Representatives from the nations that, along with the United States, signed on to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JPOA), are still trying desperately to salvage the agreement, which is on life support since the U.S. pulled out of it. The latest attempt concerns SWIFT, and Iranian access to it. SWIFT, officially the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is a secure messaging service that transmits millions of instructions per day to banks and other financial institutions. Among the many sanctions that Trump is re-imposing on November 5, in violation of an international agreement to which the U.S. is a signatory, one is to prevent these communications to and from Iran.
In the fantasy land in which the U.S. president resides, sanctioning Iran is important. Never mind that millions of people, mostly children, will starve to death by the end of the year in Yemen because Saudi Arabia, with the full support of the U.S., is preventing food from entering the country, and is bombing it (what’s one school bus full of children, after all, in the greater scheme of things, whatever on earth that is?). Never mind that 2.5 million people in Palestine are in dire circumstances, because, again with the full support and funding of the U.S., Israel is brutally attempting to squeeze the life out of them. Forget about the fact that there is seething rage in the U.S. because the newly-appointed Supreme Court Justice has…