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On or about this day in 2016, Barack Obama smashed Pablo Escobar’s likely personal record for most cash on palettes shipped in a single planeload with a special order of $400 million in mixed currencies delivered to his allies in Tehran. The cash was part of an estimated $1.7 billion donated to the world’s leading exporter of terrorism in order to release five innocent Americans and to get Iran to agree to pretend not to be developing nuclear weapons while Obama was still in office.
Escobar is responsible for at least 4,000 murders done at his behest or by his underlings. He also funded Marxist guerrillas with several million dollars. But the death toll from his directives and those rebel groups is magnitudes smaller than the hundreds of thousands killed in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Gaza, Afghanistan, Yemen and Israel as a result of Iranian arms, training and direct orders. It would be difficult to calculate a proportional attribution to Obama’s largesse, but it would be accurate to say that Barack directed a lot of money to far more lethal and destructive agents than did Pablo.
Pablo, Barrack and the mullahs all also managed to squander inconceivably large amounts of money that could have been used for a myriad of better purposes. Quite a legacy.
Discussion (6)
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Iran received $400 million the same day Americans released. [link]
But ... we don't negotiate with terrorists.
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It is not negotiations with terrorists if you declare terrorists to be our friends or our creditors.
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If it traveled the same route as the 40+ Billion in greenbacks sent to Iraq at various points between 2003 & 2008, that 400 million probably originated from a leafy Federal Reserve complex about 20 miles from my house.
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It’s literally 5 minutes from “The Bada-Bing” strip club in The Sopranos. I always wondered how Tony never hit one of the Fed’s money trucks. He must have driven past the place twice a day.
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I’ve never been able to get the sight of that bale of actual cash (undoubtedly in used small denominations) on that pallet waiting to be delivered to Iran. It’s different when you see it in cash. I remember thinking “what in the actual eff is a-goin on here?”
I still think about how casual the government is with my money, every time I have to grit my teeth and sign that check every April. The $80,000 I had to send in last year would probably be made of the bills that spilled out of the bale and they just swept into the trash. I could have really used that money. 🫣🤬
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