We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Sunday, July 7, 2013

Egypt: The people still want end to regime

Click here to access article by Tony Iltis from Green Left Weekly (Australia).
Mamdouh Habashi, co-founder of the Egyptian Socialist Party, told Green Left weekly in April that the coming of “the Islamists to power was not by chance. It was a series of actions led and directed by the United States with its tools.

“These were the military council and the Muslim Brotherhood with their deals and in the backstage the big financiers like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and so on. These are the tools with which they play and create new facts and divert and divide and so on.”

A hurried electoral process and the administrative disqualification of candidates ensured that the final round of the presidential vote was between Morsi and Mubarak crony Ahmed Shafik.

“At the end of the day, when Egyptians had to vote for a new president, they had no choice but between cholera and cancer,” Habishi said.