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.
..

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..

Egypt: Meanwhile, Not In Cairo..

Egypt: Unrest Spreads to Sinai Excerpts:

A Bedouin youth casually spreads out a piece of cloth before a police headquarters in Sheikh Zwayyed town in Sinai, the vast desert area to the east of Cairo across the Suez. "I will leave when Mubarak leaves," he says.

He joins hundreds of others. They have broken through into the police station already, and are now camping there to demand a change in government. Most youth are Bedouin, originally a nomadic tribe in the desert, who’ve been fighting for their rights for years. Over the last few days they feel they’re winning.

The police are rapidly leaving their posts, but some still appear in uniform. One uniformed policeman stands quietly to a side. He is in danger, he seems no danger to others at all. What would he do if attacked? "Just take my uniform off and join the protest," he tells IPS. "Or maybe just go over to the Palestinian side."
..
New groups have taken charge, and it’s hard to say who these are. Several check-posts have been set up all the way between Cairo and Sinai. "Who are you," says a man at one of these checkpoints. This IPS correspondent offers him his Palestinian passport. He glances at it, upside down, and pockets it. After some time he gives it back.

State security in plain clothes, riot police, secret police, the army, Bedouin youth, protesters who had come from Cairo to spread the word – no one seems to know who the people at these check-points are.
And:
The area appears to have drawn many powerful and armed groups that have converged to free their associates and relatives from the prisons. They look determined to succeed. Some of the men carry heavy weapons.

The groups mingle freely with local Bedouin youth. The deprivation across this area is greater than Cairo has ever known. And the anger seems greater too.

With the anger, Bedouin youth now present a face of triumph. "It is a revolution," one says simply.

This (national) event is still in escalation. The media has concentrated on Cairo and Alexandria, leaving outlying areas out of their coverage, unfactored into the national sentiment. This conflict has developed and bloomed in less than ten days, with no sign of conclusion. Of course, that could change abruptly, but events could continue to play out for weeks, possibly months. Cairo is the visual, but smaller but no less fervent protests are happening elsewhere, too..

The March has already started. Whatever happens, tonight will look much different than last night..