[R-G] Iran's Business Elite, Too, Is a "Dissident"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Iran's businessmen, like businessmen everywhere, are up to no good,
privileging their class  interests over the poorer two thirds'
aspirations and sacrificing what's good for the nation for what's good
for themselves. -- Yoshie

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/pourzal270609.html>
Iran's Business Elite, Too, Is a "Dissident"
by Rostam Pourzal

With mass rallies for government accountability dominating the news
from Iran since June 12, Western audiences are missing the underlying
controversy that polarizes the country's electorate.  We hear much
about the boastful social conservatism of president Ahmadinejad, whose
contested re-election on June 12 fueled days of bloody protests led by
his moderate challengers.  But the battle is also about welfare reform
and private property rights in an economy that has been
state-dominated since the Islamic Republic was established thirty
years ago.  Whether Iran's national oil revenue should now be directed
away from grassroots priorities emerged as a major election issue this
year. All of Ahmadinejad's three challengers promised to promote
investor-friendly policies if elected.

The opposition insists that Ahmadinejad unfairly buys voter loyalty
with consumer subsidies, low interest loans, and similar "handouts."
The president has especially enraged the managerial class with his
wildly popular monthly rallies in the provinces, where he orders
funding on the spot for the infrastructure needs of common folks.  A
special flashpoint is the pace of a long-anticipated privatization and
deregulation drive that was officially launched a year ago but was not
embraced by the Ahmadinejad administration.

Among the four approved hopefuls that ran for president recently,
Ahmadinejad is the least enthusiastic about the neo-liberal reforms
demanded by Iran's corporate interests.  Several of his advisors and
cabinet ministers and even a Central Bank's director general have
stepped down or been dismissed after challenging the president's
"unscientific" intervention in markets.  At least one of them, former
economic affairs minister Davood Danesh Jafari, campaigned for a rival
candidate this spring.

Not surprisingly, Iran's business journals invariably promote
Ahmadinejad's challengers.  They regularly deride his welfare-state
initiatives as "fiscal irresponsibility" and lash out in Cold War
language at his close ties to left-leaning Latin American leaders.
They demand that Iran align itself instead with the "international
community" in order to benefit from globalization.

As they clamor for "meritocracy" and "performance" to overtake
affirmative action programs, it is not uncommon for Iranian business
columnists to quote the Washington-based Heritage Foundation -- of
Ronald Reagan lineage -- which ranks Iran almost last among nations in
its Index of Economic Freedom.  In a similar vein, articles that
lament how Ahmadinejad has brought back the "irresponsible
anti-capitalist climate" of the early years of the Revolution appear
in Iran's opposition literature about as often as conservative Western
media condemn the 60s' "hippie generation" for permissiveness.

Ahmadinejad's leading ballot-box rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is allied
with Iran's most influential "free market" advocate, former president
Hashemi Rafsanjani.  His was the face next to Mousavi's on the
candidate's billboard advertisements this campaign season.  Rafsanjani
is best known for his "structural adjustment" program that met popular
resentment and resistance from 1989 to1997.  Since he was defeated by
Ahmadinejad in the presidential elections of 2004, Rafsanjani has led
a public crusade against the winner's zeal for social spending, which
he characterizes as Gadaparvari, or dependency promotion.

The powerful state Expediency Council, which Rafsanjani heads, led a
reinterpretation of Article 44 of Iran's constitution that last June
mandated a downsizing of the government in favor of private investors
and contractors.  The sale of state-owned industries is advancing
faster than ever, and the introduction of private banking was followed
late last year by the opening of the first foreign bank branch.  A
comprehensive intellectual property protection law is finally in
effect and legal restrictions on foreign investors are being relaxed
in order to circumvent UN-imposed trade sanctions.  Yet Rafsanjani's
powerful allies complain bitterly in public that Ahmadinejad loyalists
in the bureaucracy impede progress towards the competitive economy
envisioned in the new law.  This year Mousavi adopted Rafsanjani's
2004 campaign pledge to institute "an economic revolution" in which
improved efficiency would result from deregulation.

Mohsen Rezaie, a former top military commander who dropped out of the
race in 2004 and ran against Ahmadinejad again this year, is the
Expediency's Council's secretary and a confidant of Rafsanjani.
Rezaie's recent campaign boldly touted him as the "Architect of a New
Economy" in which Ahmadinejad's two most cherished initiatives (which
Rezaie ridiculed as "Komonisti") would be abandoned.  Under one of the
programs, named Sahaam-e Edaalat, millions of largely low-income
households have received bundled shares of profitable state-owned
industries at half-price.  The cost of the discounted shares is
deducted over time from the small investors' dividend incomes.
Ahmadinejad boasts about this as his favorite kind of privatization.
Ahmadinejad's year-old Maskan-e Mehr initiative, under which hundreds
of thousands of first-time home buyers are offered 99-year leases on
state-owned land and affordable loans to build modest apartments, was
also targeted for termination by candidate Rezaie.

The other investors' delight among Ahmadinejad's rivals is former
speaker of the parliament, Mehdi Karroubi, who ran for president in
2004 and again this year.  The center piece of Karroubi's economic
platform this year consisted of suggested first steps towards
de-nationalization of Iran's oil industry.  The scheme was devised by
the candidate's chief economic advisor, a self-described Milton
Friedman devotee named Masoud Nili.  It envisioned the formation of a
non-government entity that would take control of all domestic refining
and distribution of oil and make every citizen 18 years or older a
shareholder.  Karroubi's other top advisor, Abbas Abdi, a fervent
promoter of trickle-down economics, often refers to the proposition as
"empowering the people."  They neglect to mention how, over time,
better endowed Iranian (and eventually non-Iranian) investors could
acquire large blocks of the proposed oil shares from low-income
citizens and form Iranian equivalents of unaccountable Western oil
giants.

Iran's state budget (including tens of billions of dollars annually
for popular subsidies and services) relies far more on oil revenue
than on taxation.  Thus, to advocate removing oil from state control
is, in the Iranian context, equivalent to the right-wing "citizen
empowerment" protests this year in the US by tax day "tea party"
tricksters.  More generally, like the resentments that Ronald Reagan
exploited and galvanized against the civil rights gains in this
country, the backlash now energizing Iran's opposition candidates is
in part a reaction to the attention the government showers on less
fortunate Iranians.

In short, Iran's fiscal-conservative candidates are disputing the
re-election of a social- conservative president.  Which conservatism
is worse?  Should the Western progressive community side with the
libertarian candidates?  The answer may not be as straightforward as
our mainstream media pretend it is.  Instead of granting the
opposition our unconditional support, we must demand that the movement
shed its corporate bedfellows and isolate Ahmadinejad by championing
the cause of underprivileged Iranians.

Rostam Pourzal is a Washington, DC-based political analyst
specializing in the politics of human rights.