US, Iran Confirm Peace Agreement - The Monday AM Quickie 6/15/26
It was a big weekend for feats of strength, so I watched Stagecoach (1939), which has the wildest stunts I have ever seen in a movie. -Whitney
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THE BIG NEWS
US, Iran Confirm Peace Agreement (But We’ve Been Fooled Before)
The two sides reached a deal and declared “the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said early Monday morning, according to Al Jazeera, the Associated Press and Reuters. Trump announced the end of his naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, writing on his social media website “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” A senior Iranian official said the final draft of the memorandum of understanding will be finalized in the 60 days after the agreement. The draft includes the following, per Reuters:
STRAIT OF HORMUZ:
* Iran immediately reopens the Strait of Hormuz to all commercial vessels, while the U.S. lifts its naval blockade on Iranian ports. The lifting of the U.S. blockade would begin immediately after the memorandum is signed and be completed within 30 days.
FINANCIAL:
* The U.S. agrees not to impose any new sanctions on Iran until a final deal is reached.
* Following a final agreement, all U.S. and U.N. sanctions on Iran would be lifted according to an agreed timetable.
* The U.S. will waive oil sanctions on Iran for a specified period, allowing Tehran to sell oil and receive revenue.
* The U.S. agrees to release $25 billion of Iran’s frozen assets, including via direct cash transfers, cooperation among regional countries, and financial credit lines.
* Washington, in coordination with its regional allies, would prepare a reconstruction and development plan for Iran, to be negotiated and agreed with Tehran within 60 days.
NUCLEAR:
* Tehran agrees that it will neither produce nor acquire nuclear weapons.
* Pending a final agreement, Iran would maintain the current status of its nuclear programme, refraining from further uranium enrichment and expansion of nuclear facilities.
* The United States agrees to allow Iran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium on Iranian soil under a future comprehensive agreement.
* Iran’s nuclear programme, uranium enrichment activities and mechanisms for handling its stockpile of highly enriched uranium would be negotiated within 60 days of the memorandum and addressed in a final agreement.
Inshallah, officials really will sign the peace agreement, as they are scheduled to do this Friday in Switzerland. But Trump has jerked us around about this so many times that it’s reasonable to wonder whether that will really happen. A retired US general told Al Jazeera that there are plenty of factors that could ruin the deal, including Israel continuing to bomb its neighbors with total impunity. According to the NYT, Israel has multiple problems with the proposal and yesterday bombed a Beirut suburb, which Trump condemned. A headline in a popular Hebrew newspaper on Sunday summarized the rogue nation’s sentiment about the peace agreement with the headline “Bad Deal.”
MORE STORIES TO WATCH
‘Abundance’ Is a Tech Billionaire Con Job
Silicon Valley billionaires are driving the obviously fake “Abundance Movement,” according to The American Prospect and The Revolving Door Project, which obtained documents from inside the project. While Abundance boosters get mad whenever someone suggests that’s the case, that’s what the leaked documents show, including that their organizers “even frequently use the word ‘elite’ by choice.” The documents show that Abundance organizers despise working people and grassroots movements, saying that “small-dollar internet fundraising makes politics dumber” and that “the old gatekeepers were political professionals who could count cards; small-dollar donors today are amateurs yanking the handles of ActBlue slot machines,” a metaphor suggesting that these cynics view politics as a casino.
The documents also reveal that billionaire donors have set up an “Abundance Capital Stack” of $260 million annually to organize in all 50 states. That’s $120 million a year from former hedge fund manager and Meta board member John Arnold; $40 million from Meta co-founder Dustin Moskovitz; and $100 million from Steve Ballmer, owner of the LA Clippers and ex-Microsoft executive. Per the Prospect:
It is worth noting that there are two publicly announced $120 million abundance grant funds, the Abundance and Growth Fund from Coefficient Giving (née Open Philanthropy) and Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America Fund. The former is operating over the course of three years, the latter six. Those alone would equal $64 million a year.
In addition, the network has received significant donations from Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former Republican mayor of New York City, and Chris Larsen, co-founder of cryptocurrency firm Ripple. Larsen has been a major donor to Democrats in the past, but his company donated nearly $5 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration and received significant regulatory relief from the Trump-controlled SEC just months later. Ripple has also donated millions to Trump’s ballroom project and has benefited from the president promising to include the company’s XRP coin in his promised “crypto reserve.”
Can we agree now that Abundance is a fake-progressive effort to undermine Democrats, foil even the mildest leftist reforms and allow the tech industry to continue its environment-destroying death march? In my opinion, yes. Yes we can.
Anthropic Halts Latest AI Model After Feds Ban Use by Foreign Nationals, Calling It a National Security Threat
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic executives a letter Friday evening banning foreign nationals living in the US and abroad from using the company’s newest artificial intelligence tools, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, saying the technology is a risk to national security, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post reported. The letter didn’t include details about government officials’ concerns, only that there are ways hackers can get around safeguards. Anthropic reputedly takes safety more seriously than other tech companies; in response to the government’s concern, executives shut off all access to everybody. The company said it suspects the government learned of the hacking method “jailbreaking,” in which a user exploits a system’s vulnerabilities to bypass guidelines and get sensitive information or perform other restricted actions. “We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass,” the company said. But there is more at play than just straightforward security concerns. Per the WSJ:
The company and the Trump administration have been feuding for months over the guardrails dictating how the Pentagon uses Anthropic’s AI tools, and Friday’s action could escalate the battle between the two sides, analysts said. Administration officials and advisers including venture capitalist David Sacks have accused the company of so-called doomerism by warning of AI risks and stoking fear, then continuing to release more powerful models.
QUICKEST QUICKIES
- Crowd Cheers as Crew Scrape Trump’s Odious Name Off Kennedy Center In other signs news, a federal judge on Friday temporarily halted the National Park Service historical revisionism, saying it may not alter, cover or remove material just because Trump says it casts the US in a negative light, such as facts about the country’s genocide of indigenous North Americans or its nearly 300 years of slavery, which today continues behind the walls of the prison and immigration detention system. via the AP and NYT.
- Riot Police Attack Protesters in Geneva Ahead of G7 Summit Activists gathered before today’s start of a three-day meeting between Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US to voice their objection to Trump’s imperial agenda; cops in gas masks and riot gear sprayed the crowd with chemical weapons and blasted them with water cannons. via Al Jazeera, the AP and the BBC.
- Crime Family About to Rip Off UFC White House Athletes The mixed martial artists performing for Dear Leader’s special day yesterday will get paid “in the form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial.” Sure. via The Guardian.
- Good News Alert: Solar Power Surpasses Coal for First Time in History Last month, solar power generated 12.8 percent of electricity in the US versus coal’s 12.2 percent, a new record brought to us by the sun and green technology, and in spite of the federal government’s attempt to return us to an era of soot. via ABC News.
SOME NUMBER
102
That’s how many days New Jersey Republican Rep. Thomas Kean Jr. has been MIA, according to the NYT’s 100-days-missing report on Saturday plus the number 2 to account for yesterday and today. His office says he’s working from home after undergoing treatment for an undisclosed ailment. Nobody knows what’s wrong or where he is. Still, he’s somehow managed to trade stock and tell House colleagues to condemn Ireland for limiting trade with Israel. I gotta say, if any of us failed to show up to work, we’d no longer have a job! Must be nice to have taxpayers funding your good health insurance and constant vacations.
ON THE SHOW TODAY
6/15: Sam and Emma are in the studio today, and their guest is Yotam Marom, organizer and writer discussing his book, For Louder Days: Reaching Beyond a Politics of Powerlessness.
DON'T MISS MR CLIPS
Fox News Struggles To Attack Graham Platner
I will never get over the magnitude of pancake makeup on that Jesse Watters guy.
Dem Surges In Polls By Demanding We Abolish ICE And Tax Billionaires | Avila Chevalier | TMR
Abolish ICE is a popular policy position! I had the pleasure of interviewing Avilia Chevalier a few months ago; she talked about the connection between unaffordable life in the United States and the US-backed genocide in Palestine.
PARTING WORDS
“I believe that the rape was a form of intimidation used by the grower’s agents to silence me. The UFW was engaged in a battle with the growers of the Coachella Valley. Rape in the context of battle is a war crime, not ‘just something men do to women.’”
– Former United Farmworkers member Liz Sullivan, who was about 21 years old when the son of a foreman and a former union member attacked her in a field and took turns raping her. When Sullivan reported the assault to union leaders, Dolores Huerta – who was herself raped by cofounder Ceasar Chavez – told her that rape was just something men do to women. Sullivan “quit the union in disgust,” according to the New York Times in a story about the UFW’s culture of rape and how it was reinforced by its very victims. “Instead of addressing the important safety concerns which resulted from my rape,” Sullivan said, the UFW “branded talk about safety ‘counter-organizing.’” I chose this as today’s Parting Words, because as psychologist and feminist activist Harriet Fraad once told me during an interview, a big way fascists wage war is to crush solidarity between genders. If we are going to fight back and win, we must end rape culture no matter where we find it.
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