Many of the various Middle East dictatorships have long been in the pockets of the US government, awash in aid to acquire the various truncheons and tear gas that they tried to use to keep the public in line. But as the Arab Spring has begun ousting regimes in places like Egypt, the revolutionaries are seeing the US trying to shift funding to various political groups, and are expressing concern that the lack of transparency in where US money goes could mean that freedom and US subsidies really might be mutually exclusive.