Tehran (Update)

News from Tehran is, in the American press, skimpy, at best.  Lacking mass demonstrations or other TV- attracting elements, word from Iran is summarized in little supposedly dull reports:

According to the “experts” this is a uranium enrichment plant, dug into the mountains near the religious city of Qum, and on a basiji base.  It suggests that the Iranian authorities are endeavoring to place their facility in a hardened, “safe” setting, which in turn suggests their intentions are less than benign.  Of course another reading is that they are being prudently paranoid, given the behavior of their antagonists, both the USA and Israel, each of which have shown themselves capable of aggressive and damaging actions, sometimes based on less than real or honest information:

Alleged Iraqi Chemical Warfare plant

Powell’s alleged Iraqi chemical factory

Alleged Syrian nuclear bomb building facility, before and after Israeli attack

Given the sources of these recent revelations, one should be reasonably skeptical.  Self-interest is a rather strong distorting lens, and the Israeli’s have shown themselves, along with the US, to have rather curious concepts of “self-interest.”  America’s apparently lies anywhere that there’s money to be made, assets to seize, or anything like that which can be dressed up as “in the national interest.”  Or, Why Are We In Afghanistan?  Why, because it’s in our national interest, you silly child.

Back in Iran, most recently have come reports that three demonstrators, arrested in the upheaval of some months ago, have been tried and sentenced to death.  They were said to be royalists, in support of the return of the/a Shah.  Several hundred others have been imprisoned, apparently beaten, raped, and a few killed, including the son of a high up authority within the clergy.   Homosexuals are also said to be sentenced to death for this supposed crime.

Demonstrators, Sept 28 2009

Imprisoned and raped (and leaving Iran)

[Note: Apparently when same-sex rape is done by a basij, it is justice and not the supposed crime of homosexuality.]

All told, this is thin gruel for making much speculation, but there is a bit.  It seems the basiji – originally a kind of university vigilante militia organized to support the Islamic revolution  but now composed of mostly working-class toughs – has morphed steadily into an altogether different institution.  It now runs many major components within the Iranian economy, and is more a combination of quasi-military force and corporate entity of considerable wealth and power.  It apparently is considering professionalizing its militia forces, perhaps better to enforce its economic diktats.  Depending on one’s point of view it might be considered a kind of mafia.  It seems it is supposedly under the control of the clergy, though this begins to look a bit less clear.  In any event, within the major power players of Iranian culture, it seems unlikely the military would take kindly to an intrusion on its turf of this kind.  Similarly some major economic power-players apparently are chaffing at its fiscal clout.  To say there are internal stresses within the fundamental power blocks which for the most part run Iran.  The addition of the electoral fraud, and the clear unhappiness on the part of a large segment of Iranian society would suggest the future is likely to be grim, at least for the moment.  The heavy-handed behavior of the government suggests not confidence and power, but fear.   As usual with dictatorships on their way out, their is a self-delusion involved which usually finds recourse to brute force:  they’ll love us if we hit them hard enough.  Of course the usual consequence is bloodshed, more violence, repression and, finally, collapse.  Those who do it always seem to think they will be history’s exception.   So while I now imagine my previous six-month guess on when the current Iranian regime will crumble was a bit optimistic, it is clear that whatever the clock, the train is headed over a cliff.

Back in the US(S)of A, one could weave a similar story, albeit it is a bit different.  Here the US military and its “civilian” service industry, of which Republican President Eisenhower severely cautioned us in 1960, has indeed done something like the basiji:  it’s morphed from being a citizen army into a private conglomerate largely dictating just what the national economy may and may not do (afford).  A look at the old facts and figures shows the military-industrial complex is indeed running most of the show:  America spends more money on military things than all the rest of the world combined.  It litters the globe with 700+ bases.  It infiltrates both US culture, and that of other nations – with propaganda, with bribes, with all the usual stuff of a vast bloated and corrupt entity.  Like the basiji.

Basiji

US Basij equivalents

As with the Iranian Basij, the US military is increasingly taking on domestic policing, has its own economic interests (golf courses, “socialized” medical care, retirement pensions, revolving door arrangements with military contractors, etc.) and of course a deep self-interest in expanding its range of influence and assuring its continuation in power.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Speech

This report is a consequence of the fact that Tehran remains a constant high in hits to this site.  I think that indicates something – don’t want to bet on just what but….

For more on Iranian circumstances of the moment see these:

YouTube IDBasiji BBC Iran Focus ParsTimes Autnews (farsi) IranianProgressives

and a few more Iranian blogs:   Madyariran Human Rights Activists in Iran (farsi) HRA in English

Class War

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent….  Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.”     Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

In the past years, while the Republicans chronically screamed about “class warfare” as soon as one pointed out the stagnant or falling income levels of the middle-class, or noted that there was indeed a large way-under-middle-class segment of the US population, the oligarchy which controls America – its government, its corporations, its legal system, its economic system, its press – orchestrated the above figures.   More and more of the populace owning less and less, while a thin cream at the top owns and controls ever more.   It happened, as the currently fashionable boiling-frog metaphor would have it, so slowly it wasn’t noticed.

• Main Entry: ol·i·gar·chy
• Pronunciation: \ˈä-lə-ˌgär-kē, ˈō-\
• Function: noun
• Inflected Form(s): plural ol·i·gar·chies
• Date: 1542

1 : government by the few
2 : a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also : a group exercising such control
3 : an organization under oligarchic control

Webster’s Dictionary

With the fiscal crash of 2008, and the subsequent bail-out-the-banks “solution,” suddenly class-war is back on the front burner, especially as those trillion-plus bail-out bosses promptly rewarded themselves for their smooth con-job with still more bonuses, while others found themselves retreating to tent cities and waiting on food-lines.   Class war indeed.

Engels, Marx and wives

The present political furor over the matter of health care is basically an extension of this class warfare and its intricate minuet of orchestration from the top.    The shrieking of “Socialist!” and “Nazi!” provides an easily consumed mind-bite diversion, as swarthy gun-toting rednecks of the Fox “news” persuasion, goaded by the NRA, and supported by nice suit-and-tie Republican sorts drown out any discourse with rabble-rousing noise.  Tut-tut the nice liberals say, and health reform gets jiggled like a nice plate of Jello into a glistening political Rorschach test.   Distilled to its essence is that Republicans simply do not want the broad public to be healthy – they prefer them quivering, like the Jello, with fear, popping costly BigPharm mood pills to which they’ve become dependent, rolling their obese bodies in ambulatory vehicles down the supermarket aisles, and so exhausted by their Market Economy hampster-wheel devotion to more productivity with more hours to buy more things, that even under the most dire of circumstances they’re not prone to hit the streets or commence learning themselves the ins and outs of an AK-47, or building home-made bombs.   Fed and medicated into permanent Soma-land, whip-sawed by economic bubbles and bursts, propagandized 24/7, the great American public is pliable and compliant with its own destruction.   No “class warfare” from US:  the big corporations managed to get that one all sorted out.  Dumbed-down with edumacashun, punked out with political shell games, strung out on a plastic line of debt longer than your job, lost in a fog of pharmaceuticals and fine-printed on the insurance that just got canceled, Americans are prime sucker-bait, ripe for the final fleecing before the Titantic “best country in the whole world” (usually spoken by the great unwashed passport-free) sinks and the oligarchy – long ago fled via UBS and other off-shore accounts – counts its casino winnings while moving on to other realms ripe for the picking.

Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator, BoD of UBS, etc. etc.

From Supreme Court Justices who mouth moral obscenities like Scalia and Thomas, to corporate shills like Phil Gramm, the American ruling oligarchy, follows the maxim of Lord John Dalberg-Acton (1887) and is utterly corrupt – morally, fiscally, politically.

“I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority. There is no worse heresy than the fact that the office sanctifies the holder of it. “^[3]

Quote of the day

Here’s a quote attributed to Jimmy Cayne, above, former chief of Bear Stearns about Tim Geithner who engineered the sale of his bank to JP Morgan at a sizable loss:

“The audacity of that prick in front of the American people announcing he was deciding whether or not a firm of this stature and this whatever was good enough to get a loan,” he said. “Like he was the determining factor, and it’s like a flea on his back, floating down underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, getting a hard-on, saying, ‘Raise the bridge.’ This guy thinks he’s got a big dick. He’s got nothing, except maybe a boyfriend. I’m not a good enemy. I’m a very bad enemy. But certain things really—that bothered me plenty. It’s just that for some clerk to make a decision based on what, your own personal feeling about whether or not they’re a good credit? Who the fuck asked you? You’re not an elected officer. You’re a clerk. Believe me, you’re a clerk. I want to open up on this fucker, that’s all I can tell you.”

In All the Vermeers in New York, Steve Lack, playing a broker, tells one of his customers, in a knowing way, “No, no.  Bear Stearns is being completely honest with you….”

Indeed, indeed.

The Wall Street Line-Up

And here’s the President of Mexico, as Obama considers putting the National Guard along the US-Mexico border:

“I challenge anyone to tell me to what point in national territory they want to go, and I will take them,” Mr. Calderón said in a speech Thursday.

He acknowledged the magnitude of Mexico’s fight and added that its problems were a consequence of Mexico’s location next to “the biggest consumer of drugs in the world and the largest supplier of weapons in the world.”

And economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said,

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

And if you think… I gotta bridge to sell you

Jobless rate now at 16.5%—using Depression-era yardstick (Reuters)—When economists claims the current U.S. slump could never turn into another Great Depression, most point to one thing: one of four Americans was out of work in the 1930s. But since the definition of joblessness has changed over the years, this expert assessment might be too rosy. As many as 25% of Americans were unemployed during the days of bread lines that symbolized the Depression. That figure is more than three times the current 6.7% unemployment rate, the economists say. Even the most pessimistic estimates only foresee the rate rising barely above 10%. “We are in a very, very different place than the U.S. economy was in the 1930s,” James Poterba, president of the National Bureau of Economic Research told a recent Reuters Summit. Or are we? Figures collected for Reuters by John Williams, from the electronic newsletter Shadowstats.com, suggest that, while we are not there yet, the comparison is not as outlandish as it might initially seem. By his count, if unemployment were still tallied the way it was in the 1930s, today’s jobless rate would be closer to 16.5%—more than double the stated rate. “I expect that unemployment in the current downturn, which will be particularly deep and protracted, eventually will rival, if not top, the 25% seen in the Great Depression,” Mr. Williams said. He and other critics have one particular sticking point with the current way of measuring unemployment: the treatment of discouraged workers. Under President Lyndon Johnson, the government decided individuals who had stopped looking for work for more than a year were no longer part of the labor force. This dramatically decreased the jobless rate reported by the government. “Both part-time workers wanting full-time work and discouraged workers tend to make the unemployment rate lower than it would otherwise be,” says Robert Schenk, professor of economics at St. Joseph’s College, Indiana. The December report, released on Friday, showed another month of more than half a million job losses —and a jump in the unemployment rate to 7%. However, some economists, including Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard University, now say joblessness could top 11%. Under Mr. Williams’ methodology, that picture might look much more like the Great Depression.

Jobless Rate Hits 7.2%, a 16-Year High

In the news today it almost seems as if Obama is already President, as he already wrangles with the Congress about just how to pull the rabbit out of the hat suggests that B’rer isn’t nearly out of the patch just yet.  Nope.  It’s how are we gonna spend these zillions of new minted phonybucks and just who is gonna get and who not.  Wouldn’t you know?

So while the cyclone spins the economy down its deserving toilet  -  well, it was all just a sham  -  now we haggle over just how to disperse the next chunk of fakery.  Scarcely a word is to be found about that awful matter of reality.  That is just too politically a hot potato to touch, so forestalled again goes that one.  Which, of course, will only make matters worse when the real reckoning comes.    Of such folly is politics made.

Poor Barack, who while doing his best to deflate the optimism bubble attached to his imminent Presidency, is already floating so far above any possible realistic resolution, that he and the USA are surely headed for a swift hard crash when the inescapable arrives.   Sorry folks, but it is all much worse than anyone in DC or on Wall Street, or down on Main Street, dares to say.  You were sold a bill of goods, but, alas, it wasn’t.

Bridge, anyone?

[For a long but interesting bit of reading, see this NYTimes forum, in which an awful lot of people vent on the present economic squeeze.  There's a wide range of feelings, and a lot of antagonism, as one would expect under the pressures being generated.  While readers of the NYTimes hardly constitute a fair sampling of US population, I suspect if we could get those elsewhere on whatever scale to articulate, you'd get even more anger.  Hot times coming?]

New jobs numbers portray an economy in near free

fall

Employers rid themselves of 423,000 jobs in October, not the originally reported 320,000, and 584,000 positions in November, not the 533,000 first reported by the BLS.

Notice a little political juggling of the figures here – October pre-election figures only off by 25% or so..

Curiouser and curiouser

A few days after the alleged perpetrator of the anthrax attacks of 2001, hot on the heels of 9/11, supposedly committed suicide just before the vaunted FBI was going to nail him, the internet is full of stories on the case.  Or more precisely full of stories on how the MSM seems, along with the government, eager to wrap this all up and put it to bed, or preferably in a grave.  Kind of like how the government didn’t want an investigation of 9/11 itself, pressed hard to avoid one, stone-walled when it couldn’t avoid it altogether, and ended up with a ridiculous allegedly independent report that neglected to even mention the 3rd WTC building that went down, never mind all the other very loose ends involved.

In this instance the FBI, arm of the government, having accused one party of the evil deed, harrassing him for years though finally upchucking some $4 million in damages, now says it was another guy who is suddenly conveniently dead by his own hand.  At the same time, similar to 9/11’s patterns (highups told to cease flying commercial planes prior to 9/11), out come the stories of Cheney and others high up, on advice from high-level authorities, beginning to gobble anti-anthrax pills prior to the attacks.  Hmmmm…

As you’ll recall the anthrax attacks were eagerly laid at the feet of one Saddam Hussein, mustached honcho of that gigantic threat, Iraq, (pop. at the time 23,000,000, half of whom were under age 16), and used in order to hype the necessity to stop this New Hitler before it was too late and he unleashed his vaunted Weapons of Mass Destruction, including those nasty chemicals to be found in his clever mobile WMD labs.

Now we are to believe that one suspect shown innocent, another has offed himself – sophisticated professional of poisons – with some handy Tylenol (!), and that while he’d been fingered by his supposed therapist as a psycho would-be mass killer and revenge nut (though his friends say this is an unrecognizable portrait), he was allowed to stay at his post in an utterly high-security government laboratory dicking around with lethal substances to his heart’s content.

Ah, but not to worry, your trusty government is on the case, and as you well know, the FBI, the CIA, and verily your own president would never tell you anything but the truth.

Curiouser and curiouser, indeed.  Unfortunately for Mr Bush and Mr Cheney their command of events seems to be slithering out of control and the klutzy finger is pointing ever more clearly directly at them.  The fickle finger of fate.  Or what a tangled web we weave….

The victims.

There is a really thrilling and scary movie lurking in all this, and with the added benefit of that great PR line:

It’s All True !

The alleged “suicide by Tylenol” and perpetrator of the Anthrax Attacks

This little Monica doesn’t give blowjobs (so far as we know)

Instead she commits crimes for Karl Rove and George Bush while working in the “Justice Department.”  Her job was to weed out any libruls, however qualified for the public jobs as prosecutors, etc., and insert instead reliable trustworthy, if legally incompetent or totally unqualified, Federalist Society “conservatives.”  In this context “conservative” might be more properly translated as “authoritarian fascist with a so-called Christian veneer,” and naturally, “a Bushie.”

Not long ago we had a President impeached for lying (he did lie) about getting a BJ from another little Monica.  However, these not so many years later our Congress trembles to initiate impeachment for a very long laundry list of far graver lies and crimes, among them this little Monica’s participation in the illegal corruption of Alberto Gonzale’s Department of (so-called) Justice.

And thus did America’s experiment in democracy go flushing down the toilet, bought by the highest bidders (oil, pharm, military-industrial complex) and the servile salesmen of Congress all too eager to cash in on their crumbs off the table.