Iran Is Now At The Bottom Of The Global Misery Chart: Bread Is Borrowed And Leased
By Sadegh
Pashm-Foroush
1/23/2021
Iran,
January 24, 2021—On Thursday, the state-run Arman Daily wrote, “More than 90
percent of Iran’s labour community are in total poverty, and with the current
skyrocketing prices, they can’t even procure their most basic needs.”
Poverty
in Iran
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This simple
sentence perfectly depicts the tragic state of Iran’s society and the hell that
the ruling mullahs have broken loose on the country’s population.
According
to some regime authorities, the poverty line for a family of four in Iran has
reached 100 million Rials per month. To put that in perspective, most workers
earn no more than 30 million Rials per month, a third of the minimum they need
for living. This is the true meaning of absolute poverty.
What Arman
Daily means by “can’t even procure their most basic needs” is that workers
can’t even buy adequate food for their families. They don’t eat meat for months
and according to official sources, the consumption of rice and dairy products
and other food items that are considered unexpensive, such as bread, has
dramatically reduced.
Well-Stocked Store Shelves, Empty Tablecloths
Regime
president Hassan Rouhani has time again claimed that there’s abundance of
products in Iran and store shelves of full. What he doesn’t say, however, is
that most of the people can only watch these full store shelves with envy.
What makes
the situation even more disconcerting is that Iran is the eighth richest
country in terms of natural resources but ranks 120 from a quality-of-life
standpoint. Per the Arman Daily article, “According to information recently
published by Iran’s Centre of Statistics, between 2016 and 2019, Iran’s gross
domestic product has reduced by 10 percent.”
It is worth
noting that this statistic, regardless of their integrity, do not paint a
complete picture of the truth of the situation in Iran. This figure is based on
the averaged mean and does not account for outliers. Due to the mullahs’
destructive policies, the distribution of wealth in Iran is abysmally unfair.
The ruling elite and their cohorts, which account for a very small percentage
of the population, have a very large share of the country’s wealth, which they
acquire through abuse of power, deceitful economic policies, and repression of
ordinary people. The rest of the people have to feed of the crumbs of what the
mullahs leave for them. The plundering of the country’s wealth has reached a
point that even the regime’s own media are acknowledging that Iran’s middle
class has been completely destroyed and the economy is on the verge of
collapse, divided between the very rich and very poor.
File
photo of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. Photograph:( Reuters )
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Economist
Farshad Momeni warned on December 1, 2020 that Iran’s misery index (the
aggregate ratio of inflation and unemployment) has reached 70 percent, and Iran
is now at the bottom of the global misery chart.
Growing Economic Divide
According
to Alireza Zakani, the head of the Parliament Research Center, “Seventy percent
of bank assets belong to 1 percent and 90 percent of bank assets belong to 4
percent of the population.” This only shows the widening and deepening rift
between the living conditions of the majority of the population and the ruling
elite. For most f Iran’s people, life is becoming more miserable every day.
The regime
tries to blame poverty on international sanctions. But even regime officials
are admitting that sanctions can at most be blamed for 30 percent of the
economic fallout, and the remaining 70 percent is due to corruption and
mismanagement in the regime. The sanctions have become a cover for
government-linked gangs to resort to even channel more of the Iranian people’s
wealth to terrorist proxies in the region.
In a recent
debate between former minister of transportation Abbas Akhundi and Gholamreza
Mesbahi Moghaddam, member of the Assembly of Experts, it was revealed that
every year $80 billion worth of imports and exports are not registered, and $20
billion of this amount goes to a bunch of corrupt middlemen.
It is
becoming increasingly evident that Iran’s economy is in a state of paralysis,
which is fully portrayed by the country’s currency losing 75 percent of its
value in just a few years. In this wrecked economy, which has created an
endless string of social ills, we’re witnessing the emergence of a class of
elite who are living pampered, luxury lives. In contrast, most of the
population struggles to make ends meet, and their lives are becoming harder
every day.
It is clear
that the situation can’t persist. Iran is a society that has undergone three
major nationwide uprisings in less than two years and brought the mullahs’
regime to the verge of collapse in 2019. The regime only maintain to manage its
hold on power through sheer brutality, gunning down more than 1,500 protesters
in a few days. But the underlying problems, the poverty, the corruption, the
unemployment, they still remain. Iran’s society is a dormant volcano. And the
regime knows that it is only a matter of time before the volcano erupts.
As the
Arman Daily warned on January 19: “Know that tomorrow is too late. The wails
will transform into screams, and quieting those screams will not be easy.”
Original Headline: What’s the price of the mullahs staying in
power in Iran?
Source: The English Mohahedin
URL: https://newageislam.com/islamic-society/iran-now-bottom-global-misery/d/124530