Egypt – A lesson for America

Richard Salbato 2-1-2011

If you have watched the fall of the Lebanon government and then one government after another over the past month, you may be wondering what is next and how that affects America in the future. Although non of these problems are over yet, there are now plans for new riots in Syria for this week and these riots are expected to break out in all Arab countries sooner or later.

One of the lessons we can learn from all this is that even if you have a democracy, if the government does not represent the will of the people, they will rise up in what we now call “people power”. That happened in America when our government passed the health care law even though all polls showed that 78% of the people were against it even before it passed? Then during the town halls, the people spoke out saying “You do not care what we think at all.” Because of the new communications on the Internet this continued until we had the Tea Party Movements and then the downfall of most of the government.

No matter what kind of government you have it must be at the will of the people and not against it

We now have a huge problem coming up in America that has been brewing for 40 years and is about to explode and our government is doing nothing about it and the people know it.

History of Egypt

For those of us who have some reasonable education in this country, we marveled at the scientific genius of those who built the pyramids and the great cities without the power and tools we have today. For those who think outside the box, some of us wondered why the Egyptians built these great cities and centers of government out in the middle of the dry deserts instead of close to the Nile, maybe the greatest agricultural land in the world at the time. I investigated this conundrum and found this was done deliberately even though water had to be shipped in carts for miles each day. Again the answer showed their scientific genius. The great engineers of Egypt knew that the wealth of the nation rested in their great agricultural land or both sides of the Nile all the way to the Red Sea. For every building they built by the Nile they would loose valuable farm land in the fertile banks of the great river.

This long term thinking took some very smart people who thought out every unforeseen consequence of there actions before doing anything. As a result they became the most prosperous nation in the world.

Then came the Romans who dug a channel from the Medateranian Sea to the Red Sea now called the Suez Canal. A thousand or more years later the Europeans build a dam on the upper Nile and in 1950 the Aswan High Dam was built larger to control the flooding that happened every year in the lower Nile. Now this flooding spread out on both sides of the Nile and not only watered the land but brought with it the great fertilizers from the mountains. Now what do they have?

One of the highest population densities in the world, with over 90% of the people of Egypt crowded together up against the banks of the Nile, and you have all the necessary fixin’s for trouble. Eighty million people live mostly next to the Nile River. But they have almost no farming.

In fact Egypt imports more wheat for their Pita Bread than any nation in the world in spite of the fact that they have less than 85.000,000 people. They are now dependent on imports of food and the prices are going up each and everyday. The average wage for those working is $2,800 per year and they have 20% unemployment. Now think about the fact that wheat has gone up 80% in the last two years.

Even with a new government, what can the Egyptians do to solve this problem?

This is an example of mega-projects built by economically illiterate socialist governments.

Militarily, the dam is a boon for Israel. One small nuke and the entire country of Egypt will be washed into the Mediterranean. Literally!

There are basically only five things left that keep Egypt going:

1. Tourism, roughly 5% of GDP

2. Remittances. Egypt's most reliable export is workers, who send money home to their families.

3. Oil. But on the way to zero by the end of the decade.

4. The Suez Canal, built in the 1860's courtesy of Europeans. It is becoming less important as ships get larger (too large to use the Canal).

5. Foreign Aid. Mostly from America and Republicans want to shut off all FA.

The population is growing at something like 3.5% per year. And unemployment is about 25%, which means that the ranks of young, unemployed, unmarried males-unquestionably the most dangerous creatures ever to have walked the Earth are swelling.

Egypt is a disaster in waiting. But the same is more or less true of all the Islamic countries (with the minor exceptions of the Emirates and Malaysia). All of them, like Egypt, produce little that can be traded.

Technologically, there's zero innovation

If real democracy succeeds as it did in Tunisia, it could light the fuse on regional unrest that quickly flows into the big oil producers, including Saudi Arabia, Iraq and even Iran.

Iraq Cannot Survive

When we think of Iraq, we think of the war and their potential of Oil Wealth. But then the Iraqis talk, all they talk about is water.

Like Egypt, Iraq was one of the most fertile lands in the world. The land between the Tigris and Euphrates and on both sides was the greatest farm land in the world for thousands of years. From this land was first the Garden of Eden, and later the Great Babylonian Empire. However for the same reason as Egypt these great farm lands have dried up and there is a huge water shortage throughout Iraq.

I first leaned about this when I walked in the waters of the Jordan where Christ was baptized. It was no longer a river but just a slow moving stream. The reason again is Dams. Not built by Iraq, but dams built up river from Iraq by Turkey, Iran and Syria on the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon rivers.

Even with Oil Iraq will not survive. See below a more detailed explanation of this.

Soros and Egypt

Globalist widget, Mohammed El Baradei is a trustee of the "International Crisis Group"  an "independent" non-profit group run by bankers to incite revolutions and profit from them. His fellow trustee is none other than the ubiquitous Rothschild’s front man, George Soros.

El Baradei, who recently resigned as Director of the Intl. Atomic Energy Agency, is being groomed by the Illuminati to replace Mubarak. (He and his agency won the 2005 Nobel Prize.) In April, he gave a speech at Harvard saying he was "looking for a job" and wanted to be "an agent of change and advocate for democracy" in Egypt. This is code for local boss in the NWO banker tyranny. (Barack Obama has taught us about "change.") 

In February, El Baradei was part of a new non-party political movement called the "National Association for Change" which included a leader of the banned Masonic Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim brotherhood is a proxy for Britain's MI-6 and started in England before World War I.

On Thursday El Baradei returned to Egypt.

A Lesson for America

Like Egypt and Iraq’s greatest wealth, water, America’s greatest wealth today is Oil and Gas. We have the largest deposits in the world and our government has not let us drill for it for over 40 years and now without a massive all out program to get this Oil and Gas out of the ground quickly, America will fail the minute this foreign oil is shut off. This is the unforeseen consequence of not drilling for 40 years.

Rick Salbato

Dams Destroy the Garden of Eden

BAGHDAD: From his mud brick home on the edge of the Garden of Eden, Awda Khasaf has twice seen his country’s lifeblood seep away. The waters that once spread from his doorstep across a 20% slab of Iraq known as the Marshlands first disappeared in 1991, when Saddam Hussein diverted them east to punish the rebellious Marsh Arabs. The wetlands have been crucial to Iraq since the earliest days of civilization -- sustaining the lives of up to half a million people who live in and around the area, while providing water for almost two million more.

The waters vanished after the First Gulf War due to a dictator’s wrath; over the next 16 years, they ebbed and flowed, but slowly started to return to their pre-Saddam levels. By 2007, with no more sabotage and average rains, almost 70% of the lost water had been recovered. Now it’s gone again. This time because of a crisis far more endemic: a devastating drought and the water policies of neighboring

Turkey, Iran, and Syria. These three nations have effectively stopped most of the headwaters of the three rivers -- the Tigris, Euphrates, and Karoon -- that feed these marshes.

Particular attention is now being paid to the biblical Book of Revelation, in which the Euphrates River drying up was prophesized as a harbinger for the end of the world. It is not doomsday yet in Iraq, but the water shortage here has not been worse for at least the last two centuries -- and possibly for several millennia more. Government estimates suggest close to two million Iraqis face severe drinking water shortages and extremely limited hydropower-generated electricity in a part of the country where most households get by on no more than eight hours of supplied power per day, in the best of times.

The flow of the Euphrates that reaches Iraq is down, according to scientific estimates, by 50% to 70% and falling further by the week.

Here, in the land between the two rivers that was once the heartland of ancient Mesopotamia, the water crisis has ravaged agriculture, an industry still struggling to regain its footing after three decades of deprivation and war. This was the second mooted site (the other was the Marshlands themselves) of the fabled Garden of Eden -- a land so rich in soil and water that it would quench the needs of its dwellers throughout eternity. It doesn’t look quite like that now. Crops of grain, barley, mint, and dates have failed almost en masse. Further west, in Anbar province, a prized rice variety that was once sold at a premium throughout Iraq and in the markets of neighboring countries has just been harvested. Like almost all other crops, this year’s yield is a disaster.

“We blame the Turks for this,” Lack of water for irrigation, especially in Anbar, is a key problem.

“The Scent of a Dying Ecosystem”

The snow melt feeds the Tigris system from the Zagros Mountains in the Kurdish north.

There are now seven dams on the adjoining Euphrates system, most in Turkey and Syria, with plans for at least one more. And then there are the rampant inefficiencies built into Iraq’s antiquated 8,000 miles of canals and drains, which send countless millions of gallons gushing into parts of the country that have little use for the water, and no means to harness it even if they did.

Ducks and geese sit listlessly on creek banks that have not been exposed in decades -- if ever -- to direct sunlight. Infestations of flies circle like Saturn’s rings around giant, steel barrels of drinking water, imported from the nearby city of Nasiriyah, that line village roads.

Earlier this fall, the major tributaries of the Euphrates were flowing at around 30% of their normal levels. “Look at that mark on the bank,” says Awda, pointing to a stain on a corrugated iron beam at the base of the bridge. Not long ago, he notes, this had been a high-water mark. The waterline is now at least nine feet lower. The pungent murk of the riverbed lingers in the air. “Take a deep breath,” says Awda. “That smell is the scent of a dying ecosystem.”

Two fishermen, who had launched themselves into what remained of the waterway in a bid to net carp, return to the banks with their haul -- 12 fish, none bigger than 10 inches. The catch is not enough to feed their families, let alone take to market. Two years ago, the fish were fat and bountiful.

A giant water buffalo, which once spent the best part of the summer immersed in the water, is now making do with what remains. He stands motionless, buried to the midriff in a festering, black mud. The caked soil cast offers at least some respite from the heat, but with the temperature expected to hover between 118 and 124 degrees Fahrenheit for the following week, he doesn’t have long left to wallow.

There is trouble, too, from Iran, whose government earlier this year ordered the diversion back into Iranian territory of a key tributary of the Tigris -- the Karoon River, which enters Iraq just north of the southern city of Basra. Until early this year, the Karoon had sent regularly a vital flush of freshwater down the Tigris and into the Shatt al-Arab waterway at the northwestern end of the Persian Gulf. The freshwater pushed back the tidal effect and allowed tens of thousands of Iraqis from the southern Marshlands to make their livelihood through fishing and farming. “There were 13 billion cubic meters of freshwater [annually] feeding into the Shatt al-Arab,” says Dr. Rashid. “Now that has gone. We have asked them to sit down and talk but they won’t even answer our requests.”

In late October 2009, Iraqi technicians finally met with their Iranian counterparts. “They were told about the effect on the people in the south who are exclusively Shias -- their people,” says Iraq’s foreign minister, Hoshyar Zebari. “They were very embarrassed by this and promised to look into it.” Today, the saltwater of the relentless tides around Basra is still winning the push-me, pull-you game and, like a rampaging army, has pushed farther north up the waterway than ever before. As a result, some 30,000 locals have left their land, some of which has now been heavily salinated, leaving it of marginal agricultural value at best.

Across Iraq, entire ecosystems are under threat. So far, redress from the Turks and the Syrians has consisted only of sympathetic words, followed by the occasional tweak of the tap.

The giant power station in the city of Nasiriyah was still using only two of its four turbines that are normally powered by the flow of the Euphrates. Nasiriyah was getting by on about six to eight hours of power a day -- roughly the same as the rest of the country.

Throughout the summer and fall, engineers at the power station were desperately hoping the river would not fall another eight inches, to a level that would have left Iraq’s fourth-largest city without any electricity whatsoever.

Both Turkey and Syria have been suffering from the same rainfall deficiency as Iraq.