Bozorgmehr Sharafedin — In jab at rivals, Rouhani says Iran protests about more than economy

In a swipe at his hardline rivals, President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday young Iranian protesters were unhappy about far more than just the economy and they would no longer defer to the views and lifestyle of an aging revolutionary elite....

Iran is already a lot more liberal than Wahabi-Salafist states like Saudi Arabia. It is also democratic, where as the others are hereditary monarchies.

What makes Islamic countries Islamic states is that they recognize Islamic law. Iran is hardly unique in that and it's interpretation of Islamic law is more liberal than Wahabi states like Saudi Arabia.

Reuters
In jab at rivals, Rouhani says Iran protests about more than economy
Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

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Hassan Hakimian — What’s Driving Iran’s Protests?

Not a bad article considering that Project Syndicate is an organ of the corporate elite.

The author does recognize that the economic protest is the result of President Rouhani's neoliberal program to deliver the promised increase in prosperity that neoliberals assume to be widely distribute by trickle down.

So, even though the article is written from the neoliberal point of view, it does admit the failure of neoliberal reformers to deliver on their promises to the country as a whole, even though growth has improved under Rouhani.

What the author does not mention is that the economic aspect of the protest is exacerbated by the cutting back of welfare, with the result that the have-nots protesting have been severely disadvantaged even with the economy "improving."

Project Syndicate
What’s Driving Iran’s Protests?
Hassan Hakimian, Director of the London Middle East Institute and Reader in Economics at SOAS, University of London

James George Jatras — Iran and Myths of Revolution

Backgrounder.

Jatras is one of the few mentioning that some of the economic frustration is the result President Rouhani's neoliberal "reform" that shrank the the welfare state and expanded the market state to improve the economy and integrate Iran into the global economy after the nuclear deal and lifting of some sanctions. This policy further disadvantaged the have-nots that make up the bulk of the protestors. The neoliberal answer is to wait patiently; it takes time for the gains to trickle down.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Iran and Myths of Revolution
James George Jatras | Deputy Director of the American Institute in Ukraine, a privately funded American NGO, and former U.S. diplomat and foreign policy adviser to the Senate GOP leadershipAs

Also

Here is a revealing fact from a World Bank study for 2016:

“The Iranian government has implemented a major reform of its subsidy program on key staples such as petroleum products, water, electricity and bread, which has resulted in a moderate improvement in the efficiency of expenditures and economic activities.” In plain English, “efficiency of expenditures” means the Iranian government is cutting down on how much its social welfare programs actually provide social welfare....

In other words, Iran follows an extreme neoliberal, shock-and-awe kind of capitalism [under President Rouhani].

Good economic analysis.

But it appears to me that the author is crediting "the people of Iran" with more homogeneity than exists there based on what I am reading. The protests are not "people" the rising up against an incompetent and repressive government. Iranian demography and politics are more complicated then that.

Counterpunch
Iran and the Left: a Dissenting View

Reza Fiyouzat

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh — Rouhani’s “Open-Door” Economic Policy for Iran: Recipe for Indebtedness, Deindustrialization and Dependence

A number of commentators have compared President Rouhani’s policies of opening Iran’s markets to Western business with those of China’s Deng Xiaoping following the death of Mao Zedong some four decades ago [1]. A closer look at Mr. Rouhani’s open-door economic policies indicates, however, that they are more akin to those of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia following the collapse of the Berlin Wall than those of China since Deng Xiaoping.

This study makes an argument that both in theory and practice the Rouhani administration is following an economic model that is widely known to create indebtedness, warped industrialization and dependent development, which also often leads to a loss of political/geopolitical independence. To this end, the study focuses on the administration’s approach to trade and development, to foreign capital, and to industrialization and technological transfer.…

To criticize President Rouhani’s economic policies is not to question his or his advisors’ intentions or objectives of trying to bring about economic development in Iran. It is, rather, to question the means they employ—free trade and economic liberalism/neoliberalism—in order to achieve those ends. They must certainly be eager to pull their county’s economy out of the deep recessionary hole. Why, then, do they insist on pursuing economic policies that have proven—time and again, and in country after country—to be resulting in economic problems of indebtedness, deindustrialization and dependence?

The answer, in a nutshell, is that the president and his economic advisors seem to be infatuated with an economic paradigm that is regrettably detrimental to the goal of self-sustaining development for the less-developed countries. It is an inappropriate, unsuitable and misleading paradigm, crafted by economic ideologues or theorists of the more developed countries as economic “science,” whose practical outcome for the less-developed economies has been trade deficit, indebtedness, dependent development, and extreme socio-economic inequality. It is the notorious economic liberalism of the neoclassical school of economic thought, which postulates that free trade and unrestricted pursuit of self-interest lead to economic expansion and prosperity for all; that state-sponsored social safety-net programs or strategic trade policies are “costly trade-offs” in terms of lost productivity; and that, therefore, government intervention in economic affairs must be avoided.

According to this doctrine, solutions to economic stagnation, poverty and under-development lie in unhindered operations of capital and unreserved integration into world capitalist system. Recessions, joblessness and economic hardship in many less-developed countries are not so much due to economic mismanagement, uneven or unfair competition in international markets, or the nature of global capitalism as they are because of government intervention and/or exclusion from world capitalist markets.…

Falling into the trap.

Most of the post is about free trade versus smart trade. Excellent brief summary of the historical dynamic and how it benefits the core (empire) and harnesses the periphery (vassals, colonies).

Counterpunch
Rouhani’s “Open-Door” Economic Policy for Iran: Recipe for Indebtedness, Deindustrialization and Dependence

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh | Professor Emeritus of Economics, Drake University

Pepe Escobar — Iran: The New China?

Beijing regards Iran, not only in Southwest Asia but across Eurasia, as the essential hub for countering Washington’s much-advertised “pivot to Asia,” centered on U.S. naval hegemony. No wonder Xi made it clear that Iran is to be accepted as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as early as this year.

A strategic partnership implies Beijing’s full support for the Iranian economic/political/diplomatic renaissance across the arc spanning the Persian Gulf to the Caspian – and beyond. The arc also happens to span all the crucial New Silk Road maritime and land routes that are vitally important for the global projection of the Xi-coined Chinese dream.…

telesur
Iran: The New China?

Pepe Escobar

Pepe Escobar — Silk Dragon Takes Persian Road

Xi on the move. Pepe provides some of the details that were made public.

Strategic Culture Foundation
Silk Dragon Takes Persian Road
Pepe Escobar