Ever since Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999, the US government has opposed him and supported efforts to unseat him and his Socialist party from power. After Chavez died in 2013, his successor Nicolas Maduro received the same treatment.
After Chavez was elected president in 1999 and a new constitution was adopted, in 2002, a day of huge and violent protests for and against him was followed by an attempted coup that lasted just two days. According to Wikipedia, while it was not widely known at the time, “the US had prior knowledge of the coup attempt and that members of the US government had ties to prominent participants in the coup.”
Hugo Chavez had a long history of working for a Socialist government. He started out as a military officer who was assigned to counterintelligence after he graduated from military academy in 1975. It is reported in Wikipedia that he was persuaded to a Socialist viewpoint after reading a large stash of old Communist literature and banned books that he discovered in the course of his duties in counterintelligence. Two years later, he founded a revolutionary movement within the armed forces.
From 1981 to 1984, he was an instructor at the military academy, where he persuaded a quarter of the first class of students to his point of view. The army brass became suspicious of him and posted him to a remote barracks, thinking to prevent him from converting any more recruits. He spent some of his time there making contact with local indigenous tribes.
Chavez was back on track by 1988, after a promotion to major, coming into favor from a high-ranking general who took him on as his assistant at his office in Caracas. He broke with President Perez, who before his election in 1989 had promised to oppose the International Monetary Fund’s policies and the US government’s ‘Washington Consensus.’ President Perez enacted cuts in social spending despite his campaign promises, provoking widespread protests and looting. The Venezuelan government responded with a crackdown and violent repression. Chavez staged an unsuccessful coup attempt in February 1992.
President Perez was impeached for corruption and removed from power the following year, and Chavez was soon out of prison. Despite Venezuela’s enormous oil reserves (said to be the biggest in the world) and neoliberal economic policies, there was erosion of the standard of living in the 1990’s. The political climate favored a populist leader. When Chavez ran for president in 1998, he won with 56% of the vote.
He soon set about developing a new constitution, which was ratified on December 15, 1999 by popular vote. The new Constitution received 70% of the vote. Under its provisions, he took over all of the previously independent organs of government. Afterwards, his popularity dropped precipitously, partly because he endorsed and developed ties with autocratic world leaders like Moammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and “especially” Fidel Castro.
Chavez used a strategy of “polarization”, demonizing his enemies and lauding his friends. Like a current president whose name will not be mentioned, Wikipedia says, “He would insult and use name calling against original supporters that would question him; the media, business leaders, the Catholic Church and the middle class.”
According to Wikipedia, his ” ‘words spawned hatred and polarization’ with Chávez, ‘a master of language and communication’, creating his own reality among Venezuelans.” Many who had previously supported him felt that they had been used and tricked, switching from democratic to autocratic after his election; the media in particular felt deceived after they had supported him for election.
Polarization in Venezuela proceeded apace, with opposition even among the military, while supporters especially among the poor organized into groups that were said to idolize him. Opponents particularly objected to his “Cubanization” of the country; even primary school textbooks were copied over from Cuban books with only the covers changed. Land was expropriated from the owners of large estates, with a large proportion of the seized property being used to reward political supporters– that is, corruption, which was ironically one of the main reasons Chavez had originally turned against his government.
On December 10, 2001, a countrywide strike closed down 90% of the economy. The next month, protests in the streets were widespread. In the early months of 2002, Chavez took over the oil industry and forced foreign companies who had invested in the industry to double their royalty payments. He had dissenting military officers arrested after they objected to being forced to work with guerilla groups like FARC in Colombia and opening their secret files to Cuban military personnel.
For nearly a year prior to the April 11, 2002 coup, those who had become opposed to Chavez’ government planned to force him out of office. The government, aware of the opposition plans, organized their own pro-government groups. The dissension came to a head with a strike that nearly paralyzed the entire country. Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched on the presidential palace and were met by nearly equal numbers of Chavez supporters in a pitched battle that left 17 dead and 60 wounded, many shot in the back with military caliber rifles.
For two days, the opposition controlled the government, installed a little-known academic as president, and filled a cabinet with conservative and moneyed interests. Then Chavez was returned to power in a counter-coup. The United States knew about the coup, indeed it was an open secret for months, warned the government (a little too gently), and telegraphed its lack of support.
However, through the organization “National Endowment for Democracy (NED)”, the US government had been spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to “promote democracy” since the “nonprofit agency” had been established in 1983. So the issue of US government influence on political affairs in Venezuela is real. The influence may be so benign as to be unobjectionable; an example would be distribution of copies of the Constitution, but other activities like hosting cocktail parties for so-called “dissident” individuals are in a gray area.
In any case, Hugo Chavez returned to power in Venezuela until his death in 2013. He transformed the country from a corrupt but functioning democracy to a failed nation. The murder rate has increased every year since 1998. Price controls caused scarcity of essential imported goods; nationalization of industries that supplied those essential goods domestically was botched, and production actually went down. Many changes were made in society, most of them bad, in the name of socialism.
While Chavez was re-elected as president to successive terms from 1999 until his death, those internationally recognized elections were tainted by open bribery of his primarily poor supporters and the impression among many that the votes were not secret. Continued, pervasive corruption and impunity corroded every institution. Matters have only gone from bad to worse under Maduro, who was Chavez’s vice president when he died. Shortages of food and medicine have continued and worsened. Now Maduro is refusing international aid, claiming that the dignity and honor of the country is at stake.
While the United States has had a negative effect on politics in Venezuela, the root cause of the problems there lie with Hugo Chavez and his misplaced idealism. He maintained popular support with generous social welfare programs but ruined his economy with excessive controls on transactions, corruption, and a generally hostile business climate. Sitting on the huge oil reserves that Venezuela has, allegedly the largest in the world, he should have been able to grow his economy and allow his people to prosper, but that has not happened.
Studying the recent history of Venezuela, it appears that the combination of misplaced idealism, autocratism, and corruption has been disastrous over the last twenty years. The only hope is a replacement of the entire current regime in the country with reliable, honest administrators who can govern a business-friendly, people’s welfare generous, oil-rich economy.
There is talk in Wikipedia of a condition known as “Dutch disease”, a phenomenon in which a sudden influx of money from outside (such as the sale of new gas deposits, which occurred in the Netherlands in 1959) can unbalance a country’s economy and have negative effects on other sectors.
All of this talk about the US government’s cautious position and Venezuela’s internal problems goes out the window, though, when we start talking about the current US president. He (who must not be named) started pressing military advisors as early as the summer of 2017 to give him military options for the overthrow of the Venezuelan government.
Now that matters have come to a crisis internally, the US is showing public support for the head of the National Assembly, Juan Guiado, who has declared himself interim president. Guiado alleges that the election last year in which Maduro was returned to the presidency was illegitimate. There is a prospect, that is we can entertain the possibility, that He who cannot be named might invade Venezuela to install Guiado and take attention away from his domestic legal problems.
Word comes today that He who must not be named tried to push acting Attorney General Whitaker to [appoint one of his allies to] have the head of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York oversee the investigation into Him and His Organization. Unfortunately, the newly appointed director had already been recused for conflicts of interest. He who cannot be named was particularly angry after his former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was arrested and pled guilty to acting at his direction to make a hush money payment to affect the 2016 election (an illegal and unreported contribution to his campaign).
That’s obstruction of justice, assuming (it’s easy) that he did this with the intent to shut down the SDNY’s investigation of his lawyer and his finances. The only obstacle to charging obstruction of justice seems to be the need to prove that there was “corrupt intent” underlying obstructive actions attempting to take the pressure off of Him. The standard for “corrupt intent” is whether we can conclude that a “reasonable person” in such a position would think that way. Now, no one is arguing that He is a “reasonable person”– they are merely asking whether they would have thought that way.
So who did He want to be appointed to oversee the investigation of which he was a target? [edit here] was the new appointee to head the Attorney General’s office of the Southern District of New York? He appointed a man considered to be a friendly figure and potentially controllable, or at least directable. He is Geoffrey Berman, a former law partner of Rudy Giuliani– the man who impersonates His hare-brained lawyer on television.
Additions to original post follow:
I had to edit this post in part because I’m still confused about exactly what He did. Apparently, he twice contacted the acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker to complain about actions that his office had taken. He apparently first contacted Whitaker shortly after he was appointed, asking him if His appointee to be head of the SDNY Attorney General’s office could supervise of the investigation targeting Him and His lawyer. It was too late already– Berman had been recused from that investigation. A career employee of the Justice Department, Robert Khuzami, has been the supervisor of that particular inquiry because Mr. Berman was said to have a conflict of interest.
After that call, Whitaker was quoted as telling other Justice employees that New York prosecutors needed “adult supervision.” He apparently did not take any other action, partly because there was nothing he could do to satisfy His demand that His appointee and Rudy Giuliani’s former law partner supervise the investigation into His misdeeds.
He who must not be named apparently soured on Mr. Whitaker after he was unable to put His picked lawyer in charge of the only investigation He cares about. The SNDY Attorney General is asking whether He committed crimes– at any time, before, during, or after His successful campaign, unlike Mueller’s limited remit to study only collusion between His campaign and the Russians (and matters arising directly therefrom).
He who should probably not be named said that Mueller could not investigate his “business affairs”– that would be “crossing a red line.” SDNY has no such “red line”– they have complete freedom to look into anything He might have done, at any time still within the statute of limitations.
An interesting sidelight (one of many) into the complex stew of His cooperators, lieutenants, resisters, and turncoats is how He has responded to those of his assistants who have been indicted and then pled guilty and cooperated. He has called his former lawyer Michael Cohen a “rat” (among many worse insults), but he has remained positive towards Mr. Flynn. He tweeted “Good luck in court today” to Mr. Flynn on the day he was set for sentencing after pleading guilty and cooperating to an unknown extent. His reaction to Mr. Cohen was distinctly hostile, possibly given the effects of his cooperation on the *president: allegedly, release of taped phone calls between the two proving that he suborned perjury and authorized the payment of hush money to a former paramour to prevent her spilling the beans before Election Day. (I say allegedly because I can’t prove taped phone calls were released on which he could be heard saying “Kill that guy.” Just kidding.)
Worse still, I can’t find a mention of the second instance in which He communicated with Whitaker about the SDNY. This is important, first because Whitaker denied such communications to the House Committee which just interrogated him last week (although his denials were hedged about with non-responses to direct questions about this.) It’s also important for a second reason, which I can’t quite place just now.
This comes from a letter to USA Today that they reprinted in a a regular column, this time titled: “Democrats set the morality bar for themselves: Readers sound off.” The letter was apparently signed “Walt Zlotow, Glenn Ellyn, Ill.” This is entirely uncorroborated but sounds so true I thought I’d pass it along with a warning that it may not be true… it’s just the sort of thing He would do and just the sort of thing the UN would do. It just makes the whole thing that has been going on in Venezuela for the last two or three (or more) years more understandable when you know why. They’re starving because of US (and other countries) economic sanctions, and He turned the screws tighter as soon as he became *president because He so desperately wants socialism to fail– it’s central to his argument against creeping socialism in this country. He has to be able to hold up Venezuela as an example of the failure of socialism or He has nothing to prove that American capitalism is better than socialism in any country.
Republicans see the Affordable Care Act as being socialist, and Medicare for All as an extreme leftist-socialist position. This one principle underlies much of what they are trying to accomplish with their administration– although they keep running into roadblocks like detailed regulations put down by previous administrations.
China should look sharp to the essential philosophical underpinnings of “Americanism” as practiced by McCain-type conservatives. These basic rules of being American include, among the top two or three principles, the idea that capitalism is good and socialism is bad– therefore socialist (in principle) countries like China are intolerable and should be regarded as enemies. This attitude underlies His aggressive approach to trade negotiations with China.
From a Vanity Fair article about internal White House problems…titled, “[He] is hated by everyone inside the White House: the State of the Union left [him] stoked– but some of his staff are miserable”
Again, as read in the Business Insider, not a notably liberal source of information…
Also, “two intelligence officers told TIME that they had been warned not to give the president intelligence assessments that contradict his public stances.” And finally, another serving intelligence officer compared Him to a three-year-old throwing a temper tantrum– the difference being that He has the “nuclear button.”
As told to the Business Insider (sorry, I couldn’t get a link.)
No, I think that actually it was Satan who wanted him to be president.
The newly-minority Republican members of the House are supposed to seat their picks for the House Intelligence Committee so that it can begin business. The Democrats had theirs, and staff ready to go on January 3, when the House supposedly opened to a partially shuttered government. In move calculated to delay a certain specific bit of Intelligence Committee business, the Republican leadership hasn’t assigned any Republican members yet. They said they’d be ready last week. Then the government reopened, and they still aren’t ready.
Update 1:40 PM: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced the Republican members of the Intelligence Committee on the House floor Wednesday. Representative John Ratcliffe of Texas will join the committee, but the other Republican members remain the same. This is two weeks after the Democratic representatives were seated, with four new members. The Committee will now be able to formally meet and respond to Special Counsel Mueller’s request for certified copies of the testimonies in question. With these copies, Mueller will be able to charge the individuals involved with lying to Congress…
McCarthy claimed that the delay was the Democrat’s fault and had a long explanation. The rules for deciding who gets to sit on which committee are complex and involve term limits, to which two of the Republicans were subject. One received a waiver to remain on the committee, the other did not.
The committee did actually conduct some business today, holding an intelligence community briefing. POLITICO reported that Devin Nunes was invited to attend but did not show up.
The specific bit of business in hand is the provision of certified copies of the testimony of certain people very close to He who must not be named: his son Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, and a couple of other higher ups in the administration from Hell.
Donald Jr., in particular, is a sore spot for He who must not be named, because within minutes of Senator Blumenthal’s comment that Donald Jr.’s testimony was suspect, He tweeted his favorite insults about “Da Nang Dick” as He calls the poor fellow. It seems that Senator Blumenthal once made the mistake of claiming that he actually served in Vietnam rather than stateside, with a Marine Corps reserve unit. This was in 2008. By His standards, then, He who has lied 8,000 times in the last two years should be cleaning lavatories rather than be President of the United States.
This is beside the point. We all know that He who must not be named is a billionaire (or do we?) and therefore deserves anything he desires, while Senator Blumenthal is merely a multimillionaire and must bob for his apples (a cute expression, no?)
All sarcasm aside, damage that may take hundreds of years to repair is being done to our country. I refer especially to Joshua Tree National Monument, where, during the government shutdown, Parks security forces were furloughed, and vandals did massive damage to some of the oldest Joshua trees in the Monument. An expert predicted that the trees would take two to three hundred years to recover.
Strategic planning is therefore in order. In addition to direct resistance to His plans, we must maneuver the next election to become a Democratic blowout of all three parts of democratic government: the House, the Senate, and the Presidency. This can be done in this environment by attaching massive scandals to the Republican Party and all its members– except those who defect and vote Democratic. The best scandal of all, naturally, revolves around the Oval Office, and Republicans who cozy up to Him should be warned that they are not safe.
To maximize the scandal’s impact, it must be ongoing during election season: the three months before November 6, 2020. Therefore, impeaching and removing the President (and the Vice-President) should be delayed until then, if it is even possible. The best thing would be for the House Select Committee to announce that it had voted for impeachment in the summer or fall of 2020. Unfortunately for our country, He will continue to do damage until the moment he is removed from office, and leaving Pence in charge would only do further damage.
I posted this in 2013 also, and got no responses. On further reflection, it occurs to me that the ads may be individually targeted, and different for each reader of this blog. Now that I have a few followers, maybe I’ll get a response. Have you seen any ads when you read my blog? If so, what ads have you seen?
I have just recently become fully aware (yes, I was asleep at the switch) of WordPress.com advertising policy. When you read it, you realize that it is only fair that they run ads on my site because I’m too cheap to upgrade to the no ad version. And by cheap, I mean really cheap… it was eighteen dollars a year, which is less than a quarter of what I pay for my New Yorker subscription… so go figure. The problem for me, and I emphasize that this is my *only* problem with the advertising policy, is that I can’t see what the ads will be beforehand because they are tailored to the user’s preferences and thus could be different for different people.
I think that the advertising makes perfect sense, because it’s not intrusive (I think–but maybe it looks different on the receiving end?) and Google made a ton of money that way. It’s all in the clicks. If it is tailored to produce twenty or thirty bucks a year on clicks, on the average, then the ads could be very intrusive indeed… considering only three people ever read anything I write here. I’m guessing the ads don’t make up more than ninety five percent of the screen. If you consider this a problem, feel free to drop me a comment, and I will commiserate with you but probably do nothing about it.
The chances of my upgrading are slim at the moment. But we shall see, perhaps if I can insert a few photographs.
Roger Stone has been friends with He who must not be named for nearly 40 years. He began as a lobbyist for Him in the early 1980’s, after he had supported Goldwater as a student and worked for Nixon’s Committee to Re-elect the President in 1972. Roger Stone is a self-described “dirty trickster.” Most of the details are laid out in Wikipedia for everyone to see.
Apparently it is true that Roger Stone said, in 1985, “[He] will be president some day.”
Conrad Theodore Seitz 