On Sep 20, 2007, at 1:32 PM, uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
> Robert Tait in Tehran
> Thursday September 20, 2007
> The Guardian
>
> Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suffered an embarrassing
> blow to
> his prestige after his own party attacked him for adopting a
> jocular tone
> towards inflation at a time of rampant price rises.
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2172852,00.html
The rest of the piece is quite excellent:
> The Islamic Revolution Devotees Society - a fundamentalist grouping
> of revolutionary veterans co-founded by Mr Ahmadinejad - has added
> its voice to a rising chorus of economic discontent by warning the
> president that spiralling living costs are hurting the poor and
> undermining his stated goal of social justice.
>
> The society says the government is to blame because it embarked on
> extravagant projects while failing to control the money supply.
> "Unrestrained inflation increases the pressure on the weak and
> leads to the poor becoming poorer as owners of non-monetary assets
> get richer," it says in an economic report. "The result is counter
> to the goals, plans and slogans of Dr Ahmadinejad's government."
> The report also accuses Mr Ahmadinejad and other officials of
> refusing to acknowledge the problem and of making light of it with
> inappropriate jokes. It says: "Sometimes some high-ranking
> government officials deny the growth of prices and deal with them
> through making jokes. To deny the current inflation or ignoring it
> through jokes is totally unacceptable."
>
> Mr Ahmadinejad has frequently dismissed complaints of rising prices
> as the invention of a hostile media and blamed "secret networks"
> for rising house prices. This year he responded to MPs' protests
> over the rising price of tomatoes by urging them to visit his local
> greengrocer in Narmak in east Tehran. He also answered recent
> criticism of his policies by saying he took advice from his local
> butcher. "There is an honourable butcher in our neighbourhood who
> knows all the economic problems of the people. I get my economic
> information from him," he said.
>
> The latest report implicitly criticises his contemptuous view of
> economics by describing it as a "specialised science" and says
> Iran's inflationary problems cannot be solved by "ad hoc
> decisions". That may partly refer to one of Mr Ahmadinejad's most
> controversial recent moves in which he ordered banks to cut
> interest rates to 12% - below inflation, which is estimated at
> between 20% and 30%.
>
> Mr Ahmadinejad is on record as saying, "I pray to God I never know
> about economics". That echoes a comment attributed to the late
> Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran's 1979 Islamic
> revolution, who is alleged to have said that "economics is for
> donkeys".
Secret networks indeed. No wonder Ervand Abrahamian has a book chapter on the paranoid style in Iranian politics.
Doug