On the anniversary of the death of Iranian regime supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini, amid the unpredictable loss of former regime president Ebrahim Raisi, known as the “Executioner of 1988,” and faced with a premature presidential elections, supreme leader Ali Khamenei spoke of a crisis for the mullahs’ reime that he had repeatedly denied or downplayed: intensified divisions and defections among supporters linked to his office. Despite granting enormous licenses to plunder the country’s resources to his supporters and showing no hesitation in giving even more privileges, the ruling mafia factions have no qualms about clawing at and wounding each other to seize the property of Iran’s oppressed people. The result is a disgrace for the religious fascism that Khamenei is trying to cover up. He says, “In the electoral competition between candidates, ethics must prevail. Badmouthing, slander, and mudslinging damage the national reputation.”
He called on all the plundering and repressive members within and around his office to hold a grand electoral show to demonstrate to the world that he still has credibility. It doesn’t matter whether the elections have any impact and meaning for millions of poor, homeless, and destitute people or as a bottle of water for the thirsty, a blanket for flood victims, or a loaf of bread for those who go to bed hungry. The important thing is the magnificent holding of the electoral show.
Iran is not well today
Repeated crises, expected bankruptcies, and the suffocating isolation of the regime by the international community have left Khamenei and the ruling faction are running out of breath, even though the regime benefits from the appeasement tendencies of western governments. A beneficiary of this situation, Eshagh Jahangiri, Vice President under former regime president Hassan Rouhani, said after registering for the presidential election: “It is clear that the country is in a complicated situation and the people are in a difficult condition. Iran is not well. All the various achievements we have made have not been able to create a sense of growth and development. Unless we can uncover this reality and find the causes of the issues, things will continue as they are.” (source: ILNA, June 5, 2024)
He then listed the calamities that the different regime factions have brought upon the afflicted Iranian nation: increasing inflation, growing poverty and marginalization, the devaluation of the national currency and people’s purchasing power, worrying imbalances in all sectors including energy, budget, and the banking system, feelings of injustice, discrimination and corruption, decline in social capital, increasing migration, and narrow-minded and discriminatory factional approaches…
Despite all this, he promises to implement reforms under Khamenei’s leadership and with the officials who have added to the people’s suffering and pain for forty years, to save the clerical regime from the brink of collapse! The delusion and wishful thinking of this group are not erasable.
Within this regime, there is a war if you look at it as a whole
Even before the candidates are announced by the Guardian Council, they are drawing swords and daggers against each other, while a bunch of delusional people speak of reforming the regime. But even the regime’s own media don’t believe in such dreams.
On May 30, Sazandegi newspaper wrote: “According to reports from the World Bank and Transparency International, Iran has consistently been in the bottom third among countries with the highest perceptions of corruption. In fact, Iran’s latest ranking in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (rank 140 out of 180 countries) is between Russia and Iraq and much worse than China and India, which are notorious for high levels of corruption themselves.”
The Sazandegi reporter continues: “Systemic corruption through misallocation of resources and encouraging powerful players and interest groups to prevent reforms accelerates political decay.” He then mentions examples like the former director of Bank Melli who fled abroad with a $2.5 billion embezzlement! Or the “Debsh Tea” case, a product of Raisi’s cleric friends, or the entry of “dirty money” into electoral shows. Referring to renowned economist Daron Acemoglu, he concludes: “Countries fail to develop because of extractive and authoritarian institutions that benefit from the economic gains of others, and their interest lies in keeping the economy closed, suppressing creativity, and never realizing the economic agents’ freedom of action.”
Development has been lost
Now these people claim they want to fix this situation. As Hossein Rajabpour, a university professor and author of the book “Shaky Development,” said: “What we experienced in the past decade can be considered the ‘lost decade of development,’ and at the end of this decade, the country’s per capita income is lower than at the beginning of the decade. By any development index we look at it, the situation has worsened” (Ham-Mihan, May 15, 2024).
The future of the people under this regime is worse than their present
If we overlook housing, health, medicine, education, and employment, which are all disastrous, the consumption of meat and the provision of calories to replenish the working class’s strength is undeniable: “Official statistics show that the prices of 22 food items have outpaced general inflation since last year. The price of canned tuna has nearly doubled from last year to this year. The price of powdered milk has risen from 660,000 rials to about 1.1 million rials. The price of lamb meat has jumped by 66.5 percent in one year (from 3.71 million rials per kilogram to 6.18 million rials), and during the same period, the price of beef has increased by 63.6 percent…” (Fararu, June 1, 2024).
And so the empty tables of the Iranian people, who are out in the streets protesting every day, are an indication that all dictators will meet a harsh end and will eventually be swept by the masses.