It is only a matter of time before the regime of Mubarak collapses. The Egyptian people have shown an impressive determination and lack of fear and there is no way at this point that this regime can survive.
But what do these people want? Is that only an uprising against a terrible dictator and a demand for more freedoms or is there more into it? After all, Mubarak has been in power for over 30 years, but no uprising happened before. Why now? What were the instigating events?
The analysis by the media in this country seems to be missing an important piece of the whole story. What seems to have ignited the protests in Tynisia, Egypt, and Yemen and may lead to more in other places are the austerity measures forced by those governments and the widening gap between poor and rich.
Here is the major reason for which the the uprising started:
"They all want the same," said Emile Hokayem, with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in the Middle East. "They're all protesting about growing inequalities, they're all protesting against growing nepotism. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer."
Like in Tynisia, the protests in Egypt started because of austerity measures that the corrupt government of Mubarak demanded from the Egyptians. The reasons for those protests were initially not that different than from the reasons that led to the protests in Greece in May of 2010 or even the protests of the students in London in Novemeber of 2010 against the British government's austerity measures. The origins were also not than different than the protests in Spain and Belgium in September 2010.
The major difference between the european protests and the middle east protests is, of course, that in the middle east there is no democracy and the initial protests, driven in many cases by extreme poverty and suffering, have the potential to lead to extreme situations as we see in Egypt that result in regimes collapsing.
It remains to be seen how the world will evolve over the next year. But one thing is clear. Extreme capitalism and feudalism are not viable models. The current economic crisis is a crisis of capitalism as a system. The Wall street executives and their counterparts all over the world have become too greedy and in many ways out of control in their pursuit of personal wealth while many suffer in poverty. If the gap between the rich on the one side and the middle class and the poor on the other side keeps widening, there will be probably more uprisings like that in other parts of the world.
It is about time that the very rich realize that they are not alone on this planet . The middle class and the poor are also here and deserve as much from life as the very rich.