A State Department memo viewed by the Associated Press ahead of the upcoming UN General Assembly in New York proposes putting serious restrictions on the movements of delegations from Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe and, in what the AP points out as noteworthy, Brazil – almost certainly due to convicted felon President Trump’s serious hard-on for the traditionally-allied South American country over the criminal cases against disgraced former President Jair Bolsonaro.
What also stuck out to the AP in the memo was an idea to ban the Iranians from shopping at wholesale stores like Costco and Sam’s Club without the express permission of the State Department – stores that are regular stops for the delegation because they can pick up large quantities of products not normally available in Iran because of sanctions and what not.
Now while no one in their right mind should think the Iranian regime are the good guys or even necessarily victims of the Trump Reich this is still pretty fucking stupid. Like does anyone realistically expect that the Iranian diplomats won’t just pick up the phone and find just a handful of ambivalent US citizen Shiites living in New York City who’d want to make a few thousand bucks by doing Costco runs for them? How’s the friggin State Department going to stop a U-Haul full of Tide Detergent and Kirkland Value peanut butter from making a delivery to the hotel with all the Iranians? Isn’t the fact that they WANT to shop at Costco more of an indictment of their system than forbidding them from doing so is “a boss move”? Let them fucking go there and get their small taste of the fruits of what’s supposed to be a free market capitalist society as an annual reminder that living in an Islamic theocracy constantly waging a cunty little proxy war with Israel and the Saudis actually sucks.