The Guardian has the story Iran nuclear negotiations at crucial juncture over Arak reactor.

The fate of Iran’s heavy-water reactor has become a sticking point in high-level nuclear negotiations in Geneva, according to the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius.

The Iranian delegation is believed to have presented western powers with a draft text of an agreement on Friday, which is now the focus of the negotiation. But Fabius told France Inter radio on Saturday that Paris would not accept a “sucker’s deal”. He said: “As I speak to you, I cannot say there is any certainty that we can conclude.”

I knew the above was why France blocked the deal.  However, I wanted to record the rebuttal of the French position.  Maybe I had seen the rebuttal before, but I was having a bit of a struggle finding it.  This article provides the following:

Daryl Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, in Washington, argued that the heavy-water plant at Arak should not be an obstacle to achieving a stop-gap deal to defuse tensions.

Kimball said construction work “is more than a year from being completed; it would have to be fully operational for a year to produce spent fuel that could be used to extract plutonium. Iran does not have a reprocessing plant for plutonium separation and Arak would be under IAEA safeguards the whole time.

“Arak represents a long-term proliferation risk not a near-term risk and it can be addressed in the final phase of negotiations. France and the other … powers would be making a mistake if they hold up an interim deal that addresses more urgent proliferation risks over the final arrangements regarding Arak.”

With the above information firmly in hand, we can move on to the conjectures as to why France is behaving this way.

The Real News Network has the video Why Did France Thwart The Iran nuclear deal?

Robert Parry speculates:

And what happened to some degree over the summer was that Prince Bandar and other Saudi officials began trolling through Europe, trying to figure out if they could pull away some of the countries of Europe in favor of the Saudi position, and essentially the Israeli position, on issues like Syria and Iran. They seem to have had great success with the French, who, of course, have a serious economic problem. They have been struggling trying to get out of this recession. They’ve had a recent credit downgrade. They’ve had high unemployment. And so when the Saudis began to flash some of their petrodollars around, it was certainly something of interest to the French. And the Saudis have recently been signing up contracts with the French for military assistance. There’s a one-and-a-half billion dollar plan for the French to help refurbish some of the Saudi Navy. And you’ve had other Gulf states making other deals with France in terms of buying their equipment, especially their military equipment. So what you’ve got here is the French having a very clear economic incentive to help the Saudis and the Israelis as much as possible.

Perhaps being armed with this “information” we will be able to fight off the warmongers in our Congress that would rather fight than switch.

I have isolated this clip from the Hearings on Janet Yellen’s nomination to head the Federal Reserve bank.

Why do you suppose that Richard Shelby is so adamant about getting economist John Maynard Keynes’ name so connected with using monetary policy to stimulate the economy? I suspect that he knows that he does not like Keynesian economics and he does not like using monetary policy as a stimulus, thus he wants to connect the two.

In a very diplomatic way and feigning ignorance of what Keynes thought, Janet Yellen attempts to point out that it is economists like Milton Friedman who believe that monetary policy is all you need to stimulate the economy. Milton Friedman is a darling of the right wing and the Republican party. Keynes, on the other hand, is on the sh*tlist of the Republican party.

Ironically, the whole premise of John Maynard Keynes’ economic theory about getting out of the depression of the 1930s was to explain how monetary policy would not work to stimulate the economy under the conditions of the 1930s depression.

It was economists like Milton Friedman who took a very anti-Keynesian position in order to prove that Keynes was wrong and that monetary policy would have worked to end the depression. In fact Friedman even went so far as to fudge the data to prove his point. Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his insight. It was not until recently that people have realized how badly that Friedman fudged the data in order to prove his point.

All Shelby seems to be able to remember is that he dislikes Keynesian Economics. He doesn’t seem to know what Keynesian economics is, nor why he dislikes it. Yet Shelby is looked up to by some Republicans as an expert on economic and banking policy.

See the first paragraph of my previous post How Milton Friedman Fooled The Economists