larry johnson brings us a new game to play with the trumps. its a version of brer rabbits hope that brer fox will throw him into the briar patch; 

 

There was one sentence in Scott Bessent’s Monday sanctions announcement that gave the whole game away. Anyone who launders money for the Iranian regime, the Treasury Secretary warned, “will be removed from the US dollar system.” He meant it as a threat of annihilation. It is, instead, a confession of the policy’s central weakness. The entire architecture of what Bessent has branded “Operation Economic Outcast” rests on a single assumption — that Iran and its trading partners need the U.S. dollar. They increasingly do not. And a threat to bar someone from the dollar system means nothing to a trade that has already walked out of it and into the Chinese yuan.

What Bessent actually announced

Strip away the “economic D-Day” theatrics and the substance is a secondary-sanctions framework: the United States threatens to punish any country or entity that refuses to sever economic ties with Iran, expands the categories of activity exposed to those secondary sanctions into five new fields — digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping — and designates roughly sixty individuals, entities, and vessels tied to nuclear and missile procurement, cyber operations, and oil smuggling. The mechanism of pain, in every case, is the same: exclusion from the dollar-based financial system that Washington polices through its control of dollar clearing, SWIFT messaging, and correspondent banking..........more........