On Monday, Donald Trump’s pathetic excuse for a Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that the Untied States was deeming the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Pompeo made sure to remind everyone that “This designation will be the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as a FTO.” Here’s another great line from the White House’s statement on the matter:
If you are doing business with the IRGC, you will be bankrolling terrorism.
A couple of months into the Trump regime, the New Yorker’s Adam Davidson wrote an expose on the never-opened and possibly insanely criminal enterprise, the Trump International Hotel & Tower Baku in Azerbaijan’s capital city. One of the Trump organization’s partners in this very strange deal was the son of Azerbaijan’s wildly corrupt transportation minister and wealthy oligarch, Ziya Mammadov’s. The article breaks down the mountain of circumstantial evidence that connects the Mammadov family’s strong ties to money laundering with the very same IRGC that Trump has now officially designated an international terrorist group.
This is not simply a matter of getting into business with bad people. The very nature of the endeavor is predictably dubious. As Davidson pointed out in his article, when the Trump Organization announced its plans to construct the hotel in 2014, the construction boom in Baku had already ended and “the occupancy rate for luxury hotels in the city hovered around thirty-five per cent.” According to experts, opening a luxury hotel is something a developer needs to prove can sustain a 60 percent occupancy rate over at least 10 years.
How could that happen? According to Alexandria Wrage, who works with hundreds of companies to stay within the bounds of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), foreign actors—and particularly officials—like to set friends and family up in lucrative deals with big-money foreign entities, even if those entities are going to bleed their country dry in an unprofitable deal.