Arab Revolt Driven by Demographics and Internet
The democratic revolutions sweeping
the Arab world are fueled by demographics.
It took the world until 1804 to reach its first billion people. World population hit 2 billion 123 years
later, in 1927. It hit 3 billion in
1960, when Kennedy was elected president.
What is the world population today, fifty years later? 6.7 billion people. The world’s
population has more than doubled in the past fifty years.
In 1954, the life expectancy in
Britain was 70 with an infant mortality rate of 30 per 1,000 live births. (Infant mortality, meaning
children dying before the age of 5).
In Egypt, by contrast, the life expectancy in 1954 was 44 years old and
the infant mortality rate was a horrifying 353 per thousand live births.
Today, the life expectancy in
Britain is 80 with an infant mortality rate of 6; while the life expectancy in
Egypt is 70 with an infant mortality rate of 20. In other words, Egypt today is Britain in
1954. The same is generally true, with a
few notable exceptions, in Asia and the rest of the developing world. This is where the population boom of the past
half century has come from, the decline of the infant mortality rate and the
implementation of public health measures that permit people to live into old
age. This great humanistic revolution
was not accomplished by private enterprise. Quite the
contrary.
Now, all these people want
and need jobs. The internet has truly
created a global village. Everyone and
anyone can see how people live elsewhere.
It is galling for the Arabs to see the way their precious treasure of
oil is squandered in the west while the proceeds of the sale is plundered from
the people by ruling dictators like Mubarak and Hassan, king of Morocco. Make no mistake, the Arabs are voting against
rendition with their feet. The
mainstream media, whether Fox or CNN, is neglecting to mention that both Egypt
and Morocco tortured prisoners turned over to them by the United States in its
war on terror. Now, those collaborators
are history.
Furthermore, make no mistake
that the United States leadership is less than ecstatic about the turn of
events in the Arab world. America’s
dependence on foreign oil has, to a large extent, been engineered as a means of
compensating for the inability of the government to pass foreign aid
appropriations in the 1950’s.
The money funneled to the autocratic Arab regimes in
Saudi Arabia the Emirates and elsewhere has either been recycled into US
Treasury bills, purchases of western real estate or securities on foreign stock
markets, or in aid to entities like the Nicaraguan Contras as a means of
circumventing American laws against certain behavior that would be illegal for
the government (like torture.) History
is full of repeated requests of the Saudi government to fund operations and
that would be illegal or politically difficult for the United States
government.
The government of Iran’s Shah, which was installed in a CIA
engineered coup in 1953 and supported with torture, was a prime player in this
plot. That is why the Islamic Republic
of Iran has been demonized as undemocratic in the press. The Shah supplied Israel with its oil during
all the early years of its existence, when the rest of the Arab world boycotted
the Jewish state.
The tragedy of this is that
the so-called advanced state of Israel under Moshe Sharett
tried to make peace with Egypt under Nasser and could have used its technology
and skills to help eradicate the 353 per 1,000 Egyptian infant mortality rate, thereby cementing a true peace in the Middle East.
But, David Ben-Gurion’s greed
for Sinai and the Zionist movement’s zest for Jewrusalem, meant that
Israel’s skills were used to fuel an arms race in the Middle East that
continues even today.
This democratic movement in
the Middle East is good and long overdue.
However, as the recent $36 billion distribution to Saudis by the
government shows, the amount of oil money available for investment in the west
or for the purchase of treasury bills will be much less in the future.
The United States created 19 million new jobs when Reagan
was president, and 22 million new jobs when Clinton
was president. The United States has
created zero new jobs since 2000 (when the federal budget was in surplus,
remember?) That surplus was spent on tax breaks for the rich and on two wars.
Now the United States really has to become self-sufficient in energy
consumption, but Obama’s attempts to spend money on infrastructure to make this
possible: high speed rail and the new rail tunnel to New York, for example, is
violently opposed by the Republicans.
The ossification of the two party system has
created a situation in the United States that is not significantly more
democratic than the dictatorships in the Middle East. Israel, too, needs a democratic revolution
just like its neighbors. And the world
economy will continue to tank until this happens.