Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Is It Ever Not About the Oil?

By Russ Wellen



In A very Iranian coup
at Asia Times Online, Chris Cook, who had been helping Iran with its oil market development -- such as working to set up an oil bourse -- looks at the election crisis through an economic lens:

The power base of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's faction is the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and the volunteer militia, the Basiji, and their economic base consists of the religious foundations known as Bonyads.



Unlike in the West, where governments are owned and run by the banking and financial system, in Iran it's the Oil Ministry that controls the purse strings and calls the shots. The Khamenei faction has gradually been taking over key positions in the ministry and its myriad state corporations.

A mistake many of us in the West make is assuming that Supreme Leader Khamenei already had control over oil. In fact, according to Cook, it was Rafsanjani's fiefdom.
It should be remembered that when Ahmadinejad gained power he was able to put in his own appointees as ministers, except for the key Oil Ministry, where the Majlis, or parliament, twice rejected his appointments and appointed someone acceptable to the "Oil Mafia" more or less identified with former president Hashemi Rafsanjani.



In the past couple of years, we have finally seen a new oil minister appointed by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. ... and several others of long standing in key positions - have "retired" or become "advisers".



Having finally wrested control after years of struggle of the oil revenues from the Rafsanjani faction, the Khamenei'ites are in no mood to give it up.



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  1. geoffJune 16, 2009 at 9:37 AM

    I had missed this article in my searches to find any "real facts" (what a silly concept I know) about the Iranian election. Thanks. I had known that Rafsanjani was considered corrupt - he's certainly wealthy - and his endorsement of Mousavi could have been the kiss of death amongst some of the electorate. But I guess that wouldn't matter much as the West seems to have assumed from the start that the election was a sham. I'm holding my breath to see who the "useful idiots" maybe this time around. Me I'm staying in hibernation.

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