BS: Bahrain's Arab Spring

Subject: BS: Bahrain's Arab Spring
From: EBarnacle
Date: 28 May 11 - 11:52 AM

Like many others of you, I have been following the unrest in Bahrain, as well as the rest of the popular actions. In Bahrain, though, it seems that the conservatives have a different motive for suppressing dissent. Apparently, they are trying to break down the royal family's efforts to modernize the country, now that the oil has essentially stopped flowing. I had this insight when reading "Hot, Flat and Crowded" by Thomas Fiedman. Further research on line confirmed my thought.

Here's the quote that started me off, from page:

"As I follwed events in the Persian gulf during the past few years, I also noticed that the first Gulf state to hold a free and fair parliamentary election, in which women could run and vote, was Bahrain, the tiny island state off the East coast of Saudi Arabia. Bahrain was also the first Gulf state to hire McKinsey & Company to design an overhaul of its labor laws to make its people more productive, more employable, and less dependent on imported lbor, and the first Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States. Bahrain's king and his advisers minced no words about the objective: to break the culture of dependency on the oil welfare state that had dominated their economy since independence in 1971, to link wage increases to increases in productivity, and to put an end to the practice of starting a manufacturing business by importing 500 low-wage workers from India or Bangladesh--which meant that a Bahraini factory wa supporting the owner's family very well, along with the familiess of 500 hundred workers from South Asia, but not supporting any Bahraini workers or their families. Bahrain, which is a constitutional monarchy with a kin and an elected parliament, also overhauled its education system, creating a program to retrain al its teachers and establishing a new system of polytechnics to impart vocational skills to young Bahrainis who might not want to go to college. Bahrain also opened itself more than ever to foreign direct investment from abroad and privatization of state-supported industries at home in order to stimulate real competition between firms within Bahrain--and elsewhere in the Gulf, which usually consists of two government-financed companies supposedly competing with each other."

I know it's a long quote but it shows a different side of what is going on there.

Subject: RE: BS: Bahrain's Arab Spring
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 May 11 - 06:02 PM

I can see why Certain Elements would like to stop that.