Pre-election Egypt and Greece

Today and tomorrow Egypt holds its presidential elections, tomorrow the Greeks will begin their parliamentary elections. The conditions in the public facilities in the Nile Delta and Athens portrayed here are unlikely to change in either location. Political representatives are not for people.

This is a video of a friend of mine Aris from Athens about the condition of the health care system in a large public hospital in Athens:   



This is a video Jasmina Metwaly and I filmed in March during a sit-in of the water company in Mansoura in the Egyptian Delta.



These situations are not that different.

The EBRD is a bank that has nothing to do with development and everything to do with colonialism

Here some important words about the work of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development: While structural adjustment and market liberalisation were hugely beneficial for foreign corporations and wealthy Egyptians (in 2008 Egypt was named the top reformer in the World Bank’s Doing Business survey), it devastated Egypt's economy and induced outrageous social symptoms. The phenomenon of street children, for instance, began during the Mubarak era - children living on the streets, working at shining shoes, collecting garbage, begging, cleaning, parking cars, selling food, and highly vulnerable to being forced into a string of illicit activities. Western development banks are now lining up to re-enter Egypt or in the case of the EBRD, to enter Egypt and other north African countries in a highly ambitious extension of its founding mandate that saw it focusing purely on the central and eastern European states since its founding in 1991. An EBRD Technical Assessment, made public earlier this year, identifies the following operational themes to 'guide a potential engagement by the bank in Egypt': ... It's certainly easier to claim, as the bank's president Thomas Mirow regularly does, that parallels between post '89 central and eastern Europe and the Arab Spring leave the EBRD very well placed to intervene now in a different continent. Yet are there so many close parallels? ... the post-revolution mass privatisation drive that took place in eastern Europe has recently been strongly criticised by sociologists from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University. Their study - “Mass Privatization, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in Post-Communist Countries” - published in April this year claims to be the first to trace a “direct link” between the mass privatisation programs of the early 1990s and the “economic failure and corruption that followed.” ... Lawrence King, one of the study authors, commented on its release: “Rapid and extensive privatization is being promoted by some economists to resolve the current debt crisis in the West and to achieve reform in Middle Eastern and North African economies. This paper shows the most radical privatization in history failed the countries it was meant to help.” This text by Laila Iskander goes on here

State crime and street crime: Two sides of one coin

The revolutionary process that erupted in this country on January 25, 2011, is an uprising against crime. This crime was structural and legalised - made legal by the political leadership of Egypt and their friends and business partners that practice it. Various criminal forces - the police, the secret police, the state security - exist in large part to protect these criminals' interests, with authority to enforce the ruling classes' "law" without judicial liability. Read the rest of my most recent article on Aljazeera

these people change our world

watch and learn from worker strikes in egypt over the past months

اضراب عمال تليمصر- ضد الخصخصة و سرقة النخبة

What we in #egypt could learn from the citizens of #Homs:

taking out the security apparatus

In Bolivia: Resisting Privatization of Water

Sealing the gates- Another massacre of the Egyptian people

I am always afraid to travel outside of Cairo these days because I don't want to be gone. I left for five days to screen two films at the Rotterdam film festival and once again the military junta organized a massacre in Egypt. This time in revenge against the Ultras football movement- clearly for the vital role they have and continue to play in the protests since January 25.

Leading up to the game the security did not search entering fans, eventually they stopped checking for tickets. After the match someone turned off the lights, someone sealed the gates to the ahly ultras in the stadium and a massacre followed. Security forces stood by far from the stadium and did nothing.

Here the marks:



no translation needed

In this interview two of the players of Al-Masry team- whose fans are said to have carried out the attack- confirm the massacre was organized by Egyptian security forces.

Here another video with the citizens of Port Said:



Here a detailed explanation of how the massacre was pre meditated (no subtitles yet):



We fight on.

In Egypt "Democratic" Elections are undermining protests for change

here an excerpt from my most recent article

...

There is more at stake than just these violations or the extent to which these elections have been free and fair. Permeating the 2011-2012 elections is a much broader and more significant matter that is not unique to Egypt, namely how these elections and the discourse of democracy that they have generated are being used to undermine the struggle for revolutionary change.

...

read on

Cairo Military Crackdown

The Egyptian military want to maintain power, they want to snuff out the voice of protest on the streets of egypt

here is a visual summary of some of the bloodiest of those days



here are some of the latest accounts of the extents the army generals are willing to go