Mubarak Obama and the Flash Mob Revolution

After a tense day's mulling behind closed doors on what to tell the press and people, February 11, Barak Obama's White House finally let us know. In fact Barak Obama had told his near-namesake Mubarak of Egypt since 2009 he must let democracy flower and power in Egypt.

Mubarak of course didn't do that, but for old times sake, for the economy, the Obama team kept on paying Egypt military and civilian aid, and Mubarak kept on putting about one-third of this aid, estimated at a total of about $ 2.5 billion a year, in his own pocket and the pockets of henchmen like General Suleiman, the wonder Vice President who lasted 48 hours.

Mubarak certainly knew what to do with taxpayer's funds from big donor nations like the US, Germany, Japan and France, but could never deliver any kind of rational hope for the vast majority of Egypt's labouring classes. In classic neoliberal style, they were condemned to the status of faceless kleenex labor chaff turning the wheels of the country's humming sweatshops.

These fed the world class cheap wage Export Platform called Egypt. And this in turn fed the kleptocrat Mubarak and his gang of 40 thieves with yet more bakchich and rakeoffs estimated at anywhere from 40 to 60 billion US dollars through the 29 years of his "guided democracy", for Mubarak and his family alone. Barak Obama knew this but was much too polite to talk about it, or had other things to think about, until February 11.

The Mubarak police state, exactly like Ben Ali's police state in Tunisia delivered docile and cheap labor to run the export platforms that drag down the price of goods, throwing people out of work in so called rich nations. While they still have work however, the tinsel defenders of market democracy, like Obama, will use their tax dollars to grease up thieves like Mubarak and Ben Ali.

Enter the Flash Mob

The Flash Mob was far too strong for Mubarak's Ceaucescu-style guided democracy, quickly turning this 29-year-old fossil regime into another fading hangover from the long dark night of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution. At the time, in the early 1980s, the struggle for market freedom and the right to rig markets, drive trade unions underground and pay ultimate low wages in Romania was still some way from giving us the rousing street theater of the Ceaucescu couple gunned down in a pool of blood after a kangaroo trial. After this tasty image, the forced march of Romania's society to mass unemployment, social precarity, financial engineering and the Greed is Good anthem and slogan of Neoliberal No Alternative was almost inevitable.

Excited professors opined that export platforms in the ex-Third World operated by cozy right thinking, far right dictators along classic police state lines was the summum of perfection in North - South relations, and nothing less than the End of History. This was progress! The middle classes, everywhere, would directly benefit and be yet more ecstatic on their SUV trips to the Universal Supermarket.

As in Tunisia, the Flash Mob is the new alternative. The end of history is far from inevitable. The same tech revolution that generated new consumer products for the No Alternative consumer society, to be manufactured in cheap labor police states, also produced cellphones and PCs.

Calling the Flash Mob together, a million strong was even easier than in those early neoliberal days of Ceaucescu's downfall or the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Tehran. By February 11, wildcat strikes across Egypt spelled out what most working Egyptians, mostly paid derisory low pay by Western standards - typically less than two dollars per hour - want from

their Flash Mob revolution: higher wages. When or if this really simple message is not registered and saved, and acted on fast, the joyous crowd can be called out again in an instant general strike.

If this hurts the docile image of the Good Export Platform or gets violent that will be a shame, but the Flash Mob will succeed because it has the numbers. As the USA's own Mubarak Obama likes to sincerely tell us all at the mike, along with his Western democracy pals who also backed up Hosni Mubarak's police state to the hilt: Democratic action is good.

No alternative geopolitics

For over 30 years, from the dawn of No Alternative economics, geopolitics was given the same urgent restructuring as the economy. We learned the nuances of realpolitik, the preaching that liberation in Iraq is okay thanks to oil greed, but liberation in Egypt is not okay because Israel wouldn't like it and higher wages could trim the world class profits of the Gaps, Nikes, Mercedes and Googles, and a string of other predatory corporations feeding off mass poverty and precarity in Egypt. To be sure this was a go-anywhere model, exactly the same for the other "guided democracies", that is the police states which propped up the New No Alternative capitalist world, with one party China far out in the lead.

No alternative geopolitics fed off the same basic cocktail of greed, hypocrisy and aggression, using economic oppression of the masses as a powerful tool for bludgeoning down their aspirations, keeping the No Hopers distracted and off-side. Country after country in the ex-Third World, and very surely including the Arab World was nudged and shoved, and stomped into playing lapdog, keep a low profile, just a servile cogwheel in the One Only Globalising Economy. Any country whose rulers were not outright thieves like Hosni Mubarak could be strapped with debt, instead.

No alternative economics and the resource countdown

As resource depletion, climate change and a ransacked global environment also show, this model's life expectancy is low - very low. The default choice No Alternative global economy gulps resources as it destroys the environment, leaving one-only default choice: mass poverty and austerity, which is exactly what Egypt's masses do not want. For a long time it seemed that safe and reliable dictators and their bludgeon wielding secret police, like the Mubarak-Suleiman duo in Egypt, or Putin-Medvedev in Russia were part of a timeless scene during which History was either dead or dying.

The go-go neoliberal paper economy racked up a protracted period of good times, in the 1990s, but the late-great capitalist economies only moved one way, from a finance structure dominated by real banks and investor funds investing in the real economy, to flimsy shifting structures in which the main thrust was, and is hyper speculative Ponzi finance. The vaunted self-correcting ability of mature markets eroded or disappeared, replaced by their pure nemesis of self-derailing ‘automatic de-stabilisers', of the type described by Stiglitz and others. The result: the post-2008 permanent crisis economy.

The Great Credit Crisis starting in 2008 reinforced the logical doubt on what any honest person can only feel about New Economics. The neoliberal whine that well tamed and spun, low inflation numbers, massive injustice and a comfortable level of mass joblessness - with rich pickings for trader insects - were the ultimate in economic performance belongs in the same dustbin or history, or cesspit from which creatures like Mubarak crawled for a much too long moment in the sun.

Above all, the downsized aspirations and dumbed down kulchur of the neoliberal society were rational and needed to run the cheap labor export platforms of the ex-Third World, specially the Arab World outside the tiny wealthy few in the petro monarchies and gas principalities. For average persons the real message of the New Economy is clear: stay poor and keep scrabbling.

Now we can be sure of one thing. The No Alternative model of society and the economy, and its geopolitical spinoff of permanent global injustice as the only way to run the world has taken a lot of flak. So much flak since the start of 2011 we can really hope for what Mubarak Obama always preached in front of his teleprompter: Real Change.

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