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Attempted coup underway in Venezuela


Muda69

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https://www.npr.org/2019/04/30/718584269/juan-guaid-calls-for-a-military-uprising-declares-final-phase-in-venezuela

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Juan Guaidó, Venezuela's most powerful opposition leader, has declared that he has met with armed forces and is starting the "final phase" to oust President Nicolás Maduro.

Early Tuesday morning, Guaidó released a three-minute video describing the Venezuelan people's fight. He was flanked by men with helmets and weapons as he discussed ending the "usurpation," a term he has often used to describe Maduro's hold on the once-oil rich nation.

Guaidó, 35, stood near opposition leader Leopoldo López, a prominent politician who led anti-government protests, served jail time and had been living under house arrest.

López said he had been released by members of the military and Guaidó. "I'm at the La Carlota Base," he tweeted. "All to mobilize. It's time to conquer freedom."

Reports have emerged of a confrontation at the Caracas air base where Guaidó is believed to have recorded the video. Video from the scene shows people running and jumping into cars, with military helicopters and motorcycles nearby.

Reuters reported that one of its journalists saw security forces fire tear gas at Guaidó and dozens of men in military uniform.

Venezuelan Information Minister Jorge Rodríguez rejected news of a "coup attempt" in his country, saying on Twitter that the government is "deactivating a small number of traitorous military personnel."

Guaidó leads Venezuela's National Assembly and has been recognized as the country's interim president by the United States and dozens of other nations.

Leaders in Washington quickly showed their support for Guaidó's move Tuesday.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo welcomed the start of "Operación Libertad" on Twitter. "The U.S. Government fully supports the Venezuelan people in their quest for freedom and democracy. Democracy cannot be defeated," he said.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted, "This is the moment for those military officers in #Venezuela to fulfill their constitutional oath & defend the legitimate interim President."

...

Rubio posted a video of a "showdown" on a highway. He said Maduro called for armed groups to go to the streets; the senator also said Chinese technicians have helped the Maduro regime take down social media communications.

National Security Adviser John Bolton told Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López that Venezuela's armed forces "must protect the Constitution and the Venezuelan people."

Vice President Pence told Guaidó and his supporters, "Estamos con ustedes! We are with you!"

President Trump has been briefed on the developments, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders told reporters.

This is a developing story. Details may change as more information becomes available.

The end result of socialism.

 

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The Economics of Tyranny in Venezuela. Hayek predicted it all 75 years ago:  https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/venezuela-tyranny-economic-collapse-predictable/

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Venezuela is a human catastrophe. The evidence is brutally visible and can no longer be explained away by apologists for tyranny. So many people enamored with long-debunked theories had high hopes that for Venezuela — despite the enormous historical and empirical evidence to the contrary — the promise of socialism would work and would not lead to the loss of liberties or drive the once-prosperous nation into poverty. Looking back on the 20th century, we should turn to some of the most prominent thinkers who lived under similar conditions and dissected their experiences for us to learn from. Venezuela’s crisis is a good example of harsh lessons learned by one generation but forgotten by the next.

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.

Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”

A prime example of this divorce between intentions and actual consequences is price controls. In 2014, Venezuela’s new Fair Price Law capped the price of goods and services and established a sentence of up to 14 years in prison for those caught “hoarding,” “overcharging,” or “trafficking food.” There is ample economic history revealing the consequences of price controls, which disrupt the equilibrium price set through the interaction between supply and demand. The price ceilings in Venezuela’s case effectively led to long queues, empty grocery stores, and, ultimately, starving citizens. The government set prices artificially low, which resulted in a skyrocketing demand and the overconsumption of basic goods. On the other hand, producers started to make less because it had become unprofitable to sell their products within Venezuela. Instead, they began sending their goods abroad or to the black market, where sellers face prison time for their activity and usually need to pay kickbacks to continue operating. These risks are reflected in higher prices. The real-life consequences of Chavismo’s misguided policies are telling: Venezuelans lost an average of 24 pounds in the year 2017.

Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian rule over Venezuela is the next piece of the Hayekian puzzle. Chávez’s hand-picked successor has further plunged the country into devastation. Hayek’s explanation of “Why the Worst Get on Top” in his seminal book is particularly helpful in understanding the current state of Venezuela at the hands of Maduro. In Hayek’s words, at some point a dictator has to “choose between disregard of ordinary morals and failure,” failure meaning the loss of power over the lives of the people. This is the reason, Hayek argued, that the unscrupulous and uninhibited are more likely to stay in power in a society tending toward totalitarianism. This is, again, tragically accurate 75 years after the publication of The Road to Serfdom. Maduro and his inner circle have responded to the outcry for change from the hungry and desperate by unleashing ultraviolent revolutionary collectives in the hopes that millions will get the message, retreat to their homes, and watch — helplessly — as the night of dictatorship keeps falling upon them.

While the majority of Venezuelans suffer, Maduro dines at luxurious restaurants and treats his family to extravagant skydiving adventures. The president’s corrupt behavior is a reflection of his inner circle, which is composed almost entirely of crooks. To name a few, Diosdado Cabello, Chavismo’s second in command, who served as president of the Constituent Assembly under Maduro, is the head of an international drug-trafficking organization known as the Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), along with Néstor Reverol, minister of the interior and justice. Maduro’s nephews, known in the media as the narco sobrinos, are imprisoned in the United States for their involvement in the same drug trade. Meanwhile, Maduro’s former vice president, Tareck El Aissami, now Minister of Industries and National Production, has effectively acted as an ambassador to the terrorist organization Hezbollah, inviting its militants to train with FARC rebel forces in Venezuela. These are just some of the people who have led the country into chaos and who have dutifully followed Maduro while the rest of the country suffers under starvation, looting, illness, and extreme poverty.

Each day that Maduro remains in power represents another day in which the world concedes to the destructive tenets of authoritarianism. The Venezuelan people will be rid of these thieves sooner or later, but the world should have learned a lesson from thinkers such as Hayek the first time around. Now the international community can choose to heed his timeless warnings by taking action and elevating the pressure that’s already been put on the Maduro regime. “Only if we understand why and how certain kinds of economic controls tend to paralyze the driving forces of a free society,” Hayek wrote, “can we hope that social experimentation will not lead us into situations none of us want.”

 

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American Interventionists Hurt the Cause of Freedom in Venezuela: https://mises.org/wire/american-interventionists-hurt-cause-freedom-venezuela

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he United States has a long, violent history of intervention in Latin America, although few Americans know about it. Were one to ask the average American, for example, about the US occupation of the Dominican Republic — which lasted for eight years from 1916 to 1924 — one is likely to only receive a blank stare in return.

Even in the cases of those interventions which are more famous — such as the Spanish-American War or the Panama invasion of 1989 — details remains virtually unknown among much of the general public.

Perhaps this willful ignorance results partly from the fact the overall legacy of US robust record of repeated interventions in Latin America is not a good one.

Whether we're talking about the 1954 US-backed Guatemalan coup, the US support of Batista in Cuba, multiple occupations and interventions in Haiti, or the second invasion of the Dominican Republic, it cannot be said that interventionist US policy in the region has a record of producing political stability and economic success.

The Dark Side of "Humanitarianism"

This doesn't prevent some American interventionists from trying. In recent months, US foreign policy-interventionists like John Bolton have relentlessly called for more US-sponsored regime change — this time in Venezuela —and have turned Venezuela into the latest proxy-battlefield between the US and nuclear-armed Russia.

The rhetoric around this latest regime change follows essentially the same playbook of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria. In none of these cases were US policy goals achieved, although in all cases, the US did manage to destroy local infrastructure and human lives to an impressive extent.

Interventionists, however, are counting on the short memories of American voters who may have already forgotten that the "humanitarian" interventions in Iraq and Libya did little more than create a power vacuum filled by Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. Certainly, neither "peace" nor "prosperity" are terms that could describe any country recently targeted for humanitarian wars.

Bolton and friends are also counting on the idea that Americans will continue to embrace the idea that doing "something" is better than doting nothing, even though "something" has been repeatedly shown to be, by far, the most destructive option.

As historian David Kennedy noted in his book The Dark Sides of Virtue:

t is easy to overstate the humanist potential of international policy making. Many of the difficulties encountered with human rights activism arise equally in humanitarian policy-making campaigns. Policymakers can also overlook the dark sides of their work and treat initiatives which take a familiar humanitarian form as likely to have a humanitarian effect. It is always tempting to think some global humanitarian effort has got to be better than none. Like activists, policymakers can mistake their good intentions for humanitarian results or enchant their tools — using a humanitarian vocabulary can itself seem like a humanitarian strategy. ... It is all too easy to forget that saying "I'm from the United Nations and I've come to help you," may not sound promising at all.

Indeed, humanitarian interventions have hardly been slam dunks even in cases like the Rwandan Genocide, as Stephen Wertheim noted:

[H]umanitarian interventionists often assumed military challenges away, failing to think concretely how intervention might unfold...[But] a war to stop the Rwandan genocide would have been nothing like as simple as interventionists later claimed...Interventionists truly committed to achieving humanitarian results must appreciate the difficulties of forging peace after war — and register the potential harms of postconflict occupation in the calculus of whether to intervene in the first place ... On the whole, humanitarian interventionists tended to understate difficulties of halting ethnic conflict, ignore challenges of postconflict reconstruction, discount constraints imposed by public opinion, and override multilateral procedures.1

Given that the current socialism-induced disaster in Venezuela hardly rises to a level even approaching the Rwandan Genocide, it's hard to see how US's record on foreign interventions in recent decades could possibly be overlooked in favor or yet another invasion.

Of course, opposing US bombing of Venezuelans — which is what "humanitarian intervention" likely means — is not the same thing as supporting the Maduro regime itself. Nor is the fact that immoral opportunists like John Bolton and Michael Pompeo hate the Maduro regime reason enough to like it. The problem with Pomeo and Friends isn't that they badmouth kleptocrat politicians like Maduro. The problem is US Bolton, et al incessantly push the line that is is either moral or effective to launch yet another "humanitarian" war.

Nor do these interventionists even offer a critique that is either unique or insightful. Nearly anyone who isn't a true sympathizer with socialist regimes — i.e., Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn — can see the transformation of the Venezuelan economy from a mixed economy to a largely socialist one — known as Chavismo — has been predictably terrible for the Venezuelan standard of living.

By most accounts, shortages are rampant, blackouts are frequent, the entrepreneurial economy has been decimated, and homicide rates are way up.

Proving the Chavistas Right

And this is why its so unfortunate the US administration has essentially declared war on the current regime. By declaring war on Maduro, the US administration only helps the regime shore up its base, play the victim, and draw on nationalist tendencies to secure its position.

For example, supporters of Maduro — and his predecessor Hugo Chavez — always drew a sizable amount of support from Venezuelan nationalists who opposed any US meddling in domestic affairs, and who suspected the US was seeking constantly to essentially turn Venezuela into a puppet regime.

Chavez bragged repeatedly about his ability to withstand us efforts at replacing him through various CIA machinations and coup attempts. Whether these were real or imagined, both Chavez and Maduro were able to solidify their base through fears of US meddling.

Now, by explicitly declaring war on the Venezuelan regime, the US regime has only confirmed what Chavez and Maduro have claimed all along. The Administration has, in a sense, legitimized Chavismo foreign policy.

Moreover, the US declaration of War against the regime has served to make it easier to accuse all opponents of the regime as US stooges.

It's easy to see how this works just by observing American politics.

In the United States nowadays, it's quite easy to be accused of being in service to the Kremlin — as John McCain said of Rand Paul — by taking certain political positions. Specifically, anyone who supports the Trump Administration — which is said to be in the thrall of Vladimir Putin — or who pushes a relatively restrained foreign policy, opens himself to labels such as "foreign agent" or "traitor." These terms are thrown around casually as if it's simply self-evident that anyone who opposes the CIA's latest scheme, or who points out James Comey's obvious bias and incompetence, must be doing Moscow's bidding.

Now, imagine if the Russian state had come out in 2016 and said it openly supported the Trump candidacy and planned to invade the United States if Trump were not elected.

Clearly, this would inflame sentiments of nationalism and whip up support for those who were seen as enemies of the Kremlin. It would become easy to accuse anyone who supported "Russia's man Trump" as a traitor. Being "pro-American" might become synonymous with opposing Donald Trump.

The analogy fails in some respects, of course, because no well-informed person thinks Russia can actually invade North America.

In Venezuela, on the other hand, the threat of invasion by the US is very plausible and real. Thus, the stakes in real life in Venezuela are far higher than in our imagined US scenario. Faced with a very possible invasion — and aware of the US's abysmal record on spreading "freedom" in Latin America — many Venezuelans may be even more inclined to support a regime they don't like if it's perceived as a bulwark against becoming a puppet state of the United States.

Moreover, US sanctions against Venezuela provide a scapegoat for the regime's failed economic policies. As the Venezuelan economy continues to stagnate, the regime can simple say "we'd be doing much better if we didn't have these US sanctions to contend with."

The same phenomenon has been observed in Iran for decades. Various US administration repeatedly threaten Iran with invasion, sanctions, and destruction, yet the residents there don't rise up to welcome their new American overlords. Indeed, the constant war of words only gives the Iranian regime a convenient scapegoat.

Americans are no different.

Thus, by choosing sides in the Venezuelan conflict, the US has likely made the replacement of Maduro even less likely. The internal conflict has been transformed from a fight over which factions shall control the central government, and turned into a referendum on preventing US control of Venezuela.

The thought of US control, of course, isn't opposed by everyone. But given the long history of Latin American nationalism — which is often reminiscent of US nationalism — it's not hard to see why many Venezuelans have failed to take the streets to demand the current regime be replaced by the CIA's preferred candidate.

The United States of America is not the world's cop.

 

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3 hours ago, swordfish said:

MSNBC (inadvertently i'm sure) makes the case for the 2nd amendment.

“As long as the military owns the guns, the government owns the power”.

 

Yeah, because as ISIS recently demonstrated, simply having automatic rifles immediately makes you a dire threat to overcome the U.S. military....

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On ‎5‎/‎1‎/‎2019 at 6:26 PM, Wabash82 said:

Yeah, because as ISIS recently demonstrated, simply having automatic rifles immediately makes you a dire threat to overcome the U.S. military....

Not sure I am following if this is irony, hyperbole, etc...….or if we simply agree (I am as dense as a neutron star sometimes).....but given any given time in Iraq the most technologically advanced fighting force on earth has been fighting to a standstill against about 20,000 insurgents at most with a varied mix of weaponry....for more than a decade.   

For the record, I think every country in the world should be socialist/communist...….excepting the US. 

Just as I have stated (openly and often), since college, that every dude should be gay...excepting ME.

Not that I am an opportunist.

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1 hour ago, Lysander said:

Not sure I am following if this is irony, hyperbole, etc...….or if we simply agree (I am as dense as a neutron star sometimes).....but given any given time in Iraq the most technologically advanced fighting force on earth has been fighting to a standstill against about 20,000 insurgents at most with a varied mix of weaponry....for more than a decade.   

For the record, I think every country in the world should be socialist/communist...….excepting the US. 

Just as I have stated (openly and often), since college, that every dude should be gay...excepting ME.

Not that I am an opportunist.

I think your description of the conflict in Iraq is a bit off. (That is understatement.) During the time frames that  the U.S. military actually fought them directly, al Qaeda and other insurgent groups were effectively driven out of the country. (Leading to their involvement in the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS "caliphate", etc, etc.) So I believe you are misrepresenting history if you are suggesting that there was ever anything close to a military "stand off" between the insurgency and the U.S. military in Iraq during any of the discrete periods of time in that conflict when the U.S. military was actually attacking them and not refraining from offensive action due to political considerations. 

And as a side note, the most effective weapon the insurgents had in Iraq was the IED, not an automatic rifle. It's a few years old, but as this USA Today article noted,  as of 2013, IEDs had caused between half to two-thirds of the U.S. casualties.   https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3803017

So no, in case that was not clear, I am not in agreement with you. I cannot think of an armed conflict in which a civilian population armed with just guns was able to defeat militarily a government-sponsored force armed with modern military weapons (e.g., tanks, artillery, armed helicopters, war planes, etc.). Revolutions in the modern era have been won in one of two ways: (1) the insurgents ultimately acquired, through foreign interventions or the defection of government military units, weaponry and firepower much closer to that of the government-sponsored military they are fighting and won on the battlefield; or (2) the majority of the population engaged in essentially peaceful protests and the military forces of the government were unwilling to slaughter them, and "surrendered" to them. 

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1 hour ago, Wabash82 said:

I think your description of the conflict in Iraq is a bit off. (That is understatement.) During the time frames that  the U.S. military actually fought them directly, al Qaeda and other insurgent groups were effectively driven out of the country. (Leading to their involvement in the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS "caliphate", etc, etc.) So I believe you are misrepresenting history if you are suggesting that there was ever anything close to a military "stand off" between the insurgency and the U.S. military in Iraq during any of the discrete periods of time in that conflict when the U.S. military was actually attacking them and not refraining from offensive action due to political considerations. 

And as a side note, the most effective weapon the insurgents had in Iraq was the IED, not an automatic rifle. It's a few years old, but as this USA Today article noted,  as of 2013, IEDs had caused between half to two-thirds of the U.S. casualties.   https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.usatoday.com/amp/3803017

So no, in case that was not clear, I am not in agreement with you. I cannot think of an armed conflict in which a civilian population armed with just guns was able to defeat militarily a government-sponsored force armed with modern military weapons (e.g., tanks, artillery, armed helicopters, war planes, etc.). Revolutions in the modern era have been won in one of two ways: (1) the insurgents ultimately acquired, through foreign interventions or the defection of government military units, weaponry and firepower much closer to that of the government-sponsored military they are fighting and won on the battlefield; or (2) the majority of the population engaged in essentially peaceful protests and the military forces of the government were unwilling to slaughter them, and "surrendered" to them. 

Glad to hear we won and "nation formed" in Iraq.

Good for us.

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6 hours ago, Lysander said:

Glad to hear we won and "nation formed" in Iraq.

Good for us.

In terms of our stated objectives, we "won" back in December of 2003 when they pulled Sadaam from that spider hole.   

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On ‎5‎/‎3‎/‎2019 at 3:13 PM, Wabash82 said:

In terms of our stated objectives, we "won" back in December of 2003 when they pulled Sadaam from that spider hole.   

All is good then.

Good for us....again.

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A Nuclear War? Over Venezuela?: https://mises.org/wire/nuclear-war-over-venezuela

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Is President Trump about to invade Venezuela? His advisors keep telling us in ever-stronger terms that “all options are on the table” and that US military intervention to restore Venezuela’s constitution “may be necessary.” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on the Sunday news programs to claim that President Trump could launch a military attack against Venezuela without Congress’s approval.

Pompeo said that, “[t]he president has his full range of Article II authorities and I’m very confident that any action we took in Venezuela would be lawful.” The man who bragged recently about his lying, cheating, and stealing, is giving plenty of evidence to back his claim.

The president has no Constitutional authority to start a war with Venezuela or any other country that has not attacked or credibly threatened the United States without Congressional approval. It is that simple.

How ironic that Pompeo and the rest of the neocons in the Trump Administration are ready to attack Venezuela to “restore their constitution” but they could not care less about our own Constitution! 

While Washington has been paralyzed for two years over disproven claims that the Russians meddled in our elections to elect Trump, how hypocritical that Washington does not even hesitate to endorse the actual overturning of elections overseas!

Without Congressional authority, US military action of any kind against Venezuela would be an illegal and likely an impeachable offense. Of course those Democrats who talk endlessly of impeaching Trump would never dream of impeaching of him over starting an illegal war. Democrats and Republicans both love illegal US wars.

Unfortunately, Washington is so addicted to war that President Trump would likely have little difficulty getting authority from Congress to invade Venezuela if he bothered to ask. Just as with the disastrous US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the mainstream media is nothing but non-stop war propaganda. Even so-called progressives like Rachel Maddow are attacking the Trump Administration not for its reckless saber-rattling toward Venezuela but for not being aggressive enough!

The real lesson is that even a “Constitutional” war against Venezuela would not be a just war. It would be a war of aggression for which Americans should be angry and ashamed. But the mainstream media is pumping out the same old pro-war lies, while the independent media is under attack from social media companies that have partnered with US government entities to decide what is “fake news.”

The latest outrage in the mainstream media is over the most sensible thing President Trump has done in some time: last week he spent an hour on the telephone with Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss, among other things, the dangerous situation in Venezuela.

While President Trump’s neocon advisors are purposely trying to position him so that war is the only option, we can only hope that President Putin was able to explain that the Venezuela problem must be solved by the Venezuelans themselves. Certainly the US, perhaps together with the Russians, could help facilitate discussions between the government and the opposition, but the neocon road to war will surely end up like all the other neocon wars: total disaster.

The media is furious that Trump dared to speak to Putin as the two countries increasingly face-off over Venezuela. The Democrats and neocons are pushing for a direct confrontation that may even involve Russia. Republicans agree. Do they really prefer thermonuclear war? Over Venezuela?

 

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