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July 1st, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Unemployment in Iran’s industrial heartland has soared to an unofficially
estimated 35% because factories unable to import vital goods and equipment
due to sanctions are forced in turn to sack their workers.
Rising joblessness is being fuelled by Iran’s exclusion last March from the
Swift banking system, preventing businessmen from carrying out international
transactions. One company making car windscreens near the northern city of
Ghazvin sacked 500 staff because it could no longer import resin from the
EU. Iran’s biggest tyre manufacturer, Kian Tyre, recently fired around 800
workers for similar reasons.
In an illustration of a problem that threatens to cripple Iran’s sizeable
pharmaceutical industry, a medicine-manufacturing plant was forced to
lay-off 220 workers because owners could not purchase necessary raw
materials from Germany, Austria and Italy. The company is trying to
establish an overseas bank account to evade the Swift ban.
“It has become a humanitarian issue,” said Mehrdad Emadi, an Iranian
economic consultant based in the UK. “The economy is gradually being
strangled and factories dependent on free trade are withering away. At the
micro level, people are having to take basic decisions about food
consumption, which is very painful.”
Emblematic of the latter problem is the price of chicken, which rose in two
weeks from 45,000 rials (£2.37) to the equivalent £3.84 a kilo, astronomical
by local standards and prompting some restaurants to remove it from their
menus.
“Customers who would come and buy three chickens before are now only
buying one,” said the owner of a poultry shop in the middle-class Arya
Shahr neighbourhood in western Tehran. “They simply cannot afford these
prices. The cause is that chicken feed prices have risen by four-and-a-half
times their previous level. Although the feed is produced in Iran, we also
used imports but we can’t do that now because sanctions mean we can no
longer get letters of credit. That has caused the price of locally-produced
feed to rise. Mismanagement, sanctions and profiteering are all playing a
part.”
Price rises have spread across the food spectrum. Undercover student
researchers surveying 20 supermarkets and four government food distribution
centres in Tehran, discovered that 10 basic foods had risen in price by an
average of 70% since March while the average family’s weekly food basket
shrunk by half. One middle-aged male respondent said he had given up buying
meat and sugar so his family could continue eating bread and cheese at
breakfast.
At the Amir Abad fruit market in west Tehran, sellers have stopped stocking
melon and wild cherries, citing a lack of demand caused by rising prices –
caused in turn, they say, by soaring fuel costs for delivery vans.
Inevitably, the climate of austerity has sparked dissent, prompting a
predictably harsh response from a regime worried that economic discontent
could trigger a general uprising. A 10,000-signature petition addressed to
Mr Ahmadinejad’s government outlining workers’ grievances recently resulted
in mass arrests of trade union activists in Karaj, near Tehran.
Even the regime’s most cosseted insiders are not immune. Staff in the elite
revolutionary guards have experienced salary delays, with officials blaming
budgetary disagreements between parliament and Mr Ahmadinejad. And in a
potent irony for the ruling theocracy, the price of textile for clerics’
turbans has risen 15% in three months.
Despite the grim backdrop, Iranian officials have affected a lack of concern
about the EU oil embargo, insisting that they have alternative customers.
In truth, many non-European customers are taking flight, fearful of
simultaneous new US sanctions that punishes nations for buying Iran’s oil.
Even China and India – two of Tehran’s most reliable clients – have
announced in recent days that they will only continue buying Iranian crude
if Iran provides its own tankers and insurance, something rendered
impossible by the EU embargo, which also bans the sale of insurance for
Iranian oil shipments.
With fresh OPEC figures showing Iran’s production down by 720,000 barrels in
the past month, Iranian officials have resorted to desperate measures,
including offering heavily discounted sales to traditional customers.
But even that ploy could further destabilise the country’s finances, forcing
yet greater impoverishment on the hard-pressed population.
“Oil traders close to the government say discounted sales would mean a
48% fall in oil revenues in the coming months,” said Emadi. “The
government can only balance its budget if oil prices stay above $80 per
barrel. I believe you are going to see a more-than 50% drop in Iran’s
foreign trade over the next three months. It’s nothing short of disaster for
the national economy.”
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