The New Republic

I was wondering how long before you would reference that Dubai story. What I found most interesting was the French woman who paid 300 K for a condo, lost her job, and now faces prison there for not being able to pay her debts. Oh, that and the fact that talking about the financial crisis can make you end up in prison too. A Potemkin country (if an emirate can be called a country, that is)

- blackton

February 13, 2009 at 5:09pm

"Dubai's paper thin society seemed to fool almost everyone."

Not those of us who've known that, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the criminalization of most of its former constituent state regimes, Dubai has been Mafiya Central. It's where eastern european and middle eastern criminal money gets laundered.

- teplukhin2you

February 13, 2009 at 5:54pm

Agree 100% with Tep; don't know anyone who was "fooled".

- icarusr

February 13, 2009 at 6:11pm

hey ick, that french woman was sure fooled.

- blackton

February 13, 2009 at 7:45pm

Gosh, I would hate to end up in debtor's prison in Dubai or any other Arab country.

Blackton is right lots of naive Europeans and American (the type that read the fashion sections and believe what's printed there and have no clue about the real world) got fooled.

- jacksondyer

February 13, 2009 at 8:09pm

marty:

I have a suggestion for The New York Times. That it should initiate a new feature as part of its page 4 "Corrections" box, and that this should be devoted to the really big bloopers that became routine in Times coverage. The routine I have in mind was the future of Dubai.

george:

Come on Marty, if you had to post corrections in here you would never have time to post anything new .

Seriously though people take out of Dubai what they first put into it----their own prejudices, of course.

And even this constrictive agenda is buffeted back and forth by new macroeconomic tsunamis.

Dubai in today's economic sinkhole is not nearly as "fantastic" as it was back in 2005. The world literally grows increasingly "flatter" there as Tommy Freidman might say.

Speaking of which, has Freidman ever admitted how deeply flawed his glowing tribute to the global econmy was? Has he returned any of the money his own Potempkin Village has sown?

Check out this "blistering critique" of Freidman's premises by Ronald Aronica and Mtetwa Ramdoo in their book "The World Is Flat?"----at  BC Books web site:

"According to Aronica and Ramdoo, Friedman's vision of the globalized world is a deeply skewed account of globalization, often obsessed with the successful multinational corporations of India, the teeming engineers, and the "level" playing field. Not to mention the preoccupations with the limitless opportunities for profit for people who are intelligent or choose to invest in schooling, all the unmitigated fascination with gadgetry, and unbridled confidence in technology.

"Even a familiarity with the culture is missing, only rearing up its head in the Middle East to let you in on the fact that its only the backward culture that's holding the Arab civilization back from the wonderful riches on the flat world. There are no losers in the flat world, only people experiencing a time lag in seeing their riches come their way, for the global underclass will be able to educate their kids better and they will eventually be able to get better jobs and better pay. But as the authors astutely point out, there is also a vast global underclass whose resources are being pillaged and leeched ruthlessly by global corporations, leaving them with little or nothing to proceed with.

"Friedman is an acknowledged master of glib phraseology, and his utopic visions oftentimes OD on the pointless anecdotes he hears from his CEO friends, according to Ramdoo and Aronica. Friedman's book is a testament to how you can be a peripatetic and still be a resort town-to-resort town peripatetic, never really visiting the vast global ghetto made of upwards of three billion people surviving on two dollars a day and with limited access to potable water. Ramdoo and Aronica spend time discussing the vast underclass that dots the globalized world. The simple fact is that the world is not flat because it is patently laughable to compare the opportunities of the millions born into starvation and penury with children from the first or third world elites who get to buy $100 sneakers (made of course by the starving children)."

george:

Needless to say, you won't find this argument in The New York Times. Nor The New Republic. Nor The Spine. Marty I suspect is bringing us this story only because it's another chance to hammer a nail in the coffin of THEM.

THEM being everyone in the Middle East who is not a citizen of Israel. As in, "what do you expect, they're ARABS!"

And God [one of them] sees all.

george walton

- iambiguous

February 14, 2009 at 12:50am

Looking at the NY Times' fawning coverage of Dubai and noting also the parlous state of the Times' capital structure, Occam would conclude that, before Carlos Slim showed up, there was an Emirates-based white knight investor in talks with the Sulzbergers about a major capital infusion.

- teplukhin2you

February 14, 2009 at 7:49am

Or, that the NYT is, as usual, clueless.

Tep, do you remember the health care debate of 93-94?  I boycotted the NYT for a decade as a result of their outright lies about the Canadian health care system as they went about on their rampage against UHC.  It was as if there was not a single day that I opened the pages of the Times without reading one more horror story - isolated and exaggerated - about how UHC will lead to the destruction of America as We Know It.  The thing is, I couldn't figure out *why* they were doing this, other than sheer stupidity and intellectual laziness, the same kind that one used to find in Canada's "paper of record", the Globe and Mail, before the conservative Post forced it to behave.

So while I cannot rule out pandering, I suspect that as in much else, it is sheer intellectual laziness that drives crap stories, rather active malice.

Blackie: as soon as I pressed send, I thought - "shit - not clear enough".  I should have said, "no one I know personally" - and, as you can imagine, I have lots of friends and family who are in Dubai constantly.  It's impossible to be in Dubai, see the cultural barrenness of the city, hear all the Chinese and Russian and Persian spoken in the streets, and not think "Mafia".  Ask anyone who actually has to run a business there - from the lowliest dentist to the mightiest of banks - and they will complain about the silent partner who takes 50% of their profits by doing nothing other than sitting on his fat (usually, obese) Emirati ass ...

And if you're gay - let's just say that when the Morality Policy comes to your door because they have been monitoring your (and everyone else's) phone calls and have heard you say the word "gay", it sorta concentrates the mind on what the society is like; hard to be fooled then.

- icarusr

February 14, 2009 at 12:24pm

Just as the world economy has fallen on hard times, so too has Dubai. The curtain has been ripped open and the wizened wizard behind it has been revealed. You are right, jackson, only the society-mongers were fooled. They are always fooled because they are frequently fools.

- liberal reformer

February 15, 2009 at 5:08am

ick - The Company aka our intel services have for more than a decade focused on Dubai as the prime gathering point for international criminal organizations in the eastern hemisphere. I've no idea why our journalistic class has not picked up on this angle.

Then again, our media betters seem to have abandoned almost all coverage of Russia and points east-- so damned expensive, and those hip young audiences don't care if it ain't liveblogged or twittered or chattered about by Jon Stewart-- so I doubt we'll ever see any coverage of this obvious reality.

- teplukhin2you

February 15, 2009 at 2:05pm

Here is another story from swinging Dubai:

" A book festival in the Middle East that claims to celebrate the “world of books in all its infinite variety” has banned a British author because her novel contains references to homosexuality.

   The first International Festival of Literature in Dubai has attracted dozens of world-class authors, including Margaret Atwood and Louis de Bernières, with promises that it will be relaxed, vibrant and diverse. One author has found otherwise.

   Geraldine Bedell's book The Gulf Between Us was greeted with enthusiasm by organisers because of its setting in the Middle East, but the mood changed swiftly when they discovered a gay character.

   Isobel Abulhoul, director of the festival, wrote to Ms Bedell to tell her that she was not invited. “I do not want our festival remembered for the launch of a controversial book,” she wrote. “If we launched the book and a journalist happened to read it, then you could imagine the political fallout that would follow.”

   She explained that the book was unsuitable because one of the characters was a gay sheikh with an English boyfriend and the plot was set against the background of the Iraq War which “could be a minefield for us”.

   Ms Bedell, who has lived in the Gulf, told The Times that the book has since been banned from sale in Dubai and the rest of the United Arab Emirates....

   Authors due to attend the festival, which begins on February 26, include Kate Adie, Jung Chang, Carol Ann Duffy, Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Anthony Horowitz, Frank McCourt, Sir Mark Tully and Wilbur Smith. "

entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/.../article5741679.ece

- noga1

February 16, 2009 at 12:48pm

The decline of Dubai, about which I commented the other day, may have ramifications for Bill Clinton's

- Anonymous

February 16, 2009 at 9:46pm

The headline in one London newspaper was "Dubai sinking". They say the Palm Jebel Ali is sinking and it further talked about the sinking economy. New york times wasn't the only newspaper to blow it out of proportion.

- openuniversity

April 3, 2009 at 11:40am