Bernie Sanders wrote:saxitoxin wrote:Since news broke that USA is freeing Iranian hostages, now we find more good news - the Americans have agreed to pay money they owe the Iranian government as a result of illegal U.S. acts.
The U.S. State Department announced the government had agreed to pay Iran $1.7 billion to settle a case related to the sale of military equipment prior to the Iranian revolution, according to a statement issued on Sunday. The settlement comes as the U.S. is unfreezing a much larger pool of Iranian assets, estimated at between $100-$150 billion, as part of the nuclear deal.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/17/politics/ ... =obnetwork
To be clear, America and the EU are releasing Iranian assets that were frozen, due to Iran's nasty habit of breaking International norms.
Incorrect.
The U.S. is paying Iran $1.7 billion to settle a lawsuit Iran had brought against the U.S. - the penalty against the U.S. is $400 million it withheld from the Government of the Islamic Republic in 1979, plus $1.3 billion in accumulated interest. To put that in perspective, to come up with that money the U.S. will have to cut more than half of the National Park Service budget next year (which is $3 billion).
Separately, $150 billion of frozen Iranian assets in the U.S. will be unlocked ... and immediately yanked out of American markets by the Government of the Islamic Republic and reinvested in states that aren't likely to freeze them in the future (which isn't that great for American pension funds at a time when the markets are in free-fall).
The amount of financial hardship the U.S. is about to suffer will be very real and will be directly felt by many people. This is suffering that would have been avoidable had a handful of politicians not been getting their palms greased by Israeli PACs for the last 20 years to impose these sanctions on Iran. (Iran would certainly prefer to keep its billions invested in the U.S. which offers a better rate of return than Brazil or Russia, but not at the risk of periodically having it frozen.) Next time you see a homeless family in America, remember: it's Israel's fault.