They summarize for Danish readers the fundamental numerical results: House lost for the Democrats, Senate retained (as Majority Leader Harry Reid “saves his political career”), and a Republican wave also taking over most state governors and legislatures. What this means for the future: “Over the slightly longer-term political chaos [awaits] in Washington, unless the parties can find a way to work together.” The authors also make mention of the “especially offensive” defiance directed at the president by “one of the election campaign’s absolute key figures,” Sarah Palin: (Translated back from the Danish) “We’re sending representatives to Washington to stop your fundamental transformation of America. Enough is enough.”

Over at the opinion newspaper Information, their long-time American affairs commentator Martin Burcharth takes a more philosophical tone (Varied outlook for cross-political cooperation). All things will pass, he assures the reader; sudden shifts in American political fortunes are really “quite common,” citing history back to Jimmy Carter (hero in 1976; goat in 1980) to prove his point. This latest heavy midterms defeat for the Democrats and President Obama need not be regarded as any real sort of tragedy.

Rather, anything is still possible for the 2012 elections, and Burcharth offers the president two possible strategies for success. He can tack to the political center (as former Clinton political advisor Paul Begala recommends) and push a new program of extensive public works, pushed as a “jobs plan,” which Republicans would not dare to oppose. Or he can stay on the left (the advice of Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor) and launch a crusade against the Big Industry and Big Finance that got America into the economic mess it is in. That will also mean cutting taxes on the poor and middle-class, but not for the rich: the latter should be required to pay for their misdeeds!

Whichever he chooses, Burcharth recognizes that prospects for real cooperation between the president and the Republicans in Congress will probably last only until around the end of next year, when politicking for the 2012 elections begins in earnest. In fact, he offers the rather cynical recommendation that Democrats make full use of the “lame duck” period still open to them – i.e. when they still have majorities in both Houses, before the newly-elected representatives and Senators come to take their seats – to enact major legislation such as immigration reform and even new climate/energy legislation (always a leading Danish concern). No cooperation with political opponents even required!

It’s ingenious, in a way – except that Burcharth forgets that, even today, the Democrats’ Senate majority is only 59, which causes certain complications of its own in passing legislation, and in any event exploiting the “lame duck” session that way somewhat contravenes American ideas of political legitimacy.

UPDATE: What do you know, the Rude Pundit also sees great merit in that “use the lame duck session to pass some serious legislation” argument of Martin Burcharth’s, and develops it further. But beware: he’s rude! (Sample language: “No, you need to blow us, Boehner and McConnell.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

                          

It’s all still very unclear, but the essence of the plot apparently involved setting off a massive truck bomb sometime today in the center of downtown Göteborg. “Several” suspects were arrested, this (Saturday) morning, but local police are not yet ready to say how many, who they are, or what lead to their being detained – only that a tip was received in time, from a trusted source, warning of the attack. That was enough to draw the Säpo – basically, the Swedish FBI – into the case as well, although it’s the local police who hold the suspects in custody and who are now beefing up their presence in town over the weekend.

                          

Noteworthy reaction flowed promptly in two articles from that pillar of the French journalistic establishment, Le Monde. One of them (Obama’s words: work, economy, and Americans; no byline) literally offers at its head a “word-cloud” of the speech’s most-frequent terms (actually, their French equivalents) and then, by way of analysis, a hyper-short summary of his essential message: “Don’t panic.” Yes, it’s true that the president’s emphasis was much more on the economy and creating jobs, rather than on that health care reform legislation that still sits tantalizingly close to final passage. But what was of far more interest to Le Monde’s writer here was those foreign policy topics to which Obama gave short shrift, as he only briefly discussed Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, skimmed China, Russia, Germany, India, the Koreas, and said nothing at all about Pakistan or the Israeli-Palestinian peace-process! (Nor about France, come to think of it.)

A companion Le Monde article (Obama like in the first days; also no explicit byline) notes how surprisingly sprightly Obama appeared before the assembled Congress (“with a rediscovered insolence and combativeness”), just like in the old days, oh so long ago, when he was eating John McCain’s lunch on the campaign trail. This writer also issues a fitting, if cynical summary of the president’s economic message: focus on jobs this year (an election year); focus on reducing the deficit only the year after that.

For its part, the conservative paper Le Figaro contributes a lengthy review of Obama’s SOTU speech from its Washington correspondent, Laure Mandeville (Employment, Obama’s priority for 2010). I’m pretty sure “Laure” is a French woman’s name, for Ms. Mandeville not only mentions Barack’s feistiness (“more resolute and offensive than ever”) but also gets in a reference to Michelle’s couture (she was wearing a jupe bouffant violine – some sort of fancy skirt). At the same time, she captures well the lecturing, lightly-scolding tone prevalent especially in his speech’s second half, and directed largely at the Republican opposition, reflecting his greater theme of “we [i.e. the country] just can’t go on like this!”

Bonus: The judgment on Obama’s SOTU speech is also out from the foremost Danish expert on American affairs, Prof. Niels Bjerre-Poulsen of the Copenhagen Business School (as reported by Ritzau, so it’s pretty much the representative Danish journalistic view; actually published in this instance in the opinion newspaper Information). With this excellent speech, opines the good professor, Obama once again showed his strong side to the nation: that is, in speech-making, in this case in a tight situation and with many contradictory points to make. But the resulting goodwill will only last so long, and it takes much different political skills to translate such fancy words into concrete results. We still have to see if the president is similarly gifted with those latter.

                          

Who specifically is making this demand? No surprise: it’s the Danish People’s Party, the influential and powerful party (although it’s not part of the current government) best known for its strict attitude towards immigrants, asylum-seekers, and foreigners in general. In particular, it was that party’s foreign affairs spokesman, Søren Espersen, who raised this demand when being interviewed on a Danish TV news show. “We want only proper (ordentlige) people come to Denmark,” he proclaimed – presumably referring only to the period around the climate conference, although you need to be careful because, if it could, the People’s Party would clearly raise that principle to general applicability. This is no idle request, either: Espersen made clear in that same interview that the People’s Party wants to see movement towards re-imposing those border controls before it will resume cooperating with the government in pushing an important new financial law through the Danish parliament, the Folketing.

The point is of course to try to keep out those elements who might try to come to Copenhagen to make trouble in the streets while all the international bureaucrats and heads of state/government are assembled for the climate conference. The Schengen Treaty apparently does allow for the sort of temporary re-imposition of border controls that the People’s Party is requesting (not that it particularly matters to the party’s politicians whether it is allowed or not). Their demand has also won support from the Danish Conservative Party, which is important since they’re actually in the government. (It has been dismissed, on the other hand, by the Socialist People’s Party – which matters less, since they are not.)

So are you planning to head to Denmark in the near future? (In particular: Are you planning to be in Copenhagen for the big conference? Really? How on earth did you find a hotel room, or do you have friends there?) If so, better be prepared for some extra checks as you cross the border.

                          

- From the Danish Christian newspaper, Kristeligt Dagblad (Obama gives Nobel money to a good cause): Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama intends to give the 10 million Swedish kroner prize-money to a good cause, which he has not yet had time to specifically identify, according to a White House spokesman. He will also travel to Oslo on December 10 to accept the award there; Norwegian prime minister Jens Stoltenberg has already discussed this with him. Ah, but you may also be asking: How will this sudden new Scandinavian appointment affect the US president’s involvement at the UN’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen which will be going on at the same time? According to this report, it does not necessarily increase the chances that Obama will actually decide to attend that climate change conference.

(Note: This is a report from the Ritzau news agency, so the identical text appears in several other Danish newspapers as well. But in one of those we get the added detail that the “expert” behind the above calculation that Obama’s appointment in Oslo in December won’t necessary mean he shows up for the climate conference in Copenhagen – which, by the way, I don’t believe for a second – is namely Aarhus University Professor of Contemporary History Thorsten Borring Olesen.)

- The daily Berlingske Tidende offers some commentary in one article (Obama: Both a certain and a controversial choice), but doesn’t bother to credit the journalist(s) involved. Anyway: Awarding the prize to Obama was certain (sikkert): he is popular everywhere on this Earth, the nearest thing to every man’s friend. Awarding the prize to Obama was, however, controversial: Obama has been all about promises so far, not results. Maybe the Nobel committee was impressed with the resolution calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons that he managed to have the UN Security Council pass a few weeks ago while he functioned as its Chairman – on the other hand, in reality none of the nuclear powers, including the US, has done anything to fulfill the promise they made to the rest of the world at the time of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, back in 1968, that they would work to reduce and then eliminiate their nuclear arsenals, in exchange for that rest of the world giving up any idea of developing nuclear weapons of their own. Or perhaps it’s about his efforts to counteract climate change, or to shut Guantánamo – except, again, there actually hasn’t been tangible progress in these areas, either. No, the purposes the Nobel committee had in giving this prize to the President was both to give him “a tremendous moral pat on the shoulder” and to pointedly remind other countries (the exact Danish phrase is “hint with a wagon-pole”) that the American president is going to need some help from them if what he has promised is going to come true – so that that Nobel committee doesn’t find itself embarrassed a few years down the road at what it did today.

- The preeminent Danish opinion weekly, Information hasn’t yet gotten around to providing its own judgment or study of the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama. For now, it presents an analysis (again from Ritzau) from Prof. Peter Viggo Jacobsen, of the Copenhagen University Social Sciences Faculty (Obama is a highly surprising choice). Along with about a billion other people around the world, he interprets the prize as being awarded in anticipation of future achievements, not of past accomplishments since “he has not been able yet to carry out anything at all.” Further Jacobsen:

Normally there should be more then words [behind the award]. There should also be some action. And action is what we haven’t seen much of yet. This has to be in anticipation of something later, that the [Nobel] committee believes that he is capable of realizing some of the good intentions he has.

                          

A bad hand. Las Vegas is used to pulling through even when the rest of the USA is in crisis. But it’s not like that anymore. The financial crisis has hit the casinos, while the housing market has collapsed – and these days Las Vegas is the city in the USA where the most people are put out on the street.

It’s easy to see why Hansen and Hebsgaard chose Las Vegas specifically for their “US metropolis in economic crisis” feature. Predominating above all must have been the way that city exerts a certain fascination upon most foreigners, in that it is literally impossible for them to find an analogue to it in their own countries (no matter where they may be from – the gambling paradise of Macao, off the southern coast of China, probably comes the closest), and therefore to easily understand the place. Like an unconquered peak to a mountaineer, Vegas must represent to the ambitious journalist the same sort of challenge, defying one to ever come to grips with it, to ever master what really makes the place tick.

As a second reason, these days it also conveniently happens to be true that the Las Vegas economy features some of the worst economic statistics in the entire USA. Naturally, Hansen and Hebsgaard tick that box and reel these off: unemployment now at over 10%; 67% of local mortgage-holders are under water (meaning that they hold mortgages on their dwellings worth more than they are currently worth on the market); and in fact local real estate prices have fallen by as much as 80% (at least in the estimation of one local agent, by the name of Marshall Zucker, whom the authors engage to gain some insight on the market). Plus, as hinted at in the lede, they declare Vegas to “have the dubious honor of being the American champion in the number of forced sales.”

The article then ambles further along fairly predictable lines. There’s the local real-estate-agent couple, namely Marshall Zucker and his wife Barbara, who sigh for the good old days, of not so long ago, when (and I really have to quote here) “houses were sold before they were finished, and when ordinary couples from other cities invested their savings in houses in Las Vegas, with only an eye to selling them on” – or, to use the precise American terminology, with only the intention of “flipping” them in the near future for a healthy profit. Ah yes – good times, the Golden Age! And then Barbara chips in further with a tale of how, when a new casino opened for business, she heard that 2,000 people stood in line just to be able to apply for a job on the cleaning-crew. “I chatted with a woman who worked before as a restaurant chef,” says Barbara, “and she would have gladly taken this job.”

Stipulated, then: things are bad, really bad, in Sin City, there’s great suffering. Cue now “Angel with Heart of Gold,” stage left. Julie Murray, founder and head of Three Square, a two-year-old food-bank charity supported by casinos, restaurants, and private citizens, comes into the picture. At Three Square they really tried hard to plan ahead for what the need would be for their food-providing services, but still were shocked and overwhelmed by what reality turned out to be, namely (through 2008) 15,000 new households that turned to them for assistance, giving them a present total of around 210,000 Las Vegas residents (out of a total estimated population for 2008 of 1,865,746, so one-in-nine) who rely on Three Square to be able to eat.

Resurrection – Through Virtue!

Finally, of course, bring on the starry optimism, the anticipation of the Happy Ending. Speaking of Murray, the authors write:

But the city will come out of it yet, she believes – if it can only reinvent itself and bang the drum for its many good offerings. She therefore applauds the efforts to sell the city on the basis of cheap hotel rooms available for serious conferences, instead of tinsel and glamor ["tinsel and glamor" in Danish is actually "glimmer og glamour" - poetic!].

Don’t laugh – yet – for even before it gets around to Julie Murray this article has explained how that is precisely the strategy that the Las Vegas Convention and Visitor’s [sic] Authority has taken up to try to reverse the city’s economic fortunes in the face of the troubled times (as well as President Obama’s inadvertent affront to the city in February, when he warned the country’s bailed-out banks from using their new government money to head off to conventions in Vegas). That’s right: in the city’s current marketing campaigns gambling, and “sin” generally speaking, and “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas,” is out while economy and a serious environment for holding serious conferences is in – just as the head of Three Square prescribes.

The trouble is, it’s not working, as further figures Hansen and Hebsgaard bring forth attest. For January through May of this year the number of conference-visitors fell by 29%, the total number of visitors by 7%, gaming income by 13% and the average price for a hotel room by 27%. And here let us return to what I postulated was the primary reason foreign correspondents like to write about Las Vegas: it’s so hard to understand! And, try as they might to understand it, too often they simply fail! (As does, apparently, one of the sweetest, most charitable personalities in the city itself, I have to venture.)

Because Las Vegas cannot be “economical” and “serious”! “Sin” – broadly stated – and “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” (and yes, organized crime) has always been what the place (known as Sin City, after all) has always been about, and at least most Americans understand that very well. You don’t go to Las Vegas to be “serious”; I am confident that librarian conventions, say, never ever consider it a suitable locale. Look at its history: the place did not even get off the ground until gambling was legalized there in the early 1930s and, reportedly, a series of “mob boss summit meetings” (Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, et al.) essentially resulted in the decision “Let there be Vegas!”

Porn Exhibit “A”

But don’t take my word for it. Consider instead the following delightful piece of recent serendipity, and it’s in English, too, from the LA Times: Porn museum nestled in Las Vegas. Now that’s a link designed for high click-through rates – yes, I know you well, my dear reading audience, I know what you like! – but for appearance’s sake let me offer a quote anyway, on the pretense that you wouldn’t think of heading off to read the article yourself:

In typically atypical [sic] Vegas style, the museum is next to a strip club and just a G-string’s throw from Donald Trump’s glittering five-star hotel. Although porn is playing on several of the 45 flat-screen TVs, it’s not being shown lasciviously in some darkened room. It’s part of the museum’s educational displays.

Please note that this Vegas “porn museum” opened “about a year ago.” So much for that “economical” and “serious” advertising campaign; I guess these porn-proprietors missed out on the memo. But that’s really my point: Las Vegas cannot help being what Las Vegas fundamentally is, and what it is has nothing and can have nothing to do with “economical” and “serious.” Before that ever happens – and things might very well come to this, who knows – the city will have instead shriveled up instead from within an economically-desperate country that has not been able to afford to gamble and otherwise go wild in the classic Vegas way for years, and all that the passer-by in the hot Nevada desert will see left will be one last neon sign, Ozymandias-like, imploring him to “Look on my gambling works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

                          

The EU punks the American government on climate questions, and the USA is behind due to the Bush administration. But when it comes to measures for the coming years, the EU has nothing for the Americans to hear, say experts.

(Yes, I have to assume that that Danish punker corresponds to “punks,” from “to punk,” as in “to rag on, to give someone a hard time about,” even though that meaning of “punk” is some rather obscure American street-slang – with which I myself am nonetheless familiar from the past, by the way. That’s simply the meaning called for by the context.)

The ultimate point here is a counterintuitive one. As Nielsen notes, the EU in particular loves to upbraid the American authorities for dragging their feet on anti-climate change measures, and it’s true that there was absolutely no progress on this during the George W. Bush years while the Europeans already succeeded in reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions somewhat compared to the 1990 baseline. But going forward, US “ambitions” for addressing climate change can actually be regarded as superior to those of Europe.

The key element here is the Waxman-Markey bill on climate change and carbon credits, which passed the US House of Representatives in June and which President Obama hopes to have signed by the time he heads off to the great international climate-change summit in Copenhagen coming up at the beginning of December. On the face of things, the seven percent reduction in US greenhouse gas emissions that that piece of legislation aims for pales before stated EU objectives of a 20% reduction by the year 2020, and even a 30% reduction if other developed countries agree to accomplish roughly the same.

But Nielsen engages here a couple of independent environmental experts to look into these matters more deeply; the result is not so much that the US plans (again, as embodied in Waxman-Markey) come out looking better, but that EU plans come out looking worse. For one thing, the EU is already on-line to fulfill its obligations for greenhouse gas reduction to 2020 under the Kyoto Treaty, namely by 8% from the 1990 baseline, so its new ambition to accomplish 20% instead only ups the ante by another 12%. But the main thing is that EU law allows countries to gain credit towards fulfilling their greenhouse gas-reduction obligations by purchasing “CO2 credits” from undeveloped lands which naturally do not pollute as much, as a substitute for actually taking measures to reduce those gases at home. (One expert also adds that those CO2 credits are often bogus, i.e. do not really represent true CO2 emission reduction.) Under Waxman-Markey, the US can also buy such “CO2 credits,” but they cannot be used to fulfill the mandtory reduction quotas. Finally, Waxman-Markey includes an interesting provision earmarking some of the money the US Government expects to earn from selling carbon credits to domestic businesses to create a fund devoted to the preservation of (greenhouse gas-eating) natural forests in undeveloped lands. This is supposedly a highly-effective measure, and there’s nothing similar to it in anything the EU does.

Ah . . . But Will It Pass in the First Place?

The general assessment going forward, then, is that the US is set to make greater anti-climate change progress than the Europeans – again, under the assumption of Waxman-Markey. Ay, but there’s the rub . . . in a sidebar to the article, entitled “USA’s climate law can have decisive consequences for the climate summit,” Nielsen basically undercuts his argument in the main article by showing how doubtful it is that that the Waxman-Markey bill will be able to pass the hurdle that is the US Senate. For one thing, it’s a well-known fact by now that it takes at least a super-majority of 60 to pass anything there. That total may be unreachable because several Democratic Senators look at that legislation with a wary eye, fearing that it could destroy manufacturing jobs in their states. Or it could simply be watered-down to enable it to pass, in which case Nielsen’s entire analysis in the main article similarly goes out the window.

He cites John Kerry, chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, as stressing that Waxman-Markey or any similar environmental bill should not even be brought to a vote before the Senate unless its sponsors are certain that it will pass, lest a legislative failure put off sentiment in the Senate for doing anything about climate change for years. In fact, Kerry is already worried enough to be thinking about a “Plan B”: let Obama go to Copenhagen without any US-passed climate-change legislation, and instead use the results and ringing declarations from that summit to then go back and pressure the Senate to finally pass it.

Sound lame to you? (No wonder Kerry lost the presidency in 2004 – although maybe he is only being realistic.) It also sounds lame to an unnamed climate-change expert from the World Wildlife Fund whom Nielsen quotes: “[A] clear American position is a decisive precondition for a climate agreement in Copenhagen. If the Americans bring nothing? [Then] forget everything about a Copenhagen agreement.”

Still, that dispiriting result seems to be a very real danger. Until then, though, you Europeans need to stop all your lecturing of the Americans: what they theoretically desire to enact as anti-climate change legislation, at least, is superior to what you actually have enacted.

UPDATE: I was wrong! “To punk” has now seemingly made the mainstream.

                          

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage.

Along the way, he does manage to unearth some unconventional points-of-view. The most remarkable one comes from one Ali Alfoneh, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science. You’d expect Alfoneh to be well-versed in political theory and history, and his take on the current troubles in Iran bear that out: he sees Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as aspiring to follow in the power-politics footsteps of Mao and Stalin, through engineering a crude electoral swindle that deliberately provokes his regimes opponents to come out onto the streets in protest – so that he can identify them all the more easily, brutally eliminate them under a state of martial law (this includes eventual show-trials and executions of all the opposing electoral candidates), and so consolidate his hold on state power for quite some time to come. In this perspective, the presidential election was for sure stolen, indeed obviously so, but the “obviousness” – and so the implicit “insult to the intelligence of the Iranian electorate” that so many other commentators have inferred from that – was entirely the point.

Alfoneh adds that all of this was something that Ahmadinejad was not in a position to pull off back in 2005, when he did manage to win the Iranian presidency for the first time in a run-off against Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. But in the interim, he claims, the president has managed to stock much of the government with his supporters: “half of the parliament consists of former Revolutionary Guards,” and the same is apparently true of the government itself. (Note that this is a base of power in the military, not in the Shiite mullah establishment.) So basically Ahmadijenad could be confident that he could approach the 2009 presidential election not really needing to worry about actually submitting his performance to a popular referendum – he could regain his office and keep his power in better, longer-lasting way.

Wait! They Really Do Love Ahmadinejad!

But then, in the middle of his article, Relster throws us a curve ball by bringing up the controversial opinion-piece in the Washington Post a week ago in which authors Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty claimed that their polling research showed that it was in fact quite plausible that the 62% election-result officially attributed to Ahmadinejad was true and fair. (This view has in the meantime been disproved by a number of analyses, the latest of which is a Chatham House study reported on in Juan Cole’s Informed Comment weblog, but maybe Relster hasn’t yet gotten this memo.) So what harm does this twist in the scenario do to Alfoneh’s argument? Actually, not much: while a really, truly valid 62% would not have been something Ahmadinejad planned to include for carrying out his purported conspiracy, in the end it didn’t matter anyway, because the opposition rose up in revolt nevertheless.

In any event, Andreas Relster is nothing if not an assiduous surveyor of Iran-experts; if you want another commentator willing to accept the Ballen/Doherty argument that that 62% level of support for the current president was real, you got it, in the form of one Abbas Barzegar, himself a Ph.D. student (but at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, GA), who also is described as “the Guardian’s” man [i.e. the British newspaper the Guardian] in Iran,” who was visiting there the very week before the 12 June election. Barzegar pooh-poohs the very thought that the current regime in Tehran is in any trouble; “intellectuals, academics and other so-called experts” have been predicting its fall ever since the 1979 revolution, all in vain. But in fact, Iran is not just only Tehran, President Ahmadinejad still commands the support of a large majority of the population, and Mir Hussein Mousavi’s big protest movement is based upon nothing more than delusions.

In fact, take a good look at this Mousavi fellow, Barzegar urges us, and with good reason: he was Iranian prime minister after the Revolution, for most of the 1980s. So he was both very involved in that Revolution (including some of its after-events, like the American-hostage affair – so that, although Ahmadijenad himself is widely thought to have been a student at the time actively involved in storming the embassy and guarding the hostages, Mousavi was actually involved with a more responsible role) and very close afterwards to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Why, Mir Hussein Mousavi is much more representative of that original 1979 Islamic revolution – which made Iran into the country with the unique theological-political government that it is today – than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could ever be! The only reason the former has now metamorphosed into the people’s champion is that everyone conveniently forgotten that past political history – he took 20 years off starting in the late 1980s (when the post of prime minster was abolished) to lie low for awhile!

Andreas Relster has really come up with some live ones here, has he not? To be sure, he cites some other people in his article as well who express views which are a bit closer to the accepted narrative of the Iranian protestors coming out to risk life and limb in a quest for democracy, like Rasmus Christian Elling, an academic at the University of Copenhagen specializing in the Middle East and Central Asia. Elling, while not quite yet ready to characterize what is happening in Iran as a “revolution,” is clear in his mind that the actions the government took in the immediate wake of the election – shutting down the telephones and the Internet, sending security forces out into the streets, arresting opposition politicians and journalists – do constitute a political coup. Still, he also offers the following further caution: “It’s important to keep in mind that it is not only Ahmadinejad who is accused of trying a coup. Many Iranians regard the present demonstrations as the real attempt at a coup, with Rafsanjani the man behind it, holding the reins” – and so with Mousavi apparently as only Rafsanjani’s tool or even puppet.

But What If Democracy Wins?

Anyway, dear readers, there is your healthy serving of some quite alternative views of what is going on now in Iran, all thanks to Andreas Relster and Information – which is indeed known for both its high intellectual level and its defying of conventional wisdom (yes, usually from a leftist perspective). I hope it all wasn’t too disillusioning for the Iran-as-American-Revolution picture many of you might have had in your heads up to now. Especially if you have read this post down this far, you deserve a little intellectual relief, a little good news about what is happening there, so I’d like to discuss as well a remarkable commentary from the German newspaper Die Welt, What happens if Democracy wins in Iran?, by Hannes Stein (and I don’t know whether that’s a man or a woman’s name: maybe someone can enlighten me with an e-mail). Placed just above an inspiring photo of a banner bearing the hand-written words for Freedom in both Farsi and English, here is the piece’s lede:

Let’s imagine that the democratic revolution in Iran meets with success. What then? WELT ONLINE dares to undertake that thought-experiment: The entire MidEast could experience freedom and prosperity. Iranians and Israelis would love each other, and Iranian whiskey would be a sales-hit.

Sounds pretty wild, doesn’t it. But, like I wrote, that’s just the lede; here is how things would work out in a little more detail, according to the rest of Stein’s article, if (as s/he rather poetically puts it) things ultimately work out the way they did twenty years ago in Leipzig and Dresden and East Berlin:

• An Iran is born that actually reflects the educated and cultured Iranian people, where tolerance, art, and science can bloom. Tourists flock there; the leading national money-earner is no longer oil, but rather the industry and innovation of Iranians themselves, so that the world soon gets to choose among top-class mobile phones, laptops, and autos labeled “Made in Tehran.” (And, yes, there arises first-class Iranian whiskey, too.)
  
• More importantly, though, with the rise of a new Iran the Middle East now becomes a much more peaceable region since, as Stein maintains, it was never the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off but rather that between hard-line Shiite Iran and the region’s Sunni Arab regimes that was always the fundamental problem in the first place. Now “the Near East could awake out of its fevered fundamentalist dream”; radical groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah wither on the vine as their support was cut off, and Syria finds itself politically isolated.
  
• Meanwhile, Iran extends a friendly hand to Israel; mutual embassies open up on Teheran and Tel Aviv, while both El Al and the Iranian national airways begin flights the other way and citizens exchange vacation-visits in each other’s land. Further from Stein: “Young men from Isfahan and Golbahar will get to know the night-life on Shenkin Street [that's in Tel Aviv]. Young Israeli women will plunge into amorous adventures in Shiraz and Mashad.” The Iranian president – whoever he is – visits the Wailing Wall wearing a yarmulke – and, Stein again, “suddenly the union [?] of Israel with the Palestinians will no longer seem so utopian.”
  
• Of course, Stein saves the best for last: Iranian-American relations. S/he sees President Obama attending a fancy ceremony reopening the same American embassy that was subject to such fierce attack back in 1979, as the US of course resumes full diplomatic and commercial relations. And Iran’s nuclear ambitions? According to Stein’s scenario, in secret talks Obama lets Iranian leaders know that the US is prepared to accept an Iran with nuclear weapons, under the condition that such weapons can never be directed against allied states – most especially Iran’s shining new ally, Israel. Oh, and America’s dependence on Arab oil becomes a thing of the past – replaced by plentiful supplies coming from Iran.

Pretty fantastical, I must say. All that dismisses the intractable, sixty-year-old struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over the lands “of Judah and Samaria” a bit too easily, no? Note also that the new Iranian embassy is posited in this narrative to open in Tel Aviv; the Israelis would no doubt prefer to put it in Jerusalem, as yet another token of recognition of that city as Israel’s official capital, but even a new, enlightened Iranian state would likely have problems with that. And of course there is little evidence so far of anything similar happening – at the economic level, which is most relevant – in present-day Leipzig or Dresden or (East) Berlin.

It’s a nice daydream though, isn’t it – and to think that it was rather that other article, the Danish one in Information, whose title was “Iranian mirage”!

                          

The main reason for this, he declares, is Amazon’s “e-ink” technology, which succeeds in making the Kindle’s screen behave just like the regular ink-on-paper we are all used to from time immemorial: you can read a Kindle directly in sunlight, and, indeed, in the evening you better have some external source of light available somewhere nearby, as usual. But another reason the Kindle seems to have some momentum behind it is that, just like the iPod with iTunes, this content-delivery device comes with an on-line store already stocked with many thousands of bits of content for sale – this time e-books, of course, of which Amazon offers 300,000 and counting – many of which you can certainly assume that you would be interested in reading, if you are into books at all in the first place. And you can even beam them into your Kindle, after purchase, wirelessly.

But it’s precisely that iPod-iTunes analogy that also suggests the Kindle’s biggest drawback, which can be summarized by the letters “DRM” (standing for “digital rights management,” of course). Music bought from iTunes is now no longer hampered by any sort of DRM, but that has only been true as of recently and it seemed that Apple had to go through a long learning process to finally get to the point where the company – and the record companies that were its ultimate suppliers of music – was comfortable doing away with that. On the other hand, e-books from Amazon for the Kindle certainly have DRM restrictions, limiting with whom you can share them and on what sort of machine you can read them. As Thyssen puts it, they are “regionalized” the way we are used to seeing with DVDs, and copy-protected the way we were used to seeing with digital music – until iTunes finally did away with DRM.

So in the first place, Thyssen fears that Amazon is dooming itself to relearning the lesson Apple took so long to learn about DRM for iTunes – if the ultimate unsuitability of DRM for books is in fact a valid “lesson” – and its customers to putting up with various forms of DRM for as long as it does so. But he also sees another threat, and this is where the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” metaphor comes into play: Amazon is now aggressively pushing e-books at prices lower than their paper counterparts – apparently against the preference of many of the publishers it works with – because it could thereby eventually manage to dominate the e-book market, with DRM preventing its customers from defecting to other e-book formats. Then someday e-books would not be so cheap anymore, as monopoly pricing would be introduced, and Amazon could further gain who-knows-what other powers over what could be published in the new electronic format that it owned and what could not be.

It seems a legitimate point to make, even as Thyssen tries to illustrate it using what seems to me to be a thoroughly ill-suited example, namely the VHS-vs.-Betamax fued of the mid-1980s. For now, though, he makes it clear that his biggest problem with his Kindle is that its wireless book-delivery service is not available yet outside the US.

                          

The large developing country [i.e. the PR of China] through its loans financed the overconsumption in the USA that launched the global recession and now forces millions in undeveloped countries into unemployment, hunger, and extreme poverty, said the World Bank.

How many millions exactly? The report does provide these numbers: 55-90 million more people in undeveloped countries driven into extreme poverty, 50 million in addition to that made unemployed, and the ranks of the world’s chronically hungry growing to over one billion. China did this (that’s the implication Nielsen draws out from the report) by recycling its dollar earnings from exports to the US through the amassing of incredible quantities of US Treasury debt – $696 billion by the end of last year, now grown to $744 (out of a total amount of foreign-owned US Government debt obligations of $3.1 trillion).

Again, this is probably not the slant that the writers of this report originally intended. It seems clear that their point was rather to warn how the UN’s Millenium Development Goals are in danger of not being achieved by the target date, which is 2015. You probably don’t remember this (I don’t either), but back in September, 2000, there was a “Millenium Summit” held at the UN’s headquarters in New York City, the largest gathering of world leaders in history as of that date, when those leaders committed their countries (192 states in all) to certain anti-poverty/anti-disease goals. But now, the report writes, “it is improbable that most of the eight global goals agreed to can be achieved – among these the goals having to do with hunger, child- and childbirth-mortality, education and progress in the fight against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other serious diseases.” In particular, the report writes off entirely sub-Saharan Africa’s chances of achieving these goals.