The “redistribution of wealth” is the confiscation of your earnings by the state to spend on wicked things like state miseducation and state healthcare rationing. It is a tried, tested, reliable way of creating an equality of misery.

As America, the land of liberty, morphs into Obama’s socialist utopia, all taxes must rise, and he’ll not be in the least ashamed of the lies he told to the contrary when he was campaigning for the presidency.

The Heritage Foundation warns about coming tax hikes:

If you earn income, your taxes are about to go up. If Congress does not act to preserve current law, even the lowest 10 percent bracket will rise to 15 percent. Throw in tax hikes on capital gains, dividends and other tax code fixes, and the American economy is staring straight down the barrel of $3.2 trillion tax hike over the next ten years.

It doesn’t take a genius to realize that raising taxes by $3.2 trillion dollars would be an economic recovery killer. …

The tax raising culprit here is the expiration of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts set to take effect on January 1, 2011. The leftist majority in Congress is refusing to extend current law because they believe that these tax cuts are the cause of our trillion dollar deficits. They are wrong. …

The real cause of our nation’s debt problem is spending. …

The leftist majority in Congress has had years to address this impending economic disaster but have refused to act. Last month, the House leadership announced that for the first time in the history of the budgeting process, they would not set a budget this year. And not only are they refusing to set any limits on their own spending, but now they are even talking about punting the tax issue into December so that they can raise our taxes without having to answer to the American voter. …

The end of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts are just the beginning of President Obama’s tax hike spree. The Obama administration’s budget also calls for higher taxes on small businesses, higher taxes on energy and higher taxes on American companies that compete overseas.

Nile Gardiner, writing in the Telegraph, predicts that Obama’s economic policies will result in catastrophe not only for America, but for the world:

The latest annual Congressional Budget Office Long-Term Budget Outlook … offers a truly frightening picture of the scale of America’s national debt, with huge implications for the country’s future prosperity. …

The CBO warns of potentially devastating consequence for the United States if this debt mountain is not tackled, and even points out that its “projections understate the severity of the long-term budget problem because they do not incorporate the significant negative effects that accumulating substantial amounts of additional federal debt would have on the economy:

“Large budget deficits would reduce national saving, leading to higher interest rates, more borrowing from abroad, and less domestic investment—which in turn would lower income growth in the United States. …”

Over time, higher debt would increase the probability of a fiscal crisis in which investors would lose confidence in the government’s ability to manage its budget, and the government would be forced to pay much more to borrow money.

The CBO assessment is probably the most important economic report the President of the United States will read this year. And it should be a huge wake-up call for the Obama administration, which has so far adopted a policy of sticking its head in the sand in the face of an impending Greek-style financial crisis in the very near future. …

The White House needs to wake up to reality, and aggressively reduce borrowing, cut down on public spending, and dramatically reduce the size of the federal government. If it doesn’t, there will be devastating implications for the United States as the world’s only superpower.

With his reckless big government policies, Barack Obama threatens to run his country into the ground, with American decline the inevitable end result. It is not too late to reverse course, but so far there is not a shred of evidence that the president is willing to do what is necessary. Not only will the United States suffer from this kamikaze-style approach, but the world will too.

Good news: Big Business is no longer eager to give big donations to the anti-business Democratic Party, the Washington Post reports (regretfully, we suppose).

Big Businessmen are notoriously slow to understand where their political interests are best served, but it seems the big penny is dropping at last.

A revolt among big donors on Wall Street is hurting fundraising for the Democrats’ two congressional campaign committees, with contributions from the world’s financial capital down 65 percent from two years ago.

The drop in support comes from many of the same bankers, hedge fund executives and financial services chief executives who are most upset about the financial regulatory reform bill that House Democrats passed last week with almost no Republican support. The Senate expects to take up the measure this month.

This fundraising free fall from the New York area has left Democrats with diminished resources to defend their House and Senate majorities in November’s midterm elections. ..

The overwhelming factor is the rising anger among financial executives who think they have not been treated well based on their support of Democrats over the past four years, according to lawmakers, party strategists and fundraisers. …

More than 600 regular donors from the New York area  — whose four- and five-figure checks added up to $10 million … have so far abandoned their effort to retain the Democratic majorities.

In the market economies, where the rich are richest the poor are least poor.

Socialists make much of “the gap between rich and poor” in order to promote their egalitarian agenda. But the gap doesn’t matter in the least.

It is the politics of envy to claim that even when you have what you want it is never enough as long as someone else has more.

Socialism is the politics of envy. It’s solution to the “problem” of the gap is to keep everybody (except the elite who make the rules) equally poor.

Walter Williams writes at Townhall about the “poor” in America (quoting statistics from a report by Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation):

— Forty-three percent of all poor households actually own their own homes. The average home owned by persons classified as poor by the Census Bureau is a three-bedroom house with one-and-a-half baths, a garage and a porch or patio.

— Eighty percent of poor households have air conditioning. By contrast, in 1970, only 36 percent of the entire U.S. population enjoyed air conditioning.

— Only 6 percent of poor households are overcrowded; two-thirds have more than two rooms per person.

— The typical poor American has more living space than the average individual living in Paris, London, Vienna, Athens and other cities throughout Europe. (These comparisons are to the average citizens in foreign countries, not to those classified as poor.)

— Nearly three-quarters of poor households own a car; 31 percent own two or more cars.

— Ninety-seven percent of poor households have a color television; over half own two or more color televisions.

— Seventy-eight percent have a VCR or DVD player; 62 percent have cable or satellite TV reception.

— Eighty-nine percent own microwave ovens, more than half have a stereo, and a more than a third have an automatic dishwasher.

…

Material poverty can be measured relatively or absolutely. An absolute measure would consist of some minimum quantity of goods and services deemed adequate for a baseline level of survival. Achieving that level means that poverty has been eliminated. However, if poverty is defined as, say, the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution, it is impossible to eliminate poverty. Everyone’s income could double, triple and quadruple, but there will always be the lowest one-fifth.

Yesterday’s material poverty is all but gone. In all too many cases, it has been replaced by a more debilitating kind of poverty — behavioral poverty or poverty of the spirit. This kind of poverty refers to conduct and values that prevent the development of healthy families, work ethic and self-sufficiency. The absence of these values virtually guarantees pathological lifestyles that include: drug and alcohol addiction, crime, violence, incarceration, illegitimacy, single-parent households, dependency and erosion of work ethic. Poverty of the spirit is a direct result of the perverse incentives created by some of our efforts to address material poverty.

Walter Williams’s article can be profitably read alongside another one written by JB Williams at Canada Free Press on the global economy. An extract:

Facts about the U.S. economy

The U.S. remains by far the largest economy on earth with a $14.5 Trillion GDP

Americans remain the most productive people on earth with a per capita GDP of $46,400

We have one of the highest per capita personal incomes in the world at $37,500 (80.8% of PGDP)

Our federal budget is approximately 25.2% of GDP

The federal tax rate is 28.2% of GDP – and we are still running red ink well into the future

And our federal debt will 97% of GDP by end of 2010, not counting interest or unfunded Obama promises, an increase of 40% since Obama took office less than two years ago

The good news is – Americans are still very productive and prosperous despite the fact that our federal government is suffocating that private sector productivity to death with excessive spending and increasing government intrusion into the free-market.

The bad news is – Obama is not leading anyone towards the principles and values that made America the most powerful nation on earth. Instead, he is leading America toward utter destruction on the pathway of European economics.

He goes on to compare the US economy with those of Britain, Canada, France and Greece . The statistics are well worth looking at. To start with, the difference in the size of the economies is immense: the US $14.5 trillion to Britain’s $2.2 trillion, Canada’s $1.33 trillion,  France’s $2.66 trillion – and Greece’s $342 billion.

He observes:

In every case, the nations that have already been where Obama & Co. are leading the USA are in far worse shape than the USA. That’s why they all rejected Obama’s call for more debt spending at the G20 Summit – and that’s why they are all drawing back from past Democratic Socialist policies and are all headed into major austerity mode.

He goes on to remind Americans that –

The reason for America’s past economic superiority is no secret to most Americans who violently oppose everything Obama and the District of Corruption is doing to the U.S. economy today.

That reason can be summed up in two words – “individual incentive”.

The harder and smarter free people work in a free-market economy, the more productive and prosperous they become. The more saddled they become with government regulations and taxation, the less productive and prosperous they become.

Bad as most economic news continues to be, here is something to cheer the allegedly hard hearts and genuinely hard minds of us capitalists.

The efforts some financial institutions have made to launch Sharia-compliant products are not succeeding.

No surprise really. What’s investment without interest? The wonder is that  anyone ever thought they might succeed.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Islamic bank accounts and other financial products have failed to take off in Britain, according to industry insiders. …

New banks that were set up to appeal to the UK’s nearly two million Muslims and Sharia-compliant products created by the existing high street lenders have failed to make much of an impact, critics say.

Junaid Bhatti, part of the team that set up Islamic Bank of Britain, the first Sharia-compliant bank approved by the Financial Services Authority, says that the sector has been a big disappointment.

“As we now approach the sixth anniversary of IBB’s launch, I’m sad to finally have to admit that Islamic finance in the UK has been a huge flop,” he said. “IBB may still be limping on as probably the last bastion of the cause, but it’s difficult to imagine it holding out for much longer.

Competitors have fared even worse and many had closed or scaled back their operations significantly, Mr Bhatti said.

Established banks that launched Islamic banking products are also believed to have fared poorly. HSBC and Lloyds were seen as having made the biggest efforts to make inroads, but without much success, Mr Bhatti said.

“Lloyds, which made a half-hearted stab at Sharia-compliant products in 2004, doesn’t seem to have promoted its offering for years,” he said in an article for MuslimPolitics.com.

“Even HSBC Amanah, probably the most credible and efficient provider of halal banking in the UK, has dramatically reduced its dedicated Islamic banking staff in Britain, and its marketing volume has been turned way down.”

The discovery in Afghanistan of vast deposits of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, niobium, and lithium — used in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys – must change any prognostications made for that benighted country.

At last there’s something there that the world wants other than opium. Afghanistan will surely become richer, and may even be dragged into the 21st century. But will it be less strife-torn, or more?

How will it change American plans to withdraw troops? How will China act? How will Russia? How will Pakistan (part of the find being on its border)? How will India?

American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

And who among the Afghans will profit most from it?

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. …

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts.

Russians did the original prospecting that revealed the deposits, but the Soviets withdrew before they had time to assess their size, let alone exploit them. Americans found the Russian documentation and looked further.

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted. …

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings …

Read it all – it’s a dramatic story.

Though probably not an introduction to a period of peace and co-operation.

To impress the (unbelieving) world with how hard the Obama administration is working to stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico since the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar notoriously announced that it would keep its “boot on the throat” of BP.

Obama and the Democrats generally like to pretend that Big Business is a wild destructive beast that has to be brutally tamed by government, as Salazar’s image implies.

But in fact, there is a symbiotic relationship between government and Big Business.

Big Business generally donates far more to the socialist parties of the Western world than to those that ideologically support the free market. Why? Because up to a point – a point that big businessmen are apparently too short-sighted to discern – high-taxing, high-spending big government is profitable for companies like BP.

And big government, while hypocritically heaping blame on them for its own failures, keeps its hand stretched out towards them.  

From the Washington Examiner:

Lobbying records show that BP is … a close friend of big government whenever it serves the company’s bottom line.

While BP has resisted some government interventions, it has lobbied for tax hikes, greenhouse gas restraints, the stimulus bill, the Wall Street bailout, and subsidies for oil pipelines, solar panels, natural gas and biofuels.

Now that BP’s oil rig has caused the biggest environmental disaster in American history, the Left is pulling the same bogus trick it did with Enron and AIG: Whenever a company earns universal ire, declare it the poster boy for the free market.

As Democrats fight to advance climate change policies, they are resorting to the misleading tactics they used in their health care and finance efforts: posing as the scourges of the special interests and tarring “reform” opponents as the stooges of big business.

Expect BP to be public enemy No. 1 in the climate debate.

There’s a problem: BP was a founding member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), a lobby dedicated to passing a cap-and-trade bill. As the nation’s largest producer of natural gas, BP saw many ways to profit from climate legislation, notably by persuading Congress to provide subsidies to coal-fired power plants that switched to gas.

In February, BP quit USCAP without giving much of a reason beyond saying the company could lobby more effectively on its own than in a coalition that is increasingly dominated by power companies. They made out particularly well in the House’s climate bill, while natural gas producers suffered.

But two months later, BP signed off on Kerry’s Senate climate bill, which was hardly a capitalist concoction. One provision BP explicitly backed, according to Congressional Quarterly and other media reports: a higher gas tax. The money would be earmarked for building more highways, thus inducing more driving and more gasoline consumption.

Elsewhere in the green arena, BP has lobbied for and profited from subsidies for biofuels and solar energy, two products that cannot break even without government support. Lobbying records show the company backing solar subsidies including federal funding for solar research. The U.S. Export-Import Bank, a federal agency, is currently financing a BP solar energy project in Argentina.

Ex-Im has also put up taxpayer cash to finance construction of the 1,094-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline carrying oil from the Caspian Sea to Ceyhan, Turkey — again, profiting BP.

Lobbying records also show BP lobbying on Obama’s stimulus bill and Bush’s Wall Street bailout. …

BP has more Democratic lobbyists than Republicans.  … There’s no truth to Democratic portrayals of the oil company as an arm of the GOP.

Two patterns have emerged during Obama’s presidency: 1) Big business increasingly seeks profits through more government, and 2) Obama nonetheless paints opponents of his intervention as industry shills. BP is just the latest example of this tawdry sleight of hand.

To those who feel morally good because they buy and consume only “organic” food, this may come as a most uncomfortable truth: you cannot be both FOR universal organic farming and FOR feeding the hungry millions.

And you need not worry that your health will suffer if you eat mass-produced foods. It’s a misconception that organic food is better for your health than the kind grown with chemical aids. It’s just more expensive.

This report by the Center for Consumer Freedom explains:

Another study, another dose of reality for organic-only foodies. A review published this month in the prestigious American Journal of Clinical Nutrition finds that the evidence from previous studies … indicates that organic food isn’t any healthier than ordinary, conventionally grown food.

This follows on the heels of, and supports, a similar review last summer from the same team. That review, released by Britain’s Food Standards Agency, came to the same conclusion after the authors sifted through 162 peer-reviewed research articles from the previous five decades.

As you might expect, the review last summer came under instant criticism from groups that promote organic foods by making health claims. So who’s to say who’s right? Writing in the Institute of Food Technologists’ journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety this spring, Rutgers University professor Joseph Rosen analyzed the marketing and health claims made by organic proponents. After noting that experts at the Mayo Clinic and American Dietetic Association don’t find any real benefits in organic food, Rosen concludes: … Consumers who buy organic food because they believe that it contains more healthful nutrients than conventional food are wasting their money.

And …  let’s just dispose of the ridiculous idea that the whole world could go organic if we all agreed to do it. Limited crop yields mean organic agriculture simply can’t feed the world. University of Manitoba agronomist Vaclav Smil calculated that in order to replace synthetic nitrogen (widely used today) with organic nitrogen, the U.S. alone would need an additional 1 billion livestock (for manure) and 2 billion acres of forage crops (for the livestock). That’s the size of the lower 48 states.

In other words, the organic niche is just that—a niche, and a feel-good boutique system for those who can afford it. But the idea that its widespread use would bring widespread benefits to humanity belongs in the compost.

Obama delivered a commencement speech at the US Military Academy at West Point which was studded with ironies.

From the Washington Post:

Obama pledged to shape a new “international order” based on diplomacy and engagement.

His presidency has been notable for diplomatic failures and not a single success. As for “engagement”, his obstinate persistence in trying to “engage” Iran has given it all the time it needed to develop nuclear bombs and build the ballistic missiles to deliver them. But a record of failure does not prompt Obama to reconsider his policy.

“Yes, we are clear-eyed about the shortfalls of our international system. But America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation,” he said. “We have succeeded by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice — so nations thrive by meeting their responsibilities, and face consequences when they don’t.”

Just where has he “steered currents in the direction of liberty and justice”? Where has he got nations that do not “meet their responsibilities” to “face consequences”? Russia invaded Georgia, took and occupied two of its provinces, and Obama has not done a thing about it. What international cooperation has there been to make Russia withdraw?

“The international order we seek is one that can resolve the challenges of our times,” he said in prepared remarks. “Countering violent extremism and insurgency; stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and securing nuclear materials; combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth; helping countries feed themselves and care for their sick; preventing conflict and healing its wounds.”

He may be seeking such an international order, but he’s done nothing to bring it about. Far from “countering violent extremism and insurgency” he refuses even to name the perpetrators of it (Muslims) and the cause they serve (Islam). If he hoped his audience would assume he meant Iraq and Afghanistan, it should be remembered that he was always against the war in Iraq, has shown reluctance to win decisive victory in Afghanistan, and has told the enemy the dates when he’ll withdraw American troops from both battlefields regardless of whether anything that could be called victory has by then been achieved.

On “securing nuclear materials” he held a useless international conference, when Canada and one or two other non-belligerent states promised not to give fissile material to terrorists, but no real danger was eliminated.

And then he comes on to the tired and stupid mantra “combating climate change”. Combating climate? It’s a primitive and ignorant notion. Call in the rainmakers, or cool makers, or warm makers, and let them start their chants!

“Sustaining global growth”? How he feeds the buzz-words (such as “sustaining”) to his far left constituency and at the same time tries to give the impression that he is on the side of prosperity (“global growth”). But his flowery phrasing cannot conceal his lack of understanding.

In Iraq, he said, the United States is “poised” to end its combat operations this summer, leaving behind “an Iraq that provides no safe haven to terrorists; a democratic Iraq that is sovereign, stable and self-reliant.”

Since Obama came to office, there has been far less reporting of terrorist activity in Iraq by the anti-Bush and pro-Obama media. But in fact terrorism in that arrondissement of hell has not stopped. Lately it has intensified. The chances of Iraq becoming stable, “giving no haven to terrorists”, and evolving in this century into a truly democratic state are not worth betting on.

To address the military at all must, he knew, offend the far left constituency to which he long ago sold his soul. Much of his message was aimed at propitiating that radical left rather than reinforcing the morale of American soldiers.

Civilians, he added, must answer the call of service as well, by securing America’s economic future, educating its children and confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change.

His far left critics would understand that when he spoke of “securing America’s economic future” and “confronting the challenges of poverty and climate change” he meant with “green jobs” and redistribution. As for the education of children, they will take it to mean indoctrinating hapless kids with leftist ideology – a cause Obama served actively years ago in Chicago.

Here’s a dry summary of the speech by Arthur Herman in the National Review Online:

On Saturday, Pres. Barack Obama gave a commencement speech … which in effect told the thousand or so soon-to-be second lieutenants that, if he has his way, they’ll soon be out of a job.

Obama outlined for the cadets his vision of a new international order organized around bodies such as the United Nations. In Obama’s future, American military force will give way to American diplomacy joined together with new multilateral partnerships, while “stronger international standards and institutions” will replace unilateral assertion of national interests — including our own. Obama told West Point’s Class of 2010 that he sees them not battling our enemies but “combating a changing climate and sustaining global growth, [and] helping countries feed themselves” even as their citizens achieve their “universal rights.”

He’s still dreaming the dreams of his father.

Redistribution is Socialism. No need to go looking for some dead economist’s definition of the S word. If a central agency with the power of coercion, which is to say a government, takes money from some and distributes it to others, that is Socialism in practice.  The reach of government is widened, individual freedom narrowed.

It should not be called an economic system, because it cannot create wealth. It stultifies innovation and productivity. It kills incentive. It levels down. It is the primrose path to poverty.

Under the leadership of Obama and his gang of collectivists, redistribution is well under way in America. Change to Socialism is well under way.

And Obama’s vision is not just of a socialist America but of a socialist world.

The Investor’s Business Daily comments on how a small, failing, Chicago bank that – inter alia – redistributes US tax-payers’ money to Kenya (the homeland of Obama’s father) is kept going by effort of the redistributionists in the White House.

Sometimes banks are too small to fail, such as when they are in the president’s hometown, deal with the president’s friends and serve the president’s agenda. Or should we perhaps say too connected to fail?

ShoreBank’s Web site boasts: “Van Jones [Obama’s erstwhile ‘Environment Czar’ and admirer of Mao – JB] saves at ShoreBank so his money fights for green jobs just like he does.” …

While President Obama rails against the robber barons of Wall Street, the politically connected Chicago financial institution with a politically correct agenda gets a pass and gets a bailout all its own. It is the poster bank for hope and change.

Fox Business points out that “ShoreBank has ties to the Obama administration. Valerie Jarrett, President Obama’s senior adviser and a fixture in Chicago politics (as was the president), served on the board of Chicago Metropolis 2020, a civic organization which was run by Adele Simmons, a director at ShoreBank.”

ShoreBank was in trouble and needed financial help, either from the government or other financial institutions that have already received government money.

Rep. Judy Biggert, R-Ill., has joined Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., in a letter to Obama asking for records concerning ShoreBank and how it lined up at least  $125 million in capital from major banks to qualify for $75 million from the federal government.

ShoreBank has a history of making the very kind of risky loans that leftist agitators such as Acorn, with government help, pressured banks to do under the Community Reinvestment Act. …

During his visit to Africa last year, Obama praised the bank for its involvement in projects in Kenya.

Kenya? Why is a struggling community bank in the Windy City involved in projects in Kenya? We hesitate to guess.

Ten other Illinois banks have already failed in 2010, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ShoreBank has reportedly received $20 million from General Electric, $20 million from Goldman Sachs and $20 million from Citigroup — with more promised by JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley.

Considering ShoreBank’s track record, is this where taxpayer money should be going?

Forgive us. We forgot for a moment about that whole sharing the wealth and redistribution thing. …

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” President Obama said in an interview on the CBS “60 Minutes” program.

He did run to fundamentally transform America — and if those banks are on Main Street and they follow Obama’s agenda, they get help from those fat cats now in thrall to the government, not to mention all the president’s friends. Pretty sweet deal.

At last the day came when China and Russia agreed to support a US resolution in the UN Security Council that would make Iran regret it had defied the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, promise never to make nuclear bombs, stop threatening to destroy Israel, and utterly renounce its wicked ways.

As you can imagine, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton felt immensely triumphant – not so much because Iran would now be forced to do all that, but because getting Russia and China on their side had been really hard. It was especially great for Hillary, as she hadn’t achieved anything else to boast about since becoming Secretary of State.

What dire punishments, what unendurable difficulties, will the resolution impose on the Iranian regime?

Sorry, we can’t tell you. The draft of the resolution has not been made public.

However, some information about it comes from unofficial sources.

One report claims that it will ban Iran from building ballistic missiles. (Which it has already done, without permission.)

And what penalties will it impose if Iran disobeys? These:

It “calls on countries to block financial transactions, including insurance and reinsurance, and ban the licensing of Iranian banks if they have information that provides reasonable grounds to believe these activities could contribute to Iranian nuclear activities.”  And it “recalls the need for states to exercise vigilance over all Iranian banks, including the Central Bank, to prevent transactions contributing to proliferation activities.”

“Calls on them to”, and “recalls the need to”, but does not require them to do so.

Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the UN, says it will give “greater teeth” to some sanctions already imposed which haven’t proved effective, and “add strong new measures to intensify pressure on the Iranian government to resolve concerns that its nuclear program is peaceful and not aimed at producing nuclear weapons.”

And that seems to be the most that can be hoped of it.

“The draft resolution is weaker than the original Western-backed proposal, especially on financial and energy-related measures. Rather than place sanctions on Iran’s oil industry, the proposed resolution simply notes the potential connection between Iranian energy revenues and funding for the country’s nuclear program and calls on U.N. members to be aware of it.”

The draft was introduced into the Security Council last Tuesday. (It was urgent, Ambassador Rice said, but she “wouldn’t speculate on when the resolution will be put to a vote”.)

On the day before, Iran announced an agreement it had made with Turkey and Brazil [?] to send some if its low-enriched uranium to Turkey (which has as yet no enrichment facility), in exchange for higher-enriched fuel rods – which Iran will use only in an innocent medical research reactor, built long ago for Tehran by the United States. (And meanwhile, of course, it will continue with its own high-enrichment program.)

But if Iran had hoped that this little ruse, this piece of side-play with Turkey and Brazil, would thwart the resolve of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, it was underestimating the stuff they’re made of! They pressed on, confident that Russia and China were right behind them.

That is, if those two powers stuck to their side of the bargain.

The US had had to pay a price for their co-operation.

First, various provisions had to be stripped from the draft before either of them would even consider giving their nods to it.

Chiefly, the one sanction that would really hurt Iran, aimed at its oil and gas industries, had to be removed. Both China and Russia had invested too heavily in them to allow anything like that.

Next, according to another report, they had to drop sanctions against three Russian organizations that had aided Iran’s nuclear program (and that until now the Russian government had denied were giving any support at all to Iran). And “penalties against a fourth Russian entity previously accused of illicit arms sales to Syria were also lifted” as part of the deal. So were “US sanctions imposed in October 2008 against Russian state arms trader Rosoboronexport for … illicit assistance to Iran’s nuclear program.”

Now Iran may expect aid from Russia to resume or continue. (And so may Syria.)

Then China had to be paid. Part of China’s demand was that America should take no notice of certain nuclear-related transactions it has made with Pakistan, in particular its contracts to build two reactors in that country, which is already a nuclear power.

Pakistan in its turn is providing nuclear and ballistic missile technologies to both Iran and North Korea.

And North Korea has announced that it is developing a hydrogen bomb – a claim that the Obama administration refuses to believe. (North Korea recently torpedoed a South Korean ship, and warned that any retaliation will mean all-out war.)

So let’s say well done Barack, Hillary, and Susan! And thank you for keeping us safe.