The economic relationship between China and the United States is the defining issue of our day. While debates over health care are vital to American society, and while challenges ranging from Iran to Afghanistan to North Korea are real, nothing will determine the arc of the coming decades - or will shape domestic life and prosperity in the United States - more than the emergence of China as a global economic superpower unrivalled except by America.
The rise of China is hardly a secret, but because it is a complex economic that is constantly evolving, it gets less attention than hot-button issues. Absent a real crisis between the two, the relationship is more about the flow of capital and the nature of global business than it is about heated battles inside the Beltway or on Main Street. And while the rise of China and America's increased dependency on Chinese loans to fund its deficits certainly generates anxiety, it's mostly amorphous barring some specific issue to focus it.
How that relationship came to be is the subject of my new book, Superfusion: How China and America Became One Economy and Why the World's Prosperity Depends On It. While this economic fusion has taken more than two decades to evolve, with the crisis of the past year, it has become both a tighter embrace and one more fraught with tension. It's to the credit of both governments - for now - that those tensions have not boiled over.
I've said a few times in comments recently that I'm pretty optimistic, from my antiwar and similar perspective, on the Iran and sanctions issue. The reasons are various, but centered on the analysis of India career diplomat M K Bhadrakumar, who also believes the sanctions effort will fail. More on those ideas a couple paragraphs down.
As for my perspective, first of all, not that it's stopped the U.S. before but there is pretty much zero justification for U.S. saber-rattling, as indicated by the mundane headlines (i.e., Iran vows to stick with low-level nuclear enrichment) only two days after the three imperials (Obama, Sarkozy, Brown) news conference about a 'secret' low-grade nuclear 'facility' that was neither secret nor a facility, since it won't be a functioning one till construction ends 18 months from now. This is weak soup for crippling sanctions, naval blockades, and worse. Today, even weaker stuff, 'IRAN TESTS (short-range) MISSILES! Oh my gawd y-a-w-n, weak stuff for scaring us up and dealing death.
Secondly, and Bhadrakumar's analysis is critical here, despite Beltway pundits fishing for wish fulfillment, both China (emphatically) and Russia oppose sanctions on Iran. And this time the U.S. needs international cover, imho, or its 'X must prove it doesn't have WMD' campaign (Hillary Clinton) won't have the outcome (severe sanctions and an attack on Iran's nuclear power facilities) desired by the U.S. & Israeli military-industrial complexes.
Obama joined the leaders of Britain and France in accusing the Islamic republic of clandestinely building an underground plant to make nuclear fuel that could be used to build an atomic bomb. Iranian officials acknowledged the facility but insisted it had been reported to nuclear authorities as required.
Obama should try reading intelligence reports, like 2007's National Intelligence Estimate (the combined consensus report by all sixteen known U.S. intelligence agencies), which stated quite clearly that there is no concrete evidence of a weapons program in Iran. In July and August of this year, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed the lack of evidence although it refuses to state anything definitively. Yet still Obama, the D.C. political establishment, and the corporate media continue to lie to the contrary.
We've already been lied into one failed war, lied into ramping up another failed war, are so hurting for fresh soldiers that the Pentagon is now actively accepting white supremacists, yet still the establishment seeks to lie us into another conflict. And some people have wondered why my signature now has an image of Obama and Bush morphed into one unholy beast. Now you know.
News is 'news' in our corporatacracy. Currently, for example, we have the Israeli-Warmongers-Only-Perspective 'News'. See below for how the release of a UN report on the war criminal conduct on both sides of the Gaza war is widely headlined in the mainstream news (to see how news of 320 dead Gazan children in that massacre is handled (hint: 'not at all'), see NPR's Linda Gradstein):
Where the Iranian spokesperson is allowed to dispel the headline's glaring implication in paragraph 20:
Javanfekr said Iran is ready to face the six powers and "during the talks we will definitely speak of banning nuclear arms globally because it is not a problem for us as we do not possess any nuclear arms."
So, obviously 'nuclear power' means 'nuclear power power'. Some of you got your war on before you realized that, right? That was the intent.
Meanwhile, McClatchy continues to be a source of news. Here it provides some reality on the domestic side, first the real health care catastrophe:
I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, I am selling t-shirts to raise money for amnesty. They can be found at www.everthustodeadbeats.etsy.com
They picture ahmadinejad with a caption of 'demockracy'. I will donate 50% of any profit to amnesty international, or perhaps a more specific charity if someone can point me in that direction. I would donate more but I have to miss work to make the shirts and like most on here I'm pretty close to hand to mouth living. Anyways, peace.
I'll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you dont know
Ill be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that youre home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside youre twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
cause I see you
The term Velvet Revolution was coined by a journalist after the first events and it caught on in world media and eventually in Czechoslovakia. The media, riding on an infotainment wave, saw this success and started the tradition of inventing and assigning a poetic name to similar events - see color revolution.
It is believed that the term originated from the various communist opposition groups which met in theaters such as the Laterna Magika, velvet referring to the velvet ropes found in all these theaters.[citation needed]
Another theory is that the revolution took its name from The Velvet Underground, an influential American rock and roll band. Václav Havel is a great fan of the Velvet Underground, and is a friend of Lou Reed, who was the principal singer-songwriter of the group, and told Reed after the collapse of communism, "Because of you, I am President."[13] The significance of music as an influence in the revolution is reflected in Frank Zappa (of whom Havel was also a lifelong fan), being asked by Havel to serve as a consultant for the government on trade, cultural matters and tourism.
It wasn't Ronald Reagan who won the Cold War. It was Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. And Nico.
Little-noticed authority granted to the president several decades ago may be helping the architects of the crackdown in Iran. The unintended consequences are enough to justify a second look at whether those powers should stay in place.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
It has been an amazing week in Iran, and you are no doubt seeing images that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago.
For most of us, Iran has been a country about which we know very little...which, obviously, makes it tough to put the limited news we're getting into a proper context.
The goal of today's conversation is to give you a bit more of an "insider look" at today's news; and to do that we'll describe some of the risks Iranian bloggers face as they go about their business, we'll meet a blogging Iranian cleric, we'll address the issue of what tools the Iranians use for Internet censorship and the companies that could potentially be helping it along, and then we'll examine Internet traffic patterns into and out of Iran.
Finally, a few words about, of all things, how certain computer games might be useful as tools of revolution.
For the past few weeks, I have made a concerted effort to cease all attacks on Republicans. (See my article "Target Landrieu, not Limbaugh," for more.)
As progressives, the governing problem we face right now does not come from the relatively powerless Republican minority, but rather from conservative Democrats and an often too timid leadership. In fact, taking a page from the Blue Dogs, it is actually through real threats to side with Republicans that progressives might be able to win real bargaining power in Congress. (See my article "The Progressive Block" for more.)
However, in response for Republican calls for Americans to take a more active role in supporting the Iranian protesters, tonight I am going to make an exception. More in the extended entry.
Below: What Obama gets and doesn't get about what a progressive foreign policy means.
Events in Iran have taken a sharp turn towards confrontation, as the regime's attempt to shut down all demonstrations with a show of armed force met fierce resistance.
Armed police forces are being used to prevent the formation of large-scale demonstrations--two were scheduled for today--but thousands of demonstrators have repeatedly clashed with police.
10:22 AM ET -- The demonstrators' dilemma. From an Iranian via reader Samira: "All streets are full of basiji and police. they have blocked all the streets. You can not go south of Felestin street. So if one stops to ponder what to do next, they attack and beat!"
....
10:15 AM ET -- AP: Dozens of protesters "seriously beaten." "The witnesses told The Associated Press that between 50 and 60 protesters were seriously beaten by police and pro-government militia and taken to Imam Khomeini hospital in central Tehran. People could be seen dragging away comrades bloodied by baton strikes. Helicopters hovered over central Tehran. Ambulance sirens echoed through the streets and black smoke rose over the city. Tehran University was cordoned off by police and militia while students inside the university chanted 'death to the dictator,' witnesses said."
10:11 AM ET -- AFP: Unrest at Tehran University. "One to two thousand protestors have gathered in front of Tehran University, which is close to the site of a mass rally planned on Saturday, a witness told AFP."
10:01 AM ET -- AP reports "fierce clashes."
Eyewitnesses described fierce clashes near Revolution Square in central Tehran after some 3,000 protesters chanted "Death to the dictator!" and "Death to dictatorship!" Police responded with tear gas and water cannons, the witnesses said. [...]
English-language state TV said a blast at the Tehran shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini had killed one persona and wounded two but the report could not be independently confirmed due to government restrictions on independent reporting. [...]
Web sites run by supporters of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi said he planned to post a message, but there was no statement by the time of the planned street protests at 4 p.m. (7:30 a.m. EDT, 1130 GMT).
There are also reports of at least two alleged acts of violence by protesters, though such claims are highly suspicious, to say the least....
If weren't following what followed the election in Iran over the weekend, that might be due to its not being televised, but Twittered and shared on other internet social media.
As I write this, the most retweeted (RT or rt) comments seem to be a call for protestors to wear black today in mourning for those killed by the security forces and a declaration that the only violent actions are being taken by the Basij/Baseej volunteer militia.
There are also calls for the crowds at rallies to remain quiet and calm, mixed with warnings that plainclothes Basij may mingle with the crowds and try to stir up trouble. Rachel Maddow's segment on the uprising last night shows what at least one crowd of demonstrators have been doing in response to police - sitting down. This clip shows another group calmly standing beside and talking with police:
In 2002, a popular Iranian professor and disabled veteran of the Iran-Iraq war said something controversial, in calling for an Islamic Protestantism, while criticizing the clergy for corruption and the use of torture.
Aghajari was sentenced to death. This proved to be extremely unpopular and the student-originated protests lasted for weeks, spreading beyond Tehran and including people from many walks of life.
The protests had begun to be coordinated through a call-in program on the US-sponsored Radio Azadi (Freedom), a Farsi-language version of Radio Free Europe.
Jackson Diehl reported on the shutdown of Radio Azadi at the height of the protests in the Washington Post, but they don't preserve their online archives that far back, so I can only share with you the paragraphs I quoted from him at the time on my old blog:
Way back in May 2005, less than a month before Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected President of Iran, the barking idiot Condoleeza Rice was prancing around the Middle East and threatening Iran with the sort of "major changes" which the United States had already inflicted on Afghanistan and Iraq.
"The Iranians should not consider themselves immune from the major changes that are going on in the region, and we would hope that they would begin to engage in more stabilizing behavior," said Rice, speaking after a meeting with Kuwaiti's foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed al-Sabah.
Iranians voters, who were about to choose between the violently anti-American Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the much more conciliatory Mohammad Khatami, and the centrist Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, immediately understood that Condoleeza Rice was sending them a message!
"Elect that hard-liner Ahmadinejad and the biggest bully on the block will open a can of whip-ass on your sorry Islamic butts!"
Ahmadinejad immediately surged out of nowhere in the polls, and won the run-off election against Rafsanjani, because...
Contrary to what goddamned cowards and bullies like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Condoleeza Rice believe, the world is full of people whom you cannot intimidate!
Maybe you can kill them, maybe you can bomb their cities to smithereens and inflict a genocidal occupation on the ruins, but they will not get down on all fours and obey your stinking orders!
This is incomprehensible to the Bushes and Cheneys of the world, but a brilliant manipulator of public opinion like Barack Obama understands it without even thinking, and so...
When Obama set off on a junket around the Middle East a few weeks before the subsequent Presidential election in Iran, he made much more conciliatory noises at the Iranians, and in my opinion he knocked the main prop out from under Ahmadinejad and his crew of half-witted relatives and mullahs who have totally wrecked almost every segment the Iranian economy for the last four years.
Why bother to re-elect that gang of fanatical boobs when you don't have to make a statement to the bullies and infidels in faraway Washington?
I don't know how the post-election turmoil in Iran will eventually be resolved, but even if Ahmadinejad survives, his authority has been seriously undermined, and that is already a brilliant success for Barack Obama and his foreign-policy advisors.
Today's Washington Post op-ed by Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty concerning a public opinion survey they conducted in Iran on that nation's presidential election is both worth a read, and highly disturbing for what it omits. Here is the first paragraph:
The election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people. Many experts are claiming that the margin of victory of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the result of fraud or manipulation, but our nationwide public opinion survey of Iranians three weeks before the vote showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1 margin -- greater than his actual apparent margin of victory in Friday's election.
Anyone regularly involved in poll analysis would notice two red flags in this paragraph:
The actual results of the poll were 34%-14%, with 27% undecided and 22% falling into some strange category of not supporting anyone nor being undecided. To instead report the results as "more than a 2 to 1 margin" is to use a rhetorical trick that creates more similarity between the final result and the poll than the numbers actually suggest.
The poll was conducted from May 11-20, which is actually a range of 24-33 days before the election, not "three weeks." To call it three weeks instead of providing the actual dates make it sound as though the poll was taken closer to the election than it actually was.
Because of these two rhetorical slight of hands that were employed instead of simply listing the poll results and actual dates the poll was completed, my sense of the integrity of this poll drops immediately. It wouldn't even have taken any longer to just list the numbers, but for some reason the pollsters immediately employed rhetorical moves instead.
Undecideds break heavily for lesser known challengers within the context of American elections. It is difficult to imagine why that would be any different in other countries, given that the same phenomenon of the electorate making up its collective mind about an incumbent before the election season would still be in effect. Further, check out the following two paragraphs from the poll that they failed to mention entirely in their op-ed (hat-tip Juan Cole):
' A close examination of our survey results reveals that the race may actually be closer than a first look at the numbers would indicate. More than 60 percent of those who state they don't know who they will vote for in the Presidential elections reflect individuals who favor political reform and change in the current system.'(...)
The current mood indicates that none of the candidates will likely pass the 50 percent threshold needed to automatically win; meaning that a second round runoff between the two highest finishers, as things stand, Mr. Ahmadinejad and Mr. Moussavi, is likely.
So, due to the large number of undecideds and the mood of the undecideds, in writing about their own poll, Ballen and Doherty actually predicted a second-round run-off with no one reaching 50%+1. However, when official results come out showing the incumbent winning with 63%, they publish an op-ed in the Washington Post suggesting that the election was clean, based on their own polling?
I don't know anything about these pollsters. However, it is pretty bizarre to argue, at different times, that a single poll both shows the incumbent likely to not reach 50%, and also that a 63% result for the incumbent was probably legitimate. I really can't wrap my head around that one. Even though I absolutely hate making implications like this, such a strange turnabout in analysis is enough to make one wonder if there is another agenda at play.
Anyway, this isn't going to be settled by statistical analysis. Right now, the real numbers to be asking about are how many people are protesting, and how long they will continue to do so. On that front, the number seems to be rising from thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to millions.
What do you think the repressive regimes of the region are going to conclude about Obama's response to massacre, disappearances, and torture of pro-democracy movements after seeing his response to Ahmadinejad?
Conclusion: We can pull a Tiananmen and Obama will do nothing but congratulate us on a "robust debate".
"The Obama Effect" was a false dawn for Middle East democracy, now we wake up to the nightmare.
(if this is "not a diary" forgive me, but I see no open thread)
observers who want to lay a guilt trip on us about falling for Mousavi's smooth upper middle class schtick are simply ignoring the last 12 years of Iranian history.
Today, the situation in Iran seems very much in flux, as street demonstrations continued for a second day. Before discussing Iran specifically, though, I want to address the the larger world historical background.
In yesterday's discussion of what's happening in Iran, there was a lot of back and forth that seemed to me to be of the "Blind Men and the Elephant" kind--the Elephant being liberal social democracy. The diary I wrote was about the events unfolding in Iran as part of a centuries-long struggle for liberal social democracy punctuated with several such crucial moments which I referred to, and since it seems the Elephant got lost a bit in that discussion, I thought it worthwhile to begin saying a few words about it.
First off, stealing elections is not democratic. That's more or less ground zero for me. Democracy that's not liberal does not protect individual rights. It would allow a democratic majority to arbitrarily put someone to death. And, of course, the right to vote--which of course includes the right to have it counted--os one of those rights. Democracy that's not social does not recognize protect social and economic rights. It would allow any number of people to starve to death.
That's why I see liberal social democracy as the minimal acceptable form of government. And I see the struggle to achieve LSD on a worldwide basis as the great struggle of the past 250 years--a struggle we are still very much in the midst of.
The post-WWII expansion of widespread prosperity, leading to the first truly mass middle class, first centered in Western Europe and North America, then spreading around the globe, has seen a reorientation toward what are called "post-materialist values". There is a great potential here, as this represents a great maturing in the potential for collective self-government, but there is a danger as well, to the extent that people born into conditions of basic material security may not appreciate what it has taken to achieve that state, or what it means that so many still live outside of it.
Amidst the chaos of various reports from Iran, one thing seems clear: the election was stolen, and rather ham-fistedly at that.
I should hasten to say, it's possible that they stole an election they would have won anyway. I don't pretend to be an expert in Iranian politics, and with such a volatile situation--plus a class dimension pointed to by VLaszlo in quick hits that's never seriously discussed here--I doubt that many others outside Iran know much better either.
But I do know the tell-tale signs--at least some of them--when an election is being stolen. Manipulating and cutting off communications are right there at the top of the list.
Given that nothing could possibly de-legitimate the unelected government more than this, one has to wonder why they did it. Perhaps they didn't realize this. Perhaps they didn't care. Perhaps they even wanted it, to show how little they cared if they were seen as illegitimate. As I freely admit, I don't know enough about Iranian politics to even begin to say which is more likely. But given what little I do know, this moment seems clearly parallel to a number of other crucial moments in world history--none of them too happy in the short run.
Tianenman Square is an obvious parallel--a moment of potential transformation dashed, one that came at the end of a string of such moments that had swept through Eastern Europe. The CIA's coup in Iran in 1953 is another such moment, as is the multi-nation European uprising of 1848. These are all moments when it seemed that bonds of history might burst... but then they did not.
But what are those bonds of history? They are primarily the bonds of the masters, but they are also the bonds of necessity as well, which often means they are the bonds of what the poor need to survive. Those on the edge of starvation may eat like kings for a day if that's what it costs to rally enough of them to keep the Ancien Regime in place.
Since McCain said it several times to batter Obama over his willingness to talk with adversaries before bombing their innocent citizens, it's worth noting that the President of Iran has not called for "wiping Israel off the map." Obama did at least mention that Ahmadinejad is not in charge of the Iranian military and would not be able to order such an attack even if he wanted to, but that he supposedly said this has become one of the right's favourite zombie lies that cannot die.
Not since the first utterance of Mission Accomplished has a politician proved himself to be so breathtakingly out of touch with reality.
This is John McCain on "This Week" with George Stephanopolous:
Steph: But there was a fundamental difference regarding the original reason to go to war [in Iraq]. He [Obama] said it would inflame the Muslim world and become a recruitment tool for Al Quaeda. You said and you wrote that it would lessen antipathy in the Muslim world and that we would be greeted as liberators. Wasn't Senator Obama right about that?
McCain: I don't believe so. We were greeted as liberators.
