Friday, July 10, 2009

Iran's Shadow Economy and the Real Reason For Diplomacy's Demise


(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

From laser eye surgery and construction to automobile manufacturing and real estate, the IRGC has extended its influence into virtually every sector of the Iranian market... The subtext of this apparent economic populism is, of course, the IRGC’s control of Iran’s shadow economy—the illicit smuggling networks, kickbacks, no-bid contracts, and the accumulation of wealth by its senior officials that remains largely unseen by the Iranian population. Added to this is the inevitable displacement of traditional business elites by its monopolization of key financial sectors. Yet reports of opposition to this growing dominance remain largely at the anecdotal level. - Page 55 of The Rand Corporation's "The Rise of the Pasdaran".

As the post-election violence in Iran again begins to escalate, a reexamination of its ongoing "revolution" becomes necessary, beginning with the very definition of the word revolution. All commonly held definitions of the word say that a revolution is an upstart political or social body that rises up against the establishment with the intention of effecting radical change. According to Dictionary.com, a revolution is "a radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure, esp. one made suddenly and often accompanied by violence."

Revolutions are not self-sustaining. History informs us that they inevitably either fail or ossify into an establishment itself. It is absolutely impossible to indefinitely sustain a revolution. Yet leaders such as Fidel Castro and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei still cling to the word that had once stirred the hearts and minds of the young in the halcyon days of 1959 and 1979 respectively. This is because the mere memory of what was once a revolution becomes their only defense against being seen as an establishment in need of being overthrown or, at the very least, for reform. Reform is all the Iranian protesters have in mind. They simply want a slice of the much ballyhooed democratic pie. Yet the message we're getting from the Inner Party in Tehran is that these largely unarmed and disorganized protesters are themselves the next breed of revolutionaries hell-bent on overthrowing the status quo just as they were in 1979.

Through either soul-crippling, fully conscious evil or by practical necessity, establishments regardless of the religious or political fabric of the country, regardless of the avowed ideology or the language spoken, inevitably become corrupt. Said corruption almost always is done in the shadows away from the prying eyes of the people. Yet said corruption flourishes even while "revolutionary" leaders such as Castro and Khamenei laughably tell the proletariat that the revolution is not yet complete.

Earlier this year the Rand Corporation published an eye-popping report for the Office of the Secretary of Defense entitled "The Rise of the Pasdaran" (8 Mb 153 page .pdf file). It hardly made a ripple in either the press or the blogosphere when it had first come out because back then the election had yet to be held. The only time anyone mentioned Iran was in connection with their phantom nuclear weapons program brought up from one side of the ideological divide to the other.

Among many other things, Rand's report to the Sec Def says that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (henceforth referred to as the IRGC) is a criminal organization that controls the black market and its smuggling operations (which one Iranian cleric recently said accounted for a staggering full third of that nation's imports). Opening up diplomatic ties with the United States under a President Mousavi would come with conditions that would essentially put the kibosh on all their black market operations. And the IRGC, which does indeed fund terrorists, and the holy roller revolutionaries that control them aren't about to let that happen.

What is so intriguing about Rand's report is how, seemingly without any irony, in tracing the economic evolution of Iran, it reads like a parallel parable of what began happening in our own country at the same time under Clinton and especially Bush II:
The roots of the IRGC’s entry into the economic realm lie in the wake of the Iran-Iraq War, when Supreme Leader Khamenei instituted a formal ranking system into what had been a flat IRGC organization. The introduction of a genuine hierarchy began the process of inculcating the notion of perquisites, privileges, and status for the senior leadership of the IRGC into its institutional culture. The profit motive became even more pronounced in the 1992–1993 period, when business-savvy President Rafsanjani initiated the idea of involving government organizations in business transactions as a way to generate independent income. By the late 1990s, the process of economic expansion had begun in earnest, and it has accelerated even more during the Ahmadinejad presidency, which has favored the IRGC by offering it numerous lucrative no-bid contracts, especially in the areas of oil and natural gas extraction, pipeline construction, and large-scale infrastructure development.

"No-bid contracts especially in the areas of oil and natural gas extraction, pipeline construction, and large-scale infrastructure development." Please, dear reader, stop me if this sounds slightly familiar.

To give you an idea of just how corrupt the Iranian government is, of how desperate they are in need of reform, let's put it in context: Imagine an armed militia led by our nation's youth that actually managed to overthrow the government. Then almost immediately, at the onset of a destructive, 8 year-long war with neighboring Canada, our revolutionary government began handing out to its revolutionary militia no-bid contracts and showing unreasonable favoritism toward it.

The militia then became less concerned with bringing the once-noble revolution to its next level, began farming out the actual head-cracking duties to a huge group of untrained thugs that's basically an enormous neighborhood watch gone horribly, horribly wrong. The revolutionary militia, now largely freed from its day-to-day responsibilities, then concentrates on black market and smuggling operations while sinking its talons into virtually every legitimate industry in our nation's infrastructure.

Not quite fascist, not quite communist, our new revolutionary nation is brutally governed by a theocratic cover that blurs the lines between government and industry, not quite nationalizing these industries as in communist regimes yet more than merely snuggling up to industry in a typical fascist government.

That's essentially what's going on in Iran right now and has been going on for three decades. When we know this and when we remember how brutally and even murderously oppressive the Iranian government, IRGC and the basiji have been since June 13th, we have some additional context for understanding why the youth of Iran have finally gotten it right and are clamoring for the democracy they've been promised yet denied.

So you see, ideology has nothing to do with anything. Whether you're talking about a capitalist society such as ours or a fascistic theocracy such as Iran, money is still the grease that keeps the world moving and pits nations against each other. And the crowning irony is that not only are many Americans unaware that this is the real root for their belligerent stance against us but so are the young Iranians protesting to not upset or replace the status quo but to improve it through progressive reform (a fact also pointed out in page 55 of the Rand report).

Just as the Aryan Brotherhood, a notorious prison-based network, was revealed to be nothing more than a drug-dealing, bottom line-driven criminal entity in spite of its pretensions to white supremacy, the "revolutionary" Iranian government is essentially made of crooks and liars just as our existing nonrevolutionary government. They all use the same sleazy tricks like no-bid contracts and use the muscle of government to control the infrastructure just as we've seen here only in reverse.

The pigs and humans, ancient antagonists, are indeed beginning to look more and more alike once you strip them of their robes and turbans and Brooks Brothers suits and flag lapel pins.

4 Comments:

At July 11, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Blogger Lisa said...

Pigs have the better of it. They have no pretense to being other than they are, and I hear they are quite smart. For pigs.

 
At July 11, 2009 at 12:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Well isn't that special criminals run the US and Iran or pretty much the world for that matter. Oh well back to building shed 2.
jo6pac

 
At July 12, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Anonymous Comrade Rutherford said...

From the prescient movie 'Network' which inerrantly forsaw the coming of Fox News:

"What do you think the [Ayatollahs] talk about in their councils of state, [the Koran]? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business."

= = = = = = =

And in this scene, the revolutionary Communists discuss their cut:

"Laureen Hobbs: Don't fuck with my distribution costs! I'm making a lousy two-fifteen per segment and I'm already deficiting twenty-five grand a week with Metro! I'm paying William Morris ten percent off the top, and I'm giving this turkey ten thou per segment, and another five to this fruitcake! And Helen, don't start no shit about a piece again! I'm paying Metro twenty-thousand for all foreign and Canadian distribution, and that's after recoupment! The Communist Party's not gonna see a nickel of this goddamn show until we go into syndication!

Helen Miggs: C'mon Laureen. The party's in for seventy-five hundred a week of the production expenses.

Laureen Hobbs: I'm not giving this pseudoinsurrectionary sedentarian a piece of my show! I'm not giving him script approval, and I sure as shit ain't gotten him into my distribution charges!

Mary Ann Gifford: [screaming] You fucking fascist! Did you see the film we made of the San Marino jail breakout, demonstrating the rising up of the seminal prisoner class infrastructure?

Laureen Hobbs: You can blow the seminal prisoner class infrastructure out your ass! I'm not knockin' down my goddamn distribution charges!

Great Ahmed Kahn: [fires off his gun through the ceiling] Man, give her the FUCKING overhead clause. Let's get back to page twenty-two, number 5, small 'a'. Subsidiary rights. "

 
At July 12, 2009 at 1:04 PM, Blogger jurassicpork said...

Ah, someone's been visiting Wikipedia.

Yeah, Mike told me he thought about Network and the Arabs but didn't want to revisit it since so many already have over the last 8 1/2 years.

The "God bullshit" mentioned by Howard Beale the night he went off the rails is both ours and Iran's cover, it's what sustains the poor, deluded proletariat who really are pathetic enough to believe in it and not Arthur Jensen's harsh Dutch Uncle truths about how the world is really run.

The Iranian power elite is really a criminal empire, nothing less, and if you look hard enough, you'll see that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the years has socked away upwards of ten billion USA dollars in banks around the world, ten billion that'll never get frozen regardless of any official economic sanctions imposed by either the US or the UN.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home

KindleindaWind, my writing blog.

All Time Classics

  • Our Worse Half: The 25 Most Embarrassing States.
  • The Missing Security Tapes From the World Trade Center.
  • It's a Blunderful Life.
  • The Civil War II
  • Sweet Jesus, I Hate America
  • Top Ten Conservative Books
  • I Am Mr. Ed
  • Glenn Beck: Racist, Hate Monger, Comedian
  • The Ten Worst Music Videos of all Time
  • Assclowns of the Week

  • Links to the first 33 Assclowns of the Week.
  • Links to Assclowns of the Week 38-63.
  • #106: The Turkey Has Landed edition
  • #105: Blame it on Paris or Putin edition
  • #104: Make Racism Great Again Also Labor Day edition
  • #103: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Toilet edition
  • #102: Orange is the New Fat edition
  • #101: Electoral College Dropouts edition
  • #100: Centennial of Silliness edition
  • #99: Dr. Strangehate edition
  • #98: Get Bentghazi edition
  • #97: SNAPping Your Fingers at the Poor edition
  • #96: Treat or Treat, Kiss My Ass edition
  • #95: Monumental Stupidity double-sized edition
  • #94: House of 'Tards edition
  • #93: You Da Bomb! edition.
  • #92: Akin to a Fool edition.
  • #91: Aurora Moronealis edition.
  • #90: Keep Your Gubmint Hands Off My High Pre'mums and Deductibles! edition.
  • #89: Occupy the Catbird Seat/Thanksgiving edition.
  • #88: Heil Hitler edition.
  • #87: Let Sleeping Elephants Lie edition.
  • #86: the Maniacs edition.
  • #85: The Top 50 Assclowns of 2010 edition.
  • #(19)84: Midterm Madness edition.
  • #83: Spill, Baby, Spill! edition.
  • #82: Leave Corporations Alone, They’re People! edition.
  • #81: Hatin' on Haiti edition.
  • #80: Don't Get Your Panties in a Twist edition.
  • #79: Top 50 Assclowns of 2009 edition.
  • #78: Nattering Nabobs of Negativism edition.
  • #77: ...And Justice For Once edition.
  • #76: Reading Tea Leaves/Labor Day edition.
  • #75: Diamond Jubilee/Inaugural Edition
  • #74: Dropping the Crystal Ball Edition
  • #73: The Twelve Assclowns of Christmas Edition
  • #72: Trick or Treat Election Day Edition
  • #71: Grand Theft Autocrats Edition
  • #70: Soulless Corporations and the Politicians Who Love Them Edition
  • Empire Of The Senseless.
  • Christwire.org: Conservative Values for an Unsaved World.
  • Esquire's Charles Pierce.
  • Brilliant @ Breakfast.
  • The Burning Platform.
  • The Rant.
  • Mock, Paper, Scissors.
  • James Petras.
  • Towle Road.
  • Avedon's Sideshow (the new site).
  • At Largely, Larisa Alexandrovna's place.
  • The Daily Howler.
  • The DCist.
  • Greg Palast.
  • Jon Swift. RIP, Al.
  • God is For Suckers.
  • The Rude Pundit.
  • Driftglass.
  • Newshounds.
  • William Grigg, a great find.
  • Brad Blog.
  • Down With Tyranny!, Howie Klein's blog.
  • Wayne's World. Party time! Excellent!
  • Busted Knuckles, aka Ornery Bastard.
  • Mills River Progressive.
  • Right Wing Watch.
  • Earthbond Misfit.
  • Anosognosia.
  • Echidne of the Snakes.
  • They Gave Us a Republic.
  • The Gawker.
  • Outtake Online, Emmy-winner Charlotte Robinson's site.
  • Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo
  • No More Mr. Nice Blog.
  • Head On Radio Network, Bob Kincaid.
  • Spocko's Brain.
  • Pandagon.
  • Slackivist.
  • WTF Is It Now?
  • No Blood For Hubris.
  • Lydia Cornell, a very smart and accomplished lady.
  • Roger Ailes (the good one.)
  • BlondeSense.
  • The Smirking Chimp.
  • Hammer of the Blogs.
  • Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.
  • Argville.
  • Existentialist Cowboy.
  • The Progressive.
  • The Nation.
  • Mother Jones.
  • Vanity Fair.
  • Salon.com.
  • Citizens For Legitimate Government.
  • News Finder.
  • Indy Media Center.
  • Lexis News.
  • Military Religious Freedom.
  • McClatchy Newspapers.
  • The New Yorker.
  • Bloggingheads TV, political vlogging.
  • Find Articles.com, the next-best thing to Nexis.
  • Altweeklies, for the news you won't get just anywhere.
  • The Smirking Chimp
  • Don Emmerich's Peace Blog
  • Wikileaks.
  • The Peoples' Voice.
  • Dictionary.com.
  • CIA World Fact Book.
  • IP address locator.
  • Tom Tomorrow's hilarious strip.
  • Babelfish, an instant, online translator. I love to translate Ann Coulter's site into German.
  • Newsmeat: Find out who's donating to whom.
  • Wikipedia.
  • Uncyclopedia.
  • anysoldier.com
  • Icasualties
  • Free Press
  • YouTube
  • The Bone Bridge.
  • Powered by Blogger