possible election results leaked showing fraud

UPDATE: A quick timeline of events. Workers strike called for Tuesday. BBC ordered to leave Iran and officials attempt to arrest BBC crew but are stopped by protesters. Hospitals being surrounded by Iranian forces not allowing treatment to injured protesters.


Twitter is the main source of information coming from Iran now. From what I read the only way to shut down twitter is to shut down the internet itself. I don't know why but I'm really curious to the technical aspects of this. There are lots of proxy servers being set up outside Iran to help the cause. From reports SMS is down and the internet is extremely slow. Here are some other things I've gathered up, mostly from Fark. They appear to have database issues now, but there is a new thread superseding the one I posted earlier. Check Fark Politics for the latest thread.

From Telegraph:

The statistics, circulated on Iranian blogs and websites, claimed Mr Mousavi had won 19.1 million votes while Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won only 5.7 million.

The two other candidates, reformist Mehdi Karoubi and hardliner Mohsen Rezai, won 13.4 million and 3.7 million respectively. The authenticity of the leaked figures could not be confirmed.

I'm sure in time we'll find out if these are valid or not.

More photos


what you can do to help

twitter feed on iranian elections

tweeters in iran

I wonder what the US response will be to this. Obama is being impartial now. Mousavi would likely open Iran up to new foreign markets which would be in US business interests, but then Iran wouldn't be the great threat they are now. Although I don't know what Mousavi's stance on Israel is. This could go much further though. There has been a call for Supreme Leader Khamenei to step down. I'm not sure which organization this is coming from, but the demands are:

1. Remove Khamenei from supreme leader
2. Remove Ahmadinejad because he took it forcefully and unlawfully
3. Put Ayatollah Monazeri as supreme leader until a review of the constitution is set up
4. Recognize Mousavi as official president
5. Let Mousavi rule as the constitution is reformed
6. Free all political prisoners, immediately
7. Call off all secret militia and offices

What would the reform of the constitution mean? How big of a part do the working class play in these protests? Could this be a workers revolution? If it looks like the people are trying to take power, and not one bourgeois group from another you will probably see the US get involved to 'assist' with the revolution. We'll see how this unfolds.

more from iran

Fark has an ongoing thread that has a lot of on-the-ground information from Tehran. Twitter is being used to get information out. The Iranian government is trying to crack down so it's been suggested to switch your location to Tehran and time to GMT +0330. I'm not sure how they're looking for users (since I think twitter is blocked, so it might be accessed through proxies, but don't know the technical details) so I suggest doing the same in case it helps.

Twitter also rescheduled downtime due to the Iranian protests. The downtime was initially scheduled for tonight US time, but was moved to 1-2pm PST which is 130am Tehran time. The situation is supposed to escalate Tuesday (so already today in Tehran).

mass protests erupt in Iran over election results

Mass protests have broken out after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won the Iranian presidential election with more than 62 percent of the vote. Ahmadinejad needed over 50 percent of the vote to prevent a runoff election between him and top contender, reformist candidate Mir Hussein Mousavi. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei endorsed the results despite many claims of election fraud. There were expectations of neither candidate acquiring the required 50 percent of the vote and a runoff election taking place. It is estimated that over 100,000 anti-Ahmadinejad protesters have claimed the streets of Tehran, sometimes sparking violence in confrontations with police. The media has been blocked from leaving Iran so size of protests outside Tehran is unknown. Internet websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube along with pro-Mousavi sites have been blocked by the government. An AP photographer has reported that at least one person was killed as the militia fired on a rally. More than 130 prominent Mousavi supporters have been rounded up by police including Mohammad Reza Khatami, the brother of former President Mahmoud Khatami, a former speaker of the parliament, and the son-in-law of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a leader of the 1979 Islamist revolution.

The protests can be seen not just as a challenge to Ahmadinejad but also to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Moderate youth in Iran see a disconnect between their lives and ideas and the Ayatollah's hard-lined religious views. Ahmadinejad was elected as a populist, with policies helping the poor. But constant inflation, harsh penalties against unions, and rollbacks of government subsidies on staples has alienated the working class and poor. Mousavi has called for greater women's rights and political freedom strengthening his support among students and the middle class, but has made no outreach to the working class and poor living the group open to Ahmadinejad.

Even though neither candidate is truly the best choice, mainly due to required approval from the Supreme Leader to run, Mousavi's election would give Iranian people greater freedom to organize and have more control over their country. More importantly, this mass rising is a great opportunity for organization to be formed among the people for sustained grassroots control to not just elect a leader but hold them accountable, something I wish would happen with Obama's presidency. It is unknown if Khamenei will compromise with Mousavi some way or just wait for the protests to die down or crush them if they don't.

UPDATE: James sent me a link with some really good photos from Tehran.

flickr

I decided to reactivate my Flikr and use it as a place to put my best photos.

Check it out here. You can always find the link on the right hand menu, too.

photos from day of decision

Here are photos I took from the protests on the Day of Decision, when the California Supreme Court ruled to uphold Proposition 8.

prop 8 upheld, ca to cut welfare

The California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8 yesterday, outlawing gay marriage in the state. Hundreds of protesters marched into the street after the 10am ruling and 175 were arrested for blocking the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Grove Street. The civil disobedience was organized by One Struggle, One Fight. Two litigators who argued against each other in the Bush v. Gore case filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court hoping to bring it to the Supreme Court.

Update: Just found a recent Gallup poll on same-sex marriage. Even though majority of Americans continue to oppose gay marriage, the following graph can simply be called inevitability.




In response to the failed propositions of last weeks special election, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger released a budget plan that would "eliminate welfare, drop 1 million poor children from health insurance, cut off new grants for college students and shut down 80 percent of state parks."

tuesday may 26th

I just got the announcement that the decision will be made on TUESDAY MAY 26th at 10am. Spread the word! Meet at 10am at the California Supreme Court at 350 McAllister St at Civic Center Park. There will be a rally at San Francisco City Hall at 5pm. If you can't make it to San Francisco that day, there are events all over the state and country so check the Day of Decision website. For info on civil disobedience that may be going on check out One Struggle, One Fight.

some interesting statistics on wealth

Just picked up a new book and found this in the intro. This brings me up to 5 books I'm currently reading. I should start prioritizing because I've barely started all 5. The book was printed in 2006.

-The assets of the world's top three billionaires are greater than those of the poorest 600 million people on the planet.
-Globally, there are seventy thousand people who possess more than $30 million in financial assets. Half of the world's 587 billionaires are Americans, whose wealth increased collectively by $500 billion in 2003 alone. They posses the same amount of wealth as the combined gross domestic product of the world's poorest 170 countries combined.
-More than a third of the world's people, 2.8 billion, live on less than two dollars a day.
-1.2 billion people live on less than one dollar a day.

And some stats for the U.S.
-The average compensation in 2004 for the CEOs of the top 367 U.S. companies was $11.8 million, up from $8.1 million in 2003. On average, CEOs in 2004 made 431 times what a production worker made, up from a 107:1 ratio in 1990 and a 42:1 ratio in 1982.
-CEO pay has increased by 300 percent over the last fifteen years, whereas wages have increased in the same period by only 5 percent (and minimum wage workers have seen their pay fall by 6 percent). If wages had kept up with the percentage increase in CEO pay, in 2004 the average pay for production workers would have been $110,136, instead of $27,460.
-The top 20 perfect of American households control 83 percent of the nation's wealth, while the bottom 80 percent of Americans control only about 17 percent of the nation's wealth.
-A total of 34.6 million Americans in 2002, 12.1 percent of the population, lived below the official poverty line, and 8.5 million of them had jobs. Overall, black poverty is double that of whites.

election results

Here are the results of the California Special Election

Proposition 1A: Rainy Day Fund - Yes: 34.2%; No: 65.8%
Proposition 1B: Education Funding - Yes: 37.5%; No: 62.5%
Proposition 1C: Modernize Lottery - Yes: 35.4%; No: 64.6%
Proposition 1D: Child Services Funding - Yes: 34.3%; No: 65.7%
Proposition 1E: Mental Health Budget - Yes: 33.6%; No: 66.4%
Proposition 1F: Elected Official Salaries - Yes: 73.9%; No: 26.1%
[source]

Good thing California voters didn't pass these budget cuts.

Day of Decision

Sometime in the next two weeks the California Supreme Court will rule on the challenge to Proposition 8. The decision will be either next Monday or Thursday, or Tuesday or Thursday of the following week. You can sign up for a mobile alert here, which we will get 24 hours prior to the ruling. If the ruling upholds Prop 8 there will be civil disobedience organized by One Struggle, One Fight. Otherwise there will be a celebration. Come show your support! For more information visit the Day of Decision website.