Sanctions Bill Puts World on Notice That It's Not Only Trump Who is the Problem. It is the Entire U.S. Government.

UPDATE: Corker is now said to be fine with the House sanctions bill. From Matt Flegenheimer, "Key Senator Drops Objection, Clearing Way for Russia Sanctions":

“We expressed concerns about it,” Mr. Corker said of the addition of North Korea to the House plan, citing a desire for greater Senate input before placing new sanctions on the reclusive country. “They decided to add it. I don’t take affront.” 

Hours later, Mr. Corker said the Senate would move to approve the House version after all, but demanded that House leaders “expeditiously consider and pass enhancements to the North Korea language, which multiple members of the Senate hope to make in the very near future.” 

Some hurdles remain. Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said it was not yet clear if the Senate would approve and send the bill to President Trump’s desk before lawmakers leave for the August recess.

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There is a spat between Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy over the inclusion of North Korea in the House sanctions bill that appears to be holding the legislation up.

Assuming the sanctions bill eventually finds its way to Trump's desk, it is noteworthy that not one Democrat in the House voted "No." All three nays were from Republicans, which means all my donations and phone-banking for the "peace" candidate, who ended being elected to represent my congressional district, were for naught. Ambition trumps principle once again.

The sanctions bill codifies the New Cold War begun by the Obama administration in 2014. The silver lining is that the Democrats, so completely bellicose and Russophobic, will continue their accelerated collapse. Even The New York Times greeted their "Better Deal" reboot with derision. How can you front with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and expect otherwise?

The other silver lining is that Europe can no longer run away from the Trump bogeyman with the expectation that Obama's Second Coming is right around the bend. No, this is deeply-rooted institutional madness that is not going anywhere until something crashes or blows up.

The sanctions bill also moves the U.S. in a direction to undo the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) by targeting Iran's ballistic missile program. Iran's ballistic missile program was a sticking point during JCPOA negotiations, and it was purposely fudged by John Kerry so as not to kill the deal. (To get a look at the Israeli wish-list for U.S. policy toward Iran, read "Strategy to Restore U.S. Leverage Against Iran," by Eric Edelman and Charles Wald. It's basically war.)

The silver lining here is that the U.S. will be alone, except for the usual accomplices, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, maybe Poland. The sanctions bill has put the world on notice that it's not only Trump who is the problem.It is the entire U.S. government.

About-Face by Obama on Senate Foreign Relations Bill Big Win for Iran

Yesterday after seeing the news (Jonathan Weisman and Peter Baker, "Obama Yields, Allowing Congress Say on Iran Nuclear Deal") of Obama's about-face on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Iran sanctions review bill I said to a coworker, the only one in a office of more than a dozen people who I know at least keeps an eye on the headlines, "This guy is even weaker than I thought." 

What other conclusion can we draw? Obama and Kerry had been promising to fight to the last gasp any encroachment by the Senate on the administration's agreement with Iran on its nuclear program only to meekly acquiesce to a Congressional role after a vote count revealed overwhelming Democratic support for Senate Foreign Relations Chair Bob Corker's draft legislation.

But this morning I think differently -- not that Team Obama is any stronger, but that Team Obama clearly won this round by its tactical retreat. A protracted fight over a veto of a sanctions review bill would have revealed a president without a party and accentuated Obama's lame duckness, at the same time undercutting negotiations on a final agreement in the remaining two months of the P5+1 talks in Switzerland. As Weisman and Baker point out:

White House officials blitzed Congress in the days after the framework of a nuclear deal was announced, making 130 phone calls to lawmakers, but quickly came to the conclusion that the legislation could not be blocked altogether. 

Moreover, officials increasingly worried that an unresolved fight could torpedo the next phase of negotiations with Iran. 

“Having this lingering uncertainty about whether we could deliver on our side of the deal was probably a deal killer,” said a senior administration official, who asked for anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

No, Obama won this one. The sanctions review period was cut in half from 60 days to 30 (though after the time for a presidential veto and Congressional response is added, it comes to 52 days) and the White House does not have to certify every 90 days that Iran is not sponsoring terrorism. In the end, sometime in July, Congress will get to vote on the nuclear deal. A majority will vote against lifting sanctions. Obama will veto, and he will only need 34 Democrats in the Senate to maintain that veto, something I think he will be able to do:

As Congress considers any accord on a very short timetable, it would essentially be able to vote on an eventual end to sanctions, and then later take up the issue depending on whether Iran has met its own obligations. But if it rejected the agreement, Mr. Obama could veto that legislation — and it would take only 34 senators to sustain the veto, meaning that Mr. Obama could lose upward of a dozen Democratic senators and still prevail.

Proof that Obama got the best of the deal is the testy Congressional insistence that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee got everything it originally intended, which is clearly not the case:

White House officials insisted they extracted crucial last-minute concessions. Republicans — and many Democrats — said the president simply got overrun.

“We’re involved here. We have to be involved here,” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat, who served as a bridge between the White House and Republicans as they negotiated changes in the days before the committee’s vote on Tuesday. “Only Congress can change or permanently modify the sanctions regime.”

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“We’ve gone from a piece of legislation that the president would veto to a piece of legislation that’s undergone substantial revision such that it’s now in the form of a compromise that the president would be willing to sign,” Mr. Earnest said. “That would certainly be an improvement.”

Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the committee’s chairman, had a far different interpretation. As late as 11:30 a.m., in a classified briefing at the Capitol, Mr. Kerry was urging senators to oppose the bill. The “change occurred when they saw how many senators were going to vote for this, and only when that occurred,” Mr. Corker said.

Mr. Cardin said that the “fundamental provisions” of the legislation had not changed.

An important point to weigh here is that Obama would not have made this tactical retreat unless he had vetted it with his Iranian counterparts. The mild response by President Rouhani to the 19-0 Senate Foreign Relations vote shows that the Iranians can live with the bill and that the P5+1 talks will move along to a final agreement.

This does not mean that Obama will be able to deliver a final agreement even if he can maintain a veto of Congressional obstruction. Congress is controlled by the Saudi and Israeli interests. How else to explain the absurd statement by Tom Cotton?

The agreement “puts Iran, the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism, on the path to a nuclear weapon,” said Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, as he emerged from the briefing. “Whether that’s a matter of months or a matter of years, that’s a dangerous outcome not just to United States and allies like Israel but to the entire world.”

But the end game here appears to be isolation of Congress and its Saudi and Israeli paymasters from the rest of the world. As the Gray Lady makes clear in an unsigned editorial today, "A Reckless Act in the Senate on Iran":

Mr. Obama’s acquiescence might be a tactical move. He could veto the congressional vote on the final agreement, which is supposed to be concluded by the June 30 deadline, rather than expending political capital in vetoing this measure if it were to pass both chambers of Congress. But the Senate committee’s action puts him in an weakened position as the only leader involved in the negotiations who may not be permitted to fully honor commitments that were made.

The nuclear deal is the product of a multinational negotiation with Iran conducted by the United States, France, Britain, China, Germany and Russia. In no other country has a legislative body demanded the right to block the agreement. Even if Congress barred Mr. Obama from waiving American sanctions, the European Union and the United Nations Security Council could lift the sanctions they imposed, thus undercutting the American decision.

This is the bottom line: Unless Obama gets cold feet and kills the talks in the next two months, an international agreement on Iran's nuclear program will be concluded; at which time, even if Congress can prevent the U.S. from ratifying the agreement, it will not be able to block the rest of the world from doing business with the Islamic Republic.

That is why I think it is a pretty safe bet that Israel and al-Saud will gin up some sort of attack on Iran.

Obama's Weakness on Full Display in Interview with Tom Friedman: Too Many Lies Make Delivering Final Nuclear Agreement Unlikely

Obama sat down in the Oval Office on Saturday with his preferred midwife, the reliable sycophant Thomas Friedman, to expound for 46 minutes why the recent tentative agreement negotiated with Iran over its nuclear program is the best deal possible. Friedman's account, "The Obama Doctrine and Iran," was featured prominently on the home page of The New York Times yesterday; at the top of the story is a video of Friedman's interview of Obama in its entirety.

I watched all of it last night. And what I can tell you if you have yet to view the interview but plan to do so is prepare to be aggravated. Obama wholeheartedly embraces all the lies that have the resulted in the current ongoing destruction of the Middle East, principal of which is that Iran is a hostile, terrorist aggressor in the region and that America's "friends and allies," Israel and the Gulf sheikhdoms, are positioned in a merely defensive posture.

This is of course a Bizarro world retelling of facts on the ground. The fact is that Israel is an undeclared nuclear power with an arsenal of over 500 warheads that unilaterally attacks its neighbors in the region (Syria and Lebanon), while the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the global export king of Wahhabi extremism -- from Fredrikstad, Norway to Bloomington, Minnesota, and myriad points in between -- the chief source of terrorism in the world today. It is Iran and its allies in Hezbollah and Syria that are playing defense.

Not once in Obama's discussion with Friedman did I hear a pitch to the American people as to why peace and prosperity with Iran is in their best interests. Most of the pitching was done to Israel, more specifically the hard-line American Jews who have been funding an exodus to the Republican Party; then after that an obsequious sales job to the despotic Gulf kleptarchies that Obama slickly re-branded the "Sunni states."

In both cases -- Israel and the Gulf monarchies -- Obama made a significant commitment to their defense and territorial integrity. Peter Baker in his frontpage recapitulation of the interview this morning, "President Obama Calls Preliminary Iran Nuclear Deal ‘Our Best Bet’," highlights the commitment to Israel at the top of his story -- "we've got their backs" -- but ignores the commitment to the Wahhabi despots entirely.

This omission bodes ill for the future of nuclear agreement. As long as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, U.A.E., Qatar are allowed to skirt any official responsibility for instability in the region they will continue to export their maximally destabilizing terrorism. The Iranians will be blamed by the United States, the despots have their guarantee of protection from the U.S., and the endless cycle of death and destruction will continue.

In March, after the Netanyahu soft coup in his speech to a supine Congress and the Cotton letter to Iran, I thought that Obama was locked into an agreement for purely tactical domestic reasons. Failure at this stage would guarantee very little presidential leverage in his remaining two years in office. But in the last couple of weeks I thought that Kerry might walk away over the issue of how quickly sanctions would be removed.

It turns out, as Baker ably sets forth, the sanctions issue was fudged in the tentative agreement, along with the issue of how invasive inspections would be. (You'll recall from Scott Ritter that the Iraq inspections were completely compromised by spooks from Israel and the United States; that recent experience makes it hard to believe that Iran will agree to intrusive inspections of its military facilities):

Under the agreement, Iran would limit enrichment of uranium at its Natanz facility to a level useful only for civilian purposes; cut back the number of installed centrifuges by approximately two-thirds; convert its Fordo deep-underground enrichment facility into a research center; and modify its Arak heavy-water reactor to render it incapable of producing plutonium for a bomb.

But the structure of international inspections was left vague, as was the timing for lifting sanctions.

Mr. Obama said that inspectors would be able to watch “the entire nuclear chain” and that a “procurement committee” would examine Iranian imports to be sure equipment would be appropriate for peaceful nuclear uses, not a weapon. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said, “can go anyplace.” 

But the administration has been vague about how to define “anyplace,” and Iran has said it would not be required to allow inspections of military bases.

“Iran could object,” Mr. Obama acknowledged, “but what we have done is to try to design a mechanism whereby once those objections are heard, that is not a final veto that Iran has but in fact some sort of international mechanism will be in place that makes a fair assessment.”

Mr. Obama said sanctions would be lifted only after Iran lived up to its commitments. “There are still details to be worked out,” he said, “but I think that the basic framework calls for Iran to take the steps that it needs to around Fordo, the centrifuges and so forth. At that point, then the U.N. sanctions are suspended.” 

He said the United States would “preserve the ability to snap back those sanctions if there is a violation.” And he added that separate sanctions imposed for other reasons, namely Iran’s sponsorship of terrorists and its ballistic missile program, would remain in place.

Administration officials said they envisioned Iran being able to take the required steps within months or a year of an agreement, at which point nuclear-related economic sanctions would be removed. But a major sticking point in the coming months will be the issue of additional sanctions imposed for other reasons.

Mr. Obama said almost nothing about how the United States and its allies would force Iran to answer questions about suspected past work on weapons designs. For years, Iran has blocked inspectors from visiting laboratories where such work is believed to have been conducted.

In the final paragraph you will notice the way forward for the neocon warmongers who want to hijack the nuclear deal. They will force Iran to answer to falsified evidence, the famous pilfered laptop containing evidence of weapons of mass destruction.

No, the game is not finished for the neocons, not by a long shot. Lindsey Graham has promised Obama that he will back off until a final agreement is revealed in June. But Obama's bowing and scraping to Bob Corker, calling the Tennessee senator who takes his orders from Israel and Saudi Arabia, a "good and decent man," is a very bad sign. Obama is weak. His interview with Friedman proves it. At this point I don't think he can deliver a final agreement.

Other Taxes on the Table Besides Income

The last fews days there has been a noticeable reduction in fiscal cliff coverage.  I interpret this as a sign that neogiations are being conducted in earnest.

Today Brian Knowlton and Jackie Calmes have a story about a one-on-one meeting in the White House yesterday between Boehner and Obama; also, they mention GOP Senator Bob Corker's appearance on "Fox News Sunday" where he argued that his party should publicly concede the debate over raising the top tax rates in order to shift the focus to entitlement cuts.

Jackie Calmes had a front page story in the Sunday paper yesterday on revenue arithmetic.  Raising the top tax rates only gets Obama a quarter of his desired $1.6 trillion in new revenue over 10 years:

Seldom mentioned is that Mr. Obama’s revenue total also reflects four other changes from Bush-era tax cuts: higher tax rates on investment income from capital gains and dividends, and the restoration of two other Clinton-era provisions limiting deductions and tax exemptions for affluent individuals.

Together those changes would raise $407.4 billion over a decade — nearly as much as the president’s proposal on higher rates, which would raise $441.6 billion by 2023, for a total of $849 billion. Another $119 billion would come from higher estate taxes, opposed by Republicans and some Democrats.

And both the president and Republicans are committed to raising hundreds of billions of dollars by overhauling the tax code to further limit or end the tax breaks that high-income taxpayers can claim, though they differ in how to do that.

The Counterpunch left is convinced Obama is a Manchurian Candidate for the plutocracy and that a large, painful selling out on Medicare and Social Security is coming our way.  If this proves true then I will have been wrong about Obama.  I suppose a red line for me is the eligibility age for Medicare.  If it goes up as part of the bargain to avoid the fiscal cliff then I think we've been sold down the river.