carapace – Not your father's america

The Iranian Election and the Revolution Test

June 22, 2009
By George Friedman

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

Revolutions fail when no one joins the initial segment, meaning the initial demonstrators are the ones who find themselves socially isolated. When the demonstrations do not spread to other cities, the demonstrations either peter out or the regime brings in the security and military forces — who remain loyal to the regime and frequently personally hostile to the demonstrators — and use force to suppress the rising to the extent necessary. This is what happened in Tiananmen Square in China: The students who rose up were not joined by others. Military forces who were not only loyal to the regime but hostile to the students were brought in, and the students were crushed.
A Question of Support

This is also what happened in Iran this week. The global media, obsessively focused on the initial demonstrators — who were supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s opponents — failed to notice that while large, the demonstrations primarily consisted of the same type of people demonstrating. Amid the breathless reporting on the demonstrations, reporters failed to notice that the uprising was not spreading to other classes and to other areas. In constantly interviewing English-speaking demonstrators, they failed to note just how many of the demonstrators spoke English and had smartphones. The media thus did not recognize these as the signs of a failing revolution.

Later, when Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke Friday and called out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, they failed to understand that the troops — definitely not drawn from what we might call the “Twittering classes,” would remain loyal to the regime for ideological and social reasons. The troops had about as much sympathy for the demonstrators as a small-town boy from Alabama might have for a Harvard postdoc. Failing to understand the social tensions in Iran, the reporters deluded themselves into thinking they were witnessing a general uprising. But this was not St. Petersburg in 1917 or Bucharest in 1989 — it was Tiananmen Square.

In the global discussion last week outside Iran, there was a great deal of confusion about basic facts. For example, it is said that the urban-rural distinction in Iran is not critical any longer because according to the United Nations, 68 percent of Iranians are urbanized. This is an important point because it implies Iran is homogeneous and the demonstrators representative of the country. The problem is the Iranian definition of urban — and this is quite common around the world — includes very small communities (some with only a few thousand people) as “urban.” But the social difference between someone living in a town with 10,000 people and someone living in Tehran is the difference between someone living in Bastrop, Texas and someone living in New York. We can assure you that that difference is not only vast, but that most of the good people of Bastrop and the fine people of New York would probably not see the world the same way. The failure to understand the dramatic diversity of Iranian society led observers to assume that students at Iran’s elite university somehow spoke for the rest of the country.

Tehran proper has about 8 million inhabitants; its suburbs bring it to about 13 million people out of Iran’s total population of 70.5 million. Tehran accounts for about 20 percent of Iran, but as we know, the cab driver and the construction worker are not socially linked to students at elite universities. There are six cities with populations between 1 million and 2.4 million people and 11 with populations of about 500,000. Including Tehran proper, 15.5 million people live in cities with more than 1 million and 19.7 million in cities greater than 500,000. Iran has 80 cities with more than 100,000. But given that Waco, Texas, has more than 100,000 people, inferences of social similarities between cities with 100,000 and 5 million are tenuous. And with metro Oklahoma City having more than a million people, it becomes plain that urbanization has many faces.
Winning the Election With or Without Fraud

We continue to believe two things: that vote fraud occurred, and that Ahmadinejad likely would have won without it. Very little direct evidence has emerged to establish vote fraud, but several things seem suspect.

For example, the speed of the vote count has been taken as a sign of fraud, as it should have been impossible to count votes that fast. The polls originally were to have closed at 7 p.m. local time, but voting hours were extended until 10 p.m. because of the number of voters in line. By 11:45 p.m. about 20 percent of the vote had been counted. By 5:20 a.m. the next day, with almost all votes counted, the election commission declared Ahmadinejad the winner. The vote count thus took about seven hours. (Remember there were no senators, congressmen, city council members or school board members being counted — just the presidential race.) Intriguingly, this is about the same time in took in 2005, though reformists that claimed fraud back then did not stress the counting time in their allegations.

The counting mechanism is simple: Iran has 47,000 voting stations, plus 14,000 roaming stations that travel from tiny village to tiny village, staying there for a short time before moving on. That creates 61,000 ballot boxes designed to receive roughly the same number of votes. That would mean that each station would have been counting about 500 ballots, or about 70 votes per hour. With counting beginning at 10 p.m., concluding seven hours later does not necessarily indicate fraud or anything else. The Iranian presidential election system is designed for simplicity: one race to count in one time zone, and all counting beginning at the same time in all regions, we would expect the numbers to come in a somewhat linear fashion as rural and urban voting patterns would balance each other out — explaining why voting percentages didn’t change much during the night.

It has been pointed out that some of the candidates didn’t even carry their own provinces or districts. We remember that Al Gore didn’t carry Tennessee in 2000. We also remember Ralph Nader, who also didn’t carry his home precinct in part because people didn’t want to spend their vote on someone unlikely to win — an effect probably felt by the two smaller candidates in the Iranian election.

That Mousavi didn’t carry his own province is more interesting. Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett writing in Politico make some interesting points on this. As an ethnic Azeri, it was assumed that Mousavi would carry his Azeri-named and -dominated home province. But they also point out that Ahmadinejad also speaks Azeri, and made multiple campaign appearances in the district. They also point out that Khamenei is Azeri. In sum, winning that district was by no means certain for Mousavi, so losing it does not automatically signal fraud. It raised suspicions, but by no means was a smoking gun.

We do not doubt that fraud occurred during Iranian election. For example, 99.4 percent of potential voters voted in Mazandaran province, a mostly secular area home to the shah’s family. Ahmadinejad carried the province by a 2.2 to 1 ratio. That is one heck of a turnout and level of support for a province that lost everything when the mullahs took over 30 years ago. But even if you take all of the suspect cases and added them together, it would not have changed the outcome. The fact is that Ahmadinejad’s vote in 2009 was extremely close to his victory percentage in 2005. And while the Western media portrayed Ahmadinejad’s performance in the presidential debates ahead of the election as dismal, embarrassing and indicative of an imminent electoral defeat, many Iranians who viewed those debates — including some of the most hardcore Mousavi supporters — acknowledge that Ahmadinejad outperformed his opponents by a landslide.

Mousavi persuasively detailed his fraud claims Sunday, and they have yet to be rebutted. But if his claims of the extent of fraud were true, the protests should have spread rapidly by social segment and geography to the millions of people who even the central government asserts voted for him. Certainly, Mousavi supporters believed they would win the election based in part on highly flawed polls, and when they didn’t, they assumed they were robbed and took to the streets.

But critically, the protesters were not joined by any of the millions whose votes the protesters alleged were stolen. In a complete hijacking of the election by some 13 million votes by an extremely unpopular candidate, we would have expected to see the core of Mousavi’s supporters joined by others who had been disenfranchised. On last Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, when the demonstrations were at their height, the millions of Mousavi voters should have made their appearance. They didn’t. We might assume that the security apparatus intimidated some, but surely more than just the Tehran professional and student classes posses civic courage. While appearing large, the demonstrations actually comprised a small fraction of society.
Tensions Among the Political Elite

All of this not to say there are not tremendous tensions within the Iranian political elite. That no revolution broke out does not mean there isn’t a crisis in the political elite, particularly among the clerics. But that crisis does not cut the way Western common sense would have it. Many of Iran’s religious leaders see Ahmadinejad as hostile to their interests, as threatening their financial prerogatives, and as taking international risks they don’t want to take. Ahmadinejad’s political popularity in fact rests on his populist hostility to what he sees as the corruption of the clerics and their families and his strong stand on Iranian national security issues.

The clerics are divided among themselves, but many wanted to see Ahmadinejad lose to protect their own interests. Khamenei, the supreme leader, faced a difficult choice last Friday. He could demand a major recount or even new elections, or he could validate what happened. Khamenei speaks for a sizable chunk of the ruling elite, but also has had to rule by consensus among both clerical and non-clerical forces. Many powerful clerics like Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani wanted Khamenei to reverse the election, and we suspect Khamenei wished he could have found a way to do it. But as the defender of the regime, he was afraid to. Mousavi supporters’ demonstrations would have been nothing compared to the firestorm among Ahmadinejad supporters — both voters and the security forces — had their candidate been denied. Khamenei wasn’t going to flirt with disaster, so he endorsed the outcome.

The Western media misunderstood this because they didn’t understand that Ahmadinejad does not speak for the clerics but against them, that many of the clerics were working for his defeat, and that Ahmadinejad has enormous pull in the country’s security apparatus. The reason Western media missed this is because they bought into the concept of the stolen election, therefore failing to see Ahmadinejad’s support and the widespread dissatisfaction with the old clerical elite. The Western media simply didn’t understand that the most traditional and pious segments of Iranian society support Ahmadinejad because he opposes the old ruling elite. Instead, they assumed this was like Prague or Budapest in 1989, with a broad-based uprising in favor of liberalism against an unpopular regime.

Tehran in 2009, however, was a struggle between two main factions, both of which supported the Islamic republic as it was. There were the clerics, who have dominated the regime since 1979 and had grown wealthy in the process. And there was Ahmadinejad, who felt the ruling clerical elite had betrayed the revolution with their personal excesses. And there also was the small faction the BBC and CNN kept focusing on — the demonstrators in the streets who want to dramatically liberalize the Islamic republic. This faction never stood a chance of taking power, whether by election or revolution. The two main factions used the third smaller faction in various ways, however. Ahmadinejad used it to make his case that the clerics who supported them, like Rafsanjani, would risk the revolution and play into the hands of the Americans and British to protect their own wealth. Meanwhile, Rafsanjani argued behind the scenes that the unrest was the tip of the iceberg, and that Ahmadinejad had to be replaced. Khamenei, an astute politician, examined the data and supported Ahmadinejad.

Now, as we saw after Tiananmen Square, we will see a reshuffling among the elite. Those who backed Mousavi will be on the defensive. By contrast, those who supported Ahmadinejad are in a powerful position. There is a massive crisis in the elite, but this crisis has nothing to do with liberalization: It has to do with power and prerogatives among the elite. Having been forced by the election and Khamenei to live with Ahmadinejad, some will make deals while some will fight — but Ahmadinejad is well-positioned to win this battle.

This report may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to www.stratfor.com

Please feel free to distribute this Intelligence Report to friends or repost to your Web site linking to www.stratfor.com .

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Cut Out Insurers, Save $400 Billion on Healthcare?

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D., via Mark Almberg, mark@pnhp.org

National coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program, Young will be testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee, chaired by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.), on Wednesday. Young is past president of the American Public Health Association and is a master in the American College of Physicians. A longtime friend of Barack Obama, he was the Rev. Martin Luther King’s doctor when King was organizing in Chicago.

Young said today: “The health reform bills emerging from the House and Senate are deeply flawed. The crisis in health care is due to one big thing: our multi-payer system of private insurance companies. Everybody knows that. Obama knows that. He said he was for single payer not that many years ago, and has said if he were starting from scratch, he would go with it. He also said we’d first have to take back the White House, the Senate and the House. …

“Private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume nearly one-third of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single, nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.

“The system, as Obama aptly notes, is running amuck, and it’s costing our nation up to $2.5 trillion annually, rising at a rate two or three times the rate of inflation. And he’s right in saying the economy can’t tolerate it.

“A so-called public plan option won’t touch the foundations of this dysfunctional, wasteful, multi-payer system of insurers. It will not provide cost control.”

Background:

“I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program.” [applause] “I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care, cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that’s what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that’s what I’d like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.”

– Illinois State Sen. Barack Obama, 2003

Videos and background:

http://www.pnhp.org/change

http://1payer.net/videos.html

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

(click here to view)

John Auchter Grand Rapids Business Journal Jun 23, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

(click here to view)

Rob Rogers Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Jun 23, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

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Nets ignore testimony of cancer patient denied coverage by insurer

Despite poignant testimony by people denied coverage for treatment of serious health problems, the network evening news broadcasts uniformly ignored a June 16 House hearing on the practice by insurance companies of canceling the policies of people who become ill and submit claims for expensive treatments.

Read More

http://mediamatters.org/items/200906220028?lid=1045833&rid=30427067

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Congressman Paul’s Texas Straight Talk

Monday, June 22, 2009

International Bailout Brings Us Closer to Economic Collapse

“Last week Congress passed the war supplemental appropriations bill. In an affront to all those who thought they voted for a peace candidate, the current president will be sending another $106 billion we don’t have to continue the bloodshed in Afghanistan and Iraq, without a hint of a plan to bring our troops home.

Many of my colleagues who voted with me as I opposed every war supplemental request under the previous administration seem to have changed their tune. I maintain that a vote to fund the war is a vote in favor of the war. Congress exercises its constitutional prerogatives through the power of the purse, and as long as Congress continues to enable these dangerous interventions abroad, there is no end in sight, that is until we face total economic collapse…”

Click here to read the full article:

http://www.house.gov/paul/index.shtml

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Today’s Gasoline Prices

Monday, June 22, 2009

RETAIL GASOLINE: (Self Service Prices per Gallon, Including Taxes) This report contains price estimates for gasoline sold in ozone non-attainment areas which require the sale of reformulated gasoline (RFG) as designated by the Environmental Protection Agency, and Conventional areas which includes both attainment areas and carbon monoxide non-attainment areas.

Mogas web site url

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/fwd/wrgp.html

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Oil rush: Scramble for Iraq’s wealth –Critics said the war was all about the nation’s lucrative fuel industry. Are they now being proved right?

By Patrick Cockburn

21 Jun 2009

For many Iraqis, the reason the US invaded their country in 2003 was to get control of their oil… On 29 and 30 June, the Iraqi government will award contracts under which international oil companies will take a central role in producing crude oil from Iraq’s six super-giant oilfields over the next 20 to 25 years… “The service contracts will put the Iraqi economy in chains and shackle its independence for the next 20 years,” said Fayad al-Nema, head of the state-owned South Oil Company, which produces 80 per cent of Iraq’s crude. “They squander Iraq’s reserves.”

At:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/oil-rush-scramble-for-iraqs-wealth-1711570.html

From: CLG News

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New articles at Iraq Oil Report

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Iraq Oil Report has posted a new item

Interview: Muwafaq al-Rubaie

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/security-conflict/interview-muwafaq-al-rubaie-1795/

Iraq’s National Security Adviser talks about the relationship with Iran and the ongoing tension between Baghdad and Iraq’s Kurds.

Iraqis react to Iranian election

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/politics/iraqis-react-to-iranian-election-1799/

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election as President of Iran has raised new questions about relations between the two neighbouring countries.

Ninawa poultry industry faces collapse

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/economy/ninawa-poultry-industry-faces-collapse-1803/

Costs are up, subsidies down, Iraqi poultry farmers also must compete against imports.

Election fever rises in Iraqi Kurdistan

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/politics/election-fever-rises-in-iraqi-kurdistan-1807/

Competition stiff for parliamentary seats in what many believe will be a hotly-contested campaign.

Iraqis say “hands off” to Iran

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/politics/iraqis-say-hands-off-to-iran-1811/

Many praise Tehran protesters but hope Iran keeps out of their country’s domestic affairs.

Shahristani vs.

http://www.iraqoilreport.com/politics/shahristani-vs-1815/

Iraq’s oil minister faces critics on a number of fronts, some rooted in technical expertise, others in politics that plague the country.

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NEW PULSE POSTED

Monday, June 22, 2009

http://www.ornl.gov/info/news/pulse/

That’s the url to the June 22, 2009, issue of DOE Pulse. Pulse is a newsletter about accomplishments at the Department of Energy’s national laboratories. Here is some of what you’ll find in this issue:

* Idaho: Smuggler-busting robots

* Pacific Northwest: Asthma relief

* Berkeley: Tunable graphene transistor

* Los Alamos: Microelectronics

Feature: Lawrence Livermore’s pneumothorax detector

Researcher profile: NETL’s Isaac K. Gamwo

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David Letterman

By the way, if you haven’t bought dad a gift for Father’s Day, you can’t go wrong with the new book by Rush Limbaugh. You know the one I’m talking about? ‘Too Fat to Fish.’”

“But I thought this was nice. When he heard Hillary broke her elbow, Rush Limbaugh sent over some painkillers. So she’s going to be fine.”

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three thousand words

(click here to view)

Victor Harville Stephens Media Group Jun 23, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

This Modern World: Where is Obama’s solidarity with the freedom-loving peoples of Iran?
(www.salon.com)

Jeff Stahler: it’s a summer job
(www.investmentpostcards.com)

The Myth of Free Trade

What part of “lacking hindrance or restraint” has Washington forgotten?

Instead of allowing American seniors to buy their drugs affordably in Canada, we ‘give’ them a prescription drug ‘benefit program’ that costs all taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. To keep our drug manufacturers’ profits elevated, Washington digs every American’s debt hole deeper.

Ed Wallace
Special to the Star-Telegram
Posted on Fri, Jun. 19, 2009

Elected officials support many enduring myths that sound not just good but economically reasonable. They oversimplify them in business logic that helps America’s financial future sound potentially exciting. Once you get past the ostensible intelligence of the sales pitch, though, the facts of the real world intrude. That they are myths may be scarier than anything in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, but they are – equally fanciful tales.

The first is the myth of free trade.

Its logic is that the world’s nations trade with each other and all grow rich together. In real life, it doesn’t work that way; one nation usually grows richer at its trading partners’ expense. It doesn’t have to be that way, but it is. Moreover, in the future more lopsided trade seems likely, because of Detroit’s current problems – as we’ll see.

Protecting Profits, Not People

A great first example of how America preaches but doesn’t practice real free trade is ethanol. Currently we give American ethanol blenders a 46-cent-per-gallon direct tax credit, which starves our treasury of badly needed funds despite the nation’s record government deficits. Yet we place a 54-cent-per-gallon tariff on cheap Brazilian ethanol to ensure that nobody will import it. This protects our much less efficient and, frankly, foolish practice of converting food into fuel. Subsidizing our ethanol industry with large tax credits while punishing foreign makers of efficient, importable ethanol is restraint of trade in anybody’s book.

Second example. Remember when it was big news how many American senior citizens were traveling into Canada to fill their prescriptions? In Canada they could buy their prescription drugs at incredible discounts, both because of the exchange rate and because the Canadian government negotiates lower costs on those drugs in its citizens’ behalf.

Many of our elderly simply couldn’t afford to buy those life-saving drugs in the States. And you’d think Americans would have every right to shop in Canada for cheaper drugs: NAFTA was sold to us as enabling total free trade between us, Canada and Mexico. Yet, as far as Washington was concerned, old folks could go to Whistler, Canada, and purchase ski gear all they wanted – but don’t even try to cross the border for cheaper drugs that was proving to save lives.

Cross-border selling is taboo for automobiles, too – although it’s this industry’s manufacturers, not the Feds, whose policies prevent buyers from saving any money that way. In most years, buying a car in the United States can save a Canadian thousands of dollars, not incidentally helping to balance trade between the two countries. But car manufacturers refuse to honor a warranty in Canada if the car was sold in the U.S., even if the automobile was built in Canada and shipped south to begin with.

China Protects Its Own

And then there’s China, where over the past 30 years many American manufacturers have enjoyed great success in selling their product. American Motors first set up Beijing Jeep in China in 1984, where they produced the Cherokee model for that market. Jeep production continued after Chrysler bought the company in the late eighties, and in the mid-nineties China invited Chrysler to build minivans in China too. In the end, then-CEO Bob Eaton said no; the deal-breaker was letting China use Chrysler’s minivan tooling and dies. Seems the Chinese wanted to give a competitor the ability to build perfect copies of that vehicle. That would have forced down the minivan’s price, even though Chrysler alone would pay the costs of setting up production there.

Chrysler’s turning down that deal didn’t stop General Motors from entering the Chinese market a few years later with Buick. And to this day GM’s operations in China are nothing short of impressive.

But free trade it isn’t. If foreign auto manufacturers want to do business in China, they must first have a local Chinese company as a 50 percent partner. Second, they have to kick in funding to institutions of higher education to train the next generation of Chinese automotive engineers. Third, they have to allow a “free flow” of their technology to the Chinese. Fourth, they have to build their vehicles in China.

Sound lopsided to you?

Now, it is true that our American manufacturers can export their vehicles to many other countries, but the vehicles we love most simply don’t sell well in Europe, Japan, South Korea and other places. Yet many of these same vehicles have been big hits in China; in the late nineties our Buick Regal, which sold poorly Stateside at $26,000, was the vehicle that launched GM China – with a price tag of nearly $50,000. Here’s the point: There was never a reason, other than China’s rules for foreign businesses, that we could not have exported many American-made vehicles for sale in their country.

Even if the number of cars exported from the U.S. to China had been limited to a few hundred thousand per year, that would have saved American jobs and brought much-needed profits to American car companies. And, because the trade between the U.S. and China would have been more balanced, it would have repatriated billions of U. S. dollars – which we sent there by buying goods Made In China for sale in the U.S.

Or, we could have saved one or two Detroit factories to offset Wal-Mart’s Chinese purchases. That’s free trade.

The Really Big Lie

Our trade deficits are out of control because, to have true free trade, one country has to sell goods it has manufactured, services, or raw materials to its trading partners. Certainly Boeing proves that even with relatively high labor costs, America can still build products that the world wants to buy.

Obviously, our big pharmaceutical makers also find easy overseas markets; foreign governments, however, have like Canada gotten quite adept at forcing more reasonable prices on their medicines. And yes, when undeveloped countries start turning into modern capitalist societies, one of the first companies they call on is Caterpillar.

As I’ve mentioned here before, Apple Computer is still the world’s most innovative consumer electronics company, having taken that position from Sony of Japan. Apple’s products command premium prices compared to their competition, yet they build their goods in China for export back to the U.S. Best technology, brilliant designs, highest prices – and one of the leading reasons why our trade deficit with China continues to grow.

This is all brought up to end the most harmful myth so far – that America can no longer design, engineer and build products that the world will clamor for. On the contrary: Boeing, Caterpillar, pharmaceuticals and computers prove that we still have what it takes to be the world’s leader in many important manufactured items.

They Manufacture Only Nonsense

Non-manufacturers tell us over and over again that America’s labor costs are too high, our engineering is second-class, and it’s more profitable to let everything be made in countries with far lower wages than ours. So we wind up building their societies with our dollars while we diminish America’s own wealth. – At least for the masses. That logic is the exact opposite of the concept of free trade.

Free trade has to have balance to it – if not exactly equal then reasonably shared give and take – and what’s happening today is neither fairly shared nor balanced.

Because Detroit felt first and hardest the collapse of the world’s financial system – for which Wall Street’s shortsighted greed and Washington’s failure to police our financial sector are to blame – Roger Penske will probably buy GM’s Saturn division. His plan is to import more cars into America; that will dig our trade deficit even deeper, send more of our dollars overseas to build their societies, and continue to beggar our neighbors.

Not Fair, Not Free, Not Farsighted

Personally, I believe in free trade; undeniably, it can build economies around the world. We just don’t practice it ourselves.

You have to build things here to ship overseas to balance free trade, but we’re told that’s not smart.

And the myths politicians help keep alive result in not just a net loss for the country but too often a personal loss for millions of people who worked hard all their useful lives: Instead of allowing American seniors to buy their drugs affordably in Canada, we “give” them a prescription drug “benefit program” that costs all taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. To keep our drug manufacturers’ profits elevated, Washington digs every American’s hole deeper.

If we ran America like a real business, promoting our best and brightest, finding more markets for our goods overseas and demanding true free trade, we would get our winning attitude back.

Chinese consumers love Buicks even more than we do; they just won’t allow them to be built here and shipped there, and that’s not free trade.

What would happen if we refused to buy anything from China that they hadn’t manufactured in America, with American partners, and given us the technology to copy, free – all the while donating funds to teach American kids to become the next generation of engineers and potential competitors to those same Chinese-owned firms? The reverse of that is how it works today.

When free trade started gaining mythic status, America started losing its superpower status.

Ed Wallace is a recipient of the Gerald R. Loeb Award for business journalism, given by the Anderson School of Business at UCLA, and is a member of the American Historical Society. He reviews new cars every Friday morning at 7:15 on Fox Four’s Good Day, contributes articles to BusinessWeek Online and hosts the top-rated talk show, Wheels, 8:00 to 1:00 Saturdays on 570 KLIF.
E-mail: wheels570@sbcglobal.net and read all of Ed’s work at www.insideautomotive.com .

Complete article at:

http://www.star-telegram.com/ed_wallace/story/1443899.html

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Build the New GM Car in Oakland County

Friday, June 19, 2009

I (Congressman Mike Rogers) write today to update you on recent legislative activities in the United States Congress. I appreciate the opportunity to contact you.

Fighting for Michigan Auto Jobs

Despite the difficult challenges facing our state and nation with the bankruptcy of General Motors, I am excited about the possibilities that lay ahead. GM has committed to making small cars in the United States , and I think they should make them right here in Michigan.

I believe that as GM invests in its future by opening a new, state of the art small car assembly facility, it is in the best interest of the company to build upon its 100 years of shared history with Michigan and locate this facility in Oakland County at the Lake Orion plant.

That is why I recently wrote a letter to the CEO of GM to make the case for our state. I described how the Lake Orion assembly plan represents the best business choice for making the cars of the future. The Orion facility has a number of strengths, including proximity to the supply base and GM’s headquarters in Detroit , an abundance of highly-skilled auto workers, and strong relationships with UAW and community leaders.

Rest assured, I am working with President Obama and the entire Michigan Congressional delegation to help auto communities like Lake Orion retool and re-invest. I believe GM can emerge from this painful restructuring process stronger, more competitive, and with the potential to once again create enormous opportunity for Michigan . Investing in the Lake Orion plan is an important part of that restructuring process.

To read an article in the Oakland Press about my efforts to bring a new GM small car plant to Lake Orion , please click here.

http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2009/06/11/business/doc4a30dc6ecbd4e517548231.txt

Mike Rogers

Member of Congress
Michigan 8th District

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Defending Waste

Volume XIV No. 25: June 19, 2009

It’s all too rare for us to pass out gold stars for Congressional reticence around budget time. So, we’re happy to report that fiscal and strategic sanity triumphed in the House this week with the defeat of attempts to restore funding to long-troubled missile defense programs.

Missile defense boosters in the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) racked up amendments at Tuesday’s markup of the defense authorization bill in protest of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ cuts to the FY 2010 budget request. The first amendment out of the gate, introduced by Rep. Michael Turner (R-OH), would have added another 14 interceptors to the 30 currently stationed in California and Alaska to shoot down long-range missiles fired by rogue states. Gates cut this program—known as Ground-based Midcourse Defense—by 30 percent in favor of programs that target missiles in their boost phase, which commanders believe pose a greater threat to our troops abroad.

Other amendments would have devoted $500 million to establishing interceptor sites in Poland and radars in Czech Republic, a $4.5 billion project that neither country has signed off on; roll back the Pentagon’s termination of the Airborne Laser (ABL) and Kinetic Energy Interceptor (KEI), two programs that Gates has called “fatally flawed;” and reestablish the entire $1.2 billion worth of programs eliminated from the budget request.

Congressional supporters cited a number of less-than-compelling arguments, from the “moral” imperative to the effectiveness against a reactionary North Korea. This despite defense officials’ assertion that the country is years from having truly threatening capabilities. But Rep. Trent Frank’s (R-AZ) assertion that missile defense is “a great deal for our money” seemed the most disingenuous: the $130 billion spent on missile defense to date with little consensus on its effectiveness suggests otherwise.

There is another, more likely motivation for Congressional enthusiasm: Rep. Rob Bishop’s (R-UT) KEI amendment likely had something to do with the hundreds of Utah jobs associated with the system , and Boeing’s Airborne Laser brings millions of dollars to the Arizona district of Frank, who sponsored the related amendment.

Even true believers’ argument that the cuts weaken our national defense are pretty thin. The fact is Gates hardly gutted missile defense. If anything, his cuts targeted only the most rotten of the low-hanging fruit. HASC Strategic Forces Subcommittee Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) called KEI “the definition of a sinkhole if ever there was one,”adding that the Airborne Laser—so weak it would have to hover above a target to take it out—is a shabby eight years behind schedule and $4 billion over budget. Meanwhile, Turner would have paid for his proposals by cutting funding for nonproliferation—the “threat we’re dealing with here and now,” as Rep. John Spratt (D-SC) reminded the committee.

While HASC members debated, their Senate counterparts heard Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman James E. Cartwright make the same point. Budget shifts are “driven by programs we thought … should not go into production, like the ABL, and programs like the Kinetic Energy Interceptor which was a troubled program from the start,” he said. Cartwright also pointed out that the boost-phase programs receiving more money in the Gates budget, such as the Aegis and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), have both the best chance of success and value for the taxpayer.

Though HASC made some bad choices elsewhere in the bill—such as adding $369 billion for 12 more F-22 Raptors—its members should be commended for being able to separate the wheat from the chaff in the missile defense budget. We hope the Senate Armed Services Committee will follow their lead when it takes on the bill next week and keep the low-hanging fruit forbidden.

Let us know what you think.

Going on at Taxpayer.net This Week

Congressional Watchdog Reviews Bailout Program

Senate Energy Committee Passes American Clean Energy Leadership Act

Changes to Loan Guarantee Program Adopted by Senate Committee

Taxpayer Giveaway to Oil and Gas Industries Repealed in Senate Energy Committee

House Agriculture Committee Hearing on Pending Climate Change Legislation

Hearing on the 2010 Dept. of Transportation Budget: House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development

GAO and Land Swaps

House Adds Earmarks Worth $103 million to Homeland Security Spending Bill

Bailout Bank Bios

TCS Staff are compiling profiles of all financial institutions receiving funds under the 2008 Emergency Economic Stabilization Act. See all completed bios here.

TCS in the News

TCS was cited in dozens of stories this past week Check them all out in the Headlines About TCS section of our redesigned website.

Notable Quote

“It is a clunker,” Gregg said of the plan. “Why should our children and our grandchildren have to pay the bill” for the government subsidizing “somebody to buy their car today? How fiscally irresponsible is that?” he said.

Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), on the Cash for Clunkers provision appended to the Emergency War Spending Bill.

the weekly wastebasket at www.taxpayer.net

==========

Quillen: Republican support should be easy

By Ed Quillen
The Denver Post
Posted: 06/21/2009

Every now and again, I argue that Democrats should support school vouchers because they will improve the public schools by removing the need to cater to the flat-Earth parents who will send their offspring to intelligent-design academies.

This hasn’t produced many converts, so I’ll try a new tack while Congress takes up American health care: why Republicans should support a single-payer national plan.

1) Republicans hate trial lawyers. As Dick Armey, former GOP house majority leader put it, attorneys who specialize in personal-injury suits “twist our legal system to pillage the productive sector for personal gain.”

I understand why. When I worked for the local paper about 30 years ago, I wrote some columns about a county commissioner. I thought they were funny, as did many readers. However, he thought the columns held him up to public contempt, ridicule and hatred, and sued for $2.25 million.

His libel suit was totally baseless; it was dismissed by the district court, and his appeal of the dismissal was turned down by our state court of appeals, the Colorado Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the process took four years, and consumed a lot of time and energy from “the productive sector.”

If the GOP truly wants to de-fund these ambulance-chasing parasites, consider that many personal-injury cases are filed because people need to recover their medical costs. If these costs were covered by a national health plan, they wouldn’t need to sue. No lawsuits, no big contingency fees for trial lawyers, thereby accomplishing an important GOP objective.

In a related matter, I often read Republican propaganda about how physicians, under the current system, may be more concerned about the prospect of lawsuits than about caring for their patients, as well as the cost of malpractice insurance. Go to single-payer, and these issues should largely vanish.

2) Republicans admire Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain from 1979 to 1990.

Thatcher, who was lauded by Newt Gingrich for her “courage and toughness,” did not dismantle Britain’s National Health Service. If “socialized medicine” enjoyed the approval of the Iron Lady, then what could Republicans have against it?

3) Despite their public statements, Republicans actually like government health care, and they ought to come out of the closet and say so. So far as I know, every Republican representative and senator takes advantage of the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, which has an assortment of health plans and no exemptions for “pre-existing conditions.” And we taxpayers cover about 75 percent of its cost.

If “government medical care” is so terrible, why don’t these office-holders turn it down and take their chances with the private sector?

4) Republicans say they oppose “health-care rationing.” But it’s already rationed, based on factors like how much profit an insurer can gain by denying claims. So why not minimize rationing (there will always be some rationing because supply cannot meet demand) by going to a different system?

5) The GOP believes in a productive workforce. How many people do you know who just go through the motions in a job they hate because they need to keep their health insurance? If they were free to apply their talents in the pursuit of happiness, wouldn’t America boast a more creative and productive economy?

Consider all these factors, and it’s obvious that Republicans could find valid reasons, consistent with their statements, to support national single-payer health care. And I wouldn’t care if they called it the “De-funding Trial Lawyers Act of 2009.”

Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) of Salida is a freelance writer and history buff, and a frequent contributor to The Post.

http://www.denverpost.com/quillen/ci_12624757

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Poll: 72 percent want government-administered insurance plan to compete with private sector –85 percent want major healthcare reforms

20 Jun 2009

Americans strongly support fundamental changes to the healthcare system and a move to create a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll published on Saturday. The Times/CBS poll found seventy-two percent of those questioned said they backed a government-administered insurance plan similar to Medicare for those under 65 that would compete for customers with the private sector.

At:

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE55K00A20090621

From: CLG News

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Marketplace Commentary: Only public option will save health costs

NPR
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/17/pm_health_care_options/

Robert Reich
ROBERT REICH IS A PROFESSOR OF PUBLIC POLICY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY.

June 17, 2009

…ROBERT REICH: The only way to ensure that medical costs will be contained by any upcoming health-care bill is to include a public, Medicare-like option that people can choose as their health insurer over a private insurer, if they want.

Although most Americans who know about the issue favor a public option, and the president has said he wants it in the bill, don’t bet on it being there in whatever emerges from committees days or weeks from now. Most Republicans don’t want the public option. And many Democrats are being lobbied heavily against it.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t want a public option because they fear it will be so big as to have substantial bargaining power to get low drug prices. And private for-profit insurance companies don’t want a public option because they fear it will under-price them. After all, the public plan won’t have to show a profit — it just has to cover costs.

Both these powerhouse industries are saying a public option would be unfair. But what’s unfair to them may be a boon to you and me if it means lower prices and premiums….

(click here to view)

Ted Rall Universal Press Syndicate Jun 22, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

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Poll Broder cited undermines his claim that Americans have “forgotten” Bush

In his Washington Post column, David Broder asserted that Americans have “forgotten” former President Bush and that “Obama has become the only president [they] think about.” In fact, the poll Broder cited undermines both his assertions.

Read More

http://mediamatters.org/items/200906210010?lid=1045604&rid=30385818

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RIGHT-WING HYPOCRITES: 10 REASONS CONSERVATIVES SHOULD SHUT UP ABOUT LETTERMAN’S SARAH PALIN GAFFE

By Karl Frisch, Media Matters for America

Each and every day conservative radio hosts, cable-news hosts, pundits and columnists use divisive, insensitive, and downright hateful rhetoric.

http://www.alternet.org/media/140803/right-wing_hypocrites%3A_10_reasons_conservatives_should_shut_up_about_letterman%27s_sarah_palin_gaffe_/

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Thinking Twice : SURVIVAL

June 2009

Thinking Twice is a newspaper column that appears monthly in the Stanford Report. Each month Stanford scholars take a multi-disciplinary look at the same issue from their uniquely informed points of view.

https://humanexperience.stanford.edu/thinkingtwice

==========

And now for the important news ….

By Argus Hamilton

Hillary Clinton slipped and broke an elbow in the State Department parking lot Thursday and had to be driven to George Washington Hospital for treatment. There was no delay at all. The economy is so bad now that all the cab drivers speak English.

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

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three thousand words

(click here to view)

Jimmy Margulies The Record Jun 22, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

Mike Luckovich: A Healthy Iran
(politicalirony.com)

Cameron (Cam) Cardow: I better watch cnn!!
(www.cagle.com)

Happy Father’s Day

David Fitzsimmons:

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THIS WEEK IN GOD: OBAMA WHITE HOUSE MEETS WITH (GASP!) ATHEISTS

By Steve Benen, Washington Monthly

And other goings on from the world of faith.

http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/140624/this_week_in_god%3A_obama_white_house_meets_with_%28gasp%21%29_atheists/

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Creationist teacher in Ohio sues school district

June 13th, 2009

Read more

http://ncseweb.org/news/2009/06/creationist-teacher-ohio-sues-school-district-004835

“John Freshwater, an eighth-grade science teacher facing dismissal for allegedly
preaching in the classroom, is suing the Mount Vernon City School District,
saying it violated his constitutional and civil rights,” the Columbus Dispatch
(June 11, 2009) reported.

http://www.columbusdispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2009/06/11/freshwater.ART_ART_06-11-09_B4_TUE56L0.html?sid=101

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Sotomayor and Church-State Separation

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Church-State Separation and the Supreme Court:
We’re watching the Sotomayor nomination closely — Are you?

Religious liberty: it’s fundamental, longstanding, and closely tied to the history of our nation. It’s guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a document that we hold dear and are committed to defending.With the retirement of Justice David Souter, the Supreme Court is losing a champion of religious liberty. Read the Church & State article written about his retirement. In his place, we need a justice who will strongly uphold the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Will Judge Sonia Sotomayor be the justice we need?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court decided Hein v. Freedom From Religion Foundation, a case that greatly limited the ability of taxpayers to challenge Establishment Clause violations carried out by the Executive Branch and its agencies. Recent cases have also dealt with religious displays on public property, and future cases could address a range of church-state issues. Will Judge Sotomayor prevent future limitations on our First Freedom?

All eyes are on President Obama’s nominee, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, an experienced judge with a compelling personal story. But where will she stand on church-state separation? Her judicial record is somewhat limited. The staff at Americans United has been working hard to learn about Sotomayor’s church-state stance and advocate for greater attention to this issue. From intense legal analysis, advocacy with members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and coordination with allied groups and coalitions, we are dedicated to representing a strong separationist voice throughout the confirmation process.

Where do you think Sotomayor will stand on church-state separation? What issues do you think will be most important to learn about? What question would YOU ask of Sotomayor if given the chance? We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can best carry YOUR voice to the confirmation process here in DC.

Share your thoughts and questions about Sotomayor.

http://www.au.org/take-action/engage/sotomayor/

Americans United for Separation of Church and State http://www.au.org/

Americans United (AU) is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preserving the constitutional principle of church-state separation as the only way to ensure religious freedom for all Americans.

==========

The Emergence of God

by Darren Iammarino

In his recent book, Adventures in the Spirit: God, World, and Divine Action, Philip Clayton presents a constructive theology that endeavors to reconcile insights from the sciences with the wisdom derived from two thousand years of Christian tradition. The task is daunting, but through a methodical and lucid point-by-point progression, Clayton succeeds in providing the reader with a truly novel way of understanding God and the God-world relationship for the 21st Century.

The book is separated into five sections: The Methods of Philosophy and Theology, Emergence, Panentheism, Divine Action, and the Theological Adventure Applied. Section one sets the stage by explaining the numerous challenges that theology faces today given the major advances in the fields of biology and physics. An informative discussion of the differences between religious truth and scientific truth, plus a succinct account of the contemporary religion-science debate comprises the remainder of the first section.

Section two shifts gears and moves into the field of evolutionary biology, in particular the current debate over emergent theories of evolution. Clayton explains that emergence, in contrast to scientific reductionism, is characterized by the fact that higher-order phenomena cannot be fully comprehended by merely applying the laws of lower-order disciplines. In other words, science isn’t or should not be, just about reducing life to the realm of physics and chemistry. Clayton further shows that emergence draws a healthy middle ground between reductionism on one end and dualist theories on the other end. Dualistic theories refuse to accept that certain phenomena, such as mind or spirit, can have any relation to a material substrate or lower type of order. The purpose of the lengthy discussion of emergence is to lead us to an understanding of mind and spirit which, according to emergence theories, require a new conceptual framework in order to be properly understood.

One possible conceptual framework for elucidating the nature and function of mind, spirit and God is put forth by Clayton in section three. The philosophical position known as panentheism or, all things within God, is employed to highlight the workings of mind and spirit. Clayton presents us with an extended and in-depth look at different versions of panentheism, ranging from German Idealists, to 20th century Process Theology thinkers. Clayton writes, “The strength of the panentheistic analogy is that it takes the highest level of emergence known to us and uses it as the model for the divine reality. The highest level we know is the level of human personhood” (131). The question for Clayton is did the universe require a transcendent Source or Ground for all that is, or is the universe merely in a natural, yet meaningless process of emergence from simplicity to complexity?

The concept of emergence seems to point in the direction of a “deising” universe evolving from extreme simplicity, but Clayton argues that the logic of emergence need not be taken in this nearly atheistic way. Clayton believes that the universe requires a transcendent agent to act as the Ground and initiator of the process of emergence. It is at this point that two traditional, yet confusing, doctrines of the Christian faith are invoked: Trinity and kenosis. First, the inner-trinitarian relations represent a divine community. This is important for Clayton, because the interactions within the immanent Trinity provide a crucial metaphor for comprehending the God-World relationship. Unlike classical trinitarian doctrine, trinitarian panentheism suggests that the created world is within God and is therefore, a key contributor and participant within the divine (173).

Kenosis or self-emptying is central to the author’s vision because it explains how the process of creation began, while simultaneously affirming the centrality of God as love. Frequent biblical references are made for support of kenosis, in the sense of overflowing goodness and self-giving, or self-emptying, such as Phil 2:5–9:

5 Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:

6 Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

7 But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:

8 And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.

9 Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name.

…

Complete article at:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/09-06-17

==========

Book Review – Troy Jollimore on God’s Evolution

Posted on Jun 19, 2009
By Troy Jollimore

The title of Robert Wright’s new book—“The Evolution of God”—will surely put some people off; indeed it seems designed to do so. So many religious believers in the U.S. have so much antipathy toward the idea that evolution might explain anything, it seems highly unlikely that many of them will pick up a book whose title suggests that God, of all things, might have evolved—let alone (dare I mention it?) a book containing a chapter titled “Survival of the Fittest Christianity.”

But being provocative is clearly not something Wright fears. His acclaimed 1994 book “The Moral Animal” remains one of the most widely read books on evolutionary psychology, a topic that tends to breed controversy wherever it goes. In the work that has followed (notably 2000’s “Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny”), the author has displayed an increasingly strong penchant for grand pronouncements and attempts to explain all human behavior, and perhaps all of human history, in terms of a combination of evolutionary psychology and rudimentary game theory.

“The Evolution of God” finds the author going over much of the same ground, this time with a specific focus on religion. The word evolution in the title refers most straightforwardly to the process by which humanity’s idea of God has changed over time—a process described at some length in Wright’s book. The human race begins as a bunch of parochial pluralists, separate tribes each with its own group of deities. These deities are conceived, to start with, more as superheroes—humanoid beings with human personalities endowed with special powers—than as genuine divinities. Over time a few of the deities gain more prominence and become more widely accepted, as pressures toward intertribal cooperation and, eventually, globalization (as manifested in the dynamics of “non-zero-sum situations,” a key concept in Wright’s thinking) push societies toward directing their energies at one comprehensive, universalistic, all-powerful god. This god—the God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam—eventually becomes perceived as a just and loving father figure and is associated with modern ethical ideas like universal rights and the equality of all persons.

This is, in its way, a story of competition under selective pressure: God attains his ultimate position by defeating all competitors, not through brute power but by winning over the electorate, so to speak. And it is by serving various human purposes, and appealing to certain elements in human nature, that a more all-encompassing vision of God comes to take precedence over less universalistic versions. But, lest some readers be confused by the baggage inevitably attached to the word evolution (a confusion which Wright, to a certain degree, encourages), it is important to emphasize that this is no more a process of Darwinian natural selection than is television’s “American Idol.” The process is a cultural one, and applies to a god that is clearly a cultural artifact in the strongest sense: an artifact that is the creation of human beings, the product of our beliefs, as Wright makes clear:

“The god I’ve been describing is a god in quotation marks, a god that exists in people’s heads. When I said in chapter 5, for example, that Yahweh was strong yet compassionate, I just meant that his adherents thought of him as strong yet compassionate. There was no particular reason to believe that there was a god ‘out there’ that matched this internal conception. Similarly, when I say God shows moral progress, what I’m really saying is that people’s conception of God moves in a morally progressive direction.”

Passages like this will reinforce the believer’s sense that “The Evolution of God” is, at the end of the day, nothing more than yet another evolution book whose aim is to explain how humans have evolved into the sort of creatures that believe in God, and in doing so to explain away any vestige of God’s actual existence. But Wright, it turns out, wants to have it both ways. His point is not just to emphasize the usefulness if not the necessity of religious belief, and to “justify” religion in that attenuated sense (though that theme is certainly present, and sometimes pressed hard). Rather, he wants to go further:

“In this book I’ve used the word ‘god’ in two senses. First, there are the gods that [...] exist in people’s heads and, presumably, nowhere else. But occasionally I’ve suggested that there might be a kind of god that is real. This prospect was raised by the manifest existence of a moral order—that is, by the stubborn, if erratic, expansion of humankind’s moral imagination over the millennia, and the fact that the ongoing maintenance of social order depends on the further expansion of the moral imagination, on movement toward moral truth.”

Now at this point things get extremely vague, and while I’m going to try to deal with the vagueness as well as I can, I want to admit upfront that I really can’t tell just what sort of idea of God Wright has in mind. In fact, Wright seems to flip-flop between two ideas—and each, it turns out, faces a serious problem.

The first interpretation takes Wright’s realism about God to be metaphysically modest. God, Wright sometimes seems to think, might simply be the name for whatever turns out to play a certain causal role in explaining certain phenomena that we observe in the universe—and this might be a cause that is perfectly ordinary, in scientific terms. Wright likens it to our use of the word electron, which, as he says, is functionally defined. An electron is not really a tiny little particle, though that is how we picture it; in fact we do not and cannot have an accurate picture of what an electron is, because the level of reality at which electrons exist is too remote from our lived experience. So the word electron really just stands for whatever entity in the world corresponds to certain statements in physical theories, and in particular tends to play certain sorts of causal roles in making events happen.

…

Complete article at:

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/20090618_troy_jollimore_on_gods_evolution/

The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

==========

Bridgeport Diocese Appeals Release Of Priest Sex Abuse Documents and more …

Hartford Courant – United States

The diocese argued that this was a legitimate concern because two sex abuse lawsuits are pending and future claims could be brought. …

http://www.courant.com/news/custom/topnews/hc-priest-records-0613.artjun13,0,3863478.story

Suit Against Archdiocese Alleges Sex Abuse

Washington Post – United States

Two brothers who allege they were victims of sex abuse by a priest in the 1950s and early 1960s filed a lawsuit yesterday against the Archdiocese of
…

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/10/AR2009061003577.html

Fairbanks priest named in sex abuse lawsuit

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner – Fairbanks,AK,USA

The civil complaint alleges Ornowski committed felony sexual abuse of a young girl on at least three occasions while serving in Stebbins, one of two Bering …

http://newsminer.com/news/2009/jun/10/priest-named-abuse-lawsuit/

Keep better tabs on clerics in abuse cases, group asks

Toledo Blade – Toledo,OH,USA

Lawrence Varney, a retired priest whom Bishop Blair removed from ministry in October for a credible allegation of sexual abuse. …

http://toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090609/NEWS10/906090342/-1/NEWS

Priest Abuse Canton Priest Accused of Sex Abuse Allegations …

CANTON OHIO

A Canton priest is the center of sex abuse allegations now under investigation by the Catholic Diocese of Youngstown …

http://www.woio.com/global/story.asp?s=10493713

Church organist, teacher charged with child porn

Spartanburg Herald Journal (subscription) – Spartanburg,SC,USA

This is the 237th sexual exploitation case investigated by the SC Computer Crimes Center, which received assistance from the Union County Sheriff’s Office. …

http://www.goupstate.com/article/20090613/ARTICLES/906131010/1083/ARTICLES?Title=Church-organist-teacher-charged-with-child-porn

==========

SERMON

A minister told his congregation, “Next week I plan to preach about the sin of lying. To help you understand my sermon, I want you all to read Mark 17.”

The following Sunday, as he prepared to deliver his sermon, the minister asked for a show of hands. He wanted to know how many had read Mark 17.

Every hand went up.

The minister smiled and said, “Mark has only sixteen chapters. I will now proceed with my sermon on the sin of lying.”

==========

three thousand words

(click here to view)

August J. Pollak In These Times May 18, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

Stephan Pastis: dinosaurs and humans …
(assets.comics.com)

Mike Peters: how terrorists survive in america
(www.grimmy.com)

More Power for the Fed?

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The New York Times reports: “The plan the president will formally announce on Wednesday would give the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority over large financial institutions whose problems pose potential risks to the economic system.”

NOMI PRINS, nomi@nomiprins.com, http://www.nomiprins.com,

http://www.motherjones.com/bailout/2009/06/big-bank-bamboozle

Author of “Other People’s Money” and the forthcoming “It Takes a Pillage,” Prins just wrote the piece “The Big Bank Bailout Payback Bamboozle.” She said today: “As Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner talks tough about financial regulation, the banks are paying back federal subsidies with other federal subsidies — classic definition of a Ponzi scheme.

The ‘sweeping overhaul’ of the financial system detailed by Geithner on behalf of the Obama administration does not overhaul the system at all. True, items like enhanced issuer accountability and restrictions for securitized products, greater leverage constraints and relegating certain derivatives to exchanges, are useful alterations. But, giving the Fed a bigger role, creating a ‘council of regulators’ to oversee the existing oversight bodies and allowing the biggest Wall Street players to maintain their status, leaves the system intact.

“The Federal Reserve is not a fully public entity. It has amassed a set of $7.87 trillion worth of facilities and other entities through which it has lavished cheap loans in return for questionable collateral from the banking system. It has kept the true nature of these transactions a secret despite numerous FOIA requests. And, it has actively promoted the creation of bigger institutions in a chaotic environment, rather than putting the brakes on the creation of these giants. …

“Rather than regulate a complicated industry by creating more layers of regulatory entities and giving more power to the Fed, which deserves a stringent audit instead, the more lasting solution to financial chaos would be to actually restructure the banking industry itself: divide banks into consumer vs. investment bank entities, like the Glass Steagall Act did in 1933 — until it was repealed during the Clinton administration.” A former investment banker turned journalist, Prins is a senior fellow at the think tank Demos.

From: Institute for Public Accuracy

==========

Wall Street’s Toxic Message

When the current crisis is over, the reputation of Americanstyle capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn, their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.

By Joseph E. Stiglitz July 2009

Every crisis comes to an end—and, bleak as things seem now, the current economic crisis too shall pass. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ideas—over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World, among the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1.4 billion of whom subsist on less than $1.25 a day. In America, calling someone a socialist may be nothing more than a cheap shot. In much of the world, however, the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.

The economic debate takes on particular potency in the developing world. Although we in the West tend to forget, 190 years ago one-third of the world’s gross domestic product was in China. But then, rather suddenly, colonial exploitation and unfair trade agreements, combined with a technological revolution in Europe and America, left the developing countries far behind, to the point where, by 1950, China’s economy constituted less than 5 percent of the world’s G.D.P. In the mid–19th century the United Kingdom and France actually waged a war to open China to global trade. This was the Second Opium War, so named because the West had little of value to sell to China other than drugs, which it had been dumping into Chinese markets, with the collateral effect of causing widespread addiction. It was an early attempt by the West to correct a balance-of-payments problem.

Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited. Among many emerging leaders, Marxist theory provided an interpretation of their experience; it suggested that exploitation was in fact the underpinning of the capitalist system. The political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions, such as Africa, the exploitation—the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment, all in return for a pittance—was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.

The World Bank and the I.M.F. said they were doing all this for the benefit of the developing world. They were backed up by teams of free-market economists, many from that cathedral of free-market economics, the University of Chicago. In the end, the programs of “the Chicago boys” didn’t bring the promised results. Incomes stagnated. Where there was growth, the wealth went to those at the top. Economic crises in individual countries became ever more frequent—there have been more than a hundred severe ones in the past 30 years alone.

Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric—“the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand—was just a cover for the old commercial interests. Suspicions were reinforced by the West’s own hypocrisy. Europe and America didn’t open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.

Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. “Privatization” meant that foreigners could buy mines and oil fields in developing countries at low prices. It meant they could reap large profits from monopolies and quasi-monopolies, such as in telecommunications. “Liberalization” meant that they could get high returns on their loans—and when loans went bad, the I.M.F. forced the socialization of the losses, meaning that the screws were put on entire populations to pay the banks back. It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent. While capital flowed freely, labor did not—except in the case of the most talented individuals, who found good jobs in a global marketplace.

…

Complete article at:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/third-world-debt200907

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Media reports on polling reinforce public’s view of deficit, rather than informing it

Media reports on polls indicating public concern over the federal budget deficit did not report the view among prominent economists that the government’s response to recession should be spending and not deficit reduction.

Read More

http://mediamatters.org/items/200906180030?lid=1045014&rid=30007428

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Review Of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during World War II. With depression and war, the previous two decades had been a cataclysmic time for the planet. His central thesis was, “The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” The book decisively pooh-poohs many of the myths of our ruling economic doctrine. Most importantly, he eviscerates the idea of …

Saturday, May 30, 2009

Guest Post: Review of Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation

Submitted by Joe Costelo:

Karl Polanyi’s, The Great Transformation is a truly original and important work published in 1944. Polanyi doesn’t fit well in our standard left/right economic dichotomy and for the refined economic tastes of the past several decades, he includes far too much history and politics. Most contemporary economists would no doubt shake their heads and say, “How can a book about economics be taken seriously, when it doesn’t have one equation?” That would be a great mistake. Mr. Polanyi’s insights deserve great attention.

Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation during World War II. With depression and war, the previous two decades had been a cataclysmic time for the planet. His central thesis was, “The origins of the cataclysm lay in the utopian endeavor of economic liberalism to set up a self-regulating market system.” The book decisively pooh-poohs many of the myths of our ruling economic doctrine. Most importantly, he eviscerates the idea of laissez-faire and uniquely documents Europe’s century and half revolution to a market society. Time after time, Polanyi shows the very visible hand of the government interfering in all aspects of society in order to insure market dominance.

Now this point is especially relevant to us today. For the last several decades, we have witnessed a resurgence of economic liberalism — neo-liberalism. We were told once again that markets could self-regulate, and once again it has come crashing down. Most importantly, over the last year, we’ve watched government step in to save some of our largest market institutions, including the locus of laissez-faire, Wall Street itself.

Polanyi is not anti-market. He believes they are indeed beneficial, but they are not self-regulating, and more importantly the ethos of the market should not be the ruling or even dominant ethic of society. The idea of self-regulating markets is utopian, and like all utopias extremely brutal if tried to be realized.

It would take a long piece to give Mr. Polanyi an overview his thinking deserve. However, there’s a couple points in Mr. Polanyi’s book that I’d like to emphasize on their relevance for today’s financial crisis. First, regarding the financial collapse of the late 1920s and early 1930s, Polanyi writes:

“In the 1920s, the gold standard was still regarded as the precondition of a return to stability and prosperity, and consequently no demand raised by its professional guardians, the bankers, was deemed too burdensome, if only it promised to secure stable exchange rates; when, after 1929, this proved impossible, the imperative need was for a stable internal currency and nobody was as little qualified to provide it as the banker.”

This is terribly important today. If you simply replace the gold standard with our last few decades “financial innovations,” we have a very similar situation. In the last year and half, every action taken by the Federal Reserve and Treasury has been an attempt to return to the “stability” of the last decades’ casino banking of derivatives and securitization. This isn’t going to work. Just like then, the bankers who provided us with securtization and deviravtives are the least qualified to bring about the changes we are of in such desperate need.

Secondly, Polanyi astutely points out the necessity of locality. This insight deserves a great deal of thought. It is an important component of our current banking problems. It provides an important principle for the necessary political reform that must accompany any real reform of our banking sector. Polanyi writes:

“In contrast to the nomadic peoples, the cultivator commits himself to improvements fixed in a particular place. Without such improvements human life must remain elementary, and little removed from that of animals. And how large a role have these fixtures played in human history! It is they, the cleared and cultivated lands, the other buildings, the means of communication, the multifarious plant necessary for production, including industry and mining, all permanent and immovable improvements that tie a human community to the locality where it is. They cannot be improvised, but must be built up gradually by generations of patient effort,and the community cannot afford to sacrifice them and start afresh elsewhere. Hence that territorial character of sovereignty, which permeates our political conceptions – for a century these obvious truths were ridiculed.”

Once again, over the last several decades, these obvious truths were ridiculed. In short, power must in some ways remain tied to locality. It cannot all be centralized and globalized. Centralization is both the enemy of locality and democracy. Yet, over the last several decades, the centralizing of the American economy under the utopianism of free-market fundamentalism has been staggering. The Financial Times writes,“The four biggest US commercial banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – possess 64 per cent of the assets of US commercial banks.”

When power becomes so concentrated it devolves certain traits. One of the most important of these traits in recent years has been the growing use of mathematical models, no more so rampant than in the banking sector. Yves Smith has touched on the issue as it relates to the mortgage fiasco stating quite accurately,

“The problem is that there isn’t a good substitute for knowledge of the borrower and his community. Does he understand what he is getting into? How stable is his employer? What are the prospects for the local economy? Those are important considerations, and they require judgment. That may still in the end be used as an input to a more structured decision process. but overly automating borrower assessment has resulted in information loss. It’s hardly a surprise that the quality of decisions deteriorated.”

Of course, modeling is not exclusive to the banking sectors. It has become essential in many of our large corporations and just as importantly in our centralized government bureaucracies. We need to step back from this head-long rush, this modern Pythagorean movement of enshrining mathematics. We must rethink our institutions of political economy away from centralization and the seductive but wrong-headed notion of ever more efficient control from the top, both practices are antithetical to democracy.

Instead, we need to reform our institutions of political economy, not based on mathematical models, don’t misunderstand, they still can be useful tools, but instead founded on the principles that people with all their human complexities and the localities in which they live and work must always be preeminent. We must understand that in order to create truly adaptive systems of political economy, which grow ever more necessary with the evolution of technology, we must allow our political economy to evolve and adapt. Centralization is not only the least conducive and the least democratic to these means, it eventually becomes truly reactionary.

In 1944, Polanyi had lived through the great cataclysms brought about by self-regulating market utopia. With the rise of the New Deal and the defeat of fascism, Polanyi thought he was witnessing, “a development which the economic system ceases to lay down the law to society and primacy of society over that system is secured.” Yet four decades later, the myth of the market once again rules and has led once again led to crisis.

We need to learn from this. Over the longer term the New Deal failed to keep markets restrained. While providing short-term relief, over time, the centralization of political power in DC proved as problematic as centralization of economic power in our mega-corporations. The corporations were easily able to take over the government. Those today who wish to once again confront the myths of self-regulating markets also need to confront the challenge of reforming our politics and government. Mr. Polanyi offers some valuable thinking.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/05/guest-post-review-of-karl-polanyis-the-great-transformation.html

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Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Speculative bubbles and financial crisis
Pengfei Wang and Yi Wen

St. Louis, Mo. : Research Division, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 2009.
(Working paper series ; 2009-029)

http://research.stlouisfed.org/wp/2009/2009-029.pdf

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George Herbert Walker Bush Comes Clean

by Karen Kwiatkowski

On his 85th birthday, corporate son, Vice President, President, father of our second Great Leader after FDR and before Obama, plane jumper, former CIA Director, and Bonesman George H.W. Bush has become as honest as a babe.

According to a recent bubbly and adoring news article in the Washington Times, “When asked directly whether the CIA lies “all the time,” Mr. Bush said it does not.

The CIA does not lie all the time.

So there.

I recently read Russ Baker’s Family of Secrets, because Lew interviewed Russ Baker and it sounded great. The book delivers, although I suspect there are a lot of Bush family secrets that remain unexposed. I am personally curious about any Bush secret recipes on the back burner back in March 1981. As history, the Wikipedia version of the Reagan assassination attempt reads like a CIA moonlighter’s script for a movie of the week.

Baker’s research led him back to the days of the JFK assassination, where HW, or “Poppy” Bush was not where he said he was, after all these years. You’ll have to read the book for a real, and real interesting, lesson in modern American democracy.

During the “wide-ranging” interview Poppy gave to the salivating Washington Times, he had shared this observation:

I think people are alarmed now. There’s too much government intervention into everything – putting people on the boards of directors. Too much. And too much spending,” Mr. Bush said. “I think people are, you know, understandably concerned about some of the things that are going on now.

Non-interventionist conservatives, libertarians, historians, economists, and thinking people everywhere have been “alarmed” for decades, and most today have realigned portfolios, gotten passports, and planned their bug out locations. So what “people” are alarmed now, according to Poppy? Apparently, Poppy’s friends and cohorts who aren’t getting picked to lead the interventions. What people are “understandably concerned?” Apparently, Poppy’s friends and cohorts who aren’t getting invited to sit on the fasci-boards as either the government partner or the corporate partner.

Poppy also doesn’t believe the rumors that the GOP is dead. What the GOP needs, Poppy suggested, is a good dose of his good son, Jeb, who just got back from a “‘listening tour’ with other prominent Republican leaders as part of a new party effort dubbed a ‘Conversation for a New America.’”

I am not making this up.

Poppy’s good son Jeb believes that listening to good ideas and alternative voices will help the GOP recover power. Good ideas and alternative voices from everyone except those from the only activated and vibrant remnant of the GOP – Paulians who embrace the idea of a constitutional republic.

Responding to a suggestion by the Times that perhaps the GOP ought to “rediscover” Reagan in order to renew itself as a party, Poppy retorts, “I don’t know what you mean by ‘Reagan principles.’” We are two for two in the truth – the CIA doesn’t lie all the time, and a top lifelong GOP’er has no idea what Reagan principles were in 1980, but instinctively recoils.

This is considered reporting by the Washington Times. Follow-ups? Fuggetaboutit! More importantly, it is also a textbook example of the fawning corporate media (Ray McGovern’s term for American Pravda, Tass and Izvestia) doing what it does best – setting up the Daily Show for its next fake news blockbuster.

The Washington Times has just launched a radio broadcast called America’s Morning News. Featured on yesterday’s debut was Poppy Bush observing that the results of the Iranian elections last week, with a claim of a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were “weird” and “it sounded funny when the opponent claimed victory by 60 some percent then the next thing you know he’s on his back, counted out, and there is “something strange about it.”

Beyond sounding like a 14-year-old mall rat instead of an American statesman, yes, Poppy, there is a lot strange about it – not least that Washington’s fave maniac handily won a flawed election, and no one in the FCM seems to be interested in Iranian anger about it, or the extreme brutality of the Iranian state against peaceful demonstrators. This is stability, DC-style, Poppy’s own business for many decades.

It’s good to see Poppy back in the news. It’s good that he is in his reflective years, and can speak the truth sometimes, even when it makes him look dotty. But what is really great about this interview is what it says about Washington’s news reporting, and the FCM overall. Its audience has shriveled, its remaining devotees a bled-out choir of codgery, and its apparent competition, in Mine That Bird style, is the dust cloud left by comedic news producers like The Onion and The Colbert Report.

This is very good news for the revolution.

June 16, 2009

LRC columnist Karen Kwiatkowski, Ph.D. [send her mail], a retired USAF lieutenant colonel, has written on defense issues with a libertarian perspective for MilitaryWeek.com, hosts the call-in radio show American Forum, and blogs occasionally for Huffingtonpost.com and Liberty and Power.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski231.html

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N.S.A.’s Pinwale Examines Large Volumes of US E-mail Messages Without Court Warrants

–E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress
17 Jun 2009

The National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged, current and former officials said. A former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program [Pinwale] in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation.

At:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17nsa.html

From: CLG News

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FedEx: Through the Looking Glass

by Kevin L. Kearns
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

FedEx has begun an all out political and public relations campaign to defeat a provision in a recently House-passed bill that would change the classification of its Express division drivers, taking them from under the Railway Labor Act and placing them (correctly) under the National Labor Relations Act. This very expensive and very negative campaign is prima facie evidence that FedEx derives an unfair competitive advantage from the driver misclassification. Otherwise, why all the threats, bluster, and negativity?
…

Complete article at:

http://americaneconomicalert.org/view_art.asp?Prod_ID=3256

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And now for the important news ….

By Argus Hamilton

The Congressional Budget Office said the president’s health care plan will cost one trillion three hundred billion dollars. The number stunned everyone. Michael Jordan saw it in the newspaper and wondered how his divorce settlement became public.

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com

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three thousand words

(click here to view)

Steve Greenberg Freelance, Los Angeles Jun 19, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

Steve Sack: The Scope of the Problem
(politicalirony.com)

Andy Singer, NO EXIT: choose one
(www.cagle.com)

Learning to Live With the Devil We Know

June 17, 2009
By Scott Ritter

The Iranian people went to the polls last Friday to elect a president. Pre-election polling showed the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, consistently holding a 2-to-1 advantage over his closest opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi. When the final election results were announced by the Iranian Ministry of Interior (the agency responsible for counting the votes and publishing the results), President Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, with 63 percent of the vote-about a 2-to-1 advantage. And yet, when the northern suburbs of Tehran, home to a large number of moderate reform-minded Iranians who are vehemently opposed to Ahmadinejad, erupted in violent protest, and Mousavi began to cry fraud, the Western media immediately jumped on the bandwagon, giving birth to the “instant history” of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections.

Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory should have come as a surprise to no one. The controversy surrounding Iran’s president, at home and abroad, represented a double-edged sword capable of cutting not only the incumbent but those who opposed him. Thanks to the explosion in energy prices last year, the global economic crisis that threatened Ahmadinejad’s re-election chances was blunted by the newly filled coffers of the Iranian government. Awash in hard currency derived from the sale of Iran’s oil and gas (Iran is, after all, the world’s fifth largest producer of oil), Ahmadinejad successfully used the energy crisis to his political advantage.

Pundits and opponents can rail all they want about the temporary stability of the Iranian economy, noting quite accurately that the fundamental problems that afflict Iran’s economic engine have not been fixed. Once the price of oil stabilizes at a lower level more in line with the realities of supply and demand in a slow-growing global economy, Iran’s economic difficulties will re-emerge with a vengeance. But to the average Iranian on the street, pummeled by inflation and unemployment, the upswing in Iran’s economic fortune was directly tied to the policies of the country’s high-profile president, right or wrong.

Iran’s improved economic condition, however temporary, also strengthened Ahmadinejad’s hand when it came to managing Iran’s complex and controversial foreign relations situation. Until two years ago, the shunning of Iran by the West, spurred on by Ahmadinejad’s hard-line positions on nuclear energy, Iraq and Israel, was creating a backlash among a significant segment of the population of Iran, including Ahmadinejad’s political base.

The underprivileged who brought Ahmadinejad to power found themselves bearing the brunt of the economic consequences of political isolation and economic sanctions. Popular opinion held that Ahmadinejad had gone too far, and that there was a need for more moderate policies designed to ease tensions with the West and improve Iran’s economy. Iran’s economic surge, fueled more by higher oil and gas prices than sound economic policy, eliminated that domestic pressure almost overnight.

Moreover, aggressive and belligerent rhetoric emanating out of Israel and the United States-touting the possibility of military action against Iran in the hope that the Iranian people would be compelled to vote Ahmadinejad out of office if they were placed under the cloud of potential conflict-backfired. With food in their bellies and money in their pockets, Iranians increasingly rallied around their president in the face of the increasingly hawkish rhetoric coming from American and Israeli politicians and military officials.

While President Barack Obama has called for unconditional talks with Iran and appealed for moderation in U.S.-Iran relations, the U.S. military and intelligence services continue to conduct covert operations designed to undermine the authority and viability of the current Iranian government.

Ahmadinejad, given the focus of attention that had been placed on him, was able to tap into this wave of newfound Iranian nationalism in a very personal way, melding himself as one with all of Iran. Mousavi’s calls for improved ties with the West, when seen in this light, were counterproductive and severely damaged his election chances.

Due to the intervention of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s election results must now be certified by the Guardian Council of the Constitution, a powerful and influential body jointly appointed by the supreme leader and the Iranian Majlis, or parliament, for the purpose of ensuring that legislative actions are consistent with both Islam and the constitution.

Khamenei had surprised many political observers when he quickly announced Ahmadinejad’s victory on Friday, and this action has been interpreted by many as a clear indication that Khamenei is behind the fixing of the presidential election. There is no doubt that bad blood existed between Mousavi and Khamenei (Mousavi was prime minister at the same time that Khamenei was Iran’s president, and the two have been bitter political rivals since then). But Khamenei has also butted heads repeatedly with Ahmadinejad, especially on issues pertaining to corruption in the running of government and among the clergy.

Khamenei’s motivations appear to be governed less by partisan politics and more by a desire to preserve the integrity and stature of the Islamic nature of the Iranian government and state. The decision by Khamenei to have the Guardian Council intervene in the certification of the election, made after Mousavi claimed that the Ministry of Interior had tampered with the election results to assure an Ahmadinejad victory, underscores this fact.

Was there fraud involved in Iran’s presidential election? Almost certainly. One might argue that the heavy-handed involvement of unelected clerics in determining who gets to run for office in and of itself makes a fraud of the democratic process. A similar argument, however, could be made about the exclusivity of the two-party system in the United States today, and yet very few media pundits question the viability of America’s democratic system of government.

The Western media, inflamed by sentiment and prejudice coming from the politically disaffected in northern Tehran, have underscored the fact that Iran’s Ministry of Interior is run by a close ally of Ahmadinejad. Given the blatant political partisanship and cronyism which have been witnessed in every major election in the United States, such observations coming out of Iran should carry little weight. We like to judge nations like Iran, especially when their elections don’t go the way we or our political allies desire, while turning a blind eye to the corruption and other manifestations of human imperfection in the American political system. The U.S. is a country, after all, where it costs a billion dollars to become president.

The undisputable fact remains that in the lead-up to Friday’s controversial presidential elections, scientific polling conducted by Western organizations such as the New America Foundation showed Ahmadinejad with a comfortable lead over Mousavi in all 30 of Iran’s provinces. Mousavi appeared to have captured the imagination of the Western press and punditry. But it is increasingly clear that, unless findings to the contrary are brought forward, he did not capture the votes of the majority of the Iranian people. The presence of tens of thousands of Mousavi supporters in the streets of Tehran does nothing to change this reality. The Western media’s repeated citation of unnamed sources claiming a Mousavi victory represents shoddy journalism and wishful thinking, nothing more.

The world needs to collectively move past the controversy of the Iranian elections and accept the reality that, like him or not, President Ahmadinejad will be the “democratically elected” face of Iran for the next four years. Regardless, the fact remains that there are two other individuals in Iran who hold real power, and with whom the West must engage if progress on the serious issues of Iran’s nuclear program, as well as peace and stability in Iraq and Afghanistan, is to be had. These are the speaker of the Iranian Majlis, Ali Larijani, and the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Both of these men possess more constitutional power than does the Iranian president, and as such both are far more important and influential when it comes to impacting the critical issues which define Iran’s relationship with the West, Iran’s nuclear program first and foremost.

America and the West need to learn to live with the devil we know–Ahmadinejad–all the while recognizing that the Iranian president, while a nuisance, does not hold the key to improved relations. Western media ought to spend more time focusing on the realities of Iran’s political system and less time facilitating the spread of increasingly partisan gossip.

The Iranian presidential election will continue to dominate the imagination–and headlines–of the Western media for the next few weeks. But unless some dramatic new information emerges which proves widespread election fraud, the reality is that the Guardian Council will, in the next 10 days, certify Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the legally elected president of Iran.

After this happens, life in Iran will gradually return to normal, and the political protests so earnestly covered by the West will take on the character of a tempest in a teapot. Mir Hossein Mousavi will disappear from the front pages of the leading newspapers, replaced by far more important subjects, such as Iran’s nuclear program.

The sooner this happens, the better, because from the standpoint of international peace and security, how the world manages Iran’s nuclear ambition is far more important than who claims the title of president of Iran.

Author’s Bio: Scott Ritter served as a former Marine Corps officer from 1984 until 1991, and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books, including “Iraq Confidential” (Nation Books, 2005) and “Target Iran” (Nation Books, 2006).

Complete article at:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Learning-to-Live-With-the-by-Scott-Ritter-090617-110.html

Steve Benson
(i.azcentral.com)

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The private health industry’s time is up

Obama has been supportive of a public option, but how do you solve the healthcare problem when you fail to deal with its root?

The Christian Science Monitor
By Bernie Sanders

from the June 16, 2009 edition

Washington – President Obama has indicated he wants a healthcare bill on his desk sometime around October, before we worry about timetables, however, we as a nation have to answer two very fundamental questions.

First, should all Americans be entitled to healthcare in the same way we respond to other basic needs such as education, police, and fire protection? Second, if we are to provide quality healthcare to all, how do we accomplish that in the most cost-effective way?

The answer to the first question is pretty clear, and one of the reasons that Barack Obama was elected president. Most Americans believe that all of us should have healthcare coverage, and that nobody should be left out of the system. The real debate is how we accomplish that goal in an affordable and sustainable way.

To me, the evidence is overwhelming that we must end the private insurance company domination of healthcare in our country and move toward a publicly funded, single-payer, Medicare-for-all approach.

Our current private health insurance system is the most costly, wasteful, complicated, and bureaucratic in the world. But in America, the people who have to navigate that maze are the lucky ones. Today, 46 million people have no health insurance and even more are underinsured with high deductibles and co-payments. At a time when 60 million people, including many with insurance, do not have access to a medical home base, more than 18,000 Americans die every year from preventable illnesses. That is six times the number who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Despite the fact that we spend almost twice as much per person on healthcare as any other country, our healthcare outcomes lag behind many other nations. According to the World Health Organization, the United States ranks 37th in terms of health system performance and we are far behind many other countries in terms of such important indices as infant mortality, life expectancy, and preventable deaths.

The main reason we get such bad results is that the function of private health insurance companies is not to provide quality healthcare for all, but to make huge profits for those who own the companies. With thousands of different health benefit programs designed to maximize profits, private health insurance companies spend an incredible 30 percent of each healthcare dollar on administration and billing, exorbitant CEO compensation packages, advertising, lobbying, and campaign contributions. Public programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the department of Veterans Affairs are administered for far less.

In recent years, while we have experienced an acute shortage of primary healthcare doctors as well as nurses and dentists, we are paying for a huge increase in healthcare bureaucrats and bill collectors. Over the past three decades, the number of administrative personnel has grown by 25 times the number of physicians.

While healthcare costs are soaring, it should surprise no one that profits of private health insurance companies are more than keeping pace.

From 2003 to 2007, the combined profits of the nation’s major health insurance companies increased by 170 percent. And, while more and more Americans are losing their jobs and health insurance, the top executives in the industry are receiving lavish compensation packages.

It’s not just William McGuire, the former head of United Health, who several years ago accumulated stock options worth an estimated $1.6 billion, or Cigna CEO Edward Hanway who made more than $120 million in the past five years. The reality is that CEO compensation for the top health insurance companies now averages $14.2 million.

The president has been supportive of a public option – a plan that people could opt into if they are uninsured or don’t like their private coverage. But the situation is extremely fluid. How do you get to the root of a problem when you fail to take on the private health industry?

The time is now for our nation to address the most profound moral and economic issue we face. The time is now for our country to join the rest of the industrialized world and provide cost-effective, comprehensive, quality healthcare to every man, woman, and child in our country. The time is now to take on the powerful special interests in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries and pass a single-payer national healthcare program.

Bernie Sanders is an independent senator for Vermont and a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Complete article at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0616/p09s01-coop.html

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WARNING: HEALTH CARE LOBBYISTS ARE WINNING THE BATTLE TO SCREW ALL OF US

By Marie Cocco, Washington Post Writers Group

Lobbyists sense that their chances of protecting big insurers, drug companies, medical specialties, technology companies are improving.

http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/140732/warning%3A_health_care_lobbyists_are_winning_the_battle_to_screw_all_of_us_/

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More Power for the Fed?

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The New York Times reports: “The plan the president will formally announce on Wednesday would give the Federal Reserve greater supervisory authority over large financial institutions whose problems pose potential risks to the economic system.”

ROBERT AUERBACH, auerbach@mail.utexas.edu, http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/faculty/auerbach.html

Professor of public affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, Auerbach wrote the book “Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.” He said today: “The Federal Reserve has massive conflicts of interest that make it ill suited for its present regulatory functions and certainly for an expanded regulatory reach. The officials leading the Fed today preside over an organization that is run in substantial part by the bankers they regulate. Bank regulation begins at its 12 district Federal Reserve Banks, each governed by a nine-member board of directors, two-thirds of whom are elected by the bankers in the district.

“The plan for a separate federal government ‘board’ over all regulators to coordinate systemic risk management is also not a good idea. There have been poor results with divided regulation between bank regulators despite the creation of the Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) in 1979 to coordinate regulation. The FFIEC has had as much influence on the secretive Federal Reserve, which regulates the financial holding companies of the huge superbanks and foreign banks, as hitting the powerful bureaucracy with a wet noodle.”

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EDITORIAL: Time to crack down on oil speculators

From the Web via YellowBrix 6/12/2009

Energy News

By Brattleboro Reformer, Vt.

BRATTLEBORO, VA.: Last year, financial speculators caused massive swings in oil prices. In the 12-month period that ended in July 2008, oil prices rose from $70 a barrel to a record $147, then collapsed below $40 by last fall amid the global financial crisis.

Why? These wild fluctuations weren’t purely a matter of supply and demand, although that was a factor. When the speculative bubble burst, energy prices also fell. This year, oil prices have rebounded by 85 percent, and the McClatchy News Service has reported that the investment bank Goldman Sachs recently forecast them to go to $85 a barrel this year.

After gasoline prices in southern Vermont stabilized at about $1.85 a gallon in March and April, the price shot up more than 60 cents a gallon in a matter of a few weeks. Why? Because speculators like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase & Co. are able to control refineries, pipelines and storage facilities to manipulate prices.

The rules of supply and demand don’t seem to apply anymore.

Oil inventories are near record highs and demand has hovered around a 10-year low, yet oil prices are about $70 per barrel. It’s led some to conclude that Americans are paying more because speculators drive up prices by betting hundreds of billions on oil contracts.

How? Through the use of derivatives, which are bets that derive their value based on future prices of some underlying asset — such as oil

contracts, interest rates, currency or even bonds and other forms of credit. If the value rises to the future price you bet on, you win. If it doesn’t, you can lose big.

In 2000, Congress effectively deregulated the futures market, granting exemptions for complicated derivative investments called oil swaps and causing an explosion in this type of trading.

The global financial system nearly collapsed during the last four months of 2008, because firms like insurance giant American International Group had issued trillions of dollars in insurance-like private derivatives contracts and had insufficient reserves to cover its losses. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department needed to rescue AIG and other financial firms caught up in this shell game.

What’s even more galling is that the investment banks taking bailout money from the federal government — such as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase — are the ones that are actively manipulating the energy markets to doubly rip off the American people.

“This is a product people depend on to live and investment banks and hedge funds should not be allowed to buy and store the oil just to drive the price up,” Matt Cota, executive director of the Vermont Fuel Dealers Association, told the Reformer this week. “We’re being victimized by speculators.”

It’s estimated that as much as 60 percent of the price of oil is a direct result of speculation. And as much as 70 percent of the oil contracts in the futures markets are now held by speculative entities. This is a recipe for price gouging.

How bad is it? According to Reuters, global diesel storage at sea has climbed to about 41 million barrels, and Bloomberg News reported this week that seven tankers with an estimated 14 million barrels of North Sea crude are anchored off Great Britain. JP Morgan Chase recently hired a ship to store up to 2 million barrels of heating oil off the coast of Malta.

“These companies are hoarding heating oil right now, in the hope of selling it at a higher price this winter when senior citizens on fixed incomes and middle class Americans in cold-weather states need heating oil to stay warm,” Vermont Sen. Bernard Sanders said this week.

Sanders plans to introduce legislation to require the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use emergency powers to stem oil price manipulation and force big oil traders to divulge reserves they are holding in offshore tankers to drive up prices.

It’s a good start, but what’s really needed is for Congress to restore transparency to the futures market, where energy prices are set.

Stronger regulations over energy trading markets would clamp down on speculators and limit their ability to drive up oil prices.

Before we have another winter where Vermonters get stuck paying $4 a gallon for heating oil because a handful of greedy traders are manipulating prices, Congress must take action and re-regulate the energy trading markets.

To see more of the Brattleboro Reformer or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.reformer.com/.

From: http://www.energycurrent.com/?id=2&storyid=18712&email=1

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This Week in Petroleum (TWIP)

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

This Week in Petroleum (TWIP) has been updated to the EIA website:

http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/oog/info/twip/twip.asp

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President Obama’s nominee for Army Secretary has requested $40 million in earmarks to be added to the defense appropriations bill.

Rep. John McHugh, a Republican congressman from New York, called for $4.7 million for the Lockheed Martin aviation corporation, which has contributed $35,000 to his congressional campaigns, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. “Rockwell Collins, Inc., a defense contractor with a facility in upstate New York would receive $2 million under the requests. … Rockwell Collins until this year had been a client of PMA Group lobbying firm, which closed after it was the target of an FBI investigation into campaign finance violations. PMA’s political action committee, its employees and its clients gave $160,250 to McHugh’s congressional campaigns.” McHugh is the top Republican serving on the House Armed Services Committee.

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An Exit Strategy That Keeps Wars Going

Political Views
By MWC NEWS
Tuesday, 16 June 2009

If George Orwell could see this he’d probably curse himself for not having thought of it. We are apparently about to see wars perpetuated by an exit strategy. How is this possible?

CONTINUE…

An Exit Strategy That Keeps Wars Going

By David Swanson

If George Orwell could see this he’d probably curse himself for not having thought of it. We are apparently about to see wars perpetuated by an exit strategy. How is this possible?

Well, the way Congress actually ends wars, the “exit strategy” that forces the troops and mercenaries to exit, is this one: you stop funding the wars. That’s what works. That’s what the Constitution foresaw. But nowadays we talk about crafting “exit strategies” while funding the continuation of wars. We even do so when the exit strategy is nothing but a one-sentence wish to someday have an exit strategy. And we even do so when the act of supporting a ridiculous “exit strategy” serves as cover for voting Yes on more war money.

A few things happened on Capitol Hill on Monday. First, it became clear that the Democratic Party (Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi) could not find the votes to pass $97 billion in war funding. Republicans were all opposing the bill because of IMF funding that had been added, and enough Democrats were opposing the IMF funding, the war funding, or both.

Second, Moveon.org and other large organizations let it be known that they planned to encourage their members on Tuesday to urge Congress members to sign onto a bill introduced by Congressman Jim McGovern that reads in its entirety:

“Not later than December 31, 2009, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to Congress a report outlining the United States exit strategy for United States military forces in Afghanistan participating in Operation Enduring Freedom.”

The exit strategy to satisfy this bill could consist of a plan to redeploy troops to Iran in 2015. It could be anything. McGovern had tried to have this language included as an amendment to the war supplemental, but had been turned down. No doubt the Democratic leadership on Monday was beginning to wonder whether letting this harmless amendment be included would have bought them some needed votes. Already on Monday Congress members were beginning to claim they were justified in planning to vote Yes for the war money because they were cosponsoring McGovern’s bill.

And MoveOn’s timing, together with other organizations in the Win Without War coalition, was telling. Because many members of these groups oppose the war and have complained about their organizations’ silence on the supplemental vote, the organizations’ leaders chose the moment of the war vote to propose something else that might at least look like a halfway step. In reality, however, it may turn out to be counterproductive — a development that would please Pelosi and Emanuel.

Third, after having opposed the war supplemental for weeks, have committed two years ago not to fund wars, having recorded a video a few days ago denouncing this bill and committing to voting against it, on Monday Congressman McGovern decided to vote Yes, according to Congress Daily.

The report may have been wrong. Or it may have been a test by McGovern, and he may claim it was a misunderstanding if he takes too much heat for it. (For example, people might phone his office at 202-225-6101 on Tuesday morning and ask him to explain himself. There would certainly be no way I could stop people who were inclined to do that.)

But assuming the report is right and that McGovern will vote Yes to fund wars and the IMF, and do so less than a week after taping a video advocating the opposite approach, then the question must be asked: what did the Democratic Party threaten him with or promise him?

Here’s my guess: they told him that his exit-strategy bill would be brought to the floor for a vote if he voted yes on the war money. If this happened, he could have calculated that any blockage of the war money would be temporary and that he should go ahead and cave in now if it allowed him to negotiate something, even a doomed vote on a toothless piece of rhetoric.

If I’m guessing right, then an exit strategy has already prevented one key member from supporting an actual exit. But McGovern may not be the only defector. Others may have similar plans. Even if this guess is wrong about how McGovern was bought off, it is very likely that other Congress members will cosponsor McGovern’s bill and then vote Yes for the war money, claiming that a toothless, pointless, exit-strategy bill redeems their votes to fund the continuation and escalation of war.

Thus would an exit strategy succeed in keeping wars going.

By Wednesday I hope to report that all of this is completely mistaken, Jim McGovern stands firmly for peace, and over 40 principled Democrats stand with him.

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book “Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union” by Seven Stories Press.

You can pre-order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book

Complete article at:

http://mwcnews.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31287&Itemid=26

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Forward Observer: War Without End?

By George C. Wilson, CongressDaily

The Global War on Terror risks turning into an open-ended and pricey commitment in which the United States instigates fights rather than remaining on the defensive.

Full story: http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=42947&dcn=e_gvet

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More media misrepresent scope of preliminary CBO analysis of health bill

In reporting the CBO’s conclusion that a Senate draft health-care bill would leave many uninsured, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, David Brooks, and USA Today did not note that the CBO did not assess several provisions that are expected to be added to the bill and that, according to the CBO director, “could … have substantial effects on our analysis.”

Read More

http://mediamatters.org/items/200906170004?lid=1044704&rid=29958980

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Borowitz Report – Scandal gets worse – much worse

June 18, 2009

Ensign: Hours Spent on Tanning Bed ‘Fried My Judgment’
Ability to Tell Right From Wrong was ‘Baked’

One day after admitting to an extramarital affair with an aide, Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) pleaded for understanding, arguing that hours spent on a tanning bed had “fried [my] judgment.”

“I ask all of those who consider my wrongdoing to lie an hour on my tanning bed,” he said. “You’ll see – your ability to tell right from wrong gets pretty darn baked.”

The Nevada senator agreed to 200 hours of community service in which he will work as a traffic cone.

Sen. Ensign received a strong vote of confidence today from another key tanned Republican in Congress.

According to congressional insiders, fellow baked Republican John Boehner (R-OH) is considering breaking off from the G.O.P. along with Sen. Ensign and forming a so-called Orange Party.

ELSEWHERE: Andy Borowitz performs live in NY on July 2 and signs copies of his new book, Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison: The Bernie Madoff Edition.

Get tickets here.

http://www.92y.org/shop/event_detail.asp?productid=T-MM5CM41

Andy’s Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events

July 2, 2009 at 9:00PM
New York!

Come see Andy in his only scheduled show of 2009 and celebrate the launch of his new book, Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison: Bernie Madoff Edition

Location:
92Y Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street
For tickets go to 92Y Tribeca

July 9, 2009 at 7:00PM
Washington, DC!

Andy performs a free stand-up show and talks to his wife Olivia Gentile about her new book, LIFE LIST: A Woman’s Quest for the World’s Most Amazing Birds. Olivia will sign her book and Andy will sign copies of his new book, WHO MOVED MY SOAP? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison: Bernie Madoff Edition.

Location:
Politics & Prose Bookstore, 5015 Connecticut Ave.

http://www.borowitzreport.com/

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three thousand words

(click here to view)

David Cohen cohencidents.com Jun 18, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com

Matt Davies: Belly Up
(davies.lohudblogs.com)

Lloyd Dangle, Troubletown: life under socialism
(www.cagle.com)