Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
Where do they [Hizbullah] get their money to do welfare work? Iran and Syria? How much per year?
I don't know, but some comes from taxes (since Hizbullah is a state-within-a-state in Southern Lebanon). Israel's attacks will hurt their tax base, while imposing a greater need for military spending, squeezing health, education, and welfare spending. Some probably comes from local Shi'ite businesspeople, while some does come from Iran and Syria. I don't know how much. (It is common in the Mideast for countries' goverments to try to curry domestic support by helping anti-Israel forces. Some of it is purely symbolic or does no good for the people as a group, like Saddam's alleged rewards to parents of Palestinian suicide-bombers before he was smashed by the US.)
Is Hizbullah opposed to the state providing welfare or is it providing welfare because the state refuses to do so and because it allows it to build a "dual power" structure?
I don't think the official Lebanese state has the ability to do much more than survive (though Israel has now made that survival quite iffy), so that Hizbullah has stepped into the gap. It's possible that Hizbullah sees the official state as a competitor and thus has opposed health-and-welfare funds from it. However, with Israel's attacks, Hizbullah would likely lean toward greater willingness to take aid from the officials. In general, Israel's attacks have unified Lebanon. A lot of what I'm writing here is speculation, so I hope to hear from experts.
What else does Hizbullah believe in? What other items exist on its economic agenda? Women's rights? Sexuality?
I have a friend on the web who is very quick at producing answers to such questions and posts them to pen-l. I'm sure she'll do so soon. BTW, I wrote:
Karl Polanyi's THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION is a great explanation of the
early stage of classical liberalism helped to create the need for social democracy, fascism, etc. ...< I should add that Polanyi saw communism as a response to classical liberalism, too. -- Jim Devine / "An economist is [someone] who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible." -- Alfred A. Knopf
