Over Objections of Dem Hawks, Biden Agrees to Indirect Talks With Iran in Vienna to Return to the 2015 Nuclear Deal
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51519"><span class="small">Juan Cole, Informed Comment</span></a>
Tuesday, 06 April 2021 08:15
Cole writes: "AFP reports that an arrangement was reached at Friday's teleconference in Vienna between the current signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to mediate indirect talks between Iran and the United States next week."
Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is in New York this week to make the case for lifting sanctions on his country. (photo: Eslah Attar/NPR)
Over Objections of Dem Hawks, Biden Agrees to Indirect Talks With Iran in Vienna to Return to the 2015 Nuclear Deal
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
06 April 21
FP reports that an arrangement was reached at Friday’s teleconference in Vienna between the current signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to mediate indirect talks between Iran and the United States next week.
State Department spokesman Ned Price said that the US had agreed to participate in the discussions with an eye toward a “mutual” return to the treaty. He said that it is not envisioned that the US and Iran will speak directly at this stage, but that the US remains open to such direct talks.
The US and Iran will have representatives physically present in Vienna on Tuesday. The current signatories will form two working groups to formulate proposals for the reintegration of the US and Iran. European Union diplomatic chief Josep Borrell will take proposals back and forth between Iran and the US. Since each side has been unwilling to make the first concession, the Europeans will attempt to identify a series of simultaneous steps Washington and Tehran can jointly announce.
Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif spoke of “choreographed steps.” According to IRNA, he said that Tuesday’s meeting would aim to “quickly finalize the lifting of sanctions and enact nuclear measures by designing a way to lift all sanctions and then suspend the measures Iran had taken to compensate [for the sanctions].” He said that Iran and the United States will not meet: “It is unnecessary.”
I find it interesting that Iranian state media, when speaking of the US breach of the accord in 2018, said that “Donald Trump exited it” rather than blaming America in general. They didn’t call him “former president Donald Trump,” either. They also referred to the need to lift “the sanctions of the Trump era,” not implicating President Biden in them.
Washington does not expect an imminent breakthrough but rather a hard slog. The Russian attendee, Mikhail Ulyanov (director of the non-proliferation unit in the foreign ministry), said, “The sentiment is that we are on a good path, but that the road to be traveled will not be easy and will necessitate intensive efforts. The parties seem ready for that.”
The Biden administration says that it wants to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or nuclear deal, which the odious Trump breached after the US had signed it in 2015. Biden has, however, kept in place the punitive economic and financial blockade on Iran’s economy put in place by Trump from May, 2018, when he broke the agreement despite Iran’s scrupulous adherence to its terms up until then. After being strangled by Trump for a year, Iran began going out of compliance with the terms of the treaty in relatively minor ways.
Iran insists that the US must drop its unilateral sanctions before it will go back to complying with the treaty. The Biden administration had said that Iran must come into compliance before any sanctions will be lifted.
So the situation was frozen.
That is dangerous. First, the United States is actively strangling Iran’s economy for no good reason. A naval blockade is an act of war. The US is doing to Iran exactly what a naval blockade does, and there is a danger, as nuclear expert Joe Cirincione cogently argues, of the situation spiraling out of control. In fact, the odious Trump’s assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani in January, 2020, could have led to war. The Iran-backed attacks on Gulf oil tankers flagged by the United Arab Emirates and on the major refinery at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia are part of this drumbeat that could easily lead to hostilities.
Second, hard liners on both sides could derail the diplomatic process. Iran has presidential elections in June, and the centrist government of Hassan Rouhani is expected to be succeeded by one much more xenophobic and suspicious of US motives. Biden has been under pressure by Iran hawks (i.e. warmongers) in his own party such as Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), and one reason the Biden team put off taking steps to restore the JCPOA was that they wanted to get their foreign policy team confirmed by the senate first. The longer a return to the agreement is put off, however, the more opportunity hard liners will have to disrupt the diplomacy, and the greater the danger of a US-Iran clash.
The Biden team, after dithering for a precious two months, seems suddenly to have come to this realization.
Rand Paul Claims Biden's Infrastructure Plan Infringes on Bridges' Right to Crumble
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=9160"><span class="small">Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker</span></a>
Monday, 05 April 2021 13:20
Borowitz writes: "Senator Rand Paul said that he is opposing President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan because it 'infringes on bridges' constitutional right to crumble.'"
Rand Paul. (photo: Getty Images)
Rand Paul Claims Biden's Infrastructure Plan Infringes on Bridges' Right to Crumble
By Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
05 April 21
The article below is satire. Andy Borowitz is an American comedian and New York Times-bestselling author who satirizes the news for his column, "The Borowitz Report."
enator Rand Paul said that he is opposing President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan because it “infringes on bridges’ constitutional right to crumble.”
“Decay, deterioration, and collapse are all a part of the natural process of entropy,” Paul said. “It is not the job of government to play God and interfere with that.”
Warning of the “slippery slope of government overreach,” Paul said that the Biden plan is “threatening our infrastructure’s precious freedom to disintegrate.”
“First they came for our bridges, then they came for our potholes, and then they came for our lead water pipes,” he said.
The Kentucky senator’s comments drew support from an unlikely ally, Dr. Anthony Fauci. “Look, I was just glad to see Rand talking about something besides the pandemic,” Fauci said.
Bill Gates Is the Biggest Private Owner of Farmland in the United States. Why?
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=58970"><span class="small">Nick Estes, Guardian UK</span></a>
Monday, 05 April 2021 13:20
Estes writes: "Bill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him 'Farmer Bill' this year?"
'Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land - who owns it, who works it, and who cares for it - reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy.' (photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters)
Bill Gates Is the Biggest Private Owner of Farmland in the United States. Why?
By Nick Estes, Guardian UK
05 April 21
Gates has been buying land like it’s going out of style. He now owns more farmland than my entire Native American nation
ill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report dub him “Farmer Bill” this year? The third richest man on the planet doesn’t have a green thumb. Nor does he put in the back-breaking labor humble people do to grow our food and who get for far less praise for it. That kind of hard work isn’t what made him rich. Gates’ achievement, according to the report, is that he’s largest private owner of farmland in the US. A 2018 purchase of 14,500 acres of prime eastern Washington farmland – which is traditional Yakima territory – for $171m helped him get that title.
In total, Gates owns approximately 242,000 acres of farmland with assets totaling more than $690m. To put that into perspective, that’s nearly the size of Hong Kong and twice the acreage of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, where I’m an enrolled member. A white man owns more farmland than my entire Native nation!
The United States is defined by the excesses of its ruling class. But why do a handful of people own so much land?
Land is power, land is wealth, and, more importantly, land is about race and class. The relationship to land – who owns it, who works it and who cares for it – reflects obscene levels of inequality and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy in the United States, and also the world. Wealth accumulation always goes hand-in-hand with exploitation and dispossession. In this country, enslaved Black labor first built US wealth atop stolen Native land. The 1862 Homestead Act opened up 270m acres of Indigenous territory – which amounts to 10% of US land – for white settlement. Black, Mexican, Asian, and Native people, of course, were categorically excluded from the benefits of a federal program that subsidized and protected generations of white wealth.
The billionaire media mogul Ted Turner epitomizes such disparities. He owns 2m acres and has the world’s largest privately owned buffalo herd. Those animals, which are sacred to my people and were nearly hunted to extinction by settlers, are preserved today on nearly 200,000 acres of Turner’s ranchland within the boundaries of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty territory in the western half of what is now the state of South Dakota, land that was once guaranteed by the US government to be a “permanent home” for Lakota people.
The gun and the whip may not accompany land acquisitions this time around. But billionaire class assertions that they are philosopher kings and climate-conscious investors who know better than the original caretakers are little more than ruses for what amounts to a 21st century land grab – with big payouts in a for-profit economy seeking “green” solutions.
Our era is dominated by the ultra-rich, the climate crisis and a burgeoning green capitalism. And Bill Gates’ new book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster positions himself as a thought leader in how to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and how to fund what he has called elsewhere a “global green revolution” to help poor farmers mitigate climate change. What expertise in climate science or agriculture Gates possesses beyond being filthy rich is anyone’s guess.
When pressed during a book discussion on Reddit about why he’s gobbling up so much farmland, Gates claimed, “It is not connected to climate [change].” The decision, he said, came from his “investment group.” Cascade Investment, the firm making these acquisitions, is controlled by Gates. And the firm said it’s “very supportive of sustainable farming”. It also is a shareholder in the plant-based protein companies Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods as well as the farming equipment manufacturer John Deere. His firm’s largest farmland acquisition happened in 2017, when it acquired 61 farming properties from a Canadian investment firm to the tune of $500m.
Arable land is not just profitable. There’s a more cynical calculation. Investment firms are making the argument farmlands will meet “carbon-neutral” targets for sustainable investment portfolios while anticipating an increase of agricultural productivity and revenue. And while Bill Gates frets about eating cheeseburgers in his book – for the amount of greenhouse gases the meat industry produces largely for the consumption of rich countries – his massive carbon footprint has little to do with his personal diet and is not forgivable by simply buying more land to sequester more carbon.
The world’s richest 1% emit double the carbon of the poorest 50%, an 2020 Oxfam study found. According to Forbes, the world’s billionaires saw their wealth swell by $1.9tn in 2020, while more than 22 million US workers (mostly women) lost their jobs.
Like wealth, land ownership is becoming concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, resulting in a greater push for monocultures and more intensive industrial farming techniques to generate greater returns. One per cent of the world’s farms control 70% of the world’s farmlands, one report found. The biggest shift in recent years from small to big farms was in the US.
The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns.
Small farmers and Indigenous people are more cautious with the use of land. For Indigenous caretakers, land use isn’t premised on a return of investments; it’s about maintaining the land for the next generation, meeting the needs of the present, and a respect for the diversity of life. That’s why lands still managed by Indigenous peoples worldwide protect and sustain 80% of the world’s biodiversity, practices anathema to industrial agriculture.
The average person has nothing in common with mega-landowners like Bill Gates or Ted Turner. The land we all live on should not be the sole property of a few. The extensive tax avoidance by these titans of industry will always far exceed their supposed charitable donations to the public. The “billionaire knows best” mentality detracts from the deep-seated realities of colonialism and white supremacy, and it ignores those who actually know best how to use and live with the land. These billionaires have nothing to offer us in terms of saving the planet – unless it’s our land back.
FOCUS: Trump's Campaign Bilked His Fans Because of Course It Did
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=10204"><span class="small">Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine</span></a>
Monday, 05 April 2021 11:57
Chait writes: "Donald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people."
Former President Donald Trump. (photo: Getty)
Trump's Campaign Bilked His Fans Because of Course It Did
By Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
05 April 21
onald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.
Typically, a grifter runs up against the limits of public knowledge: Once he is exposed, it becomes progressively more difficult to find new marks. But here is where Trump’s particular genius exceeds all who came before him, and allowed him to operate his scam on a world-historical scale. Trump has always attracted so much media that any particular exposé of his crooked deeds is overwhelmed by the cacophony.
Shane Goldmacher reports at the New York Times that Trump’s campaign bilked donors out of tens of millions of dollars. The scam was not complicated. When people gave them money online, the donations came with pre-checked boxes authorizing the campaign to take donations every single week. They needed to uncheck the box to stop the automatic transfer.
At first the auto-checked box simply said, “Make this a recurring monthly donation.” Then it added, “Make this a recurring weekly donation until 11/3,” with a second box below it, with even more text, authorizing an additional one-time $100 donation on September 29.
Ultimately, the messages included two text-heavy boxes, filled with boldfaced, all-caps slogans, with a much less conspicuous line at the bottom informing whoever had made it through this mini op-ed that they were authorizing the campaign to drain their bank account.
Goldmacher found victims who faced serious financial hardship as a result of this scam. Even some professional political operatives sometimes failed to recognize the inconspicuous little box.
The story cannot tabulate how much the campaign raised from unwitting victims. Many of them simply paid without realizing it. The only measure of the size of the grift comes via people who recognized their bank accounts were losing funds every week and demanded a refund. There were a lot of them: The Trump campaign refunded $121 million, or $101 million more than the Biden campaign did.
Trump has been operating like this all along. His business hires contractors and then — by the hundreds — pays them half the promised fee, or nothing at all, knowing it can just find new contractors to unwittingly work for the famous Donald Trump. He bilks his fans into buying expensive vitamin scams, or investing in a casino that he loots, or signing up for expensive courses where the instructors take the students for all they’re worth.
Trump’s political career was — or, more pessimistically, is — an extension of his grifting career. He recognized conservative media as the perfect vehicle to identify a new and vast collection of marks. He ran as a populist and used the trust his voters placed in him to govern as a plutocrat. All the promises of restoring the factories that disappeared in the 1980s simply gave way to another tax cut for the rich.
It is a testament to Trump’s grifting genius that his victims continue to venerate him. Goldmacher’s story contains this utterly perfect sentence, describing one of the victims who was tricked into giving the campaign more than ten times what he intended to donate: “Like multiple other donors interviewed, though, he held Mr. Trump himself blameless, telling the Times, ‘I’m 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.’”
Almost every confidence artist has had to flee from his victims after they realized the trick. Trump may be the greatest con man in history. His victims still adore him.
Derek Chauvin Really Believes He Did Nothing Wrong
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=63"><span class="small">Marc Ash, Reader Supported News</span></a>
Monday, 05 April 2021 08:26
Ash writes: "Derek Chauvin's demeanor since the moment of his arrest for the killing of George Floyd has been a combination of disbelief, rage, and victimhood."
Security was lax at the capitol on 01/06/21, but not at the White House on 06/01/20 as a George Floyd protester is restrained and arrested. (photo: Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
Derek Chauvin Really Believes He Did Nothing Wrong
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
05 April 21
erek Chauvin’s demeanor since the moment of his arrest for the killing of George Floyd has been a combination of disbelief, rage, and victimhood. Chauvin’s attorney, Eric Nelson, was quick to engender those perceptions in the jurors, saying, “You will learn that Derek Chauvin did exactly what he had been trained to do over the course of his 19-year career.” Guess what? Nelson is to a large extent right.
Why wouldn’t Derek Chauvin be shocked? American policing has contained within its DNA a culture of violence and rogue conduct from its origins. Violence and subversion of rights have been a longstanding tradition in police departments, complete with support for the most virulently racist organizations in US history, most notably the KKK.
In historical context, what Derek Chauvin did was not remarkable for an American law enforcement officer. Nor is the contention by his defense that he did nothing wrong. It was wrong, but it certainly was not an outlier. Yes, the conduct we see in the George Floyd video is derivative of many aspects of police training.
“You are men and women of violence. Violence is your tool.”
In the aftermath of the 2014-2015 Michael Brown killing protests in Ferguson, Missouri, director Craig Atkinson produced the groundbreaking documentary Do Not Resist. Atkinson’s film confronted, among other things, the culture of violence in American police training.
A key segment focused on former US Army Ranger Colonel turned police training specialist Dave Grossman. Grossman’s advocacy of police violence is legendary, and while an extreme example of the violent ideologies that shape American police practices, his philosophies are nonetheless common to police training programs nationwide.
The following segment from Do Not Resist focuses on Grossman’s training techniques. Listening to Grossman nonchalantly encourage police killing, the image of Derek Chauvin’s air of ambivalence as he slowly snuffs out the life of George Flood with his hand in his pocket suddenly makes sense.
As the film points out, ”Dave Grossman’s books are required reading at the FBI Academy and at police academies throughout the country.”
The striking similarities between the video images of the Eric Garner and George Floyd killings were undeniable. Multiple police officers restraining one man, neck compression, pleas for air, for mercy, all going unheeded, ending in silence and death. But there is another similarity that weighed heavily in the Garner case and may too in the Floyd trial.
The medical examiner’s report in the Garner case described the cause of death as “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest, and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” Here’s a look at what really killed Eric Garner …
Image from Ramsey Orta original cellphone video of Eric Garner killing.
In the Floyd case, the construct of finding by the medical examiner was nearly identical and reached functionally the same conclusion: “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint and neck compression [and] is not a legal determination of culpability or intent.” The main takeaway from both reports is take away whatever you like, it’s wide open to interpretation.
Both reports are conveniently vague enough to undermine overwhelming video evidence that, absent the report, would unavoidably lead to a conclusion that the chokeholds applied were the cause of death.
The medical examiners are part of the police-justice system support network. They know exactly what kind of report police defense attorneys need to sow reasonable doubt with jurors and they know exactly how to write them. It’s another cog in the wheel.
Derek Chauvin was an actor in a process, a system of violent American policing. Now he’s on trial and the system doesn’t know anything about what made him do it. Convict Derek Chauvin and force the system to change.
Marc Ash is the founder and former Executive Director of Truthout, and is now founder and Editor of Reader Supported News.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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FP reports that
enator Rand Paul said that he is opposing President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan because it “infringes on bridges’ constitutional right to crumble.”
ill Gates has never been a farmer. So why did the Land Report 
onald Trump may be a man with a very limited set of talents, but he has learned to apply those talents to masterful effect. His talent is to employ shameless lies to create an image of himself in the media, and then use that media to bilk people.
