People are protesting against the corruption of an islamo-fascist mafia that has been robbing them blind for the past 40 years, and has been using mass murder, torture, rape, violence, targeted killings and all manner of coercion and blackmail tactics to keep them in submission.
A few families connected to the highest levels of the regime and the leader have been getting fatter and fatter and becoming obscenely rich, while presiding over the systematic dispossession of the average Iranian through regime sanctioned schemes and sweetheart deals, resulting in industrial scale thefts of the country's financial resources.
The system is thoroughly corrupt. The people with the guns (IRGC) control the economy. There's no independent judiciary. The justice system is just a political tool in the hands of the IRGC and the leader. There's no transparency. They convict you of whatever they want behind closed doors, and there's no accountability. There's no oversight over the security system. They nab people from their homes in the middle of the night. And later deliver their beaten and tortured bodies to their families. And nobody can say a word.
Same is true with the TV, radio and mass media. The totalitarian regime decides which movies can be shown, which singer can sing, which books can be published and which newspapers can be printed.
They also control the only means of effecting change within the system, by deciding who may or may not represent the voice of people, and disqualifying whomever they don't like. They can even remove sitting elected officials, simply by issuing a decree, as they recently did in the city of Yazd.
And when people come to protest all of this, they tell you with a serious face that you need to have the permission of thieves to protest their theft. The bitter irony...
Corruption and lawlessness is inherent to this regime. There is no reforming it. It is an ideological system meant to implement a particular islamist vision, at any cost. It was never meant to work for the benefit of the Iranian people. Ideas like the rule of law, accountability and transparency would be the end of them. Corruption, theft and abuse of power are natural by-products of this system...