Building new capital cities is a sop for kleptocracy
EGYPT AND THE IMF
Like many people of my generation (I am apparently a “cusper,” having characteristics in common with both Gen X and millennials, so make of that what you will), I was very influenced by Naomi Klein’s 2007 book “Shock Doctrine.” If you haven’t read it, she argued forcefully that the then-ongoing U.S.-led Iraq takeover was part of a neoliberal ploy to exploit crises to force through unpopular policies so as to benefit big business and immiserate ordinary people. The book has many villains: Milton Friedman, the U.S. and British governments, the Central Intelligence Agency and the International Monetary Fund among them.
Part of the reason I found the book so compelling (leaving aside the fact that it confirmed everything I already thought about the 2003 Iraq War) was that her analysis of the 1990s in Russia supported what my Russian friends told me: greedy Western advisers turned up and forced the Russian government to pass laws that ruined the country. The oligarchs were our fault.
So why am I talking about this now? In what looks like a classic example of her thesis, those villains at the IMF have faced down the Egyptian government and forced it to do all the things the IMF always demands — liberalize the exchange rate, expand the private sector, cut spending, balance the budget, blah blah. So presumably I’m furious about it? Hmmmmm, perhaps not.
Egypt may not be the most depressing example of how the Arab Spring turned wintry, but it is depressing enough. The hopes of democratic transformation were extinguished by a coup in 2013, and since then military officers have gradually cemented their hold on pretty much everything.