrative Capital City”, rising pointlessly in the desert, has siphoned $55 billion from the economy. A needless expansion of the Suez Canal took another $9 billion with hardly an increase in revenues. Third and most importantly, an estimated $45 billion went into weapons purchasing, without any obvious geopolitical risk or need. From 2015-2019, Egypt - a country heavily in debt with significant poverty – became the third-largest arms importer in the world. Contrarily, spending on essential sectors like health and education is consistently below even constitutionally guaranteed minimums.
This kinda thing can only go on for so long before something snaps. This doesn’t necessarily mean there will be another mass mobilization and popular overthrow, but the anger will reach a point that it will spill into the streets where undoubtedly it will be met with more brutal, deadly repression.
Side Items
Deadly Shooting in Los Angeles: An unknown gunman killed 10 people and wounded 10 others at a ballroom dance club in Monterey Park, California, following a Lunar New Year celebration yesterday. The Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, just east of Los Angeles, is one of California’s largest and has attracted tens of thousands of people in the past. Most of the 60,000 residents of Monterey Park, are Asian immigrants from China or first-generation Asian Americans
Canadian Reparations: Canada has agreed to pay almost $3 billion (Or $2.8 billion ~Canadian dollars~ if you’re a nerd) to settle a class-action lawsuit seeking compensation for the loss of language and cultural destruction caused by its residential school system. The lawsuit was brought by 325 First Nations back in 2012, and demanded reparations for the abuse indigenous Canadians faced at these government boarding schools. Approximately 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their families and placed in these schools from the 19th Century into the 1970s. This was all part of a government policy meant to assimilate children and destroy indigenous cultures and languages
Modi Blocks Documentary: India has blocked the airing of a BBC documentary which calls into question Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership during the murderous 2002 Gujarat riots, which he presided over, saying that even sharing of any clips via social media is barred. A hallmark of a healthy democracy, it’s always nice to see the leader of a country blocking the distribution of documentaries using obscure and repressive information technology laws