What Do Liberals Want?

What do liberals want, regarding the empire and its enemy number one? It looks like the demand is now not so much "oppose the US government and the Iranian regime" as support the rich men of both countries who are advertised as "moderates" by the corporate media, for example, rooting for men like Bloomberg¹ and Rafsanjani².

While that's a slight improvement over favoring the US government over the Iranian government under the guise of opposing both, it also puts liberal advocacy for human rights in question. After all, Rafsanjani, who has been at the center of power in Iran from the very beginning of the Islamic Republic, is responsible for the deaths of thousands of opposition activists and intellectuals for which the current President of Iran isn't. As for the human rights record of the ruling class of the empire, the people of Iran need only look at the countries to their east and west and see what it is.

1 Exhibit A

The editor of Left Business Observer (who endorsed John F. Kerry in 2004) says this about Bloomberg:

I don't think Bloomberg makes much difference for how the NYPD operates. Instructions for the RNC 2004 almost certainly came down from the White House, and I doubt things would have gone much differently under Mark Green. . . . But things like 311 make routine daily life easier. And you can be sure that FEMA would have responded well to Katrina had Bloomberg been president. The passport office wouldn't be backed up for three months like it is now. The capitalist imperialist system would still go on, for sure, but for your average Joe or Jo, things would run more smoothly. (Doug Henwood, "Rudy's Braintrust," LBO-Talk, 14 September 2007)

2 Exhibit B

Hossein Derakhshan has taken note of the corporate media's and so-called reformists' advocacy for Rafsanjani: e.g, "Suddenly there is media storm in defence of Rafsanjani as a moderate saviour" (سردبير: خودم ",افسانه‌ی میانه‌روی رفسنجانی" , 21 August 2007). See, also, his English-language blog -- e.g.:

The other day I asked you to take part in a guessing game, based on some quotes. Now, here is the answer.

The person who, in a speech at Woodrow Wilson's centre in 2003, said those words was Ramin Jahanbegloo.

Jahanbegloo also said in his speech, titled ' Iran: From Political Gridlock to Crisis of Legitimacy' that "[t]oday, what is certain is that democratic developments in Iraq are taking a slower pace than what was expected and the Iranian population has no hope of a future American intervention in Iran." (And note, thanks to my friend Mo, that Jahanbegloo used the word 'hope,' not 'fear'.)

He later went on and and by his three scenarios of a) the centrist Rafsanjani's win b) Revolutionary Guard's coup and c) wide-spread urban chaos, effectively called the US liberals to stand behind Rafsanjani in the then forthcoming election, if they didn't want to see those two other scenarios.

This is a further evidence for me about the ties between the neo-liberal regime change plans and Rafsanjanist reformers. ("Jahanbegloo Advocated Rafsanjani in Wilson Centre," Editor: Myself, 2 August 2007)