On Sunday, the regime’s president Ebrahim Raisi claimed his government broke export records with over $50 billion. But even the state media admits he broke the world record for lying, solidifying his position as the chief charlatan in the world’s most deceptive regime.
One of Raisi’s real achievements is an unprecedented censorship of the already engineered economic statistics provided by the government-affiliated statistic centers.
“Unlike previous years, Iran’s Statistic Center has not published inflation rate for the last two months,” the state-run Donyay-e Eghtesad website wrote on May 2, calling out the government’s “collective censorship of data.”
“This collective censorship is not limited to the inflation rate, and we can see how statistics regarding the country’s mining, housing, and business have been censored. Seemingly, authorities are not interested in publishing statistics, as doing so would debunk their promises and claims,” the outlet added.
Raisi, who made much fuss about “economic prosperity,” doesn’t want to acknowledge that the country’s inflation hovers above 50%, the production rate dwindles under 3%, the housing prices have increased by 150%, and as the state-run Taadol wrote on March 27, “the prices of commodities have increased by 200%.”
So as the state-run Etemad daily wrote, “The pensions funds’ crisis, like other social and economic problems, is like a timing bomb. It should be defused soon, or it will have devastating consequences.”#IranRevolution https://t.co/2V8egyrblz
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) May 7, 2023
Raisi has no boundaries in lying. By ordering prices to “stop soaring,” promising to eradicate poverty in two weeks, building one million houses a year, and realizing double-digit economic growth, Raisi has set new boundaries for duplicity.
“There is no institution on authority to assess the claims about economic prosperity and to see if the government has really achieved what it claims. This is not the first time that authorities lie, but no one holds them accountable,” Ali Saadvandi, a regime-affiliated economist, said on May 6.
With its institutionalized corruption, believing in clarity in the ruling kleptocracy is far more unrealistic than believing in the tooth fairy.
The plummeting value of Iran’s national currency, the rial, is another “record” Raisi’s government has broken. “In nearly two years since Raisi’s ascendance to the presidency, the dollar exchange rate has jumped from 230,000 rials in April 2021 to 500,000 in April 2023,” the state-run Etemad daily acknowledged on April 8, 2023.
The prices are skyrocketing per minute. “We blink and see the prices of consumer goods increase by 30-40%. Officials do not care, and people’s voices are not heard. It is true that many Iranians can’t win their bread,” said Hossein Qomi, a state-affiliated cleric, on May 7.
Iran’s ongoing financial calamity and Raisi’s failure to address it is indeed a humiliating debacle for the regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who appointed Raisi as president and described his presidency as the “sweetest event” in 2021. Khamenei’s primary goal was to consolidate power in his regime to counter future uprisings. Raisi’s main task was oppressing a restive society, not to address its problems.
Yet, amidst an ongoing nationwide uprising, the clerical regime’s failure to at least temporarily address the country’s economic crunch fuels public hatred and can pave the way for more public protests.
“The rampant inflation and the increasing poverty and misery rapidly worsen the situation for people. The systematic and institutionalized corruption in the system is another worrying sign of the new situation. In terms of its popular base, the Islamic Republic is in its most dangerous periods, and a rebellion could happen any moment,” Mehdi Nasiri, former editor-in-chief of Keyhan Daily, an outlet known as Khamenei’s mouthpiece, warned on May 5.
Source » ncr-iran