Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Highlights from Egypt, Dec 10 2012 (Part 1) Yesterday's Taxes Rescinded (or Postponed rather) Today
Previous thread, Highlights from Egypt, Dec 9 2012 (Part 1) Grand Treason, can be found here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021950316
The National Salvation Front categorically rejects the constitutional referendum
Mass protests on Tuesday
Presidential decrees for huge tax hikes on utilities and goods to satisfy the thugs in the IMF didn't go over well at all
Less than 10 hours after State Organs announced the tax hikes, they were rescinded
Gregg Carlstrom ?@glcarlstrom
So now Morsi *isn't* raising taxes (yet), because he realizes they'd be unpopular with "the Egyptian street": http://bit.ly/YSKoRa (Arabic)
Hani Shukrallah ?@HaniShukrallah
#MB in power: raise sales tax (hit poor), don't raise tax on rich; issue secret decree, announce week later, take back next morning! slick
sherief gaber ?@cairocitylimits
Holy shit this is getting ridiculous "Egypt president Morsi halts tax hikes, calls for dialogue" http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/60166.aspx
Egypt president Morsi halts tax hikes, calls for dialogue
In a statement in the early hours of Monday, the Egyptian President suspends the implementation of tax increases announced Sunday afternoon
Ahram Online, Monday 10 Dec 2012
Egypt President Mohamed Morsi has retracted his Sunday decisions to increase tax burdens on the Egyptian people, and ordered the government to carry out a "social dialogue" on the measures before implementation.
In a statement issued on his official Facebook page at around 2 am on Monday, Morsi said he had put on hold the measures of raising sales taxes on a wide range of consumer goods and services that were made public Sunday afternoon.
“(The President) does not accept that the Egyptian citizen carries any extra burdens without consent. His Excellency has decided to halt the (tax raising) decisions until the degree of public acceptance is made clear,” the statement read.
The measures represent the implementation of an economic programme that Egypt has proposed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to be eligible for a $4.8 billion loan. They are aimed at reducing public deficit through increasing state revenue.
...
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/60166.aspx
In a statement in the early hours of Monday, the Egyptian President suspends the implementation of tax increases announced Sunday afternoon
Ahram Online, Monday 10 Dec 2012
Egypt President Mohamed Morsi has retracted his Sunday decisions to increase tax burdens on the Egyptian people, and ordered the government to carry out a "social dialogue" on the measures before implementation.
In a statement issued on his official Facebook page at around 2 am on Monday, Morsi said he had put on hold the measures of raising sales taxes on a wide range of consumer goods and services that were made public Sunday afternoon.
“(The President) does not accept that the Egyptian citizen carries any extra burdens without consent. His Excellency has decided to halt the (tax raising) decisions until the degree of public acceptance is made clear,” the statement read.
The measures represent the implementation of an economic programme that Egypt has proposed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in order to be eligible for a $4.8 billion loan. They are aimed at reducing public deficit through increasing state revenue.
...
http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/60166.aspx
Edit: Gameela Ismail ?@GameelaIsmail
@Bassem_Sabry not ANNULS,but SUSPENDS decrees.We will protest 3pm in Cairo at the cabinet,central bank &governorate buildings nationwide
((Tax Details))
Ahmed Ateyya ?@Ateyya
#morsitaxes: 10% on stock market profits, 18% on cell phone bills, 15% on land fertilizers, 10% on rents, 200% on beer, 150% on liquor
Retweeted by Cherif Barakat
53 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
8m السيد مانكي السيد مانكي ?@Sandmonkey
pic.twitter.com/IEFcyfLp On the islamists assassination list, my name... http://fb.me/14qdTJvnR
matthew cassel ?@justimage
Khartoonist @khalidalbaih 's illustration of news media covering famine in Africa
Mostafa Hussein ?@moftasa
Egypt: The Right to Water (with a nice yet worrying infographic) /by @MaliciaRogue http://futurechallenges.org/local/egypt-the-right-to-water/#.UMYCnWD-25k.twitter …
Egypt: The Right to Water
Monday, 10 December 2012 / Rayna Stamboliyska Tags: egypt, human rights, management, sanitation, water
Regions: Egypt
Water is indispensable to human life. As a basic need, it is highly vulnerable to exploitation and has been recognized as a human right in several international human rights treaties and declarations. Addressing the right to water in terms of sustaining life highlights how important proper policies are for securing health and welfare in human populations. One of the greatest challenges Egypt faces today is implementing appropriate measures to close the worrying gap between limited water resources and increasing water demand (see our infographic below).
The Right to Water, an Egyptian Perspective. Click to see full size. Credit: the author (CC-by 3.0)
Since the 1959 treaty with Sudan, Egypt has maintained a stranglehold on the Nile’s water resources, securing 75% of them for its own use. However, this treaty, so advantageous to Egypt, has been bitterly criticized by other Nile states: let’s not forget that the river actually flows through eight other countries besides Egypt. Introduced in 2010, the Nile Basin Initiative aims at granting access to the Nile’s water to the other countries. If the Initiative were ratified, Egypt would see its main water source diminished – a worrying prospect as the Egyptian population keeps on growing and water share per capita already dropped below the UN’s water poverty line of 1000m3 per person in 2005. Thus far the situation is one of relative water scarcity, but experts predict a certain water crisis in the foreseeable future.
...
Meanwhile, not only the quantity but also the quality of water is deteriorating as groundwater sources show abnormally elevated amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This has an immediate impact on health as nearly half of Egyptians live in rural zones where water is often only available from irrigation canals. Water treatment plants happen to be improperly maintained, and thus the water they produce is often contaminated with a wide range of micro-organisms. The neglected critical situation of slums also poses a serious problem as the water supply is unequally distributed within urban zones, and the poor suffer most from scarce resources and poor quality water.
Egypt is the only country to consider bottled water as a “medical food” in the same class as special food for diabetics. How long is the medicine going to be the cause of the ailment?
http://futurechallenges.org/local/egypt-the-right-to-water/#.UMYCnWD-25k.twitter
Monday, 10 December 2012 / Rayna Stamboliyska Tags: egypt, human rights, management, sanitation, water
Regions: Egypt
Water is indispensable to human life. As a basic need, it is highly vulnerable to exploitation and has been recognized as a human right in several international human rights treaties and declarations. Addressing the right to water in terms of sustaining life highlights how important proper policies are for securing health and welfare in human populations. One of the greatest challenges Egypt faces today is implementing appropriate measures to close the worrying gap between limited water resources and increasing water demand (see our infographic below).
The Right to Water, an Egyptian Perspective. Click to see full size. Credit: the author (CC-by 3.0)
Since the 1959 treaty with Sudan, Egypt has maintained a stranglehold on the Nile’s water resources, securing 75% of them for its own use. However, this treaty, so advantageous to Egypt, has been bitterly criticized by other Nile states: let’s not forget that the river actually flows through eight other countries besides Egypt. Introduced in 2010, the Nile Basin Initiative aims at granting access to the Nile’s water to the other countries. If the Initiative were ratified, Egypt would see its main water source diminished – a worrying prospect as the Egyptian population keeps on growing and water share per capita already dropped below the UN’s water poverty line of 1000m3 per person in 2005. Thus far the situation is one of relative water scarcity, but experts predict a certain water crisis in the foreseeable future.
...
Meanwhile, not only the quantity but also the quality of water is deteriorating as groundwater sources show abnormally elevated amounts of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. This has an immediate impact on health as nearly half of Egyptians live in rural zones where water is often only available from irrigation canals. Water treatment plants happen to be improperly maintained, and thus the water they produce is often contaminated with a wide range of micro-organisms. The neglected critical situation of slums also poses a serious problem as the water supply is unequally distributed within urban zones, and the poor suffer most from scarce resources and poor quality water.
Egypt is the only country to consider bottled water as a “medical food” in the same class as special food for diabetics. How long is the medicine going to be the cause of the ailment?
http://futurechallenges.org/local/egypt-the-right-to-water/#.UMYCnWD-25k.twitter
31m نشرة القاهرة? نشرة القاهرة? ?@cairowire
#egypt's political crisis: why are hundreds of thousands of egyptians out on the streets again? http://is.gd/9FdfAo #dostor (via @mwhanna1)
Egypt's political crisis
Posted By Ellis Goldberg Monday, December 10, 2012 - 9:48 AM
President Mohamed Morsi and his advisors cannot have expected that his November 22 constitutional declaration would throw Egypt into a renewed state of turmoil. That it has speaks volumes to the immense changes that have occurred in the country during the past two years. Morsi's support for President Barack Obama's truce initiative during the fighting in Gaza clearly reassured the U.S. president that under a Muslim Brotherhood (MB) president Egypt would keep the peace with Israel. Because this has been the dominant concern within the U.S. foreign policy elite about the Egyptian revolution, Morsi had good reason to believe that the United States and the Egyptian Armed Forces would not object to his domestic decisions.
...
Divisions among U.S. commentators mirror divisions in Egypt. Many Morsi supporters argue that the new constitution is the most democratic one ever produced on Egyptian soil. It guarantees the right to start parties and open newspapers without prior approval; it bans torture and espouses the dignity of the prisoner. Opponents argue, in contrast, that it is an extremely bad constitution. It gives unelected religious figures the right of prior review of legislation and it allows the Armed Forces to function independently.
...
For the moment we can only go on impressions, however the political divisions appear, for the first time, to be linked to social conflict. Reports from the textile capital, Mahallah, in the middle of the Egyptian Delta, are that protesters took over the city hall and declared themselves independent of what they called "the Muslim Brothers government." Leaders of the insurgent trade union movements there have long evinced opposition to the MB, which has sought to gain control of their movement. In 1981 Assiut was the scene of an uprising designed to create an Islamic emirate by supporters of Abbud al-Zumr, one of the organizers of the assassination of Anwar Sadat and today a prominent Salafi politician. On December 6, thousands of people there marched to protest against Morsi behind a banner calling for Muslim-Christian unity. In Port Said, as elsewhere, already a week ago there were pitched battles between youth opposed to the MB and their members.
...
Morsi and his advisors also seem to believe that they can use any stratagem, as long as it remains formally valid, to accomplish their substantive ends. In this they are, regrettably, all too like Egyptian governments of the last 60 years. One of Morsi's advisors admitted that, having been unable to remove former Public Prosecutor Abdel Meguid Mahmoud by ordinary means, Morsi simply changed the constitution to make it feasible (this was supposed to be one of the sections of the declaration that rendered it palatable to the public). Equally remarkably, the MB members of the Constituent Assembly even overrode the advice of the assembly chair and ally, Hosam al-Gheriani, to deny former leaders of Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party political rights for a decade and to grant members of the government's prosecutorial staff judicial immunity. Al-Gheriani was reduced to leaving the dais of the assembly in protest against these provisions. He described the one as political vengeance and the other as an assault on the rights of citizens.
...
http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/12/10/egypts_political_crisis
marlyn ?@virtualactivism
After slamming ElBaradei re his comment on the holocaust, turns out alIrian made similar comment on his page in2011 http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=512279938816841&set=a.235996836445154.65674.204290409615797&type=1&theater …
Dan Murphy ?@bungdan
The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military are friends together (for now). http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/1210/Muslim-Brotherhood-s-unlikely-new-ally-Egypt-s-military?nav=87-frontpage-entryNineItem …
Muslim Brotherhood's unlikely new ally? Egypt's military
Egyptian boys sit in front of graffiti and Arabic, bottom. that reads, 'regime your afraid of a paint brush and a pen,' in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Monday, Dec. 10. The Egyptian military on Monday assumed joint responsibility with the police for security and protecting state institutions until the results of a Dec. 15 constitutional referendum are announced. Hassan Ammar/AP
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood have made their peace with a military elite that hounded them for decades.
Yesterday, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi raised taxes on a host of goods and services, among then alcohol, tobacco, advertising, and construction rebar. Then at around 2 a.m. today, he suspended the tax increases with a short update to his public Facebook account.
The image of President Morsi in his pajamas padding to his computer to change legislation with a few keystrokes is, in essence, what's filling Egyptian human rights activists and secular politicians with so much dread. Morsi can legislate at whim. And he's demonstrated an appetite for doing so.
Now, he and the Muslim Brotherhood that propelled him to power appear to be accommodating themselves to the authoritarian institutions that worked so well during the country's nearly 60 years of military-backed dictatorship. Concessions have been made to protect the military's autonomy and business interests, and in return Morsi appears to have secured the cooperation of the military.
One law he passed yesterday and did not rescind in a late-night bought of leader's remorse will put that cooperation to the test. The law empowers the Egyptian military to arrest civilians as deemed necessary to maintain "public order" until a referendum on a new Egyptian constitution, scheduled for Dec. 15, is finished. "Public order" offenses were a favorite method of Mubarak's police state for controlling and punishing political dissent.
...
Read more: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backchannels/2012/1210/Muslim-Brotherhood-s-unlikely-new-ally-Egypt-s-military?nav=87-frontpage-entryNineItem
