Syrian government forces bombard Homs

The New York Times reports: Syrian government warplanes and artillery were reported on Friday to have launched a ferocious barrage against the central city of Homs while, near the capital, Damascus, rebels said they captured an air defense base with a cache of surface-to-air missiles.

The fighting came a day after the bloody, 18-month conflict raised broad fears of regional repercussions when Turkish artillery hit Syria for a second consecutive day on Thursday following a mortar attack on Wednesday that killed five Turkish civilians. Turkey’s Parliament reinforced Ankara’s resolute message by authorizing further military action against Syria.

The confrontation between the two countries along the divide between the NATO alliance and the Arab world threatened to escalate a confrontation that has highlighted Turkey’s fraught double role as it tries to stay out of direct involvement in the fight against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria while offering haven and support to the rebels.

Inside war-battered Syria, Friday’s bombardment of Homs by airstrikes, tank and mortar fire subjected rebel strongholds to their heaviest bombardment in months, according to The Associated Press quoting activists. Some analysts suggested that the focus on big cities like Homs and Aleppo further north showed that the government was maintaining its focus on urban warfare rather than regional maneuvering.

Facebooktwittermail

Bankers still overpaid, says Morgan Stanley boss

The Guardian reports: The chief executive of the US investment bank Morgan Stanley has said Wall Street pay is still “way too high” and remuneration and jobs will have to be sacrificed to boost shareholder returns.

The comments by James Gorman, who took over the running of the bank in 2010, set him apart from longer standing peers who have always defended high pay as necessary for retaining key staff.

But Gorman told the Financial Times: “Compensation is way too high. As a shareholder I’m sort of sympathetic to the shareholder view that the industry is still overpaid.”

Morgan Stanley is cutting 4,000 jobs, 7% of its workforce, by the end of this year and the bank said it would consider more redundancies next year and pay cuts for the remaining staff.

Gorman said that in the past bankers’ pay had always increased with revenues, but never came down when revenues came down, as banks were so afraid of losing staff. “That’s a classic Wall Street case of ‘heads I win; tails you lose’. The current Wall Street management is a little tougher-minded about that and shareholders are certainly tougher-minded.”

His comments follow announcements from a string of European banks ceding to pressure from shareholders over pay. Deutsche Bank last month said it was cutting bonuses and would spend less of its revenue on pay. UBS said it was considering capping bonuses and linking them to the bank’s profitability. The Barclays chief executive, Antony Jenkins, said bonuses would be linked to the way staff did business, not just the revenues they generated.

Facebooktwittermail

Obama pays price for ducking the questions

Dana Millbank writes: Barack Obama received a valuable reminder in his drubbing at Wednesday night’s debate: He is a president, not a king.

In the hours after the Republican challenger Mitt Romney embarrassed the incumbent in their first meeting, Obama loyalists expressed puzzlement that the incumbent had done badly. But Obama has only himself to blame, because he set himself up for Wednesday’s emperor-has-no-clothes moment. For the past four years, he has worked assiduously to avoid being questioned, maintaining a regal detachment from the media and other sources of dissent and skeptical inquiry.

Obama has set a modern record for refusal to be quizzed by the media, taking questions from reporters far less often than Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and even George W. Bush. Though his opponent in 2008 promised to take questions from lawmakers like the British prime minister does, Obama has shied from mixing it up with members of Congress, too. And, especially since Rahm Emanuel’s departure, Obama is surrounded by a large number of yes men who aren’t likely to get in his face.

This insularity led directly to the Denver debacle: Obama was out of practice and unprepared to be challenged. The White House had supposed that Obama’s forays into social media — town hall meetings with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like — would replace traditional presidential communication. By relying on such venues, Obama’s argument skills atrophied, and he was ill-equipped to engage in old-fashioned give and take. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Does Obama really want to get re-elected?

Kevin Baker writes: The president seemed unable to concentrate or focus throughout the debate, mouthing occasional numbers and assorted caveats to points he could never really complete. When it came to the issues, he offhandedly conceded much of the Republican worldview, something he is now apt to do at anytime, without warning.

What caused the financial crisis? Well, it had something to do with the banks. But Obama also had to admit it was poor people “who took out home mortgages they couldn’t afford.”

Physically, he looked shamefaced, even guilty. Whenever Romney made some point, he would drop his head, purse his lips, and nod, like a prisoner in the dock admitting to some shabby crime.

There is no reasonable explanation — no acceptable explanation — for such a performance.

We will get one, of course. We always do. Michael Dukakis had a cold for his big debate, and besides he was afraid that his wife couldn’t stand the mental strain of being First Lady. Al Gore never really wanted the political career that his father pressured him into. Etc., etc., etc. Barack Obama has repeatedly informed us that he hates living in the White House and can’t wait to be an ex-president.

Yet all of these personalized, psychological apologetics merely underscore the essential disconnect between the leadership of the Democratic party and its base. The leadership is now filled almost exclusively with careerists, who have no real goals they want to accomplish beyond their own advancement, and who actively don’t want to pursue any of the liberal ideas they pretend to support.

They don’t sound like they believe what they’re saying . . . because they don’t believe what they’re saying.

Neither does Mitt Romney, but he was able to put on a convincing act last night, visibly gaining confidence and command with each sally. By the end of the night, he seemed to have channeled not only Ronald Reagan’s genial manner and poise but even his voice.

Romney and his advisers displayed a sleight-of-hand beyond anything I thought them capable of. In Romney’s reach back toward the center in the debate, he had to lie almost incessantly, breezily denying most of the things he has been advocating in almost two years of campaigning. And it didn’t help Obama that Jim Lehrer looked as if he was up well past his bedtime, barely able to keep track of the debate much less effectively monitor it.

Obama had a perfect opportunity to impose his own agenda on last night’s debate. He could and should have made the entire evening a debate on Romney’s shocking contention that nearly half the country is made up of “victims and dependents,” mooching off the rest of us simply because they are not currently paying federal income taxes.

Romney did not want this made public, but he has not denied that he believes it, admitting only that he expressed himself badly. Could there possibly be any better setup? Obama could have turned the whole evening into a seminar on just how radical and bizarre Republican thinking has become. All of Romney’s attempts to obfuscate and lie about the figures of his fantastical schemes for balancing the budget could have been easily bulldozed.

A real president, a president of the professional ability that Democrats used to elect routinely, could have managed such a feat while simultaneously threatening the mullahs of Tehran into submission and making a condolence call to a sick child.

Instead, Obama signaled that he wants out. His diehard supporters are already trying to wave away this weirdly awful, unengaged performance as just his latest turn of Zen mastery, but that dog won’t hunt. They should steel themselves for more shocking displays of indifference over the next month on the part of this strangely diffident individual. It’s quite possible that he means what he says, and he really can’t wait to become an ex-president.

Facebooktwittermail

Inside Pakistan’s drone country

BBC News reports: Pakistan’s tribal region of Waziristan, constantly watched and regularly bombarded by US military drones, has been called the most dangerous place on earth. The relentless assault exacts a huge psychological toll on the people who live there.

The US missile-attacks destroy militant training compounds and cars but they also hit mosques, homes, religious schools and civilian vehicles.

I witnessed the fear, stress and depression this causes for the tribal communities on a visit to the region in May.

The drones do not suddenly appear over the horizon, carry out the attack and leave. At any given time of the day, at least four are hovering in the sky, emitting a distinctive and menacing buzzing sound.

They call them “mosquitoes”.

“Anybody who has been listening to the buzzing all through the day usually can’t sleep at night,” says Abdul Waheed, a tribesman in North Waziristan.

“It’s like a blind man’s stick – it can hit anybody at any time.”

People here tell me that it is not just Taliban and al-Qaeda members who are targeted, many ordinary citizens have been killed as well.

In some cases, tribesmen, motivated by a clan or blood feud, have pointed out a rival as a Taliban member or al-Qaeda sympathiser, they say, in the hope he will be blown to bits.

Everybody believes they could be next.

“There is only one way to sleep now,” says Mateen Khan, a car mechanic in the town of Miranshah. “I take sleeping pills like many other people here. It is either that or stay awake all night.”

As I drive into Waziristan via the Orakzai tribal region the road is littered with sites of drone attacks – some militant compounds, but most of all vehicles. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

What hurts Iranians may not harm the regime

Ali Gharib writes: Now is the autumn of Iranian discontent. And who can blame them? Over the past week, the value of Iran’s Rial fell 40 percent against the dollar.

The economic woes drove Iranians into the streets of Tehran yesterday, where they reportedly clashed with riot police during a few modestly-sized and — best as I can tell — relatively isolated protests. The largest, and perhaps most significant, were in Iran’s famed bazaar, which shut down as protesters moved through, and outside the Bank of Iran. At the former locale, the shopkeepers’ closures ostensibly protected their stalls from demonstrators, but that doesn’t seem to be how the story actually played out.

The latest protests seem unlikely to be the spark that brings down the Islamic Republic. Instead, they focused on the government’s mismanagement of the economy — a realm, unlike foreign affairs and the nuclear program, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually has power to enact policies. But the showing could be a harbinger of what’s to come as Iranians go to the polls next year.

Many analysts and media accounts speculated that the bazaaris had a hand in organizing the protests, a notion confirmed by a source in Tehran who normally keeps abreast of opposition goings-on by social media. The source found out about the protests late, remarking: “This time it’s the bazaar, no need for Facebook or e-mail.” [Continue reading…]

Tony Karon writes: For Iran’s citizens, who have seen the prices of many basic foodstuffs more than double since last year, and who are struggling to access even life-saving medicines, the effect of the sanctions is more than mere “collateral damage.” The sanctions are, as U.S. officials like to point out, designed to put Iran’s economy in a “chokehold”, in the hope that one of the effects will be that the resultant economic pain rouses them to defy and challenge the regime, forcing it to rethink its nuclear program in order to win Iran’s release from the stranglehold of sanctions that are fomenting rebellion. While official statements might insist that innocent Iranians are not the target of that “chokehold,” an unnamed senior U.S. intelligence officer showed no such squeamishness when explaining the sanctions strategy to the Washington Post earlier this year. “In addition to the direct pressure sanctions exert on the regime’s ability to finance its priorities,” the official said, “another option here is that they will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

Advocates of that line of thinking may have seen Wednesday’s protests as vindication — but it may not be that simple. While President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad eagerly concurs that it is Western sanctions that are behind the economic chaos in Iran, his political opponents — loyalists of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei — actually blame Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement of the economy for the precipitous currency collapse. That sentiment appears to have been shared by many on the streets in the series of small demonstrations around Tehran on Wednesday: Most of the protesters’ rage appears to have been directed at Ahmadinejad, who was accused of failing to take measures necessary to protect Iranian living standards. After all, the Iranian economy isn’t exactly on the verge of collapse, and the regime is believed to have a foreign currency reserve of some $100 billion. Indeed, the fact that it is still sending billions in aid to prop up the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad — another sore point with protesters on Wednesday — underscores the fact that is not exactly bankrupt, yet.

So, even if sanctions are fueling the economic pain that is prompting Iranians to return to streets in protest, the expectation that such demonstrations will prompt Iran’s leaders to surrender a nuclear program that has been among their long-term priorities requires a considerable leap of faith. ”It would be optimistic at best to hope that the deteriorating economic circumstances will spur Iran’s leaders to shift their nuclear stance,” said Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month. “They do not seem to know or care much about the country’s economic situation — their own income has been hurt only a little, if at all, and they appear unconcerned about the prospect of popular unrest given their past success at repressing opposition. For now, they are likely to stay the course on both domestic economic policy and the nuclear issue.” [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

‘Turkey does not want war with Syria’ — aide to Erdogan

The New York Times reports: Turkey’s Parliament approved a motion Thursday that authorizes further military action against Syria, as Turkey began its second day of shelling targets within Syria in response to a mortar attack that killed five civilians.

The measure, which was ratified after several hours of a closed-door session in the capital, Ankara, permits cross-border raids, although senior officials insisted that NATO ally Turkey did not want a war with its Arab neighbor — an escalation that could turn Syria’s bloody civil strife into a regional conflict with international involvement.

The motion read, in part, “The ongoing crisis in Syria affects the stability and security in the region and now the escalating animosity affects our national security,” according to the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency.

The Turkish military pounded targets inside Syria on Thursday in retaliation for the mortar attack a day earlier that killed five civilians in Turkey.

Local news reports said Turkish shells fell inside Syria on at least 10 occasions after midnight, landing near the border town of Tel Abyad, some six miles inside Syrian territory, across a historic fault line where modern Turkey abuts Arab lands that once formed part of the Ottoman Empire.

State television said the shelling continued until dawn with four more barrages until the guns fell silent around 6:45 a.m. Activist groups in Syria said the shelling killed several Syrian government soldiers.

The exchanges sent tremors across a region fearful that the mounting violence in Syria would spill into neighboring countries. Ibrahim Kalin, a senior aide to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, wrote on Twitter feed: “Turkey does not want war with Syria. But Turkey is capable of protecting its borders and will retaliate when necessary.” In a separate message, he said: “Political, diplomatic initiatives will continue.” [Continue reading…]

AFP reports: Turkish troops pounded targets in Syria on Thursday morning in reprisal for cross-border fire that killed five Turkish civilians the previous day, a security source said.

“Artillery fire resumed at 0300 GMT this morning,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Several Syrian soldiers have been killed as a result of overnight Turkish shelling across the border, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights watchdog said earlier, without giving an exact figure.

AFP also reports: Syria has admitted it was responsible for a shelling that killed five civilians on Turkish soil and apologised, Turkey’s deputy prime minister said today.

“The Syrian side has admitted what it did and apologised,” Besir Atalay told reporters.

Michael Koplow sees little evidence that either Turkey, NATO, or Syria have an interest in seeing further escalation.

First, as I have noted too many times to count and as Aaron Stein firmly argued yesterday, there is simply no appetite on NATO’s part to get involved in Syria. Turkey was able to convene an Article 4 meeting in which NATO strongly condemned the Syrian shelling that killed five Turkish civilians, but that is about as far as NATO is willing to go. NATO is not going to get involved in setting up a buffer zone, a no-fly zone, or a humanitarian corridor inside Syria, and the U.S. is also not going to commit to doing any of those things any time soon. It has been clear for a year now that Turkey is not going to invade Syria on its own, which is why Ankara has desperately been trying to convince outside actors to intervene, and absent an international intervention, I don’t see yesterday’s incident changing this calculus. Without international support – and I’d note that Prime Minister Erdoğan has explicitly ruled out anything outside of official UN auspices – Turkey is going to stay out of Syria. With reports of Hizballah fighters and IRGC soldiers crawling inside Syrian borders, the Turkish government does not want to get entangled in a scenario that might quickly blow up out of its control.

Second, there is no reason for Syria not to back away from this as quickly as possible. The only way in which Turkey will be drawn into Syria unilaterally is if the Assad regime escalates this in a serious way, and while Assad and the Syrian army are unpredictable, this is not a fight they are eager to have. Syria has spent months testing Turkey’s patience and trying to figure out what its boundaries are, and yesterday’s events will make it clear to Syria that this was one step too far. The regime has its hands full with the FSA and doesn’t need to add the Turkish military into the mix, which explains the quick decision to express sorrow over the death of Turkish civilians and a promise to investigate. There are two possibilities here; either the shelling was unintentional, in which case Syria has every reason to back down, or it was done on purpose to test how far Turkey is willing to go in retaliation, in which case mission accomplished and Syria still has every reason to now back down. While allowing for the fact that this cannot necessarily be gamed out in an entirely logical manner, I don’t see a scenario in which Syria decides to turn this into a high intensity conflict.

There is little question that Turkey had no choice but to retaliate in some form yesterday. When Syrian forces shot across the border last spring and killed two Syrian refugees in Turkish camps, Turkey threatened retaliatory action but did nothing. When the Turkish F-4 reconnaissance plane was downed this summer, Turkey moved tanks and artillery to the border but ultimately stood down. This time, however, Turkish civilians died, and no government can afford to sit idly by when its citizens are targeted and killed by a hostile foreign government.

Facebooktwittermail

Inequality and its perils

Jonathan Rauch writes: At a salon dinner in Washington recently, the subject was inequality. An economist took the floor. Economic inequality, he said, is not a problem. Poverty is a problem, certainly. Unemployment, yes. Slow growth, yes. But he had never yet seen a good reason to believe that inequality, as such—the widening gap between top and bottom, as distinct from poverty or stagnation—is harmful to the economy.

Perhaps he spoke too soon.

Once in a while, a new economic narrative gives renewed strength to an old political ideology. Two generations ago, supply-side economics transformed conservatism’s case against big government from a merely ideological claim to an economic one. After decades in which Keynesians had dismissed conservatism as an economic dead end (“Hooverism”), supply-siders turned the tables. The Right could argue that reducing spending and (especially) tax rates was a matter not merely of political preference but of economic urgency.

Something potentially analogous is stirring among the Left. An emerging view holds that inequality has reached levels that are damaging not only to liberals’ sense of justice but to the economy’s stability and growth. If this narrative catches on, it could give the egalitarian Left new purchase in the national economic debate.

“Widely unequal societies do not function efficiently, and their economies are neither stable nor sustainable in the long term,” Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes in his new book, The Price of Inequality. “Taken to its extreme—and this is where we are now—this trend distorts a country and its economy as much as the quick and easy revenues of the extractive industry distort oil- or mineral-rich countries.”

Stiglitz’s formulation is a good two-sentence summary of the emerging macroeconomic indictment of inequality, and the two key words in his second sentence, “extreme” and “distort,” make good handles for grasping the arguments. [Continue reading…]

An interview with Richard Wilkinson co-author of the book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger and co-founder of The Equality Trust:

Facebooktwittermail

How organized crime groups are destroying the rain forests

The Washington Post reports: The phrase “organized crime” typically conjures up images of drug trafficking or stolen-car rings. But it turns out that the illegal logging trade is just as lucrative — and far more destructive. Between 50 to 90 percent of forestry in tropical areas is now controlled by criminal groups, according to a new report (pdf) from the United Nations and Interpol.

Across the globe, deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, responsible for one-fifth of humanity’s emissions. Farming and logging both play big roles. What makes this area so difficult to regulate, however, is that a great deal of logging simply takes place illegally — much of it in tropical areas such as the Amazon Basin, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia. The U.N. estimates that illicit logging is now worth between $30 billion to $100 billion, or up to 30 percent of the global wood trade.

These rogue lumberjacks are growing more sophisticated, evading the efforts of countries to crack down. For instance, in the mid-2000s, it appeared as if illegal logging was on the wane in countries such as Indonesia, thanks to stepped-up law enforcement. But the numbers were deceptive. Illicit logging was either migrating to other tropical nations — such as Papua New Guinea or Myanamar — or simply eluding detection.

Corruption helps. A well-placed bribe can help groups obtain logging permits illegally, or cut beyond what their permits allow. Crime syndicates can mask their activities by pretending they’re engaged in plantation development or road construction. Chaotic conflict zones, like in the Congo, are ripe for exploitation. And, unlike ivory or cocaine, it’s easy to ship timber without getting caught — simply bundle up illegal logs with legal ones. [Continue reading…]

The UN/Interpol report states: In the last five years, illegal logging has moved from direct illegal logging to more advanced methods of concealment and timber laundering. In this report more than 30 ways of conducting illegal logging, laundering, selling and trading illegal logs are described. Primary methods include falsification of logging permits, bribes to obtain logging permits (in some instances noted as US$ 20–50,000 per permit), logging beyond concessions, hacking government websites to obtain transport permits for higher volumes or transport, laundering illegal timber by establishing roads, ranches, palm oil or forest plantations and mixing with legal timber during transport or in mills.

The much heralded decline of illegal logging in the mid- 2000s in some tropical regions was widely attributed to a short-term law enforcement effort. However, long-term trends in illegal logging and trade have shown that this was temporary, and illegal logging continues. More importantly, an apparent decline in illegal logging is due to more advanced laundering operations masking criminal activities, and not necessarily due to an overall decline in illegal logging.

Facebooktwittermail

Post-debate analysis: The media can now get the electoral horse race it wants

Matt Stoller writes: Let me just start by saying I hate horse race electoral analysis, because it’s bullshit. Not just meaningless, it’s frequently done by analysts who are on the payroll in one way or another of Wall Street or telecoms or pharma or whoever. More than that, the data is terrible. Despite the vaunted social scientists who claim, essentially, that elections can be manipulated through exquisitely crafted micro-targeting, we just don’t know that much about how voters behave. And more than that, politicians and pollsters don’t want to know. In 2008, it was obvious that foreclosures were going to have a massive impact on the electoral landscape. From 2008-2011, I counted one, yes, just one, paper looking at this problem. Tom Ferguson and Jie Chen showed that housing price declines were the main reason for Scott Brown’s capture of Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat. The only other study I’ve seen took place this year, showing that 60% of Milwaukee’s black voters from 2008 have disappeared.

You can’t run a control America in which an economic crisis happened, and a non-control America in which one didn’t happen. So you can’t know what kind of impact the financial crisis and foreclosure crisis have had on voters, until after the election. But the fact that there is almost no analysis of the foreclosure crisis in the electoral context shows that political elites just don’t want to know what’s really going on. Field people, who are in charge of door knocking, know exactly how bad it is, because they know that if you can’t find your voters, you can’t get them to the polls. But if this were acknowledged, then the foreclosure crisis would have to be acknowledged, and then the banking oligarchs would have to be acknowledged. Better to run shitty campaigns based on poor data promoted dishonestly by hacks getting speaking fees from various trade associations. So recognize, first of all, that nearly all the prognostication you’re hearing on TV and radio, which is done by an intentionally ignorant professional class who just wants their team to win. It’s Jeff Connaughton’s “blob”, sliming its way through our broadcast media infrastructure.

That said, here’s my horse race electoral analysis!

A debate happened, and Obama didn’t do well. Prior to tonight, the conventional wisdom was that debates don’t determine elections. I have no idea if this is true going forward, and the only way to know is to watch the polls over the next few days. If every registered voter watched this debate and made a decision about who to vote for based on this debate, Mitt Romney would win. But who watched the debate? And do people decide based on this debate (or the post-debate spin)? Only Gallup can tell. Still, it’s useful to know what happened, and why, because at the very least, Obama and his team was embarrassed tonight. We’re in an election season, so the press is probably going to turn to this as An Important Moment (see the CNN headline: Romney Shakes Up Race) [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

The currency war on Iran

Peter Beaumont writes: The continuing currency crisis in Iran, which has seen the rial go into freefall, has been cited, with some celebration in certain quarters, as proving that US-led sanctions are “working” against Tehran. Increasingly shut out from international banking and struggling to sell its oil, Iran has been forced to sell more cheaply while buying raw materials at a higher cash price. This, in turn, has led to currency speculation that the government has done nothing to halt, and to sharp devaluation.

But what does “sanctions are working” actually mean? Some hawks have read it as the possible beginning of the end for Iran’s nuclear programme and the collapse of the clerical regime. For others, including those anxious to avoid conflict over Iran, it has been seized on as a suggestion that the crisis might be resolved through negotiation and non-military pressure.

The reality is that the political, economic and social impact of sanctions can produce very different results from those allegedly desired, more often than not hurting ordinary people. And there is a third scenario, in which sanctions might actually make the confrontation with Iran more dangerous still.

The increasing popularity of economic sanctions, as Britain’s former ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, has observed, is due to the perception that no other tool exists “between words and military action if you want to bring pressure upon a government”.

When three academics – Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey Scott and Kimberly Ann Elliott – examined the history of sanctions between 1914 and 1990, in Economic Sanctions Reconsidered they determined that out of 115 cases that they looked at, only a third had seen any measure of success. The US political scientist Robert Pape has challenged even this measure, claiming that of the 40, only five can be determined genuine successes for sanctions. [Continue reading…]

As Iran’s currency crisis escalates, Ali Chenar has spoken to people in and around the bazaar in Tehran.

Many merchants in the bazaar had already shut down their stores since Monday, claiming that they do not know what prices they should be charging their customers. The sudden fall in the rial’s value has brought it to a level unthinkable only a week ago.

“The problem is that the exchange rate always sends a signal about market stability and government reliability,” said Muhammad, an economic activist. He adds, “With the rial in freefall, many believe that the situation is simply out of control.”

He explains the dilemma faced by the merchants. “Many in the bazaar save in dollars and need hard currency to import the products they sell. If the products are produced domestically then they need hard currency to import the material needed in the production process. The machinery and other services cost too, and usually we have to pay companies who use the [open-market] dollar-rial exchange rate to estimate their costs.”

Babak, a graduate student, is worried about his upcoming sabbatical trip abroad. “With the hard currency rising so fast, I am not sure if I can afford it anymore.” He also cannot wait much longer to make a decision — the deadline to apply for a visa is fast approaching.

Businesses face similar decisions about whether to renew their orders and sell their inventories. Mahmoud, an apprentice in the bazaar, wants people to know that “we would like to work, but how can you work when you do not know what will happen tomorrow.”

Ahmad Reza, a dealer in Persian rugs, is mad at the government. “They ruined everything. They wasted all the revenues generated by oil and now they are not supplying the market with hard currency…. Every day, something new happens: one day it is sanctions; the next, new banking regulations. The authorities always need to be greased with some extra cash.” The challenge of keeping his business going is making him infuriated. “Some days, I just want to go to the Sahara and just yell. I do not know why I come to this store anymore.”

Hamid, a social science teacher who lives near the bazaar just south of central Tehran, believes that the “bazaaris have always been unhappy and frustrated. Almost every government has found ways to interfere with them and to tell them what to do.” What is different now “is that Ahmadinejad has become more vulnerable.” Hamid observes that criticizing his administration is no longer equivalent to opposing the regime as a whole. On his way home, he saw people had set fire to garbage and other flammables. “Bazaaris usually hate governments, but I think they hate the current administration the most.”

Facebooktwittermail

Is the U.S. admitting defeat in Afghanistan?

Tony Karon writes: Don’t expect to hear about it in the presidential campaign debates, but the U.S. will leave Afghanistan locked in an escalating civil war when it observes the 2014 deadline for withdrawing combat troops set by the Obama Administration — and supported by Gov. Mitt Romney. The New York Times reported Tuesday that the U.S. military has had to give up on hopes of inflicting enough pain on the Taliban to set favorable terms for a political settlement. Instead, it will be left up to the Afghan combatants to find their own political solution once the U.S. and its allies take themselves out of the fight.

Washington has known for years that it had no hope of destroying the Taliban, and that it would have to settle for a compromise political solution with an indigenous insurgency that remains sufficiently popular to have survived the longest U.S. military campaign in history. Still, as late as 2009, the U.S. had hoped to set the terms of that compromise, and force the Taliban to find a place for themselves in the constitutional order created by the NATO invasion and accept a Karzai government it has long dismissed as “puppets.” This was the logic behind President Obama’s “surge,” which sent an additional 30,000 U.S. troops into the Taliban’s heartland, with the express purpose of bloodying the insurgents to the point that their leaders would sue for peace on Washington’s terms. But the surge ended last month with the Taliban less inclined than ever to accept U.S. terms as the 2014 departure date for U.S. forces looms.

Now, according to the Times, the best case scenario has been reduced to on in which, as a result of NATO’s training and armaments, “the Taliban find the Afghan Army a more formidable adversary than they expect and [will] be compelled, in the years after NATO withdraws, to come to terms with what they now dismiss as a ‘puppet’ government.” Some would see that as another in a long line of optimistic assessments. The Afghan security forces, or at least its ethnic Tajik core, may well find the political will to fight the Pashtun-dominated Taliban, and the means to prevent themselves from being overrun. But it’s a safe bet that the security forces will control considerably less Afghan territory than NATO forces currently do. [Continue reading…]

Facebooktwittermail

Islamophobia and Hollywood

At Salon, Sandy Tolan writes:

Society has forged standards of respect and unacceptability about racial, ethnic, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs. Rightly or wrongly, the message is: use certain hateful words in public, and you’ll pay the price. So why is there a different set of values at work when it comes to the hurt caused Muslims by hateful, Islamophobic characterizations of the Prophet Mohammed, or denigrations of Islam?

Tolan notes:

There is little in the public conversation that seeks to understand and explain the hurt caused to Muslims by these slurs. “To mock, to denigrate, to make fun of, somebody who’s deep…[in] the hearts of the Muslims? Really?” asked Sheikh Hamza Yusuf at a packed forum at Zaytuna College, a new Muslim college in Berkeley, in the aftermath of the … furor [provoked by the YouTube trailer to “Innocence of Muslims”]. (I was the forum’s moderator.) Yusuf argued that religious denigration should be seen in the same light as racial slurs, where “there are consequences. You will lose your job! We don’t accept racial denigration anymore. I think religious denigration has to be seen as identity.”

Islamophobia, and the accompanying hating on Arabs, helps provide cover for exceptional denigration. At the Zaytuna forum, Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of the college, described “an Islamophobic production industry that is dedicated to demeaning, to speaking ill of Muslims and attempting to silence Muslims from civil discourse.” This “othering” simply does not spur the same kind of outrage as slurs on blacks, gays, Jews, Asians or Latinos. In Hollywood especially, from “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to “Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” Arabs and Muslims are the last fair game for attacks with impunity.

The question is: why should this apply especially to Hollywood?

The entertainment industry likes to portray itself in the humble position of giving people what they want — that it mirrors this society much more than it shapes its values. But when it comes to issues like homophobia, there’s no question that Hollywood has taken a lead in combating prejudice; it hasn’t simply kept in step with changing societal attitudes. So why has this socially progressive force more often fueled rather than challenged Islamophobia?

A couple of years ago, JewishJournal.com reported on the history of Hollywood as described by Werner Hanak-Lettner, a curator for the Jüdisches Museum Wien (the Jewish Museum Vienna).

Hollywood’s founders went West, Hanak-Lettner said, because the East Coast was code for Jewish emigration. Way out West, they could not only become American, they could envisage the ideal of what it would mean to be American.

“They created not only a whole history, a whole industry, but they also recoined the American myth and gave images to it,” Hanak-Lettner said. “It isn’t very often that somebody comes from the outside and has the eye for what is the core of the society and can make [it into] a narrative that then is accepted by the whole.”
[…]
“Hollywood helped Jews find a place in America, and it is a very special cultural life that Jews gave to Hollywood and to Los Angeles: Just look at the historic sight of Wilshire Boulevard Temple with the murals inside. Nobody else in the world, even in a Reform synagogue, has murals like that. There you feel [a sense of] some sort of kingdom that was once here.”

It was Warner Bros. chieftain Jack Warner who commissioned the biblically inspired murals in 1929, and they are emblamatic of Hollywood’s importance to the Jewish community, a reminder that the Kingdom of Hollywood was a Jewish response to the modern world.

“A guy once said to me — a musician working in TV — ‘It would be interesting to work in Hollywood, but you have to be a Jew.’ I said, ‘I don’t believe that, because I know other musicians in Hollywood who aren’t Jewish; you just have to face [the fact that] they invented it!’ ” Hanak-Lettner said.

To assert that Islamophobia should reap consequences in just the same way that other forms of prejudice do is to fail to address the more fundamental question: why is this form of hatred so widely accepted in America?

When it comes to Hollywood’s portrayal of the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, the narrative that Americans have been fed has indisputably been shaped by tribal animosity.

“In every movie they make, every time an Arab utters the word Allah? Something blows up,” said Eyad Zahra, a young filmmaker who organized the Los Angeles premiere of Jack Shaheen’s documentary “Reel Bad Arabs.”

Islamophobia emanates from many sources in America yet an entertainment industry that has for decades vilified the Middle East, its peoples, cultures and predominant religion must be seen as a primary agent in legitimizing and sustaining this prejudice.

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. is tracking suspects in attack on Libya mission

The New York Times reports: The United States is laying the groundwork for operations to kill or capture militants implicated in the deadly attack on a diplomatic mission in Libya, senior military and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday, as the weak Libyan government appears unable to arrest or even question fighters involved in the assault.

The top-secret Joint Special Operations Command is compiling so-called target packages of detailed information about the suspects, the officials said. Working with the Pentagon and the C.I.A., the command is preparing the dossiers as the first step in anticipation of possible orders from President Obama to take action against those determined to have played a role in the attack on a diplomatic mission in the eastern city of Benghazi that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three colleagues three weeks ago.

Potential military options could include drone strikes, Special Operations raids like the one that killed Osama bin Laden and joint missions with Libyan authorities. But administration officials say no decisions have been made on any potential targets.

Spokesmen for the Defense Department and C.I.A. declined to comment.

The preparations underscore the bind confronting the White House over the Benghazi attack. Mr. Obama has vowed to bring the killers to justice, and in the final weeks of the presidential campaign Republicans have hammered the administration over the possible intelligence failures that preceded the attack — including a new accusation that repeated requests for strengthened security in Benghazi had been rejected.

But any American military action on Libyan soil would risk casualties and almost certainly set off a popular backlash at a moment when support for the revolt against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had created a surge in good feeling toward the United States that is unique in the region.

Reflecting a surge in nationalism, the Libyan government has opposed any unilateral American military action in Libya against the attackers. “We will not accept anyone entering inside Libya,” Mustafa Abu Shagur, Libya’s new prime minister, told the Al Jazeera television network. “That would infringe on sovereignty and we will refuse.”

Note: the New York Times headline doesn’t say “suspects”; it says “killers.” Naturally, Times journalists lack the authority to question their government handlers and if “killers” is the term administration officials use, then “killers” is the term the paper of record will repeat. After all, if there might be any doubt about the identity of individuals being lined up for possible execution in a U.S. drone firing range, it would be reasonable to question the use of drones.

A Gallup poll conducted in March and April showed that 75% of Libyans supported the NATO military intervention in 2011. Gallup also noted:

U.S. support for the Libyan revolution may have generated an almost unprecedented level of goodwill toward the U.S. In 2012, 54% of Libyans approve of U.S. leadership — among the highest approval Gallup has ever recorded in the Middle East and North Africa region, outside of Israel.

If President Obama goes ahead and authorizes drone strikes in Libya right before the U.S. presidential election, then whatever national security justification officials may provide for such killing, the “necessity” for such an operation can reasonably be inferred to have been political.

Facebooktwittermail

Libya says pushing forward with Islamic finance plans

Reuters reports: Libya hopes to start implementing its new Islamic banking law by the end of the year and expects strong demand among the public for sharia-compliant financial services, Libyan central bank governor Saddek Omar Elkaber said on Monday.

The country approved an Islamic banking law in May and has been working to amend its legislation to attract foreign investment and stimulate its private sector following last year’s war that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.

“The demand is so high in Libya so we set up a higher committee for Islamic finance…Now they are working to set up a road map for Islamic finance in Libya,” Elkaber told reporters on the sidelines of an Arab central bankers’ conference in Kuwait.

Asked when Libya might be able to start implementing the rules, he said: “Hopefully very soon. Hopefully this year.”

He said the authorities envisaged several options for Islamic banking services. One would be to allow conventional banks to open branches or windows for Islamic finance; another would be permitting conventional banks to become Islamic. Libya is also looking at introducing a special licence for Islamic banking, he said.

The licensing option is still under discussion because authorities have yet to agree on capital requirements, he added.

Apparently for ideological reasons, Gaddafi did not support the development of Islamic banking, which follows religious principles such as bans on interest and pure monetary speculation.

Facebooktwittermail