31 January 2011

i blame barackhenaten

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Al Jazeera has been replaying everything over and over and over and over... and specifically to include Hillary Clinton's non-statement regarding the situation in Egypt. It's like watching planes crash into the World Trade Center, okay? I am traumatized. All night the Egyptian Army has been building road blocks, and just generally looking to be gearing up for a lot more control, and people are trickling into the square now, stepping over the supine campers who were up chanting all night, now sleeping it off in place. So. What does al Jazeera do? Why, they play the same clips and interviews over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... with occasional snippets of live footage of the action. But the Clinton part is the absolute worst. It's a goddam controlled demolition. It's an inside job. It's a fat fucking lie drilling at my third eye until I want to strip all layers off and go screaming naked off that cliff out there....

I'm snapping this puppy off for now, and will hope to time my next foray for when there might be some GOOD news. I'll add it to this post if.... The cyclone about to hit Queensland has nothing to do with my mood.

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11:00am PST: Old Uncle Dave offers THIS LINK as confirmation of my suspicions, and it is emblematic of the trouble brewing in my muddled brain, so I'm glad he brought it up. I had not bothered to peak at Groupthink until late last night, but I was noticing too many Egypt-related headlines coming up on the feed for my comfort. If it gets heavy rotation on the AP and Reuters, that means only one thing. The controllers want us to be concerned for the overthrow of a government, want popular solidarity behind a "regime change". All the points Lendman brings up have been on my mind, and I think you should give him your eyeprints.

I'm not sure I agree that the other recent uprisings were not welcomed by our controllers, were not managed by them, but mayhap the cables put out by WikiLeaks really did nudge them into it. Being that Mubarak is 82, there can be NO doubt, his replacement has been a priority for the people who have no business controlling anything, but DO control everything.

Other signs that we should be concerned are that Al Jazeera has not only stuck to this with very little attention to the Israeli end of it until today... and it is pretty benign stuff being aired today... and that our cable and satellite services are airing al Jazeera suddenly. It serves to keep them off the MSM so people will think they're the subversive news, but we have seen for quite some time that al Jazeera is no longer the voice of the Middle East, that they have modulated their coverage and commentary to such an extent that they are now only something like a marriage between PBS and CNN, only rarely airing things that give real insight into world affairs. If I hadn't known it already, my visceral reaction to having it on for so many hours every day would have told me.

Added to my wall-to-wall coverage today is the news that Omar Sharif is very, very old. He has not left Cairo. He is 100% in favor of the revolution... but no longer so gorgeous it makes my knees go all wobbly.

Basically, I would feel better if Hu Jintao or Dmitry Medvedev were backing the revolution, if the hairdos on al Jazeera were looking to them for comment on this matter—not that I think they are great humanitarians, but that I think they are more concerned for the real welfare of humans than the controlling elite in the West. That would make me feel more like there is a chance for all of us. As it is, with everyone looking to the imposture who abdicated upon inauguration and the harpy he didn't really supplant, this really does feel like watching airliners smack into skyscrapers.

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Nomi Prins....
Around 2005, Egypt decided to transform its financial system in order to increase its appeal as a magnet for foreign investment, notably banks and real estate speculators. Egypt reduced cumbersome bureaucracy and regulations around foreign property investment through decree (number 583.) International luxury property firms depicted the country as a mecca (of the tax-haven variety) for property speculation, a country offering no capital gains taxes on real estate transactions, no stamp duty, and no inheritance tax.

But, Egypt's more devastating economic transformation centered around its decision to aggressively sell off its national banks as a matter of foreign and financial policy between 2005 and early 2008 (around the time that US banks were stoking a global sub-prime and other forms-of-debt and leverage oriented crisis). Having opened its real estate to foreign investment and private equity speculation, the next step in the deregulation of the country's banks was spurring international bank takeovers complete with new bank openings, where international banks could begin plowing Egyptians for fees. Citigroup, for example, launched the first Cards reward program in 2005, followed by other banks.

According to an article in Executive Magazine in early 2007, which touted the competitive bidding, acquistion and rebranding of Egyptian banks by foreign banks and growth of foreign M&A action, the biggest bank deal of 2006 was the sale of one of the four largest state-run banks, Bank of Alexandria, to Italian bank, Gruppo Sanpaolo IMI. This, a much larger deal than the 70% acquisition by Greek's Piraeus Bank of the Egyptian Commercial Bank in 2005, one of the first deals to be blessed by the Central Bank of Egypt and the Ministry of Investment that unleashed the sale of Egypt's banking system to the highest international bidders.

The greater the pace of foreign bank influx and take-overs to 'modernize' Egypt's banking system, inevitably the more short-term, "hot" money poured into Egypt. Pieces of Egypt, or its companies, continued to be purchased by foreign conglomerates, trickling off when the global financial crisis brewed full force in 2008, though not before Goldman Sachs Strategic Investments Limited in the UK bought a $70 million chunk of Palm Hills Development SAE, a high-end real estate developer, in March, 2008.
Lest you begin to believe I'm too harsh on Western oligarchs....

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love, 99
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8 comments:

  1. Have you seen this?

    http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201113085252994161.html

    Probably the reason for the reruns at Al Jazeera, however the Hillary crap is unforgivable!

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  2. "It was simply that he had become irrelevant. His mental architecture was adjusted to a world which had long since faded."

    The triviality of US Mideast policy.

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  3. http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2011/01/revolutionary-change-in-egypt-internal.html

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  4. 99, BB2, OUD and anyone else reading this...You Rock, I love you people.

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  5. BB2, yes, I saw that, but aside from ruining the broadcasts from their Cairo office, they still have reporters all over Egypt who are now reporting without giving their names... "for their safety"....

    OUD, nice to see I'm still in alignment with the faithful real left! I wish it would ever be about something happy.

    Sam, thanks... we love you back.

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  6. Sam, thanks... we love you back.

    Indeed!

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  7. Speaking of space lizards...

    WTF?
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  8. Just because I have been upholding where the righties are making cogent points, defending their humanity and equality and fellowship in our general state of totally-fuckedness, doesn't mean I think they are any less psychedelic than lefties.... Rumsfeld should be dead.

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