GLOBAL WARMING AND THE ECO-SOCIALISTS
OBAMACARE: A THANK YOU TO TED CRUZ FOR HAVING THE BALLS TO FACE DOWN THE PROGRESSIVE SOCIALIST DEMOCRATS

HISTORIC IRAN DEAL: CAN YOU TRUST PRESIDENT OBAMA AND THE OBAMA STATE DEPARTMENT TO PROTECT AND DEFEND THE UNITED STATES, ISRAEL, AND OTHER ALLIES?

There is no doubt in my mind, or in the minds of many political and military analysts in the world, that President Obama’s “historic” deal with Iran is not only hollow, but that it greatly disadvantages the United States and its premier ally in the region, Israel. With the real winners being Iran, and the oil-importing nations of China, India, and South Korea.

So why did President Obama allow this empty and poorly-crafted interim agreement to be signed in a late night session that was trumpeted Saturday evening with the President commanding airtime to speak to the nation?

  1. There is the obvious. President Obama and his principle advisor Valerie Jarrett have little sympathy for Israel and have demonstrated pro-Muslim sympathies in the past. From his 20+ year association with the anti-Semitic Jeremiah Wright, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, Father Pfleger, and others, one might intimate that he has been exposed to years of virulent anti-Israel, anti-Jew rhetoric.
  2. Also obvious is President Obama’s disdain for the United States, apparently believing that America has used its power unwisely and to the detriment of other nations in this world. Where others see America as bringing democracy to the world and defeating or curtailing totalitarianism, Obama may see America as projecting undue influence to promote its self-interests and those of the corporate special interests.
  3. There is more than a little proof that President Obama is a disengaged President, willing to leave the heavy lifting to others in his Administration. Others who he is quick to condemn if their actions are misguided or problematical; others who he is willing to throw under the proverbial bus if things go wrong. President Obama brought Vice-President Joe Biden onto the presidential ticket for his supposed “foreign policy experience,” yet it appears that the Administration is loath to let him do anything more substantive than provide comedy relief as a distraction from real and troubling problems.
  4. President Obama and his Administration lacks a coherent foreign policy and seems to be regarded as a weakling – even weaker than the notorious marshmallow, former President Jimmy Carter, another President who lost a significant battle and America’s prestige in the region to the Iranian hostage crisis.
  5. The State Department is ruled by effete socialist liberals from Ivy League colleges, many of who are waspish anti-Semites, possibly to the extent of the British upper class and the socialist French.
  6. Politically, President Obama’s personal and job approval ratings are at a “historic” low for the man hailed by many as the messiah and savior of the progressive movements. While it appears that he does not care about what others think of him, or his short-term reputation, it does appear that he may be pushing international socialism, even to the point of auditioning for his next gig as the Secretary General of the United Nations, where anti-America, anti-Israel, and progressive socialist thought abounds.
  7. Again, politically, President Obama needs to distract the American public from the disaster inflicted by the progressive socialist democrats in the guise of Obamacare – a plan for nationalizing one-sixth of the economy and enlarging the size and scope of the government. Imposing Soviet-style, top-down central planning on the nation. This is a disaster of unimaginable proportions as millions of Americans are suffering real pain and anguish over a botched attempt to impose a single-payer system of healthcare on the United States and turn the nation firmly towards socialism.
  8. President Obama needs to provide cover to the Congressional democrats lest the American people rise up and remove the majority of them from office – stymying any further Obama momentum towards socialism.
  9. More pragmatically – it is possible that President Obama took this action to remove the criminal penalties for violating the Congressionally-imposed Iran sanctions ban – which some of the nation’s largest corporations may have violated. Especially one company that may have been perceived as the propaganda arm of the Obamanation. 
  10. And more disturbing, perhaps President Obama wants to allow Iran to go nuclear and provide a countervailing force in the Middle East to neutralize Israel. Why wealthy American Jews and the Hollywood crowd continues to support the democrats is beyond me. Or, perhaps this is a ploy to raise money and significant media support for Congressional democrats in the short term – with Obama promising to reverse course if he retains the Senate and wins the House?  Cynical, you bet – but we are dealing with the corrupt Chicago thugs who appear to place personal gain and socialism over traditional American values.

crs
 

On May 6, 1995, President Clinton issued Executive Order 12959 banning U.S. trade and investment in Iran.9 This followed an earlier March 1995 executive order barring U.S. investment in Iran’s energy sector. The trade ban was intended to blunt criticism that U.S. trade with Iran made U.S. appeals for multilateral containment of Iran less credible. Each March since 1995 (and most recently on March 11, 2009), the U.S. Administration has renewed a declaration of a state of emergency that triggered the investment ban. Some modifications to the trade ban since 1999 account for the trade between the United States and Iran. As noted, in the 111th Congress, H.R. 208 would reimpose many of the trade restrictions. 

The following conditions and modifications, as administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the Treasury Department, apply:

• Some goods related to the safe operation of civilian aircraft may be licensed for export to Iran, and as recently as September 2006, the George W. Bush Administration, in the interests of safe operations of civilian aircraft, permitted a sale by General Electric of Airbus engine spare parts to be installed on several Iran Air passenger aircraft (by European airline contractors).

• U.S. firms may not negotiate with Iran or to trade Iranian oil overseas. The trade ban permits U.S. companies to apply for licenses to conduct “swaps” of Caspian Sea oil with Iran. However, a Mobil Corporation application to do so was denied in April 1999. 

• Since April 1999, commercial sales of food and medical products to Iran have been allowed, on a case-by-case basis and subject to OFAC licensing. According to OFAC in April 2007, licenses for exports of medicines to treat HIV and leukemia are routinely expedited for sale to Iran, and license applications are viewed favorably for business school exchanges, earthquake safety seminars,
plant and animal conservation, and medical training in Iran. Private letters of credit can be used to finance approved transactions, but no U.S. government credit guarantees are available, and U.S. exporters are not permitted to deal directly with Iranian banks. The FY2001 agriculture appropriations law (P.L. 106-387) contained a provision banning the use of official credit guarantees for food and medical sales to Iran and other countries on the U.S. terrorism list,
except Cuba, although allowing for a presidential waiver to permit such credit guarantees. Neither the Clinton Administration nor the George W. Bush Administration provided the credit guarantees.

• In April 2000, the trade ban was further eased to allow U.S. importation of Iranian nuts, dried fruits, carpets, and caviar. The United States was the largest market for Iranian carpets before the 1979 revolution, but U.S. anti-dumping tariffs imposed on Iranian products in 1986 dampened of many Iranian products.

The tariff on Iranian carpets is now about 3%-6%, and the duty on Iranian caviar is about 15%. In December 2004, U.S. sanctions were further modified to allow Americans to freely engage in ordinary publishing activities with entities in Iran (and Cuba and Sudan). As of mid-2007, the product most imported from Iran by U.S. importers is pomegranate juice concentrate. In the 110th Congress, H.R. 1400, S. 970, S. 3445, and H.R. 7112 would have re-imposed the full import ban. 

Application to Foreign Subsidiaries of U.S. Firms

The U.S. trade ban does not bar subsidiaries of U.S. firms from dealing with Iran, as long as the subsidiary has no operational relationship to the parent company. Among major subsidiaries that
have traded with Iran are the following:

  • Halliburton.
  • General Electric (GE).
  • Foreign subsidiaries of several other U.S. energy equipment firms are apparently still in the Iranian market. These include Foster Wheeler, Natco Group, Overseas Shipholding Group, UOP (a Honeywell subsidiary), Itron, Fluor, Flowserve, Parker Drilling, Vantage Energy Services, Weatherford, and a few others.
  • An Irish subsidiary of the Coca Cola company provides syrup for the U.S.-brand soft drink to an Iranian distributor, Khoshgovar. Local versions of both Coke and of Pepsi (with Iranian-made syrups) are also marketed in Iran by distributors who licensed the recipes for those soft drinks before the Islamic revolution and before the trade ban was imposed on Iran.

<Source>

Secretary John Kerry, blind, bamboozled, playing French, or following Obama’s orders? 

Israel blasts Iran nuclear deal as 'historic mistake'

Netanyahu told his cabinet on Sunday that "what was achieved yesterday in Geneva is not a historic agreement but rather a historic mistake." Speaking later at a ceremony in Jerusalem, he said that the more details emerged on the deal, "the more it becomes clear how bad the deal is for Israel, the region and the world."

"Iran gets billions of dollars in sanction relief without paying an actual price," said Netanyahu. "Iran gets written permission to breach UN Security Council" resolutions.

According to Netanyahu, the agreement "rescues Iran from a significant part of the pressure it was under, while giving it international legitimacy to continue its nuclear programme. This is a bad deal."

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said the agreement conferred legitimacy on Iran's uranium enrichment programme in what he described as a diplomatic coup for the Islamic republic

Tehran has a long history of belligerent statements towards the Jewish state, notably under former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Israel has repeatedly warned that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat, refusing to rule out a preventative military strike on Iran's atomic infrastructure. The holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, who was president for eight years, often questioned Israel's right to exist, famously saying Israel should be "wiped from the page of time," which was mistranslated as "wiped off the map".

US Secretary of State John Kerry, a key player in the marathon talks that led to the interim deal, had earlier tried to head off criticism by saying the agreement would push back the threat and ultimately make the Jewish state more secure. "This first step, I want to emphasise, actually rolls back the programme from where it is today, enlarges the breakout time, which would not have occurred unless this agreement existed. "It will make our partners in the region safer. It will make our ally Israel safer," Kerry told reporters.  Read more at Israel blasts Iran nuclear deal as 'historic mistake' - Yahoo News

Surrender to evil and the forces of anti-civilization Islam?

John Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador -- Abject Surrender by the United States

Negotiations for an “interim” arrangement over Iran’s nuclear weapons program finally succeeded this past weekend, as Security Council foreign ministers (plus Germany) flew to Geneva to meet their Iranian counterpart.  After raising expectations of a deal by first convening on November 8-10, it would have been beyond humiliating to gather again without result.  So agreement was struck despite solemn incantations earlier that “no deal is better than a bad deal.”

This interim agreement is badly skewed from America’s perspectiveIran retains its full capacity to enrich uranium, thus abandoning a decade of Western insistence and Security Council resolutions that Iran stop all uranium-enrichment activities. Allowing Iran to continue enriching, and despite modest (indeed, utterly inadequate) measures to prevent it from increasing its enriched-uranium stockpiles and its overall nuclear infrastructure, lays the predicate for Iran fully enjoying its “right” to enrichment in any “final” agreement.  Indeed, the interim agreement itself acknowledges that a “comprehensive solution” will “involve a mutually defined enrichment program.”  This is not, as the Obama administration leaked before the deal became public, a “compromise” on Iran’s claimed “right” to enrichment. This is abject surrender by the United States.

In exchange for superficial concessions, Iran achieved three critical breakthroughs. First, it bought time to continue all aspects of its nuclear-weapons program the agreement does not cover (centrifuge manufacturing and testing; weaponization research and fabrication; and its entire ballistic missile program). Indeed, given that the interim agreement contemplates periodic renewals, Iran may have gained all of the time it needs to achieve weaponization not of simply a handful of nuclear weapons, but of dozens or more.

Second, Iran has gained legitimacy. This central banker of international terrorism and flagrant nuclear proliferator is once again part of the international club.  Much as the Syria chemical-weapons agreement buttressed Bashar al-Assad, the mullahs have escaped the political deep freezer. 

Third, Iran has broken the psychological momentum and effect of the international economic sanctions. While estimates differ on Iran’s precise gain, it is considerable ($7 billion is the lowest estimate), and presages much more.  Tehran correctly assessed that a mere six-months’ easing of sanctions will make it extraordinarily hard for the West to reverse direction, even faced with systematic violations of Iran’s nuclear pledges.  Major oil-importing countries (China, India, South Korea, and others) were already chafing under U.S. sanctions, sensing President Obama had no stomach either to impose sanctions on them, or pay the domestic political price of granting further waivers. 

Benjamin Netanyahu’s earlier warning that this was “the deal of the century” for Iran has unfortunately been vindicated. Given such an inadequate deal, what motivated Obama to agree?  The inescapable conclusion is that, the mantra notwithstanding, the White House actually did prefer a bad deal to the diplomatic process grinding to a halt. This deal was a “hail Mary” to buy time. Why?

Buying time for its own sake makes sense in some negotiating contexts, but the sub silentio objective here was to jerry-rig yet another argument to wield against Israel and its fateful decision whether or not to strike Iran. Obama, fearing that strike more than an Iranian nuclear weapon, clearly needed greater international pressure on Jerusalem. And Jerusalem fully understands that Israel was the real target of the Geneva negotiations. How, therefore, should Israel react?

Most importantly, the deal leaves the basic strategic realities unchanged. Iran’s nuclear program was, from its inception, a weapons program, and it remains one today. Even modest constraints, easily and rapidly reversible, do not change that fundamental political and operational reality.  And while some already-known aspects of Iran’s nuclear program are returned to enhanced scrutiny, the undeclared and likely unknown military work will continue to expand, thus recalling the drunk looking for his lost car keys under the street lamp because of the better lighting. Read more at Abject Surrender by the United States

Appeasement in the making?

Why Israel sees ‘historic’ Iran nuclear deal as dangerous appeasement -- While the deal freezes growth in Iran’s nuclear capabilities, Israel says it doesn’t curtail Tehran’s ability to create a nuclear bomb in short order.

As a nation that prides itself on understanding Middle Eastern mentalities better than Western countries, and which already feels the sting of Iranian military power from Tehran-backed militant groups on its borders such as Hezbollah and Hamas, Israel has consistently warned Western powers of the dangers of trusting Iranian words without actions to confirm Tehran’s sincerity.

A central fear behind this attitude is the European appeasement of Nazi Germany that ended in the death of 6 million Jews.

In a deal that echoes loudly in Israel today, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain heralded the 1938 Munich Agreement as securing peace in exchange for allowing Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia. But Winston Churchill recognized the grave mistake, which soon paved the way for Hitler and his allies to take over much of Europe.

“We have suffered a total and unmitigated defeat,” said Mr. Churchill, who had to deal with the consequences when he succeeded Chamberlain two years later. “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning.”

"What was achieved last night in Geneva is not an historic agreement; it is an historic mistake,” Mr. Netanyahu told his cabinet today, criticizing the world’s leading powers for easing the sanctions on Iran in exchange for “cosmetic Iranian concessions that can be cancelled in weeks.”  Read more at Why Israel sees ‘historic’ Iran nuclear deal as dangerous appeasement - CSMonitor.com

Bottom line …

I have no idea what President Obama and his cadre of progressive socialist democrats are doing; other than noting that most of their actions appear to disadvantage the United States and confer aid and comfort to our enemies and economic competitors. Whether this so-called “historic” action is to misdirect the American public at a time when Obama is facing an extremely turbulent political scene, to provide legal cover to corporations that have violated Iran sanctions, or simply because President Obama wants a nuclear Iran as a counter to Israel in the region is an open question. We will have to ignore the rhetoric and watch what Obama and his messianic acolytes actual do on the world stage.

-- steve


“Nullius in verba”-- take nobody's word for it!
"Acta non verba" -- actions not words

“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”-- George Bernard Shaw

“Progressive, liberal, Socialist, Marxist, Democratic Socialist -- they are all COMMUNISTS.”

“The key to fighting the craziness of the progressives is to hold them responsible for their actions, not their intentions.” – OCS

"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

“A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves, and traitors are not victims... but accomplices” -- George Orwell

“Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt." (The people gladly believe what they wish to.) ~Julius Caesar

“Describing the problem is quite different from knowing the solution. Except in politics." ~ OCS

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