News and views …

by Debs is Dead
excerpted from a comment

Anyone who had any doubt about a deal having been done between the
appalling Benazir Bhutto and amerikan intelligence to create a false
aura of democratic rule about Mushareef’s Pakistani dictatorship,
should take note of this:

Musharraf reopens charge against Sharif

General Pervez Musharraf has dramatically upped the
stakes in his confrontation with Nawaz Sharif by reopening a corruption
charge against the former prime minister days before he is to return to
Pakistan to challenge the military leader. And a court ordered a murder
warrant for the arrest of Mr Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, who is to
return from London with him.

An anti-corruption court in Rawalpindi held a hearing in a
five-year-old case relating to allegations that Mr Sharif’s family
defaulted on a bank loan. The case had been adjourned for years but was
reopened at the instigation of the government last month. …

Pakistan has been a nation of amerikan interest since 911, before
that no one seemed to care, and many will be unaware of this nation’s
unlucky political history.

Cont. reading: Pakistan: Election Preperations

Osama bin Laden has prepared an address to Americans that will be released next week on the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks, jihadist forums are claiming.

The SITE Institute, which monitors extremist Web sites, reports that an "image of bin Laden contained in the banner found on jihadist forums is reminiscent of his last video appearance in 2004, but his beard is now completely black, as it was previously streaked with grey."
Report: Bin Laden Tape To Be Released On 9/11 Anniversary, National Journal, Sep. 6

The tape surfaced less than 24 hours after the appearance of announcements on several Islamic Web sites of the imminent release of a new statement from the "Lion Sheik" bin Laden.

The video was obtained early yesterday by U.S. intelligence officials and was first made public on the Web site of the SITE Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit group that studies terrorist organizations. The circumstances of its release were unusual: No copy of the video had appeared on Islamic Web sites as of yesterday, as has been the norm for past al-Qaeda videos. A spokesman for SITE declined to comment on how it obtained the most recent video.
In a New Video, Bin Laden Predicts U.S. Failure in Iraq, WaPo

Cont. reading: Prop-Agenda

by Bea

Naomi Klein has a new book out:

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a painstakingly detailed analysis of how corporations manipulate natural and manmade disasters to line their pockets and further their privatizing agenda, is not a marginal, academic treatise by a lefty think tank targeted at a small, like-minded audience.

Further down in the piece, the book is described in greater detail:

In it, Klein assails the legacy of Milton Friedman, the late, Nobel Prize-winning Chicago economist beloved by conservatives for his unequivocal belief in the supremacy of the private sector, even as a means of delivering traditionally public services such as health care, education and drinking water.

The book argues that since the public doesn’t necessarily share the Friedmanite faith, corporations seize on the disorientation caused by situations of turmoil and upheaval to inflict their privatizing agendas.

Examples range from the way in which the Friedman doctrine was implemented in Chile after the 1973 coup that brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, to the more recent displacement of Sri Lankan fishers who were prevented by resort developers from returning to their villages in the aftermath of the 2003 tsunami.

Klein began connecting the dots in her own mind at the start of the Iraq War in 2003. At the time she and her husband, filmmaker and former TV host Avi Lewis, were living in Argentina, a country then emerging from its own period of economic shock therapy. She was struck by how closely the original reconstruction plans for Iraq conformed to the shock formula.

I would like to take this occasion to pay tribute to her entire body of work by providing a series of links that will hopefully stimulate some interesting and insightful discussion here at MOA.

• The Rise of the Fortress Continent
• Privatization in Disguise
• Free Trade  is War
• Bring Halliburton Home
• Shameless in Iraq
• The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
• Laboratory for a Fortressed World
• The Quest to Impose a Single World Market Has Casualties Now in the Millions, from Chile Then to Iraq Today

A full set of links to all her many articles can be found on her web site.

I know we have seen some of these pieces in passing as they were published, but I think that reviewing them together, and discussing the economic ideas in them, is worthwhile.

The metropol police department’s claim that accidents have decreased sharply in recent months has come under scrutiny from many experts, who contend that some of the underlying
statistics are questionable and selectively ignore negative trends.

Reductions in accidents form the centerpiece of Mayor Liar’s claim that his accident reduction strategy is working.

Statistic analysts computing aggregate levels of accidents puzzled over how the police designated accidents as irrelevant, severe or collateral, according to one senior official. "If a car is hit in the rear,
it’s severe," the official said. "If it is front on, it’s
irrelevant."

Among the most worrisome trends cited were an escalating number of downtown accidents involving pedestrians. According to a spokesman for the police department, those events are not included in
the police’s statistics. "Given a lack of capability to accurately
track such incidents, except in certain
instances," the spokesman said, "we do not track this data to any
significant degree."

Accidents involving city owned vehicles are also excluded from the police’s calculation.

The police stopped releasing statistics on deaths by accident in late
2005, saying the news media were taking them out of context.

Mayor Liar’s reelection campaign is expected to claim a 75% reduction in accidents as his main achievement. The campaign is enjoying bipartisan support.

An analysts, however, said the
overall assessment was that the accident situation "was still getting worse," he said, "but not as fast."

link

These threads fill up faster and faster … news & views …

What is the Farsi word for Kremlinology? I don’t know, so I’ll just write up some facts without much conclusions.

There is a noticable shift in the Iranian government that may well reflect into its future policies.

President Ahmedinejad is under fire for his economic policies. He had ordered interest rates to be cut despite significant inflationary pressure and sacked the ministers for oil and industry. The head of the Central Bank resigned. A new ‘reformist’ Central Bank chief was introduced today, but the important ministries are still headless and there is some conflict with the parliament about the replacements.

Two of the Iranian-American scholars held by Iran on espionage accusations have been freed and are allowed to leave the country. This was likely the influence of the Supreme Leader Khamenei and not Ahmedinejad’s decision.

In a deal with the IAEA a timeplan to answer old questions was fixed. This plus a  remarkable slowdown in enrichment might forestall further UN sanctions. The compact was the work of Ali Larijani, who is a member of the National Security Council on behalf of Khamenei.

Last Friday the commander of the Revolutionary Guard, a 250,000 men military/industrial force, was moved up and away to become a special advisor to Khamenei. No ‘western’ media seems to have an explanation for this move. Our commentator Parviz noted:

[T]he head of the Revolutionary Guards was dismissed last week for having delivered a speech that the Religious Leader (Khamenei) considered too belligerent.

But the ex-patria Iran Press Service writes just about the opposite:

No reason was given for the very important change at the highest level of the 250.000 strong Guards, but some informed sources said Rahim Safavi might have been changed because of his relative “mildness” compared to some other hard line officer, including General Ja’fari.

So was he too hard or too soft? Whatever it is, Safavi is still holding speeches and the new ICRG leader Ja’fari didn’t sound shy in his first press conference.

The most significant recent move though is the election of former president Rafsanjani as head the Council of Experts, a powerful chamber that elects, consults and supervises the Supreme Leader, currently Ajatollah Khamenei. Rafsanjani is a pragmatic conservative Islamic cleric and a very rich man with best relations to the business class. This puts him into opposition of Ahmedinejad who’s constituency are the poor workers and farmers.

All the above steps are limiting Ahmedinejad’s position and assert the position of Khamenei.  Coming within a short timeframe they signal a major shift which
will have some consequences in the foreign policy relations.

Rafsanjani’s election will certainly tame some of the statements coming from Iran that the ‘west’ interprets as bellingerance. But Rafsanjani is certainly not bending his knees to ‘western’ demands.

"Now they (the United States) have started an anti-Shiite wave and we should be careful not to fall into their traps,"added Rafsanjani. "We should not let ourselves be provoked and give an excuse for the enemy."

Still, the U.S. reaction to Rafsanjani’s election was positive:

"We would hope that reasonable individuals in Iran would see the positive opportunity given to it by the international community to enter negotiations and be able to achieve a peaceful nuclear program while still reassuring everyone else that it is not simply a cover for building a nuclear weapon," State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey told reporters.

As far as I remember, the U.S. had previously denied any legitimacy of such a peaceful nuclear program in Iran. Is this a major change in U.S. policy or just a trial balloon by the State Department?

Nothing of the above will likely appease the U.S. neocons who want to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.

Regime change to them is not simply a change of foreign leaders, but a change of the political, social and economic system of a foreign country. Iran is certainly not willing to go down that road.

But the changes can be helpful for those in the U.S. who argue for negotiations instead of destruction.

The Brookings Institute publishes a quarterly short report about "The State of Iraq". It is a collection of various criteria, numbers measuring these and a short interpretating note. A chart with the numbers is regulary published in the New York Times and often quoted in discussions about Iraq.

Responsible for "The State of Iraq" is Brookings’ Senior Fellow Michael E. O’Hanlon, who recently wrote a contentious op-ed favouring a continuatuion of the ‘surge’ military escalation in Iraq.

Reason enough to analyse the most recent report published in today’s NYT with data for August 2007. For comparisons the numbers for May 2007, February 2007, November 2006 and August 2006 are available at the Brookings site.

In today’s introducing text O’Hanlon notes:

Nonetheless, the military momentum appears real, despite the tragic multiple truck bombings in Ninevah Province on Aug. 14 that made that month the deadliest since winter. Overall, civilian fatality rates are down perhaps one third since late 2006, though they remain quite high.

In detail:

Cont. reading: O’Hanlon’s Sloppy ‘State of Iraq’ Reports

Sorry, still on the road and no time to write up something.
You could talk about today’s PR show in the Anbar desert or other news & views …
(and please no personal attacks ..)

News & views …

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig resigned Saturday over a men’s room sex sting, bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans worried about a scandal dimming their election prospects.
[…]
Craig’s resignation completed a stunning downfall that began Monday with the disclosure that he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge following his arrest during a sex sting in a Minneapolis airport men’s room.
Sen. Craig resigns over sex sting

That’s ok. He is a hypocrite who several times voted against gay people’s interest. There are too many such hypocrites around. The Republicans only pushed him out to lessen the damage to themselves and only because they are sure that the Republican governeur of Idaho will send them an adequate partisan replacement.

But aside from the politics, the case let me think about the differences between the U.S. and old Europe, i.e. Germany. Again they are bigger than I first thought. This in the social sphere as well as in the legal realm. 

Cont. reading: Stings and Plea Bargains