Egypt Update: February 10, 2011

The People aren't intimidated: The Protests are getting larger..

The demonstrators are pissed about Mubarak and family's 70 billion dollar fortune and workers country wide are going Norma Rae in response, and the Really Poor started burning stuff. Excerpts:

Strikes erupted in a breadth of sectors _ among railway and bus workers, state electricity staff and service technicians at the Suez Canal, in factories manufacturing textiles, steel and beverages and at least one hospital.

In one of the flashpoints of unrest Wednesday, some 8,000 protesters, mainly farmers, set barricades of flaming palm trees in the southern province of Assiut. They blocked the main highway and railway to Cairo to complain of bread shortages. They then drove off the governor by pelting his van with stones.

Hundreds of slum dwellers in the Suez Canal city of Port Said set fire to part of the governor's headquarters in anger over lack of housing.
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Egyptians have been infuriated by newspaper reports that the Mubarak family has amassed billions, and perhaps tens of billions of dollars in wealth while, according to the World Bank, about 40 percent of the country's 80 million people live below or near the poverty line of $2 a day. The family's true net worth is not known.

And yet, The Regime refuses to budge.. That will only work against them, later..

The Obama administration's response sucks, as it seems to be returning to how the U.S. normally deals with the fall of a dictatorship: Replace it with another. No Change, there.. Really disappointing excerpts:

After a good start, the Obama administration's response to the democratic revolution in Egypt has begun to exude the odor of betrayal. Now distancing itself from the essential demand of the protesters that the dictator must go, the administration has fallen back on the sordid option of backing a new and improved dictatorship. Predictably, it is one guided by a local strongman long entrusted by the CIA, Vice President Omar Suleiman, described by U.S. officials in the WikiLeaks cables as a "Mubarak consigliere." The script is out of an all-too-familiar playbook: Pick this longtime chief of Egyptian intelligence who has consistently done our bidding in matters of torture and retrofit him as a modern democratic leader. But this time the Egyptian street will not meekly go along.

Anyone else perplexed that the new hero of Egypt is a Google executive?



Not too much follow up on this one, but I'm guessing it has something to do with Egypt or the Middle East..