After over 40 years of destruction of the country, the Iranian regime has further accelerated this destruction during the tenure of its current president Ebrahim Raisi. The regime no longer has the right to speak about development and progress while the levels of destruction have reached the people’s basic necessities, from bread and water to clean air.
The country is currently imperiled by the threat of famine. Forty years of back-breaking two-digit inflation, the loss of capital and financial resources, national savings, and oil revenues, are collectively vaporizing the different classes in Iranian society. It is beyond imagination to assess the impact the destruction has had on medical treatment, health services, people’s health, and longevity.
This is something that Ruhollah Khomeini, as the founder of this regime, left for the people of Iran and now his successors are continuing his dark heritage.
The latest atrocity is the collapsed Metropol building in Abadan which caused the deaths of many deprived people. The regime has done nothing to help the victims of the disaster and has outright refused to extract their bodies buried under the rubble of the building.
The regime is also adding insult to injury with the presentation of a song named ‘Hail to the commander,’ praising the regime’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
The state-run Jahan-e Sanat daily blamed the regime as the main culprit. It wrote, “The government, which is the main factor in designing inflationary budgets and fiat money and growing liquidity, appears every day as a public prosecutor, accusing the private sector, guilds, and producers, and sometimes with harsh behavior, it is misrepresenting the cause of rising inflation.”
Many of the regime’s experts and economists have come to believe that using the word ‘crisis’ to describe the current situation is no longer effective. All the while, the regime is putting the blame on an imaginary enemy for this crisis and catastrophe.
The Jahan-e Sanat added, “Everyone is shocked at what has happened to Iran’s economy. How is it possible for a country with such resources and capacities to have such a miserable economy?”
Even with a collapsed economy, the regime is fiercely insisting on printing fiat money, which will further affect the children and elderly in the country by starving them and driving them further into poverty.
After tripling the price of fuel and murdering 1,500 protesters during the November 2019 uprisings, the regime has now decided to increase the price of bread, cheese, and egg, deceptively referring to it as ‘economic reforms’.
The Jahan-e Sanat further stated, “For forty years, governments in Iran have come to the fore one after the other, but they have not been able to solve the problem of double-digit inflation. Rising prices for commodities such as flour, poultry, and dairy products are passive reactions and cannot be called economic reforms.”
The waste of the country’s resources is another factor in this devastation. Mehrdad Bazrpash, the head of the regime’s court of audit, highlighted, “Investigations by the Court of Audit show that a significant portion of the country’s resources is being wasted.”
To waste the country’s resources simply means to starve millions. Now the regime is planning to steal the people’s last assets and savings in the worst possible way, but claiming that they are reforming the economy.
This, of course, is just an excuse to further reduce the value of subsidies in the face of the rapidly rising cost of goods and commodities needed by the people.
Hojjat Mirzaei, the former deputy minister of social welfare, believes that the recent liberalization of prices is an extreme measure that shows the confusion and a kind of disintegration within the government’s decisions.
The state-run website Rooz-e No quoted MIrzaei as saying, “Countries that put structural adjustment on the agenda were very cautious and slow about eliminating food and medicine subsidies. But the 13th government has implemented the most extreme part of the adjustment in the most extreme way possible. Personally, I do not know of any economist who, in the current state of society, would consider the abolition of bread and medicine subsidies to be a correct step. In other words, they carried out an extremist policy in the most radical way.”
What is more painful is that the reduction of water, bread, and medicine is being done in the name of increasing subsidies, to compensate for the millions of rials for the increase in the price of essential goods and services.
