Q: Please, can you explain to me how do the multi-national companies dominate our country? How are they benefiting of the economy being down? What does the IMF have to do with all this? And how can a guy like me with a little group of friends help to change this?
A: The economy is down for you, not for them; first of all.
Well, the answer is at once simple, and quite complex. It is simple because on one hand, there is the obvious fact that massive companies push smaller companies out of business. Small companies can’t compete. Large companies have bigger budgets, bigger supply chains, better research and development, and a great deal of advantages granted by the government.
In the case of Egypt, or anywhere else in the developing world, this means foreign companies pushing out local companies, and gaining control over the local market. They pressure the government to privatize state sectors, so eventually, they own your food, electricity, water, oil and gas; they build your roads and bridges, they own your hospitals and schools, and so on and so forth. It is not a military occupation, an occupation of ownership.
And, of course, the control the labor market; they dictate salaries and benefits and worker protections. The government wants them to invest, and has to provide incentives for investment. Incentives include deregulation of their activities. They should be allowed to under-pay, to lay off workers, to downsize companies, to discard work safety and environmental protection standards, etc, etc. These are all incentives for investors; and all of these things impact the lives of the people. It determines your standard of living and quality of life. And on top of that, they determine the price of goods and services. And, obviously, all of the money you pay for foreign-owned goods and services, flows out of your country, and increases the state’s poverty.
Because they know that these policies harm the people, they also know that opposition and unrest are likely. Therefore, they demand that the government guarantee “stability”, which is usually just a code word for repression and violence against the domestic population.
So that is the simple way companies dominate a society.
Then you have institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, which lend money to developing economies with a set of strict policy conditions attached to the loans. For instance, they may demand the implementation of a VAT tax system, cuts to social spending, privatization, currency devaluation, and so on. All of these things are happening in Egypt. All of these things harm the public, and benefit multinationals. They give you a loan, and require that you prioritize repayment of that loan over everything else. And this just erodes your economy, and makes it even more difficult to pay the money back. Thus, they keep you in debt slavery. That is on the state level, and on the personal level as well. As prices go up, and salaries go down, and the value of the currency drops, eventually, people go into debt. They get loans and credit cards, and the bulk of their paychecks go to the banks.
As far as what a small group of people can do to oppose this, well, it depends on your skills and resources and your will. I have written many, many times about tactics of disruption that can be employed by as few as two or three people, or even a single individual. You will have to assess your own capabilities. Just keep in mind that business exerts unparalleled influence over the government, and they use this influence to enact policies that benefit them financially. If those policies are not profitable; in other words, if you make those policies a reason for the disruption of their profitability, and you require companies to support popular demands in exchange for profitability; you will tame and domesticate the most powerful and dangerous predators in the world today, and you will be able to change the society.