Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[AlicetheKurious]

After 50-year hiatus, Egypt's first independent labor union is born
Jano Charbel
Thu, 03/03/2011 - 10:38



The Preparatory Conference for the Egyptian Federation of Independent Unions held on Wednesday marks thebirth of Egypt's first independent trade union federation since 1957.

Several hundred workers, professionals and labor activists from across the country cheered what they anticipated would amount to impending death for the state-run Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF). For more than five decades, the ETUF has acted as the only federation of its kind allowed by law. ETUF President Hussein Megawer, along with other federation officials, has undergone investigation on charges of administrative corruption and union fund mismanagement following the ouster of former President Hosni Mubarak.

The new union falls within a larger context of political restructuring and the creation of new political parties following the 18-day uprising that began on 25 January. Workers and employees are capitalizing on the momentum by restoring their right to unionize and staging protests to demand long-ignored rights.

The ETUF claims a nationwide membership of over 4 million workers, most of whom are employed in the public sector. Owing to allegations of corruption, mismanagement, and misrepresentation, however, the state-controlled federation's is declining and the organization is on its way to becoming obsolete. Indirect elections had handed members of Mubarak's ruling party the presidencies of 22 out of 24 general unions within the ETUF.

Labor-leader Kamal Abu Eita declared the official inauguration of the independent federation, and added "from here we announce the downfall of the yellow Egyptian Trade Union Federation!" In response, a crowd of workers chanted "Oh Megawer, go away! Go away! Let unions see the light of day."

The formation of the independent federation was initially announced on 30 January, but its structure, membership mechanisms, electoral guidelines and bylaws are still being formulated. The Egyptian Federation of Independent Unions currently includes: the Real Estate Tax Authority Employees' Union, the Egyptian Health Technologists' Syndicate, Federation of Pensioners, and the Independent Teachers' Syndicate, all of which were established in the last two years.

Elsewhere across the country, an untold number of workers are organizing their own independent associations--leagues, unions, syndicates and federations--outside the framework of the ETUF.

Other workers have announced they will be joining the ranks of the new independent federation. These include tens of thousands from the Mahalla Textile Company, the Public Transport Authority (bus drivers, conductors, mechanics, engineers and employees across Cairo), national postal workers, the Helwan Iron and Steel Complex, and the industrial workers in the town of Naga' Hamadi.

Thousands in private sector enterprises, including industrial workers from the cities of Tenth of Ramadan and Sadat, have also expressed their intention to unionize and join the Egyptian Federation of Independent Unions.

"We have some 5,000 factories in the Tenth of Ramadan City, yet only 13 of these have unions,” lamented a worker-delegate who attended the conference.

Nearly all the worker-delegates who spoke at the conference expressed their support for the 25 January revolution and democratic demands. Speakers also mentioned that workers' protests and strikes assisted in ousting Mubarak, and that such actions must be allowed to continue as part of the ongoing fight for democracy.

Salah Abdel Salam, President of the Real Estate Tax Authority Employees' (Branch) Union in the Daqahliya Governorate, emphasized that the ETUF, along with Egypt's labor and trade union laws "denied us the right to strike or protest… or to establish our own independent unions." Abdel Salam added that independent unionization will help realize a new minimum wage law of LE1200 per month (US$215) and safeguard the right to peaceful strikes and protests.

Abu Eita explained to workers, "All that you need in order to unionize is to collect notarized signatures from your co-workers and submit them, along with documents pertaining to the establishment of your union, to the Ministry of Labor. You don't have to ask, or wait, for the approval of Megawer's federation to establish an independent union in your workplace."

In the lobby outside the conference hall, a labor lawyer addressed dozens of workers. “Since the Constitution and the legislation of the old regime are suspended,” he said, “we are entitled to organize ourselves in line with conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) which Egypt has ratified." His voice grew louder. "We are entitled to organize ourselves on the levels of workshops, factories and companies across the country; and on the basis of our industries, neighborhoods, towns, cities and governorates,” he added.

The lawyer was referring specifically to ILO conventions concerning “Freedom of Association & Protection of Right to Organize” (No. 87) and the “Right to Organize & Collective Bargaining” (No. 98). Though Egypt ratified the conventions in 1957 and 1954, respectively, it has failed to uphold them. Link

[AlicetheKurious]

How Palestine's uprising inspired Egypt's
Hossam el-Hamalawy, The Electronic Intifada, 2 March 2011


An Egyptian flag hangs on a lightpost marked "Free Palestine" in Cairo's Tahrir Square during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak. (Matthew Cassel)

In the 1990s, one could only whisper Hosni Mubarak's name. Political talk or jokes were avoided in phone calls. This year, millions of Egyptians fought for 18 days against their aging tyrant, braving the police troops firing teargas, rubber bullets and live ammunition. People in Egypt have lost their fear, but it did not happen overnight. The Egyptian revolution, rather than coming out of the blue on 25 January 2011, is a result of a process that has been brewing over the previous decade -- a chain reaction to the autumn 2000 protests in solidarity with the Palestinian intifada.

Mubarak's iron-fist rule and the outbreak of the dirty war between the regime and Islamist militants in the 1990s meant the death of street dissent. Public gatherings and street protests were banned and if they did take place, confronted by force. Live ammunition was used on strikers. Trade unions were put under government control.

Only after the Palestinian intifada broke out in September 2000 did tens of thousands of Egyptians take to the streets in protest -- probably for the first time since 1977. Although those demonstrations were in solidarity with the Palestinians, they soon gained an anti-regime dimension, and police showed up to quell the peaceful protests. The president, however, remained a taboo subject, and I rarely heard anti-Mubarak chants.

I recall the first time I heard protesters en masse chanting against the president in April 2002, during the pro-Palestinian riots around Cairo University. Battling the notorious central security forces, protesters were chanting in Arabic: "Hosni Mubarak is just like [Ariel] Sharon."

The anger was to explode on an even larger scale with the outbreak of the war on Iraq in March 2003. More than 30,000 Egyptians fought the police in downtown Cairo, briefly taking over Tahrir Square, and burning down Mubarak's billboard.

The scenes aired by Al Jazeera and other satellite networks of the Palestinian revolt or the US-led onslaught on Iraq inspired activists across Egypt to pull down the wall of fear brick by brick. It was in 2004 that pro-Palestinian and anti-war campaigners launched the Kefaya movement, which took on the president and his family.

Though it failed to create a mass following among the working class and the urban poor, Kefaya's use of both social and mainstream media helped shift the political culture in the country. Millions of Egyptians, while sitting at home, could watch those daring young activists in downtown Cairo mocking the president, raising banners with slogans that were unimaginable a decade before.

In December 2006, workers at the biggest textile mill in the Middle East, located in the Nile delta town of Mahala, went on strike. The action followed two decades of a lull in the industrial struggle, caused by repression and by an aggressive neoliberal program that had the blessing of the IMF and the World Bank. Following their victory, which received widespread media coverage, a wave of strikes engulfed the textile sector, with workers in other mills demanding the same gains as those of Mahala. The industrial militancy was soon to spill over into other sectors of the economy. Images of the strikes, aired via both social and mainstream media, meant millions of workers could gradually overcome their fears, and organize protests inspired by news of victories of strikes in other sectors. As a journalist covering the strike wave in 2007, I frequently heard from strikers: "We were encouraged to move after we heard of Mahala."

Though scoffed at by some as only economic, the strike wave was political in essence. In April 2008, a mini revolt took place in the city of Mahala over the price of bread. Security forces put down the uprising in two days, leaving at least three dead and hundreds detained and tortured. The scenes from what became known as the "Mahala intifada" could have constituted a dress rehearsal for what happened in 2011, with protesters taking down Mubarak's posters, battling the police troops in the streets, and challenging the symbols of the much-hated National Democratic party. Soon after, a similar revolt took place in the city of al-Borollos, north of the Nile delta.

Though these uprisings were quelled, the country continued to witness almost on a daily basis strikes and sit-ins by workers, and smaller demonstrations by activists in downtown Cairo and the provinces. Protesting workers in the spring and winter of 2010 occupied the area around parliament, in what local columnists described as a "Cairo Hyde Park."

Those daily economic and political struggles against the state meant the legitimacy of Mubarak's regime was rapidly eroding, if it ever really existed.

By October 2010, there was definitely something in the air. It became normal to bump into a strike here or there while heading to work. Civil servants heading home from the office would pass by activists holding small protests in downtown Cairo. They looked, and very occasionally reacted. But they were witnessing visual displays of daily dissent.

Tunisia then went through its own revolt, overthrew a tyrant, and, more importantly, the revolution was televised to millions of viewers in Egypt and elsewhere, largely via Al Jazeera again. This was only one of many catalysts -- daily incidents of police brutality provided many others.

The uprising that started on 25 January 2011 was the result of a long process in which the wall of fear fell, bit by bit. The key to it all was that the actions on the ground were visually transmitted to the widest possible audience. Nothing aids the erosion of one's fear more than knowing there are others, somewhere else, who share the same desire for liberation -- and have started taking action.

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist from Cairo. He blogs at arabawy.org. This article originally appeared in the Guardian's Comment Is Free and is republished with permission. Link

[Stephen Morgan]

[b]After 50-year hiatus, Egypt's first independent labor union is born

[JackRiddler]

...the logic could be that it was not neoliberalism that ruined Mubarak’s Egypt, but the faulty application of neoliberalism.

"The Egyptian revolution should be taken as an opportunity by the U.S. and other major aid donors to require, as a condition of continued aid, the additional economic reforms necessary for Egypt to grow at a 7 to 10 percent annual rate."

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12833

They would say the same thing if the nice Jesus came back,
with unlimited rains of manna for all on demand,
and the world broke out into a love-thy-neighbor orgy.
They would say the same thing, in their final publication,
if watching TV coverage of Mars plunging into the Earth.
They would say the same thing if you were sticking
a Crocodile Dundee knife
between their sixth and seventh ribs,
and expire.

(EDIT: Sorry. Decided that looked better as a poem.)

.

[AlicetheKurious]

Turkish President Abdullah Gul came to Egypt and held intensive meetings this morning in the Turkish Embassy with 20 youth representatives of leading groups in the Egyptian Revolution, with the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and with Arab League Sec-Gen Amr Moussa.

Gul told the revolutionaries that he identified with them and admired what they had accomplished and that he, too, had once struggled for freedom in his country and had been imprisoned for it.

He indicated that the Mubarak regime had discouraged a closer relationship between Turkey and Egypt but that Turkey is very interested in promoting bilateral trade and in providing economic and other types of assistance to Egypt, in expanding bilateral educational, professional and business ties, and he proposed to eliminate visa requirements between the two countries.

The revolutionaries welcomed President Gul's overtures and later said in an interview with the new Al Jazeera Direct Egypt satellite channel that in their view, the Mubarak regime's over-emphasis on relations with the West had cost Egypt dearly in terms of regional influence and prestige and that they looked forward to a more rational foreign policy under the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, whoever it is.

They also said that Egypt's new prime minister, Essam Sharaf, was one of three names submitted by the revolutionaries to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces as their choice to head the new government.

They've also proposed other names to fill the new Cabinet positions and explained that they intend to keep up the popular presence in Tahrir Square in order to counter any pressure by "internal or external powers" on Prime Minister Sharaf related to his choice of ministers.

Of course, there's still a LOT of work to be done, on so many levels.

But maybe I'll have another glass of that nice champagne...

[tazmic]

Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera 'Real News,' Criticizes U.S. Media (VIDEO)

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/hillary-clinton-calls-al-_n_830890.html

[WakeUpAndLive]

Great news Alice, I wish for the best to all Egyptians, you and your fellow Egyptians have done a great job of establishing the rights of it's people. I am in admiration of the determination that has been shown, it is awesome to witness.

[JackRiddler]

Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera 'Real News,' Criticizes U.S. Media (VIDEO)

"Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/03/hillary-clinton-calls-al-_n_830890.html

When she's right, she's right.

Out of context it sounds like one thing, in context like another.

From http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn03042011.html

Weekend Edition
March 4 - 6, 2011
CounterPunch Diary

Hillary Clinton: "We're Losing the War"


By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

None other than the US Secretary of State herself, Hillary Clinton, paid fulsome tribute to Al Jazeera last Wednesday, March 2. Appearing before a US Foreign Policy Priorities committee, she was asked by Senator Richard Lugar to impart her views on how well the US was promoting its message across the world.

Clinton promptly volunteered that America is in an "information war and we are losing the war," and furthermore, that "Al Jazeera is winning".

"Let’s talk straight realpolitik," Clinton went on. "We are in a huge competition" for global influence and global markets. China and Russia have started multi-language television networks, even as the US cuts back in this area. "We are paying a big price" for dismantling international communications networks after the end of the Cold War. "Our private media cannot fill that gap."

As noted here across the past couple of weeks, there’s been a flourishing little internet industry claiming that the overthrow of Mubarak came courtesy of US Twitter-Facebook Command. The New York Times runs numerous articles about the role of Twitter and Facebook while simultaneously ignoring or reviling Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.

Of course, in any discussion of the role of the internet in fuelling the upsurges across the Middle East, WikiLeaks should be given major credit. But WikiLeaks, along with Twitter and Facebook, all pale into insignificance next to the role of Al Jazeera,

Millions of Arabs can’t tweet. Facebook is unfamiliar to them. But most watch TV, which means they all watch Al Jazeera. And of course it was Al Jazeera which detonated the IED exploding under the Palestinian Authority, namely the cache of documents known as the Palestine Papers.

There were huge ironies in Clinton’s confession to Senator Lugar and his colleagues. In the late 1970s, radicals in the United Nations were eagerly promoting the need for a 'New World Information Order' (NWIO) to counter the lock on world communications and hence propaganda by the advanced industrial countries, preeminently the United States.

Ronald Reagan, campaigning for the presidency in the late 1970s, issued almost daily denunciations of the prospective NWIO, making it sound like a particularly sinister arm of the international communist conspiracy. Battered by this assault, the UN abandoned the NWIO and instead went into the Global Warming business, investing heavily in the IPCC as a way of restoring UN heft worldwide. Information-wise, the world tuned into Ted Turner's CNN, founded in 1980, which swiftly became precisely the US worldwide propaganda vehicle the Third World countries had been complaining about in the UN.

Enter the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khaifa, founding patron and financier of Al Jazeera, in 1996. CounterPuncher Afshin Rattansi, ex-BBC, was the first English-language journalist to work at the TV network. It was an immensely significant moment in the history of the Middle East. Its power has long been tacitly acknowledged by the US government which has pressured US cable companies not to carry it.

In the early days of the rebellion in Egypt, US TV viewers had the somewhat surreal experience of seeing Al Jazeera being broadcast on one of the two sets in Obama’s office, though Al Jazeera English is blacked out to cable viewers in the US, with the exception of those in Toledo, Ohio; Burlington, Vermont and Washington DC. (This did not prevent both Obama and Mrs Clinton from decrying censorship in Iran.)

Poor Mrs Clinton. She envisages a vast imperial communications network disseminating sophisticated propaganda for the American way. She hints that it should be financed out of public funds, a ramped up version of Voice of America, devotedly followed by audiences behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago. The propaganda model is the “Mighty Wurlitzer”, as the propaganda apparatus commanded by the CIA’s Frank Wisner Sr. was termed.

But the world has moved on. One has only to watch US TV for 10 minutes to conclude that America’s communicators no longer have the intellectual resources and political literacy to mount successful, well-informed propaganda. The Fox Channel is for home-turf idiots. And besides, what would the state-subsidized propagandists be able to boast about? Predator raids in Afghanistan? Guantanamo? Thirty million on part-time work or jobless in the Homeland? America is not the sell it once was, when the economic growth rate was headed up and capitalism seemed capable of delivering on its promises.

As for the HuffPo article:

Hillary Clinton Calls Al Jazeera 'Real News,' Criticizes U.S. Media (VIDEO)

First Posted: 03/ 3/11 12:57 PM Updated: 03/ 4/11 11:12 AM


Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday that Al Jazeera is gaining more prominence in the U.S. because it offers "real news" -- something she said American media were falling far short of doing.

Clinton was speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and she said the U.S. is losing the "information war" in the world. Other countries and global news outlets, she said, were making inroads into places like the Middle East more effectively than the United States has. One of the reasons she cited for this was the quality of channels like Al Jazeera. The channel, she said, was "changing peoples' minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective." U.S. news, she added, was not keeping up.

"Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it's real news," Clinton said. "You may not agree with it, but you feel like you're getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."

She's saying she hates going to war with the (media) army she has, and not the one she wishes she had. Understandably.

.

[wintler2]

..She's saying she hates going to war with the (media) army she has, and not the one she wishes she had. Understandably.

Ha ha, so the infowar forces that suffice to hold the US are inadequate in other countries. Will we see standards rise on FauxNews as it attempts to mint some credibility, in the interests of national security? If they televise someone trying to coach Glenn Beck, i might even watch.

[barracuda]

Mubarak's custom pinstriped suit was striped with his name.

The Signature Collection suits available for both men and women range from $13,000 to $25,000.

[AlicetheKurious]

Hillary Clinton: "We're Losing the War"

It's not just the Americans who are "losing the war" -- everybody seems to have taken a shot at setting up an alternative to Al-Jazeera, like the Brits with their BBC World Arabic and Al-Arabiya, the Saudi version. They're all very well funded and technically slick productions and they even try to imitate Al-Jazeera's style, with their own versions of its most popular shows.

The problem with propaganda, though, is that it can only succeed to the extent that it can monopolize the discourse. It reminds me of that old joke, about the entrepreneur who got rich and bought a yacht. Wearing a captain's hat, he shows off to his mother, saying, "What do you say, Ma? I'm a captain now!" His mother looks at him and says, "To me, you're a captain. To a captain, you're no captain." In other words, propaganda does not bear up well under scrutiny or comparison with the "real thing". So as long as a quality alternative exists, Clinton's lament will go unheeded not because the Americans don't have enough money or enough expertise to produce really sophisticated propaganda, but because even the most sophisticated propaganda relies on ignorance and suppression of information. If that information is available through another source, it neutralizes the propaganda.

Also, truth has a certain ring to it and most people are not really as bovine as propagandists wish they were, or as stupid as they're trying to make them. True, they can be manipulated with lies and half-truths and selective news and dumbed-down demagogic appeals, but when they gain access to a high-quality alternative all these things quickly become like the glamor of a disco exposed to the cold light of day: bleak, cheap, repugnant and depressing. Another thing is that the truth is exhilarating and empowering, even when it's bad news. No matter how sophisticated it is, propaganda "news" inevitably creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that people learn to tolerate when they don't have a choice. But once they do, events start to make more sense; that by itself creates a sense of relief and promotes sanity. Also, even distant events acquire more relevance to people's daily lives. The more they know, the more they want to know, because it matters.

[AlicetheKurious]

The revolution continues. Last night was another crazy night. Following information that State Security troops were busily destroying all the secret files, thousands of demonstrators surrounded headquarters of State Security all over the country, including in Alexandria and several cities in the Nile Delta and in two Cairo districts, trying to get inside to save them and give them to the army. They were met with snipers shooting from the roofs, then molotov cocktails.

This video is from Alexandria, Pharaohs' Street (Faraana) (At around 25 seconds, some of the demonstrators are laughing because huge flocks of birds, terrified by the gunfire, burst out of the trees.)



Several demonstrators were wounded. The army at first stood around and watched, but when several of its own soldiers were shot, it moved in, took over the buildings and arrested those State Security officers still inside. The demonstrators swarmed in and found mountains of shredded documents.





Some of the State Security employees had tried to start fires, especially on the top floors, as they already have in many buildings across Egypt which house sensitive information about corruption and crimes by the regime.

Not everything was destroyed -- even the surviving files contain shocking information, according to witnesses. Few details yet, although some have mentioned deliberate attempts by State Security to incite sectarian hatred, among other things.

These files are very important because they contain details about how State Security operated, and also about the enormous web of collaborators and informants and agents that are embedded at every level, even among the opposition.

The army has surrounded all the State Security buildings in Cairo and Alexandria and issued an order to freeze all activities of the State Security apparatus indefinitely.

(By the way, I do not live in Alexandria -- I have no idea why Lupercal thinks I do).

[AlicetheKurious]

The sign says: "Half-way revolutions are graves for the people: we remain steadfast until all our demands are realized."

[AlicetheKurious]

An online ad campaign to free Amr Beheiry, one among a number of unarmed demonstrators beaten and arrested near the parliament building off Tahrir Square at dawn on February 26 by the army. The others were later released, and the army issued a formal apology, but Amr was sentenced within 3 days by a military court, to five years in prison. He was charged with "creating unrest", "assaulting an officer" and "violating curfew". He was not allowed to have a lawyer. According to the witnesses, Amr didn't assault anybody, it was he who was badly beaten by Military Police officers. There remain dozens or more political prisoners arrested since January 25 and held incommunicado by the army. Nobody knows why they in particular are being singled out.

Human Rights Watch: Stop Military Trials of Civilians

"Half-way revolutions are graves for the people: we remain steadfast until all our demands are realized."

[Nordic]

The problem with propaganda, though, is that it can only succeed to the extent that it can monopolize the discourse. It reminds me of that old joke, about the entrepreneur who got rich and bought a yacht. Wearing a captain's hat, he shows off to his mother, saying, "What do you say, Ma? I'm a captain now!" His mother looks at him and says, "To me, you're a captain. To a captain, you're no captain." In other words, propaganda does not bear up well under scrutiny or comparison with the "real thing". So as long as a quality alternative exists, Clinton's lament will go unheeded not because the Americans don't have enough money or enough expertise to produce really sophisticated propaganda, but because even the most sophisticated propaganda relies on ignorance and suppression of information. If that information is available through another source, it neutralizes the propaganda.

Also, truth has a certain ring to it and most people are not really as bovine as propagandists wish they were, or as stupid as they're trying to make them. True, they can be manipulated with lies and half-truths and selective news and dumbed-down demagogic appeals, but when they gain access to a high-quality alternative all these things quickly become like the glamor of a disco exposed to the cold light of day: bleak, cheap, repugnant and depressing. Another thing is that the truth is exhilarating and empowering, even when it's bad news. No matter how sophisticated it is, propaganda "news" inevitably creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance that people learn to tolerate when they don't have a choice. But once they do, events start to make more sense; that by itself creates a sense of relief and promotes sanity. Also, even distant events acquire more relevance to people's daily lives. The more they know, the more they want to know, because it matters.

Alice, something to look out for, especially if the American model is going to be emulated by the wannabe PTB's there, is what happened here with Fox News.

Fox News is a big con job, as we all know. But it gives a certain percentage of the American population what they want. It's very clever that way.

How it works (and forgive me if you already know all of this, but I'm assuming since you're in Egypt you might not have the first-hand day-to-day exposure to it that we do here) is that it captures a certain percentage of the population. Doesn't have to be a majority, just a large enough percentage.

Then the "divide and conquer" tactics come in. The Fox News viewers are stirred into a rabid hatred of everyone on "the other side", meaning their fellow American citizens, the "liberals" and the "elites" and the "intellectuals" and the "decadent Hollywood types" and "the gays" and "the Muslims" ....

Everybody who isn't a rabid follower of Fox News then sees these rabid people coming at them and they respond accordingly, with hatred right back.

Mission accomplished. The people are divided, they fight each other, they see each other as "The Enemy" rather than the PTB who are shafting them daily, and who have orchestrated the entire thing.

And you end up with:



I know you're aware of this, I'm just saying it again because you seem confident the Egyptian people won't fall for this. And I'm sure the Egyptian people are WAY WAY WAY smarter than the Americans. But there are some very sophisticated people studying the Egyptian people RIGHT NOW figuring out what buttons to push in order to follow this model there.

Something to look out for, because IMHO it is one of the gravest dangers facing any population today. The media.