University of California-Santa Barbara professor Paul Amar on the military’s role in a post-Mubarak Egypt.
Professor Amar's first segment during the 2-hour Democracy Now feature of today starts here on the video at the 27:19 minute mark:
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/2/5/uprising_in_egypt_a_two_hourI watched it again and this is what I could type from his statements -
We've seen the rise and fall of the police as a dominant force
We've seen the rise and fall of a crony privatizing group of businessmen
The Public Prosecutor of Egypt has frozen the assets of the head of the privatization of hotels and the privatization of the steel industry The new chair of the NDP is Hassan Badrawi. He is the founder of Egypt's first HMO in 1989. Started the movement to privatize Egypt's health care system from government run universal, free health care to private.
Another businessman, Naguib Sawiris, probably the richest man in Egypt based on contracts for tourism, development, infrastructure, communications and building, has presented a list of demands for a transition plan be be run by a bunch of very old businessmen, technocrats & scientific members - a "rule of experts coalition". Conservative businessmen with businessmen from the Muslim Brotherhood and some scientists.
So we're seeing a shift from what started 12 days ago as a protest started by labor unions. Many of them womens based labor unions in the manufacturing cities of Egypt. Russian and Chinese investment had brought back manufacturing working class jobs to Egypt. Jobs often done by women sweat shop workers. This started out as a nationwide labor protest with a human rights component - anger about police and police brutality. And now it's shifting to a businessman wing of the Muslim Brotherhood movement to step just outside the neo liberal movement into a national capital development strategy with the military backing it. And it's happening very fast. Right now one of the military's roles is to protect the people. The reason we see more men protesting in the streets is because the military doesn't see its role as being the protector of women.
The populist branch of the military is more powerful now counterbalancing the police. But the military is run by businessmen who ran such things as all the shopping malls in Eqypt, they run the many beach resorts. They make a lot of money through economic ventures. So the military is split between it's populist role and its economic interests. They want to protesters to love them as the military. But they want to get the protesters off the streets so the tourists come back. Suleiman's intelligence agency has less legitimacy with the "regular Egyptian folks on the street". He's more tied to Israel, the U.S. and international negotiations. Yesterday, his tv interview was like "Glen Beck stroking your bunny moment. He was just nuts. The way he blamed the media and others for the uprising was creepy and weird. Things are happening very fast for him and there may have been an assassination attempt on him.
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