[programmertote]

Believe it or not, the US imposed sanctions targeting specifically to the rich. But the sad reality is that a lot of poor people are dependent on the rich to make their day to day living (food). So sanctions eventually affected poor people even if they are designed for the rich. For example, make it difficult for the rich to buy cars in the country by imposing sanctions? Too bad, the rich also buy cars to run their tax companies etc. and so the sanction has to be applied to those class of cars as well. Then what happens is the car prices are too expensive across the board and people have to import second-hand cars which costs more for maintenance and are MPG inefficient. Since the car prices are too high, there's no insurance to be had and once you get into an accident as a bus driver, your life can be ruined (meaning, you'll lose your job and career regardless of whether you are at fault or not). I have not even started about gas prices (because of the sanctions, the gas prices are much higher than they should be and people have to queue up in long lines to get their weekly quota--not to mention it creates black markets and dangerous consequences like occasional fires--thereby wasting productivity of everyone involved. I'm not giving you very good examples here, but one will understand how sanctions impact poor people the most only if one has lived in a country under sanction.

The quickest and most effective way to transform an authoritarian country for the better is to let the rich, the poor and the middle class have a taste of what quality living (to some extent, the capitalism) is like. Then their children will get proper education and things will automatically change for the better in a generation at most. I have seen that with the children of the rich and military/ruling class people in my home country; these younger generations are the ones who, using their parents' accumulated enormous wealth and influence, to make changes (some bad, some pretty decent) to copy what they've tasted in other, more developed countries.