“Gathering Dissent”

Joel Beinin, the director of Middle East Studies (or what I like to call the MES) at AUC and Stanford University professor, wrote a great article regarding the recent labor woes in Egypt in MERIP’s Middle East Report.  He writes:

The liberal daily al-Misri al-Yawm reported a total of 222 strikes, demonstrations and protests in 2006 and 580 in 2007. Workers and Trade Union Watch, a labor-friendly website, enumerated 27 collective actions in the first week of January 2008 alone. Estimates of the number of workers involved in this movement range from 300,000 to 500,000. During 2007 strikes spread from their center of gravity in the textile and clothing industry to encompass building materials workers, transport workers, the Cairo subway workers, food processing workers, bakers, sanitation workers, oil workers in Suez and many others. Private-sector industrial workers comprised a more prominent component of the movement than ever before.

In the summer of 2007 the movement broadened to encompass white-collar employees, civil servants and professionals. The single largest collective action of the entire strike movement was the December 2007 strike of some 55,000 real estate tax collectors employed by local authorities. After months of public demonstrations, they struck briefly and won their demand for wage parity with their counterparts employed directly by the Ministry of Finance.

The Muslim Brotherhood seems to be missing a piece of this action—rather it is intentionally excluded from it—so things are looking up for alternative forged coalitions in Egypt. Moreover, privatizing industries without any regulations or laws makes it less about fixing the economy and more about placing as much money in the pockets of Mubarak’s CEO friends as possible.  This spells trouble for the Mubarak Dynasty and his businessmen cronies.

Office Space: “Here’s My Flair”

Have I ever mentioned that Office Space is one of the greatest movies in history? Here’s one of my favorite scenes.

Canadian Builders Don’t Build Any Hope for Peace

Two Canadian construction companies have been building illegal settlements in Israel which led Palestinian villagers to sue them for “breaching international law, including the fourth Geneva convention, as well as Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.” (whatever that means anymore).  

I am too hard on Israel sometimes.  I forget that much of the so-called “free” democracies out there actually aid and abet Israel in its crimes against the Palestinians, yet Israel unfairly gets all the blame.  But every now and then someone demands accountability, or in the case of Palestinian villagers in Bil’in sues for it, and reminds us that it is not only governments that make decisions of perilous consequences.