It’s almost impossible to see what’s going on in Iran and not bring in the grandest human frameworks of Justice, Freedom, Right vs. Wrong, and Good vs. Evil.  The men currently controlling Iran’s theocratic totalitarian government seem as sinister and vile as a Sith Lord or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.  They’re violently repressing a people desperately struggle for the right to choose their own path in life.

To live as they choose, not as they’re forced to on fear of death.

Thing is, the men holding the reigns of coercive power in Iran are just men.  They aren’t supernatural creatures possessing any fictional powers whatsoever.   Shattering that fantasy, dispelling the alchemic grip on power they seem to have, is an essential step in understanding what’s really going on in any situation – especially this one.

The following passages were sent to me in an email from an Iranian-American whose family has extremely close and very old ties to Iran’s clerical regime.  The same regime that’s currently in power, the one the people are currently revolting against.  He has immediate family members there now so for obvious reasons he doesn’t want to be named, but his words tell the story behind the evening news.

It shows the men in power not as super-villains, but simply as the petty, insecure thieves that they are.  It lifts the veil that masks their true nature, and shows them for who they were before they got the firm grip on power they have now.

And besides that, it’s pretty damn entertaining.

A quick note that’ll help you follow everything: remember that Khomeini is the cleric who lead the ’79 Revolution and who’s since died, while Khamenei is the Supreme Leader now who you see on TV all the time.

“Ruholah Khomeini was born in the rural, desert town of Khomen in 1902.  His last name just means “from the city of Khomen.” Lived there until he was old enough to go to cleric school at which point he moved to Qom to start his schooling. The main place where you can become a certified cleric in Iran is in the city of Qom. All boys who want to become one when they grow up have to leave their family wherever they are living and move there to do their schooling (it’s like the Harvard of Shi’ite Islam).

After several years of learning and being under the advisement of a fully certified cleric, with his approval you become a certified cleric. This is the equivalent to becoming a priest in Catholicism. Although clerics can marry there’s still a catch.

There are harsher punishments if a cleric breaks a code of Islam, just being around a woman without the veil for a cleric warrants the death penalty. In addition to this clerics also must give up all material desires, kind of like Buddhist monks. They aren’t allowed to have material possessions. Furniture is considered a luxury so that’s not allowed either. Most of them live in very small houses with just a kitchen and a place to sleep. They wear a ceremonial robe and these Arab-style slippers.

Now here’s something that you always see but probably miss. Their head-garment. The color of their head-garment means a lot.  It signifies their bloodline. Clerics with a distinct bloodline known as the Saayad bloodline wear black head garments. Anyone not from the bloodline wears white. I call them head-garments instead of turbans because I’m not a racist fuck, and because they aren’t required to cover the whole head, some just put it around like a donut, it really comes down how the cleric wears it. But anyway, the Saayad bloodline requires some explanation of its own before I go on.

Since the creation of their sect, the Shi’ites kept tabs on anyone who had blood relation to the 12 saints of Shi’ite Islam. These records have been passed down for over a thousand years. If you are among the people who are from the bloodline you are considered a Saayad. This only applies to males though. Women have another name for it which I forget right now but I’ll let you know when I remember. The bloodline can only be passed to the next generation through a male as well. It’s designated by giving the person the title of Saayad on their birth certificate although no one uses the title on a daily bases, it’s mostly just for documents and such. If the bloodline reaches a woman and there are no men to carry it on, the title ends there for that family. This is why it is kind of rare to find Saayads these days.

A lot of Saayads, however, are born into religious families since because of their title they have a moral obligation to follow Islam by the book. Because of this, a majority of the clerics are Saayads. It only makes sense that people with a religious title would be born into a religious family and would want to further pursue a career in their religion. During the era of the Shah this stuff didn’t mean crap. It was a title of respect, and nothing more.

However, since the ’79 Revolution, this title could make a huge difference and practically makes you nobility. People with the title gain a lot more respect under a religious government than they did under the Shah. How much this could help someone in their life, lets just say if you want to make friends with people in the government or gain someone’s respect it gives you some leverage. Some people you  know of who are Saayads are: Khamenei, Khomeini, Khatami, and Mousavi.

Back to the clerics. Basically before the ‘79 Revolution the clerics weren’t worth two shits. They just proceeded over weddings and funerals and gave weekly sermons if they had their own mosque. There was really no money in it and because of this most of them were beggars. Khomeini was all about changing all of that.

He believed that religion is above all and that the power should be given to the clerics since they know what’s best for the people. Furthermore, he thought the clerics were under appreciated and that the poor were misrepresented. (He didn’t grow up with the best childhood living in a rural farm and all.) So that was basically his whole campaign for a revolution.

Because of this the government ended up kicking him out and letting him back in multiple times. When they got rid of him he would make secret audiotapes that were sent to the people in Iran spewing his propaganda at them and convincing them that change was needed. It seemed like something that would never happen until the Shah made a stupid mistake…

President Carter made a statement in the media one day about how certain countries need to be more open or they might find themselves undergoing a revolt or big change if they don’t meet the needs of their people (some shit like that, this one little part I got from an Iranian sociology professor rather than my family so I’m a little fuzzy on it, you might already know it better). The Shah became afraid from hearing this and decided to let Khomeini come back and gave people the freedom of speech. Before that if anyone talked badly if the Iranian government they were considered a national threat and were dealt with by the Sovok.

The Sovok was the Iranian equivalent of the KGB in that they had their hand in a little bit of everything, but they were secret at the same time. They were very powerful people, your stereotypical guy in black suit and sunglasses that comes and takes your neighbor away to secretly interrogate him. So after the Sovok wasn’t a threat anymore all the parties that wanted to cause a revolution started going to work, with Khomeini being the strongest voice. People began rioting, just as they did now, and the Shah was a pussy so he gave up and gave him Iran.

Now this is where Khamenei comes in. Khamenei was a worthless beggar before the revolution. He was born and raised in the holy town of Mashad and became a cleric in Mashad.  It’s possible to become a cleric elsewhere, but Qom is where it’s at.  The he decided to go for further learning in Qom.

Oddly, people from the town are famous for being very stubborn and ironically perverted. This can be noticed in the sermons of the clerics from Qom who devote almost all their sermons toward something regarding sex. Don’t believe me? Read Khomeini’s manifesto on the illegality of fucking chickens and what the conditions are for eating a chicken that’s already been fucked. (I’m not joking, it really exists, you can’t make this shit up.)

While there he followed the advisement of Khomeini and at that point became involved in politics. From then on he followed Khomeini and his ideals. However when Khomeini was outcast from Iran, Khamenei was arrested and afterward agreed to stop conspiring against the government and went back to teaching. This wasn’t enough to make ends meet though – you won’t ever read this shit in wikipedia or any textbooks – and when he moved to Iran he had to beg for money, often playing the bongos in return for change to get by.

Seriously, he hung out on street corners playing the fucking bongos.

People say he had a scooter he always rode around and would ride around in traffic, asking people for change at stop lights and such too. Well after the revolution happened, Khamenei’s devotion to Khomeini paid off and he became a key figure in the government of Iran since then. He became the first cleric to serve as the president of Iran in 1981. I’ll spare you the rest of this stuff since you can find a lot of it on wikipedia.

Now going onto the government and why the people are sick and tired of it. Basically, the government hasn’t stayed true to its promise, and the poor are still poor and the rich were driven out of Iran pretty much. The clerics have all the money. The average salary of an Iranian is equal to about $300 a month, which is pretty good with their cost of living…. the average cleric makes $50,000 a month just for being a cleric, and $500,000 a month if they actually preach at a mosque. Compare that to the cost of living here, and their salary would well over $1,000,000 a month just for sitting on your ass and wearing a fancy robe.

Also, many of the clerics have gone against their teachings, you can see a lot of them wearing fancy Italian shoes and expensive slacks. This goes against the teachings of anti-materialism that they learned. Also Khamenei, the poster boy for clerics, moved into a mansion about 20 years ago with the excuse that he needed it for extra protection.  (No one knows the location of his house as it’s kept secret for his protection.)

The reason the people are so pissed off now isn’t just because the elections were supposedly rigged. It’s also because the government spends too much money serving the clerics (majority of taxes go toward “religious funds” which translates to the clerics’ salaries). Also the government has ownership over 100% of business and all institutions. Even private businesses are technically owned and monitored by the government. These were all things that Mousavi promised to stop, he also promised to get rid of Iran’s bad image of Anti-America and Anti-Israel

In reality most Iranians don’t give two shits about the affairs of a bunch of Palestinians that throw rocks over a country the size of Delaware.”

– learn more about Tremble the Devil –

California is going to explode. And it’s not just because of the $18.6 billion dollars in cuts that Arnold is going to have to make, which is going to include eliminating entire welfare programs.

The budget crisis, unemployment, all of that is going to the last of your average Californian’s worries before the summer’s out.   Probably the last of  many of our worries, as what begins in California will inevitably spread to many of our doorsteps. Getting to that point though,  that requires a little bit of explaining.

In one of the opening scenes of the coming-of-age cinematic classic Dazed and Confused, the history teacher yells after her class on the last day of school that over the summer during the holiday weekend “when you’re being inundated with all this American bicentennial Fourth Of July brouhaha,”  they shouldn’t forget “what you’re celebrating, and that’s the fact a bunch of slave-owning, aristocratic, rich white males didn’t want to pay their taxes.”

There’s a lot of truth to that sentiment, although it’s not something anyone studies much in high school – where we focus on the social and philosophical elements of the American Revolution and, for the most part, ignore its underlying economic element. But if those rich white men had been taxed more fairly, the Revolution might never have occurred.  Something you’re reminded of every time you see the cheeky slogan on a DC license plate.
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When you are sworn into Federal Court, you are exhorted to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”  Each of these phrases carries a slightly different angle against any possible lie – not only are you swearing to speak the truth, but also to not hold any part of the truth back, and to not mix in lies among the truth you do tell.  And so by its own standards, the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics has been openly and unabashedly lying about the racial divisions that remain within the American penal system for at least the past five years.

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Things had been looking up for black families, back in 1963 as MLK gave his “I Have A Dream” speech about 70% of black families were headed by a married couple. But that percentage steadily began to drop, between 1970 and 2001 it declined by 34%, double the white decline, and by 2002 it had bottomed out at just 48%.

In fact, the impact of the War on Drugs has been so racially biased that in 2006 America had nearly six-times the proportion of its black population in prison than South Africa did at the height of Apartheid. And our penal system has grown so massive that the U.S. criminal justice system now employs more people than America’s two largest private employers, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, combined.

The explaination is not that blacks simply use drugs at a higher rate than whites. If anything, studies have shown that whites, “particularly white youths, are more likely to engage in drug crime than people of color.” Surveys published by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse reported that compared to black students: white students were seven times as likely to use cocaine, eight times as likely to use crack cocaine, seven times as likely to use heroin, and were 33% more likely to have sold illegal drugs.

And although only 14% of all illicit drug users are black, blacks make up over half of those in prison for drug offenses. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life.

After all, drug laws in America “have originally been based on racism… all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot.” Nixon’s public motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War.

Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there’s no way in hell drug-using veterans was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers’ addiction as opportunistic displacement. As one Nixon’s Chief of Staff wrote in his diary: “Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.”

And if there’s any doubt about the weight that quote might have had on legislation, here are Nixon’s own words on abortion: “There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. ” And when exactly would that be? “When you have a black and a white.”

As the Arab world is wracked by the spasms of popular violence brought on by their social and economic inequality, many Americans have begun to stop and consider the possibility that violent fissures in our own society may begin to open. Much has been made of the emerging upperclass in American society, but the reality is that with the median white family having over twenty-times as much wealth as a black family – no economic disparity is starker than the one that correlates directly with race.

Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you that the average black family has eight-cents of wealth for every dollar of wealth owned by whites, that the the ongoing recession has doubled the wealth gap between blacks and whites, or that the unemployment rate of blacks is edging up on twice as high as the white rate – easily surpassing it when you count incarcerated blacks. After all, a black child in American is nine-times more likely than a white child to have a parent who’s locked up.

But let’s look into the data and the implications a little bit more.

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated.”

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller drug laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.” Direct empirical research into incarceration’s economic effects weren’t done until recently, when a Pew Charitable Trusts research paper showed that prior to imprisonment two-thirds of male inmates were employed and half were their family’s primary source of income. Additionally, upon release an ex-con’s annual earnings were reduced by 40%

In the nearly forty years since America’s modern drug laws were passed, there has been a massive increase in economic inequality by any measure. In the early 1970’s not only did the income gap between black and white begin to widen again, it also becomes much more top-heavily favored to the very rich – who happen to be almost exclusively white as well.

With home equity making up 44% of an average American’s family’s net worth and fully 60% among our middle class,³¹ the statistics around homeownernship further delineate the racial schisms of American wealth. Not only do blacks pay higher interest rates, have higher downpayments, have less access to credit, get turned down more frequently for loans no matter what’s controlled for, and pay what amounts to an 18% “segregation tax” because homes in black neighborhoods have much less equity than homes in white neighborhoods³² – but since 1970 black homes have appreciated in value roughly half as much as white homes.

Even Eminem seemed to have little sense of the irony that was invoked as his self-consciously white autobiographical film, 8 Mile, highlighted the hopeless plight of Detroit’s urban black community that’s existed for generations. The 8 Mile district was created in 1941, when a six-foot wall was built around a black enclave that was deemed unfit to accept loans from the Federal Housing Administration. This was “part of a system that divided the whole city, in theory by credit-rating, in practice by colour.” And so the segregation that emerged in Detroit “was not accidental, but a direct consequence of government policy.”

The Chinese had tied their yen to it for a time, but they stopped a few years ago.  Industrialized nations the world over hold the dollar as a reserve currency since holding vast amounts of dollars makes buying oil and other commodities cheaper, but some nations want to switch over to the euro or ruble.  And no one even knows how many dollars are even out there, as each and every one of them is in fact loaned into existence.  Our dollars are not backed by a set amount of gold, or a set amount of anything at all – the Federal Reserve simply agrees to electronically conjure them up as it sees fit.

This is a difficult and paradoxical concept, but here’s an explanation that will help: Imagine that you borrow ten-dollars from your friend Rob, and write him a note saying IOU Ten Bucks.  Your friend Mary then needs to borrow ten-dollars, and so you pass the ten-dollar bill you’d gotten from Bob on to her, and she writes you a note saying IOU Ten Bucks.

Now pretend that you or Mary or Bob could walk into almost any store and use the IOU Ten Bucks note instead of a ten-dollar bill to buy some coffee or a book.  So if you pretend each IOU Ten Bucks note can be actually used as a ten-dollar bill, there are thirty usable units of currency in circulation even though there’s just one ten-dollar bill.

Well, you don’t have to pretend.  Because that’s really what you’re doing every single day.

Every single strip of printed currency is actually an IOU Note, it’s just that the entities that did the lending are enormous, private financial institutions like banks and mortgage companies.² And chances are you’ve never used printed money to make a purchase of more than one-hundred bucks anyways, the vast majority of our financial interactions are purely electronic.  When’s the last time you mailed $250 in cash to Pepco, or put down a down payment of more than $50 on anything?

If all the clients of a bank showed up demanding to cash-out their accounts, no bank in the country would be able to supply them with the cash – because there simply aren’t anywhere near enough real American dollars in the world to cover all of the electronic, loaned, IOU Note, American dollars out there.

Understanding this concept is at the core of understanding the ongoing mortgage and credit crises.  If your friends full-names were Fannie Mary and Bob Sterns, all that’s happened is your friend Bob wanted to buy from a store that won’t accept IOU Notes, and has come back for that ten-dollars he originally lent you, so you go to Mary with the IOU Note which she wrote you – but all she has is an IOU Note from someone else since she too lent the ten-dollar bill out.

And that someone also lent the ten-dollar bill out for an IOU Note, so if there are five or six more people down the line the original ten-dollars now represents almost one-hundred IOU Note dollars.  Instead of IOU Notes we just have mortgages and car loans.

That’s the simple and inescapable reality at the core of our economic predicament, which just gets more complicated as you substitute nations for individuals, electronic exchanges for written IOU Notes, and more and more layers of lending.

On top of that, there’s the role the American dollars plays as an international currency reserve, since the most industrialized nations want to hold as many dollars or IOU Notes as they can, a kind of inflation sink is created.  But there’s one very exposed and brittle gear in the machine our country depends on.

Our present geo-economic system only begin forty-years ago, back when you could supposedly still redeem your printed dollars for a set amount of gold bullion.  But then De Gaulle and other heads of state, suspecting we were printing way more dollars than we had gold to back, tried to cash in France’s bucks for gold.

De Gaulle and the rest of the world were right, and so in response the U.S. “closed the gold window” and told the world they were going to just keep on printing out – really, loaning out – dollars as they saw fit.

In response, the world pretty much just shrugged and international financial interactions went along as they had before.  There wasn’t really much reason to make much of a fuss, as the most powerful nations in the world had agreed in the Bretton Woods agreement to accept the dollar as the international reserve currency.  So in the years since then countless billions of dollars have been loaned into electronic existence across the globe since there was no practical way to replace all of them.

Two other important gears connect to this one: the Carter Doctrine of defending our Gulf oil interests at any cost, and Saudi Arabia’s decision to only allow their oil to be purchased in dollars.

Exactly how big each of these gears is and precisely how they effect each other is impossible to see.  There are now uncountable trillions of electronic American dollars in existence across the globe, and no one, including the Saudis themselves, know how much extractable oil is left beneath their sands.  The world just knows the dollar is the most important international currency unit, and Saudi Arabia has the largest remaining oil reserves on the planet.

But even though there’s no way to tell how these gears work together, the fact remains that the relationship is there as a vital part of the international economic system, maybe even the most important one.  Should Saudi Arabia decide to stop accepting dollars for oil, or even just accept other world currencies, these two gears would be wrenched apart and the economic system we have now would end.

As bad as the current crisis may be, the essential underpinnings of the system have remained intact.  The Stock Market has crashed before, that doesn’t mean the entire system will come crashing down with it.  Detaching the dollar from Saudi oil would unavoidably cause a much more dire result.

Our American economic machine, which has been leaking and sputtering for several months now, would simply grind to a screeching and violent halt.

Looking at America’s confrontation with Iran like a chess match you see the obvious threats, the potential checkmates: an American naval blockade of Iran or an outright airstrike against Iranian nuclear sites, and Iran’s threat to sink oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz or launch missiles at America bases in Iraq and at oil facilities across the Gulf.  Which is why you should remember that chess doesn’t serve as a good metaphor for geopolitics, and it shouldn’t worry anyone too much that Persians invented the game.

But if the Middle East is one big, brown, sandy poker table – a much more interesting analysis can be made.

There are several players sitting at it.  Including America and Iran, there’s also Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Israel playing each and every pot  along with a few smaller more disreputable characters like Hezbollah and Halliburton.

More than just chips in play, occasionally someone will bet blood, bombs, or treasure – the proverbial shirt off their backs – and raise the stakes.  The game’s not entirely straight up, sometimes during a hand Iran will lift up one of their hole cards to show Russia, and another to China, but not both to either one and never showing a single card to America or Israel.  And sometimes America will chase Iran out of a pot that Israel is also in after Iran re-raises Israel’s initial bet.