Saturday, May 8, 2010

15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America

By Gus Lubin

May 07, 2010 "
SFGate" -- Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at any time since the Gilded Age.
The poor are getting poorer, wages are falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low.

The gap between 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since the roaring Twenties

The gap between 1% and everyone else hasn't been this bad since 

the roaring Twenties
Source: The Nation
 

Half of America has only 2.5% of the wealth


Half of America has only 2.5% of the wealth
Source: Institute for Policy Studies
 

Half of America has only 0.5% of the stocks and bonds


Half of America has only 0.5% of the stocks and bonds
Source: Institute for Policy Studies
 

Look at the gap grow!


Look at the gap grow!
Source: Professor G. William Domhoff
 

The last two decades were great... except for American workers


The last two decades were great... except for American workers

 

Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years


Real average earnings have not increased in 50 years

 

But savings rates are sinking


But savings rates are sinking

 

Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle class


Poor Americans have a SLIM CHANCE of rising to the upper middle 

class
Source: NBER
 

Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap


Republican tax cuts have significantly increased the gap
Source:
 

Taxes get better and better for the rich


Taxes get better and better for the rich

 

America spreads the wealth FAR LESS than other developed countries


America spreads the wealth FAR LESS than other developed 

countries

 

America's income spread is nearly twice the OECD average


America's income spread is nearly twice the OECD average
Source: Economist
 

The gap is NOT growing in many countries, like France


The gap is NOT growing in many countries, like France

 

Inequality is worst around Wall Street and Oil Land


Inequality is worst around Wall Street and Oil Land

 

If you aren't in the top 1%, then you're getting a bum deal


If you aren't in the top 1%, then you're getting a bum deal

 

Now read...


Now read...

20 Cities That Have Completely Missed The Recovery

 

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Would You Put Up With What is Being Asked of the Greek People?

By Tony Bonsignore
 
May 07, 2010 "City Wire" -- Want to know exactly why public anger in Greece is running at such explosive levels? Then take a look at the austerity measures currently being debated by the Greek parliament.
The BBC reports that as part of the IMF/ EU bailout Greek leaders are proposing the following measures:
  • Public sector pay to be frozen till 2014;
  • Public sector salary bonuses – equivalent to two months’ extra pay – to be scrapped or capped;
  • Public sector allowances to be cut by 20%;
  • State pensions to be frozen or cut, with the contribution period up from 37 to 40 years;
  • The average retirement age raised from 61 to 63, and early retirement restricted;
  • VAT to be increased from 19% to 23%;
  • Taxes on fuel, alcohol and tobacco raised to 10%;
  • A new one-off tax on profits to be introduced, plus new gambling, property and green taxes.
On their own any one of these measures would probably be enough to prompt significant political disquiet; taken together they represent a catastrophic setback to the financial aspirations of the average Greek.
It certainly wasn’t what the Greek population voted for when they entered the EU in 1981 and adopted the single currency two decades later.

The country’s government argues that it has no choice it if is to avoid an even greater catastrophe.

‘We are all responsible so that it does not take the step into the void,’ prime minister Karolos Papoulias argues, warning that the country is on the ‘brink of the abyss.’

Others, though, argue that Greece is being held to ransom by the EU and the IMF for ideological reasons, and that there are other more equitable options available.

Leave the single currency, for example, or nationalise Greece’s banks.

Or even default or restructure - and leave those German and French banks with massive holdings of Greek debt to deal with the consequences of their own investment folly.

More broadly, protestors argue that they are being made to pay for a crisis they did not cause, and which wealthy speculators are still profiting from.

That is inherently unfair, they say, and it must not be allowed to pass.

It all adds up to a huge dilemma for the Greek government.

Here in the UK on general election day, meanwhile, the main political parties are digesting yesterday's news from the European Commission that our economy now has the biggest budget deficit in the 27-nation EU.

The UK, of course, with its own currency, has many more policy options that Greece, and its economy is not nearly in the same mess as Greece's. Not yet, anyway.

'The first thing for the new government to do is to agree on a convincing, ambitious programme of fiscal consolidation in order to start to reduce the very high deficit and stabilise the high debt level of the UK,' said EU commissioner Ollie Rehn.

'That's by far the first and foremost challenge of the new government. I trust whatever the colour of the government, I hope it will take this measure.'

Today's Money Blog question, then, is one which goes to the heart of the political crisis which is gripping the Eurozone at the moment; it might even be a question asked of us by the next government, whatever hue they might be.

Put simply: would you put up with what is being asked of the Greek people?

Thoughts please.


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

What I Learned in Afghanistan - About the United States


By Dana Visalli

May 07,2010 "
Lew Rockwell" -- I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.

I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan "to help Afghan women," and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled "Silence is Violence," that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.

95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.

US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the "30-year war" there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.

Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.

Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us "a thousand stories like this." There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.

Armed conflict and insecurity, along with criminality and lawlessness, are on the rise in Afghanistan. In this respect, the country mirrors experience elsewhere which indicates a near universal co-relation between heightened conflict, insecurity, and violence against women.

Once one understands that the US military presence in Afghanistan is not actually helping the Afghan people, the question of the effectiveness or goodwill of other major US military interventions in recent history arises. In Vietnam, for example, the country had been a colony of France for the 80 years prior to WW II, at which point the Japanese invaded and took over. When the Japanese surrendered, the Vietnamese declared their independence, on September 2, 1945. In their preamble they directly quoted the US Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness….").

The United States responded first by supporting the French in their efforts to recapture their lost colony, and when that failed, the US dropped 10 million tons of bombs on Vietnam – more than were dropped in all of World War II – sprayed 29 million gallons of the carcinogenic defoliant Agent Orange on the country, and dropped 400,000 tons of napalm, killing a total 3.4 million people. This is an appreciable level of savagery, and it would be reasonable to ask why the United States responded in this way to the Vietnamese simply declaring their inalienable rights.

There was a sideshow to the Vietnam war, and that is that the United States conducted massive bombing campaigns against Vietnam’s two western neighbors, Laos and Cambodia. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos in a operation consisting of 580,000 bombing missions – equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. This unprecedented, secret bombing campaign was conducted without authorization from the US Congress and without the knowledge of the American people.

The ten-year bombing exercise killed an estimated 1 million Laotians. Despite questions surrounding the legality of the bombings and the large toll of innocent lives that were taken, the US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs at the time, Alexis Johnson, stated, "The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there . . . is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

One Laotian female refugee recalled the years of bombing in this way: "Our lives became like those of animals desperately trying to escape their hunters . . . Human beings, whose parents brought them into the world and carefully raised them with overflowing love despite so many difficulties, these human beings would die from a single blast as explosions burst, lying still without moving again at all. And who then thinks of the blood, flesh, sweat and strength of their parents, and who will have charity and pity for them? In reality, whatever happens, it is only the innocent who suffer."

In Cambodia, the United States was concerned that the North Vietnamese might have established a military base in the country. In response, The US dropped three million tons of ordnance in 230,000 sorties on 113,000 sites between 1964 and 1975. 10% of this bombing was indiscriminate, with 3,580 of the sites listed as having "unknown" targets and another 8000 sites having no target listed at all. About a million Cambodians were killed (there was no one counting), and the destruction to society wrought by the indiscriminate, long-term destruction is widely thought to have given rise to the Khmer Rouge, who proceeded, in their hatred for all things Western, to kill another 2 million people.

Four days after Vietnam declared its independence on September 2, 1945, "Southern Korea" also declared independence (on September 6), with a primary goal of reuniting the country – which had been split into north and south by the United States only seven months before. Two days later, on September 8, 1945, the US military arrived with the first of 72,000 troops, dissolved the newly formed South Korean government, and flew in their own chosen leader, Syngman Rhee, who had spent the previous 40 years in Washington D.C. There was considerable opposition to the US control of the country, so much that 250,000 and 500,000 people were killed between 1945 and 1950 resisting the American occupation, before the actual Korean War even started.

The Korean War, like Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was an asymmetrical war, in which the highly industrialized and mechanized US pulverized the comparatively primitive North Korean nation. One third of the population of North Korea was killed in the war, a total of three million people (along with one million Chinese and 58,000 Americans). Every city, every sizable town, every factory, every bridge, every road in North Korea was destroyed. General Curtis LeMay remarked at one point that the US had "turned every city into rubble," and now was returning to "turn the rubble into dust." A British reporter described one of the thousands of obliterated villages as "a low, wide mound of violet ashes." General William Dean, who was captured after the battle of Taejon in July 1950 and taken to the North, later said that most of the towns and villages he saw were just "rubble or snowy open spaces."

More napalm was dropped on Korea than on Vietnam, 600,000 tons compared to 400,000 tons in Vietnam. One report notes that, "By late August, 1950, B-29 formations were dropping 800 tons a day on the North. Much of it was pure napalm. Vietnam veteran Brian Wilson asks in this regard, "What it is like to pulverize ancient cultures into small pebbles, and not feel anything?"

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein came to power through a U.S.-CIA engineered coup in 1966 that overthrew the socialist government and installed Saddam’s Baath Party. Later conflict with Saddam let to the first and second Gulf Wars, and to thirteen years of severe U.S.-imposed economic sanctions on Iraq between the two wars, which taken together completely obliterated the Iraqi economy. An estimated one million people were killed in the two Gulf wars, and the United Nations estimates that the economic sanctions, in combination with the destruction of the social and economic infrastructure in the First Gulf War, killed another million Iraqis. Today both the economy and the political structure of Iraq are in ruins.

This trail of blood, tears and death smeared across the pages of recent history is the reason that Martin Luther King said in his famous Vietnam Speech that the United States is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." Vietnam veteran Mike Hastie expanded the observation when he said in April of this year (2010) that, "The United States Government is a nonstop killing machine. The worst experience I had in Vietnam was experiencing the absolute truth of Martin Luther King's statement. America is in absolute psychiatric denial of its genocidal maniacal nature."


A further issue is that "war destroys the earth." Not only does, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower said in 1960, "Every rocket fired signify a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed," but every rocket that is fired reduces the life-sustaining capacity of the biosphere. In an ultimate sense it could be argued that those who wage war and those who pay for and support war, in reality bear some hidden hatred for life and some hidden desire to put and end to it.

What are our options? The short answer is, grow up. Grow up into the inherent depth of your own existence. After all, you are a "child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars, you have a right be here." There is no viable, universally inscribed law that compels you to do as you are told to do by the multitude of dysfunctional and destructive authority figures that would demand your compliance, if you acquiesce.
"If we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature," wrote French author La Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience," we should be intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody." La Boétie wrote this in the year 1552, but people today remain slaves to external authority. "Our problem," said historian Howard Zinn, "is not civil disobedience; our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. 
Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty."

Do you want to spend your life paying for the death of people (executed by the US military) that you would probably have loved if you have met them? Do you want to spend your life paying for the arsenal of hydrogen bombs that could very well destroy most of the life on the planet? If not, if you want another kind of life, then as author James Howard Kunstler often suggests, ‘You will have to make other arrangements." You will have to arrange to live according to your own deepest ethical standards, rather than living in fear of the nefarious authority figures that currently demand your obedience and threaten to punish you if you do not obey their demands on your one precious chance at life.

"We must know how the first ruler came by his authority." ~ John Locke

"How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." ~ Henry David Thoreau

Dana Visalli [dana@methownet.com] is an ecologist, botanist and organic farmer living in Twisp, Washington.

Copyright © 2010 Dana Visalli

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Deficit Reduction: Argument By Authority


History gives the public serious grounds for being suspicious about the latest efforts to cut social security and Medicare.

By Dean Baker

April 30, 2010 "
The Guardian" -- April 27, 2010 --  The deficit hawks are going into high gear with their drive to cut social security and Medicare. President Obama's deficit commission is having a big public event on Tuesday in which many of the country's most prominent deficit hawks will tout the need to reduce the budget deficit. The next day, Wall Street investment banker Peter Peterson will be hosting a "summit on fiscal responsibility", which will feature more luminaries touting the need to get deficits under control.
What will be missing from both of these events is any serious debate on the extent of the deficit problem and its causes. These affairs are not about promoting a real exchange of views on issues like the future of social security, Medicare, and public support for education, research and infrastructure, the purpose of these events is to tell the public that everyone agrees, we have to cut the deficit. And, this means cutting social security and Medicare. This is argument by authority.

Many public debates in the United States take this form. The issue is not what is said, but rather who says it. A few years ago all the authorities said that there was no housing bubble. The large body of evidence showing that house prices had hugely diverged from the fundamentals did not matter when the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the president's Council of Economic Advisers and other leading lights of the economic profession insisted that everything in the housing market was just fine.

Going further back to the mid-90s, many of this same group of deficit hawk luminaries tried to use argument by authority to cut social security. They came up with the story that the consumer price index (CPI) overstated the true rate of inflation. After workers retire, their social security benefits are indexed to the CPI. This crew (which included then Senator Alan Simpson, a co-chair of President Obama's commission, and Peter Peterson) argued that social security benefits should lag the CPI by one percentage point a year. In other words, if the CPI shows 3% inflation, then social security benefits will only rise by 2%.

That may seem a small cut, but it adds up over time. A worker retired for 10 years would have their benefits reduced by approximately 10%. A worker retired for 20 years would have their benefits cut by almost 20%.

To push this agenda, they put together a panel of the country's most prominent economists, all of whom blessed the claim that the CPI overstated the true rate of inflation by at least one percentage point. In addition to this panel, the social security cutters also pulled in other prominent economists, including Martin Feldstein, formerly President Reagan's top economist and the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The social security cutters were so successful in rounding up the big names that virtually no economists were prepared to publicly stand up and question their claims about the CPI. They had near free rein, running around the country with the "all the experts agree" line.
As events unfolded they were not able to get their cut in social security benefits. (Ted Kennedy and Dick 
Gephardt deserve big credit on this.) But what is really interesting for the current debate is what happened to the experts' claim on the CPI. There were some changes made to the CPI, but in the view of the expert panel, the major causes of the biases in the CPI were not fixed. They concluded that even after the changes the CPI still overstated the true rate of inflation by 0.8 percentage points annually.

If this claim is really true then it has enormous ramifications for our assessment of the economy. It means, for example, that incomes and wages are rising far more rapidly than the official data show. It means that people in the recent past were far poorer than is indicated by official statistics. If the claim about the CPI being overstated is true, then we would have to re-examine a vast amount of economic research that starts from the premise that the CPI is an accurate measure of inflation.


However, almost no economists have adjusted their research for a CPI's overstatement of inflation. In fact, even the members of the expert panel don't generally use a measure of inflation that adjusts for the alleged bias in the CPI. In other words, when they are not pushing cuts to social security, these economists act as though the CPI is an accurate measure of the rate of inflation. This could lead one to question these experts' integrity.

This history should give the public serious grounds for being suspicious about the latest efforts to cut social security and Medicare. A serious discussion of the deficit will show that in the short-term the deficit is not a problem and that the longer-term deficit problem is really a problem of a broken US healthcare system. The public should not allow the deficit hawks to derail a more serious discussion with their argument by authority.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Justice Department opens Goldman Sachs criminal investigation, sources say


By Zachary A. Goldfarb and Jerry Markon

April 30, 2010 "
Washington Post" -- The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into possible securities fraud in mortgage trading at Goldman Sachs, law enforcement sources said Friday.

The U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan and the FBI are conducting the probe, which sources said has been underway for weeks. The sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation has not been publicly disclosed, said no charges -- or a decision on whether to file them -- are imminent.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil securities fraud case against the firm two weeks ago, and a source familiar with the matter said the SEC had referred that investigation to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution. But law enforcement sources said the probe by the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office -- which is known for aggressively investigating financial fraud cases -- was not based on an SEC referral and was underway before the SEC announced the civil case April 16.

It was not immediately clear if the FBI and prosecutors are probing different mortgage-related transactions than those at issue in the civil case. No Goldman Sachs employees involved in the mortgage-related transactions that are the focus of the SEC case have been interviewed by Justice Department prosecutors or FBI agents, another source familiar with the matter said.

The Justice Department typically investigates high-profile cases of securities fraud, but the threshold for criminal prosecution is significantly higher than that of civil cases, and such investigations are highly complex.

Given the recent focus on the firm, "we're not surprised by the report of an inquiry," said Goldman spokesman Lucas Van Praag. "We would cooperate fully with any request for information."

Although the SEC frequently sends its cases to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, the stakes are higher because the Goldman case involves one of Wall Street's most storied firms, a business that had survived the financial crisis with its profitability intact but now faces accusations that it misled clients.

It is rare for the government to indict a company, and even the threat of criminal prosecution can doom a business. A criminal investigation destroyed the Wall Street firm Drexel Burnham Lambert in the 1980s even though the firm settled with authorities.

And although the Supreme Court ultimately overturned the conviction, accounting firm Arthur Andersen collapsed after facing criminal charges in connection with corporate corruption at Enron in 2002.

In that case, the justices said that lower courts had given juries far too broad guidelines by which to decide whether to convict the company. The decision, lawyers at the time said, would make it more difficult for prosecutors to bring criminal cases against corporations.

The SEC says that Goldman and employee Fabrice Tourre broke the law and committed fraud when they sold clients a complex investment linked to the value of home loans that was secretly designed to fail. Another firm, Paulson & Co., a hedge fund, helped Goldman create the investment and planned to bet against it. But the SEC says the relationship was not disclosed to Goldman's clients, ACA Financial Guaranty and the German bank IKB.

Goldman and Tourre have denied any wrongdoing. Goldman says that ACA and IKB were sophisticated investors and that disclosure of Paulson's role was not required.

Proving a criminal case could be challenging given that prosecutors must show "beyond a reasonable doubt" that Goldman and its employees committed fraud, compared with the threshold for a civil case, which requires a "preponderance of evidence."

Under civil law, the SEC does not have to prove that Goldman set out to defraud investors -- only that it did. But criminal law would require prosecutors to show that Goldman maliciously planned to mislead its investors.

Since the SEC filed its lawsuit this month, securities lawyers have debated the merits of the agency's case. Most agree that it represents an ambitious legal theory, saying the bar to show that Paulson's role was relevant would be high because the financial firms involved were big and engaged in speculative betting.

Goldman also says ACA was told about Paulson's role, and the firm has written a letter to its investors strongly suggesting that was the case.

The Justice Department suffered a setback this year when a case against two Bear Stearns hedge fund managers failed. A jury rejected securities fraud charges against the hedge fund managers, who ran funds linked to subprime mortgages, after presenting evidence that the men knew about risks but did not disclose these to investors.

The SEC is still pursuing the Bear Stearns case.


© Copyright 1996-2010 The Washington Post Company


There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Can You Pass The Iran Quiz?



Rentless U.S. diplomatic (and mainstream media) assault on Iran ?

It cannot be argued that Iran is an aggressive state that is dangerous to its neighbors, as facts do not support this claim. It cannot be relevant that Iran adheres to Islamic fundamentalism, has a flawed democracy and denies women full western-style civil rights, as Saudi Arabia is more fundamentalist, far less democratic and more oppressive of women, yet it is a U.S. ally. It cannot be relevant that Iran has, over the years, had a nuclear research program, and is most likely pursuing the capacity to develop nuclear weapons, as Pakistan, India, Israel and other states are nuclear powers yet remain U.S. allies—indeed, Israel deceived the U.S. while developing its nuclear program.

The answer to the above-posed question is fairly obvious: Iran must be punished for leaving the orbit of U.S. control. Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, when the Shah was removed, Iran, unlike, say, Saudi Arabia, acts independently and thus compromises U.S. power in two ways: i) Defiance of U.S. dictates affects the U.S.'s attainment of goals linked to Iran; and, ii) Defiance of U.S. dictates establishes a “bad” example for other countries that may wish to pursue an independent course. The Shah could commit any number of abuses—widespread torture, for example—yet his loyalty to the U.S. exempted him from American condemnation—yet not from the condemnation of the bulk of Iranians who brought him down.

The following quiz is an attempt to introduce more balance into the mainstream discussion of Iran.
Iran Quiz Questions :

1. Is Iran an Arab country?

2. Has Iran launched an aggressive war of conquest against another country since 1900?

3. How many known cases of an Iranian suicide-bomber have there been from 1989 to 2007?

4. What was Iran 's defense spending in 2008?

5. What was the U.S. 's defense spending in 2008?

6. What is the Jewish population of Iran ?

7. Which Iranian leader said the following? “This [ Israel 's] Occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.”

8. True of False: Iranian television presented a serial sympathetic to Jews during the Holocaust that coincided with President Ahmadinejad's first term.

9. What percentage of students entering university in Iran is female?

10. What percentage of the Iranian population attends Friday prayers?

11. True or False: Iran has formally consented to the Arab League's 2002 peace initiative with Israel.

12. Which two countries were responsible for orchestrating the 1953 overthrow of Iran's populist government of democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, primarily because he introduced legislation that led to the nationalization of Iranian oil?

13. Who made the following address on March 17, 2000? “In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. The Eisenhower administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons. But the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs.”

14. Which countries trained the Shah's brutal internal security service, SAVAK? 

15. Does Iran have nuclear weapons?

16. Is Iran a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)?

17. Is Israel a signatory of the NPT?

18. Does the NPT permit a signatory to pursue a nuclear program?

19. Who wrote the following in 2004? "Wherever U.S forces go, nuclear weapons go with them or can be made to follow in short order. The world has witnessed how the United States attacked Iraq for, as it turned out, no reason at all. Had the Iranians not tried to build nuclear weapons, they would be crazy. Though Iran is ruled by Islamic fundamentalists, most commentators who are familiar with the country do not regard its government as irrational. ...  [I]t was Saddam Hussein who attacked Iran, not the other way around; since then Iran has been no more aggressive than most countries are. For all their talk of opposition to Israel , Iran 's rulers are very unlikely to mount a nuclear attack on a country that is widely believed to have what it takes to wipe them off the map. Chemical or other attacks are also unlikely, given the meager results that may be expected and the retaliation that would almost certainly follow.”

20. What percentage of Iranians in 2008 said they had an unfavorable view of the American people?

21. What percentage of Iranians in 2008 expressed negative sentiments toward the Bush administration?

22. What were the main elements of Iran's 2003 Proposal to the U.S., communicated during the build-up to the Iraq invasion, and how did the U.S. respond to Iran's Proposal?
23. True or False: Iran and the U.S. both considered the Taleban to be an enemy after the 9/11 attacks.

24. Did the U.S. work with the Tehran-based Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq both before and after the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq?

25. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, who said the following? "The Iranians had real contacts with important players in Afghanistan and were prepared to use their influence in constructive ways in coordination with the United States ."

26. Who wrote the following in 2004? “It is in the interests of the United States to engage selectively with Iran to promote regional stability, dissuade Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, preserve reliable energy supplies, reduce the threat of terror, and address the ‘democracy deficit' that pervades the Middle East …”

Iran Quiz Answers :

1. No. Alone among the Middle Eastern peoples conquered by the Arabs, the Iranians did not lose their language or their identity. Ethnic Persians make up 60 percent of modern Iran, modern Persian (not Arabic) is the official language, Iran is not a member of the Arab League, and the majority of Iranians are Shiite Muslims while most Arabs are Sunni Muslims. Accordingly, based on language, ancestry and religion, Iran is not an Arab country. ( http://www.slate.com/id/1008394/ )

2. No.
-According to Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Iran has not launched such a war for at least 150 years. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009; p.199.)
-It should be appreciated that Iran did not start the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s: “ The war began when Iraq invaded Iran, launching a simultaneous invasion by air and land into Iranian territory on 22 September 1980 following a long history of border disputes, and fears of Shia insurgency among Iraq's long-suppressed Shia majority influenced by the Iranian Revolution. Iraq was also aiming to replace Iran as the dominant Persian Gulf state.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War)

3. Zero. There is not a single known instance of an Iranian suicide-bomber since the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988. ( Robert Baer; The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower; Crown Publishers; New York: 2008.)
-According to Baer, an American author and a former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East, it is i mportant to understand that Iran has used suicide bombers as the ultimate “smart bomb.” In fact there is little difference between a suicide-bomber and a marine who rushes a machine-gun nest to meet his certain death. Therefore, while Iran had used suicide bombers for tactical military purposes, Sunni extremists use suicide bombing for vague objectives such as to weaken the enemy or purify the state.


-There is also little doubt that Israel could defeat Iran in a conventional war in mere hours. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009; p p.206-7.)

6. 25,000. It is one of the many paradoxes of the Islamic Republic of Iran that this anti-Israeli country supports by far the largest Jewish population of any Muslim country. After the 1979 Islamic revolution, thousands of Jews left for Israel, Western Europe or the U.S., fearing persecution. But Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran's first post-revolutionary supreme leader, issued a fatwa, upon his return from exile in Paris, decreeing that the Jews and other religious minorities were to be protected, thus reducing the outflow of Iran's Jews to a trickle. ( http://www.sephardicstudies.org/iran.html )

7. Ruhollah Khomeini. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York : 2009; p.201.)
-This wasn't a surprising statement to come from the leader of the 1979 Revolution as Israel had been a firm ally of both the U.S. and the Shah.
-According to Cole, Ahmadinejad quoted this statement in 2005 yet wire service translators rendered Khomeini's statement into English as “Israel must be wiped off the face of the map.” Yet, Khomeini had referred to the occupation regime not Israel , and while he expressed a wish for the regime to go away he didn't threaten to go after Israel . In fact, a regime can vanish without any outside attacks, as happened to the Shah's regime in Iran and to the USSR. It is notable that when Khomeini made the statement in the 1980s, there was no international outcry. In fact, in the early 1980s, Khomeini supplied Israel with petroleum in return for American spare parts for the American-supplied Iranian arsenal. As both Israel and Iran considered Saddam's Iraq a serious enemy, they had a tacit alliance against Iraq during the first phase of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. It should also be noted that Ahmadinejad subsequently stated he didn't want to kill any Jews but rather he wants a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. While Ahmadinejad's preferred solution is a non-starter, Israel 's refusal to pursue a comprehensive peace creates space for Arab hardliners whose agendas do not include a realistic peace with Israel .

8. True. Iranian television ran a widely watched serial on the Holocaust, Zero Degree Turn , based on true accounts of the role Iranian diplomats in Europe played in rescuing thousands of Jews in WWII.

9. Over 60%. ( M. Axworthy; A History of Iran : Empire of the Mind; Basic Books; New York : 2008.)
-In fact, many women—even married women—have professional jobs.

10. 1.4%. ( M. Axworthy; A History of Iran : Empire of the Mind; Basic Books; New York : 2008.)

11. True. In March 2002, the Arab League summit in Beirut unanimously put forth a peace initiative that commits it not just to recognize Israel but also to establish normal relations once Israel implements the international consensus for a comprehensive peace—which includes Israel withdrawing from the occupied territories and a just settlement of the Palestinian refugee crisis. (This peace initiative has been subsequently reaffirmed including at the March 2009 Arab League summit at Doha.) All 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, including Iran , "adopted the Arab peace initiative to resolve the issue of Palestine and the Middle East ... and decided to use all possible means in order to explain and clarify the full implications of this initiative and win international support for its implementation." ( Norman G. Finkelstein; This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion; OR Books; New York : 2010; p. 42.)

12. The U.S. and Britain . ( Stephen Kinzer; All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; New Jersey: 2008.)
-According to Kinzer, Iranians had been complaining that the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) had not been sharing profits on Iranian petroleum with Iran fairly; and Iran's parliament (Majles) had tried to renegotiate with the AIOC. When the AIOC rejected renegotiation, Mossadegh introduced the nationalization act in 1951. In response, Britain and the U.S. organized a global boycott of Iran which sent the Iranian economy into a tailspin. Later, the military coup was orchestrated that reinstalled the shah. (One irony is that Britain itself had nationalized several industries in the 1940s and 1950s.)

13. Madeleine Albright: U.S. Secretary of State , 1997 -2001. ( Stephen Kinzer; All The Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror; John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; New Jersey : 2008; p.212.)

14. According to William Blum, a highly respected author and journalist, "The notorious Iranian security service, SAVAK, which employed torture routinely, was created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel in the 1950s. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. After the 1979 revolution, the Iranians found CIA film made for SAVAK on how to torture women." (http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Torture_RS.html)
-According to Reed College Professor Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading writers on the subject of torture and the consequences of its use for modern society, “[T]he Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was the revolution against torture. When the Shah criticized Khomayni as a blackrobed Islamic medieval throwback, Khomayni replied, look who is talking, the man who tortures. This was powerful rhetoric for recruiting people, then as it is now. People joined the revolutionary opposition because of the Shah's brutality, and they remembered who installed him. If anyone wants to know why Iranians hated the U.S. so, all they have to do is ask what America 's role was in promoting torture in Iran . Torture not only shaped the revolution, it was the factor that has deeply poisoned the relationship of Iran with the West. So why trust the West again? And the Iranian leadership doesn't.” ( http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002387 )

15. No.
-"We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons
program …” “ We judge with high confidence that Iran will not be technically capable of producing and reprocessing enough plutonium for a weapon before about 2015.” ( U.S. National Intelligence Estimate Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities November 2007
-According to U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency Chief Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, "The bottom line assessments of the [National Intelligence Estimate] still hold true, " … We have not seen indication that the government has made the decision to move ahead with the [nuclear weapons] program." (http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100115_1438.php)



18. Yes.
-According to Juan Cole, The NPT specifies that “Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination.” Therefore, as long as Iran meets its responsibilities under the NPT and continues to allow inspections by the IAEA, it is acting within its rights. The sorts of research facilities maintained by Iran are common in industrialized countries. The real issue is trust and transparency rather than purely one of technology. Yet, Iran has not always been forthcoming in fulfilling its obligations under the NPT.
   The Ford administration of the mid-1970s produced a memo saying that the shah's regime must “prepare against the time … when Iranian oil production is expected to decline sharply.” Iran 's energy reserves are extensive, so that fear was misplaced. But Iran already uses domestically 2 million of the 4 million barrels a day it produces, and it could well cease being an exporter and even become a net importer in the relatively near future. (This helps explain Iran's focus on nuclear energy. Yet, the desire for nuclear weapons isn't irrational either.) Ford authorized a plutonium reprocessing plant for Iran , which could have allowed it to close the fuel cycle, a step toward producing a bomb.
   In the 1970s, GE and Westinghouse won contracts to build eight nuclear reactors in Iran . The shah intimated that Iran would seek nuclear weapons, without facing any adverse consequences beyond some reprimands from the U.S. or Western Europe . In contrast, Khomeini was horrified by the idea of using weapons of mass destruction, and he declined to deploy chemical weapons at the front in the Iran-Iraq War, even though Saddam had no such compunctions and extensively used mustard gas and sarin on Iranian troops. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York: 2009)

19. Martin van Creveld: Distinguished professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem . ( http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/21/opinion/21iht-edcreveld_ed3_.html )
-It should not be surprising that Creveld would deem it rational for Iran to want nuclear weapons. "For more than half a century, Britain and the US have menaced Iran . In 1953, the CIA and MI6 overthrew the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadegh, an inspired nationalist who believed that Iranian oil belonged to Iran . They installed the venal shah and, through a monstrous creation called SAVAK, built one of the most vicious police states of the modern era. The Islamic revolution in 1979 was inevitable and very nasty, yet it was not monolithic and, through popular pressure and movement from within the elite, Iran has begun to open to the outside world – in spite of having sustained an invasion by Saddam Hussein, who was encouraged and backed by the US and Britain.
At the same time, Iran has lived with the real threat of an Israeli attack, possibly with nuclear weapons, about which the ‘international community' has remained silent.” ( http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=8533 )


20. 20%. ( Juan Cole; Engaging The Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; New York : 2009; p.197.)

21. 75%. ( Juan Cole; Engaging the Muslim World; Palgrave Macmillan; ( New York : 2009); p.197.)
-One wonders what the percentage of Canadians—or Americans—held the same view?

22. According to the Washington Post, “Just after the lightning takeover of Baghdad by U.S. forces … an unusual two-page document spewed out of a fax machine at the Near East bureau of the State Department. It was a proposal from Iran for a broad dialogue with the United States , and the fax suggested everything was on the table -- including full cooperation on nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups. But top Bush administration officials, convinced the Iranian government was on the verge of collapse, belittled the initiative. Instead, they formally complained to the Swiss ambassador who had sent the fax with a cover letter certifying it as a genuine proposal supported by key power centers in Iran …” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700727_pf.html )

23. True. According to Ali M. Ansari, Professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews, “[K]hatami, moved quickly to offer his condolences to the US President [after the 9/11 attacks]. … [T]he Iranians soon recognized the opportunity that now confronted them. The United States was determined to dismantle Al Qaeda, and in the face of Taleban obstinacy decided on the removal of the Taleban. Nothing could be more amenable to the Iranians, who had been waging a proxy war against the Taleban for the better part of five years. … The collaboration which took place both during and after the war against the Taleban seemed to inaugurate a period of détente between Iran and the United States … It came as something of a shock therefore to discover that President Bush had decided to label Iran part of the ‘Axis of Evil' … Now it appeared that the [Iranian] hardliners within the regime had been correct after all; the United States could not be trusted …” ( Ali M. Ansari; Modern Iran: The Pahlavis and After Second Edition; Pearson Education; Great Britain: 2007; pp. 331-332.)

-One wonders what the Bush administration thought the party name entailed? Would it have been unreasonable to assume it had good relations with Iran and might support an Islamic Revolution?
-In 2007, the party, showing good public relations, changed its name to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq .

25. Flynt Leverett: Senior director for Middle East affairs in the U.S. National Security Council from March 2002 to March 2003. He left the George W. Bush Administration and government service in 2003 because of disagreements about Middle East policy and the conduct of the war on terror. ( http://www.antiwar.com/orig/porter.php?articleid=8590 )

26. A task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by two prominent members of the American foreign policy establishment, former CIA director Robert Gates and former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, recommended “a revised strategic approach to Iran.” Their report included the above statement. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/mar/24/clouds-over-iran/?pagination=false )
Jeffrey Rudolph, a college professor in Montreal, was the Quebec representative of the East Timor Alert Network, and presented a paper on its behalf at the United Nations.

There is nothing civil about civil wars!

Report: Still Not Enough Troops For Afghanistan Operations

By Jeff Schogol

Read the report here. (PDF, 4MB)April 30, 2010 "Stars and Stripes" April 28, 2010 --  ARLINGTON, Va. — Despite the addition of more than 50,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the past year, there still aren’t enough forces to conduct operations in the majority of key areas, according to a congressionally mandated report released Wednesday on progress in Afghanistan.

Coalition forces have decided to focus their efforts on 121 key districts in Afghanistan, but right now, NATO has enough forces to operate in only 48 of those districts, the report said.

There are currently 86,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, up from about 30,000 when President Barack Obama took office. By August, there will be 98,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

With the rest of the U.S. and foreign partner troops that will arrive in Afghanistan this year, coalition and Afghan security forces will be able to focus on all 121 districts "over coming months," a senior Defense official said Wednesday, declining to be more specific.

The 150-page progress report said that Afghanistan’s deteriorating situation has leveled off, but violence still increased 87 percent between February 2009 and March 2010. A senior Defense official attributed the increase to the presence of more troops in Afghanistan moving into tougher areas.

The most significant challenge that coalition forces face is fielding enough high-quality Afghan troops and police to assume primary responsibility for security in Afghanistan, the official said. The need for police trainers is particularly pressing.

While the Afghan police force has grown substantially over the past year, many were rushed into service for the August presidential elections with little or no training, the report said. Those police will complete their retraining by July.

Meanwhile, corruption is a continuing problem, according to the report, the fifth in a series required every 180 days.

While the Afghan government has taken steps to fight corruption, "real change remains elusive and political will, in particular, remains doubtful."

"The government of Afghanistan, as a whole, has yet to exercise sustained leadership on this critical issue or to take the initiative, instead of merely responding to international community initiatives, pressure, and encouragement," the report said.

Frustration with the government is one reason behind the success of the insurgency.

Insurgents in Afghanistan regard 2009 as their "most successful year," according to the progress report.

While instability has leveled off, the insurgency has a "robust means of sustaining its operations."

"A ready supply of recruits is drawn from the frustrated population, where insurgents exploit poverty, tribal friction and lack of governance to grow their ranks," the report said.

Among the insurgents’ strengths is their ability to carry out media campaigns, conduct complex attacks, and crate a "shadow government" that undermines the Afghan government’s legitimacy.
But the insurgency does have weaknesses:
  • Fissures among local insurgent leaders
  • Violence against civilians
  • Over-reliance on outside support
  • Layered command structure that makes it hard to act on a decentralized level
  • Dependence on marginalized or threatened segments of the Pashtun population.
The report anticipates a "significant insurgent response" to NATO operations in Kandahar, expected to kick off in June.

While NATO troops have cleared some insurgent strongholds, the Afghan government has been slow establishing a presence there.

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There is nothing civil about civil wars!