Iran’s New President Poses a Challenge to the West

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript

The sham June 18 Iranian presidential election, where the candidates had to be vetted as ideologically correct by the country’s real rulers, the Shia theocracy, resulted in the victory of hardliner Ebrahim Raisi, himself a cleric. No surprise. 

Power lies not with the president, but in the office of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He controls the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the media channels, the clerics and foreign policy. 

Some 600 hopefuls, including 40 women, had been winnowed down to seven candidates, all men. Many Iranians saw this latest election as having been engineered for Raisi to win and shunned the poll.  

Official figures showed voter turnout was the lowest ever for a presidential election, at 48.8 per cent, compared to more than 70 per cent for the previous vote in 2017. For what it’s worth, Raisi won almost 62 per cent of the votes. 

Raisi, who in 2017 lost to more moderate Hassan Rouhani, was the preferred candidate of Ayatollah Khamenei, who in March 2019 had appointed him as head of Iran’s judiciary, where he launched a “war on corruption.” He has even been seen as a possible successor to Khamenei. 

Raisi was already notorious for his role in the mass execution of thousands of prisoners in the late 1980s. He is said to have been one of four judges who oversaw secret death sentences for about 5,000 prisoners in jails near Tehran, according to Amnesty International. It says the location of the mass graves where the men and women were buried is being systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities.   

In 2009, he defended the executions of a dozen people who took part in the protests that followed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection.  

Under his presidency, Iran will seek to reinforce a puritanical system of Islamic government, possibly meaning more controls on social activities, fewer freedoms and jobs for women, and tighter control of social media and the press. 

The regime will also, according to analysts, look to China to help the economy out of its deep crisis. Raisi will zealously stamp out nationwide uprisings, and those remain a possibility after the 2019-2020 fuel price protests. 

Will Iran continue to develop a nuclear arsenal, something it denies but which most observers think is progressing?  

Iran on June 15 announced that it has produced 6.5 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 per cent purity and 108 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 per cnt purity in five months.  

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi contended May 24 that Iran was enriching uranium at purity levels that “only countries making bombs are reaching.” He stated that it was Iran's “sovereign right” to develop its program but added: “This is a degree that requires a vigilant eye.” 

A three-month monitoring deal between Iran and the IAEA has expired, so the agency no longer has access to Iran’s nuclear data. 

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan will be uncomfortable with Raisi as president. Indirect talks with Iran over reviving the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal that was abrogated by Donald Trump, may face more uncertainty.  

Yet Biden seems unwilling to threaten Tehran with more sanctions and military action even as Iran keeps enriching uranium and developing more advanced centrifuges. His administration may have to admit that Tehran under Raisi has no intention of making any nuclear deal “longer, stronger, broader” as Blinken once described a follow-up agreement to the JCPOA, without sanctions relief. 

Israel is the country most likely to derail the administration’s hopes. Its opposition to the nuclear deal is much deeper and broader today than it was in 2015. Israel continues to conduct covert actions inside Iran, such as its sabotage of a power generator at the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz in April. 

Many Sunni Arab states also fear Iran’s imperialism via proxy militias in Gaza, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen and see America as a declining power. 

However, major Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure would surely cause a rift between the Jewish state and the Democratic Party, and with Benjamin Netanyahu no longer prime minister, this may be less likely.

Morocco is Moderating Under Islamist Party's Rule

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript

In the mid-1960s, the Islamic Youth in Morocco, the predecessor to the Movement for Unity and Reform (MUR) and the Party for Justice and Development (PJD), was a violent movement targeting the Moroccan monarchy.

However, a major transformation took place when a large number of MUR leaders and cadres joined the PJD, which then entered the electoral arena. Today it is legitimising the same Moroccan regime it once aimed to bring down by participating in the party system.

It contested the legislative elections of 1997 and 2002, winning 14 and 44 seats, respectively, in the 326-seat parliament. In contrast to other Islamist parties at the time, the PJD formally recognized the Moroccan monarchy.

In the next election, held in September of 2007, the PJD won 46 out of 325 seats, narrowly losing to the country’s leading political formation, the Independence Party.

The PJD increasingly adopted a moderate rhetoric that allowed it to proceed along a pragmatic, gradualist, and non-confrontational stance with the monarchy.

The Arab revolutions of 2011 also hit Morocco, with thousands of Moroccans joining nationwide protests in February. They demanded that King Muhammad VI hand over some of his powers to a newly elected government and make the justice system more independent.

A national referendum took place on July 1, 2011. A new constitution now ensures that the prime minister is selected from the party that received the most votes in elections, rather than chosen by the king.

This enabled the PJD, which won 107 seats in the November 2011election, to form a coalition with three parties that had been part of previous governments, headed by PJD leader Abdelilah Benkirane, who became prime minister.

In 2016, the party increased its numbers in parliament to 125 seats, with Saadeddine Othmani, Benkirane’s successor as leader of the party, as prime minister. He heads a coalition of six parties.

In February 2013, Benkirane stated that the PJD is an Islamist party that shares some of the same ideologies as the Muslim Brotherhood but operates “with different principles.” Benkirane denied that the PJD belongs to the global Brotherhood movement, instead claiming that each Islamist movement has “its own political thought.”

The PJD again denied affiliation with the Brotherhood in January 2015 when the PJD was publicly accused of attempting to “Islamize Moroccan society.” Benkirane reaffirmed the PJD’s Islamist agenda, but claimed that its philosophy differed from that of the Brotherhood. There was no organizational relationship between the two, he insisted.

The party considers Moroccan society as Muslim, as opposed to radical Islamists, for whom the members of any society not ruled by God’s law cannot be considered Muslim.

Since the 1990s, the PJD has paid attention to the experiences of other Islamist political parties and learned that it is safer to follow a pragmatic, gradual and progressive strategy rather than to engage in deep and comprehensive reforms.

Therefore, the PJD’s inclusion process and non-confrontational strategy is marked not only by domestic constraints but also by what the party has learned from the region, especially from its counterparts in Algeria in the 1990s, where events led to a horrific civil war.

This “Moroccan exception” has been attributed to the intimate relationship between Islam and the monarchy, to the unifying role of the king as both political arbiter and Commander of the Faithful, and to Muhammad VI’s own reformist style.

The party was opposed to the king’s recent normalization of relations with Israel, however, reiterating its “firm position against the Zionist occupation.” Some even urged Prime Minister Othamni, the party’s secretary-general, to resign from both posts. 

An element of the deal was American recognition of Morocco’s claim to sovereignty over the Western Sahara. The decades-old territorial dispute has pitted Morocco against the Algeria-backed Polisario Front, which seeks to establish an independent state. This did find favour with the PJD.

As Morocco prepares for general elections, scheduled for September this year, the PJD faces ideological divides over these issues. In March, former prime minister Abdelilah Benkirane suspended his membership in the party.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nasser Bourita has conveyed Morocco’s concerns over the recent warfare between Hamas and Israel and the PJD demanded the closure of the Israeli liaison office in the capital, Rabat.

Russia is Becoming a Precarious Petrostate

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton NB] Times & Transcript

Prior to meeting U.S. president Joe Biden in Geneva June 16, Russian president Vladimir Putin has contended that the United States is trying to stifle Russia’s economy. “It wants to contain our development and publicly talks about it,” he told the Channel One television station June 4. But the country’s economic problems are mainly domestic in nature.

How has Russia fared in the decades since Putin assumed power? The post-Soviet Russian political system was supposed to develop liberal market democracy but has become increasingly dictatorial and illiberal. A form of capitalism has been built in which the market plays a role in the distribution of resources, but this is a political capitalism in which the economy is dominated by elite political interests, which take “rent” – essentially unearned profits – from the economy and use them to buy support.

The new authoritarianism in Russia is different to that of the Soviet past. The ruling Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has been replaced by United Russia, but this is a highly personalized party loyal to President Putin; it is not a political force in its own right. Repression still exists but is less systematic than it was for most of the Soviet era.

The first decade of post-Soviet life under Boris Yeltsin had been one of dizzying opportunities for some Russians. But for the vast majority, it was a nasty fight for survival. Russia experienced a catastrophic decline of its economy. Industries were closing down, life expectancy was dropping, and people were becoming homeless and malnourished.

Yeltsin had created uncontrolled monopolies, making the oligarchs who had acquired these assets extremely wealthy. The country was in a downward spiral by the time he left office at the end of 1999.

Putin spent much of his early years as president rebuilding a “power vertical,” subordinating executive powers and the regions to one system of command and control. He intimidated into submission, drove into exile, or imprisoned oligarchs who tried to convert their vast wealth into political power. This happened concurrently with a Soviet-style institutional rebirth, doubling state control over the economy, and returning secret services to the centre stage of Russian life.

The concept of “sovereign democracy,” introduced by Vladislav Surkov, was a signal that Russia was beginning to pivot away from the west. The last few years have seen an increasingly ideological politics developed based on what Putin calls “traditional Russian values” -- respect for family, patriotism, intolerance of social difference, Orthodox Christianity, and hostility to liberalism. The Russian Orthodox Church stood at the centre of this new conservative pact, with Patriarch Kirill rejoicing Putin as a “miracle of God.”

One of the undeniable achievements of Putin’s rule was a massive reduction in absolute poverty. That was achieved on the back of historically high oil prices, an early reformist agenda and several years of high growth. Over the 10 years from 1999 to 2008, Russian GDP increased by 94 per cent. More recent years have not been as good, though.

Many analysts consider Russia to be a “petrostate,” dependent on oil and gas revenues exported abroad. Russia is ranked third in the world for oil production, producing 12.1 per cent of the world’s oil, some 11.5 million barrels per day, and exporting $72.37 billion dollars worth in 2020.

The three major companies include market leader Rosneft, which is fully owned by the Russian government, Lukoil, and Gazprom. Much of the industry is state-owned and controlled. Putin has a grip on the industry and directs it to his own ends.

Such dependence is fraught with economic danger. For example, when the price of oil declined in 2014 the Russian ruble fell in value by 59 per cent relative to the U.S. dollar in just six months.

Most oil and gas exports go to Europe, so Russia is mostly dependent on the European market for export revenues. But this is a cause for concern because Europe is striving towards a future of clean and renewable energy and trying to phase out the use of fossil fuels.

Sooner or later, Russia will have to diversify and become less tied to oil and gas exports, if it wishes to remain a major player in the global economy.

The Pandemic’s Effect in America Varies

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottown, PEI] Guardian

This pandemic is different from the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen, and the wealthiest in the United States have seen their riches greatly increase. According to a study by 24/7 Wall St., the net worth of America’s 614 billionaires grew by a collective $931 billion during the first seven months of the pandemic.

Last year, Democratic presidential aspirant Andrew Yang remarked that “Amazon is like a giant spaceship” sucking up retail jobs and destroying smaller businesses. Jeff Bezos, its owner, is worth some $200 billion.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone shows how the company increasingly wields its enormous scale against potential rivals. Amazon contributes to individual inequality by paying salaries so low that more than 4,000 warehouse workers in nine states are eligible for federal food-stamp subsidies.

Big Tech execs have especially profited. For example, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s personal wealth grew by $7.8 billion. Obviously, things are good for the billionaire class.

The most recent World Inequality Database shows the top one per cent of Americans control just under 35 per cent of the nation’s personal wealth – more than China’s 29.6 per cent.

Societies now recognize that workers in essential services, such as supermarkets, warehouses, delivery services, utilities maintenance, and above all health, have been taken for granted and underpaid for too long.  

 “Martin Luther King Jr. predicted this moment,” wrote Gene Sperling, the national economic adviser to presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, in the April 24, 2020 New York Times, referring to King’s support for the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike.

“One day,” King told them, “our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive, for the person who picks up our garbage, in the final analysis, is as significant as the physician, for if he doesn’t do his job, diseases are rampant. All labor has dignity.”

Yet we are forced to confront the dissonance between calling workers “essential” and “heroes” while accepting the fact of their limited wages, benefits, and inability to organize. Many nursing, psychiatric and home health aides aren’t offered even a single day of paid sick leave.

Why have we privileged, not just billionaires, but white-collar and so-called “knowledge” workers?

Because the essence of modern meritocracy is the link between education and work, so one of its key social manifestations is the phenomenon of credentialism – the belief that academic or other formal qualifications are the best measure of a person’s intelligence or ability to do a particular job. This belief has undermined the dignity associated with other forms of work requiring less in the way of cognitive thinking skills.

In The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice, Fredrik DeBoer contends that a “system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.” Academics who help define what it means to be progressive live lives of great privilege, thanks to the very meritocratic system that creates inequality.

The Merit Myth by Anthony P. Carnevale, Peter Schmidt and Jeff Strohl sees elite colleges as gatekeepers that shut out “large swaths of the American population from access to power, opportunity, and wealth.”

This may help us understand why so many manual workers have turned to right-wing politics. The anthropologist Ralph Linton in his 1936 The Study of Man pointed to the difference between “achieved” identity and “ascribed” identity.

The institutions that have historically accepted you as a member unconditionally – family, church, nation – are all weakened in a more mobile and more individualistic society, he wrote. Achieved identities based on educational and career success have eclipsed ascribed identities based on attachment to place and group.

In his book Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century, British writer David Goodhart takes up Linton’s point, and makes a case for reviving the status of work outside the “knowledge economy,” especially in the age of automation.

Can we really argue that the work of a junior account manager is more useful than that of a bus driver? asks Goodhart. Or, indeed, more skilled?

 

Unlikely Coalition Could Mean Netanyahu's End

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

National elections were held in Israel on March 23 to elect the 120 members of the Knesset, Israel’s unicameral parliament. Due to Israel’s proportional representation party list electoral system, there are no constituency seats and parties are simply allocated seats based on their percentage of the total nationwide vote.

This dysfunctional system has resulted in no party ever coming close to winning a majority of seats, and all governments have been coalitions since the founding of the state in 1948. This was the fourth election in two years, as election after election failed to break the country’s political deadlock.

With 13 parties winning mandates, as they are called, to the Knesset, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud came first – but with just 30 seats, less than half needed for a majority of 61. While his is a long-established party, in recent years a bewildering number of other groups have emerged, gained popularity, and disappeared soon afterwards.

In fact the once mighty Labour Party, which governed the Jewish state for its first decades, won a mere seven seats, good for sixth place.

In order to dethrone Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, his opponents have created an eight-headed monster, a puzzling grouping ranging from the left to the far right, including an Arab party. They are united on little, other than taking power. Some are themselves former former protégés of Netanyahu’s Likud-led governments.

Coming second was Yesh Atid, a centrist party founded in 2012 by former journalist Yair Lapid. He created Yesh Atid as a “fusionist third-way” party between Israel’s traditional left and right.

Despite that, this self-described “change government” will be led until 2023 by Naftali Bennett, though his party, Yamina, won just seven seats. A far-right ideologue and former Netanyahu ally, he opposes a Palestinian state.

Bennett and centrist Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid agreed to a rotation scheme, with Bennett becoming prime minister for the first two years, followed by Lapid. The latter will serve as foreign minister until the two swap roles.

Odd as this may seem, it is not without precedent. An indecisive election held in 1984, in which the Labour Party-led Alignment and the Likud won 44 and 41 seats, respectively, led to a national unity government.

Labour’s Shimon Peres held the post of prime Minister until September 1986, when Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir took over.

Also part of the alliance is the left-wing Meretz, led by Nitzan Horowitz, which holds six mandates; Avigdor Lieberman’s nationalist Israel Beiteinu, with seven seats; Benny Gantz’s liberal Kahol Lavan with eight; and the new centre-right Tikva Hadasha, created last year by Gideon Sa’ar, with six.

Completely unprecedented, though, is the formal inclusion of an Arab party in a governing coalition – all the more so because the United Arab List, known as Ra’am, is an avowedly Islamist organization.

It is the political wing of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, considered more moderate than the Northern Branch, which was banned by the Israeli government in November 2015 due to close ties with Hamas and the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood.

Ra’am won four seats in this election. On June 2, after holding negotiations with Lapid and Bennett, its leader, Mansour Abbas, decided to back a non-Netanyahu government. He has reportedly secured major policy victories for Israel’s Arab sector in return.

The political struggles in Israel have reached this state because the actors are focused not on issues but on personal, sectorial, factional, and party-based considerations. The Israeli right and left are equally to blame for this process.

Opportunism reigns and national interests have been relegated to the margins of political discourse, at a time when Israel is under increased pressure from Iran and its proxies.

Is this a first step towards a bi-national state, where politics becomes sectarian? It becomes an even more pressing matter following last month’s violence between Arabs and Jews within the country.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu, as opposition leader, will be poised to pounce on this shaky new governing coalition. He accused Bennett of carrying out “the fraud of the century,” referring to the Yamina leader’s earlier promises not to join forces with Lapid.

This unlikely alliance still needs to be confirmed by parliament to take power. Is yet a fifth election on the horizon?