15th
Joe Biden (via thetenthamendment)
While I’ve always been disillusioned with the Democratic party, which falsely touts its protection of civil liberties, one of the things that astounded me about the VP debate was Biden’s pride over the economic sanctions on Iran.
By artificially restricting supply, economic sanctions raise the price of basic living essentials, like food medical supplies. It may be economic policy, but it’s a humanitarian issue at it’s core; people are starving to death, while the Obama administration champions ‘non-violence’. The sanctions hurt innocent Iranian citizens.
Domestic political banter around the issue is rooted in controversy which simply doesn’t exist: the sanctions are not about nuclear weapons. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US and Israeli have all acknowledged that Iran hasn’t violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, because Iran does not have any nuclear weapons. The conditions outlined in the sanction legislation pertain to a regime change. The sanctions are meant to encourage Iranians to overthrow their current government.
The critical problem with this logic is that by ceasing all trade with Iran, Iranian small businesses have collapsed because people cannot buy the goods necessary to run their businesses. Without the ability to trade internationally, the private sector—and with it, citizens’ income—ceases functioning. The Iranian people are relying on government now, more than ever, to provide basic essentials they need to live. The government is thriving under the collapse of civil society.
tl;dr: The US is cutting off Iranians’ access to trade with the US and its allies in an effort to overthrow their government (under the guise of alleviating those same people’s suffering), while necessitating their increasing dependence on that very same government. Obama may claim that his intention is to to “hold the Iranian government accountable for its actions,” but his ever-increasing stranglehold on Iran is a political response to the Republican criticism of not being ‘tough on Iran’, not a humanitarian attempt to prevent nuclear armament.
The common dismissal of economic policy as rigidly distinct from social policy and repercussions is to completely mistake the nature of economics: the study of people in the ordinary business of life.
*facetious interpretation of his actual statements
(via election)
