I got this from a friend.  I’m not this funny.

And lest we forget to thank:

Aside from the heroics of every single person who – in any way – helped bring about this historic day, we have to remember the “others” who inadvertently helped:

10) The genius behind the “Kill za Internet Mr Bresident, that should end it” gem!  Instead of social networking, hundreds of thousands decided to communicate by actually going to Tahrir Square!!

9) The nutcase who envisioned “The Charge of the Camel Brigade”!!  Your retardation has been a jewel to us dear Sir.

8) The dolt who brilliantly released Wael Ghoneim, at a crucial point in the Revolution’s life- just after speech #2!  Kudos to you Sir.

7) The mastermind behind ACTUALLY ALLOWING Wael Ghoneim to appear LIVE on TV (to say how he wasn’t tortured!) to “win support for Mubarak”, & instead galvanize the nation !!

6) The mind behind the regime’s harassment & beating up of the WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS NEWS ANCHORS!!  We instantly gained some amazing champions for our cause!

5) The brilliance of using plainclothes policemen to act as Pro-Mubarak “supporters” and beat up and kill pro democracy protesters… AND THEN LEAVING THER POLICE ID’s on them !!!  Epic stuff!!

4) Both the EX-President (God I LOVE SAYING THAT!!) and the Vice-President’s speech writers!!  Aside from Mubarak’s #2 speech, the rest were political suicide!  Written by chipmunks at best!!  Thanks a lot guys!!

3) The dude behind releasing criminals and maniacs to create “Chaos” in Egypt… Thereby instantly blowing up Mubarak’s later mandate of “Either me or Chaos!”… Huh ? And what do you call this current MESS?!!

2) Habeeeeb! Our ex interior minister.  There was absolutely NO WAY this regime could have fallen, without the abject hatred that he had cultivated in the hearts of 85 million Egyptians.  The officer who shot dead (in cold blood), the un-armed Alexandria hero also deserves an honourable mention.  Especially that it was “You-tubed” and seen by 1.6 million after one day!!

1) Finally, the absolute best help we ever got in this revolution came from the man himself. Our ex-president made it difficult to root for him (even by members of his own party towards the end). By being patronizing, haughty, and seemingly “bonkers”; he personified “Dictator” like no one else before him.  Of his many “quotes” (and it’s hard to pick a favourite, the man has given us SO MANY “gems” over 3 decades).   My pick is when he was first told that some “Kids were planning a protest march on January 25th, to ask for more democracy Ya Fandem”… His DOCUMENTED response… “خليهم يتسلوا ”!! (Let them have fun)
Thank you for being 83, Mr President, (and about 60 years older than your average citizen) !!  We couldn’t have done it without you  :))
Adios.

The challenges facing a new Egypt are legion, and too many to be detailed in one post.  Here, I highlight some comparative economic statistics to place the performance of the Egyptian economy in a wider global context, focusing on average output per worker (admittedly, quite a crude measure for productivity) and investment as a percentage of national output.  I obtained these figures from the CIA World Factbook.  I derived the output per worker figure by dividing gross domestic produce (purchase power parity GDP calculation rather than the exchange rate GDP).  The results are surprisingly encouraging from one perspective but also reveal some of the profound challenges facing the Egyptian economy.  First, the good news: Egyptian output per worker is not terrible.  Egypt’s comes in at $19,157 per worker; India’s is less than half of this at $8,459 and China’s is also less than Egypt’s at $11,225.  Brazil’s output per worker, which is $21,177, exceeds that of Egypt only by approximately 10%.  The Egyptian labor force is substantially more productive than Morocco’s, whose output per worker is only $13,224, and Jordan’s exceeds Egypt’s by only a few hundred dollars.  Turkey’s labor force, however, is twice as productive as Egypt’s, coming in at $38,785.

Investment as a percentage of GDP is comparable to Brazil and Turkey at approximately 18%.  By contrast, investment as a percentage of India’s and China’s GDP is a shockingly high 32% and 48%, respectively.

What seems clear is that the kind of poverty facing the 40% of Egyptians living on $2/day or less is a function more of the poor distribution of resources internally to the country rather than Egypt being poor in absolute terms.  I also suspect that there are vast gaps in the productivity of different sectors of the Egyptian economy that are responsible for the distributive problems within Egypt that have resulted in mass poverty that is incommensurate with the overall productivity of the Egyptian economy.

Indeed, economists have documented that the last twenty-years of Mubarak’s economic policy, while moderately successful in attracting foreign direct investment and generating some decent top-line economic growth, failed completely in reducing poverty, which might, in some respects, have become worse despite real top-line growth.

The new Egyptian government will need to address these problems by instituting redistributive policies and investing in improving the productivity of the Egyptian labor force.  Both will require substantial economic growth to succeed in the medium and long terms.  In the short term, there needs to be a dramatic expansion of the tax base.  Some ideas that come to mind: a property tax on all second homes, e.g., al-Sahil al-Shamali and all homes with a market value in excess of, e.g., 1,000,000 Egyptian pounds; a tax on the value of shares of companies provided the taxpayer meets certain thresholds, e.g., owns, directly or indirectly, 1% or more of any company, or has share ownership in the aggregate in excess of 1,000,000 Egyptian pounds.  Clearly, the new government must also institute a capital gains tax.  Although the stock market has appreciated more than 700% in the last ten years, there is no capital gains tax in connection with profits realized from the sale of securities.  Egypt has a surprisingly high corporate tax-rate of 40% which probably reduces Egypt’s competitiveness as a place to do business.  It would seem to make more sense to lower the corporate tax rate but subject individuals to taxation on dividends received and capital gains realized going forward.

I also have some ideas on how the government might sell new-government debt securities that are designed to be used specifically for investment in Egypt’s human capital base.  I will try to outline those thoughts in an upcoming post.

On this great day of national rebirth, we should show our gratitude as well as our joy to perfect the blessings of this day. As Muslims, one of the best ways to do this is to make a gift (sadaqa) for those who are suffering.  I can suggest a couple of organizations who do good work in providing relief to the suffering: Mercy-USA For Aid and Development (United States) and Islamic Relief Canada.

Sa’d al-Din al-Shadhili (b. 1922), the architect of Egypt’s successful crossing of the Suez Canal  in the 1973 War, died late February 10, 2011, in Cairo.  Al-Shadhili had a long and distinguished military career, beginning with action as a junior officer in World War II fighting against the Germans in the western desert, to service with distinction in the 1967 War during which he was able to withdraw with his unit intact from Sinai despite being cut off.   Al-Shadhili was dismissed from the Egyptian Army in December 1973 due to his sharp disagreements with then Egyptian President, Anwar al-Sadat, and was sent to England and then Portugal, where he served as Egyptian Ambassador to those two countries.

He broke with the regime in 1978 as a result of the Camp David Accords, and lived in Algeria as a political refugee. Returning to Egypt in 1992 for the first time since 1978, he was arrested and imprisoned for seven years as a result of a conviction that was obtained against him in abstentia for disclosing military secrets.  Even though Egyptian civil courts overturned the conviction, he was not released until 1999.  Despite al-Shadhili`s critical role in planning and training the Egyptian armed forces in connection with the 1973 War, he was the only Egyptian commander who fought in that war who received no official honors.  It is tragic that he died as Egypt stands on the cusp of a revolutionary transformation that he now doubt supported.  To add to the irony, he was buried with full military honors on February 11, 2011, the very day that Muhammad Husni Mubarak was forced to resign the Presidency in disgrace. May God have mercy on him.

I wrote these comments in connection with a very interesting thread on the Facebook page of another friend which seemed to suggest that the regime was in charge and would be able to wear out the demonstrators.  Here is why I think that narrative is wrong:

There has been very little class/social analysis of this revolution with the exception of a couple of articles by Paul Amar that appear on jadaliyya.com, which in general is an excellent source of analysis. One of these articles, which he posted yesterday, is “Why Egypt’s Progressives Win.” The other is “Why Mubarak Is Out.” My view from the very beginning of this crisis is that the regime, although it has many cards to play, they were all losing hands, and thus it has depended largely on bluffs from the beginning.

The reality is that the Egyptian state is not an ideological state; it is a state whose elites are bound together largely for the purpose of extracting rents for the people. The police were the primary line of defense of their privileges and they were used largely to convince people of the futility of challenging the regime, and then used specifically to terrorize and brutalize anyone who had the temerity to challenge it. Using strategies of overwhelming any sign of dissent, e.g., sending out a 1,000 policemen to surround any demonstration, even if it had only 100 demonstrators, the basic strategy was to convince Egyptians that it would be impossible to mobilize against the regime and thus render them passive subjects who acquiesced to the regime’s demands.

That was why the demonstrations on Jan. 25 were so revolutionary. If you have not seen the amazing video of Asmaa Mahfouz on YouTube imploring people to show up on Jan. 25, it is difficult to understand how decisive that day was. For the first time in the Mubarak era, Egyptians were able to mobilize substantial numbers of people to march publicly in opposition to the regime. I think that resulted in a decisive breakthrough: the people effectively called the regime’s bluff. The regime unleashed the police on Jan. 28, but the size of the demonstrations overwhelmed them. No doubt, too, one has to wonder about the commitments of the rank and file policemen and low-ranking officers who were responsible for suppressing those demonstrations: was it ever really plausible that a police force composed of 1.5 million persons in a state like Egypt’s had sufficient will to engage in killing on the scale that would have been necessary to convince what was now several million Egyptians to go back to their homes and give up their demands?

The next bluff the regime played was the idea of an inevitable “civil war” between demonstrators and pro-Mubarak supporters. The meme of “civil war” was of course almost entirely the product of the regime’s own mercenary forces — hired thugs — attacking Egyptian protesters and foreign journalists, producing some of the most discrediting scenes imaginable (the infamous horse and camel attack, for example), at least from the regime’s perspective.

Having beaten back the regime’s thugs, and forcing the army to protect them from those thugs, the regime’s next strategy was to convince the still-majority of Egyptians who were not demonstrating that the government had in fact given up, that it had accepted their demands, and that the demonstrators were unreasonably demanding the government to fall when preservation of the government was the only way to effect the very reforms they demanded. That’s where we stood as of the Sunday.

Since then, two very important things have happened. First, Wael Ghoneim was released and gave a very powerful and emotional interview on a private Egyptian satellite channel whose viewers were precisely those fence-sitters who were inclined to believe that the government should be given a chance to implement “reform.” Second, the spirit of the revolution has spread to other corrupt institutions in Egypt of which, sadly, there are many. But yesterday, for example, the Faculty of Law of Cairo University issued a statement officially endorsing the Revolution and its dean and teaching staff went to Tahrir; university professors from all over Cairo from other faculties also joined the demonstrators at Tahrir. Al-Ahram online (English) reported the spread of strikes in several important state-owned firms, obviously protesting their pathetically low wages, but also the corrupt leadership of these companies who are inevitably cronies, directly or indirectly, of the Mubarak regime. More shocking, al-Ahram, the most important government newspaper, has completely turned on the regime, and while it is not clear to me exactly how this happened, it was a combination of the poor working conditions, the fact that an Egyptian journalist (working for a government newspaper, ironically enough) appeared to have been intentionally shot on Jan. 28 (he later died a couple of days ago), and that they were being forced to publish the crudest kinds of anti-opposition propaganda.

A friend of mine who teaches comp lit in the US and with whom I have spent considerable time in Egypt, wrote to me yesterday saying “Last night I thought I’d check what kind of propaganda al-Ahram is spewing, or whether it is even saying anything about the revolution. Unbelievably, I found that every article article and opinion piece I read was eviscerating the regime. I never thought I’d see the day when something like this could happen. I think something like this really means the regime is coming to an end, even if it keeps standing in the short term.” This is exactly correct. The regime has lost its ability to manipulate virtually any element of civil society to come to its defense. Even leading figures of the NDP have resigned, e.g., Mustafa Fiqqi, who had been the chair of the foreign affairs committee of the upper house of the Egyptian parliament and an ally of Gamal Mubarak, with accusations that NDP thugs are trying to intimidate him for lack of loyalty.

So, given all these revolutionary developments, the regime has no card left to play except the threat of a coup. But what does such a threat mean when a military regime is already in place? The imposition of martial law directly? But the Egyptian Army will not be willing to govern Egypt directly. I doubt that it wishes to or that it has the means.  It would certainly cut into its profits if it attempted to do so. So now, Suleiman is back to the same dilemma: having given up their fear, he can only suppress the people using massive force, but can the army be relied on to supply it? Pretty unlikely in my opinion. So, this is a long way of saying: a coup at this stage seems to be an empty threat, and sooner rather than later, but probably later given the psychological profile of the old men running this regime, they are going to step down.

Professor Cherif Bassiouni is one of the most distinguished of the scores of Egyptian emigres to the United States.  Professor Bassiouni is a well-respected expert in the field of international criminal law, and cares passionately for the future of Egypt.  He prepared the following brief memo as suggestions to the Egyptian protesters.  They are of course free to take those portions of his advice that they find useful, or reject it in its entirety: it is their revolution.  Our job as Egyptian emigres is merely to provide moral support and whatever technical assistance they may choose to seek from us:

1.         Keep up the peaceful demonstrations and occupation at Tahrir Square, outside Parliament and the PM’s office

2.         Maintain pressure by calling out two demonstrations each week: one on Friday after prayers, and one on Sunday midday after Christian religious services.

3.         Call upon all those working in Suez, Ismailia, and Port Said to go on a one-day strike as a symbol of solidarity. This will immobilize traffic in the canal and it will send a significant message to the world.

4.         Have the Organizational Committee select a group of 50 credible Egyptians who have achieved some degree of prominence inside and outside Egypt to constitute an Advisory Commission to the transition from a military regime to a constitutional democracy.

5.         The Advisory Commission should prepare a document similar to that of the Declaration of Independence, which would basically state the principles and goals of the revolution. The text of this document, which should, at first, be considered a draft ,should be circulated worldwide.

6.         The Organizing Committee should have a media office to deal with both Arab and foreign media.

7.         There should be a group of constitutional law and other legal experts formed to work with the movement. The movement should reach out to the Egyptian Bar Association to prepare a number of lawyers to assist those who are arrested.

8.         There should be a group working on daily documentation and recording of everything by category. This could be a computerized database, which could be kept in different local locations as well as abroad, to document government violations, provocations, government actions of various sorts, including governmental initiatives designed to convey the questionable impression that reform is on the move.

9.         Weekly demonstrations should be organized in Alexandria, Tanta, Beni-Sweif, Assiut, and Aswan.

10.       Greater effort to mobilize rural areas should be made through personal advocacy.

11.       A group of volunteers should be put together to work with lawyers and other experts in finance to make a list of all of the corrupt regime persons who have profited in illegal ways. This should include an analysis of foreign and domestic investments, transfer of funds abroad, (e.g., which bankers are involved, how did the party and other government officials facilitate the theft of Egyptian resources for personal gain, etc). It should not be expected that the Prosecutor General’s office will do that except maybe for a few token cases. The corrupt oligarchy must not evade accountability and benefit from impunity.

12.       A time table should be established to achieve the following:

a.         Establishment of a Council of Regents of the revolution, consisting of three persons of the highest level of integrity, competence, and wisdom, who are representatives of the major currents of political and social thought.

b.         The Council of Regents would appoint an acting PM who will select a cabinet to be approved by the Council of Regents and to administer the ordinary affairs of state until a new constitution is in place and a new parliament elected.

c.         The time table for the above should be 6 months.

d.         The Council of Regents should declare the suspension of the current constitution pending its amendment.

e .        The Council of Regents should dissolve the two houses of Parliament.

f.          The Council of Regents should appoint a Constitutional Commission to draft a new Constitution which is to                         be submitted to a public referendum for approval within the ensuing two months.

g.         Upon approval of the new constitution, legislative elections are to be called.

h.         After the legislative elections, presidential elections should be called.

i.          The new president will designate a PM who will form a cabinet in consultation with the president,but which                         will have to be subject to the approval of Parliament.

j.          The new Constitution should provide for Parliament’s right to withdraw confidence in the cabinet and thus

to  have a change in cabinet or its re-organization.

k.         One of the pre-conditions for participating in public political life is for those seeking public office, regardless                        of which position is sought, to relinquish any ties with the military or the police.

l.          The proposed Advisory Commission (first mentioned in paragraph four) should, as much as possible, address principle issues which concern democracy and its exercise, civil and human rights, upholding the rule of law, preserving the independence of the judiciary, and insuring social and economic justice for all. These principles should in turn, be addressed with more detail by the Constitutional Commission, (as previously mentioned in paragraph f).

This article barely scratches the surface of the corruption of the crony capitalists that surrounded the Mubarak regime. It would be nice to see some momentum develop toward freezing the assets of the Mubarak family and those who profited from close political relationships to his discredited regime.

Hamza Yusuf, a prominent American-born religious scholar has come out strongly in support of the Egyptian revolution, even though it is not, explicitly Islamic, saying:

It is important to note that this is not an ideological movement. This is not about Right or Left, Communist or Capitalist, Liberal or Conservative, Islamist or secularist—even if all of these elements are invariably reflected in the various motivations of the diverse peoples populating Independence Square and other sites of protest. This is far more basic: it’s about jobs, food prices, fair elections, reducing poverty, social justice, and above all, not living in fear of a government that should be serving the needs of its people instead of making them the servants of its wants.

He also says:

Islam is not a political ideology and hence does not offer a political solution per se; basic morality in politics is the solution. Most Muslims would be content living under Finnish or Swedish forms of governance, with a few adjustments to the sexual liberties in those countries, and feel as if it were the time of Saladin, given that they are committed to eradicating poverty and hunger, serving the aged, and even ensuring rights for dogs and cats. If you torture a dog in Stockholm, you go to jail. In the jails of Egypt, people can be tortured with impunity by dogs of the state.