End Of Days News
When visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry sat one-on-one with Egyptian
President Morsi in Cairo, Sunday, March 3, he talked at length about Egypt’s
calamitous economic straits, relations with Israel, democratization and
essential reforms. He had hoped to find the Egyptian president amenable to
getting to grips with his country’s fast approaching bankruptcy. In the event,
Morsi nodded politely but,
debkafile’s Middle East sources report, he was far more preoccupied
with pushing forward the three-point plan he and the Muslim Brotherhood’s
supreme leader Mohammed Badie have begun implementing:
1. The Muslim Brotherhood will not settle for a parliamentary majority in the
coming general election – most likely in April or June; it is aiming for 100
percent of the seats.
2. To set the stage for this campaign, the Brothers
have installed their loyalists in the governates of Egypt’s 19 provinces. The
spreading of Brotherhood values in the national constituency is going full steam
ahead across Egypt.
The MB turned to this course when they saw they had no
hope of exercising total control over the restive capital and the protest
movements springing up regularly in Tahrir Square. So they decided to build up
their support in the country at large in the hope of making Cairo an isolated
Island in the predominantly Islamist country.
3. To boost their popularity in the coming election, Morsi and Badie decided
they could not afford the painful measures required by the International
Monetary Fund for a $4.8 billion loan to tide the economy over its current
crisis - spending cutbacks, downsizing the vast Egyptian civil service, reducing
food subsidies and cutting away dead wood.
Instead, they dropped their credit application to the IMF altogether and so
avoided mass unemployment and widespread hardship in the months leading up to
the election.
However, the US Secretary of State sternly called the Egyptian
president’s attention to three major concerns which need to be addressed with
the utmost urgency:
a) Egyptian foreign currency reserves continue to bleed
dangerously and no one knows how to stop the disastrous drain. By April, it is
predicted that no more than $4 billion will be left to sustain a population of
80-90 million souls.
2. Egypt’s industrial plants are working at just 50
percent capacity because fuel is scarce and the money to buy it even
scarcer.
3. Gas for powering electricity is running out. More and more areas
no longer receive regular electricity – some none at all. The water supply is
also affected.
debkafile’s
sources report two conflicting approaches on how to resolve Egypt’s calamitous
economic emergency:
