The unprecedented wave of economic sanctions imposed on Iran by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is “on track” to reduce Tehran’s coffers by “$50 billion” in oil revenue alone, the American special representative for the Islamic Republic told reporters on Friday.
Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya quotes the U.S. Department of State (DOS) diplomat Brian Hook as telling reporters in London on Friday:
We will intensify sanctions on Iran until it decides to be a normal state. … We will sanction any illicit purchases of Iranian crude oil. We are on track to deny Iran $50 billion in oil revenue alone. Iran does have a history of using front companies to evade sanctions and enrich the regime and fund its foreign adventurism.
Radio Farda, a component of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), notes that “since the imposition of U.S. sanctions on Iran in 2018, daily oil exports have dropped from more than two million barrels a day to around 300,000.”
In a Bahrain-based interview with Al Arabiya, published on Wednesday, Hook also said Iran’s proxies in the region, including terrorist groups Lebanese Hezbollah and Palestinian Hamas as well as Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria, “are experiencing a financial strain they never experienced before” as Iran feels the crunch from the sanctions.
Hook’s comments echoed testimony he gave before a U.S. House panel on June 19. The top diplomat told lawmakers the Trump restrictions are forcing Hezbollah to beg for spare change and place “piggy banks” in stores.
Hook said the sanctions are “working,” noting that it has hindered Iran’s ability to expand its military capabilities and fund terrorist groups.
“Today by nearly every metric the regime and its proxies are weaker than when our pressure began. … Our pressure campaign is working. It is making Iran’s violent and expansionist foreign policy cost prohibitive,” he told the House panel.
The State official did concede that Tehran still poses an asymmetric warfare threat.
“Iran still, even with very little revenue has asymmetric capabilities that terrorists have,” he testified, noting that Tehran has responded to the sanctions with violence.
Hook pointed out that Tehran pays for 75 percent (about $700 million) of Hezbollah’s budget every year. Nevertheless, he said the U.S. has been able to reduce Iran’s ability to fund terror. Iran and Hezbollah maintain a substantial presence in the United States’ backyard, Latin America.
Iran has routinely gloated about its ability to dodge U.S. sanctions, particularly on its oil exports, saying the United States is unable to prevent the Islamic Republic from selling its oil.
President Trump took the United States out of the controversial 2015 Iran nuclear deal, arguing that the pact was not tough enough on the Islamic Republic. The Trump administration reimposed the sanctions suspended under the accord as part of an unprecedented wave of economic restrictions imposed on Iran’s energy, banking, and shipping sectors, among others.
U.S.-Iran tensions have intensified amid the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign. The tense relationship reached a boiling point when Iran shot down an American drone last week. In the wake of the incident, President Trump imposed new sanctions on Iran, including the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Thursday’s Democrat presidential debate showcased a “California credo” that has wrought “Road Warrior” conditions in parts of the Golden State, remarked Victor Davis Hanson, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University.
Hanson offered his comments on Thursday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight with host Rebecca Mansour and special guest host John Hayward.
Hanson described California as “America’s first Third-World state” in a June-published column at National Review Online:
Third World symptomologies are predictably corrupt government, unequal or nonexistent applicability of the law, two rather than three classes, and the return of medieval diseases. Third World nations suffer from high taxes and poor social services, premodern infrastructure and utilities, poor transportation, tribalism, gangs, and lack of security.
Another chief characteristic of a Third World society is the official denial of all of the above, and a vindictive, almost hysterical state response to anyone who points out those obvious tragedies. Another is massive out-migration. Residents prefer almost any country other than their own. Think Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, or Guatemala.
“California, I think, might be our first third world state, depending on where you go in California,” said Hanson.
LISTEN:
Hanson reflected on changes in California he has observed across his lifetime residency in the coastal state.
“I used to mow lawns in Palo Alto when I was a graduate student,” recalled Hanson, “and I never saw people defecate on the street as I have on University Avenue. When I was there, I never saw the types of warnings about hepatitis A or tuberculosis. My spouse teaches at community college, and she’s had two warnings that students in her class have tuberculosis. I don’t remember that growing up in California.”
Hanson added, “I rode a bike not too long ago and I was bitten, and I don’t remember all the dogs on my venue — I live in southwest Fresno County — having no licenses and no vaccinations, and the owners don’t speak English. That’s something that didn’t occur. We had large numbers of people from Mexico, but they came here legally. They spoke English. They were assimilated and integrated. So in a lot of ways we’re going backwards, and yet that’s called progress. I don’t see it as progress.”
A deteriorating quality of life resulting from poor governance has driven an exodus of millions of Californians to other states, noted Hanson.
“We have the highest income tax rates,” said Hanson of California. “We have the highest gas tax rates. We have among the highest sales tax. Our schools [and] our infrastructure is in the bottom ten percent. I don’t remember one out of every three people being admitted to a hospital suffering from diabetes in California. When I was growing up we didn’t have two or three dialysis clinics in every single little town. We have an epidemic of health problems and yet the money to address that is such that we can’t spend it on infrastructure.”
As Californians flee profligate politicians’ parasitism to other states, California’s Democrat-run state government reacts with amplified taxation and control, explained Hanson. About 115,000 Californians supply about half of the state’s income tax revenues, he added, with approximately five to six million Californians having left the state in recent years.
Hanson described Democrats’ prerogative of “diversity” as increasing social fragmentation in California. “When you have 27 percent of the state that was not born in the United States, it’s not necessarily ‘diversity is our strength,’” he commented. “The strength of the country is unity, and it’s very hard to have unity if [immigrants] are getting an opposite message that your host country that accepted everybody is somehow racist, sexist, nativist, homophobic – you name it — and owes the immigrant something. We’ve reversed the traditional calculus that makes the melting pot work. I’m not optimistic.”
California’s politicians are disconnected and contemptuous of those they rule, stated Hanson.
“If I tell them that the high school I used to go has metal detectors and you can get killed there, they don’t want to talk about it,” said Hanson of California’s political and social elites. “They do not want to discuss unionization [or] the curriculum. They do not want to discuss vouchers or charter schools because their kids are all in prep schools in the Bay Area.”
Hanson went on, “When I hear somebody like Nancy Pelosi or Gavin Newsom or Dianne Feinstein or any of those Bay Area politicians lecture me on being illiberal, and all the things that they think are great for California, I know that they’re not telling the truth because they never put their kids in public schools. I put all three of mine [in public schools]. They live behind walls. They don’t want to be around the other. They don’t want to associate with them unless they’re maids or gardeners. They don’t live with them. They don’t go to PTA with them. They don’t work side-to-side with them. They don’t treat them as equal. Yet in a weird psychological mechanism, they blast this middle class — the deplorables, the bitter clingers, the irredeemables — as racists, or white supremacists, or whatever, and these people have had enough and they’re leaving.”
“A lot of middle-class Mexican-American people are getting really angry [and] leaving,” added Hanson. They don’t like being patronized.”
Mansour and Hanson discussed the latest Democrat presidential debate. “I was watching the Democratic debate tonight, and what you hear up on that stage is pretty much the California credo.”
“People are leaving California to get away from the craziness,” noted Mansour. “It starts out here and moves its way east. We are the petri dish in California. We’re like the Democratic Party’s petri dish. What we’re hearing in that 2020 debate among the Democrats is basically the California agenda, the Californization of the entire Democratic Party: free health care for illegal aliens, totally open borders, completely decriminalized immigration, green politics run amok, high taxes, confiscatory gun laws, did I miss anything? This is the agenda they want for the whole country.”
“Not only do they like private jets, they have no care what the 99 freeway is like between Delano and Visalia because they’ve never been on it,” said Hanson of California’s Democrat leadership. “If they would go over there tonight they would see that there are only two lanes in each direction. It’s unchanged from 1960, and it’s Road Warrior. It’s deadly. It’s the most deadly highway in the United Sates per mile driven, and that’s in California. It could be easily solved, but their solution for that is high-speed rail. That’s because they’re not conversant with what most people’s lives are like, and you saw that in the debate with this progressive doctrine.”
Hanson concluded, “The Democratic Party in California is a party of the very, very rich and the very, very poor. They romanticize the poor that are never around, and they despise the middle class. They despise the consumer-capitalist caste of the middle class. They despise their supposed lack of culture, and it’s really a weird group of progressive elites that we’ve created in the state.”
Breitbart News Tonight broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot channel 125 weeknights from 9:00 p.m. to midnight Eastern or 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Pacific.
California has long been associated with the American dream. But these days, the liberal state is turning into more of a nightmare. If you listen to progressives, the Golden State should be an absolute paradise by now. After all, California has become a sort of test-bed for liberal policies: Strict gun control, sanctuary cities, broad…
Culturally and politically, this was a disastrous week for the left. The curious thing is, they don’t even know it. The two big stories that dominated the last few days, at least in the political sphere, were the Democrat debates and the rape accusations against the president by writer E. Jean Carroll. Both of these quickly…
On Thursday Night at the Democratic Candidate debate the NBC Moderator asked the Democrat politicians:
— Raise your hand if your government plan would provide health care coverage for undocumented immigrants.
The following committed to free health insurance for illegals:
Democrats want to use American taxpayer dollars to provide healthcare to illegal immigrants, while American citizens suffer ⬇️pic.twitter.com/b6jtkpBfDt
On Saturday President Trump was asked about the Democrat debates during his trip to Osaka, Japan for the G20 meetings.
The president was asked about the Democrat Party’s push for open borders.
“The Democrats it seems to me that they want to have open borders and for the life of me I can not figure that out.”
⚡️⚡️President Trump still is planning to begin mass deportations after the deadline he gave the Dems. ☝️☝️PresidentTrump : "The Democrats it seems to me that they want to have open borders and for the life of me I can not figure that out."???? pic.twitter.com/ADN3k5pOq8
— Trump Luxembourg????⭐️⭐️⭐️ (@BrebsomClaude) June 29, 2019
The nation’s second-largest bank decided to stop lending money to companies that run private prisons and detention centers. Bank of America (BOA) will do so after meeting contractual obligations now in effect.
“We have decided to exit the relationship’’ with companies that provide prison and immigration-detention services, Vice Chairman Anne Finucane said Wednesday in an interview. “We’ve done our due diligence that we said we would do at the annual meeting, and this is the decision we’ve made.’’
The move followed a review by the bank’s environmental, social and governance, or ESG, committee, which included site visits and consultation with clients, civil rights leaders, criminal justice experts and academics. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based lender also met with its internal Hispanic and black leaders.
In other words, another major corporation caved to the open borders crowd. It will probably not be a surprise that the two largest private prison companies saw their stocks fall by more than 4% after the announcement was made. A spokesman for one of the companies, CoreCivic, said that the company was misrepresented and the decision is all about politics.
“We care deeply about doing business in an ethical, responsible way,” he said in an emailed statement. “This was clearly not a fair, transparent and genuine dialogue about corrections and detention.”
Bank of America is following in the footsteps of JPMorgan Chase & Company and Wells Fargo & Company. Elizabeth Warren tweeted last week that she has a plan to get rid of private prison companies. BOA’s Finucane admits it’s a political move. “The broader issues are the need for reforms in the criminal justice system and immigration.”
While the companies run centers on behalf of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, they’ve said they don’t operate facilities that house unaccompanied minors. Detention centers have become a flash point in recent weeks amid reports of substandard conditions at facilities for migrant children. Warren also criticized Caliburn International Corp. for profiting off what she called the Trump administration’s “inhumane” immigration policies.
“The GEO Group has never managed any facilities that house unaccompanied minors, nor have we ever managed border patrol holding facilities,” GEO Group Chief Executive Officer George C. Zoley said in a statement.
This decision by BOA falls in line with the moment during the second Democrat debate Thursday when all of the candidates on stage raised their hand in approval when asked if entering the United States without papers should be a civil, not a criminal offense. They have demagogued the detention of illegal aliens. Remember Beto O’Rourke’s involvement in the closing of the Tornillo facility for unaccompanied minors, mostly teenagers? I wrote about that in January. There is never an alternative to providing shelters or even tent cities for the detainees offered up by the critics. The Democrats want an open southern border and no enforcement of immigration laws. This is particularly unfortunate with the ever-growing humanitarian crisis on the border.
For BOA, the decision process began in April during its annual meeting. Activists demanded the company put an end to funding private prisons and detention centers. The activists are pleased with themselves because, you know, Orange Man bad.
On Wednesday, Bank of America did exactly that, distancing itself from a sector that has triggered protests over its links to the Trump administration’s immigration policy and concerns about detention center conditions. Hector Vaca, one of the activists at the April annual meeting, declared victory.
Next, he hopes to get SunTrust Banks Inc (STI.N) to cut ties with private prisons. SunTrust did not respond to a request for comment.
In the past, companies had the luxury of taking a wait and see approach to demands of political activists. In Trump’s America, that is no longer an option. Now political activists can stir up the outrage machine on social media immediately and companies are overwhelmed by the attacks. So, they cave.
The rise in activism accompanies a surge in ESG investing, or investing based on environmental, social and governance factors. Morningstar estimates funds that invest according to non-economic guidelines managed $1.2 trillion at the end of last year.
It has prompted companies to disclose more about how, and with whom, they do business and tackle issues they might have tried to evade in the past.
The corporate world is changing with the rise of millennials in the work force. Personal politics of employees and investors is placed above practical solutions.
“Historically, we’ve relied on companies to tell us about their ESG performance, but that doesn’t work anymore,” said Witold Henisz, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
Younger generations, investors themselves and equipped with more access than ever to information about companies, are at the forefront of a more transparent, activism-fueled corporate universe, he said, stressing the importance of data when it comes to ESG investing.
Millennials are “even willing to take lower wages if they feel like a company has a strong social purpose,” Henisz said.
Here’s a closing question – How does shutting down housing facilities help the people crossing the border? How does it ease the chaos on the border if facilities are being shut down and limiting the options for those who are charged with finding places for illegal aliens to stay while their immigration claims or asylum claims are being processed? Catch and release is not an acceptable answer, certainly not for the cities and towns affected by sudden arrivals of large groups of illegal aliens. This is a public safety issue and a national security issue. It’s time to stop playing games during a humanitarian crisis.
California’s Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a $215 billion budget on Thursday, which includes taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens.
Newsom signed the massive $214.8 billion funding bill into law, which includes a provision that would expand health care for people who are illegally in the U.S. and penalizes people who do not purchase health insurance, the Los Angeles Timesreported.
The California Democrat had proposed expanding health care for illegal aliens long before he took office.
In an August 2018 interview, Newsom said he would use an executive order to give universal health care to those residing in the U.S. illegally. Once Newsom took office in January, he proposed expanding Medi-Cal, the state version of Medicaid, to illegal aliens up to 26 years old.
The plan sailed through California’s Democrat-controlled legislature, although there were concerns over how much money the state should provide for expanding Medi-Cal for low-income illegal aliens.
Newsom proposed that $98 million in the budget should go to expanding taxpayer-funded health care for illegal aliens between 19 and 25 years old, but one state Assembly bill proposed setting aside $3.4 billion to cover all illegal aliens over 19 years old.
The bill is Newsom’s first budget since he took office in January, largely helped along by a $21.5 billion surplus carrying over from his fellow Democrat, former Gov. Jerry Brown’s, administration.
Italy’s populist deputy prime minister and minister of the interior Matteo Salvini has proposed a border barrier to halt illegal immigration from the Balkans, similar to the one U.S. President Donald Trump wants along the Mexican-American frontier.
Salvini, whose League (La Lega) turned in one of the best performances of any European political party in the recent European Parliament elections, has proposed the barrier — which may be similar in design to the protective fences built by Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, which slashed illegal migrant numbers by over 99 per cent — after increased activity on the Balkan migrant route.
“The Balkan route has reopened,” the Italian deputy prime minister said in comments reported by The Times.
“If the migrant flow does not stop we don’t rule out physical barriers on the frontier as an extreme remedy,” he added.
Hungary builds a wall; cuts illegal immigration by over 99 per cent. Lessons for President Trump…? https://t.co/ME09N3n3eg
Tens of thousands of illegal migrants have massed in Bosnia, which is outside the European Union, in recent months, although crossing from there into the largely borderless political bloc is not as easy as it was in 2015, when hundreds of thousands marched through Europe to Germany and other prosperous welfare states in the continents north and west.
Deputy Prime Minister Salvini’s proposed wall would run along its border with Slovenia, a fellow EU member-state — but an EU source conceded to The Times that “Being in [the open borders Schengen area] does not preclude infrastructure on the border although the EU would not pay for it, and is not in favour [of it].”
The number of illegal migrants — often of Pakistani origin — who cross through woodlands from into Italy from Slovenia is up significantly, to 780 this year so far from a total of 446 last year.
The numbers pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands who have crossed to Italy by boat, however, often facilitating by so-called “rescue” ships operated by pro-migration NGOs — which Salvini has also taken a tough line on, declaring Italy’s ports closed to boat migrants and massively reducing the influx by doing so.
All kinds of Democrats said it, so why not their allies in the media? I’m speaking here of the media chorus that insisted — insisted — that what President Trump, in an Oval Office address to the nation in January called a “humanitarian crisis” at the border — was in fact nothing more than a “manufactured crisis.”
