Morning Edition, February 3, 2009 · Iran, a nation made rich by oil money, is now struggling with a troubled economy — one that's counted on to support a population of about 70 million.
Most of that population is made up of people under 30, like the two young lovers out for a stroll in Tehran on a recent day who stop before the glittering gold in a jewelry store window. They are shopping for a wedding ring; they plan to marry in two months.
Reza wears a black leather jacket — almost a uniform for young men in Tehran — while Faizah wears loose black clothes of the kind insisted on by the government. As they speak through an interpreter, it becomes clear that they must be marrying for love, since they don't have any money. They can't afford the rings that shine in the store window.
When asked to consider their country's economic and political situation, they say it's definitely not a good time to get married.
Young people like Reza and Faizah, both 24, didn't experience the Islamic Revolution of 30 years ago — when Iranians overthrew an American-backed king — or the years before it. Ali Askar Vafaei, the curator of what's known as the Martyrs Museum, which honors Iranians killed in the 1979 revolution, says younger people don't realize how much Iran's economy has improved since then.
The museum is across the street from the former U.S. Embassy, still standing in Tehran three decades after Iranians seized it and took hostages. It's now used as a school for Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Inside the museum, three floors of display cases show artifacts from decades' worth of Iranian revolts and the Iran-Iraq War.
The curator says Iran's unhappy younger generation is like a fish that is desperate for water, not realizing it's already in the ocean.
A Population Explosion
The government knows that some people are restless. Islamic morals police move about the city in green and white vans. Opposition newspapers are being shut down.
Reza, the young man admiring wedding rings, says it's risky to talk about how he feels about his country's economy — because there's a possibility someone would overhear. "I have to say it's very good," he says.
Reza, a building superintendent, makes the equivalent of $500 a month. He says his entire salary probably wouldn't pay the rent for a decent Tehran apartment. He and his fiancee aren't sure how they will move out of their parents' homes.
Iranian businessman Bijan Khajedpour is among many who see young people's struggles as a side effect of the 1979 revolution.
"There are some mistakes that you can see. Look at the Iranian demography, for example," he says. "You see immediately that they discontinued birth control policies after the revolution. So in the '80s, we had an explosion ... We had, in mid-'80s, a population growth of almost 4 percent. Exactly that age group of 20 to 30 years now are the bulk of our unemployed population, because we cannot provide jobs for them, so that retrospectively you can see what a big mistake that was."
Facing A Difficult Economy
Since the 1980s, Iran has faced the overriding question of what to do with a population that doubled.
In recent years, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad promised more jobs and subsidies for the poor. But falling oil revenues made that hard to sustain, and inflation as high as 28 percent canceled out many of the benefits.
The effects of all this are visible in the office of a real estate broker in a working-class section of southern Tehran. The broker, named Talibi, says business was very good until six or seven months ago. That's when Tehran's real estate bubble burst.
Now, he says, almost nobody is buying the properties listed on slips of paper taped to his wall.
A few customers do stop by, including Bimani Tahkhani, an elderly woman looking for an apartment.
When asked about the economy, she says she lives with her son. "We can manage," she says, and leaves the office. Then, several minutes later, she bursts back in the door — to say what she really thinks.
"Greetings to the people of America," she declares, "especially to your new president."
Then she tells her story: Her son is a taxi driver who makes the equivalent of $10 a day, not nearly enough for both of them. She pulls a worn-out shoe off her foot and flings it on the ground. She says she cannot afford a new pair. She's about 70 years old, and the stairs in her apartment building are killing her.
Tahkhani must climb five flights of stairs in all before she reaches the tiny apartment she shares with her son. In a building with no elevator, a top-floor apartment is the cheapest, and she says she can't afford to move.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Old, Young, Struggle in Iran
From NPR: Economic Struggles in Iran
Richard Cohen on Iran
The Other Iran
February 2, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
The Other Iran
By ROGER COHEN
TEHRAN
At one of the embassies offering islands of peace from the gridlocked, grinding Iranian capital, a Western diplomat said this of United States and allied policy toward Iran: “You could argue that our policy has not yet failed.”
That would be the most charitable view. But it is failing. Where Iran had a handful of centrifuges enriching uranium four years ago, it now has at least 5,000. With its enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan removed by American military force, it has extended its regional influence.
This city, whose real-estate boom has rivaled Manhattan’s in recent years, is still awash in cash from the giddy oil price season. Those billions, even ebbing, equal confidence. The Iranian Revolution, at its 30th anniversary, has recharged its batteries on a global wave of Bush-inspired, Gaza-cemented, anti-Western sentiment.
It’s time to think again, not merely to recalibrate old formulas, in order to end the three-decade impasse in U.S.-Iranian ties, a breakdown of huge cost and menace. A non-relationship has locked itself in stereotypes as American threats (“the military option must be kept on the table”) and demands (stop the centrifuges) meet a wall of Iranian pride.
One place to begin that reflection might be in southern Tehran, where I was the other day on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s triumphant return from France. I’d been at an airport ceremony, featuring a kitschy reproduction of the Air France jumbo jet that brought him home, and found myself surrounded by graves near the Khomeini shrine.
The graves, many adorned with wrenching photos of 16-year-olds, stretch away, hundreds of thousands of them, mostly for victims of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which followed the 1978-79 revolutionary violence. Iran bled for a decade.
The psychological impact is still palpable. Iranians don’t want to bleed again; they want to get ahead. In this, they resemble the post-Cultural Revolution Chinese.
For all the inflammatory official rhetoric, pragmatism reigns. Money, education and opportunity drive people. Years of mayhem in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan have concentrated Iranian minds: who needs that?
“Overthrowing regimes is no longer on the agenda,” Mohammad Atrianfar, the former editor of a reformist magazine shut down by the government, told me. “Reform, yes, upheaval, no.”
Young people — and well over half the population is under 30 — may want a freer press or freer dress. But cellphones, widespread Internet access and satellite TV (government restrictions are as easily circumvented as Western sanctions) sap confrontational adrenaline. The Islamic Revolution has proved resilient in part through flexibility.
In this land of competing currents, the U.S. has focused on one: Iran as an expansionist, would-be nuclear power. Iran’s political constellation includes those who have given past support to terrorist organizations. But axis-of-evil myopia has led U.S. policy makers to underestimate the social, psychological and political forces for pragmatism, compromise and stability. Iran has not waged a war of aggression for a very long time.
Tehran shares many American interests, including a democratic Iraq, because that will be a Shiite-governed Iraq, and a unified Iraq stable enough to ensure access to holy cities like Najaf.
It opposes Taliban redux in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda’s Sunni fanaticism. Its democracy is flawed but by Middle East standards vibrant. Both words in its self-description — Islamic Republic — count.
These common interests and the long misreading of Iranian priorities demand that President Obama innovate. The radical Bush presidency produced a radical Iranian response. While modern Iraq was sketched on a 20th-century map, Persia is a millennial thing. Its pride requires treatment as an equal.
To suggest, as a recent report from the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington did, that Obama must “begin augmenting the military lever” to complement intensified diplomacy is to recommend burrowing deeper into failure.
Blinking is never pleasant but can be shrewd. America and its allies should drop their insistence that enrichment at Natanz cease before talks begin (Iran could always restart enrichment anyway). Obama should also say the military threat has moved under the table in the name of restoring dialogue. These steps would place the onus on Iran.
Can revolutionary Iran live without “Death to America?” Powerful hard-line Iranian factions think not, but I’m with the majority of Iranians who believe their Islamic Republic can coexist with a functioning U.S. relationship.
Obama should do five other things: Address his opening to the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because he decides. State that America is not in the Iranian regime-change game. Act soon rather than wait for the June Iranian presidential elections; Khamenei will still be around after them. Start with small steps that build trust. Treat the nuclear issue within the whole range of U.S.-Iranian relations rather than as its distorting focus.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Krugman on GOP
Krugman Article on the GOP
Bigger Than Bush
By PAUL KRUGMAN
As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power, Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.
Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?
But most of the whining takes the form of claims that the Bush administration’s failure was simply a matter of bad luck — either the bad luck of President Bush himself, who just happened to have disasters happen on his watch, or the bad luck of the G.O.P., which just happened to send the wrong man to the White House.
The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the G.O.P. decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Mr. Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.
If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: after the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”
Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?
Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.
Oh, and the racial element isn’t all that abstract, even now: Chip Saltsman, currently a candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, sent committee members a CD including a song titled “Barack the Magic Negro” — and according to some reports, the controversy over his action has actually helped his chances.
So the reign of George W. Bush, the first true Southern Republican president since Reconstruction, was the culmination of a long process. And despite the claims of some on the right that Mr. Bush betrayed conservatism, the truth is that he faithfully carried out both his party’s divisive tactics — long before Sarah Palin, Mr. Bush declared that he visited his ranch to “stay in touch with real Americans” — and its governing philosophy.
That’s why the soon-to-be-gone administration’s failure is bigger than Mr. Bush himself: it represents the end of the line for a political strategy that dominated the scene for more than a generation.
The reality of this strategy’s collapse has not, I believe, fully sunk in with some observers. Thus, some commentators warning President-elect Barack Obama against bold action have held up Bill Clinton’s political failures in his first two years as a cautionary tale.
But America in 1993 was a very different country — not just a country that had yet to see what happens when conservatives control all three branches of government, but also a country in which Democratic control of Congress depended on the votes of Southern conservatives. Today, Republicans have taken away almost all those Southern votes — and lost the rest of the country. It was a grand ride for a while, but in the end the Southern strategy led the G.O.P. into a cul-de-sac.
Mr. Obama therefore has room to be bold. If Republicans try a 1993-style strategy of attacking him for promoting big government, they’ll learn two things: not only has the financial crisis discredited their economic theories, the racial subtext of anti-government rhetoric doesn’t play the way it used to.
Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.
Global Pool of Money
A must read/listen to article from This American Life, on how we got to where we are in the financial meltdown.
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