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

The Real News Network has the video and transcript Hedges: Jeremy Hammond Exposed State’s Plan to Criminalize Democratic Dissent.

JAY: So, quickly, for people–most of our viewers must know this, but quickly, just what is it that Jeremy exposed?

HEDGES: He broke into the private security firm known as Stratfor, which does work for a variety of intelligence agencies–for the Marine Corps and the Defense Department, the Pentagon, but also for corporations, including Raytheon, Dow Chemical, and others. And he turned over 3 million emails, email exchanges within the company to Rolling Stone, WikiLeaks, and other publications.

Now, this was quite a significant dump, because it illustrated two or three very chilling things about the security and surveillance state, first of all that there was no division between corporate spying and government spying. It was seamless, including the same people going back and forth. It was from that dump that we realized the extent to which the Occupy movement was being spied upon and infiltrated and monitored and followed. And we also found from those email exchanges that there was a concerted attempt on the part of security officials, both inside the government and within the private security contracting agency, to link, falsely, nonviolent dissident groups with terrorist groups so that they could apply terrorism laws against these groups.
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Let me be perfectly clear about this – I DO NOT DO COMPUTER HACKING. However, it is clear that the government knows what I am publishing here. Who knows when they will decide that I support something or other that they do not like?

Well, at least they might decide to take care of my room and board for the rest of my life. How bad could that be?

The Daily Kos has the article Rush Limbaugh Fans Now Literally Crapping Their Pants.

Surely they don’t mean literally literally.  They must mean figuratively literally.  No, if you read the article it is literally literally.  I won’t quote the key sentence and spoil your anticipation of finding out how this could be true.

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

Many times our fiscal policy and monetary policy has been working in cross purposes.

I have finally found someone from the Federal Reserve to plainly state what I have been claiming on this blog for a long time.

If this were not a job interview for Janet Yellin she could say it less diplomatically. The Fed would not had had to do some of the extraordinary things it has done, and you are so worried about, if the Fed had not needed to undo the damage that Congress has done with Congress’s economic policies.

Reuters has the article Yellen says Fed has ‘more work to do’ to aid recovery.

(Reuters) – Janet Yellen, President Barack Obama’s nominee to lead the Federal Reserve, thinks the U.S. central bank has “more work to do” to help an economy and a labor market that are still underperforming.

“I believe that supporting the recovery today is the surest path to returning to a more normal approach to monetary policy,” Yellen, the Fed’s vice chair, said in remarks prepared for delivery to the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday.

Yay, Janet Yellen!  She appears to “get it” much more than President Obama does.  Although, I am not sure how much more the Fed can do to help the economy.  The powerful tools are in the hands of Congress and the Executive branch.  Rather than deploying these tools, they are both bragging about how they are retiring these tools – fiscal stimulus to be exact.

Truthout has the article Pivotal Trans-Pacific Partnership Section Revealed.

The TPP has been shrouded in secrecy from the beginning because the Obama administration knows that the more people know about it, the more they will oppose the agreement. The release of the full Intellectual Property chapter today by Wikileaks confirms what had been suspected, the Obama administration has been an advocate for transnational corporate interests in the negotiations even though they run counter to the needs and desires of the public.

The article gets its information from a WikiLeaks announcement and publishing of leaked documents in the article Secret Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP).

I am surprised that some fairly active political people have not even heard of the TPP yet.  It is something that will do very little to enhance free trade, but it will do a good job of locking in power and wealth disparities that are the cause of so many of our economic problems.

I have been doing my best to correct this lack of knowledge problem with previous posts Bill Moyers: The Corporate Plot That Obama and Corporate Lobbyists Don’t Want You to Know About and Video: The Anti-TPP Take Over Of The US Trade Representative Building.

Since I was as the title suggested, I found the video below to bring back a lot of memories.

If you were also born and raised in Lowell, have I got the Facebook group for you.

Thanks to MarleneK for sending me the link to the video.

Alternet has the article Could Elizabeth Warren Thwart a Clinton Presidency?

The press seems to have anointed Hillary Clinton as the next Democratic presidential nominee. But Clinton’s ties to the Wall Street wing of the party could prove trouble for her future. Could Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Senator from Massachusetts, thwart what seems to be the inevitable?

The Alternet article is really a discussion of The New Republic article Hillary’s Nightmare? A Democratic Party That Realizes Its Soul Lies With Elizabeth Warren. The New Republic article is very worthwhile reading, itself.  However, it is a fairly long article.  If you want to get just a flavor of the argument plus some original material, then the Alternet article is the one to read.  If you have time to read both, then reading both is a good approach, too.

Being the Elizabeth Warren fan that I am and being luke warm to Hillary Clinton, I really would like to see Warren run.  I would be open to someone who fights for the Warren issues better than she does, but I cannot imagine who that would be at the moment.