Written by Amira Al Hussaini

This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011.

Mubarak addressing Egyptians. Photo credit: Sultan Al Qassemi

After keeping quiet as protests raged Egypt for four days in a row, a defiant president Hosni Mubarak addressed the nation early today, calling protesters “gangs” and “thugs.” He also fired the cabinet and said that he would reinstate a new cabinet today. Netizens from around the world are not only disappointed, but outraged with his speech.

The Angry Arab News Service’s As’ad Abukhalil rants:

Mubarak is speaking live. He is digging a bigger hole for himself. He is insulting the protesters. HE said that he has been sympathetic to the poor all his life. Is that why billionaires surround you, you dictator?

In another missile, the Lebanese-American writes:

Has called for the resignation of his cabinet. Somebody needs to tell him: it is you that people want to resign, you fool.

And he compares Mubarak’s speech to that of ousted Tunisian president Zein El Abidine Ben Ali, who was forced to leave Tunisia after 29 days of protests:

You may compare this speech by Mubarak to the last speech by Bin `Ali. It just made things worse. He talked as if the people are merely blaming prime minister Nadhif for their misery. How dictators fight to the last second. I personally think that Mubarak probably would have surrendered power today but the US pushed him to stay in power. I am speculating but I have a feeling I am right. I received information that the US is trying to install the Egyptian Army’s chief-of-staff as the new leader.

UAE writer Sultan Al Qassemi, who has been paying close attention to Egypt since the beginning of its protests on January 25, describes his outrage and disappointment in a series of tweets.

He says:

He didn’t raise curbs on the internet or the mobile phones. He didn’t offer to meet with opposition leaders. He didn’t acknowledge Egyptians

and adds:

He didn’t even say he won’t run again later this year, install his son or dissolve parliament! A new gov controlled by Gamal is all you get

and explodes:

The biggest bullshit speech that any aging dictator has ever made in history. What a load of crap.

Meanwhile, here are more reactions from around the world:

Stay tuned for more coverage from Egypt as massive protests against Mubarak’s 30-year rule continue for the fifth day.

This post is part of our special coverage of Egypt Protests 2011.

Sourced from: Google User’s shared items in Google Reader

by Kevin Pina

Without question, the Lavalas political movement opposed the neo-liberal economic model of development that is unfolding in Haiti today. Lavalas militants and spokespersons called International Monetary Fund, World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank dictated structural adjustment the “death plan.” It included eliminating tariffs, selling off State-owned enterprises, keeping the minimum wage low, and relying on the private sector as the motor for economic development.

The major obstacle to the plan of the international financial institutions (IFIs) for Haiti was democracy itself. It took the form of the Lavalas movement, representing the poor majority’s interests, and the president they twice elected, Jean Bertrand Aristide. His government refused to privatize key industries like TELECO, the state telephone company, and EDH, the electricity company. While the IFIs insisted that social programs be cut, Aristide’s government took profits from these State-owned companies to invest in a universal literacy program and to provide millions of subsidized meals for the poor. For the first time in history, Haiti had the beginnings of a safety net in place to insure against widespread hunger and malnutrition. Over the objections of the IFIs and Haiti’s predatory economic elite, the minimum wage for the lowest paid work force in the hemisphere was doubled twice during Aristide’s first and second terms. Not so coincidentally, both of Aristide’s terms were cut short by coups.

This challenge to the IFI program was a major factor in the Feb. 2004 coup that not only ousted the democratically elected president but also drove out more than 7,400 elected officials from municipal and parliamentary posts throughout Haiti. It was an attempt to destroy the movement of Haiti’s poor majority and their right through elections to establish their own priorities for economic development based on the pillars of national sovereignty and social justice. The Bush administration and the Republican Party backed Haiti’s elite in overthrowing the constitutional government and orchestrating the “transition.”

Far from the “popular rebellion” concocted by the corporate media’s well-paid reporters, Haitian democracy’s overthrow in 2004 was a violent affair perpetrated by former military and death-squad commanders on a killing spree. The wealthy elite’s paid minions took to the streets to give the illusion of a “popular rebellion” but they could not take down the government, so the vile dogs of war were unleashed after being nurtured in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Not unlike recent events in Honduras, this coordinated campaign resulted in a president being taken from his home against his will under the cloak of darkness and forced onto a plane as the killing began in earnest to insure the success of the plotters.

The two years following the 2004 coup in Haiti would make the intentions of the Organization of American States, the United Nations and the so-called “international community” clear as glass. They all gave their blessings to the US-installed regime that took power even as it unleashed an unprecedented campaign of summary executions, the gunning down unarmed protesters, and arbitrary arrests. All of this was done in the name of “restoring democracy.” It was a period of gross human rights violations committed under UN aegis that remains successfully cloaked and obscured to this day.

Faced with thousands killed, jailed and forced into exile, the Lavalas movement elected René Préval their new president in 2006. People hoped he would stop the repression, free the political prisoners, and allow Aristide to return to Haiti. What they could not know was that he had already signed onto the cynical project to destroy the poor’s popular movement as preparation for bringing Haiti back into the camp of neo-liberal economic development and the “death plan” they had fought so hard against.

Despite more than $4 billion of international assistance since the 2004 coup, life has only become worse for most Haitians as the predatory elite squeezes as much profit as they can out of a desperate population. With little business investment to speak of, this elite has used their monopoly on the importation of food staples to steal away the more than $1.5 billion in remittances sent annually by thousands of families and friends to their loved ones in Haiti in an effort to keep them alive. These monopolists kept filling their pockets even as protests broke out against the growing misery and hunger in April 2008.

Throughout, the Lavalas movement and the poor kept demonstrating against the coup, demanding justice and that Aristide be allowed to return to Haiti. Their leaders were disappeared as in the case of Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine on August 12, 2007, forced to rot away in prison like the still-imprisoned Ronald Dauphin, or eventually succumbed to the ravages of harsh treatment as happened to Father Gérard Jean-Juste on May 27, 2009. Still others were courted by Préval and offered well-paid positions of authority within his government if they would turn their backs on their own history and the Lavalas movement.

Then came the much-delayed senatorial elections in April and June 2009, where the final blow was to be delivered to Lavalas. The Fanmi Lavalas party was excluded from participating on a cooked-up technicality. But the Lavalas waged a massively successful boycott of both rounds of the elections, a clear and collective rebuff of Préval and the international community.

Kill, imprison, exile, divide, exclude, and buy-off as many as you can: this became the strategy to destroy Lavalas and pave the way for Haiti’s re-emergence as a neo-liberal success story in the Caribbean. Still, Haiti’s poor majority are a resilient and hopeful force. They hoped that the election of Barack Obama, the first US president with African blood coursing through his veins, would change the trajectory of US-foreign policy in Haiti since 2004. It did not. They hoped that Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State would make a difference until she visited the sweatshop of coup-backer Andy Apaid to tout the neo-liberal model in June. They hoped that Bill Clinton’s appointment as UN Special Envoy to Haiti would signal a change, but he ignored their pleas at every turn during his two brief visits over the last two months. Instead he spoke of coordinating NGO aid in preparation for instituting the new “death plan” as postulated by UN economic advisor Paul Collier, which is really the same old neo-liberal “death plan” first rolled out under Reagan’s Caribbean Basin Initiative in the 1980s.

The IFIs announced in late June that they had forgiven $1.2 billion of Haiti’s debt, most of which was racked up by former US-sponsored dictatorships.

Finally, last week, the Haitian parliament voted in closed session to double the minimum wage to a whopping $3.75 a day or about $0.46 per hour for an 8-hour day. Haiti still has the cheapest labor in the hemisphere off which US manufacturers and their Haitian elite partners can still turn a handsome profit.

This past weekend in Miami Beach we saw Haiti’s former mistress of the NGO sector and current Prime Minister, Michele Duvivier Pierre-Louis, take the stage with Bill Clinton to formally announce that the new-old “death plan” has given birth to renewed hope in Haiti. The corpses have been buried and the blood has been washed away so now Haiti can turn the page on the Lavalas movement and those upstarts in the poor majority who had the audacity to think that elections meant they could choose an alternative. Still, this struggle for Haiti’s future is not over, not by a long shot.

It’s only fitting to give Aristide, who remains in exile in South Africa, a few words here. “Pep pa achte libete ak demokrasi nan mache,” he once said. “The people do not buy liberty and democracy at the market.” Some feel that anything is possible with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress. They succeeded on a platform of “Change we can believe in.” The lesson for the world’s poor remains the same: when it comes to the Democratic Party, don’t confuse hope with change, especially if $3.75 is all you’re going to be paid for an 8-hour day.