Sanctions on Iran are Working, Preventing War
Feeling bad for the Iranian people who are enduring hardship wrought by the West’s economic sanctions, but the majors demos in Tehran today–inveighing against the Ahmadinejad government and religious establishment–show the whole sanctions policy is working. President Obama has insisted they be given a chance to work, and he’s being proven correct. Mitt, Bibi, and other wingers all look silly, having insisted on imminent war. Even Bibi is now altering his stance to favor sanctions. The mullahs have a growing currency crisis on their hands, while the cost of consumer goods has increased four-fold. Instability is brewing. Sanctions that result in curtailment of their nuclear ambitions are a far better option than bombing. Painful though the sanctions are for Iranians, the people are taking their anger out on the regime, where it belongs for their autocratic rule.
Think my outlook is too rosy? Read what Tod Robberson, editorial writer at the Dallas Morning News published yesterday:
“Mitt Romney and his pal, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, face an increasingly uphill battle arguing that the tough sanctions regime put in place by the Obama administration isn’t working. The pressure on Iran’s government to cease its uranium-enrichment program and abide by its international treaty obligations has never been more severe than it is today.
The value of Iran’s currency, the rial, is in free fall. According to Reuters, the rial reached a record low value of 37,500 to the dollar on the free market. A week ago it traded at about 24,600. Between 2010 and 2011, the rial’s value remained relatively steady at between 10,300 and 10,800 to the dollar. According to one report, Iranians lost 660 trillion in rial-based assets because of the plummeting market. This marks an enormous financial crisis for the country.
Heck, things are so bad that, instead of sightseeing in New York last week, the Iranian delegation headed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad went on a shopping trip to Costco to buy stuff like shampoo that they can’t get in their own country. One member of his delegation reportedly has defected.
What has happened since last year to make the currency plummet to less than half its 2011 value? Sanctions, that’s what. . . .
And now, there can be no argument that the sanctions are taking a steep toll on Iran’s government. This helps explain why Israel’s foreign ministry issued a report last week calling for the government to give sanctions more time — in spite of the constant drumbeat of war coming from Netanyahu and Romney.
Yes, Romney can ask for proof that Iran has curtailed its uranium enrichment program as a result, and that’s a fair question. The answer almost certainly is: There is no proof — yet. That’s what the sanctions are all about. At a certain point pretty soon, Iran’s isolation and economic strife are going to reach a breaking point, at which time Tehran will seriously enter negotiations on inspections and agree to international limits on its enrichment activities. Sure beats war.
Romney is going to have to come up with another argument heading into tomorrow’s debates. He can’t even rely on backing from Netanyahu, who appears to be backing away from the hard-line stance he had maintained barely three weeks ago. Read more on that at ForeignPolicy.com,” in a Joel Rubin story headlined Netanyahu Aligns with Obama on Iran.
10 Years Later, Michael Bell Still on the Trail of New England’s Vampires
One of the most unusual and fascinating books I edited and published in the seven years I was an editorial executive with Carroll & Graf (2000-07) was Food For the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires by folklorist Michael Bell. Over more than 20 years of research at the point the book was published in 2001, Michael had identified more than a dozen New England gravesites where, beginning in the late 1700s and continuing for at least 100 years, the relatives and neighbors of people who’d died from tuberculosis handled the cadavers and conducted their burial in a way that they imagined might diminish the chances of the disease being passed on to others. These funerary practices, at first inexplicable to moderns living with 20th century medicine, possessed a clear logic in an era when the notion of contagion was sensed but not formally known. They included burning some of the fleshly remains and inhaling the smoke from the resulting fire; feeding some of the burnt byproducts to the ill; and arranging the limbs of the dead in such a way as to thwart transmission of illness. Clearly, the grieving and anxious survivors hoped they could somehow inoculate themselves by taking these steps.
The book is a readable synthesis of fascinating stories combining literary lore from such authors as Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Amy Lowell, and Robert Frost, who retold and reimagined these vampire stories; medical anthropology; and travel tales, with Michael wandering from one corner of New England to another, always in search of more folklore on this surprising topic.
Though Michael’s book came out more than ten years ago, his investigation didn’t end with publication. In fact, according to a comprehensive article by Abigail Tucker in this month’s issue of Smithsonian, Michael has now documented more than eighty examples of these burials and exhumations, ranging beyond New England and stretching as far west as Minnesota. According to Tucker,
“Hundreds more cases await discovery, [the author] believes. ‘You read an article that describes an exhumation, and they’ll describe a similar thing that happened at a nearby town,’ says Bell, whose book, Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New England’s Vampires, is seen as the last word on the subject, though he has lately found so many new cases that there’s a second book on the way. ‘The ones that get recorded, and I actually find them, are just the tip of the iceberg.’”
I remain fascinated by this topic, and am excited to have Smithsonian‘s update on Michael’s research, and to be reminded of the book that Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe described as an “Absorbing account [that] is neither Halloween fantasy nor tabloid frenzy, but a major contribution to the study of New England folk beliefs.” I’ll be interested to learn about the more recent cases that Michael has discovered in the decade since I published Food For the Dead with him, and eager to learn about the next book. Below are images of the front and back cover of the 2002 paperback edition.
Sam Zell Part II/Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) says Out-of-Work are “Hobos”
Are Dean Heller, Nevada Repub Senate candidate, and Sam Zell–who this morning asserted that under-employed people lack work because government has “incentivized” them to stop trying to find it–sipping at the same toxic water cooler? In the same news cycle as Zell made the offensive assertions in the post below–Steve Sebelius of the Las Vegas Review-Journal is reporting this about Heller, as tipped to me by maddowblog.com:
“In February 2010, Heller questioned the wisdom of extending unemployment benefits for people thrown out of work by the recession. He told the Elko County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day dinner that the longer a person is out of work, the smaller the chance they’d eventually be re-employed. ‘Is the government now creating hobos?’ he asked, according to the Elko Daily Free Press.”
In a debate this week with his Senate opponent, Dem Shelley Berkley, Heller denied he’d ever made the “hobo” remark. It isn’t clear from Sebelius’s story if Berkley nailed him for it then, but post-debate Sebelius has him red-handed having said it.
Jeez, from “incentivized” to “hobos” in a few hours–I am forced to conclude that there are a lot of Repubs who hate the people they think of as lower-class. It can’t get much more conspicuous!
Sam Zell, Corporate Raider & Certified Asshole
In case you’re unfamiliar with businessman Sam Zell, he’s the billionaire who a few years ago managed to acquire the Tribune media empire (which at the time included the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Baltimore Sun, and Hartford Courant). While the newspapers were already losing money, the advent of Zell’s ownership and the ways he leveraged his acquisition of the media company saddled it with additional enormous debt, whereupon he began downsizing newsrooms, laying off journalists and gutting the papers. At the same time, he fashioned himself a media critic, supposedly knowledgable about what news organizations must do to survive amid a transformed media landscape.
By now, several years after his Tribune purchase, the company is embroiled in a number of lawsuits over Zell’s attempt to walk away from various pension obligations. Zell has remained what he was at the outset–a foul-tempered, profane, corporate raider who routinely exhibits contempt for news and media professionals. By the standards of Geoffrey Nunberg’s provocative new book, Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years, Sam Zell is a certifiable “asshole.”
This all brings us to today, where I see on ThinkProgress.org in a story by Pat Garofalo that Zell’s done an interview on CNBC TV’s “Squawk Box” program, during which he offered these observations, complaining:
ZELL: The reality is as follows: the whole focus has been on how the, quote, one percenters, the 10 percenters, whatever these top earners have moved ahead of everybody. I wonder if there’s any correlation between while they were moving ahead, the rest of the government was subsidizing, subsidizing more and more people and disincentivizing them. Why is it always assumed that somebody doesn’t succeed because he can’t, as opposed to he doesn’t want to, or isn’t incentivized to. […]
SORKIN: There’s no suggestion, at least that I’ve heard, that the reason why people have had a harder time rising through the ranks today is a function of the fact that they’re disincentivized to rise through the ranks.
ZELL: Wait a minute. I think that they are disincentivized by, in effect, if you don’t have to pay for your health care, that’s another thing you don’t have to worry about…For every step contributing to the progress at the top, there’s an additional step on the bottom to increase the earned income [tax credit], to extend unemployment insurance for 28 years.
This guy doesn’t even know what he’s talking about. My wife and I damn well pay for our expensive healthcare, and hope each year to get the benefit of a tax deduction for having obtained coverage through the small business we operate. And, “unemployment insurance for 28 years”? What rank hyperbole! Ninety weeks is the absolute limit, as I recall, and mine in NY State didn’t even last that long after I was laid off from Sterling Publishing in 2009, an experience I’ve recounted in a personal blog essay, Three Years Ago Today.
So, let’s get this straight–a man who used Bain-like tactics to strip money out of a company he acquired, laid off hundreds of experienced professionals, and ignored his obligations to their pensions, is now lecturing the rest of us on why many Americans lack full-time employment–it’s because we’ve been conditioned to be lazy by government policies that “disincentivize” us. This guy would fit in perfectly in Mitt Romney’s 47% video reel. What an asshole.
Did You Hear the One about a Bigoted Christian Who Walks into a Synagogue on Yom Kippur?
I thought this was a parody or an Onion story, but evidently it’s not.
Word comes via the Chicago Tribune that congregants of Anshe Emet Synagogue in Lakeville, IL, were upset by the unexpected appearance in their sanctuary of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann during Kol Nidrei, the service that began the solemn Yom Kippur holiday last Tuesday. According to reporter Manya A. Brachear’s story, there is “No word on why Bachmann was in Chicago or why she chose to attend the Jewish service. Calls and emails to her campaign and congressional office were not returned.”
Rabbi Michael Siegel, following his congregation’s practice of acknowledging the presence of public officials as guests in their sanctuary, welcomed the conservative congresswoman from the pulpit. But according to Brachear,
“The formality enraged more than a few congregants, prompting some to walk out and one to start a campaign of his own in support of Bachmann’s opponent in the race for her congressional seat, Jim Graves. ‘The holiness of the room and the holiness of the evening was greatly diminished for me, if not completely destroyed,’ said Gary Sircus, who stormed out of the synagogue where he has observed the High Holidays for 25 years. ‘Our congregation values and embodies tolerance, compassion, respect for individual rights, intelligence, science—all of the things that I think Michele Bachmann stands against.’
“Later that night, [Sircus] composed an email to Graves’ campaign and sent it to others, urging them to donate. His words have since gone viral. ‘I felt that the best way to ‘honor’ Ms. Bachmann’s visit was to make a contribution to your campaign,’ Sircus wrote [to Graves]. ‘Even though I do not vote in Minnesota, please do everything in your power to take away this evil woman’s soapbox.'”
I’ve seen reports that Bachman is in the closest race of her congressional career, and really may be ousted on November 6. Also reportedly in very close races are Bachmann’s fellow right-wing extremists Joe Walsh of Illinois, the deadbeat who failed to pay his wife her child support; Steve King of Iowa, as demeaning a congressman as there is toward new Americans and immigrants looking to catch a foothold our country; and Alan West of Florida who routinely demeans female politicians.
Big Poll Margin Growing for PBO in NH?
This could be an outlier poll, but wow: President Obama is up 52-37 in New Hampshire–according to the latest survey from WMUR, the most widely viewed TV station in the Granite State. Even if 15% makes it an outlier, they’re must be something working very well for the president there right now. I suspect it’s the recent ads the Obama campaign has fashioned from Mitt’s disastrous 47% remarks, like this spot, for which all the words are supplied by Mitt, against the moneyed sound of cutlery colliding with crockery during the meal eaten by the Repub candidates’ wealthy donors. In counterpoint to the aural part of the ad, all the graphics and visuals are skillfully supplied by the president’s ad-makers.