Anyone who says they know how to "fix" Venezuela's many problems is full of shit, and/or has an agenda. But you can be sure that Elliot Abrams will find a way to make it worse. That turd should have been flushed twenty years ago, but the Cheney regime made sure to fish him out of the bowl and put him back to work.
There is some truth to that "drain the swamp" stuff, you know. It's just that there's more to it than simply swapping in your own gators.
The US has been sniffing around Venezuela since oil was discovered at Maracaibo back in 1905. Nowadays, it's also about the coltan and other valuable metals and minerals there, and a desperate, destitute populace that will settle for just about any respite from million-percent inflation and non-stop crime.
Where it gets a bit strange is that Russia is supporting Maduro and bucking our support of Guaido. I don't think this turns into another Syria, but odds are there's already a few cells of mercs and spec-ops guys setting up shop outside Caracas, training irregulars in "counterinsurgency" techniques. With Abrams' involvement, it could be another Guatemala or El Salvador.
There is some truth to that "drain the swamp" stuff, you know. It's just that there's more to it than simply swapping in your own gators.
The US has been sniffing around Venezuela since oil was discovered at Maracaibo back in 1905. Nowadays, it's also about the coltan and other valuable metals and minerals there, and a desperate, destitute populace that will settle for just about any respite from million-percent inflation and non-stop crime.
Where it gets a bit strange is that Russia is supporting Maduro and bucking our support of Guaido. I don't think this turns into another Syria, but odds are there's already a few cells of mercs and spec-ops guys setting up shop outside Caracas, training irregulars in "counterinsurgency" techniques. With Abrams' involvement, it could be another Guatemala or El Salvador.
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"odds are there's already a few cells of mercs and spec-ops guys setting up shop outside Caracas, training irregulars in "counterinsurgency" techniques. With Abrams' involvement, it could be another Guatemala or El Salvador."
DING DING DING DING -- WE HAVE A WINNER! I've been waiting to see how long it takes people of the Left to realise that's what the game plan is. Contras for the new millennium! Because it worked soooooo well in Central America during the 1980s (for the sociopathic bastards who wanted to exert U.S. control in those countries for the geopolitical chess game against USSR commies, not so much for the peasants being slaughtered by the death squads). It's what people such as Bolton and Abrams DO. One-trick ponies.
One of the reasons I read comments on select blogs including Balloon Juice is to see what the zeitgeist on the Left is. (I similarly look at comments on reich-wing sites such as Zero Hedge to see what maggot-thoughts are squirming in the brains of the Right.) So far, I don't see that many lefties have twigged to death-dealing destabilisation as being the Amerikkkan regime's end-game for Venezuela. You, sir, are a Thought Leader. Others will come to your conclusion, hopefully before the massacres by the "freedom fighters" -- HAH! -- begin.
What I wonder is: "Why?" What's the profit motive behind sowing chaos? Iraq, Libya, Syria: ruled by murderous scumbags who were nonetheless single-point sources of evil that citizens could mostly avoid if they stayed wary. Now they're in random car-bomb chaos where anyone might die anywhere at any moment. Ditto Afghanistan. Ukraine: ginned-up "colour revolution" to replace one corrupt sonofabitch with OUR side's corrupt sonofabitch. Now there's freezing, shooting and generalised misery all over the eastern side of the country. Vietnam, Cambodia, Panama... the list of countries that preceded Amerika's current list of targets is long. Where's next? (after Venezuela, that is.)
Is it Amerika's aim to make the rest of the world fall apart so that it will prevail by being the Last Country Standing? Ukraine and the eastern expansion of NATO was an obvious move to wrong-foot Russia. Deep conspiracy theorists see Amerikan support for Brexit (there's been a lot of economic nudging of the UK to break away) as a means of nobbling the European Union as a power competitor to the USSA. China might LOOK strong (and it IS, in a lot of ways, because it has the machinery and trained workers to actually MAKE shit) but there are economic fault lines throughout the country (tonnes of debt for crap like "ghost cities" that can never be repaid.) If the U.S. can somehow fuck with the financial flows there, using tricks from having the world re$erve ⍧urren⍧y (China has a lot of dollar-denominated DEBT, as well as its surplus of Amerikan money from the long-running trade imbalance) that could bring on the collapse of a rival.
If Amerika can make China's money flows seize up for a while, long enough to disrupt the functioning of society, it would be like running your car's engine without oil flowing. You'll still have a car, with seats and windows and tyres. There would even be an engine, even though the pistons would be melted into the cylinder walls. That car would just be sitting on the side of the road unable to GO anywhere. I could see something analogous happening to China, after a sustained, engineered loss of business makes hungry unemployed workers get angry enough to fuck shit up en masse. They still seem to have enough of the "we're as mad as hell and we're not going to take this any more!" spirit that's been sheeple-ised out of slobbovAmerikans.
Thing is, Amerika is also eating ITSELF with such games, just as it is trying to do with Venezuela. Look at the "deaths of despair" epidemic. Look at the hollowing-out of Detroit and so many other places that are not part of the glittery coastal New Economy paradises. Even amongst them, such as the shit-piles on the streets of San Francisco (where I was living before I fled the U.S.) there's a lot of desperation. Amerika is being riven with a "my team vs. your team" ideology, where people don't see themselves as fellow countrymen, but have internalised their faction as being who they ARE.
Before Amerika can bring down the rest of the world, I predict it's going to Yugoslavia-ise or Rwandise itself. But not before it causes hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in Venezuela through violence and immiseration. On the bright side, though, it's a sign of Amerika's declining power that it has to fuck around closer to home, instead of being able to project its malign power to the other side of the planet like it did with the Himalayan Heroin Colony or the Babylonian Oil Suzerain. Progress! Or maybe that should be "regress"...
What I wonder is: "Why?" What's the profit motive behind sowing chaos?
Several likely motives come to mind. Some or all of them are almost certainly true.
1. The true elites, the people who really run the world, view non-elites as another species. Literally another species. They care about the average Venezuelan -- or the average American -- about as much as the average 'murkin cares about a factory-farmed chicken.
2. There is profit to be made in destruction and rebuilding, just as much as in building and innovating. I think that's why they don't really give a fuck about global warming -- the rebuild and seawall contracts for Miami and New York will dwarf what they screwed out of New Orleans post-Katrina.
3. As Michael Caine sagely observed in The Dark Knight, some people just want to watch the world burn. Turns out some of those people have inordinate amounts of money and power and influence. Really, what's the point of being a billionaire if you can't push the peons around?
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