> Iran is the only country in the world where selling a kidney in legal.
> Since the 1980s, the government has offered a fixed payment of 10 million rials (about $236) and subsidised health insurance to donors it matches with a person in need of a transplant, but many people head to the black market to bid for a better price.
> On a well-known street near Tehran's Valiasr Square, walls are littered with signs advertising organs for sale, with sellers listing their blood type, age and phone number next to listings for livers, kidneys and corneas.
> Keyhan, 39, said he “can’t count” how many people have contacted him to buy his kidney, which he has advertised on Twitter, Instagram and Telegram, where some organ-selling channels have tens of thousands of subscribers.
The exchange rate used to get to the $236 amount is the "official" exchange rate stated by the government which even the government itself doesn't use. 10 million rials is $20.28 based on the real exchange rate used by literally everyone inside the country (see bonbast.com for the real rates - also, as an aside, "bonbast" means deadend in Farsi, which aptly describes the current economical situation in Iran).
For context, the minimum wage is $152 per month (around 75,182,000 rials).
The economy has gone to shit in the past 10 years. The minimum wage was around $425/month, or $2.4/hour back then, compared to $0.86/hour now.
The Rail has lost much of its value since then but the salaries haven't increased enough to cover the brutal inflation, resulting in extreme poverty for the majority of the population and situations like the one explained in the article.
These SEO-optimized salary websites are a joke, and usually never cite sources for their figures. An average annual salary of $17,600 makes Iran a relatively rich country...in reality, it's much lower than that. With crippling sanctions and extreme inflation, it should be somewhere between $100 and $500 monthly.
I am Iranian, working as a software developer full time, I'm getting paid around 250 usd a month.
It's a shit show here. I'm trying to buy a car and I should be paying about 20 month of my salary for this (shit)[https://dl.bahalmag.ir/images/%D8%B9%DA%A9%D8%B3_%D9%BE%D8%B...]
Iran is under US sanctions, which makes it impossible for developers to apply for remote jobs. It's even harder for boys, who are required to spend 2 years in conscription in the military without payment before they can leave the country.
Even after that, the government won't release the academic certificate and requires a high price of working at least 5 years to earn that money.
In short, if anyone is born in Iran, they should also die there.
Additionally, I should mention that the dollar exchange rate, which Google shows, is completely inaccurate and is even worse than that.
P.S. do not believe other claims either, as those who succeed in Iran usually come from wealthy families or have connections to the government, or they have both.
Sadly, this country is worse than North Korea (T-T).
This is one of those really horrible situations that you want to ban because the knowledge of its existence is too depressing to grasp. But if you ban it, you haven't solved the poverty issue, in fact you've made people even more desperate. It becomes even more dangerous, higher prices due to lower supply.
But the opposite isn't desirable either. Sure, you can make it more legal, but now these people are being systematically exploited for their organs and there would be very little reason for it to go away, meaning there would now be incentives to keep people brutally poor so that you can get their organs.
What if you made a social program that said "if you are desperate enough to sell your organs, come to us and we will give you resources so you don't need to (Conditions apply)." And in order to curb abuse, some small percentage of the applicants actually were required to donate an organ, so that the program wasn't exploited by people stealing resources from those very desperate people. If you take resources from this program, you risk actually selling an organ like you otherwise intended. Only truly desperate people would be brave enough to use the program. And if you think that compelled donation is also barbaric, even in a small percentage, it would actually be a lie, but one that some portion of the program's budget is dedicated to upholding.
Or they can just stop getting nuclear weapons. And spending all their money funding terror against Israel, in Yemen and in Syria. You know, the sane option that they could've done for years.
Truth is that Iran is a terrorist organization leaching of its people. They have plenty of options to fix their problem, but their priorities are holy wars and nuclear weapons. Sadly it will be incredibly difficult for the Iranian people to overthrow this regime, and many of the Iranians who could've fight back had been leaving the country for years. I can't blame them, but sadly, regimes like these usually spiral downward in this way.
I don't think the allure of extremely desperate people selling their body parts will ever go away if an economy gets bad enough, and an economy being bad enough is not always dependent on some specific theoretically-easy-to-fix geopolitical situation.
In literally (yes, literally) every instance sanctions result in increasing the human suffering of the population at the expense of an already authoritative government regime.
What you're arguing is for sanctions to increase human suffering to a point where the public has nothing left to lose and they topple the government. It ignores the quagmire that human suffering increases, but not to the point where people have nothing left to lose. It also ignores the high likelihood the new government is even more hostile rather than less.
You should genuinely be embarrassed for even suggesting this.
Sadly, the alternative with this regime isn't lack of sanctions, it's (potentially nuclear) war. They have said many times they intend to destroy Israel, and I believe they intend to do as they say. We're on the brink of a regional war, that would be much worse than those suffering from economic hardship in Iran.
The sanctions aren't meant to topple the regime, they are meant to restrict the magnitude of the external damage they inflict. If there were no sanctions, Iran would have had nuclear weapons years ago, and there would probably have been a regional war with tens of thousands of casualties. I'm not sure it's even avoidable at the moment.
We're already on the brink of war if Iran decides to rush nukes right now.
I don't have any hope Iranians topple the regime, it's just robust enough to survive. The sanctions are necessary to prevent war or at least delay it. Without sanctions today, we wouldn't have prosperous Iran, we would have war ravaged middle east.
Israel could've had peace with Lebanon by now if it wasn't for Iran's cancer of hizbullah. Instead we have this. The only obstacle to peace in the middle east right now is Iran. Every terrorist organization can trace it's funding to Iran.
The only thing we can do is suffocate Iran so they can't afford to spread. That's the least violent option on the table.
Nah, not OP but I support the idea assuming it follows your train of logic, not embarrassed in the slightest as I've always voiced the same POV in public.
That drip feed is the worst, it's a cancer kept at bay, the one that keeps hostile governments like Venezuela or Cuba with a lifeline. If their population is too passive to topple the government, or if after repeated attempts they end up with people not worried about nation building, it's not our problem. Don't they want self-determination? Then if they aren't playing by the rules, sanctions should get deeper.
Yes - fix poverty, no - higher order effects will fix themselves.
Think about how many billions of COVID relief funds were stolen due to governments being terrible or corrupt at administration. There has to be some (perceived) risk to taking common resources. And that risk needs to be calibrated so that it does not phase truly desperate people, but discourages exploitative people to move on to easier targets. Imagine if by taking COVID relief funds, you signed a contract that could destroy your business and made everyone in your organization personally criminally liable, if the funds were taken fraudulently.
Then there is the forced organ Harvesting in China. Need a new heart that’s a match. No need to wait. Politically inconvenient Donors are dying to meet demands.
No one has ever found any actual evidence for that though. There are just people repeating each other claims as sources or citing poorly understood stats...
Exactly. The best they can manage is to not conclusively disprove the inference that it might have happened...
The Washington post did a piece saying it's nonsense too. The best evidence anyone can find is basically "it would be profitable". This is right up there with Pizzagate...
I am from Pakistan, were organ selling is technically illegal. And yet, it happens, poor bonded labourers end up with generational debt and sell their kidneys to try to recoup.
Are Iranians in especial need of kidneys for some reason compared to, say, Americans? Or do other countries have a more functioning donor network? Better results managing treatment with damaged kidneys/more readily available dialysis?
Start from understanding that the list of people waiting on kidney donations in the United States is long, and the average wait time is 3-5 years. Some awaiting kidneys will die before getting a donated one.
If selling kidneys were legal in the United States then people would be buying and selling them here.
What is up with journalists including this one[1] publishing only negative sentiment news stories ? If we could make The "Sentiment Meter" that measures the sentiment neutrality of news publications based on past journalist publications, they would sink in this rating.
Why should sentiment be neutral, especially from a single journalist? It seems absurd to assume that there must be an equal amount of positive and negative things to cover.
If you are e.g. A war correspondent and that's your job, you're probably going to have mostly negative sentiment stories. Similarly If you focus on reporting child abuse topics, similar. If your shtick is to embed yourself in poverty areas and bring true stories, it won't be lolipops and rainbows. Outside of journalism, same thing. There are jobs where you get exposed to wonderful things day in and day out, and there are jobs where you get exposed to bad sad stuff. and everything in between.
Particularly if your goal to be in journalism in the first place may be to change / improve the world, you might focus on things that need changing / improving.
Finally, outside of some very specific places, in a lot of the world things suck more than they don't.
I don't know if that answers your question or you had a different question / point to make?
wouldn't be surprised if kidney donor is going to be a job some day. a rich person pays a salary to a compatible potential donor and expects you to live healthy, workout, no alcohol etc. and ... if necessary part ways with one of your kidneys.
A regulated organ trade is good. We have provenance management here in the US already and the lifetime risks for a kidney donor are dwarfed by other jobs like underwater engineering.
When I was in prison I was approached about creating an app to sell/buy kidneys for third world countries by a guy with really good connections. I was like traffic in human body parts? Yeah no.
Then the next app old boy wanted help with was 'arranged marriage' in countries that practice that where it was more of a bride auction marketplace. So now straight human trafficking? Again pass.
He finally settled on a project where he and his son arrange for people overseas to come study in the USA. What? How do you go from human trafficking to something harmless like that? They have to live/stay on his properties so he was directing money straight to himself, and after they got to the USA his 'associates' coerced them into signing contracts to work for his companies for X years. So basically human trafficking again, and sanctioned and sponsored by these peoples home country (whom he had connections within and who was paying for these people to study overseas). Now that I'm thinking about this I should probably look into if there is a way to report this.
Smart dude with lots of money but he just couldn't not be shady AF. He thought all of these were perfectly legit things and was surprised when I didn't.
Solving the root problem is outside the realm of startups. You must know the difference between problems that have political solutions and those which are primarily solvable through business activity.
In this case, if a platform existed that made it easy to connect donors with people in need, organized the transplant with reputable surgeons, provided insurance, and guaranteed the donor or their family were suitably compensated, then I imagine this would be far better than whatever black market horrors go on now.
A person should be allowed body autonomy – it’s their body, their choice. If you want to sell one of your spare organs such as a kidney, or maybe all your organs if you’re planning to euthanize, that should be your right.
Raising a family out of deep poverty will always take luck or sacrifice, there is no other way out.
Don't pull the "my body my choice" bs, because it doesn't apply when commerce is involved. You're free to cut out your own organs, you're not free to create a system of economic incentives for that process, because that's outside of your body and clearly in the realm of broader social impact. I know you know that the government regulates business.
This problem is solvable through social programs, and I made another post in this thread explaining how I think that might work.
This is a false narrative. While true that the sanctions have pushed the value of IRR down, the lifting of sanctions, during Obama / Khatami era only fed the corrupt IRGC and its shadow economy. It is easy to think that people are being forced to sell kidneys because of the economic sanctions and as countries imposing the sanctions we are implicit in this, but the Iranian government and Khamenei are the main culprits here. They have the power and the means stop playing menace in the region, stop their proxy wars and move towards lifting of sanctions. There is a small but vocal Iranian backed lobby in the US (NIAC specifically) that is constantly pushing for the lifting of sanctions, even during the most brutal suppressions of the Iranian people by the government, peddling a narrative that the Iranians are dissatisfied with the economy and if the sanctions are lifted, all is going to be ok.
There is a shadow army, government and economy in Iran, created and tightly controlled by the office of the supreme leader, Khamenei and enforced by IRGC. They have a chokehold on the economy, imports and exports as well as almost exclusive control over critical foreign affairs. While lifting of sanctions will marginally reduce the pressure on the IRR in the short term, it will feed this cancerous growth which is not in the interest of the Iranian people and the world.
Bully nations must never be allowed to successfully weaponize starvation. Giving in to sanctions is tantamount to negotiating with terrorists. A terrible precedent to set.
Without making me read a whole book to find the answer, what are some examples of cases where sanctions have worked?
It seems that sanctions are primarily useful at driving the target country into the arms of a larger adversarial state. And as a near-absolute rule, they never affect the leadership responsible for the behavior being sanctioned; only the common people suffer.
My impression is that economic sanctions amount to collective punishment, and are thus unethical. I still hold out hope that they will prove effective against certain egregious actors such as the Russian government, but I think it's fair to demand continuous oversight and adjustment to ensure the sanctions are having the intended effect, and not just causing needless suffering among people who are powerless to effect change.
"According to Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, only the UN Security Council has a mandate by the international community to apply sanctions (Article 41) that must be complied with by all UN member states (Article 2,2)."
For the US, congress is supposed to approve of wars but that has not always happened either.
"It has been alleged that the War Powers Resolution has been violated in the past – for example, by George W. Bush invading Iraq in 2003 or by President Bill Clinton in 1999, during NATO bombing of Yugoslavia."
They are and they do kill people and make them suffer! Just nobody will count civilian casualties.
I think they are terrible. Just look at how little inflation has affected society even in most resilient economies and rich countries. Angry and impatient people everywhere, shoplifting and all sort of theft and crime going up.
Sanctions are not designed to directly pressure elites and corrupt leaders. They probably benefit even more because everyone now relies on them to do any foreign business. Average investor can no longer do anything. Therefore, it gives more power to the sanctioned regime.
Sanctions are designed to inflict great suffering on ordinary people in the hope of toppling the government. That's what they do!
