thanks for posting. I saw it on Al jazeera by accident. Amazing story. And lesson for future activists.

Glad you saw it too … it was great to see the behind the scenes, how they did it view.

Aloha, Siun…! Wow, Italy too…! I wonder if the Greeks will rise up again too…!

Maybe when the draconian cuts, that are being proposed, start biting we’ll see some action here…!

The sight of Arab women in the streets is powerful. It must make the Saudis nervous. Many wealthy Saudi women aren’t that thrilled with their status, and know how western women live, since they live that way on their trips to Paris. I wonder how they feel, seeing their sisters in the streets.

Although I had nothing to do with the events in Egypt, I am so proud of the people there. They went through tremendous hardship and won. Hats off to them.

Here’s the latest rumours swirling the internet Siun:

Sources: Mubarak falls into coma in Sharm al-Sheikh
http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/sources-mubarak-falls-coma-sharm-al-sheikh

True or not, makes you go hmmmmm.

We need to take some responsibility and take down our government who is supporting all these other oppressive governments who are doing it with arms provided by us to protect the “interests of the wealthy”, our oil, gas, or military bases.

And yet one more:

Recently-appointed Finance Minister Samir Radwan said there would be “no change” in the economic policies pursued by his ministry.

“But our priority is to meet the demands of the people,” he said.

“Our second priority is to honor our commitments to international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank,” he added.

http://www.almasryalyoum.com/en/news/new-finance-minister-no-change-egypts-economic-policies

Doesn’t sound much like there is going to be any economic change for the poor, unless this is yet another fake story.

That’s one way to avoid prosecution, eh?

Certainly would explain his stepping down, and the need for the military to take over rather than giving the protestors what they want.

It’s important to remember that Egypt is just at the beginning of their revolution. The hard work comes now … the organizers seem to have a very clear view of what they want and are watching carefully to see how to get it. There’s a call for a celebration march this coming Friday and clearly many discussions going on about next steps – including the formation of a coalition committee of the youth organizers who do expect representation in the developments to come.

And to avoid paying his bills since his assets have been frozen. I wonder if he will get calls from a collection agency?

I wonder if Ken Lay is with him.

Something to keep our eye on in Wisconsin.
The Gov. has said that he is not going to negotiate with the unions in the state. (Union busting at it’s best) but then he added that he has put the National Guard on alert for any unrest that takes place in regard to his stand.
This is going to be interesting.

I don’t know about that, Twain…

Mubarak family moved assets to Gulf weeks ago…

Mubarak’s Billions Beyond Reach of The Law…

“If we pay attention, maybe we will have a second chance, maybe we will find our voices and join them.”

Let us take heart from this thought.

AJ just reported we have 44 million in poverty. that is 1/7 of our people.

I’m sure the PTB are freaking out…the media certainly is…

I like it. With his new face and all.

I don’t see much happening from our youth today in the US. Complacency has yet to ferment into out right anger. I feel it will take years for the youth to see how much they are being led like sheep.

Not so fast. Yes, the people got rid of Mubarack that’s the easy part. Egypt has a massive corrupt bureaucracy and changing that is another story. I’ve watched in this country how change can easily be thwarted even reverse no matter what the people want and we have 200+ yrs. of trying. This Revolution is a very very long way from over, in fact the most important part is still ahead. Calling for a massive march online is one thing getting through the dead weight of decades of corruption is another. Habits, bad ones especially don’t just suddenly change in 3 weeks. Ask the Russians who ended up after 1917 in a deadly system for 74 yrs, one every bit as bad or worse then the Czarist system they overthrew. Look at our system 250 yrs after our so called Revolution. Were stuck right back in a Plutocracy. It’s time to sober up the forces of repression might have a slight bump on it’s head today from Tahair, but it’s naive to believe real change in Egypt is going to be this easy. The Military now rules Egypt not the street.

I have to reluctantly agree with you, but miracles can happen…the world is always changing; especially communication..

Ah, I think they know it very well … but also have no hope of the possibility of change. The youth I know well feel there is very little opportunity here to break through the control by the “old white guys” as one told me. Egypt provides an example of action possible – and what happens next provides important lessons for all of us.

iz our hippies learning ? :D

fabulous one page visualization of Egypt/Twitter/Inter mesh

startling in what jumps out

While right now may be “a slight bump” a lot was accomplished over the past few weeks (and past 3 years April 6 has been organizing). Three weeks ago, the idea that Mubarak would be forced out would have been rather laughable – today he is gone. Yes, the regime is not gone – but they are on notice in a way unimagined not so long ago. The youth of Egypt are well aware change is not easy – they’ve lost over 300 colleagues in the past few weeks.

Aside from specifics in governance in Egypt, the youth movement there has offered an stunning message of pride and potential to middle eastern youth in particular – and that’s valuable.

Yes, they have also shown themselves capable and willing to do something unimaginable (as yet) here: walk away from their jobs, in very large numbers.

My son all of 26years and his friends are finding themselves on the out’s as far as ownership in their local industry,commercial fishing. They find no way in as loans are far from their reach. Save those who have family who can come up with the funds to buy into an industry. They do their jobs and then withdraw. Voting and involvement are not going to happen. Some pockets of this country may find those ready to act but i think there is just not the anger yet to get the majority needed from their couches.

Egypt shows what might have happened had the young people who supported Obama used the internet to empower themselves instead of him.

The effort to elect Obama was not wasted – not at all. We now have two immensely valuable pieces of information that we did not have before. We now know that:

1. A decisive majority of the electorate wants progressive government.

2. Voting for the most progressive-sounding “mainstream” candidate within the existing political system will not by itself achieve such change.

If it hadn’t been for 2008 and the Obama administration, would it even occur to anyone to draw parallels between Egypt and the USA?

We need only recognize that losing a single election is not the same as losing the struggle, and that we cannot simply accept the existing political system as a given. The energies that drove 2008 are still there. They have merely been stunned into demoralization (which is not the same thing as apathy).

My fantasy is that the Egypt uprising is a model for revolution, that the participants had the vision, courage, and knowledge because Net-based tools enabled a global awareness of human rights and democratic freedom.
In Egypt and other Arabian/North African countries, things are so bad that the direction is clear.
Here, I’m not sure agreement could be found, and that might be the problem: articulating a clear, concise set of conditions/demands. What are we uprising against and for?
Assignment: define five to nine clear conditions for a local revolution.

That seems like an awfully good challenge for all of us – thanks!

To start:
1. End the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, all military home beyond small groups of advisers.
2. Public option for health care. Looks a lot like universal Medicare.
…and so on…
But you see, these are policies and programs. How does this become a revolution? Are Americans of sufficient numbers willing to camp on the mall and strike their jobs and block traffic in their cities and go to jail over and over…for enough weeks or months to bring about an end of the war? (Would I, at 59 and having given up public protest somewhere in 1970 about the same time I got my draft notice?)
Or does that get in the way of consumption of the Newest and Coolest Thing?
Makes my head ache to think how this actually happens around here.

Three weeks ago, the idea that Mubarak would be forced out would have been rather laughable – today he is gone. Yes, the regime is not gone – but they are on notice in a way unimagined not so long ago. The youth of Egypt are well aware change is not easy – they’ve lost over 300 colleagues in the past few weeks.

Thanks for pointing this out, Siun – the point cannot be made often enough. In North Africa they know perfectly well that getting rid of the top-level dictator is only the first step. The Tunisian Revolution is still underway well after the departure of Ben Ali, and the last I looked, it was still making progress. But that first step is a critically important one, and the key to all the others. Nietzsche, Daybreak (Morgenröte), aphorism 571:

Field-dispensary of the soul. – What is the strongest cure? – Victory.

It is one thing to recognize what I’ve called the “slalom” of attempts to sidetrack genuine change that these Jasmine Revolutions must negotiate in order to achieve their ultimate aims. It is quite another thing to say “Getting rid of the dictator is only the first step” with the intent to disparage or deny the significance of that first step. I’ve noticed that those who do this are often the same people who thought it unlikely that that step would ever be taken in the first place. They need to admit that they were wrong about that, and examine their assumptions to find the deep-seated flaws and fallacies that led them to misjudge the Jasmine Revolutions so badly. To me, and a few others at FDL, it was clear that the Tunisian Revolution – the first Jasmine Revolution – was a matter of supreme significance. Those who did not see that need to ask themselves why not. I think in many cases the answer involves deep-seated prejudice against revolution as such. It’s time for everyone to abandon that prejudice.

Sebastos,

Good points. Something has changed in our world – not everything but something so significant.

For a number of reasons, I don’t think the USA is ready for a revolution just yet (despite my enthusiasm for the Jasmine Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt):

1. We have a lot more to lose than they did. The rule of law is temporarily inoperative in this country, but at least we have a long history of reasonable, if imperfect, democracy. We need to try to restore the rule of law without revolution if we can (although we definitely need to make sure the PTB hear the message loud and clear, that there likely will be a revolution if they don’t give us our democracy back, and fast).

2. The Left and the military are worlds apart in the USA. I can’t see an American protest crowd chanting “The army and the people are one.” Serious attitude adjustment is needed on both sides. We really need to get past Kent State. The military needs to regard the shooting of protesters as unthinkable, and the Left needs to give up pacifism, and recognize that there is nothing wrong with being a soldier per se.

3. Most of us – myself included – are just waking up to the disappearance of the rule of law and of meaningful democracy in the USA. These are still controversial topics even on FDL. By contrast, the Egyptians had known for decades that Mubarak was a dictator, and that his “elections” failed the laugh test.

4. We’re not yet feeling as much economic pain – yet – as the Tunisians and Egyptians.

In my opinion, this is not the time to start a revolution in the USA. But it is the time to start talking and thinking seriously about the possibility that we might need to do that in the relatively near future.

Egypt is an inspiration for us, but not a model. We need to develop a model
suited to our peculiar problems, which are manifold and so deeply embedded in our system they are hard to ferret out. Rather than taking on the beast with mass demonstrations in Washington D.C. (led by an array of interest groups each with their own message and demands), we have to work in the microcosm on a local level, in each neighborhood, town by town, state by state, and we need to retool the Internet to help us do that.

The problem is, huge demonstrations like what we’ve seen in Egypt have mass appeal because they are so dramatic, but the long, hard slog to reclaim our democracy in the U.S. will take more endurance and toughness.

Ten Vital Steps To Restore The American Dream..­­.

1. Enact Fair Elections Now Act. $100.00 maximum donation

2. FCC mandate that all TV political advertisin­­­g is a public service and therefore free

3. Permanentl­­­y ban anyone who has served in federal office from becoming a lobbyist

4. Enact The Bipartisan Tax Fairness and Simplifica­­­tion Act of 2010 – Eliminate $1 trillion in tax giveaways. Change the top individual income tax bracket to 70% to help balance budget

5. Break up the big banks and strengthen the Volker Rule

6. End ALL wars and reduce the bloated defense budget

7. Reduce health care costs by adding the public option. Allow Medicare to purchase drugs. Allow drug re-importa­­­tion. The Medicare Independen­­­t Payment Advisory Board be given a broader mandate for cost control.

8. National Infrastruc­­­ture Bank – Run by engineers, not politician­­­s. Federal government invest $2 trillion over 10 years to create jobs now and increase productivi­­­ty later. Put millions back to work. Fund with millionair­­­e’s tax

9. Federal government invest 6% of GDP yearly on R & D to create quality jobs long term in areas like biotechnol­­­ogy, alternativ­­­e energy, IT, science, alternativ­­­e-fuel automobile­­­s, clean technology­, etc­­. Fund with 7% national sales (innovatio­n) tax

10. Raise educationa­­­l standards through a national core curriculum­­­. Advocate the firing of the bottom 10% of teachers nationwide and replace them with good teachers. Make higher education free to families that can’t afford it to encourage upward mobility. Fund with financial transactio­ns tax

How We Got To This Point In Our History…

A profitable US capitalism kept running ahead of labor supply. So, it kept raising wages to attract waves of immigration and to retain employees, across the 19th century until the 1970s.
Then everything changed. Real wages stopped rising, a…s US capitalists redirected their investments to produce and employ abroad, while replacing millions of workers in the US with computers. The US women’s liberation moved millions of US adult women to seek paid employment. US capitalism no longer faced a shortage of labor.

US employers took advantage of the changed situation: they stopped raising wages. When basic labor scarcity became labor excess, not only real wages, but eventually benefits, too, would stop rising. Over the last 30 years, the vast majority of US workers have, in fact, gotten poorer, when you sum up flat real wages, reduced benefits (pensions, medical insurance, etc), reduced public services and raised tax burdens. In economic terms, American “exceptionalism” began to die in the 1970s.

The rich, however, have got much richer since the 1970s, as every measure of US income and wealth inequality attests. The explanation is simple: while workers’ average real wages stayed flat, their productivity rose (the goods and services that an average hour’s labor provided to employers). More and better machines (including computers), better education, and harder and faster labor effort raised productivity since the 1970s. While workers delivered more and more value to employers, those employers paid workers no more. The employers reaped all the benefits of rising productivity: rising profits, rising salaries and bonuses to managers, rising dividends to shareholders, and rising payments to the professionals who serve employers (lawyers, architects, consultants, etc).

The richest 10-15% – those cashing in on employers’ good fortune from no longer-rising wages – helped bring on the 2008 financial crisis by speculating wildly and unsuccessfully in all sorts of new financial instruments (asset-backed securities, credit default swaps, etc). The richest also contributed to the crisis by using their money to shift US politics to the right, rendering government regulation and oversight inadequate to anticipate or moderate the crisis or even to react properly once it hit.

California’s austerity program parallels similar programs in many other states, in thousands of municipalities, and at the federal level (for example, social security). Together, they reinforce falling real wages, falling benefits, falling government services and rising taxes. In the US, capitalism has stopped “delivering the goods”, as it so long boasted. The reality of ever-deeper economic division clashes with expectations built up when wages rose over the century before the 1970s. US capitalism now brings long-term painful decline for its working class, the end of “American Exceptionalism” and rising social, cultural and political tensions.

We need another Depression to get real change!

The True Leader of Egypt’s Uprising! (Reclaiming the Soul of a Nation)…

“New disciplines seem to be emerging that are very different from our past understanding. The events in Egypt over the past weeks have demonstrated the discipline arising from a shared vision of direction in living. Orderly crowds freely allocated themselves to tasks under the direction of their shared focus and intention. Group leadership emerged as very a different dynamic to individual leadership. A New York Times article offered these observations:

“A dentist from Aswan… traveled 600 miles to be at the antigovernment protest. ‘I was expecting to find the Wafd were the leaders, or the Brotherhood were the leaders,’ he said, speaking of two of Egypt’s best-known opposition movements. But what he found was far better, he said. ‘There are no leaders at all.’ … The only real leaders seem to be the young people who have returned to the barricades, again and again, for days now. …‘We don’t need a leader,’ said one of them, Amira Magdy, 22. ‘This system is beautiful.’ …[and from others] ‘We want the young people to be the ones to form a negotiating committee.’ “ [Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar, 3 Feb.]

In response a commentator asks: “leaderless or leaderful? – a leaderless grassroots movement. Or rather leaderful, where everyone takes a shared leadership, shared responsibility role. And in a spontaneous, unplanned, organic way, no less, but rather through the mass consciousness enabled by Facebook, Twitter, and the like.”

From an old perspective based on more familiar models of authority patterns, the crowds seemed leaderless. Yet order and direction emerged spontaneously from the group as a whole. Perhaps there is something so new emerging that our eyes are not yet attuned to see it. We are told that a mystery is only what the mechanism of perception is not yet able to register. And these disciples of the new discipline are helping us all to tune our perception.

Past approaches have been learned from the lessons of pain and sorrow. These methods are still being practised but their dynamic is slowing while something new is emerging through human hearts and into human consciousness. Rather than driven by fear we are being drawn by a vision – shared so immediately with our increasing sensitivity to one another and supported by the emerging technologies, always just in step with, and in the vanguard of, human potential unfolding. The Tibetan Master speaks of this new Discipline:

“Have you ever thought, my brother, that just as there is a discipline of pain and of sorrow, there may also be a discipline of joy and of achievement? This is a thought worthy of attention. Men need these days to learn this new truth, and its perception will greatly change human consciousness. That which is bliss is today here or on its way, and the disciples and aspirants of this present time must be taught how to recognise and implement it.” [Discipleship in the New Age II, page 671]

New laws also are emerging from humanity’s unfolding new vision – such as the laws pertaining to the freedom of the One Life we share. We begin to realise that: “…A law is only an expression or manifestation of force, applied under the power of thought by a thinker or group of thinkers.” [Esoteric Psychology II page 193].”

Sydney Goodwill Newsletter: http://www.sydneygoodwill.org.au

“A dentist from Aswan… traveled 600 miles to be at the antigovernment protest. ‘I was expecting to find the Wafd were the leaders, or the Brotherhood were the leaders,’ he said, speaking of two of Egypt’s best-known opposition movements. But what he found was far better, he said. ‘There are no leaders at all.’ … The only real leaders seem to be the young people who have returned to the barricades, again and again, for days now. …‘We don’t need a leader,’ said one of them, Amira Magdy, 22. ‘This system is beautiful.’ …[and from others] ‘We want the young people to be the ones to form a negotiating committee.’ “ [Kareem Fahim and Mona El-Naggar, 3 Feb.]

In response a commentator asks: “leaderless or leaderful? – a leaderless grassroots movement. Or rather leaderful, where everyone takes a shared leadership, shared responsibility role. And in a spontaneous, unplanned, organic way, no less, but rather through the mass consciousness enabled by Facebook, Twitter, and the like.”

The “leaderful” group is a new phenomenon in human history and it is quintessentially Aquarian, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts and its individual parts exhibit non-locality through instant communication with their thoughts and feelings flowing seamlessly from one to another aided in part by twittering on the internet. There is no single leader of the group; rather, everyone is plugged in, engaged, assuming responsibility for the survival and betterment of the whole, and acting as a co-leader.

This is the true dawning of the Age of Aquarius and Aquarius is ruled by Uranus, the planet that metaphorically represents Prometheus, the mythological figure who stole fire from the Gods and gave it to humans transforming their lives for the better. Prometheus lives and breathes revolutionary change. He breaks the chains that binds us and liberates us from self-destructive limiting thoughts and behavior.

The force for change is growing stronger day by day and nothing can stand in its way; not Obama, the ridiculously corrupted government over which he presides, or the military. All of them and their neoliberal and neoconservative bullshit ideas are about to be swept away and consigned as dim and empty memories in the Failed file in the moldering basement of the Museum of History.

Que todos se vayan.

We Shall overcome.

The difference now, seaglass, is that the vulnerability of all oppressive regimes is their economic imperative. In order for them to exist, they rely on business as usual. Once that is disrupted, they will have to negotiate to survive. That has been clearly demonstrated by the populace in Egypt, who have really put flesh onto the wikileaks phenomena by using a different model for organized protest which we can certainly build on as Siun says.

I was struck by this morning’s account that although the Egyptian regime at first shut off the internet, they couldn’t keep that up because they too depend upon it. That is the strength of the movement. That is why it can be successful without vulnerable leadership that can be imprisoned or disappeared. We are all Spartacus now.

You miss the obvious fact that in order to remain with the status quo, the oligarchy has to expand into everyone’s life and livelihood, and that is happening at a faster and faster pace. The world next month will look different from the world this month, and you can bet that once poor elderly folk cannot keep themselves warm in the wintertime and they start making inroads on social security, there will be old folk out on the streets demonstrating as well.

Here in New Mexico supplies of heat were shut off to northern areas for one of the coldest weeks – you think the young people up there just kept on playing their video games happily at subzero temperatures?

Egypt had had enough. They demonstrated their proud humanity, and we shall also. By using the very tool that the wall street magnates use so effectively to shift their megamillions around.

The internet.

Well said!!!