Eyptian Portlander Ahmad Raslan lays out the crescendo of events that brought eight million people into the streets and toppled the Mubarak regime last week:

"The working-class people in many many cities, for the last three days, they started going on strikes.  There was a threat of civil disobedience across the entire Egypt.  And I think that's what made the military at the end tell the president 'We can't afford this.  If working-class people start getting into this from a strike perspective and from a civil disobedience perspective, then we have to end it.' And they ended it."