Correct. Arts longa, vita brevis. And I dare you say that, despite your polymath tendentencies, you have you not made an intensive study of the procedure aspectys of the Us crimininal justice system or the nature of class actions or the scope of the white collar federal crimes or even the statutury and constitutional basis for US anti-war-on-terror policies. These are things that I have done in between teaching and represebting clients. I am am a time in my life when I have to pick my priorities. It will happen you you, Chomskyain as you are. But I am willing to defer to you on the proposition that the Islamic Republic has improved material living conditions,. That does not, in my view, justify its being a repressive and mysogynist theocracy. As I have said, Stalin's Russia improved material living standards over all. That buys it something, but does not entitle it to our unbualified defense, unless improved living stndards trump all feninist and civil nd political right coniderations.
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/10/07, andie nachgeborenen
> <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > It doesn't settle the issue of whether the current
> > Russian or Iranian government are Good Things even
> if
> > it is established, and with regard to Russia I do
> not
> > dispute that it is true (with regard to Iran I do
> not
> > know) that materially the citizens are better off
> than
> > they were, say, ten years ago.
>
> If you don't know, that's because you haven't cared
> about Iran enough
> to study it and have actually even ignored such
> information as has
> been made available here.
>
> There are many books and articles by Iran Studies
> scholars that are
> worth reading. See, for instance, Djavad
> Salehi-Isfahani (a professor
> of economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute &
> State University),
> "Revolution and Redistribution in Iran: Poverty and
> Inequality 25
> Years Later," August 2006,
>
<http://www.filebox.vt.edu/users/salehi/Iran_poverty_trend.pdf>.
> See,
> especially, "Table 7: Per Capita Income and
> Expenditures Per Day in
> 2004 Rials, 1974-2004" on p. 49, "Table 8: Poverty
> Lines, Consumer
> Price Index, and PPP Exchange Rates" on p. 50, and
> "Table 9: Poverty
> Rates" on p. 51. It is clear from Salehi-Isfahani's
> work as well as
> other studies* of social and economic change in Iran
> over the last
> three decades that the government of Iran, through
> its fiscal policy
> and public investment, has diminished poverty and
> raised the standard
> of living for working people.
>
> In terms of GINI, the story is more mixed. Shortly
> before the
> revolution, near the end of the Shah's regime, GINI
> indexes for both
> urban and rural areas, as shown in "Figure 5: The
> Gini Index of
> Inequality of Household Expenditures, 1971-04" on p.
> 27, rose to
> all-time highs.
>
> Between 1972 and 1977 the Gini index of
> inequality rose
> from 0.4 to 0.5 in urban areas and from 0.37 to
> 0.44 in
> rural areas. The Gini index declined immediately
> after the
> Revolution, to about 0.4 for both rural and
> urban areas
> (Behdad 1989, Nowshirvani and Clawson 1994), but
> rose
> slightly in the 1980s. These changes in
> inequality mirror
> the fall and rise in poverty in the 1980s
> discussed above.
> According to household expenditures the period
> since the
> end of the war with Iraq has been one of general
> stability
> in inequality. Urban inequality which was higher
> than rural
> inequality before the Revolution, has been
> generally below
> rural inequality for the last twenty years. In
> contrast to the
> oil boom of the 1970s, which brought greater
> inequality,
> the latest oil-induced expansion of 2000-2004
> did not
> change the level of inequality; if anything it
> seems to have
> lowered it. . . . Individual earnings also mark
> the rise
> in inequality of earnings in the post reform
> period (after
> 1989) more sharply than household expenditures
> or
> incomes. Signicantly, the higher inequality of
> earnings
> in the post war year has been tempered
> effectively by
> non-earned incomes, which appear to have had
> an equalizing effect." (Djavad Salehi-Isfahani,
> "Revolution and
> Redistribution in Iran: Poverty and Inequality
> 25 Years
> Later," August 2006, pp. 26 and 34
>
<http://www.filebox.vt.edu/users/salehi/Iran_poverty_trend.pdf>).
>
> In other words, after the reduction of inequality in
> the early phase
> of the revolution, neoliberal reforms began, with
> the Rafsanjani
> administration, which made the inequality of
> individual earnings rise
> sharply, and if the overall inequality has been
> stable despite that
> rise, it is only because of the redistributional
> impact of the
> government's expenditures on entitlements, social
> programs, and the
> like. The contours of these changes are important
> to understand.
>
> Lastly, the period under discussion is basically the
> period when many
> nations, in the core as well as in the periphery,
> saw dramatic rises
> in inequality, most strikingly in the USA in the
> core and China in the
> periphery. We ought to recognize the power of
> Iran's working people
> to check the state (the power that workers of many
> other nations do
> not have) in the post-reform period, which, but for
> the fear of
> responses of workers and political instabilities
> they bring, would
> have gone further in the direction of
> liberalization. Even today, the
> levels of inequality and poverty in Iran compare
> favorably to those of
> Venezuela. In Venezuela, "The Gini coefficient was
> 0.45 during 2006.
> According to government statistics, the percentages
> of poor and
> extremely poor among Venezuelan population were
> 33.9% and 23.2%,
> respectively, in 2006. These high ratios are due
> primarily to lower
> real wages earned by employees, and high rates of
> un- and
> underemployment" ("Background Note: Venezuela,"
> February 2007,
> <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/35766.htm>).
>
>
> * E.g,
>
>
<http://web.worldbank.org/external/default/main?pagePK=51187349&piPK=51189435&theSitePK=312943&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=312984&theSitePK=312943&entityID=000090341_20041207102532&searchMenuPK=312984&theSitePK=312943>
> Primary Health Care and the Rural Poor in the
> Islamic Republic of Iran
> Amir Mehryar
> 2004
>
> Abstract: Rural households in Iran have
> traditionally been the most
> disadvantaged segment of Iranian society, not only
> in terms of income
> and political power but also in accessing basic
> public services,
> including health. A major achievement of public
> policy in Iran over
> the past 20 years has been the improvement of rural
> health and the
> near elimination of health disparities between
> higher-income urban
> populations and the rural poor. For example, in 1974
> the infant
> mortality rate was 120 and 62 per thousand live
> births for rural and
> urban areas, respectively. By 2000, however, both
> the level and the
> differential of infant mortality had declined
> considerably, to 30 for
> rural areas and 28 for urban ones.
>
> --
> Yoshie
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
____________________________________________________________________________________ Don't pick lemons. See all the new 2007 cars at Yahoo! Autos. http://autos.yahoo.com/new_cars.html