Word: bazaaris
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...very conspiracy-minded." So let's indulge ourselves and think like Persians about recent events in the Middle East. Here's my conspiracy theory: It starts with the fact that no one really does know who runs Iran. There are all sorts of competing institutions-governmental and religious and bazaari. There is a secular President, mouthy Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a supreme leader, the Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. There is a constitutional tension between those two offices, a tension that may have been heightened in the past year by Ahmadinejad's close relationship with Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Corps...
Rafsanjani's power base in the Majlis is made up of a small clique of technocrats and the bazaari merchant class, of which he is a member. The bazaaris were the key to the overthrow of the Shah, and now they want the President to live up to his promises to privatize industry and liberalize the centralized economy. On the other hand, Islamic radicals are still the moral guardians of the revolution, and they oppose reforms that might endanger social benefits and let in greater Western influence. They sometimes accuse Rafsanjani of being too liberal on cultural matters...
...basic items. On a morning radio show called Hello, Have a Good Day, listeners have repeatedly complained about high prices and profiteering. Some gripe that while government employees can barely make ends meet, a few merchants are getting richer and richer. Nonetheless, the social and political status of the bazaari, the powerful businessmen who traditionally have run the economy, seems to be declining as the government assumes a larger role in setting prices...
...such an atmosphere, corruption thrives. One prosperous bazaari, who lives in a villa on a tree-lined street above the center of Tehran, says he can still bribe a policeman when the officer stops him late at night in his Mercedes-Benz for drunken driving. A diplomat discloses that he pays off local police before giving a dinner party and afterward finds them in his kitchen dining on the leftovers and drinking his vodka...
...matter is crucial because Khomeini has come to realize how little he can afford to antagonize the bazaari, the prosperous and traditional merchants who helped finance his overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Four years ago the Ayatullah sneered that "economics matters to donkeys." By now, he has been heard to confess, "If the bazaar opted out of the Islamic Republic, the republic would face defeat...
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