IT ALL BEGINS WITH HATING MUSLIMS:

The plight of those sliding into the category known as "absolute poverty" is even more tragic. According to the Iranian Parliament's Research Center, in fiscal year 2016-17 (calculated in the Iranian calendar), 16 percent of the population lived in absolute poverty, defined as living on or less than $1.08 a day. In 2017-18, the figure increased by an average of 30 percent. That figure must have risen even higher in the past year. This means at least another 10 percent of the population has fallen into absolute poverty in just two years.

All you have to do to see the impact of the sanctions is observe buyers' behavior in municipal stores reserved for fruits and vegetables. "Before, except for the homeless people, you would hardly ever see anyone asking for rotting produce from us," said a manager at one of these stores. "We just threw them into giant bins to be picked up by garbage trucks the next day. Today, for every individual buying our 'normal' produce, twice, sometimes three times as many people could be seen scurrying about until the closing hours when we offer our rejected produce at reduced rates." He said the competition to grab this rejected produce could get quite fierce. "They just need to feed themselves and their family no matter what, pride be damned," he added wryly.

Available data for the economy are hard to come by, but from what is published, the emerging picture is of a society on the brink. For instance, according to the Central Bank of Iran, after a 12 percent growth in GDP in 2016, the first year after the conclusion of the multilateral nuclear agreement (officially, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), it dropped to 3 percent growth in 2017, followed by a 4 percent contraction in 2018 and a further projected 10 percent contraction in 2019, showing the effect of the new sanctions imposed after Trump's 2018 withdrawal from the JCPOA. This is a cumulative contraction of 14 percent in just two years, which, when combined with the impact of the previous sanctions regime, easily surpasses the Great Depression in its severity and devastating consequences (this year's conditions are expected to be worse than those of the previous two years).

 

It seems that, for once, Trump is not exaggerating when he describes the sanctions against Iran as "the most severe ever imposed on a country." Indeed, the situation is uniformly bleak for all social and economic indicators. From suicide rates to divorce rates to substance abuse to air and water quality to crime rates, the story is the same.

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