{"id":185066,"date":"2011-10-21T19:39:00","date_gmt":"2011-10-22T00:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/10\/21\/another-inspector-renault-moment\/"},"modified":"2011-10-21T19:39:00","modified_gmt":"2011-10-22T00:39:00","slug":"another-inspector-renault-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2011\/10\/21\/another-inspector-renault-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Inspector Renault Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a> I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!<\/span><\/div>\n

So, now that we are looking into the corruption and cronyism in Mubarak’s Egypt, and it turns out that it has its roots in the American led privatization of the Egyptian economy<\/a>, just like the rampant corruption in post-Soviet Russia:<\/p>\n

Beginning two decades ago, the United States government bankrolled an Egyptian think tank dedicated to economic reform. A different outcome is only now becoming visible in the fallout from Egypt\u2019s Arab Spring.<\/p>\n

Formed with a $10 million endowment from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies gathered captains of industry in a small circle \u2014 with the president\u2019s son Gamal Mubarak at the center. Over time, members of the group would assume top roles in Egypt\u2019s ruling party and government.<\/p>\n

Today, Gamal Mubarak and four of those think tank members are in jail, charged with squandering public funds in the sale of public resources, lands and government-run companies as part of a dramatic restructuring. Some have fled the country, pilloried amid the public outrage over insider deals and corruption that toppled President Hosni Mubarak.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became a crony capitalism,\u201d Magda Kandil, the think tank\u2019s new executive director, said of the privatization program advocated by its founders. Because of the corruption, the center now estimates, the assets that Egypt has sold off since 1991 have netted only about $10 billion, $90 billion less than their estimated worth.<\/p>\n

The privatization saga is a cautionary tale about the power and perils of U.S. foreign aid \u2014 most notably the nearly $8 billion that the United States has provided to Egypt since the 1990s to push the country toward economic reforms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not a bug, it’s a feature. This sort of economic liberalization is all about creating a few corrupt individuals, because it’s cheaper to allow cronies to get siphon off a billion or two while our banksters steal the rest than it is to allow those resources to accrue legally to the workers and the country.<\/p>\n

I may seem cynical about this, but the corruption in Egypt, or Russia, or pretty much all<\/b> of other privatization schemes outside of the Scandinavian countries run this way, so I’ve come to the conclusion that this is the actual goal of these policies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here! So, now that we are looking into the corruption and cronyism in Mubarak’s Egypt, and it turns out that it has its roots in the American led privatization of the Egyptian economy, just like the rampant corruption in post-Soviet Russia: Beginning two decades ago, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1095,970,973,986,1196],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-corruption","category-economy","category-middle-east","category-privatization"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185066"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185066\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}