On Jun 17, 2009, at 11:52 AM, ravi wrote:
> And being fundamentally liberal, they cannot deliver the goods, but
> only promise that the poor's best hopes is in the "rising tide", no?
> Free the Blackberry-toting, texting and twittering crowd and they
> shall lift your lot ("twitter-down" replaces "trickle-down"?). So,
> perhaps you can ask Dabashi (and also take a shot at an answer
> here): is Ahmadinejad unable to deliver a better economy because is
> a charlatan, or because he doesn't understand economics (i.e., he
> doesn't see that laissez-faire liberalism is the only option), or he
> faces the same constraints that any economist populist faces:
> powerful (not necessarily the religious leaders) interests that
> prefer a different outcome?
Insofar as "populist" economics means just spreading around money and deficit spending, it is doomed to fail, since it doesn't transform the productive structure or social relations. Iran needs a new economic model - it's now dominated by oil and merchant capital with little industry. And its society is ossified by the rule of a corrupt clerical class. Ahmadinejad's strategy, it seems to me, has been to use the sedative of free money to perpetuate the status quo.
> And the section I quoted and called for Yoshie in response was to
> point out that her views ("Persian Prince" and all), to me, were a
> lot more palatable and edifying than the sort of Western posturing
> that Dabashi was calling out in his piece, which I tend to associate
> with both the right-wing (which wants a counter-jihad) or a good
> part of the left (Doug Ireland to your garden-variety liberal).
I don't get this at all. You mean you prefer Yoshie's apologias for stonings to the call for an end to rule by the mullahs, even when issued by someone of Iranian origin who's no friend of American imperialism?
Doug