Independent Talk

Democracy advocates worldwide and the Obama administration are outraged by the recent raids of NGOs by Egyptian authorities. The Egyptians are claiming that the raids were the result of evidence found suggesting that the organizations, some of which were backed by the United States, were participating in activities to incite riots and organize demonstrations within Egypt. 

According to the Washington Post, a total of seventeen individual organizations were raided by the Egyptian authorities. The raids were not peaceful; the Egyptian officials stormed the offices and seized both documents and “devices.”

Social media has been of strategic use to protestors in the middle east seeking to organize protests against their government(s). Likewise, the governments spy on the citizens who use social media with technological tools and advances sold to them by western companies. The governments in turn use the information they uncover to arrest dissidents who they sometimes torture. 

In response to the news that American and European corporations are aiding repressive middle eastern regimes, Republican Chris Smith introduced the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 to ban exports of software and hardware used for monitoring and surveillance on the Internet. Just recently, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton asked corporations to be responsible with the exports of technology used to to spy on individuals in different countries. 

As the European economy stumbles and falls, European Union leaders are considering asking the International Monetary Fund for a bailout for some of the struggling European nations; the major problem at this point is that the IMF doesn’t have enough reserves itself to lend such a significant amount of money to such a large numbers of countries. At present, the IMF only has $400 billion on hand to loan out, but the amount needed by countries such as Italy and Spain is much, much higher. 

Yesterday, the media buzz surrounding the failure of the supercommittee to solve the budget woes focused primarily on the Bush tax cuts and the supercommittee’s inability to agree about whether to extend the tax cuts or not. Today, I came across THIS ARTICLE from NPR discussing how further budget cuts would impact the Pentagon.