Category: Politics

It’s a little hard to follow the news from Iran these days, let alone figure out what it all means. One way to do it is to follow Juan Cole’s reporting and commentary. Here’s this morning’s installment; you could do worse than subscribe to his blog.

Day of Mourning, Protests, Called by Mousavi on Thursday

Mir-Hosain Mousavi, who maintains he won last Friday’s presidential election despite official assertions that he lost 2 to 1 to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is calling for another rally Thursday, this time in part to honor the persons killed by hardliners or security forces in the course of previous demonstrations.

Mourning the martyr is as central to Iranian Shiite religious culture as it was to strains of medieval Catholicism in Europe, and Mousavi’s camp is tapping into a powerful set of images and myths here. The archetypal Shiite martyr is Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, who championed oppressed Muslims in Iraq and was cut down by the then Umayyad Muslim Empire. Recognition that a Muslim state might commit the ultimate in sacrilege by beheading a person who had been dangled on the Prophet’s knee has imbued modern political Shiism with a distrust of the state. When Husayn’s head was brought to the Umayyad caliph Yazid and deposited before his throne, older companions of the Prophet are said to have wept and remarked, “I saw the Prophet’s lips on those cheeks.” Shiites ritually march, flagellate, and chant in honor of the martyred Imam or divinely-appointed leader.

Today’s protesters are wearing green, which symbolizes Mousavi’s descent from the Prophet Muhammad. (Mousavi’s family name refers to the Seventh Imam (descendant of the Prophet with claims to divine knowledge), Musa Kazim, whose tomb is in Kazimiya, north Baghdad. Sayyid families, those claiming descent from the Prophet, often take one of the Imams’ names as a family name to honor them, though of course they are also claiming descent from the previous Imams right back to the Prophet.) The repertoires of protest the reformists are using echo those of the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution — they are chanting “God is Great,” mourning pious fallen martyrs, etc. — another sign that this movement is not just alienated secularized elites.

But now Mousavi’s his supporters are also sporting black ribbons to indicate that they are in mourning for the fallen. Typically, the dead will be commemorated again at one month and at 40 days. In 1978 such demonstrations for those killed in previous demonstrations grew in size all through the year, till they reached an alleged million in the streets of Tehran. Since the reformists are already claiming Monday’s rally was a million, you wonder where things will go from here.

The regime’s attempt to paint the protesters as nothing more than US intelligence agents underlines how wise President Obama has been not to insert himself forcefully into the situation in Iran. The reformers and the hard liners are not stable groupings. The core of each is competing for the allegiance of the general Iranian public. If the reformers can convince most Iranians of the justice of their cause, they will swing behind the opposition. If the hard liners can convince the public that the reformers are nothing more than cat’s paws of a grasping, imperialist West — i.e. that they are Ahmad Chalabis trying to bring Iran foreign occupation so as to get power themselves — then the reformists will be crushed. Iranians value national independence above all, having suffered with a CIA-installed goverment for decades in the mid-twentieth century.

The prescriptions of John McCain and Faux Cable news for muscular US diplomacy at this point are tone deaf to Iranian realities and would backfire big time, harming both the reform cause and US interests. Anyway, after the basket case to which the US Republican Party reduced Iraq, no one in the global South is likely to want them meddling in their internal affairs.

Reports are streaming in of the arrest of over a hundred opposition figures and of hard line militia men following protesters home and breaking into their homes to terrorize them. See e.g., Basij paramilitary forces terrorize residential complex. The Basij militiamen are said to be afraid to come out in numbers during the opposition demonstrations, but sneak around at night to trail protesters and harass or arrest them.

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had met Tuesday morning with the representatives of all four presidential candidates, urging them to make up but continuing to insist that Ahmadinejad was the winner by 24 million to 14 million votes. He portrayed the massive post-election demonstrations and charges of ballot fraud as a minor tiff.

Gary Sick wonders if Khamenei really is the supreme leader any more, and hints that the hard line tack of stealing the election was directed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the country’s religious national guard.

Reports are coming in from Iran that allege that the regime is tracking down and destroying satellite dishes, using helicopters for aerial surveillance of neighborhoods and Basij, the right wing militia (sort of like Mussolini’s Black Shirts) to do the breaking and entering. Kindly neighbors who have tried to warn suspected satellite dish owners that the militiamen were coming have sometimes reportedly themselves been arrested.

SF Techie helps Iranian protests.

Glenn Greenwald.

Hillary Clinton demands China investigate and disclose its past abuses

On behalf of the Obama administration, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement this week regarding the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, and demanded that China do the following (h/t sysprog):

A China that has made enormous progress economically, and that is emerging to take its rightful place in global leadership, should examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal.

Compare that moving defense of transparency to what the Obama administration — as I wrote about earlier today — is currently doing in Congress in trying to round up enough Democratic votes to vest the Pentagon with a new secrecy power, whereby it can unilaterally suppress all photographic evidence relating to our own abuse of detainees.  Or compare it to our current President’s repeated insistence that we Look to the Future, Not the Past and his fervent opposition even to a Truth Commission.

What’s there even to say about this?  I didn’t think it was possible to top — for pure irony and hypocrisy — the Bush State Department’s 2006 condemnation of Russia for engaging in illegal warrantless eavesdropping on its own citizens and failing to impose accountability on those who did that.  But Clinton’s righteous injunction to China about the need for “examining openly the darker events of [China]’s past” — “both the learn and to heal” — comes very close.

Rather than, say, distinguish between civil and sacramental marriage, or between marriage and civil union, IOZ suggests that the government get out of the marriage/union business altogether. It’s an attractive idea, though it seems to me that there are some enforceable rights associated with marriage that would need to take some other form. Presumably many property-related matters could be handled by contract. What else?

Abolish Everything

A few days ago a friend of mine expressed the not-uncommon view that rather than advocating for gay marriage, we should fight to “get the government out of the marriage business.” I agreed. Yes, he mused, what we really need are universally available civil unions.

This is the moderately more radical position of some gay activists who see in the fight for access to civil marriage an unfortunate kind of assimilationism, an attempt to gain access to one of the very institutions of bourgeois, heteronormative, and patriarchal oppression that have for so long stood in the way of real liberation, and yet many of these same activists will then quickly turn to the benefits of civil unions, marriages in all but name really, made available to all.

But it seems to me that if you advocate for civil unions, you accept by implication that the government does have a compelling interest in the private social and economic arrangements of its citizens, because however such unions might be styled, they will in the end provide benefits and privileges to people in certain types of relationships not available to others, and will moreover continue to privilege some fairly traditional familial norms of cohabitation and economic interdependence over, for instance, living a single life.

And if you accept that the government has such an interest, then you accept the government’s right to discriminate between those relationships which do or do not live up that interest, which are or are not in the best interests of a stable, moral, sustainable society.

The real radical position is neither that the government should let gays marry nor that it should transform civil marriage into civil unions to avoid the trouble of terminology. It is instead that the government should get out of the marriage business altogether, and convey no additional privileges (nor duties nor obligations) on anyone for any kind of relationship or domestic arrangement.

This is, more or less, a repeat of a comment that I left at Jonathan Turley’s post on the California Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Proposition 8 (opinion here).

Turley writes, “I have long supported doing away with the term “marriage” in favor of a uniform civil union standard for all couples regardless of gender.”

I’ve been reading the opinion, and it seems to me that the court has, in effect, granted exactly that result, once the implications of the decision are worked out. The opinions are very clear that in the view of the court the only thing that Prop 8 accomplishes is to reserve the name “marriage” to opposite-sex unions, and that the substance of the courts Marriage Cases decision (which legalized same-sex unions) is untouched.

It’s easy, it seems to this non-lawyer, to read the opinion as all but inviting an action to forbid the state to use the term “marriage” to make any civil distinction at all.

Here’s an sample of the opinion language:

Nor does Proposition 8 fundamentally alter the meaning and substance of state constitutional equal protection principles as articulated in that opinion. Instead, the measure carves out a narrow and limited exception to these state constitutional rights, reserving the official designation of the term “marriage” for the union of opposite-sex couples as a matter of state constitutional law, but leaving undisturbed all of the other extremely significant substantive aspects of a same-sex couple’s state constitutional right to establish an officially recognized and protected family relationship and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

This is both unsubtle and unanimous. If the state reserves any substantive right to marriage, Prop 8 requires, according to the opinion, that the state may no longer use the term “marriage” in connection that right or privilege.

I’m not disputing the fact that many of us would like to have the term “marriage” back. But in the meantime, the state of affairs in California is profoundly different than it was before Marriage Cases, and Prop 8 has not touched the substance of that difference. So says the Supreme Court of California.

…thinks that Sonia should pronounce “Sotomayor” in the good old American way.

This may seem like carping, but it’s not.

She can eat ethnic food and go to an ethnic church, though, he hastens to add. That’s OK with him.

I’ve had a soft spot for Jesse Ventura since, while visiting family in Minnesota, I listened to his pre-election gubernatorial debates. This via Glenn Greenwald.

[JESSE] VENTURA: I don’t watch much TV. This year’s reading, I covered Bush’s life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I’m very disturbed about it. I’m bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we’ve created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it’s a good thing I’m not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.

[LARRY] KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That’s right. I was water boarded, so I know — at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence – every one of us was waterboarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It’s drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you — I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a waterboard, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

Greenwald comments:

Let’s just repeat that: “I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law.” That is the crux of the case for investigations and prosecutions. That’s it.

Here’s a fragment from a post by Richard Posner at his blog.

Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam?

… By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation. …

Good news from Dean Baker? Twice in one post? Indeed.

Health Care and Student Loans: The Bad Guys Are on the Run

Progressives should be feeling good right now. There is clear evidence that we are winning on two really big issues.

Starting with the smaller of the two, Sallie Mae, the largest private issuer of student loans, is now proposing to accept a plan in which the government is the sole issuer of government guaranteed loans. Sallie Mae’s plan is that it continue to be given the opportunity to originate these loans, picking up fees in the process.

This proposal is in response to the Obama administration’s plan to get the private sector out of the government guaranteed loan business. There is ample evidence that the involvement of private firms just adds costs — approximately $90 billion over ten years according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sallie Mae’s compromise proposal is a recognition of the fact that it cannot stop the Obama plan.

If this story is good, the news on health care is even better. The industry is now proposing a scheme whereby it will curtail cost growth by 1.5 percentage points a year. At these point none of the details of the proposal are public and it is unlikely that any of the commitments in the proposal will be binding in any serious way on the industry.

However, the fact that they would suggest that such cost savings are possible is an enormous concession. After 10 years, the cumulative savings from this proposal would amount to more than $400 billion a year, more than $3,000 for every family in the country.

The industry is talking this way because they are scared to death at the prospect of having a Medicare type public plan, which will both provide competition for private insurers and create an effective mechanism to constrain the fees charged by health care providers. As many have argued, the public plan is a real game changer.

These new developments in both the health care debate and the debate over student loan policy are great news. In both cases the industry groups are now prepared to make important concessions that they never would have envisioned even a year ago.

Of course, there is no reason to accept their compromises. Why should we waste any of the money that could be going to help college students so that Sallie Mae executives can draw high salaries and its shareholders can enjoy large dividends. Let them make money in the market, not by adding costs to a government program.

Similarly, the threat of a public plan has forced promises of concessions from the health care industry. If we don’t actually get the public plan, there is no enforcement mechanism for these promises. If we go ahead and put the public plan in place, then we know that the industry will deliver on its promises.

Now is not the time for compromises. We must keep the pressure on. It is showing results.

—Dean Baker

Makes sense to me.

Term Limits for SCOTUS Justices

Here’s a good four year-old article from Stephen Calabresi and James Lindgren making the case for abolishing life tenure for Supreme Court justices. Their mathematically sensible advice is that justices should serve for a fixed term of 18 years. This is longer than the historical average for the Supreme Court but considerably shorter than the post-1970 average of 25 years.

A new justice would be picked, on schedule, ever two years. This would eliminate the risk of what happened during the Carter administration when nobody died or retired and consequently by 1992 all the justices had been selected by Republicans. It would also formalize the rhetoric around the idea that “elections have consequences” by specifying in advance what those consequences are.

…

It has always seemed to me that Maine’s solution is the obvious one: distinguish between civil and sacramental marriage, and restrict the government’s cognizance of marriage to the civil aspect.

Google tells me that I’ve never quoted the National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru here on Pragmatos. Until now.

Sidestepping the Issue

Based on my reading, the leading argument against prosecutions is that it would be imprudent, divisive, poisonous, etc., and therefore an abuse of prosecutorial discretion. I don’t know if that argument will or should carry the day. It seems to me to be an important but decidedly second-order consideration.

Surely the primary question is whether laws were broken; and if there is serious reason to believe that they were, then shouldn’t there be a presumption in favor of investigation? An argument against prosecution that appears to concede that laws may have been broken, or treats the question as an afterthought, seems to me to be unlikely to prevail. The people who strongly oppose investigation and prosecution would be on stronger ground, it seems to me, making the argument that it is simply outlandish and absurd to think that policymakers violated the law. Can that argument be made?

Ponnuru puts his finger on the peculiar confusion between investigation and prosecution of acts of torture.

There’s a second distinction to be made as well, between prosecution and punishment, made explicit in the Nuremberg principles.

Article 8. The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires.

Keep an eye on student-loan reform for a great example of crony capitalism at work. The first two names are Republicans, but I think we can expect bipartisanship at its best to keep those bucks flowing to the lenders. Matthew Yglesias:

Sallie Mae Thinks $17 Billion a Year in Giveaways to Banks is a Good Job-Creation Program

As I’ve had occasion to mention in the past, many legislators, including Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH) have developed the curious notion that the essence of the free market is wasteful crony capitalist giveaways to private sector student lenders. That’s why they’re opposing an Obama administration initiative to end subsidies to private lenders and just lend the money directly, instead.

Today’s New York Times has an article on the lobbying frenzy that’s under way as private lenders try to keep their ill-gotten gains. …