# Economic sanctions

Economic sanctions are commercial and financial penalties applied by one or more countries against a targeted self-governing state, group, or individual, usually for political reasons.

## Quotes

* Since the start of the great recession in 2008 the U.S. has become increasingly dependent on the use of unilateral economic sanctions to achieve its policy objectives against its declared targets. Presently, sanctions impact one-third of humanity in 39 countries. Economic sanctions not only cause untold death and devastation to a given country by denying it access to U.S.-dominated markets—which restricts its ability to generate wealth, stabilize its currency against price fluctuations and provide critical services and resources for its people—but economic sanctions also serve to justify and conceal theft, through asset freezes and seizures, at a rate only previously accomplished through invasion and occupation. The victims of economic sanctions are easy to identify because they are visible—there are dead bodies and malnourished children, with stunted growth and development, in once-thriving communities. They constitute the underemployed and working-class and are predominately people of color.
** United States Imposed Economic Sanctions: The Big Heist, by Lauren Smith, LA Progressive (16 April 2020)
* When analysis is done to uncover the big winners of U.S. economic sanctions it is learned that ExxonMobil and JP Morgan Chase Bank are often front and center; case in point, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela. Also, consider that JP Morgan Chase Bank did very well in the 2008 collapse through vulture capitalism. Fortunately, U.S. economic sanctions contain the seeds of their own undoing, since they engender the expansion of foreign reserve currencies at the expense of the U.S. dollar, and the phasing out of the U.S. money transfer system (SWIFT) to alternate foreign models such as Russia’s System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS).... Since millions of lives are at stake now, it is imperative that secondary sanctioned countries, business owners, workers, and elected officials join together with sanctioned countries and peace activists to end economic sanctions. The oligarchy must be stopped from literally stealing the wealth of the world.
** United States Imposed Economic Sanctions: The Big Heist, by Lauren Smith, LA Progressive (16 April 2020)
* President Trump strengthened the 60-year US blockade against my country, implementing 90 economic measures against Cuba between January 2019 and March 2020 alone. These measures have targeted the main sectors of the Cuban economy, including our financial transactions, tourism industry, energy sector, foreign investments - which are key for the development of the Cuban economy - and the medical cooperation programmes with other countries. These unilateral coercive measures are unprecedented in their level of aggression and scope... stopping Cuba from getting much-needed medical supplies... the US has imposed restrictions on banks, airlines and shipping companies to stop Cuba from receiving materials that other countries are donating or sending to Cuba. In April, the Alibaba Foundation of China tried to donate masks, rapid diagnostic kits and ventilators to Cuba, but the airline contracted by Alibaba to transport those items to Cuba refused to take the goods because they were afraid the US would sanction them. A ship recently arrived in Cuba with raw materials to produce medications but it decided not to unload... out of fear it would be sanctioned by the US government. So this is why we say we are suffering from two pandemics: COVID-19 and the US blockade. For that reason, it is so important that people of goodwill around the world continue to raise the demand to end the blockade of Cuba and to forcefully assert that these are times for solidarity and cooperation, not sanctions and blockades.
** Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, Cuba's two pandemics: The coronavirus and the US embargo, by Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, AlJazeera, (21 Jun 2020)