Thursday, February 24, 2011
Killer weather slows down NYC
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
East Midtown New Yorkers have been brave this winter, taking record snowfalls and windstorms in their stride, going easy on the Mayor’s planners and not asking too many questions.
There are explanations for the cold and storms, if we are willing to be rational about it. The area of global warming is subject to the greatest political ploys, and the cold winter does not help. There are powerful deniers in office, and Sen. James Mountain Inhofe (R, OK 1988- ) Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is at work removing carbon dioxide regulations, He does not accept the scientific community’s findings of man-made damages to the environment, and has the campaign funds backing of the oil companies ($450K) and electric utilities ($200K_) to support him.
The scientific community is certain in the finding that the ice around the Arctic Circle has since 1979 (start of measuring) declined by more than 30 percent, using September as the bellwether month. Global warming around the North is causing it, and the open sea absorbs the heat, rather than reflecting it back into atmosphere, thus advancing the meltdown.
Researchers of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Radiation) offer the theory that the tight Arctic air vortex (circle) around the pole, called the jet stream, held in check by the cold, has been broken, and the cold forays down southward are clashing with the normal atmosphere, causing unseasonable frigid temperatures, storms, and downpours.
Last winter the cold related to the vortex hit it’s lowest since 1865, when recordkeeping began, and September 21010 was the warmest ever.
Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington MA, a reputable private firm, offers the link between the breach in the Arctic air circle and increasing snow in Siberia. The declining Arctic ice is producing additional water in the atmosphere from the evaporations of the open sea, comparable to the lake effect for Buffalo and Syracuse in the US.
While the scientific community does not doubt that the greenhouse gasses released by human industry contribute to the warming of the atmosphere, they still do not know how it is distributed. Still, it makes sense to see that even if distributed equally, the greatest impact would be in the extreme areas, such as the Arctic Circle.
The year 2910 has been devastating. El Nino dumped Pacific heat t into the atmosphere, producing an agriculturally destructive heat wave in Russia, and all time high temperatures in 17 countries (NYC’s highest ever recorded), followed by devastating floods on Pakistan, China (250,000 buildings destroyed), Australia (Brisbane area flooded), and parts of the US. Luckily, we have the facilities and insurance to recover, unlike most of the world, and stockpiles of food.
I was looking through the internet to tighten up the number in the disasters, and found a site, Fire-Earth, that had detailed data for early 2010, including the numbers of houses destroyed in China , and the US states and governors who declared specific counties as disaster areas (Alabama, Florida, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah and then some). Fire Earth is apparently a volcanic activity observer, and also collects counts and dates of all types of ecological disasters. However, at the end of the long listing, looking to identify the authority of the resources, I found a humble request from a user to reprint data, in his church bulletin. In response, the FEWW (?) provided the following policy statement:
The Blog Moderators consider the institutionalized religion [The Church] as an antisocial, anti-spiritual weapon devised by the moneylenders to suppress the human race. If you are willing to quote the above statement alongside each portion of the Fire-Earth Disaster Calendar 2010 that you are seeking permission to quote, together with a link to the appropriate pages/posts and Blog’s copyright notice, you have the Moderators consent to quote the materials.
You really have to be paranoid not to go crazy in this world. These strange environmentalists - who also introduce their blog with a statement accusing the Google Mafia of censorship - put out valuable info that could help persuade the doubters about global warming. Yet, their inclusion of a statement of their emotional crude prejudice undermines the valuable data and put in doubt all those interesting little facts so painfully collected, and sworn to by the providers. I would not use them. Senator Jim Inhofe would certainly embrace Fire Earth as another evidence of Liberal lies, along with the baboons of East Anglia University who did the publishing of some selected data. That helps Imhofe in propagandizing the big denial of man-made climate changes,
as paid for by his oil and electric company contributors.
Speaking of earthquakes, the professional Columbia U Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, led by Dr. Wen-Young Kim, there since 1989 and currently the head of the seismographic network for the entire Northeast American region, states that NYC is due for its major quake, about every 100 years. The last, magnitude 5.5 tremor, was in 1884. This size quake will not destroy skyscrapers but will hurt brick buildings, and chimneys will topple. Kim is placing a larger seismograph network in NYC, for early warning. In recent years the Albany area has had more tremors – 24 in 2009, maximum magnitude 2.7, same in 2010. Stay alert, not to pack up, we are not Haiti; NYC is built on solid bedrock schist.
Wally thanks NYTimes, internet sources and NY Metro, a free daily doing quality reporting..
East Midtown New Yorkers have been brave this winter, taking record snowfalls and windstorms in their stride, going easy on the Mayor’s planners and not asking too many questions.
There are explanations for the cold and storms, if we are willing to be rational about it. The area of global warming is subject to the greatest political ploys, and the cold winter does not help. There are powerful deniers in office, and Sen. James Mountain Inhofe (R, OK 1988- ) Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, is at work removing carbon dioxide regulations, He does not accept the scientific community’s findings of man-made damages to the environment, and has the campaign funds backing of the oil companies ($450K) and electric utilities ($200K_) to support him.
The scientific community is certain in the finding that the ice around the Arctic Circle has since 1979 (start of measuring) declined by more than 30 percent, using September as the bellwether month. Global warming around the North is causing it, and the open sea absorbs the heat, rather than reflecting it back into atmosphere, thus advancing the meltdown.
Researchers of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Radiation) offer the theory that the tight Arctic air vortex (circle) around the pole, called the jet stream, held in check by the cold, has been broken, and the cold forays down southward are clashing with the normal atmosphere, causing unseasonable frigid temperatures, storms, and downpours.
Last winter the cold related to the vortex hit it’s lowest since 1865, when recordkeeping began, and September 21010 was the warmest ever.
Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington MA, a reputable private firm, offers the link between the breach in the Arctic air circle and increasing snow in Siberia. The declining Arctic ice is producing additional water in the atmosphere from the evaporations of the open sea, comparable to the lake effect for Buffalo and Syracuse in the US.
While the scientific community does not doubt that the greenhouse gasses released by human industry contribute to the warming of the atmosphere, they still do not know how it is distributed. Still, it makes sense to see that even if distributed equally, the greatest impact would be in the extreme areas, such as the Arctic Circle.
The year 2910 has been devastating. El Nino dumped Pacific heat t into the atmosphere, producing an agriculturally destructive heat wave in Russia, and all time high temperatures in 17 countries (NYC’s highest ever recorded), followed by devastating floods on Pakistan, China (250,000 buildings destroyed), Australia (Brisbane area flooded), and parts of the US. Luckily, we have the facilities and insurance to recover, unlike most of the world, and stockpiles of food.
I was looking through the internet to tighten up the number in the disasters, and found a site, Fire-Earth, that had detailed data for early 2010, including the numbers of houses destroyed in China , and the US states and governors who declared specific counties as disaster areas (Alabama, Florida, Minnesota, Colorado, Utah and then some). Fire Earth is apparently a volcanic activity observer, and also collects counts and dates of all types of ecological disasters. However, at the end of the long listing, looking to identify the authority of the resources, I found a humble request from a user to reprint data, in his church bulletin. In response, the FEWW (?) provided the following policy statement:
The Blog Moderators consider the institutionalized religion [The Church] as an antisocial, anti-spiritual weapon devised by the moneylenders to suppress the human race. If you are willing to quote the above statement alongside each portion of the Fire-Earth Disaster Calendar 2010 that you are seeking permission to quote, together with a link to the appropriate pages/posts and Blog’s copyright notice, you have the Moderators consent to quote the materials.
You really have to be paranoid not to go crazy in this world. These strange environmentalists - who also introduce their blog with a statement accusing the Google Mafia of censorship - put out valuable info that could help persuade the doubters about global warming. Yet, their inclusion of a statement of their emotional crude prejudice undermines the valuable data and put in doubt all those interesting little facts so painfully collected, and sworn to by the providers. I would not use them. Senator Jim Inhofe would certainly embrace Fire Earth as another evidence of Liberal lies, along with the baboons of East Anglia University who did the publishing of some selected data. That helps Imhofe in propagandizing the big denial of man-made climate changes,
as paid for by his oil and electric company contributors.
Speaking of earthquakes, the professional Columbia U Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, led by Dr. Wen-Young Kim, there since 1989 and currently the head of the seismographic network for the entire Northeast American region, states that NYC is due for its major quake, about every 100 years. The last, magnitude 5.5 tremor, was in 1884. This size quake will not destroy skyscrapers but will hurt brick buildings, and chimneys will topple. Kim is placing a larger seismograph network in NYC, for early warning. In recent years the Albany area has had more tremors – 24 in 2009, maximum magnitude 2.7, same in 2010. Stay alert, not to pack up, we are not Haiti; NYC is built on solid bedrock schist.
Wally thanks NYTimes, internet sources and NY Metro, a free daily doing quality reporting..
Labels: east anglia, Imhofe, lamont-doherty, weather
Thursday, February 17, 2011
American prophet Gene Sharp moves Egypt to democracy
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
You may wonder why so much attention to Egypt in this midtown New York publication, but then we are all interested in the revolt’s impact on Israel’s future. During the first of the 18 days of The Egyptian revolution many of us may have scratched our heads, asking whether US government was pro or con in regard to this worthy effort to democratize the Mideast, ruled since WWI by autocratic Sunni sheiks, unified mostly in their opposition to Israel and to the Shiite Persians of Iran. The Obama missions were taking ambivalent positions, some pro-Israel oriented and favoring the Mubarak status quo, others showing outright revolutionary democrat postures.
It might have helped us to know what became public knowledge in the last few days, that an American prophet of nonviolent establishment of democracy, in the spirit of Henry D. Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, a Harvard professor of 30 years, Gene Sharp, was behind the scenes. In 1983 he designed a Cold War defense oriented Nonviolent Sanctions Program designed for Europe, in case the Warsaw Pact armies were to take over the more vulnerable East European countries. It was for the Center of International Studies at Harvard, although concurrently he also organized an NGO, the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, to further his studies. Funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace, in 1987 it started it conducting seminars in non-violent actions. In 1993 Gene Sharp, sometimes called the Machiavelli of passive resistance, wrote his 77-page bible, From Dictatorship to Democracy, a manual in nonviolence, at the request of a democratic Burmese newspaper publisher. It was printed and stapled in booklets in Bangkok, in two languages. The book was considered so incendiary by the military Burmese government that mere possession would cause the owner’s imprisonment for seven years. It is now in its fifth edition, 90-some easy to digest pages, and lists nearly 200 specific non-violent protest actions, economic and government targeted.
It was next translated into Indonesian, then Serbian, and, eventually, in 23 languages, including Farsi. The small Institution, originally employing up to a dozen people, in 2010 was down to two, in a two-room apartment in a working-class Boston area, with a budget of $150,000, when Gene Sharp was named by the Iranian and Venezuelan governments as the central figure in pushing for overthrow of the Iranian rulers, and studied extensively,, unraveling the Institution's Cold War era CIA connections. The Institution indeed advised anticommunist movements; in Taiwan it helped the Progressive Democratic independence party, in Tibet the Dalai Lama organization, and in Palestine tried to help form a faction within PLO that would discourage terrorism. In Serbia it trained a group of Slobodan Milosevic’s young opponents, Otpor (“Resistance”) and apparently managed the overthrow of his dictatorship; Milosevic resigned in 2000. There were further involvements in the Baltic States and Russia before the collapse of the USSR.
Moving on to the Mideast and Egypt connections, the student group called the April 4 Youth Movement, first formed in 2005 and led by Ahmed Maher, a young engineer in a political movement called Kefaya (“Enough”), became mired in the old ineffective opposition parties. By 2008, after a labor strike in March, in Malhalla, they revived, as a Facebook coordinated group. Meanwhile in Tunisia another labor strike against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took place, coordinated via Facebook, and about that time the April 6 group discovered Gene Sharp’s writings, found them well fitted to Arab countries, and got in touch with the Otpor in Serbia, traveling there to study democratic revolutionary techniques. Another influence in Qatar, Egyptian émigrés and Sharp’s adepts, called the Academy of Change, helped the Cairo group organize. In 2010 another Facebook group, led by a young Google marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, and named We Are All Khalid Said, to honor a young victim of police brutality, continued organizing, all in context with the Tunisian labor groups, who had a successful revolution on January 14. There were contacts with Nobelist El-Baradei’s group, also the older political parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Day of Rage, January 28, in Tahrir Square, the April 6 leaders, helped by Tunisians, Otpor people, the Qatar group and local businessmen, were holding on, while the Obama emissaries worked on President Mubarak (who was pushed into non-resignation by his son Gamal Mubarak, an ex- banker hoping to inherit the dictatorship, despite being unacceptable by the party), until success came. President Obama and the State Department people had to satisfy Mideast governments of PM Netanyahu in Israel, PM Recep Tayyib Erdogan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and other leaders of the Maghreb, who advised support of Hosni Mubarak, for political balance in the region. Meanwhile Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Islamic Republic of Iran was violently suppressing his dissidents, at the same time loudly applauding the Egyptians and courting their support for his Hezbollah organization in Lebanon and Gaza.
Although the Mideast is in more turmoil – protesters in Yemen, Bahrain, teargas in Iran, cabinet change in Jordan – there appears hope in all this highly secular shift to democracy that the perpetual warring around Israel may end in our lifetime, particularly if US continues its monetary supports to Egypt (sans the rip-off). Let us hope.
Wally Dobelis thanks the NYTimes and Internet sources. You can read Gene Sharp’s manual by googling the Albert Einstein Institution.
You may wonder why so much attention to Egypt in this midtown New York publication, but then we are all interested in the revolt’s impact on Israel’s future. During the first of the 18 days of The Egyptian revolution many of us may have scratched our heads, asking whether US government was pro or con in regard to this worthy effort to democratize the Mideast, ruled since WWI by autocratic Sunni sheiks, unified mostly in their opposition to Israel and to the Shiite Persians of Iran. The Obama missions were taking ambivalent positions, some pro-Israel oriented and favoring the Mubarak status quo, others showing outright revolutionary democrat postures.
It might have helped us to know what became public knowledge in the last few days, that an American prophet of nonviolent establishment of democracy, in the spirit of Henry D. Thoreau, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, a Harvard professor of 30 years, Gene Sharp, was behind the scenes. In 1983 he designed a Cold War defense oriented Nonviolent Sanctions Program designed for Europe, in case the Warsaw Pact armies were to take over the more vulnerable East European countries. It was for the Center of International Studies at Harvard, although concurrently he also organized an NGO, the Albert Einstein Institution in Boston, to further his studies. Funded by the U.S. Institute for Peace, in 1987 it started it conducting seminars in non-violent actions. In 1993 Gene Sharp, sometimes called the Machiavelli of passive resistance, wrote his 77-page bible, From Dictatorship to Democracy, a manual in nonviolence, at the request of a democratic Burmese newspaper publisher. It was printed and stapled in booklets in Bangkok, in two languages. The book was considered so incendiary by the military Burmese government that mere possession would cause the owner’s imprisonment for seven years. It is now in its fifth edition, 90-some easy to digest pages, and lists nearly 200 specific non-violent protest actions, economic and government targeted.
It was next translated into Indonesian, then Serbian, and, eventually, in 23 languages, including Farsi. The small Institution, originally employing up to a dozen people, in 2010 was down to two, in a two-room apartment in a working-class Boston area, with a budget of $150,000, when Gene Sharp was named by the Iranian and Venezuelan governments as the central figure in pushing for overthrow of the Iranian rulers, and studied extensively,, unraveling the Institution's Cold War era CIA connections. The Institution indeed advised anticommunist movements; in Taiwan it helped the Progressive Democratic independence party, in Tibet the Dalai Lama organization, and in Palestine tried to help form a faction within PLO that would discourage terrorism. In Serbia it trained a group of Slobodan Milosevic’s young opponents, Otpor (“Resistance”) and apparently managed the overthrow of his dictatorship; Milosevic resigned in 2000. There were further involvements in the Baltic States and Russia before the collapse of the USSR.
Moving on to the Mideast and Egypt connections, the student group called the April 4 Youth Movement, first formed in 2005 and led by Ahmed Maher, a young engineer in a political movement called Kefaya (“Enough”), became mired in the old ineffective opposition parties. By 2008, after a labor strike in March, in Malhalla, they revived, as a Facebook coordinated group. Meanwhile in Tunisia another labor strike against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali took place, coordinated via Facebook, and about that time the April 6 group discovered Gene Sharp’s writings, found them well fitted to Arab countries, and got in touch with the Otpor in Serbia, traveling there to study democratic revolutionary techniques. Another influence in Qatar, Egyptian émigrés and Sharp’s adepts, called the Academy of Change, helped the Cairo group organize. In 2010 another Facebook group, led by a young Google marketing executive, Wael Ghonim, and named We Are All Khalid Said, to honor a young victim of police brutality, continued organizing, all in context with the Tunisian labor groups, who had a successful revolution on January 14. There were contacts with Nobelist El-Baradei’s group, also the older political parties, and the youth wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Day of Rage, January 28, in Tahrir Square, the April 6 leaders, helped by Tunisians, Otpor people, the Qatar group and local businessmen, were holding on, while the Obama emissaries worked on President Mubarak (who was pushed into non-resignation by his son Gamal Mubarak, an ex- banker hoping to inherit the dictatorship, despite being unacceptable by the party), until success came. President Obama and the State Department people had to satisfy Mideast governments of PM Netanyahu in Israel, PM Recep Tayyib Erdogan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and other leaders of the Maghreb, who advised support of Hosni Mubarak, for political balance in the region. Meanwhile Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the Islamic Republic of Iran was violently suppressing his dissidents, at the same time loudly applauding the Egyptians and courting their support for his Hezbollah organization in Lebanon and Gaza.
Although the Mideast is in more turmoil – protesters in Yemen, Bahrain, teargas in Iran, cabinet change in Jordan – there appears hope in all this highly secular shift to democracy that the perpetual warring around Israel may end in our lifetime, particularly if US continues its monetary supports to Egypt (sans the rip-off). Let us hope.
Wally Dobelis thanks the NYTimes and Internet sources. You can read Gene Sharp’s manual by googling the Albert Einstein Institution.
Labels: Ahmed Maher, C.I.A.Albert Einstein Institution, CIA, el Baradai, Eugene Sharp, Facebook, Fron Dictator to Democracy, Gene Sharp, Kefaya, Mubarak, Otpor, Serbia, Wail Ghonim
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
Obama, Prisoner of Prior Presidents’ Policies
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The dowry of past policies is such that one wonders why a perceptive person like Barak Obama would want the Presidency. He has had to retreat from a number of campaign promises; to begin, the heritage from George W. Bush.
First, the war in Afghanistan, from which the US cannot withdraw from for fear of a Taliban takeover of Pakistan, a country that has nuclear weapons. We note that Bush’s Secretary of Defense Douglas Rumsfeld, let Osama bi Laden escape in Tora Bora, and now this hero of words (Michiko Kakutani of the NYTimes claims his new book. Known and Unknown, is tedious, self-serving, and filled with efforts to blame others) rushes to disclaim all responsibilities.
Iraq War – another war the US could not afford to withdraw from for fear of collapse of the country. Now we worry, ditto, about an Iran-based Shiite takeover.
Bad blood with Iran, a country that could have been befriended when they offered to support the UN in Afghanistan but Bush chose to define them as members of the Axis of Evil.
Actually the US got into interference in Iran during the Truman presidency, in 1952 when a secular nationalist government with USSR connections led by PM Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil and deposed the Shah Mohammad Resa Pahlavi. US and UK had a remedy - CIA expert Col. Kermit Roosevelt bribed the local wrestler associations who sent out burly guys to bring back the Shah. It worked, but he Shah became repressive, was chased out, and in 1979 a genuine major revolution brought down the caretaker government and raised to power the radical Shiite leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A year later a government-supported student movement captured the US Embassy in Teheran and held 62 Americans as hostages until Jan. 20, 1980, when President Reagan took over from the Carter administration and released the frozen Iranian assets. In 1980 an eight year war between Iraq and Iran over the Shatt al-Arab waterway killed as many as a million people. Meanwhile in 1986 US, generally a supporter of Iraq, negotiated a secret weapons sale to Iran, to get the release of 96 US and other hostages held in Lebanon.
Which brings us to the current situation in Egypt, a country that coincidentally revolted against a British supported King Farouk also in 1952, and established a republic led by Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser. It participated in a six nation Arab League (now 23 members) then mostly aimed at stopping Israel, which resulted in Israel occupying the oil-rich Sinai peninsula and Gaza, in 1956 and 1967, with UN, US and UK intermediation. Nasser died in 1970, and the new President Anwar Sadat in 1977 visited Jerusalem, and in 1979, with Presser Carter’s aid, negotiated a peace with Israel, after 30 years of war, and the return of Sinai to Egypt. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League and its headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis in Lebanon in 1979, with a readmission in 1989... Sadat was assassinated by a Muslim extremist in the army in 1982, and replaced by Vice President Hosni Mubarak, who suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and established trade with Israel (Egypt supplies 40% of Israel’s natural gas).
The current popular revolt against Mubarak’s 29 years of dictatorship brings on difficult decisions for the President of the US. First off, the independence and self-determination for Egyptians, mostly secular people who by and large support Hamas against Israel. Is there a huge risk of the Egyptians turning against the US policies for peace in the Middle East?
Can Muslim Brotherhood, with its 25 percent Egyptian support, rise to the top, to run the country? Can the army, for nearly 30 years maintained by US (currently US contributes $1.3B a year for army and $250M for civilian welfare) provide a provisional order pending development of civilian ruled democracy? Should Mubarak’s attempt to hold on be passively supported? The example of events in Iran, a more violent country, shows what can happen in the Middle East, and President Obama has to tread very carefully and send possibly mixed signals to cover all contingencies.
The prisoners of Guantanamo are another problem, left unsolved. No one wants to accept them for resettlement.
The bailout of banks and stock exchange firms was necessitated the collapse of the mortgage backed securities resulting from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act) of 1933 which separated the investment bank, retail bank and insurance company activities . The decontrol started in 1980 with the Depository Institution Deregulation in 1980, and was completed with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999, with the latter enjoying support of both political parties.
Discussions of US budget abuses inherited in the current recession/ depression are overworked, except to mention that all the cures involve reducing government expenses offered by both parties work directly counter to the main problem, jobs, reducing employment by literally hundreds of thousands of employees in discontinued functions. The most notable solution that involves reduction of social benefits, offered by Paul D. Ryan, (R., WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, appears to identify reduction of Social Security and Medicare benefits affecting those under age 55. The continuation of these benefits has been strongly supported by voters of all three parties (80. 80 and 79 percent) and a cut will lot fly. To salvage the budget, it appears that many of us will have to bite the bullet.
But, Green Bay, the smallest team, won Super Bowl, surely a hopeful sign for all of us.
The dowry of past policies is such that one wonders why a perceptive person like Barak Obama would want the Presidency. He has had to retreat from a number of campaign promises; to begin, the heritage from George W. Bush.
First, the war in Afghanistan, from which the US cannot withdraw from for fear of a Taliban takeover of Pakistan, a country that has nuclear weapons. We note that Bush’s Secretary of Defense Douglas Rumsfeld, let Osama bi Laden escape in Tora Bora, and now this hero of words (Michiko Kakutani of the NYTimes claims his new book. Known and Unknown, is tedious, self-serving, and filled with efforts to blame others) rushes to disclaim all responsibilities.
Iraq War – another war the US could not afford to withdraw from for fear of collapse of the country. Now we worry, ditto, about an Iran-based Shiite takeover.
Bad blood with Iran, a country that could have been befriended when they offered to support the UN in Afghanistan but Bush chose to define them as members of the Axis of Evil.
Actually the US got into interference in Iran during the Truman presidency, in 1952 when a secular nationalist government with USSR connections led by PM Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil and deposed the Shah Mohammad Resa Pahlavi. US and UK had a remedy - CIA expert Col. Kermit Roosevelt bribed the local wrestler associations who sent out burly guys to bring back the Shah. It worked, but he Shah became repressive, was chased out, and in 1979 a genuine major revolution brought down the caretaker government and raised to power the radical Shiite leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. A year later a government-supported student movement captured the US Embassy in Teheran and held 62 Americans as hostages until Jan. 20, 1980, when President Reagan took over from the Carter administration and released the frozen Iranian assets. In 1980 an eight year war between Iraq and Iran over the Shatt al-Arab waterway killed as many as a million people. Meanwhile in 1986 US, generally a supporter of Iraq, negotiated a secret weapons sale to Iran, to get the release of 96 US and other hostages held in Lebanon.
Which brings us to the current situation in Egypt, a country that coincidentally revolted against a British supported King Farouk also in 1952, and established a republic led by Lt. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser. It participated in a six nation Arab League (now 23 members) then mostly aimed at stopping Israel, which resulted in Israel occupying the oil-rich Sinai peninsula and Gaza, in 1956 and 1967, with UN, US and UK intermediation. Nasser died in 1970, and the new President Anwar Sadat in 1977 visited Jerusalem, and in 1979, with Presser Carter’s aid, negotiated a peace with Israel, after 30 years of war, and the return of Sinai to Egypt. Egypt was suspended from the Arab League and its headquarters moved from Cairo to Tunis in Lebanon in 1979, with a readmission in 1989... Sadat was assassinated by a Muslim extremist in the army in 1982, and replaced by Vice President Hosni Mubarak, who suppressed the Muslim Brotherhood extremists, and established trade with Israel (Egypt supplies 40% of Israel’s natural gas).
The current popular revolt against Mubarak’s 29 years of dictatorship brings on difficult decisions for the President of the US. First off, the independence and self-determination for Egyptians, mostly secular people who by and large support Hamas against Israel. Is there a huge risk of the Egyptians turning against the US policies for peace in the Middle East?
Can Muslim Brotherhood, with its 25 percent Egyptian support, rise to the top, to run the country? Can the army, for nearly 30 years maintained by US (currently US contributes $1.3B a year for army and $250M for civilian welfare) provide a provisional order pending development of civilian ruled democracy? Should Mubarak’s attempt to hold on be passively supported? The example of events in Iran, a more violent country, shows what can happen in the Middle East, and President Obama has to tread very carefully and send possibly mixed signals to cover all contingencies.
The prisoners of Guantanamo are another problem, left unsolved. No one wants to accept them for resettlement.
The bailout of banks and stock exchange firms was necessitated the collapse of the mortgage backed securities resulting from the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (Banking Act) of 1933 which separated the investment bank, retail bank and insurance company activities . The decontrol started in 1980 with the Depository Institution Deregulation in 1980, and was completed with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act of 1999, with the latter enjoying support of both political parties.
Discussions of US budget abuses inherited in the current recession/ depression are overworked, except to mention that all the cures involve reducing government expenses offered by both parties work directly counter to the main problem, jobs, reducing employment by literally hundreds of thousands of employees in discontinued functions. The most notable solution that involves reduction of social benefits, offered by Paul D. Ryan, (R., WI), chairman of the House Budget Committee, appears to identify reduction of Social Security and Medicare benefits affecting those under age 55. The continuation of these benefits has been strongly supported by voters of all three parties (80. 80 and 79 percent) and a cut will lot fly. To salvage the budget, it appears that many of us will have to bite the bullet.
But, Green Bay, the smallest team, won Super Bowl, surely a hopeful sign for all of us.
Labels: Farouk, kermit Roosevelt, Khomeini, Mossadegh, Nasser, Resa Pahlavi
