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171 comments on DrumBeat: July 31, 2006

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fleam on July 31, 2006 - 5:20pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I'd heard somewhere ...... it shoud be researchable.... a "first class" citizen among the Saudis got a stipend, something around US $30k a year in the 1980s, but it's gone down over the years, due to varying oil profits, demographics, etc and is now about US $7k a year. That's a huge decrease, in the US the working and middle classes have been barely keeping even or in the case of the working class losing ground, but imagine that kind of decrease. Thus, the Saudi kingdom must have a very pissed off middle class, interestingly this seems to be the class that terrorists out of there are coming from.
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Darwinian on July 31, 2006 - 5:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Fleam, I spent five years in Saudi Arabia, 1980 to 1984, and I have a son who has been there since 1991. He is here now on repat. I just called him and asked him if he ever heard of such a thing. He had not and neither have I.

I don't know what you mean by "first class citizen". Perhaps you mean the royal family, of which there are a two or three thousand. Perhaps they get some kind of stipend but the average citizen does not.

When I was there the government did give a newly married couple a small grant of land to build a house. I don't know if that practice has stopped or not.

Saudi Arabia is a highly stratified society. The royal family is at the top, and then there are those that are friends of the royal family and those that are friends of these people and so on down. It is called "wasta". If you have wasta then you get promoted in your job, you never have to pay a traffic ticket and so on. If you do not have wasta then you are S.O.L. There are degrees of wasta. Some have lots of it, like the royal family, some have less and some have only a tiny bit while others have none. How high you rise in your job depends entirely on how much wasta you have and absolutely nothing else. But there is no "official" wasta. It is all under the table.

The Sunnis are also a rung above the Shiites. A Sunni will always have more wasta than a Shiite. Well, that is in ARAMCO and most of the rest of the country. In some towns where the Shiites are in the majority, they would have more "local" wasta than a Sunni. But there is no hard line between "first class" and "second class" citizens although there is a strong, but graduated class structure.

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fleam on July 31, 2006 - 5:59pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
OK I was hoping someone who knew would pipe up here. My understanding was that somehow, there was a kind of basic living provided to those of the royal family (which is large) and to a sort of middle class, and it sounds like there is, a sort of providing jobs, immunities from fines, etc.

Am I correct in that the amount has been decreasing, causing unrest?

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fleam on July 31, 2006 - 6:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
OK here's an example of the stuff I've been hearing, an article by Zepezauer on Third World Traveler:

"The level of corruption in the House of Sa'ud is staggering. While they impose strict Wahhabi law on their subjects, with public beatings for alcohol consumption and amputations for thievery, the thousands of princes have siphoned off billions of dollars from the public treasury, wining and dining all over Europe and America, building lavish palaces and gambling away their stipends. A minor scandal ensued in Washington when some of the Saudi entourage's slaves tried to escape from a hotel suite by jumping out of windows. Meanwhile the standard of living for ordinary Saudi citizens has fallen dramatically over the past two decades, while annual budget deficits are soaring from the family's high living and the extraordinary level of military spending."

Thousands of princed spending away, and standard of living for the middle class joe going down.

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Darwinian on July 31, 2006 - 7:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Yes Fleam, this hits the nail on the head. There are still desperately poor people in Saudi Arabia, no matter what you hear. I have seen old women begging in the streets. When their husband dies they are all left destitute they have savings or unless their extended family will take them in. Life insurance is against the law in Saudi. It is considered placing a wager against the will of Allah.

Saudi has one of the highest unemployment rates in the Middle East. They have over five million expats in Saudi and about 5 million unemployed Saudis. But don't get the wrong idea, only a few thousand expats have a really good job making lots of money. The vast majority or expats from third world countries doing things that the Saudis consider "below" them. They will starve before they will do menial labor.

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canbrit on July 31, 2006 - 8:37pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

Reminds me of that great P J O'Rourke quote; from 1st Gulf War:

"The heaviest thing you will ever see a Saudi lifting is money..."

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Don Sailorman on July 31, 2006 - 11:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
In fact, many Saudi princes carry no money. They have slaves for that.
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Apuleius on July 31, 2006 - 11:44pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
That does make me wonder about what happened in the 90's when there were American troops stationed in Saudi. On one side, rednecks, i.e. working class Americans, in large part from the South, for whome the highest idea of manliness is to show off broad shoulders and strong arms in doing heavy lifting, and on  the other side, Saudi Arabs, for whom that kind of display is the utmost servility...
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AlphaMaleProphetOfDoom on August 1, 2006 - 11:49am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
http://www.iraq-war.ru/article/94343

I came across that googling after reading your post. Don't know if it's true. I found it highly disturbing.

If I ever have kids I'm adhereing to the Hulk Hogan school of parenting.  (Sidenote: he tossed some punkass pop star boy band member out of his house for being disrespectful to him. Didn't see it but the image is damn funny.)

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canbrit on July 31, 2006 - 8:57pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
You could be confusing KSA with Kuwait..

Kuwait has a kind of "class system" ... depending on proving your blood line from the original bedouin tribes (pre 1920)  Only 1st class males were allowed to vote until recently.

When zI lived there (1991-99)... All males were guaranteed A "desk job" in a ministry... there are numerous state gifts... upon coming of age, upon marriage; also housing loans (which tend to be "forgotten" after the first few repayments) etc... as well as free health care & education; and of course, no income tax!!

I'm not sure how these differ for each "class"...  

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fleam on August 1, 2006 - 12:17am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Hmm..... that could be......

The point is, the gravy train is starting to show signs of coming to an end in these countries, and in many cases there's been quite a drop in the standard of living. This breeds a lot of anger.

We've yet to see real signs of this in the US, but it's coming for us too. Timothy McVeigh probably would never have bombed if he'd had a good job to come home to, or college that didn't cost an arm and a leg. We've so far seen a slow rot in the standard of living for the US working class, and it's bred some anger. When things start dropping like a rock, it's going to get very interesting.

Yet, I have a feeling the good ol' boys will be much more open to ideas like permaculture than is often thought.

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171 comments on DrumBeat: July 31, 2006

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