Good points, David. Informative selection of graphs (Uneven Prosperity is the chillingest). And one great image: "The butterflies are flapping their little hearts out all over the world today." Fly, colorful little insect, fly.

While I have no problem with your general point, you have this part very wrong:

all these revolts began when a Tunisian university graduate, unable to find work in any profession in consonance with his education and forced to earn his living peddling vegetables from an illegal pushcart, set himself on fire in protest.  His suicide struck a chord in the entire Arab world and maybe, deep down, farther afield as well.

It's not at all what happened.

And understanding what happened in Tunisia is key to understanding its influence on Egypt.

It's very key to get right what Mohamed Bouazizi's situation was, and what he was responding to, as it explains why he became a hero to so many, it's why so many found him very inspiriing.

And you're really missing a lot by not understanding it.

He wasn't a college graduate mad about not being able to get proper employment.

He was s simple average guy in his poor town fed up with horrible humiliating treament by the powers that be. It was about police and government repression in trying to earn a living at being a fruit seller. He wasn't fed up that he was a fruit seller, he was constantly hassled and humiliated at trying to earn a living selling fruit.

The New York Times sums up his background here:

He was not a college graduate, as earlier reports had said. He had been a vendor since he was a teenager, and had worked odd jobs since he was 10, his relatives said. His father, a construction worker in Libya, died of a heart attack when he was 3, said his mother, Mannoubia Bouazizi. She later married Mohamed’s uncle.

Mr. Bouazizi made it to high school, but it was unclear whether he graduated: a cousin said he devoured literature and especially poetry, but his mother said he preferred math. He had a girlfriend, but they had broken up recently. He was a soccer fan and spent much of his spare time at the Fustat cafe downtown, engaged in the local diversions of smoking and playing cards.

Despite his struggles to work, he was easygoing and liked to laugh. His relatives saw no hint of depression, and though they said Mr. Bouazizi refused to pay bribes, they could not recall any time where he had made such an unyielding stand.

The whole article does a fairly decent job of describing the Bouazizi story.

His simple average poor guyness is part of the inspiration--that even without an education, you don't have to take it, that not only the elite should expect freedom from fear of the government.

HOWEVER, to truly get it, you have to watch at minimum a couple of the the videos posted as a group

HERE.by The Lede.

Especially the first one. That's the one that went viral not just across Tunisia but the Arab world, where only a few hours after he torched himself in front of a government building, his relatives complaints start an incredible spontaneous demonstration that will bring tears to the eyes of anyone with a soul.

And the last one, where the British Channel 4 goes to Sidi Bouzid to interview his mother, the cousin that took the video, and townspeople that consider him a hero. They much more movingly confirm the Times article summary, of what this was all about.

The narrator says "he left school early, because his widowed mother couldn't afford to keep him there."

His mother explains how much he was humiliated by the police  that "because of the oppression and the pressure, he set himself alight" and how proud she is that he stood up to it and inspired others, something along the lines that he was a gift from god to all the suffering oppressed simple people.

On the street, one guy says "we love him because he was a poor guy, a simple guy, yes, and now he is a hero." And a woman, there's almost a giddiness in her voice with the freedom to be able to speak about it, says Mr. Bouazizi! He was a hero ...to me....Mr. Bouazizi was a symbol...I thank him because he freed me of my fear... and has trouble finding the next words. The reporter asks Fear of what? She answers: Fear of oppression! Fear of the government!

You have to undestand how much it was about government oppression and humiliation by the government of the average guy than it was about inequality and lack of opporitunity, in order to understand how it has influenced Egyptians. Mad as hell about government oppression and not going to take it anymore. Surely, if you're an educated young man and have a lousy job or no job, you're humiliated, too. But this was about something different than not having that opportunity, it was about not being permitted to even try to earn a living as a simple peddler, being punished for trying, being oppressed and humiliated and constantly fearful.

If you don't understand this, you don't understand why the call for Mubarak to leave is the number one unfiier in Egypt, it is the reason so many people are out on the streets. It's not that they expecting to have their financial or career situations to improve, they just want the oppression to stop. It really is about "freedom." David, freedom from fear of the government, not about economic inequality. That's the Tunisia story, whether you like it or not. And does appear to be a lof ot the Egypt story, too. I don't think Egyptians are expecting an economic miracle or a class miracle, they just want the oppression to go away. They think now, after the Tunisian example, that they can do that.

You can go on agreeing with Thomas Friedman's the earth is flat blather if you like and quoting sclerotic theories about the French Revolution that have been "revisionized" umpteen times over over the past half century.

You don't have to call it freedom if you wish, call it whatever you like.

But the revolution in Egypt, it's about the police state (just like with Bouazizi in Tunisia.)

Here again, evidence: It's not about the income inequality thing (as of yet, of course, it may be later), nor the "I'm educated but I can't get a decent job" thing.

It's just like the protesters keep saying, which you dismiss and dis as not knowing what they mean or want,

even among the working class,

it's about the police state, the police state they want gone (you know, those words you don't think they don't understand, freedom from fear.):

....First, the passion of workers that began this uprising does not stem from their marginalisation and poverty; rather, it stems from their centrality to new development processes and dynamics. In the very recent past, Egypt has reemerged as a manufacturing country, although under the most stressful and dynamic of conditions. Egypt's workers are mobilised because new factories are being built in the context of a flurry of contentious global investment. Several Russian free-trade zones and manufacturing settlements have opened up, and China has invested in all parts of the Egyptian economy.

Brazil, Turkey, the Central Asian Republics and the Gulf Emirates are diversifying their investments. They are moving out of the oil sector and real estate and into manufacturing, piece-goods, informatics, infrastructure etc. Factories all over Egypt have been dusted off and reopened, or new ones built. And all those shopping malls, gated cities, highways and resorts have to be built and staffed by someone. In the Gulf, developers use Bangladeshi, Philippine and other expatriate labour. But Egypt usually uses its own workers. And many of the workers in Egypt's revived textile industries and piece-work shops are women.

If you stroll up the staircases into the large working-class apartment buildings in the margins of Cairo or the cement-block constructions of the villages, you’ll see workshops full of women, making purses and shoes - and putting together toys and computer circuitboards for sale in Europe, the Middle East and the Gulf. These shop workers joined with factory workers to found the April 6 movement in 2008. They were the ones who began the organisation and mobilisation process that led to this uprising in 2011, whose eruption was triggered by Asmaa Mahfouz circulating a passionate YouTube video and tens of thousands of leaflets by hand in slum areas of Cairo on January 24, 2011. Ms Mahfouz, a political organiser with an MBA from Cairo University, called people to protest the next day. And the rest is history.

The economic gender and class landscape of Egypt’s micro-businesses has been politicised and mobilised in very dynamic ways, again with important gender and sexual dimensions. Since the early 1990s, Egypt has cut back welfare and social services to working-class and lower-middle-class Egyptians. In place of food subsidies and jobs they have offered debt. Micro-credit loans were given, with the IMF and World Bank's enthusiastic blessing, to stimulate entrepreneurship and self-reliance. These loans were often specifically targeted toward women and youth.

Since economically disadvantaged applicants have no collateral to guarantee these loans, payback is enforced by criminal law rather than civil law. This means that your body is your collateral. The police extract pain and humiliation if you do not pay your bill. Thus the micro-enterprise system has become a massive set of police rackets and "loan shark" operations. Police sexualised brutalisation of youth and women became central to the "regulation" of the massive small-business economy.

In this context, the micro-business economy is a tough place to operate - but it does shape women and youth into tough survivors who see themselves as an organised force opposed to the police state. No one waxes on about the blessings of the market's invisible hand. Thus the economic interests of this mass class of micro-entrepreneurs are the basis for the huge and passionate anti-police brutality movement. It is no coincidence that the movement became a national force two years ago with the brutal police murder of a youth, Khalid Said, who was typing away in a small internet cafe that he partially owned. Police demanded ID and a bribe from him; he refused - and the police beat him to death, crushing his skull to pieces while the whole community watched in horror.

Police demanding bribes, harassing micro-businesses - and beating those who refuse to submit - became standard practise in Egypt. Internet cafes, small workshops, call-centres, video-game cafes, microbuses, washing/ironing shops and small gyms constitute the landscape of micro-enterprises that are the jobs base and social world of Egypt's lower middle classes. The so-called "Facebook revolution" is not about people mobilising in virtual space; it is about Egyptian internet cafes and the youth and women they represent, in real social spaces and communities, utilising the cyberspace bases they have built and developed to serve their revolt.....

excerpt from:

Why Egypt's progressives win
Suleiman considers the business fraternity friendly, but it is the nation's women and youth who are driving the unrest.
Paul Amar, Al-Jazeera Opinion, 10 Feb 2011 12:30 GMT

(Amar is author of Cairo Cosmopolitan; The New Racial Missions of Policing; Global South to the Rescue; and the forthcoming Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics and the End of Neoliberalism)

To claim that it's the same suffering or the same fight as the poor of the U.S. or the unemployed over educated youth of Italy or Spain or whatever is to dishonor their specific fight.

And  that's why it really sort of bugs me to see you twist their fight to your ideological agenda on that topic.

Because it's an amazing thing what Bouazizi followers did in Tunisia standing up to a police state, and an amazing thing that the Egyptians are doing now. It's something that very few have tried all through history. And of those who did, many were crushed like worthless insects.

That's not something to minimize to the benefit of some other agenda.