Cheap at twice the price!

I'm not sure if this picture has been occasioned by this story, but I love it, even if it's not. £12 billion is the price of the Arab spring:

The £12bn ($20bn) figure, although impressive sounding, will have to be examined carefully to see how much represents grants as opposed to loans. The money will predominantly come from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US and the EU. Both the UK and France have offered bilateral sums: France offered Egypt up to $250m a year in development aid on Thursday and David Cameron set aside £110m over four years for political and economic development.

This is cheap, compared to, say, the annual $1.3 billion of American finance to Egyptian military industry alone. It is also very, very important to note aid and/or loans are rarely anything more than a trap. We must remember the aim of the G8 is to subject this crucial region to the needs of western capital accumulation. Obama is not forging a new path, but trailing behind the Egyptian and Tunisian working class. They are the ones who created this opening to liberty.

But, as the article points out, the old regime is being contested but it still survives. For example, the leader of the dynamic Cairo Bus Workers Union, Ali Fattouh, is still threatened with jail for defying the anti-union laws (Email messages of support for Ali Fattouh to menasolidarity@gmail.com).