Chapter 1: What are the main causes of the recent protests in Iran?
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Ali goes back to Iran every few years. And in those visits, he always notices how it's changed. Every once in a while, for the better. Like when he was just there in December, he went to a restaurant and looked around.
I was like, wow, I cannot believe I'm sitting at the restaurant and no one is wearing hijab.
None of the women were covering their hair.
They were riding motorcycle bikes. Women were not allowed to ride motorcycle bikes, but they were choosing to do it.
But other changes he's noticed have been more ominous. Like this trip, people were way more worried about money than they used to be. He says a decade ago.
People were more open. They didn't have to think about their businesses. They didn't have to think about their struggles, like the financial struggles and all that.
The financial struggles, that has been a huge part of the change that Ali's been tracking. He says things changed even over the course of his short visit in December to see family and friends from childhood, the few that stayed.
One simple indicator was the price of egg. Yeah. Like a dozen egg, like just within that weeks that I was visiting, just like jumped by 30 something percent.
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Chapter 2: How have US sanctions impacted Iran's economy over the years?
This protest was about all that, too. But it was triggered by economic pain.
And a lot of that economic pain is from corruption. But a lot of it is because of the U.S., because of sanctions. The U.S. has been sanctioning Iran in one way or another for 47 years. The aim has been to push the regime to stop arming militias and terrorist groups in the Middle East, to stop pursuing nuclear weapons.
And one way sanctions can push countries towards change is by infuriating their citizens. The economic pain people experience can lead people to pressure their governments to comply, to stop the pain. And for a second in Iran, with those protesters in the street, it looked like sanctions might help achieve the goal of pushing the Iranian government towards change.
But instead, the regime cracked down. Shot thousands of people in the streets. Imprisoned thousands more. Shut down the internet.
All of a sudden, we saw a panic in the crowd. So we couldn't tell what was happening. We have to move. You hear the panic. You hear people screaming. They're trying to run. There was definitely fear in the air.
Ali managed to get home safely. But in the days that followed, as people in Iran got connected back to the internet, he would learn about all the killing.
The Iranian government has said 3,000 people were killed. Independent observers estimate the true number to be many times that, in the tens of thousands.
My friends are okay, but when I say okay, no one's okay. People are not okay. They may be alive, but they're not okay.
Ali says you got to keep in mind, the entire history of this regime in Iran has been littered with protests and violent crackdowns, protests and violent crackdowns.
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Chapter 3: What triggered the latest protests in Iran?
This is not new. But there is a difference lately, partly because the economic situation has gotten so grim, which is particularly demoralizing for young people.
They're Their lives, their future, their hope, everything's changed, right? They don't have much to look forward to. Basic human rights are not there. That's why most of the people that now you see their photos, most of the people that have been shot are the younger generation because they're fearless.
Of course, they all have a dream too, but they're putting the dream of freedom ahead of their own dreams.
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Nick Fountain.
And I'm Mary Childs. Today, as we hit publish on this episode, representatives from the U.S. and Iran have just met in Oman after a week in which President Donald Trump threatened attacks and Iran continued to crack down on protesters.
The protests in Iran are about so many things. The biggest things. Human rights, women's rights, anti-corruption, freedom. But this time, they are also motivated by economic hardship caused, in part, by U.S. sanctions. Today on the show, what were those sanctions? What do they do to Iran's economy? And what has been the result?
Sanctions are supposed to avert war, but how different from war are they really? So what are sanctions? Sanctions are a tool countries use to try to get another country to do what it wants, like to stop being communist or to stop doing a war. The idea is to influence political behavior without military force by imposing restrictions on trade and capital instead.
But as a tool, most experts will tell you they only work some of the time. Like when communication is really good, the goal's really narrowly defined, and the targeted country isn't too big or too well integrated into the global economy.
The U.S. 's sanctions on Iran have not always conformed to those expert recommendations. Nonetheless, the U.S. has had sanctions on Iran for basically the past 47 years.
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Chapter 4: What role do sanctions play in the protests against the Iranian regime?
It's not that far from where they're sitting. I could see the movie of what I was reading in my in my mind's eye, that they're commenting on, oh, wow, wait, what's going on outside? What's the latest news and what's happening? And that really radicalizes the direction of the discussion.
And then there's one more key piece of news in the archives. The U.S. responds to the hostage situation by putting its first sanction on Iran, freezing assets held in the U.S. until they released the hostages. And all this, the students, the American pressure.
It changes the mood of the room. And it's like you can see it's like this flashpoint where it sort of could have gone in a slightly different direction.
Economically, the mood changed in favor of shutting out foreign investment. One guy suggests banning foreign companies from getting any concessions, permission to operate in the country. And Eva Leila writes in her book, they quickly whip up a line and put it in the Constitution. Absolutely forbidding foreign concessions. They go full protectionist.
And they make those decisions in the context of this really live, discursive war with the Americans and conflict through the embassy seizure.
That's one of the big things Iwilela found in all those big books, that the hostage situation and the sanctions that followed, the clear desire to keep foreign influence out of Iran, helped calcify Iran's oppositional stance. Their whole economic identity was created in opposition to the U.S. and the West.
Which meant for the coming decade, while growing global trade was lifting its peer countries, Iran was cut off voluntarily and through sanctions.
Iran in this period wanted to have its own economy. The idea being we can do it all ourselves.
That proved pretty challenging. At that same time, Iran and Iraq began a devastating eight-year war. Iran needed foreign imports, like raw materials and consumer goods, which made surviving with a closed economy even more difficult.
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Chapter 5: How has the Iranian government responded to recent protests?
And it started to change policies to actively attract foreign investment.
And over time, this liberalization basically worked. GDP grew in fits and spurts, but keeping pace with its peers like Turkey. The middle class of Iran was growing. Economically, things were basically fine.
And all of that happened while there were U.S. sanctions. During the 90s, the U.S. imposed sanctions on Iran for state sponsorship of terrorism, and also because Iran was pursuing nuclear capabilities. But Iran was able to find enough economic partners that weren't the U.S. Those sanctions were kind of weak sauce.
Yar actually got to see the results of this second period of our economic history of Iran, the yield of those two decades of opening up and economic growth. In 2013, Yar's dad went back to Iran again, and this time, Yar went with him. He was in college at the time.
The country hadn't opened up much politically. Women still had to wear hijabs. Homosexuality was still a crime. The state was executing increasing numbers of people. Huge anti-government protests were violently quashed. But economically, Iran was surprisingly vibrant.
You could see that this was a country where most of the things in the stores were made in Iran, where unlike most countries, the cars that people were driving were made in the country. This was a country where you had a diversified economy with a large services sector and you had
local manufacturing you had of course agricultural sector as well and then the oil sector was like you know a part of it how did that manifest as you're like on the ground walking around with your dad Yeah, I mean, it seems crazy, but traditionally people would be buying their food and household goods in a bazaar. But the country was moving towards basically modern supermarkets.
And in fact, in Iran at the time, there was a joint venture between the French supermarket giant Carrefour and a UAE company called Maggi Del Futame. And they were building hypermarkets, supermarkets the size of like a Walmart. And it was revolutionizing modern retail in Iran.
There were more mall developments going up. People were buzzing around buying their things.
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