Moody’s downgrades Egypt’s bond ratings

Funny how quick they are to do that with sovereign states but not with crap CDOs.

Sharif Kouddous, who has been tweeting from Cairo, is scheduled to be on Democracy now this morning.

The Obama administration is going to have to decide if it’s going to be on the right side of history or if it will perpetuate the toxic legacy of our government propping up dictators and authoritarians based solely on our interests, like outsourcing torture to Egypt post-9/11.
http://www.sunstateactivist.org

Good Morning…Wonderful letter from the Professional left; thanks for that information. Collection of both schools and names is fascinating….

listening now :D

Good morning. Cloudless sky this morning in eastern PA. Nothing to be seen above except blue sky and scores if not hundreds of chemtrails and several high-altitude planes making new ones. Is this of any concern to anyone? What is the objective?

I sent yet another email to Obama telling him to firmly and publicly get Mubarek to step down. Especially in light of the alarming announcements about him appointing his top 3 ministers from the security apparatus and 6 reporters from Al Jazeera being arrested.

Mornin’, BT, pups

Another fine day for revolution.

Morning pups. It`s the end of January, and we still haven’t gotten the Wikileaks B of A stuff. I wonder where it’s hiding.

Morning BT & Pups of Fire:

Hedges weighs in…

An Egyptian “march of millions” on Tuesday into the Tahrir, or Liberation, Square, would be impossible for the army to ignore

but setting the bar so high risks an easy dismissal of a large march of a couple hundred thousand.

But then that is why I do not get involved in planning revolutions.

As always, an interesting week ahead.

Assange made mention of it in the 60 Minutes interview but provided no specifics. Is he using it as leverage in his legal struggle?

One of those nagging professional lefters is speaking now on Democracy Now: Professor Sameer Saheta of Georgetown U.

Sharif was so moving talking about his uncle in Tahrir Square. His uncle has been protesting alone for years. Worth listening to later if you didn’t get to hear it live.

An Egyptian blogger is saying that the police have been deployed to protect the high end neighborhoods while in the working class neighborhoods they are absent and the residents are saying if they see a policeman they will cut him to pieces. Some factories in the provinces have been taken over by the workers.

That sounds just like what would happen in the U.S. …except the cutting to pieces and taking over factories parts.

I was wondering about that also – BofA is not even in the backwash of this weekend’s Bear Steans/JPMorgan mortgage revelations.

Krugman notes that the bankers want higher interest rates, but if all we are doing is giving them reserves at near zero borrowing rates which they then turn around and lend us at the prevailing rate, all higher interest rates will do is raise the bank profits with no change in economic activity. Indeed it makes a stupid banker’s “circle of life” even more stupid.

Samer Shehata is how his name is spelled in English. Sorry.

Yep.

From MSNBC twitter feed: “6 Al Jazeera journalists arrested in Cairo have been released but their camera equipment remains seized – Al Jazeera”

Al Jazeera just said the same thing.

continuing with audio-only dispatches per twitter

Concrete barriers being erected around Tahrir Square. Mubarak’s forces are gonna try to stop the revolution in the next couple days.

Good morning all.

Hedges is his usual insightful self.

The failure of the United States to halt the slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by Israel has consequences.

Mubarak CAN stop this, IF he can keep the army and is willing to pay the price. It was 10 years before China started to escape the results of Tianamin (sp) square and now nobody mentions it to them.

I think Mubarak will try to crush this rather than retreat. Especially if ObamaLLP is telling them behind the scenes it won’t hurt their foreign aid. And they might well be saying that: When the GOPers all scream “Eeek! Moslems” ObamaLLP’s response has always been to go with the flow.

Boxturtle (Do we take him in if the Saudi’s refuse?)

The cameramen should consider themselves lucky that no US Apache helicopters are around.

I think Mubarak will try to crush this rather than retreat.

I agree but don’t think he’ll be successful.

Good morning to a new week of high anticipation.

Off to swim in the great capitalist cesspool.

US KIA Afghanistan: 1,467

US KIA Irak: 4,436

Iraki, Afghan and Pakistani casualties: estimates vary to over 1.5M

US MBS 2011: 3,720 and counting

Stupid’s Song and Stupid’s Pledge

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things

Namasté

Tony Blair’s opinion is that whatever happens should be orderly and gives the example of how the Israelis and Palestinians have moved forward. When I heard him say that I was furious. The Israelis have been treating the Palestinians like dogs and trying to kill them, exclude them, isolate them, starve them, imprison them in Gaza, shoot their rescue ships’ passengers. Mr. Blair, what is ‘orderly’ about that???? Why do they keep interviewing that war criminal, anyway??

Mubarak is going to figure out that promises of reform and job generation doesn’t mean anything. He’s not actually taking advice from our president is he?

Agreed. Tony Blair deserves to sit in the same cage with Dick Cheney.

If he keeps the army, he wins. But I think the reason he hasn’t already moved to crush is that he’s not confident the army will stay with him if he orders them to open fire.

I don’t think anybody is really talking to Mubarak anymore. They’re speaking to the army leaders.

Boxturtle (Except for ObamaLLP, who is speaking with Israel)

Beginning to look that way.

The concrete barriers are surrounding the Radio and TV Building and a couple of other buildings. Where are the concrete barriers to protect the museums?

I fear the worst from Mubarek.

It’s what the Israeli lobby in Washington wants, and it always gets its way.

Until they don’t.

Israeli street is quite divided. I keep thinking that’s one of the overlooked stories in all of this, but don’t know enough about it to say anything intelligent.

The street may be divided, but the zionist faction somehow always manages to get the upper hand. If some of the victims happen to be persons on the other side of the Israeli street, the zionist faction could not care less.

Here’s a good source to follow that action.

Iraq and Egypt. Two of the oldest former empires on earth. For domestic political reasons Bush ‘the decidor’ chose to invade Iraq to rid the world of a right wing fascist dictator. On the other hand Bush chose to scold Mubarak, another fascist right wing dictaor, for brutalizing his people and then sent him $24 billion dollars to help him torture them. WTF? Abu Mazen is too corrupt to contine on in a leadership role.

Only difference is that Iraq has something of value to steal. Egypt, not so much.

Egypt will deliver the levers of power now controlled by the international oligarchy to the Arab Street. As Egypt goes, so goes the Muslim World.

The PA’s Abu Mazen does have an interesting past – wrote a thesis that claimed (since recanted) that the 6 million names of Jews dead from the Holocaust are in error and only 890,000 died in the Holocaust, and those died because other Jews (zionists) got the Nazi’s to do their bidding Ones past that is recanted is ignored of course – but is still interesting. But is the recanting that which makes him “corrupt”, or is it the near standard Fatah corruption (the lack of standard corruption in Hamas was the one thing that made me like them – I hoped Hamas’s proclaimed clean government approach would change Fatah’s attitude toward corruption, but then Hamas got into favoritism, and refused to drop the drive Jews into the sea goal, so I gave up on picking heros – indeed the time I spent in the area left me less sure of just about everyone’s goals and everything’s implications).

6 million Jews died in WWII. Many of them Russian and Polish Jews. (And we can discuss the reason for Hitler’s compulsion for killing Russian Jews and Polish Jews in large numbers if you’d care to.) How many ‘other’ Jews were executed by the Nazis is an unknown unknown. As few as 890,000? That would be a guess even given the documents which do exist on the subject. Some say the “Holocuast’ (gas chambers and ovens used to systematically annilate a group of people, in this case the Jews, didn’t begin until as late as January of 1944. Mazen has sold his soul for the bucks. Hamas can only exist if it does so in a state of grace, ie the call for the elimnation of the Zionist State. That does not equate to the elimination of the State of Israel per se.

True as to all you post – but State of Israel after Hamas is an Islamist State, Sharia Law, that allows minority Jews but only under “Sharia rules” – effectively the end of a Jewish state called Israel.

But the above – as in what would be the “Sharia rules applied to Jews” – was never clear to me and indeed seemed to change from person to person and month to month.

And like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas has become less visibly threatening over the last few years – and I don’t know what that means.

I am reduced to – in all these events – to hoping “no one gets hurt and some good comes out of it” – and that is about all I can add to any conversation.

Surprised that the University of Michigan’s Juan Cole’s name wasn’t on the list of scholars trying to “nudge” Obama, unless I just missed it.

Agree. That is a great letter. I look forward to more signatures being added.

BT thanks for the link.

That was the first link I clicked, and I had a similar reaction.

Maybe, like with Vietnam, “protest” will begin at the universities. [Now if we can just get them to shift their focus to what a failure Obama is in general . . .]

I also looked for Cole’s name and didn’t find it. I also didn’t see anyone from Berkeley or Columbia, and only one from UCLA. There were several other schools not represented, but they are small potatoes in ME history studies.

It would be good to hear a lot more about the situation in Suez and other factory centers, where I have read mention of worker takeovers but also references to the high price paid by protestors.

The general strike call referred to in the BBC story with no details is probably the one from a new independent labor formation announcing itself here. If anyone sees a follow-up with a date, it would be good to post here.

Here’s hoping that the new workers’ group are really are able to co-ordinate with enough rank and file to make this go. Could be a real ticking clock for those negotiating Mubarak’s exit.