Let me tell you guys a [real life] story.

On December 16, 2010, a 26 year-old Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi needed a loan to buy fruit and vegetables to sell at market the following day.

[A thread. Stay with me]

As a result of a rise in food prices, Bouazizi, like many other street traders across North Africa, had no choice.

Bouazizi woke early the following day. He was at his usual spot at Sidi Bouzid market by 8:00 A.M., but by 10:30 A.M., according to eyewitness accounts,

local police began harassing him to move on, ostensibly because he did not have a vendor’s permit.

An argument ensued over money. Officials had extorted bribes from Mohamed in the past, but this time he refused.

As he stood his ground, Faida Hamdi, a 45year-old municipal officer, slapped him in the face.

She spat at Bouazizi and confiscated his electronic weighing scales.

Two unnamed men with Hamdi then overturned Bouazizi’s cart into the alleyway, his goods were confiscated.

He now had no means of making a living. Bouazizi—a quiet man who did bookkeeping & accounts for other traders—was enraged.

He asked to see the governor—Hamdi’s superior—but was ignored.

Bouazizi then left & bought a large container of paint thinner. On the pavement outside the governor of Sidi Bouzid’s office, he covered himself in thinner.

Onlookers gathered and took out their phones.

Bouazizi is alleged to have shouted, “How do you expect me to make a living?” He then set fire to himself with a match and a revolution began.

Days after Bouazizi set light to himself, a 1,000 strong funeral procession was forbidden by the Tunisian government from passing the place where he died, for fear of inspiring copycat acts.

But the “Arab Spring” had already begun.

The crowd chanted, “FAREWELL, MOHAMED, WE WILL AVENGE YOU!”

On social media, people were mobilizing.

The Arab Spring is often described as a “Twitter Revolution” but there were only 200 active Twitter accounts in Tunisia on the day Bouazizi committed suicide.

There were, however, 2 million @Facebook accounts, & it was the handful of @Twitter posts shared with these millions of Facebook users across North Africa that fueled the uprising.

One image in particular went viral; not of Bouazizi, but of a woman in a hijab holding her @BlackBerry aloft to film the growing mob.

The fact that Bouazizi’s act could be communicated was as important as the act itself.

In days, the Arab Spring had spread across the whole of North Africa, coming to topple governments like dominoes: first the Tunisian government of Ben Ali, then Mubarak in Egypt & Gaddafi in Libya, then Saleh in Yemen.

In Syria, Assad was challenged by pro-democracy rebels, erupting into a complex civil war that drew in Russia, the United States and Europe

Mohamed Bouazizi’s death sparked the most dramatic reconfiguration of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 [Google it] carved up the map of North Africa to create French, British and Russian “spheres of influence.”

The Arab Spring was portrayed in the West as a spontaneous outpouring of anger to bring freedom and democracy. But that was not how it started.

There was another factor at play.

A little-reported financial maneuver that could be traced to a handful of US companies with an enigmatic acronym: ABCD.

ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus are the biggest grain producers on earth, known by their initials, ABCD.

They collectively control 90% of the world’s wheat.

End.

[Deals That Made The World, Jacques Peretti.]