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Interesting stuff...


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Informed Comment 
 
Informed Comment   
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	* Can Obama Make good on his Pledge to overturn Citizens United with a Constitutional Amendment? 
	* Iran’s Rouhani pulls a Pope Francis: ‘Let People choose own path to Heaven’ 
	* Does our and Obama’s Paralysis on Global Warming come from American Exceptionalism? 
	* On D-Day:  Remembering the Muslim Troops who Fought the Axis 
Can Obama Make good on his Pledge to overturn Citizens United with a Constitutional Amendment? 
Posted: 05 Jun 2014 11:02 PM PDT
New Book Reveals Obama Told Big Donors He Wants to Repeal Citizens United…and Thinks He Can (via Atlas Left) 
In his new book, Ken Vogel claims that President Barack Obama told Democratic donors he believes he is in a good position to pass a constitutional amendment to repeal Citizens United. The book, entitled “Big Money: 2.5 Billion Dollars, One Suspicious… 

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Related video:
Nevada Senator Harry Reid: “Reid Calls For Constitutional Amendment To Overturn Citizens United”  
Iran’s Rouhani pulls a Pope Francis: ‘Let People choose own path to Heaven’ 
Posted: 05 Jun 2014 10:42 PM PDT
By Golnaz Esfandiari
Twenty-five years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's death, the clerical establishment ushered in by the Islamic republic's founding father is at odds over how far its influence on Iranians' lives should extend.
The debate pits powerful, hard-line religious conservatives against Iran's relatively moderate president, Hassan Rohani. And at the center of the debate is heaven, and the path leading to it.
There are few limits to the Islamic regime's interference in the public and private lives of Iranians, who, among other things, are required to follow a strict dress code dictated by the state.
During a public speech late last month, however, President Rohani called for more freedom and rights for Iranians and less state intervention in their lives. "Let people relax. Let people be mentally healthy. Do not interfere so much in the people's lives even for sympathy," the cleric-president said on May 24. "Let people choose their own path to heaven. We cannot send people to heaven by force or the lash."
The reference to lashing was a not-so-subtle nod to the punishment commonly carried out for drinking, partying, and other violations of Islamic laws over the past three decades.
Critics: Rohani Creating 'Chaos'
The comments came under scrutiny, and shined the light on the issue of the state's role in leading its flock to heaven.
The ultra-hard-line daily "Kayhan" published Rohani's comments with a question mark on its May 25 front page, while describing them as "questionable."
Criticism also came from hard-line clerics, who used their May 30 Friday Prayers sermons as a platform to speak against Rohani.
During Tehran's Friday Prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said it was the state's duty to guide people to heaven. "The mission is to smooth the path to heaven, therefore the government is duty bound to pave the way to lead people to heaven," the hard-line cleric said.
 
Ayatollah Alamolhoda, the Friday Prayer leader of the city of Mashhad, also criticized Rohani in his sermons. "We will stand against all of those preventing people from reaching heaven with all of our force, not only with a whip," he said.
 
Hojatoleslam Hamid Rohani, the founder of the Islamic Revolution Documentation Center, also blasted Rohani. "Why does the president say no one should be sent to heaven by the lash? The majority of people have voted for the establishment and said that religious rulings should be enforced," the cleric was quoted as saying by Iranian media.
 
He added that those who speak out against lashing citizens to lead them to heaven are bent on creating "chaos" in the country.
 
Rohani: Critics 'Deluded'
 
Hard-liners who control the judiciary and other centers of power believe that giving Iranians more freedom could undermine an establishment that claims to rule the country based on Islamic principles.
 
In recent weeks they have stepped up their pressure on Rohani, who is firmly rooted in the clerical establishment but is considered more a pragmatist who has pledged to bring about change, and his government.
 
On May 31, the Iranian president hit back at his opponents with a bit of sarcasm. In a speech at the department of environment, he criticized those who are adverse to change and added that those who constantly worry about religion and the afterlife are delusional.
 
He recalled that when showers were being introduced in the holy city of Qom and bathhouses were being eliminated some thought a "disaster" was in the making. "Some said that half of the religion was being destroyed," Rohani said, laughing.
WATCH: Hassan Rohani mocks his hard-line critics.
YouTube
 
"Some people have really nothing to do," he added. "They don't have jobs, they suffer from delusions, they're constantly worrying about religion and people's afterlife, [yet] they have no idea about what religion nor the afterlife is."
 
"They keep worrying," Rohani said to an applauding audience.
 
While criticism of the handling of the disputed nuclear program appears to be on the wane, pressure is on the rise against Rohani's social and cultural policies, which include calls for greater access to the Internet and less censorship. There have also been calls for stricter enforcement of the obligatory hijab for women.
 
The popular website "Fararu" focused on the recent dispute with a report titled, "Criticism Of Rohani Changes Course From 'Geneva' To 'heaven.'" It noted that there had not yet been any reaction to Rohani's latest speech against his critics, but it predicted that the "toughest attacks" are still to come.
Mirrored from RFE/RL 
Copyright (c) 2014.RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Ste 400, Washington DC 20036. 
Does our and Obama’s Paralysis on Global Warming come from American Exceptionalism? 
Posted: 05 Jun 2014 10:29 PM PDT
By William Espinosa
President Obama’s proposal to modestly curb carbon emissions from power plants is – if carried out—a serious one.  But opposition was immediate, so is there reason to think anything will really change this time?  The warnings have been issued before, the underlying process has been understood for decades, yet at least in the United States, no serious response emerges into action.  And even when climate change and the human contribution are admitted, a curious fatalism sets in— it’s too late, responding is too expensive, India and China won’t join us, it’s God’s business. Is there now reason for hope? 
It’s easy to attribute resistance to the manipulations of the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry and their ability to scare the nation with images of Godzilla Government and economic collapse.  And to be sure there is uncertainty in any forward projection in a complex system.  But is that really the story?  Is there ambivalence even in Obama’s own proposal?
Climate change is not a new issue. For at least a quarter century we’ve known about the problem with a certainty that would have made any rational person buy insurance.  In the 19th century we knew that the earth’s climate changed and that certain gases absorbed more infrared energy than others. In the early 20th century, Svante Arrhenius, postulated global warming from man-made CO2 emissions over a long term. By the 1970s, a rise in atmospheric CO2 and the Earth’s temperature during the industrial era was documented. 
In the 1980s, consensus was forming among climate scientists and governments were warned.  In 1988 UNEP organized a conference calling for action. In 1992, at the UN sponsored Earth Summit, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and a companion agreement on biodiversity were approved.  This in turn led to the Kyoto Protocol which set both binding and voluntary CO2 emissions limits.  But Kyoto was doomed from the start because the US wouldn’t have any part of it.  Twenty years later—and with CO2 concentrations up another 12% over pre-industrial norms– no broad substitute has emerged. 
“Cheap” insurance policies have been available and can be easily expanded.  They range from energy conservation, to solar power applications (see a sample list at Informed Comment, 3/22/14), to wind power generation, to cleaner-burning biomass stoves, to name just a few.  They might not solve the whole problem but they would make the risk of a catastrophic climate shift a lot smaller. The mechanisms for economic adjustment aren’t secrets either—education, training, government investments and incentives for alternatives in affected regions and nationally, substitution of a carbon tax for taxes on work.
In the past we’ve had no difficulty responding to serious man-made environmental threats even when industries warned of economic ruin.  During the Reagan era, within ten years of the first alarm about CFC’s, an international convention was put in place to protect the ozone layer.  At the height of the Cold War, with militaries and industries anxious to test “better” nuclear weapons, the major powers stopped atmospheric and underwater nuclear testing to avoid irradiating populations.  Within ten years of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, DDT use was curtailed, even in the face of predictions of doom. “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson,” a scientist/executive of the American Cyanamid Company intoned, “We would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.”
Americans relish large challenges. Kennedy and Johnson launched us to the moon—a feat accomplished in eight short years. During WWII over initial business resistance, the “arsenal of democracy” grew up in three brief years.  When three thousand people were killed on 9/11, the United States launched two wars and spent more than four trillion dollars to counter the threat.  Climate change threatens the wellbeing of hundreds of millions including Americans. Even the military has recognized the danger for years. Yet no concerted response is put forward, no national agenda emerges. 
Why? The problem, I would suggest, goes deeper than the fossil fuel industry or the dysfunction of American politics. The phenomenon of climate change, I believe, challenges some core collective beliefs, provoking deeper anxieties. Consciously and unconsciously, fear drags on our intentions and clouds our thinking. “Fear is the mind-killer,” the Bene-Gesserit warned in Dune.  To name a few now-in-doubt precepts:
1. Nations are sovereign within their borders. 
2. The United States is an exceptional nation that can always prevail. 
3.  The US way of life is benign and benefits the world. 
4. Consumption is the measure of economic growth and health. 
5. God gave humans natural resources for enterprising individuals to exploit. 
Frontier values and opportunities still endure.
At least on Earth, climate change threatens to make this last forever untrue and nine billion people can’t become American-type consumers. The United States can’t solve the climate problem at the nation-state level. Our activities have caused harm way beyond our borders and we need everyone’s help—even those whom we have harmed.  “We are all Bangladeshi’s now,” as someone memorably put it. 
Ever since we became farmers and village/city dwellers, our values have formed around the notion that it was for humans to tame nature. “That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that had given us birth,” E.O. Wilson wrote, watching waves of extinctions and pleading for change.   The mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee offers another perspective.  The outer threat reflects an inner state of selfishness and greed. Moreover, the ecological challenge was an opening for humankind to make an evolutionary leap. But, Vaughan-Lee contends, we missed the opportunity to manifest a consciousness of unity (with humans, with nature) and now the end of the West is coming. 
I don’t believe the apocalypse is here but I do believe that the challenge is deep and that more scientific studies aren’t going to change much. What is needed is a collective change of perception and heart.  Solutions can’t be buried in regulatory techno-jargon or disingenuously offered up, as President Obama just did, as a response to child asthma. If the effort is serious, the fate of coal miners can’t be ignored (cf. Obama’s speech). US trade negotiators can’t be promoting dirty oil and unfettered fracking rights at the same time. 
From the bottom up and from the top down, we need to acknowledge the moral, political and spiritual issues that the climate change phenomenon brings forth. These are likely greater than the economic and technical challenges. Fears need to be addressed and not left to fester and magnify problems.  As noted above, much can be done at low cost but this gets lost in a fear-filled debate. If President Obama truly wishes to address climate change, he needs to define the problem and the response with clarity and purpose. Relying on the better angels of our culture—a can-do practicality, good will towards others and an inextinguishable optimism– we have the capacity to adapt. We can build a better civilization on a co-evolving planet but we have to stop thinking we’re so exceptional we can defy the laws of chemistry.
William Espinosa  is the author of the science fiction eco-thriller
Warming!   
On D-Day:  Remembering the Muslim Troops who Fought the Axis 
Posted: 05 Jun 2014 09:54 PM PDT
By Juan Cole
One of the frustrations for a world historian is the unyieldingly parochial vision of the North Atlantic common among journalists and even many historians, and consequently among the public.  The 17 world leaders gathering for the D-Day commemoration should by all rights include Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Senegalese President Macky Sall, among others from countries whose troops fought the Axis on European soil even if they weren’t part of this landing.  They in many ways made it possible by their exploits in North Africa, Italy and southern France.
The great literary and cultural critic Edward Said pointed out that although Britain, France, Italy and other European states were multicultural empires in the 19th and early 20th century, many academics and popular writers now project back onto them the narrow framework of the nation-state.  Postcolonial states are sometimes touchy and embarrassed about millions of their countrymen having volunteered to serve a now-gone empire.
World War II is a case in point. The British Indian army was expanded to 2.5 million men under arms through calls for volunteers.  It fought in Italy (yes), Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.  Tens of thousands  were killed, a similar number wounded, and more tens of thousands taken prisoner.  The British decorated 4,000 of them for valor.  These troops were made up of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims (and probably some Buddhists).  Punjabi and Baluch Muslims, who would now be termed Pakistanis, were prominent among them, as were Muslims from the Indian Princely states.  Along with regular British units, the British Indian Army fought the Italians and Germans in Libya from Egypt and campaigned on in to Tunisia.  Once North Africa fell, they fought in the invasion of Italy.  When I lived in New Delhi in 1982, my landlord was a Sikh colonel who had Italy campaign stories from his youth.  Among the troops decorated in that Italian campaign was Sepoy Ali
 Haidar, 13th Frontier Force Rifles, for his role in allowing a key river crossing.
BBC The forgotten volunteers – Indian army WWII 
All this is not to mention the role of British Muslims like Noor Enayat Khan in intelligence and other work toward defeating the Nazis.  Or Shapour Bakhtiar, the later Iranian nationalist who went to Europe for an education and ended up fighting both on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and in the French Resistance to the Nazis in southern France.
While a few Muslims did support the Axis out of resentment of Western colonialism and hopes that the rise of an alternative power center would aid their quest for independence, they were tiny in their numbers compared to the Muslims who not just supported the Allies (as almost all did if you go back and read the newspapers) but actively fought on their behalf, on the battlefield. Nor was it only Muslims– Hindus in the British Indian Army captured by the Japanese sometimes were willing to join the latter’s puppet Indian forces and fight against British colonialism.  But if you think about it, most Muslims would have realized that a Nazi-dominated world would not exactly be good for groups categorized as lesser and degenerate races.
Senegalese troops fought in the Free French army of Charles De Gaulle in the invasion of Italy and in the liberation of southern France.  German officers, steeped in Nazi racism, were surprised and outraged to have to fight Africans on European soil.  Imagine their further dismay as the African troops turned out to be in the winning side.  The Senegalese were called Tirailleurs or Riflemen.
Here is footage set to a poem by Senegalese President Leopold Senghor:
( Poem and translation here) 
At a time when the Network for Muslim-Hatred constantly attempts to link Islam to the Nazis (who were as far as I can tell Europeans of Christian heritage), it is worth remembering Ali Haidar, Noor Enayat Khan and all the hundreds of thousands of others who fought on the right side of history– along with all their Hindu, Sikh and Buddhist counterparts.  It is called a World War for a reason. 
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