“I gotcher ‘Invisible Hand’ right here!”
Adam Smith’s metaphor shows us that all hands – invisible or not – have a middle finger, the flipping of which translates really well from Farsi to ‘Murrican.
This from the AP.
Iran Invites U.S. to Bid on Nuclear Plant
By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer
Iran on Sunday offered the United States a share in building a new nuclear power plant in an apparent effort to curb U.S. opposition to its atomic program.
"America can take part in international bidding for the construction of Iran's nuclear power plant if they observe the basic standards and quality," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said at a news conference.
Asefi was apparently talking about a 360-megawatt light water nuclear power plant in southwestern Iran, which the head of the country's top atomic organization announced plans to build on Saturday.
Iran also wants to produce 2,000 megawatts of electricity by building nuclear power plants with foreign help in southern Iran.
Relations between both countries have been severed since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. Washington also imposes unilateral sanctions on Iran, preventing U.S. companies from doing business in Iran.
The United States has also ratcheted up pressure against Tehran, accusing it of pursuing a nuclear weapons program and supporting anti-Israeli militants.
Iran, which denies it wants to build atomic bombs, has been involved in stalled talks with European negotiators over its contentious nuclear program aimed at making Tehran permanently freeze uranium enrichment.
Enrichment is a process that can produce material for use in warheads or fuel for nuclear plants to generate electricity.
…
Let’s be clear; Iran really is an enemy of this country. But since Republicans have given up any pretense of a rational foreign policy in favor of letting nuclear-armed oil plutocrats run their Shock-n-Awe, Shake-n-Bake international Ponsi scheme out of the Oval Office, what can they possibly say?
When the only tools in your shed are tax cuts, bombing and bending over for oligarchs, what rebuttal can a Republican possibly offer to the Iranian government using a policy of economic engagement on us in exactly the same way the Bush Administration “engages” China?
I mean, aren’t “the markets” supposed to solve every single fucking problem from slavery to public education to global warming?
Isn’t unfettered capitalism always right, and isn’t that exactly what Tehran is offering?
One other thing.
The rulers of Iran, as I have said, are genuinely Bad Guys. However, simply as a recognition of technical excellence in the field of geopolitical bitchslappery, calling out our government as slipshod bumblefucks by making United State’s involvement in the bidding process contingent on our ability to meet the Iranian's “basic standards and quality” was some top shelf snark.
16 comments:
Good point - banning a sovereign nation's building of nuclear plants (or creating nuclear weapons programs) would represent some things anathema to this administration:
1) Interference with free market capitalism
2) International regulatory authority, in other words
3) Recognition of International Law
and would probably require actions by
4) The U.N.
I have to disagree with the characterization of Iranians as bad guys without any modification of the term 'bad'. Sure they're unrequited islamocists, but if you have any knowledge of US/Iranian history you know that we have abused them for dacades. And if you look at a map of US forces in the mid-East, you can see that they surround Iran. Don't buy into the Iran-is-bad syndrome without having reservations about what information we are allowed to get.
Saddam was bad, but I have read enough material by objective (probably) writers that indicate that he wasn't anywhere as bad as reported in the MSM.
Iran's leaders go around talking about how the "cancer of Israel" ought to be forcibly relocated to Europe and they go around funding psychotic terrorist organizations who seem to think killing people who are essentially unoffensive to them is an act of great good. Among other things.
Winter: The really strange/funny/frightening thing is that the US government (think CIA) did fund/arm/train psychotic terrorist organizations in the Middle East (including Iran) and killed a good number of innocent people and, not incidentally, engineered the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected government in order to re-establish the Shah in the 1950s.
Given the bizarre, conjoined, and apparently doomed nature of US/Israel foreign policies, it's not surprising that Iranian politicians would call the country a cancer and wish to relocate its population to Europe.
In order to get a better understanding of why Iran and Iraq are what they are now, you have to go back, at the very least, to the 1940s and 1950s. Even better if you go back to the early 1900s and understand how the British were diddling around in the region.
maybe we'll see a battle of the Titans as Bechtel and Fluor duke it out while Halliburton goes after the oilfield infrastructure
Just as an aside, the "invisible hand" image has been sorely abused... Smith didn't mean that it corrected the market, it was more an argument for economic nationalism, quashed with the introduction of "Free Trade."
Good write-up here: http://pl.net/~keithr/rf98_InvisibleHandQuote.html
He had little faith at all in the morality of capital, and did not believe in wholly unregulated lassaize-faire capitalism, for reasons best left to him to describe:
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Describing Adam Smith's reaction to what has been done to his words could basically start with "apoplectic," then work upwards through "absolutely bat-shit," possibly ending up somewhere near "foaming-at-the-mouth insane."
"...geopolitical bitchslappery..." Oh, dear GOD, it HURTS when you snort carbonated water through your nose. Your final paragraph is simply a work of art.
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