Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Arthur Delaney
arthur@huffingtonpost.com | HuffPost Reporting

People across the United States are sharing their personal stories with Barack Obama’s repurposed campaign arm, Organizing For America, to tell the world about the failures of the U.S. health care system. Some people say they would almost rather die than deal with it.

Joan in Washington, D.C. wrote that she fears she and her husband will be homeless if he can’t find a job, and that she is “uninsurable” because of cancer.

“Maybe I should wish for the cancer to kill me sooner — it might be a better option,” Joan wrote. “I am terrified.”

Jackie in Logan, N.D., wrote that she cried when she was hospitalized in January out of fear for the bills — even though she has health insurance.

“I told my husband that perhaps I should just go home and wait to die,” Jackie wrote, “as it would be cheaper to be cremated, than to have to exist dealing with the debt of surviving.”

Brad of Granite City, IL, wrote that “I may die any day because Health Insurance isn’t available to me.”

“For profit healthcare killed my wife,” wrote John of Nashville, Tenn.

These notes are just a few of “hundreds of thousands” of stories submitted, according to an official with Organizing for America. The site, called “Health Care Stories for America,” was launched last week as a counterbalance to claims that the administration’s agenda for health care reform will create a government-run bureaucracy that will make you wait in line for a doctor. As many of the stories on the OFA site demonstrate, the current system kind of sucks already.

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Eliot Spitzer
Former Governor of New York

If the senior Wall Street bankers and Washington decision makers who can move billions of dollars with a single conference call want to understand what is truly happening in the economy, they should sit down with small business people like Peter Elliot, the owner of a clothing store in New York City for the past 35 years. Peter prides himself on the craft of selling and marketing products made in America. He has built his business that way. He is the salt of the earth, a Veteran who retired with the rank of Captain in the Army, rugged but charming, salesman and proselytizer, southern gentleman and New York tough, all at once.

And he is seething with anger. Once he employed 29, now 14. Once he had a solid line of credit with a major bank, now they have cut it off – even though in 35 years, he never missed a payment, and was late – by four days – only once. Once he had faith in the basic decency of the leaders at the major banks and Wall Street firms that allocated capital and stoked the engine of our economy. No longer.

Just to be clear, his anger has nothing to do with the fact that he is now struggling. He is a survivor, and he has built a business over too many decades, seen too many peaks and valleys, had a life filled with the complications we all face, to be thrown off his game by any of those realities. No, it is rather the deep sense of unfairness about how the plutocracy has handled the crisis that eats at him. The sense that we have lost the basic sense of decency that used to define how we addressed issues of national crisis – with a common sense of sharing of both the upside and the down.

Peter grabbed me a few days ago as I was strolling past his store, bathed in sweat from a three-mile run. His store window, on Madison Avenue, was, as always, neatly bedecked with an attractive array of jackets, shirts, sweaters, ties, and assorted accompanying articles of clothing. Understand, Peter has built this store, and a few others, with grit, charm, and perseverance. Through ups and downs, he sold on thin margins, talked up the quality of his domestic products over mass produced imports, took raw college grads and turned them into effective salespeople before they moved on to the world of law or business. He told them that they would learn everything they needed to know to be successful if they could sell on the shop floor – how to read a customer, appreciate value, close a deal, massage an ego.

Once inside, he asked a simple question: How can they do this to me? How can a bank that has received tens of billions of tax dollars – whose very survival was guaranteed by a massive infusion of the tax dollars he and countless millions of others like him pay – how could that bank now rely on a pretext to cut his line of credit so he couldn’t finance his ongoing payroll, acquire next season’s merchandise, and pay for some expansion plans he had.

Their decision forced him to lay off half his employees and go to his vendors for help. His vendors, with whom he had a relationship for decades, all agreed to work with him – they understood the mutual interest in keeping each other going through the rough patch. But they all agreed – the banks were heinous institutions, and if they could get a pound of flesh out of them, they would. After all, these small businesses had all been playing by the rules, and it wasn’t the greed of small business that had led the banks to create credit default swaps, pretend that sub-prime debt was really AAA rated, or originate debt that had no hope of repayment. It wasn’t the small business owners who took out gobs of money in bonuses and back-dated options.

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Keith Thomson

I would guess that in the past year, there were more regime-change-in-Iran plots floated by members of the intelligence community than there are Iranians.

During that time, research for my novel Once A Spy (Doubleday, 2010) brought me into contact with an array of intelligence community personnel ranging from analysts to CIA Director Michael Hayden. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would estimate their overall enthusiasm for a change of regime was a 9. Among Israeli intelligence officers (who didn’t exactly cotton to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the Holocaust as a myth or to his frequent mentions of the end of the Zionist regime and Iran’s nuclear program in the same breath), the average was 12.

Still, the consensus on actively promoting regime change was: “Let’s wait and see what happens in the election in June.” After all, the United States hasn’t had the easiest time installing new foreign governments lately (see: Iraq). And certainly not in Iran (see: Shah, The).

What was the intelligence community’s best-case scenario? Short of outright regime change or Ahmadinejad climbing aboard a missile and accidentally launching himself at Pyongyang Strangelove-style, we are now witnessing it: An election leaving the Iranian people–and the world–outraged.

According to former CIA case officer Fred Rustmann, “If we were doing our job, and I’m not sure we are, we would be knee deep into supporting opposition factions in Iran and would be able to claim at least partial credit for what’s going on there today.”

“The agency’s political warfare capability has been dead since the days of Bill Casey,” says John Lenczowski, the president of the Institute of World Politics whose extensive foreign policy résumé includes Director of European and Soviet Affairs for the National Security Council.

Regardless, Rustmann and Lenczowski say, the CIA may now help set Tehran’s smoldering tinder ablaze by supplying the opposition factions with money, intel, press placement, and weapons–perhaps the most potent of which may be BlackBerrys.

“What we could do immediately is essentially manipulate Iranian media, especially the media that serves the Iranian diaspora,” says the former CIA operations officer who goes by–and wrote an espionage memoir under–the pseudonym Ishmael Jones. “The internet-driven communication between Iranians worldwide and those in Iran is frenetic.”

“The CIA already has a cooperative program in place with [certain American publications],” he adds. “Reporters from [those publications] meet regularly with the top CIA officials–not a conspiracy hatched in a smoke-filled room, but the natural result of reporters working hard to develop top-level sources within the CIA. Just switching [those reporters] for journalists who serve the Iranian diaspora would do the trick. These journalists will be eager to [cooperate]. The CIA must certainly have extensive and true information about Iranian government corruption. This information, supplied by Iranian diaspora journalists, would be read within hours by ordinary Iranians and would strengthen resistance to the current regime.”

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Huffington Post Investigative Fund |  Ben Protess

When President Obama unveiled his regulatory overhaul plan last week, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, dodged a bullet.

Lacking power, the agency has only gently regulated the derivatives markets, which have been blamed for wreaking havoc on the global economy. Rather than abolish the agency, however, Obama proposed strengthening it.

A week later, not all reformers are convinced that the plan is comprehensive enough and, more so, doubt the CFTC is capable of recovering from its long legacy of deregulation. A look back at that legacy explains the skepticism.

“The CFTC was left with the responsibility for policing fraud and abuse and had no tools to do that,” said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

The agency’s reputation has been so damaged that shortly before Obama’s announcement, the administration signaled that the CFTC and SEC would join forces. (The two agencies currently split oversight of derivatives).

But the merger never made it into the final plan. It met opposition in Congress, where the CFTC still maintains strong allies on the agricultural committees.

So Obama instead asked the two agencies to reconcile their differences and cover holes in their oversight. This week, in a move that pleased many advocates of financial reform, they released a blueprint for greater regulation of derivatives.

The CFTC’s job was not always so complicated. The agency was created in 1974, primarily to oversee commodity futures contracts. This type of derivative allows investors to buy a commodity, often an agricultural product like wheat, at a fixed price and date.

Soon the futures industry expanded beyond commodities, making it more complex and harder to control.

But the CFTC lacked the teeth and size to take on new responsibilities. And some in the agency who had close ties to industry wanted it that way.

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Ex-Insider Testifies to ‘Fear Tactics’

By David S. Hilzenrath
Washington Post Staff Writer

Health insurers have forced consumers to pay billions of dollars in medical bills that the insurers themselves should have paid, according to a report released yesterday by the staff of the Senate Commerce Committee.

The report was part of a multi-pronged assault on the credibility of private insurers by Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.). It came at a time when Rockefeller, President Obama and others are seeking to offer a public alternative to private health plans as part of broad health-care reform legislation. Health insurers are doing everything they can to block the public option.

At a committee hearing yesterday, three health-care specialists testified that insurers go to great lengths to avoid responsibility for sick people, use deliberately incomprehensible documents to mislead consumers about their benefits, and sell “junk” policies that do not cover needed care. Rockefeller said he was exploring “why consumers get such a raw deal from their insurance companies.”

The star witness at the hearing was a former public relations executive for major health insurers whose testimony boiled down to this: Don’t trust the insurers.

“The industry and its backers are using fear tactics, as they did in 1994, to tar a transparent and accountable — publicly accountable — health-care option,” said Wendell Potter, who until early last year was vice president for corporate communications at the big insurer Cigna.

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By William Greider

The most disturbing thing about Barack Obama’s call for financial reform was the way in which the president falsified our predicament. He tried to make it sound as though everyone was implicated in the financial breakdown and therefore no one was really to blame. “A culture of irresponsibility took root from Wall Street to Washington to Main Street,” Obama explained. “And a regulatory system basically crafted in the wake of a 20th century economic crisis–the Great Depression–was overwhelmed by the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy.”

That is not what happened, to put it charitably. Unlike some other presidents, Obama is much too intelligent not to know this. The regulatory system was not overwhelmed by historic forces. It was systematically gutted and dismantled by the government in Washington at the behest of the banking interests. If Obama wants details, he can consult his economic advisors–Summers-Geithner–who participated directly as accomplices in unwinding the prudential rules and regulations. Cheers were led by the Federal Reserve with heavy lifting by both political parties.

The president’s benign version of events reminds me of what compliant politicians and opinion leaders said after the war in Iraq they had endorsed turned disastrous. “Hey, we were all fooled.” If Obama were to tell the truth now about what went wrong in the financial system, he would face a far larger political problem trying to clean up the mess. Instead, he has opted for smooth talk and some fuzzy reforms that effectively evade the nasty complexities of our situation. He might get away with this in the short run. Congress doesn’t much want to face the music either. But Obama’s so-called reform is literally “kicking the can down the road,” as he likes to say about other problems. In the long run, it will haunt the country because it fails to confront the true nature of the disorders.

Giving more power to the Federal Reserve to be the uber-regulator of banking and finance is a terrible idea (I examine the dangers in a forthcoming Nation article). Asking the cloistered central bank to resolve all the explosive questions about the over-reaching power of financial institutions is like throwing the problem into a black box and closing the lid, so people will be unable to see what happens next. That is the idea, after all, the reason Wall Street’s leading firms first proposed the Fed as super-cop, then sold it to George W. Bush and now Barack Obama. Give the mess to the Wizard of Oz, the guy behind the curtain. He can do miracles with money, but don’t watch too closely. This constitutes the high politics of evasion.

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Banking “broken,” consumers need help:

By Kevin Drawbaugh and Karey Wutkowski

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The outspoken head of a U.S. Congressional watchdog panel will strongly urge lawmakers on Wednesday to set up a new government agency to protect consumers from “tricks and traps” set by banks.

President Barack Obama has called for creating an independent financial products agency to oversee consumer lending as part of his sweeping proposal to overhaul the U.S. financial regulatory system.

“We can help fix the broken credit market. And I can sum it up in four words: Consumer Financial Protection Agency,” said Elizabeth Warren, chairman of the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in prepared remarks.

Warren, who is a professor at Harvard Law School, will be the marquee witness at a House of Representatives committee hearing on Wednesday looking at a key provision of Obama’s broad plan to drag the aging U.S. financial regulatory system into the 21st century.

The provision to establish a financial protection agency for consumers “will be carried out,” Senator Jack Reed, chairman of the Senate securities subcommittee, said in an interview with Reuters Television on Tuesday.

“Definitely you have to have a consumer protection agency,” he said, echoing vows made in recent days by Obama and by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd on a proposal that is meeting more criticism from business interests than perhaps any other part of the Obama plan.

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By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers’ copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

Multimedia

Interactive Feature

Documents: Financial Links Between Saudi Royal Family and Al Qaeda

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed “support for terrorist organizations” at least through 2006.

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by Nate Silver

As I lamented yesterday, health care is one of those areas where both popular opinion and sound public policy seem to take a backseat to protecting those stakeholders who benefit from the status quo. But can we actually see — statistically — the impact of lobbying by the insurance industry on the prospects for health care reform? I believe that the answer is yes.

Some 37 senators are listed by Howard Dean’s website as supporting the public option so far: 36 Democrats plus Olympia Snowe. To Dean’s list I add Arlen Specter as a ‘yes’ vote, based on a recent public statement.

I decided to build a model to explain and predict whether a particular senator supports the public option. The variables in the model are as follows:

– The senator’s ideology, as measured by his DW-NOMINATE score;
– Per capita health care spending in the senator’s home state;
– Lobbying contributions received by the senator from health insurance PACs since 2004.

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*25 percent of households have trouble paying

*40 percent expect to delay care this summer

*Baby boomers hardest hit

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON, June 22 (Reuters) – Americans are struggling to pay for healthcare in the ongoing economic recession, with a quarter saying they have had trouble in the past 12 months, according to a survey released on Monday.

Baby boomers — the generation born between 1946 and 1964 — had the most trouble and were the most likely to put off medical treatments or services, said researchers at Center for Healthcare Improvement, part of the Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters (TRI.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz).

The study, available here, found that 17.4 percent of households reported postponing or delaying healthcare over the past year.

The U.S. Congress is working on a way to cover more of the 46 million people who lack health insurance, lower costs and coordinate care better. President Barack Obama has made it one of his administration’s top priorities.

Americans pay more per capita for healthcare than people in any other country, yet have high rates of infant mortality, diabetes, untreated heart disease and other conditions. Americans are often dissatisfied with their access to care.

Thomson Reuters — the parent company of Reuters news agency — used its annual Pulse survey that queries 100,000 households to get information about health behavior.

Gary Pickens, George Popa and colleagues at the Michigan-based center interviewed more than 6,000 people in March and April about job losses, what healthcare they had used and their plans for future treatment.

UNEMPLOYMENT FACTOR

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By Eric W. Fonkalsrud, M.D., and Michael D. Intriligator, Ph.D.

Exploding costs, limited accessibility and uneven quality of basic health care in the United States have been highlighted as a top priority for early correction by the Obama administration¹. The cost of health care represents a significantly higher proportion of national income in the U.S. than in any other industrialized nation. Medical expenses currently consume almost 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, up from 13.5 percent in 1998², and now are the most rapidly escalating expenditure in the federal budget. At the same time almost one-sixth of the U.S. population is uninsured, with many others being underinsured. Market forces have been unable to restrain the downward spiral of medical care delivery or the upward spiral of medical costs.

Recent enormous financial losses posted by General Motors and many other U.S. corporations have been attributed in part to the costs of covering health benefits for active and retired employees. Such costs are not borne by companies in countries with a national health system.

When the accelerating costs of private health care insurance, estimated to be about $14,000 annually for a family of four, are passed on to the employer, large companies are at a significant disadvantage in the international marketplace, and small employers often face bankruptcy. As a result, more and more companies have shifted the growing burden of health care costs to their workers. Over the past five years companies have seen their health care spending rise some 29 percent, while employees have seen their outlays for premiums, co-pays and deductibles rise some 40 percent.

The number of uninsured Americans is increasing rapidly as unemployment figures escalate in the current economic crisis and as companies engage in restructuring layoffs. Family incomes are decreasing, and health insurance premiums are continuing their rise. Even the temporary COBRA provisions for the recently unemployed are unaffordable for a large number of people and are costly for employers.

The burden for underinsured health care is placed increasingly on county, city and charity hospitals, which are already overcrowded, understaffed and progressively underfinanced. Currently over 40 percent of the hospitals in California are financially in the red. Furthermore, routine health care, as well as the treatment of severe disease and critical emergencies, is being funneled through busy emergency rooms where the wait to be seen by a physician may be as long as eight hours.

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By Sasha Abramsky

As California goes, so goes the nation.

If that old adage still holds true, then the nation may soon see a gradual backpedaling from the criminal justice policies that have led to wholesale incarceration in recent decades. For the most populous state in the union is on the verge of insolvency–partly because it didn’t set aside a rainy-day fund during the boom years; partly because its voters recently rejected a series of initiatives that would have allowed a combination of tax increases, spending cuts and borrowing to help stabilize the state’s finances during the downturn; partly because it has spent the past quarter-century funneling tens of billions of dollars into an out-of-control correctional system. Now, as California’s politicians contemplate emergency cuts to deal with a $24 billion hole in the state budget, old certainties are crumbling.

The state with the toughest three-strikes law in the land and a prison population of more than 150,000 is facing the real possibility of having to release tens of thousands of inmates early in order to pare its $10 billion annual correctional budget. At the same time, an increasing number of the state’s political figures are challenging the basic tenets of the “war on drugs,” the culprit most responsible for the spike in prison populations over the past thirty years; they argue that the country’s harsh drug policies are not financially viable and no longer command majority support among the voting public.

Similar stories are unfolding around the country; in Washington, federal officials are talking about drug-policy reform and, more generally, sentencing reform in a way that has not been heard in the halls of power for more than a generation.

For old-time politicians, who have spent the past three-plus decades navigating the country’s roiling tough-on-crime waters, the changes are almost unfathomable. Onetime California governor and current gubernatorial hopeful Jerry Brown, for example, has spent decades trying to erase the public’s memory of his liberal tenure in the 1970s, when California’s prison population shrank to well below 30,000. As a part of that remodeling, he has assiduously courted the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, the trade union representing the state’s prison guards. Now, with his war chest flush with CCPOA funds, Brown won’t do anything to challenge tough-on-crime orthodoxies.

Yet many newer political faces view the current moment as something of an opportunity. For Betty Yee, chair of California’s Board of Equalization–the office responsible for collecting sales tax in the Golden State–the changes, especially around drug-law enforcement, can’t come soon enough.

Sitting at her conference table high up in one of downtown Sacramento’s few sky-rises, Yee has marijuana on her mind. Specifically, she has become an outspoken advocate for legalizing pot for residents older than 21. Her friend Assemblyman Tom Ammiano, a former San Francisco city councilman, is pushing just such a bill in the State Legislature. Yee wants to levy fees on business owners applying for marijuana licenses, impose an excise tax on sellers and charge buyers a sales tax. Do it properly, and the state could reap about $1.3 billion a year, she has estimated. “Marijuana is so easily available. Why not regulate it like alcohol and tobacco?” she says, and gain additional tax revenue into the bargain?

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The GOP’s New Health-Care Alternative.  Join the Line

By Jay Newton-Small / Washington

House Republicans on Wednesday introduced their official alternative health-care-reform plan. Well, kind of. It’s not the official alternative, but it has the support of the leadership. And sure, some leaders may support other alternative bills out there, but this one also has the support of the top Republicans on the relevant committees. Oh, wait — some of them may also support other bills. But in any case, all this should remind you that the GOP does really stand for something.

Let’s leave aside for the moment that this plan was a four-page exercise in public relations that left out how many of the 47 million uninsured Americans would be covered, how it would be paid for or even how much it would cost. The plan — and the four others introduced by Republicans in the House and five more in the Senate — is indicative of how the GOP is handling Democratic efforts to pass universal health care: death by a thousand paper cuts. “There’ll be lots of Republican plans. I think that many of our members will want to be part of this plan,” Representative Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican in charge of the House Republican Health Care Solutions Group, said upon leaving Wednesday’s press conference. “And there will be Republicans who sponsor this plan and who sponsor other plans that have slightly different ideas than this plan. On health care, we are truly the party that brings the ideas to the table that are much more innovative than the government taking over the health-care system.”

Ideas, sure, but details — not so much. This proposal, similar to a plan introduced in May by GOP Representatives Mark Kirk and Charlie Dent, would allow small businesses, states, associations and other organizations to pool their health insurance across state lines to help bring down costs. Kirk and a group of 34 moderate Republicans this week also introduced another alternative, which would allow those not insured by their employers to deduct the cost of their insurance policies from their income taxes. In May, Representative Paul Ryan, together with Representative Devin Nunes, introduced a bill called the Patients’ Choice Act, which would essentially 1) redirect much of the money that goes into Medicaid to individuals to buy health savings accounts, 2) encourage high-deductible health insurance and 3) tax employee health benefits in a manner similar to what Senator John McCain proposed during the presidential election. That bill was akin to what Ryan proposed in the 2010 GOP budget alternative.

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Supporting Single-Payer Health Care

Whereas:

• 46 million Americans are currently without health insurance;
• 60 million Americans, both insured and uninsured, have inadequate access to primary care due to a shortage of physicians and other health service providers in their community;
• 100 million Americans have no insurance to cover dental needs;
• 116 million adults, nearly two-thirds of all non-seniors, struggled to pay medical bills, went without needed care because of cost, were uninsured for a time, or were underinsured in the last year;
• The United States spends $2.3 trillion each year on health care, 16 percent of its Gross Domestic Product;
• Americans spend $7,129 per person on health care, 50 percent more than other industrialized countries, including those with universal care;
• The U.S. does not get what it pays for. We rank among the lowest in the health outcome rankings of developed countries, and on several major indices rank below some third-world nations;
• The number of health insurance industry bureaucrats has grown at 25 times the growth of physicians in the past 30 years;
• In 2006, the six largest insurance companies made $11 billion in profits even after paying for direct health care costs, administrative costs and marketing costs.

And, whereas:

• Medicare has administrative costs far lower than any private health insurance plan;
• The potential savings on health insurance paperwork, more than $350 billion per year, is enough to provide comprehensive coverage to every uninsured American;
• Only a single-payer Medicare-for-all plan can realize these enormous savings and provide comprehensive and affordable health care to every citizen.

Now, therefore:

• We, the undersigned, urge the United States Congress to pass a single-payer Medicare-for-all program which will provide quality, comprehensive health care for all Americans.

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Iran’s Ex-Foreign Minister Yazdi: It’s A Coup

by Robert Dreyfuss

It’s Saturday afternoon in Tehran, and the streets are generally quiet. But the aftermath of Iran’s rigged election, in which radical-right President Ahmadinejad and his paramilitary backers were kept in office, has left Iran’s capital steeped in anger, despair, and bitterness.

Last night, after the polls closed, heavily armed troops from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were in evidence in the streets. In one area of north Tehran, where backers of opposition challenger and reformist ex-Prime Minister Mousavi are concentrated, I saw a convoy of at least fifteen military vehicles filled with armed guards idling along the side of the road. The street in front of the Interior Ministry, where votes are counted, is blocked and heavily guarded after rumors that Mousavi supporters might gather there to protest the election count.

Mousavi himself has pledged to fight the verdict, using words like “tyranny” and adding, “I will not surrender to this dangerous charade.”

To get some perspective on the crisis, today I went to see Ibrahim Yazdi, a leading Iranian dissident and Iran’s foreign minister in the early days of Islamic republic. Here is the text of the interview:

What is your reaction to the results of the election?

Many of us believe that the election was rigged. Not only Mousavi. We don’t have any doubt. And as far as we are concerned, it is not legitimate.

There were many, many irregularities. They did not permit the candidates to supervise the election or the counting of the ballots at the polling places. The minister of the interior announced that he would oversee the final count in his office, at the ministry, with only two aides present.

In previous elections, they announced the results in each district, so people could follow up and make a judgment about the validity of the figures. In 2005, there were problems: in one district there were about 100,000 eligible voters, and they announced a total vote of 150,000. This time they didn’t even release information about each particular district.

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Pepe Escobar:

Fishy vote count + Guile + Tactics: Why Ahmadinejad won

Iran has been hit by a political “earthquake”: against worldwide expectations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has won a landslide victory and a second term in the Iranian presidential election. At least that’s what the Iranian regime says – to the disbelief of quite a few Iranians, not to mention the puzzlement of the world. Pepe Escobar argues this has been a mix of a very well organized state operation, and Ahmadinejad’s real appeal to Iran’s vast rural and working classes. The objective was to prevent a “threat” to the Iranian revolution principles from emerging, embodied by the “green revolution” of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s young supporters. The official margin of victory though, is simply not credible. The Iranian revolutionary system – embodied by top clerics and the Republican Guards – won. But will they get away with it?

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Iranian filmmaker Makhmalbaf reports on phone call from Ministry of Internal Affairs to Mousavi HQ

Bio

Persian: (born May 29, 1957, Tehran) is an Iranian film director, writer, editor, and producer. He is currently the president of the Asian Film Academy. Makhmalbaf’s films have been widely presented in international film festivals in the past ten years. The multi-award-winning director, belongs to the new wave movement of Iranian cinema. Time magazine selected Makhmalbaf’s 2001 film, Kandahar, as one of top 100 films of all time. In 2006, he was a member of the Jury at the Venice film festival.

Makhmalbaf’s Interview on Radio Farda June 13, 2009, 12:00 AM Translated for The Real News Network

Makhmalbaf:
Yesterday, twenty agents in civilian clothing attacked press offices of Mousavi‘s campaign at Gheitarieh. They broke all communication devices and attacked the campaign staff, including Mr. Kharazi and Mr Amirzadeh. They beat up the staff and when the people confronted them, they fired tear gas at the crowd. These were agents in civilian clothing! Then the agents attempted to runaway. About seven of them were captured by the people and were kept at the campaign headquarters. Next the police arrived at the headquarters and demanded to have custody of the seven captives and said “We would punish these lawbreakers ourselves.” . “No, we need this to be court documented; we know that after the election, you will lose them”, said Mr. Amirzadeh.

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by: Juan Cole

A woman holds rocks gathered for throwing at police in Tehran, Iran. A second day of protests is currently underway.

Top Pieces of Evidence that the Iranian Presidential Election Was Stolen

1. It is claimed that Ahmadinejad won the city of Tabriz with 57%. His main opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is an Azeri from Azerbaijan province, of which Tabriz is the capital. Mousavi, according to such polls as exist in Iran and widespread anecdotal evidence, did better in cities and is popular in Azerbaijan. Certainly, his rallies there were very well attended. So for an Azeri urban center to go so heavily for Ahmadinejad just makes no sense. In past elections, Azeris voted disproportionately for even minor presidential candidates who hailed from that province.

2. Ahmadinejad is claimed to have taken Tehran by over 50%. Again, he is not popular in the cities, even, as he claims, in the poor neighborhoods, in part because his policies have produced high inflation and high unemployment. That he should have won Tehran is so unlikely as to raise real questions about these numbers. [Ahmadinejad is widely thought only to have won Tehran in 2005 because the pro-reform groups were discouraged and stayed home rather than voting.)

3. It is claimed that cleric Mehdi Karoubi, the other reformist candidate, received 320,000 votes, and that he did poorly in Iran’s western provinces, even losing in Luristan. He is a Lur and is popular in the west, including in Kurdistan. Karoubi received 17 percent of the vote in the first round of presidential elections in 2005. While it is possible that his support has substantially declined since then, it is hard to believe that he would get less than one percent of the vote. Moreover, he should have at least done well in the west, which he did not.

4. Mohsen Rezaie, who polled very badly and seems not to have been at all popular, is alleged to have received 670,000 votes, twice as much as Karoubi.

5. Ahmadinejad’s numbers were fairly standard across Iran’s provinces. In past elections there have been substantial ethnic and provincial variations.

6. The Electoral Commission is supposed to wait three days before certifying the results of the election, at which point they are to inform Khamenei of the results, and he signs off on the process. The three-day delay is intended to allow charges of irregularities to be adjudicated. In this case, Khamenei immediately approved the alleged results.

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Juan Cole

Aljazeera.net is reporting that the streets in Iran’s capital, Tehran, were almost deserted Sunday morning. Since it is a weekday in Iran, there should have been heavy traffic, but many people appear to have stayed home from work. Reports from students in Tehran say that the universities and polytechnic institutes have been closed for the next few days. This step was obviously taken to prevent students from gathering and demonstrating on campus. Many shopkeepers have closed up shop.

Mir-Hosain Mousavi’s protest letter is here.

On Saturday, thousands of pro-Mousavi protesters staged sit-down strikes, started fires in metal trash bins, and confronted police and Islamic Republic of Iran paramilitary forces, pelting them with stones. Riot control police were sent in on motorcycles, in heavy gear. Toward midnight Saturday, tear gas canisters were being lobbed at the thinning ranks of protesters, with at least one hit in the head and wounded by a canister. Observers in Iran said that Facebook was taken off line and that even cell phone service was interrupted. (The latter two techniques are further circumstantial evidence that the election was rigged, since the regime seems to fear it has something to fear from a free and open inquiry and from communication among voters.)

The demonstrations did not only take place in Tehran, as some observers have charged, but were also staged in parts of other cities (I’ve seen Tabriz and Rasht cited).

Iranian authorities have taken into custody at least four of the leaders of the Islamic Iran Participation Front Party, which supported Mir-Hosain Mousavi in Friday’s presidential election. The IIPFP was a leading party within the reformist Second of Khordad Movement of former president Mohammad Khatami.

Russia Today has video coverage of the election results and the demonstrations:

The wife of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is said to have called for protests, according to Javan as translated by the USG Open Source Center:

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by James Dunham

Sadly, about 100% of all Republican Congressmen and Senators really don’t care about people dying. They don’t care about Americans getting killed in Iraq. They don’t care about Americans losing their jobs. And they certainly don’t care about 70 million Americans with no health care and tens of millions more who are going bankrupt trying to pay their premiums and medical expenses. The GOP is a lost cause.

Republicans, backed by the insurance and drug industries will fight tooth and nail to kill any type of Government Medicare type universal plan available to all who want it. The insurance and drug industries will pump billions into TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertisements to scare the hell out of ill informed and ordinary Americans.

They’ll tell us it’s Communism, Socialism, Marxism, and that’s its un-American. They’ll try to claim that Canadians have to wait years to get a doctor’s appointment and that medical care in Europe is grossly inferior compared to the great United States of America. They’ll tell us we will have to go to a big, old, ugly bureaucratic Government building and sit in hard plastic chairs for weeks to just see a doctor. They’ll tell us that the Government is going to tell us what doctor or hospital we can go to, and what treatment they can give us.

They’re going to lie through their teeth. The “big lie” will be told over and over and over and over.

You will even hear as we hear so many times, even from Obama that “most Americans are satisfied with their current insurance coverage”. I pray like hell, he really doesn’t believe that one. That’s a whopper. Although if 60 million people voted for Bush and then for McCain/Palin I would imagine that that group would say that they “were quite satisfied that their only son was killed in Iraq”, or that “I’m satisfied that I lost my job”, or that “I’m quite satisfied that the price of my home has declined by 40%”.

In reality I doubt that even one American who has NO insurance has said “I’m quite satisfied with my current health insurance”. Apparently, none of the 70 million uninsured are asked the question.

Corporations and industries that have been allowed to grow as big as the insurance and drug industries are more powerful than our Government. They are more powerful than 50% of the American people. THEY control Congress. THEY control the White House’s agenda. THEY control the economy, as we have seen in the banking and financial sectors.

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