The United States is already at war with Iran, squeezing its economy down to nothingness. If another country tried to do this to the US just on a whim and with no UN or international-law basis, the US would certainly launch a war over it. Iran's choices are much more limited because it is a small, weak, Third World country, with not so much as a proper air force. But countries without conventional military capabilities that are squeezed like this by an enemy reply with unconventional tactics.

Trump did this to Iran despite Iran's adherence to the 2015 nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as certified quarterly by the UN International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran oil exports before Trump Breach of Treaty and Severe Sanctions of 2017:

2.5 million barrels per day (# 6 exporter in world after Canada)

Iran oil exports in June 2019:

300,000 barrels a day

(# 27 in world, after Equatorial Guinea and Australia)

Iran's economy grew an incredible 12.9% in 2016 after the UN Security Council signed the nuclear deal with Tehran and lifted sanctions.

In 2019, Iran's economy

Under US sanctions will shrink an incredible 6%

Al-Jazeera English reports that "the rial, plummet[ed] by about 60% over the past year. Inflation is up to 37% and the cost of food and medicine has soared by 40% to 60%, according to EU figures."

Note that Trump's sanctions are unilateral. They haven't even been approved by Congress, and are actively rejected by the United Nations Security Council.

They are a form of financial blockade. Physical blockades of this sort are considered legitimate causes for war in international law.

(c) 2019 Juan R.I. Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He has written extensively on modern Islamic movements in Egypt, the Persian Gulf and South Asia and has given numerous media interviews on the war on terrorism and the Iraq War. He lived in various parts of the Muslim world for nearly 10 years and continues to travel widely there. He speaks Arabic, Farsi and Urdu.

The odds are now very strong that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders will be the Democratic presidential nominee. New polling averages say they account for almost 70 percent of support nationwide, while no other candidate is anywhere near. For progressives who want to affect the news instead of just consume it, active engagement will be essential.

Biden is the most regressive Democrat with a real chance to head the ticket. After amassing a five-decade record littered with odious actions and statements, he now insists that the 2020 campaign "shouldn't be about the past"-an evasive and ridiculous plea, coming from someone who proclaims himself to be "an Obama-Biden Democrat" and goes to absurd lengths to fasten himself onto Obama's coattails, while also boasting of his past ability to get legislation through Congress.

As he campaigns, Biden persists with disingenuous denials. During the June 27 debate, he flatly-and falsely-declared: "I did not oppose busing in America." On July 6, speaking to a mostly black audience in South Carolina, he said: "I didn't support more money to build state prisons. I was against it." But under the headline "Fact Check: Joe Biden Falsely Claims He Opposed Spending More Money to Build State Prisons," CNN reported that "he was misrepresenting his own record."

Biden used the Fourth of July weekend to dig himself deeper into a centrist, status quo trench for his war on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. During a repeatedly cringeworthy interview, Biden told CNN that what can't be done includes Medicare for All, tuition-free public college and student debt cancelation. Bernie Sanders quickly responded with a tweet calling Medicare for All, debt-free college and a Green New Deal "the agenda American needs-and that will energize voters to defeat Donald Trump."

No one has summed up Biden's political stance better than Elizabeth Warren, who told the California Democratic Party convention five weeks ago: "Some Democrats in Washington believe the only changes we can get are tweaks and nudges. If they dream, they dream small. Some say if we all just calm down, the Republicans will come to their senses." She added: "When a candidate tells you about all the things that aren't possible, about how political calculations come first . . . they're telling you something very important-they are telling you that they will not fight for you."

Being preferable to Joe Biden is a low bar, and Kamala Harris clears it. But, like Biden, she stands to lose potential support from many self-described liberals and progressives to the extent they learn more about her actual record.

Overall, Harris's work as San Francisco's DA and the California attorney general was not progressive. Lara Bazelon, former director of the LA-based Loyola Law School Project for the Innocent, wrote in a New York Times column early this year: "Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state's attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors."

Last week, Bazelon said: "Kamala Harris claims to be a champion of criminal justice reform. But as a prosecutor . . . she was anything but. She needs to make the case to the voters that her change of heart is genuine. Crucial to that case is reckoning with her past."

That past needs scrutiny, especially since Harris has refused to acknowledge there was anything wrong with it.

"As the top law enforcement official" of San Francisco and then California, the New York Times reported in a February news article, "she developed a reputation for caution, protecting the status quo and shrinking from decisions on contentious issues."

Reporter Kate Zernike wrote: ** "Years before ending mass incarceration became a bipartisan cause, she started programs to steer low-level drug offenders away from prison and into school and jobs. At the same time, she touted her success in increasing conviction rates, and as attorney general remained largely on the sidelines as California scrambled to meet a federal court order to reduce its swollen prison populations. She also repeatedly sided with prosecutors accused of misconduct, challenging judges who ruled against them."

** When Harris first ran statewide, for California attorney general in 2010, "she had campaigned to the right of her Republican opponent on the question of easing the state's tough three-strikes law. Once in office, she declined to take positions on ultimately successful ballot initiatives intended to reduce prison populations-one expanding opportunities for parole, the other reducing many nonviolent felonies to misdemeanors."

** "After the Supreme Court upheld the judges' overcrowding order, the state promised to 'promptly' release a significant number of nonviolent prisoners, giving credit for time served. A delay in meeting that promise drew a judicial scolding in 2014. The state's response proved embarrassing, and unsuccessful: Reducing the prison population, Ms. Harris's office maintained, would hurt California's ability to fight wildfires by shrinking the pool of forced labor."

** "Ms. Harris won praise for releasing statewide data in a way that informed rather than inflamed the brutality debate: It included numbers on the use of police force but also on use of force against officers. She instituted body cameras for police agents who worked in her office, and offered implicit-bias training for police statewide. But she declined to support statewide regulations for the use of body cameras, agreeing with local departments that they should set their own standards. And she did not support a bill that would have required the attorney general to investigate police shootings."

** Early in this decade, responding to the house foreclosure crisis, "the banks agreed to $18 billion in debt reduction that Ms. Harris said would allow California homeowners to stay in their homes, and the national agreement included $2.5 billion for a fund to provide educational counseling and other services for those in danger of foreclosure. But critics, especially on the left, have long said that the settlement was no grand bargain. It did not require banks to pay much out of pocket; $4.7 billion of the $18 billion in relief came from forgiving second mortgages, many of which the banks would have written off anyway because they were so severely underwater, and $9 billion came from homeowners selling their homes for less than the value of their mortgages, meaning that homeowners did not stay in their homes."

The New Republic recently summed up: "From her role in a California prison labor debate to her prosecutions of sex workers," Kamala Harris "has a past of her own to defend."

It's sometimes difficult to gauge what Harris really believes in, especially in light of her tactical backsliding and flip-flops. Longtime observers had no reason to be surprised last week when she walked back her forceful debate position that the federal government shouldn't leave it to localities to assist school desegregation with busing. "Harris muddied the waters," the Associated Press reported, when "she told reporters she too did not support federally mandated busing and supported it only as an option for local governments."

On foreign policy, the little that Harris has to say is often hazy while conforming with mainstream Democratic Party militarism. In the Senate, she has voted for six of eight major military spending bills.

Harris-who cosponsored a bill to withhold U.S. dues to the United Nations because of a UN Security Council resolution that condemned illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank-pandered to AIPAC while delivering 2017 and 2018 speeches to the Israel-can-do-no-wrong organization. While acquiescing to requests from MoveOn and other groups that presidential candidates not speak to AIPAC's 2019 conference in late March, she pulled off a smooth maneuver, as Mondoweiss pointed out: "Harris is a very pragmatic politician, and the conference came to her yesterday! She met leading AIPAC officials at her office and then tweeted her devoted support to Israel."

Harris's tweet shared the news: "Great to meet today in my office with California AIPAC leaders to discuss the need for a strong U.S.-Israel alliance, the right of Israel to defend itself, and my commitment to combat anti-Semitism in our country and around the world." But progressive journalist Ben Norton did not share in the upbeat mood as he tweeted: "Far-right Israeli PM Netanyahu just formed an alliance with a literal fascist party, and is bombing people trapped in the Gaza concentration camp right now, but fake 'progressive' Kamala Harris is meeting with AIPAC and praising the apartheid regime."

Yet Harris does not adhere completely to AIPAC positions. She cosponsored the Yemen war powers bill introduced by Bernie Sanders. And she has expressed support for the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by President Obama that was canceled by President Trump.

The military-industrial complex might prefer Biden to Harris. But from all indications, that complex would be quite comfortable with a President Harris, and vice versa. The same goes for Wall Street and other big corporate sectors. No wonder they're pouring many millions of dollars into the Biden and Harris campaign coffers.

However tense and testy the current relations between Biden and Harris might be, their falling out is likely to be temporary. "I adore Joe Biden," she proclaimed in mid-spring when he was on the verge of announcing his campaign. Anyone who doubts the prospect of a rapprochement-and even a shared ticket is forgetting how easily campaign-trail conflicts can be jettisoned a little bit down the road. In 1980, George H.W. Bush fought Ronald Reagan for the GOP presidential nomination all the way to the convention, even after losing the vast majority of primaries, and tensions were raw; then came the Reagan-Bush ticket.

Among the Democratic presidential candidates, the viable alternatives to the Biden and Harris corporatist duo are the progressive candidate Elizabeth Warren and the more progressive candidate Bernie Sanders. While Warren is impressive in many ways, I continue to actively support Sanders. As an eloquent essay by Shaun King recently underscored, Sanders-like no other member of the Senate or candidate for-has boldly participated in progressive movements for his entire adult life. That orientation toward social movements is crucial in a time of profound needs for fundamental change, in an era of multiple and concentric crises-from record-breaking economic inequality to extreme corporate greed to racist xenophobia to the climate emergency to rampant militarism and so much more. No matter how distasteful or repugnant, the electoral process is an opening for progressive forces to be influential and potentially decisive.

Bernie Sanders must very quickly get serious about building a grassroots movement-type politics on the ground that disrupts the corporate-managed pace, coverage and content of the primary season.

Corporate Democrats have had great success in smothering Bernie Sanders' challenge to the capitalist austerity regime that has eroded U.S. working class incomes and economic security for two generations. Just two years ago, in the wake of his astounding bid to deny Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nomination, the Vermont senator was the most popular politician in the country. Although some Democrats blamed Sanders for Donald Trump's even more surprising 2016 election, by the next year the septuagenarian Medicare for All champion's favorability ratings exceeded all others - including among Black voters. Most astonishingly, Sanders had almost single-handedly removed the stigma from the word "socialism" - an amazing feat for a New Deal Democratic reformer who has never advocated anything remotely resembling the overthrow of the rule of capital, and who remains an "imperialist pig" in foreign affairs.

As the 2020 campaign season approached, a great sense of foreboding was evident within the US ruling class. Sanders was by now associated with a whole menu of issues -- Medicare for All, free public college, a $15 an hour minimum wage, and more - that had become popular with majorities of all voters and super-majorities (80 or even 90 percent) of Democrats. With the Clinton machine in tatters and Sanders' supporters presumably eager for another shot at seizing the commanding heights of the Democratic Party, 2020 was looking like a very problematic year for capitalist duopoly politics. The system was already under the deliberately-induced stress of Russiagate, as corporate Democrats and their allies in media and the national security state daily delegitimized the Trump regime. Corporate Democrats were confident - just as they were in 2020 - that they could win the White House by making Trump, himself, effectively the sole issue of the campaign. But first they had to neutralize Bernie and his austerity-busting, super-majority issues, to clear the way for an economic issues-less anti-Trump crusade - the corporate Democratic ideal.

So they simply threw all the shit at hand into the game, simultaneously mobbing and co-opting Sanders with the biggest, most multi-colored crowd of Democratic politicians ever assembled for a presidential race - even larger than the horde that Republican money-bags financed in hopes of derailing Donald Trump, four years earlier. Dollar-drenched corporate hacks like Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris claimed to endorse Sanders' signature Medicare for All legislation, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, once considered anathema by corporatists -- the Bride of Berniestein - was suddenly a darling of party leaders and media.

Sanders has gotten lost in the slosh, as intended. The corporate strategy was to ensure that the super-majorities of Democrats that support Sanders' issues were split among the progressive pretenders, while Joe Biden soaked up the nervous-nellie voters that are desperate to beat Trump with someone - anyone -- "electable." The corporatists' nightmare scenario, that Sanders would rev up his highly energized and youthful 2016 machine, funded by tens of millions in small-contributions, and smash his way to a first ballot victory at the convention, seems far less likely. The corporate media -- now supremely acclimated to close-order political drill by Russiagate -- have acted in near-unison to alternatively ignore or malign Sanders,often pretending he is just not there as they fawn over his mimics, who can be counted on to retreat from corporate-opposed issues once the Bernie-bear has been contained.

In their desperation to blunt Bernie, the Lords of Capital gave Kamala Harris permission to ambush Old Man Biden, who personifies Barack Obama's partially successful Grand Bargain with Republicans, as well as an earlier accommodation with Dixiecrats. Harris rose to the occasion in the last debate, miraculously losing her signature tic-giggle as she committed euthanasia on screen. But it's all in service to the higher corporate purpose. Harris' strategy to diffuse the Sanders vote is much like the "close as a man's belt" battle doctrine employed by the Vietnamese, who would attack the Americans from such close quarters that was impossible for the U.S. to effectively deploy its awesome artillery and air power without hitting their own troops' positions. Harris hung around Sanders belt on Medicare for All, even showing her hand when the corporate debate instigator/moderator asked who among the candidates would abolish private health insurance. (Naturally, she reneged afterwards.) As the emerging Great Corporate Black Hope (Booker is clearly hopeless), Harris offers the African American supermajority that supports Medicare for All a Black face (and a woman) to vote for. At the end of the process, Harris will revert to corporate form. There is only one escape from this fetid and flooded corporate swamp for Sanders. He must very quickly get serious about building a grassroots movement-type politics on the ground, that creates issue-based events that cannot be ignored, involving tens of thousands of people, and that disrupts the corporate-managed pace, coverage and content of the primary season. In short, Sanders must subvert the corporate process and start acting like he really is leading a "revolution," as he tells his supporters. Otherwise, he will be effectively marginalized, despite the super-majorities that support his issues and the transparent dishonesty of his mimics.

If you think this column is supportive of the Sanders candidacy, then you haven't been reading BAR all these years. We are socialists and Black liberationists who do commentary and analysis, and have never backed corporate parties or candidates. The Democratic Party serves its ruling class financiers, and is the main agency of their control over Black America, where the Republicans are irrelevant. As one of the two parties of capitalist governance in the U.S., the Democratic Party will self-destruct before it bucks its corporate bosses. That's why purported "socialists" like Sanders, or the Democratic Socialists that always wind up supporting Democrats, are delusional if they think they can usurp control of the devil's machine - or they are trying to fool the rest of us.

However, Bernie Sanders' non-socialism isn't really important at this juncture in history. The ruling class isn't scared of his socialist pretensions, but will viciously resist New Deal-type reforms that threaten their austerity regime, a global Race to the Bottom that ruthlessly diminishes the living standards and economic security of the masses of people, so that they will accept any job, under any conditions of employment. Capitalist austerity is designed to provide working people with no options but to take what the bosses offer. Austerity regimes gut the social safety nets, not to save money, but to impose abject desperation on working people, so that they will accept the "shit jobs" that are now the norm even in the "most-developed" capitalist countries. The Lords of Austerity are creating a global precariat, defined as "a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare."

The Lords of Capital oppose single payer health care, not so much in solidarity with their capitalist brethren in the insurance and pharmaceutical industries (capitalists have no problem devouring or sacrificing each other), but because single payer erases the connection between employment and health care, eliminating medical precarity and reducing the bosses' power. Thus, capitalists oppose single payer even though it would dramatically reduce the costs of labor for most businesses. That's why corporate Democrats resist Sanders' menu of reforms despite the fact that 80 to 90 percent of Democratic voters support them.

The ruling class agenda for the future is quite simple: endless war and austerity. Since they have no other vision, and have done fabulously well for themselves over the past 40 years of austerity and war, they tolerate no deviation from the corporate order and will lash out lethally against those that threaten their war-making and austerity-imposing prerogatives. It is unthinkable that the rulers would allow one of their governing parties to fall into the hands of austerity busters. Rather, the Lords of Capital would be compelled to destroy such a party - and govern from another platform -- rather than surrender the institution to folks that actually want to give the people what they want.

The people need to see that contradiction played out in the Democratic Party, the duopoly party whose constituencies are actually eager to make substantive demands on the state. (Republican rank and file whites desire only that their government affirm white supremacy.) It would have been a great political lesson if Sanders' momentum was such that corporate Democrats have to steal the nomination from him in broad daylight, hopefully prompting a mass exit from the party and creation of a new social democratic formation (or a much bigger Green Party). Or, if somehow Sanders won the nomination, we could all watch the corporate players pick up their marbles to form a new "centrist" party, leaving leftish Democrats encamped in the hollow shell. As things stand at this early stage in the process, Sanders may simply wind up an also-ran - allowing the corporate spinners to write the obituary on his "far left" escapades.

Or maybe Bernie will catch fire again, and propel us to the next contradiction.

On March 12, 1938, the vaunted German army was to make its triumphant entry into Austria-the infamous Anschluss by which a compliant Austrian government surrendered to the Nazis without a shot.

A grand parade of the Third Reich's might was scheduled for the Austrian capital Vienna but the army's tanks were not as invincible as the generals bragged. They quickly broke down, clogging the roads, stalling the advance, and infuriating Adolph Hitler. And so, French author and filmmaker Eric Vuillard writes in his eloquent essay, The Order of the Day, "the German troops loaded as many tanks as they could onto railroad cars... the trains hauled away the armor the way you'd transport circus equipment." The tanks arrived in Vienna and the parade went on as planned.

It was that image of massive weapons as circus gear that flashed to mind this week when photos were released of tanks on railroad cars in Washington, DC, ready to be placed on display at our National Mall on the orders of Donald Trump. They were part of his plan to hijack the Fourth of July and make our nation's birthday all about him-a "Salute to America," featuring the tanks, military flyovers (including the Blue Angels and Air Force One) and a speech made by the man who calls himself, "Your favorite President, me!" The White House, the Republican National Committee, and the Trump reelect distributed VIP tickets.

As per The New York Times, "Pentagon officials have long been reluctant to parade tanks, missiles, and other weapons through the nation's capital like the authoritarian leaders of North Korea and China. They say the United States, which has the world's most powerful military and spends more on defense than the seven next largest military spenders combined-China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, Britain, and Germany-does not need to broadcast its strength."

Many former military weren't crazy about the idea either. Retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, who commanded troops under George W. Bush, told Politico, "This looks like it's becoming much more of a Republican Party event-a political event about the president-than a national celebration of the Fourth of July, and it's unfortunate to have the military smack dab in the middle of that." Retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash added, "The president is using the armed forces in a political ploy for his reelection campaign and I think it's absolutely obscene."

(Mother Jones reported on Wednesday that soldiers assigned to the tanks and other armored vehicles plopped down among our national monuments had been given a card by the Pentagon about what to say to the public, including, "I am proud of my job and my vehicle/tank. I am glad to share my experience with American People.")

Anyone who has ever spent a Fourth of July in Washington knows that it's a festive fun day in the capital, albeit wilting hot and sopping humid, usually above politics, featuring a parade, a folk life festival, grand music, and fireworks. But this year, the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, usually a prime vantage point for watching the skyrockets, and the surrounding parkland were cordoned off for the invited guests so that they could watch our egomaniacal president and the first lady make a grand entrance across a red-carpeted stage at the spot where Marian Anderson sang "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" when she was barred from Constitution Hall by the DAR in 1939, and Martin Luther King, Jr., told an eager crowd in 1963 of his dreams for racial harmony and freedom.

Trump's attempt to wedge himself and his reelection into the festivities-using, in part, taxpayer millions diverted from much needed repairs of the national parks-had the grace of that clown who tries to photobomb a group portrait in the high school yearbook, making faces and wiggling fingers in his ears. The speech, which many feared would be a partisan attack similar to the rants he delivers at his campaign rallies, turned out to be standard if dull rhetoric that sounded more like the third-place winning essay in an eighth grade civics contest than a speech by our putative chief executive. It went on at such monotonous length that CNN actually cut away for a commercial break, something I have never in my life seen happen during a presidential address.

Standing behind a wall of bulletproof glass so rain streaked it appeared he was speaking from behind a car windshield during a cloudburst, Trump was at his best when quoting the eloquence of his predecessors rather than the boilerplate of his speechwriters. (Lincoln's "government of the people, by the people, for the people" was trundled out, but there was no mention of Abe's "malice toward none.") He lumbered through a rambling litany of moments in American history and named its greats, glossing over our sins, thanking all the branches of the military, and presenting notables in the audience who had been brought there, State of the Union-style, to be lauded for their achievements.

(One of them, Clarence Henderson, introduced by the president as among the first to participate in the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 and cited by Trump as an exemplar of the success of civil rights, has in recent years been an outspoken Trump supporter and president of the North Carolina chapter of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group that seeks, according to The Fayetteville Observer, "to grow the ranks of conservative Christian black Republicans.")

Aside from the verbal slips he inevitably stumbles into when reading from a teleprompter ("ramparts/airports") there was no groaner of an improvised joke or insult, although given his draft record, the call for young people to join the military was a little rich. That this failure to further embarrass the nation was cause for kudos from Republican leadership and some in the media gives an idea of how low we've let this man set the presidential performance bar.

But as conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin noted in The Washington Post, Trump misconstrues American traditions: "What should be a commemoration of human rights ('All men ... ') and the unwavering faith in the rule of law and in democratic governance in Trump's hands becomes a caffeinated Armed Services Day. He manages to transform a holiday about the greatest experiment in civilian self-government into a garish military Mardi Gras."

So why spend even a moment wringing hands over such an event when there are horrors perpetrated by this regime on an hourly basis that far eclipse some uninspiring oratory and slipshod pageantry? When Trump perpetually lies, makes policy mayhem worldwide, utters dark threats about the homeless and deportations and allows men, women, and children to cluster in overcrowded squalid cells along our southern border?

Why bother? Because, as Eric Vuillard writes of World War II in The Order of the Day, "Great catastrophes often creep up on us in tiny steps." Because on the same day a company donated $750,000 worth of free fireworks for Trump's Fourth of July party, he dropped a tariff on imported Chinese fireworks that same company had been lobbying against. Because every bit of graft like that, every small indignity inflicted, each gesture and symbol of disdain, are reflective of a greater, potentially fatal insult to democracy and a degradation of the greater good that was idealized by the men who signed the Declaration.

Because, Vuillard warns, "We never fall into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread."