Iran News Round Up November 23, 2011

Politics

* Hassan Rouzitalab, former Iran journalist, comments on yesterday's police attack against Iran's office in Tehran: "The attack reminded of the hooligan raid against the newspapers during the Mosaddeq era."

Diplomacy

* Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani: "The West should not imagine that sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran will go unanswered. Certainly, Iran will reassess its relations with countries supporting this plan... Behavior of certain countries like the United States and Britain arises from a kind of backwardness... It seems as if the new sanctions regime of the European Union against the Islamic Republic is rooted in collapse of their dictator lackeys in the region... The Islamic revolution has had a central role in regional affairs the impact of which was collapse of dictators dependent on the West, but the new sanction is also to a degree related to the futile efforts of the West in the Security Council or the IAEA... Their steps will not have any impact on the nuclear program."

Economy

* Davoud Danesh-Jafari, former Finance Minister: "In one sentence one can say that this plan [reform of the subsidies system] is aimed at helping the defective production patterns of the country and its reform in order to increase productivity... Production was not the main goal of economic actors and the goal could not be achieved without reforming the subsidies system. Another goal of this plan was to increase investments. All these goals could only be reached when the subsidies system had been reformed... However, in practice and after the reform of the subsidies, what happened was that we pass good laws, but their face challenges in their realization. Ninety to 95% of the results of this plan were transferred to the bank accounts of the people and nothing was left to the productive units or the state-owned enterprises... This happened at the time when the government ordered the producers not to increase the price of the products, and the market too could not pay [the increased price]... I studied a ceramics factory where the production cost has increased 25% and according to the government's decree, the price had to be increased with 10%, but because of low demand, the price was in practice increased with 6%... I predict that we will experience electricity outages in the coming three years and it should not surprise us. When we don't invest in power plants, we will experience electricity deficit and naturally we can only deliver electricity through a rationing scheme... It is this type of planning which makes the Housing Ministry build thousands of housing units which the Energy Ministry can't supply with water and electricity..."

Military and Security

* Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei visits the family of Hassan Tehrani-Moqqadam.
* Mohammad Tehrani-Moqqadam retracts his earlier statement about his brother, Hassan Tehrani-Moqqadam, the late Revolutionary Guards Self Sufficiency Organization commander, having died in an explosion "caused by unsuccessful test firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile."
* Bahram Hosseini Motlaq, Tehran Seyyed al-Shohada Revolutionary Guards unit commander, says 15,000 Basij members have passed "a course in blogging."
o Hossein Hamadani, Greater Tehran Mohammad Rasoulallah Revolutionary Guards unit commander, on the other hand, says only 2,000 bloggers have been trained to participate in "cyber warfare."
* Shafaf News releases a background article about AEI resident fellow Ali Alfoneh whom it depicts as "the man behind the psychological operation against the Revolutionary Guards."
* [E] The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) controls the US warships and every other vessel which intends to pass through the Strait of Hormoz, Iranian Supreme Leader's top advisor for military affairs Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi said on Wednesday.

Nuclear Issue

* Esmail Kowsari, parliamentary National Security Committee deputy, says a new generation of centrifuges now in use in Iran.

Source: IranTracker