Chomsky -The State-Corporate Complex & the Arab revolts

The demonstration in Egypt -- Tahrir Square, the January 25th movement -- was initiated by a group of young people -- tech savvy young people who call themselves the "April 6th movement". Why the April 6th movement? The reason is that on April 6th, 2008 there was a major labour action planned at the biggest industrial conglomerate in Egypt along with solidarity actions, and it was all crushed by force by the very brutal security system.

What that reflects is that there have been substantial labour struggles, labour militancy against the dictatorship -- trying to gain elementary rights and some elements of democracy. It kind of blew up on January 25th but it's been going on a long time. And the same in the other countries: if you look there's been protests, repressions, violence, torture, more protests. This wave, it actually got started in Western Sahara, but that was crushed very quickly by Morocco. Then it went to Tunisia. There, it succeeded in overthrowing the dictatorship, lit a spark, and then it spread all over the region.

The United States and the West are really concerned about: namely the ones that have oil and that have loyal dictators. If a country has plenty of oil and a loyal dictator, the West is going to back the dictator to the hilt, and that's what happened in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain -- which is kind of like an offshoot of Saudi Arabia.

In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the repression was so severe that people could barely even appear for the demonstrations, and there's no criticism of that in the West because their dictators are fine. In Egypt, the US and the West followed what is, in fact, a familiar gameplan when you can't hang on to a favoured dictator. What you do is you hold on as long as possible. When it's impossible, typically when the army turns against him, which is what happened in Egypt, then [you] shelve him and try to restore as much as you can of the old order, and that's in fact what's happening in Egypt and Tunisia.

A different case is Libya -- plenty of oil but not a loyal dictator, so the West would be happy to get rid of him, even though they've supported him right to the end.

Gaddafi -- he's a brutal, vicious dictator. He's been in for a long time, '69. There's been plenty of protest, mostly repressed. He has plenty of support too, you can tell that from the reports, but there's a strong popular opposition to the dictatorship, as there is throughout the entire region… Dictators are not popular. Sometimes they're powerful enough and strongly enough supported by the West so they can crush opposition -- as, for example, in Saudi Arabia. And Gaddafi's done that for a long time, with plenty of Western support, incidentally. But this time, it broke through and the West would be quite happy to get rid of him. That's why the Western powers are intervening in support of the rebellion.

The State-Corporate Complex has been in the US forever. The state [and the] interaction between state power and concentrations of private power goes back hundreds of years. It takes different forms at different times. It started with financialization of the economy and export of production that led to heavy concentration of profit in financial capital, that translated itself into political power. Political power then enhanced it by introduction of a whole range of policies, ranging from tax policies to deregulation, which further enhanced corporate power, increasingly financial power.

Deregulation set in, and the big corporations are just paid off by the taxpayer […] they're rescued. Then they're richer than ever and set up for the next crisis. It almost crashed the economy and the next time around it'll be worse. Quite apart from the fact that it almost utterly undermines any democratic functioning of the state -- and it's pretty similar in other countries -- the United States happens to be extreme.

Revolution in Cairo

Frontline

Building Egypt's Future

What happens next for those who dreamt of a free and democratic Egypt?

The young activists from Egypt's April 6th movement were among the key players in the uprising that brought down Hosni Mubarak, the then-Egyptian president.

So how have they fared in the weeks since? Though the news of the president's resignation was greeted with wild jubilation by the massed crowds in Tahrir Square, the revolution is far from over.

A military council now runs the country and many of the political and economic conditions that led to the revolt are still in place.

The challenge facing the activists and the pro-democracy movement in general is how to build on their gains and secure real and lasting change.

But as reporter Elizabeth Jones found out, the cold reality of the morning after is that there is still much to do. People & Power follows the activists as the future of a democratic Egypt hangs in the balance.

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A first draft of why it happened must begin in a rural town in Tunisia on the shores of the Mediterranean where Mohamed Bouazizi was the unlikeliest catalyst of the extraordinary realignment in the region.

Known locally as Basboosa, Mohamed, aged 26, was a street fruit vendor in Sidi Bouzid, where unemployment is conservatively estimated at 30%. He earned around £87 a month, the money going to support his six siblings, including one sister in university. He was regularly stopped by police, who expected him to pay them bribes to allow him to sell his wares from a wheelbarrow. On the morning of 17 December last year he had spent the equivalent of £125 on merchandise when it was seized.

What made the loss harder to take was the humiliation. A 45-year-old female officer slapped him across the face, spat at him, scattered his fruit on the ground and confiscated his electronic scales. Two of her colleagues joined in, beating him. As a coup de grace, the woman insulted Mohamed's dead father, a labourer who died of a heart attack when his eldest son was just three years old.

Mohamed finally snapped. For decades millions of young men like him right across the North African coastal plain have watched television images beamed from the other side of the Mediterranean from a European continent of prosperity, freedom and opportunity. They have watched the cronies of their own regimes growing older and, in their decadence, more arrogant and corrupt. They have watched hope for a better future leaking away.

Seeking justice, Mohamed went to the local governor's office to complain about his treatment. He issued a warning when told that the governor was unavailable: "If you don't see me, I'll burn myself." At 11.30am, less than an hour after he had been robbed and humiliated by the state's forces, he doused himself in petrol in front of the governor's office and set himself alight.

"What kind of repression do you imagine it takes for a young man to do this?" said his sister Samia when her brother finally died of horrific injuries on 4 January. "A man who has to feed his family by buying goods on credit when they fine him ... and take his goods. In Sidi Bouzid, those with no connections and no money for bribes are humiliated and insulted and not allowed to live."

For decades Tunisia had been characterised by the west as a "model" Arab nation, but the WikiLeaks saga, months earlier, revealed the ugly truth of what its key sponsor, the United States, really thought of this "mafia state", run as a virtual private enterprise by Ben Ali and his hated, avaricious wife Leila Trabelsi, who plundered 1.5 tonnes of gold from the central bank when they fled to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

In Egypt, Khaled Said was beaten to death by the two officers who came looking for him. They smashed his head against a marble ledge in the lobby of the building next door before throwing his body into the back of a van, driving around, then dumping it by the roadside. It later emerged that Said had taped a secret video depicting what appeared to be corrupt local security chiefs dividing up the spoils of a drugs bust. His family also discovered self-penned anti-government songs stored on his computer.

Online, Facebook group "We are all Khaled Said", quickly gathered hundreds of thousands, of supporters, who swapped information on other examples of inhumane police treatment and helped organise small-scale acts of civil disobedience.

Along with a loose network of more explicitly political online activist groups, the anonymous administrators behind Kolina Khaled Said – one of whom turned out to be Google's regional marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, who attended to the web page from his home 1,500 miles away in Dubai – tried to find creative ways to get round Egypt's suffocating legal prohibitions on collective action in an effort to make their voices heard on the ground.

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