When the people speak …

First Tunisia and Egypt, now Bharain and Yemen and… the Catholic Church.

No there have not yet been hundreds of thousands of altar boys in St. Peter's Square demanding that the Pope be replaced by a popularly elected leader. But as Tunisia and Egypt tried to organize elections and a government more responsive to popular opinions and demands, the Vatican has ordered several dioceses in Massachusetts to reopen churches which the local hierarchy had closed. The parishioners had occupied these churches or otherwise protested their closing for several years. And – will wonders never cease – the Vatican responded to popular demands.

It appears that we are entering once again a period where those in power need to listen to the opinions of the populace.

At the same time, what happens in Tunisia and Egypt and in the Catholic Church illustrates the limitations of this kind of responsiveness to popular opinion. Egyptian democracy is being organized by the military. It is not being organized by the people themselves. The same is true in Tunisia. Nor has the Catholic Church become any less hierarchical and top-down. The God of the Catholics still only speaks to the Pope not to ordinary parishioners. 

 

However welcome this new responsiveness to popular turmoil is, it is not yet popular democracy when the people do not just protest against a given government, but organize themselves to run their own affairs.

The protests show the formidable organizing power of ordinary people. Not only were massive protests organized in different cities, but everywhere institutions sprang up as needed. In Tahrir Square in Cairo, the protesters put together a first aid post that provided emergency medical care for protesters hurt by police or Mubarak's thugs. In Bahrain, the protesters set up a number of services including one to take care of lost children and finding their caretakers.

People are able to organize what they need. But the heritage of thirty or more years of authoritarian government that ruthlessly persecuted any attempt at popular self-organization is a scarcity of popular organizations and political networks. It will take considerable time to reconstitute those if the military and its new government will allow it.

In the mean time, the army and the powerful in Egypt are rebuilding the government of, for and by the people with money and power. It remains to be seen how much of a peoples' democracy will emerge.

Politics are not all that different in the US. To be sure, it is a rare day when popular organizing efforts are stopped by the police and the members hauled off to jail to be tortured and, perhaps, killed. Instead we have made political access into a commodity. In American politics you have to pay if you want to play. In order to influence government decision makers you need the service of lobbyists --who are very expensive.

Yes, ordinary people in North America can organize themselves. But they have difficulties making themselves heard because they don't have the millions of dollars lobbyists charge to make those opinions heard in the halls of Congress or in the offices of the government bureaucracy.

There is not much room for popular democracy in the US. In that way it is not that different from Egypt.

Oh, please, no Revolution !!

Some 60 odd years ago I appeared in Federal Court in Chicago before Judge Igoe to be sworn in as an American citizen. The judge spoke to us at some length. He wanted to make very sure that we would remember that the United States was born in revolution. In order to emphasize that important lesson he read to us the entire Declaration of Independence. It is a long document and reading it took a long time. Lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants, witnesses and the public were crowding the hall waiting for this citizenship ceremony to end. The judge did not care; the lesson he was trying to impress on us was more important than keeping some people waiting.

The President and the Secretary of State and other leaders of the United States should have been in that courtroom. They too have forgotten our revolutionary antecedents. When they see the upheavals in the Arab world, they react fearfully, urging that stability be maintained, that the masses in revolt be calm and nonviolent. Little attention is being paid to the fact that the Egyptian government has ruled under a State of Emergency for 30 years and that the police has wreaked exemplary violence on ordinary Egyptians for all this time. Much of the looting so prominently displayed in our news reports is actually done by police -- some apparently even in uniform.

Americans pose in the world at large as the protectors of freedom and democracy. But when freedom and democracy mean the self-determination of ordinary Egyptians and their impassioned protests against poverty and very high unemployment, we retreat. We prefer stability -- a government whose actions are predictable. Crowds are notoriously unpredictable. The turbulence of freedom and democracy do not always produce a stable investment climate.

Most of the $2 billion, Mubarak received from the US annually in foreign aid returned to the US in the pockets of US weapons manufacturers, reports Ami Goodman: “ Where has the money gone? Mostly to U.S. corporations. I asked William Hartung of the New America Foundation to explain: 'It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M-1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear-gas canisters [from] a company called Combined Systems International, which actually has its name on the side of the canisters that have been found on the streets there.' “ The money strengthened the Egyptian military and police. It provided no help to the vast number of ordinary Egyptians who live in poverty without any work.

Egypt is important to us because US corporations make money there by selling the country arms. Ordinary Egyptians do not count for much in the halls of US power. (How much do ordinary Americans count?) A good and stable investment climate has become the prime concern of our government. Freedom no longer means the freedom of ordinary people to run their lives as they think best. Freedom means the ability of multinational corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.

We too need to take Judge Igoe’s reminder very seriously: our country was born in revolution. When revolutions occur, we need to be firmly on the side of the people.