You Get Ranked or You Get Bombarded

What is your first think if I mention name of some countries like Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Iran, and North Korea. You might think about the communist country, petrodollar, or nuclear energy. Yet all these countries share one thing in common: they prohibit or impose conditions on foreign investment and imports. That includes US investment and US exports. It would hardly be surprising that the US state, dominated by business interests, where the majority of cabinet members are, and have, for at least the past century, been corporate directors or members of corporate law firms, would be hostile to countries that interfere with, or prohibit, activities related to the accumulation of capital by US-based trans-nationals.
Accordingly, Iran prohibits private ownership of power generation, postal services, telecommunications and large-scale industry – hardly an inviting place for a foreign investor looking to expand his capital. Add to that the fact that Iran’s constitution severely restricts foreign ownership in the petroleum sector and mandates that the banking sector be state-owned. There’s also the reality that the government uses its ownership stake in over 1,500 companies to influence pricing to meet social policy (not trans-national profit-making) goals. Top these multiple crimes against the potential for fat profits with a trade policy that fosters the development of domestic industry by discouraging imports, and the conclusion is clear: Iran isn’t the kind of place a capitalist scouring the globe for markets and investment opportunities is going to warm up to.
So, is alarm over Iran acquiring the means to develop nuclear weapons, and Ahmadinejad’s reputed “violent anti-Semitism,” a cover for an effort to pry open the Iranian economy to move it up the Index of Economic Freedom?
To answer the question above, we can make an analogy toward Iraq. Before the US installed itself as the effective ruler of the country, Iraq had a largely state-owned economy, imposed restrictions on foreign ownership of key economic sectors, and subsidized necessities, such as fuel, cooking oil and staples, to meet social policy objectives. Like Iran today, Iraq had all the features of a largely closed, dirigiste economy, so richly at odds with the expansionary requirements of US capital. But Iraq, under US guidance, is in the midst of an economic makeover. State-owned enterprises are to be sold off. Subsidies for fuel and oil are being eliminated. The country is under the control of the IMF. Foreign investors are to be allowed to enter the state-run oil-export business, and promises are being made to open up downstream infrastructure, like refining, to private investors. (New York Times, August 11, 2005) So, yes, Iraq is being transformed from an economy much like Iran’s into one much like Hong Kong’s.
That’s one reason to believe that alarm over Iran is contrived, a cover for pursuing a new economic makeover project to benefit the economic elite of the US imperialist alliance. But there are others. Lay aside the monumental hypocrisy of rich, industrialized countries, some teeming with nuclear weapons, all with the capability of producing them, most with their own civilian nuclear power industries, demanding that Iran relinquish its right under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to independently develop nuclear power for civilian use. Ignore, too, that the same demands are not made of other less developed countries, higher on the index of economic freedom, and more accommodating to the profit-making interests of Western investors and trans-national corporations.