Protests For Democracy
Over the last two weeks in Iran, a resurgent Green movement has been staging a number of large demonstrations, showing that the reformist challenge to the Iranian regime remains as strong as it was in the days and weeks after Iran's controversial June 12 presidential elections. On Dec. 19, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Al-Montazeri, Iran's leading clerical dissident and the Green movement's most vocal religious supporter, passed away at age 87. Demonstrations erupted at his funeral in the holy city of Qom two days later, "with several mourners clashing with groups of [pro-government] vigilantes, according to reports from witnesses and opposition Web sites." Police then "used tear gas and batons to disperse people." The demonstrations increased in size and intensity throughout the Muharram observances that week, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government responded to with increasing violence -- even on the holy day of Ashura, the culmination of the Muharram observances. Just as was done during the 1979 revolution in Iran, demonstrators used the occasion of the remembrance of Hussein's murder by an unjust ruler as a form of protest against the current regime, challenging its claim on being an "Islamic" government.
THE STATE OF THE REGIME: Even though they have been repeatedly warned by Iranian authorities, two presidential candidates associated with the Green movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have continued to criticize the regime since June, exposing fissures in Iran's ruling revolutionary elite. But the latest protests represent a growing challenge not only to the conservative faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who many in Iran believe was re-elected fraudulently, but also to some extent to the very system that underpins the Iranian Republic -- velayet- faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," in which one supreme Ayatollah wields veto power over all aspects of Iranian government. The founder of this system and the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was Iran's most authoritative cleric. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has far weaker scholarly credentials and has faced increasing criticism from a number of reformist clerics (of whom Montazeri was the most notable) for what they see as his unjust stewardship of the republic, signified by Iran's authoritarian brutality. Combined with the challenges to the legitimacy of Iran's elections, this represents the most significant and sustained challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution.
WHAT SHOULD OBAMA DO?: Some have criticized President Obama for not more overtly taking sides in the Iranian dispute. Although he has spoken out in favor of human rights and fair elections in Iran, Obama has continually stressed that the current disagreement is for Iranians to resolve. In a statement on Dec. 28, the President said that what was "taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves," but he was "confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice." As to how this might affect the administration's ongoing attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program, Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration adviser on Iran, said, "You can have negotiations with Iran, as the United States has had negotiations with many adversarial countries while also at the same time disapproving on the internal practices of those regimes." Though talks with Iran have thus far failed to achieve an agreement, in a recent article examining Obama's maneuvers over the last months, Iran expert Gary Sick wrote that Obama has effectively "taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks...converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse."
TIME FOR SMART SANCTIONS: Though Iranians are uniformly against the kind of "crippling" sanctions that would hurt the Iranian population -- as well as against military strikes, which would snuff out the Green movement immediately -- some Iranian dissidents have voiced support for sanctions targeted at regime actors, such as the Revolutionary Guards, who have increasingly consolidated control over large segments of Iran's economy. Although Russia and China are, according to Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour, "instinctively opposed to sanctions," Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress that "Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind." While some in Congress are anxious to employ precisely the sort of blunt sanctions that Iranian dissidents have said they don't want, the administration has been working on a set of sanctions that would target specific regime actors, rather than the Iranian people. Describing these measures, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Haaretz, "We have begun discussions with our partners and like-minded nations about pressure and sanctions," but that the goal was "to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving." As an anonymous Green protester told the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, what the Greens want from the world is to "help us make our democracy."
LABOR -- BUSINESS LOBBYISTS YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN BUSH APPOINTEE ELAINE CHAO RAN THE LABOR DEPARTMENT: The Associated Press reports that the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' tenure has brought "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules." In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery." She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and "started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate."
Former U.S. government officials said yesterday that the "suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership." The bomber had been recruited to infiltrate the terrorist organization's leadership circles and was trusted by his CIA and Jordanian handlers.
"The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database" to the no-fly list or to the Secondary Security Screening Selection list. White House spokesman Bill Burton said counterterrorism officials examined "thousands upon thousands" of names before deciding which to transfer.
The Obama administration's decision to require citizens traveling from 14 countries to receive extra searches at airports has drawn angry criticism from foreign officials. "It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person," Nigerian information minister Dora Akunyili told the press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina yesterday. Criticizing Graham for his vote in favor of the 2008 financial bailout and his outspoken support of immigration reform, the Lexington GOP became the second county party organization to pass a censure resolution.
$2.3 trillion: Amount the U.S. spent on health care in 2008, averaging $7,681 per person, and up 4.4 percent from 2007. The rate of growth was the lowest in 48 years because of the recession, although health spending "reached 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008, up from 15.9 percent in 2007." The White House called the new federal report "a striking reminder of what defenders of the status quo are defending."
"Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency." "From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) told the Huffington Post. "Can you say EPA?"
"The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses," the Wall Street Journal reports. Personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32 percent from 2008. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others," also rose 42 percent last year.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the Obama administration remains open to talks with Iran over its nuclear program, despite Tehran's unaccommodating stance. President Obama said he will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively to his overtures by the beginning of 2010.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that climate change skeptics and entrenched industries threaten to harm the world's poorest people. "Powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in Mexico City,"
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Protest for freedom of Expression and Democracy
Protests For Democracy
Over the last two weeks in Iran, a resurgent Green movement has been staging a number of large demonstrations, showing that the reformist challenge to the Iranian regime remains as strong as it was in the days and weeks after Iran's controversial June 12 presidential elections. On Dec. 19, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Al-Montazeri, Iran's leading clerical dissident and the Green movement's most vocal religious supporter, passed away at age 87. Demonstrations erupted at his funeral in the holy city of Qom two days later, "with several mourners clashing with groups of [pro-government] vigilantes, according to reports from witnesses and opposition Web sites." Police then "used tear gas and batons to disperse people." The demonstrations increased in size and intensity throughout the Muharram observances that week, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government responded to with increasing violence -- even on the holy day of Ashura, the culmination of the Muharram observances. Just as was done during the 1979 revolution in Iran, demonstrators used the occasion of the remembrance of Hussein's murder by an unjust ruler as a form of protest against the current regime, challenging its claim on being an "Islamic" government.
THE STATE OF THE REGIME: Even though they have been repeatedly warned by Iranian authorities, two presidential candidates associated with the Green movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have continued to criticize the regime since June, exposing fissures in Iran's ruling revolutionary elite. But the latest protests represent a growing challenge not only to the conservative faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who many in Iran believe was re-elected fraudulently, but also to some extent to the very system that underpins the Iranian Republic -- velayet- faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," in which one supreme Ayatollah wields veto power over all aspects of Iranian government. The founder of this system and the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was Iran's most authoritative cleric. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has far weaker scholarly credentials and has faced increasing criticism from a number of reformist clerics (of whom Montazeri was the most notable) for what they see as his unjust stewardship of the republic, signified by Iran's authoritarian brutality. Combined with the challenges to the legitimacy of Iran's elections, this represents the most significant and sustained challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution.
WHAT SHOULD OBAMA DO?: Some have criticized President Obama for not more overtly taking sides in the Iranian dispute. Although he has spoken out in favor of human rights and fair elections in Iran, Obama has continually stressed that the current disagreement is for Iranians to resolve. In a statement on Dec. 28, the President said that what was "taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves," but he was "confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice." As to how this might affect the administration's ongoing attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program, Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration adviser on Iran, said, "You can have negotiations with Iran, as the United States has had negotiations with many adversarial countries while also at the same time disapproving on the internal practices of those regimes." Though talks with Iran have thus far failed to achieve an agreement, in a recent article examining Obama's maneuvers over the last months, Iran expert Gary Sick wrote that Obama has effectively "taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks...converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse."
TIME FOR SMART SANCTIONS: Though Iranians are uniformly against the kind of "crippling" sanctions that would hurt the Iranian population -- as well as against military strikes, which would snuff out the Green movement immediately -- some Iranian dissidents have voiced support for sanctions targeted at regime actors, such as the Revolutionary Guards, who have increasingly consolidated control over large segments of Iran's economy. Although Russia and China are, according to Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour, "instinctively opposed to sanctions," Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress that "Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind." While some in Congress are anxious to employ precisely the sort of blunt sanctions that Iranian dissidents have said they don't want, the administration has been working on a set of sanctions that would target specific regime actors, rather than the Iranian people. Describing these measures, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Haaretz, "We have begun discussions with our partners and like-minded nations about pressure and sanctions," but that the goal was "to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving." As an anonymous Green protester told the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, what the Greens want from the world is to "help us make our democracy."
LABOR -- BUSINESS LOBBYISTS YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN BUSH APPOINTEE ELAINE CHAO RAN THE LABOR DEPARTMENT: The Associated Press reports that the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' tenure has brought "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules." In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery." She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and "started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate."
Former U.S. government officials said yesterday that the "suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership." The bomber had been recruited to infiltrate the terrorist organization's leadership circles and was trusted by his CIA and Jordanian handlers.
"The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database" to the no-fly list or to the Secondary Security Screening Selection list. White House spokesman Bill Burton said counterterrorism officials examined "thousands upon thousands" of names before deciding which to transfer.
The Obama administration's decision to require citizens traveling from 14 countries to receive extra searches at airports has drawn angry criticism from foreign officials. "It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person," Nigerian information minister Dora Akunyili told the press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina yesterday. Criticizing Graham for his vote in favor of the 2008 financial bailout and his outspoken support of immigration reform, the Lexington GOP became the second county party organization to pass a censure resolution.
$2.3 trillion: Amount the U.S. spent on health care in 2008, averaging $7,681 per person, and up 4.4 percent from 2007. The rate of growth was the lowest in 48 years because of the recession, although health spending "reached 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008, up from 15.9 percent in 2007." The White House called the new federal report "a striking reminder of what defenders of the status quo are defending."
"Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency." "From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) told the Huffington Post. "Can you say EPA?"
"The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses," the Wall Street Journal reports. Personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32 percent from 2008. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others," also rose 42 percent last year.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the Obama administration remains open to talks with Iran over its nuclear program, despite Tehran's unaccommodating stance. President Obama said he will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively to his overtures by the beginning of 2010.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that climate change skeptics and entrenched industries threaten to harm the world's poorest people. "Powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in Mexico City,"
Over the last two weeks in Iran, a resurgent Green movement has been staging a number of large demonstrations, showing that the reformist challenge to the Iranian regime remains as strong as it was in the days and weeks after Iran's controversial June 12 presidential elections. On Dec. 19, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Al-Montazeri, Iran's leading clerical dissident and the Green movement's most vocal religious supporter, passed away at age 87. Demonstrations erupted at his funeral in the holy city of Qom two days later, "with several mourners clashing with groups of [pro-government] vigilantes, according to reports from witnesses and opposition Web sites." Police then "used tear gas and batons to disperse people." The demonstrations increased in size and intensity throughout the Muharram observances that week, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government responded to with increasing violence -- even on the holy day of Ashura, the culmination of the Muharram observances. Just as was done during the 1979 revolution in Iran, demonstrators used the occasion of the remembrance of Hussein's murder by an unjust ruler as a form of protest against the current regime, challenging its claim on being an "Islamic" government.
THE STATE OF THE REGIME: Even though they have been repeatedly warned by Iranian authorities, two presidential candidates associated with the Green movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have continued to criticize the regime since June, exposing fissures in Iran's ruling revolutionary elite. But the latest protests represent a growing challenge not only to the conservative faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who many in Iran believe was re-elected fraudulently, but also to some extent to the very system that underpins the Iranian Republic -- velayet- faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," in which one supreme Ayatollah wields veto power over all aspects of Iranian government. The founder of this system and the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was Iran's most authoritative cleric. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has far weaker scholarly credentials and has faced increasing criticism from a number of reformist clerics (of whom Montazeri was the most notable) for what they see as his unjust stewardship of the republic, signified by Iran's authoritarian brutality. Combined with the challenges to the legitimacy of Iran's elections, this represents the most significant and sustained challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution.
WHAT SHOULD OBAMA DO?: Some have criticized President Obama for not more overtly taking sides in the Iranian dispute. Although he has spoken out in favor of human rights and fair elections in Iran, Obama has continually stressed that the current disagreement is for Iranians to resolve. In a statement on Dec. 28, the President said that what was "taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves," but he was "confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice." As to how this might affect the administration's ongoing attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program, Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration adviser on Iran, said, "You can have negotiations with Iran, as the United States has had negotiations with many adversarial countries while also at the same time disapproving on the internal practices of those regimes." Though talks with Iran have thus far failed to achieve an agreement, in a recent article examining Obama's maneuvers over the last months, Iran expert Gary Sick wrote that Obama has effectively "taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks...converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse."
TIME FOR SMART SANCTIONS: Though Iranians are uniformly against the kind of "crippling" sanctions that would hurt the Iranian population -- as well as against military strikes, which would snuff out the Green movement immediately -- some Iranian dissidents have voiced support for sanctions targeted at regime actors, such as the Revolutionary Guards, who have increasingly consolidated control over large segments of Iran's economy. Although Russia and China are, according to Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour, "instinctively opposed to sanctions," Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress that "Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind." While some in Congress are anxious to employ precisely the sort of blunt sanctions that Iranian dissidents have said they don't want, the administration has been working on a set of sanctions that would target specific regime actors, rather than the Iranian people. Describing these measures, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Haaretz, "We have begun discussions with our partners and like-minded nations about pressure and sanctions," but that the goal was "to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving." As an anonymous Green protester told the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, what the Greens want from the world is to "help us make our democracy."
LABOR -- BUSINESS LOBBYISTS YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN BUSH APPOINTEE ELAINE CHAO RAN THE LABOR DEPARTMENT: The Associated Press reports that the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' tenure has brought "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules." In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery." She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and "started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate."
Former U.S. government officials said yesterday that the "suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership." The bomber had been recruited to infiltrate the terrorist organization's leadership circles and was trusted by his CIA and Jordanian handlers.
"The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database" to the no-fly list or to the Secondary Security Screening Selection list. White House spokesman Bill Burton said counterterrorism officials examined "thousands upon thousands" of names before deciding which to transfer.
The Obama administration's decision to require citizens traveling from 14 countries to receive extra searches at airports has drawn angry criticism from foreign officials. "It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person," Nigerian information minister Dora Akunyili told the press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina yesterday. Criticizing Graham for his vote in favor of the 2008 financial bailout and his outspoken support of immigration reform, the Lexington GOP became the second county party organization to pass a censure resolution.
$2.3 trillion: Amount the U.S. spent on health care in 2008, averaging $7,681 per person, and up 4.4 percent from 2007. The rate of growth was the lowest in 48 years because of the recession, although health spending "reached 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008, up from 15.9 percent in 2007." The White House called the new federal report "a striking reminder of what defenders of the status quo are defending."
"Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency." "From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) told the Huffington Post. "Can you say EPA?"
"The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses," the Wall Street Journal reports. Personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32 percent from 2008. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others," also rose 42 percent last year.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the Obama administration remains open to talks with Iran over its nuclear program, despite Tehran's unaccommodating stance. President Obama said he will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively to his overtures by the beginning of 2010.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that climate change skeptics and entrenched industries threaten to harm the world's poorest people. "Powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in Mexico City,"
Protest for freedom of Expression and Democracy
Protests For Democracy
Over the last two weeks in Iran, a resurgent Green movement has been staging a number of large demonstrations, showing that the reformist challenge to the Iranian regime remains as strong as it was in the days and weeks after Iran's controversial June 12 presidential elections. On Dec. 19, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Al-Montazeri, Iran's leading clerical dissident and the Green movement's most vocal religious supporter, passed away at age 87. Demonstrations erupted at his funeral in the holy city of Qom two days later, "with several mourners clashing with groups of [pro-government] vigilantes, according to reports from witnesses and opposition Web sites." Police then "used tear gas and batons to disperse people." The demonstrations increased in size and intensity throughout the Muharram observances that week, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government responded to with increasing violence -- even on the holy day of Ashura, the culmination of the Muharram observances. Just as was done during the 1979 revolution in Iran, demonstrators used the occasion of the remembrance of Hussein's murder by an unjust ruler as a form of protest against the current regime, challenging its claim on being an "Islamic" government.
THE STATE OF THE REGIME: Even though they have been repeatedly warned by Iranian authorities, two presidential candidates associated with the Green movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have continued to criticize the regime since June, exposing fissures in Iran's ruling revolutionary elite. But the latest protests represent a growing challenge not only to the conservative faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who many in Iran believe was re-elected fraudulently, but also to some extent to the very system that underpins the Iranian Republic -- velayet- faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," in which one supreme Ayatollah wields veto power over all aspects of Iranian government. The founder of this system and the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was Iran's most authoritative cleric. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has far weaker scholarly credentials and has faced increasing criticism from a number of reformist clerics (of whom Montazeri was the most notable) for what they see as his unjust stewardship of the republic, signified by Iran's authoritarian brutality. Combined with the challenges to the legitimacy of Iran's elections, this represents the most significant and sustained challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution.
WHAT SHOULD OBAMA DO?: Some have criticized President Obama for not more overtly taking sides in the Iranian dispute. Although he has spoken out in favor of human rights and fair elections in Iran, Obama has continually stressed that the current disagreement is for Iranians to resolve. In a statement on Dec. 28, the President said that what was "taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves," but he was "confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice." As to how this might affect the administration's ongoing attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program, Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration adviser on Iran, said, "You can have negotiations with Iran, as the United States has had negotiations with many adversarial countries while also at the same time disapproving on the internal practices of those regimes." Though talks with Iran have thus far failed to achieve an agreement, in a recent article examining Obama's maneuvers over the last months, Iran expert Gary Sick wrote that Obama has effectively "taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks...converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse."
TIME FOR SMART SANCTIONS: Though Iranians are uniformly against the kind of "crippling" sanctions that would hurt the Iranian population -- as well as against military strikes, which would snuff out the Green movement immediately -- some Iranian dissidents have voiced support for sanctions targeted at regime actors, such as the Revolutionary Guards, who have increasingly consolidated control over large segments of Iran's economy. Although Russia and China are, according to Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour, "instinctively opposed to sanctions," Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress that "Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind." While some in Congress are anxious to employ precisely the sort of blunt sanctions that Iranian dissidents have said they don't want, the administration has been working on a set of sanctions that would target specific regime actors, rather than the Iranian people. Describing these measures, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Haaretz, "We have begun discussions with our partners and like-minded nations about pressure and sanctions," but that the goal was "to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving." As an anonymous Green protester told the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, what the Greens want from the world is to "help us make our democracy."
LABOR -- BUSINESS LOBBYISTS YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN BUSH APPOINTEE ELAINE CHAO RAN THE LABOR DEPARTMENT: The Associated Press reports that the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' tenure has brought "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules." In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery." She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and "started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate."
Former U.S. government officials said yesterday that the "suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership." The bomber had been recruited to infiltrate the terrorist organization's leadership circles and was trusted by his CIA and Jordanian handlers.
"The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database" to the no-fly list or to the Secondary Security Screening Selection list. White House spokesman Bill Burton said counterterrorism officials examined "thousands upon thousands" of names before deciding which to transfer.
The Obama administration's decision to require citizens traveling from 14 countries to receive extra searches at airports has drawn angry criticism from foreign officials. "It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person," Nigerian information minister Dora Akunyili told the press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina yesterday. Criticizing Graham for his vote in favor of the 2008 financial bailout and his outspoken support of immigration reform, the Lexington GOP became the second county party organization to pass a censure resolution.
$2.3 trillion: Amount the U.S. spent on health care in 2008, averaging $7,681 per person, and up 4.4 percent from 2007. The rate of growth was the lowest in 48 years because of the recession, although health spending "reached 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008, up from 15.9 percent in 2007." The White House called the new federal report "a striking reminder of what defenders of the status quo are defending."
"Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency." "From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) told the Huffington Post. "Can you say EPA?"
"The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses," the Wall Street Journal reports. Personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32 percent from 2008. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others," also rose 42 percent last year.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the Obama administration remains open to talks with Iran over its nuclear program, despite Tehran's unaccommodating stance. President Obama said he will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively to his overtures by the beginning of 2010.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that climate change skeptics and entrenched industries threaten to harm the world's poorest people. "Powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in Mexico City,"
Over the last two weeks in Iran, a resurgent Green movement has been staging a number of large demonstrations, showing that the reformist challenge to the Iranian regime remains as strong as it was in the days and weeks after Iran's controversial June 12 presidential elections. On Dec. 19, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Al-Montazeri, Iran's leading clerical dissident and the Green movement's most vocal religious supporter, passed away at age 87. Demonstrations erupted at his funeral in the holy city of Qom two days later, "with several mourners clashing with groups of [pro-government] vigilantes, according to reports from witnesses and opposition Web sites." Police then "used tear gas and batons to disperse people." The demonstrations increased in size and intensity throughout the Muharram observances that week, during which Shia Muslims mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. The Iranian government responded to with increasing violence -- even on the holy day of Ashura, the culmination of the Muharram observances. Just as was done during the 1979 revolution in Iran, demonstrators used the occasion of the remembrance of Hussein's murder by an unjust ruler as a form of protest against the current regime, challenging its claim on being an "Islamic" government.
THE STATE OF THE REGIME: Even though they have been repeatedly warned by Iranian authorities, two presidential candidates associated with the Green movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have continued to criticize the regime since June, exposing fissures in Iran's ruling revolutionary elite. But the latest protests represent a growing challenge not only to the conservative faction of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who many in Iran believe was re-elected fraudulently, but also to some extent to the very system that underpins the Iranian Republic -- velayet- faqih, or "rule of the jurisprudent," in which one supreme Ayatollah wields veto power over all aspects of Iranian government. The founder of this system and the Islamic Republic's first leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was Iran's most authoritative cleric. His successor, Ali Khamenei, has far weaker scholarly credentials and has faced increasing criticism from a number of reformist clerics (of whom Montazeri was the most notable) for what they see as his unjust stewardship of the republic, signified by Iran's authoritarian brutality. Combined with the challenges to the legitimacy of Iran's elections, this represents the most significant and sustained challenge to the Iranian government since the 1979 revolution.
WHAT SHOULD OBAMA DO?: Some have criticized President Obama for not more overtly taking sides in the Iranian dispute. Although he has spoken out in favor of human rights and fair elections in Iran, Obama has continually stressed that the current disagreement is for Iranians to resolve. In a statement on Dec. 28, the President said that what was "taking place in Iran is not about the United States or any other country. It's about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice, and a better life for themselves," but he was "confident that history will be on the side of those who seek justice." As to how this might affect the administration's ongoing attempts to engage Iran over its nuclear program, Ray Takeyh, a former Obama administration adviser on Iran, said, "You can have negotiations with Iran, as the United States has had negotiations with many adversarial countries while also at the same time disapproving on the internal practices of those regimes." Though talks with Iran have thus far failed to achieve an agreement, in a recent article examining Obama's maneuvers over the last months, Iran expert Gary Sick wrote that Obama has effectively "taken what appeared to be a losing hand and, with a few well-placed leaks...converted a lose-lose proposition of crippling sanctions vs appeasement into an Iranian nuclear collapse."
TIME FOR SMART SANCTIONS: Though Iranians are uniformly against the kind of "crippling" sanctions that would hurt the Iranian population -- as well as against military strikes, which would snuff out the Green movement immediately -- some Iranian dissidents have voiced support for sanctions targeted at regime actors, such as the Revolutionary Guards, who have increasingly consolidated control over large segments of Iran's economy. Although Russia and China are, according to Iran analyst Karim Sadjadpour, "instinctively opposed to sanctions," Sadjadpour told Middle East Progress that "Iranian intransigence has put them in a bind." While some in Congress are anxious to employ precisely the sort of blunt sanctions that Iranian dissidents have said they don't want, the administration has been working on a set of sanctions that would target specific regime actors, rather than the Iranian people. Describing these measures, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Haaretz, "We have begun discussions with our partners and like-minded nations about pressure and sanctions," but that the goal was "to pressure the Iranian government, particularly the Revolutionary Guard elements without contributing to the suffering of ordinary [Iranians] who deserve better than what they are currently receiving." As an anonymous Green protester told the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman, what the Greens want from the world is to "help us make our democracy."
LABOR -- BUSINESS LOBBYISTS YEARN FOR THE DAYS WHEN BUSH APPOINTEE ELAINE CHAO RAN THE LABOR DEPARTMENT: The Associated Press reports that the first year of Labor Secretary Hilda Solis' tenure has brought "aggressive moves to boost enforcement and crack down on businesses that violate workplace safety rules have sent employers scrambling to make sure they are following the rules." In many ways, Solis has reversed the course of the Labor Department that was set by her Bush-era predecessor, Elaine Chao. Solis' crackdown has business lobbyists yearning for the days when Chao ran the show. "Our members are concerned that the department is shifting its focus from compliance assistance back to more of the 'gotcha' or aggressive enforcement first approach," Karen Harned, executive director of the National Federation of Independent Business' small business legal center, told BusinessWeek. Keith Smith, a spokesman for the National Association of Manufacturers, explained that his organizations wants "to build upon [Chao's] progress and recognize what's working." The business lobbyists' reaction to Solis' tenure is unsurprising, given the fact that her predecessor's Labor Department spent eight years "walking away from its regulatory function across a range of issues, including wage and hour law and workplace safety." The Government Accountability Office found that under Chao, the agency "did an inadequate job of investigating complaints by low-wage workers who alleged that their employers were stiffing them for overtime, or failing to pay the minimum wage." In one survey, 68 percent of low-income workers reported a pay violation in the previous week alone. Solis, meanwhile, has "slapped the largest fine in [Department] history on oil giant BP PLC for failing to fix safety problems after a 2005 explosion at its Texas City refinery." She is hiring 250 additional wage-theft inspectors, and "started a new program that scrutinizes business records to make sure worker injury and illness reports are accurate."
Former U.S. government officials said yesterday that the "suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda's top leadership." The bomber had been recruited to infiltrate the terrorist organization's leadership circles and was trusted by his CIA and Jordanian handlers.
"The Obama administration has transferred dozens of names from a broad terrorism database" to the no-fly list or to the Secondary Security Screening Selection list. White House spokesman Bill Burton said counterterrorism officials examined "thousands upon thousands" of names before deciding which to transfer.
The Obama administration's decision to require citizens traveling from 14 countries to receive extra searches at airports has drawn angry criticism from foreign officials. "It is unfair to discriminate against over 150 million people because of the behavior of one person," Nigerian information minister Dora Akunyili told the press.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina yesterday. Criticizing Graham for his vote in favor of the 2008 financial bailout and his outspoken support of immigration reform, the Lexington GOP became the second county party organization to pass a censure resolution.
$2.3 trillion: Amount the U.S. spent on health care in 2008, averaging $7,681 per person, and up 4.4 percent from 2007. The rate of growth was the lowest in 48 years because of the recession, although health spending "reached 16.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2008, up from 15.9 percent in 2007." The White House called the new federal report "a striking reminder of what defenders of the status quo are defending."
"Senate Republicans are determined to prevent the creation of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency because they consider it as threatening as their current arch-nemesis regulator: the Environmental Protection Agency." "From the Republican point of view, the idea of a separate agency is still anathema," Sen. Bob Bennett (R-UT) told the Huffington Post. "Can you say EPA?"
"The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy rose by nearly a third in 2009, a surge largely driven by foreclosures and job losses," the Wall Street Journal reports. Personal bankruptcy filings hit 1.41 million last year, up 32 percent from 2008. Filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, "which liquidates assets to pay off some debts and absolves the filers of others," also rose 42 percent last year.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that the Obama administration remains open to talks with Iran over its nuclear program, despite Tehran's unaccommodating stance. President Obama said he will move toward tougher sanctions if Iran does not respond positively to his overtures by the beginning of 2010.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that climate change skeptics and entrenched industries threaten to harm the world's poorest people. "Powerful vested interests are perhaps likely to get overactive in the coming months, and would perhaps do everything in their power to impede progress towards a binding agreement that is hoped for by the end of 2010 in Mexico City,"
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