Progressives (Liberals)

NYMag

So, all that hard work by Hans von Spakovsky, Kris Kobach, Louie Gohmert and others finally bears fruit. I expect they are all delighted and self-congratulatory.

I consistently point out your factual errors. That you are too deluded to recognize your errors is not evidence that you don't make errors--again, and again, and again and again . . .

Why is Bernie Sanders hesitant to call Maduro a dictator? Why is he apparently agreeing with 45’s benign “sending food and humanitarian aid” approach?

Those sneaky GOPs are gonna make us wear alphanumeric tattoos on our foreheads. They want that. They dont care how they do it to make their case. (Did I say that out loud?)

He’s catching holy hell about that. He spoke against regime change, but his call to Maduro to allow in humanitarian aid has him in hot water.

Venezuela is receiving aid from countries that aren’t involved in the current coup.

We are.

So Bernie’s statement yesterday is troubling. He needs to reword/clarify it.

The money may stop until he does.

Bernie supporters want OUT of the regime change business completely.

#handsoffvenezuela

That is incorrect. No one can list a single error that I've made.

No delusions. I always recognize when it is pointed out that I've made an error. It just is not happening here.

When it does happen, it is an incredibly rare event.

Refusing to call Maduro a dictator could signal an inability to deal with reality.

The reason why he agrees with sending aid to starving and dying people is probably because it is the right thing to do.

How dare we send aid to help starving and dying people!

The left really has lost it.

We are hardly involved, unless you want to count "verbal support from afar" as involvement.

And "aid" that Maduro will withhold from the very people who are starving and dying hardly counts as aid.

Leftists have a horrible history of deliberately starving innocent people to death. Today's leftists remind me of the horrible famines imposed by Mao and Stalin.

There are starving people all over the world; some in our own country.
Why do you think we’re so hell-bent on sending ‘humanitarian aid ‘ to Venezuela?

Look at the plight in Africa.
Yemen.
******* Flint, Michigan.

It took me a while to believe it. I didn’t want to believe it, but the pattern and the motive is undeniable.

This is our tried and true method of scaring countries into not dropping the petrodollar and giving us oil deals.

Listen, I don’t enjoy sharing dark hypotheses, but this Khashoggi thing might be
the beginning of the end for life as we know it in America. That despicable Salmon guy is on a Kiss My Ring global jog, amassing gifts from China, Russia etc. This isn’t because he likes travel or needs golden machine guns.

Our government’s chickens are coming home to roost, but the assholes that created this disaster are all millionaires, likely with compounds ready for their escapes to other countries, leaving the people they robbed to bear the brunt of whatever happens.

Because we are good people.

We send aid to Africa.

Hard to send aid to Yemen given the aggression from the terrorists and the Iranians.

The left is trying to whitewash Flint because it happened under the watch of Obama's EPA.

There is no such thing as a petrodollar.

That is unlikely.

https://www.mintpressnews.com/venezuela-drops-petrodollar-us-sanctions-drug-trafficking/232056/

Dude, you are a peckerhead.

Excerpt:

Venezuela Accused Of Drug Peddling After Dropping U.S.’ Petrodollar Trade Scheme
U.S. President Donald Trump recently signed a determination that singles out Venezuela for failing to adhere to counternarcotics obligations. The accusation came – perhaps not so coincidentally – on the same day that Venezuela declared it will no longer participate in the U.S.’ petrodollar trade system.


by Whitney Webb
September 18th, 2017
By Whitney Webb Whitney Webb

In what is set to be a major blow to the U.S.’ increasingly fragile “petrodollar” system, Venezuela announced on Wednesday that it would no longer accept U.S. dollars as payment for its crude oil exports. According to the Wall Street Journal, Venezuela has begun using euros in lieu of the dollar and will convert existing cash holdings into euros as well.

However, the official website of Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, has begun offering prices in the Chinese yuan, not euros. The decision is similar to that once made by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who dropped the dollar in favor of the euro a few years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The move, though drastic, was not entirely unexpected. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had stated earlier in the month that the country would look to “free” itself from the dollar within a week’s time, following the U.S.’ sanctions against the embattled nation.

I think posting blogs and opinion pieces (as opposed to academic papers or peer-reviewed studies) is acceptable. When writing for publication most authors will include citations and references which would be unwieldy when simply responding to a post on a message board. Dialogs between people posting here are more conversational so backing up an opinion by drawing attention to someone else's more elaborately detailed opinion can be useful. Simply dismissing reference to an off-site opinion as "hypocrisy writ large" seems a bit harsh.

The nonexistent petrodollar Part 2

https://www.google.com/amp/s/newspunch.com/venezuela-drops-the-petrodollar/amp/

Excerpt:

Venezuela Drops The Petrodollar

Niamh Harris Niamh Harris
1 year ago


Venezuela announced on Wednesday that it will no longer accept U.S. dollars as payment for its crude oil exports.


Earlier this month Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro said that his country would be seeking to “free” itself from the U.S. dollar.

The official website of Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, has now started offering prices in the Chinese yuan

The move is similar to one made by former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who dropped the dollar in favor of the euro just a few years prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Could this mean Venezuela is due to be targeted for some democracy or regime change or are we about to witness the death of the petrodollar?

A history of the nonexistent petrodollar

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untold-story-behind-saudi-arabia-s-41-year-u-s-debt-secret

Excerpt:

The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia’s 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret

How a legendary bond trader from Salomon Brothers brokered a do-or-die deal that reshaped U.S.-Saudi relations for generations.
By Andrea Wong
May 30, 2016, 7:00 PM EDT
SHARE THIS ARTICLE
Share Tweet Post Email
Failure was not an option.

It was July 1974. A steady predawn drizzle had given way to overcast skies when William Simon, newly appointed U.S. Treasury secretary, and his deputy, Gerry Parsky, stepped onto an 8 a.m. flight from Andrews Air Force Base. On board, the mood was tense. That year, the oil crisis had hit home. An embargo by OPEC’s Arab nations—payback for U.S. military aid to the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War—quadrupled oil prices. Inflation soared, the stock market crashed, and the U.S. economy was in a tailspin.

Officially, Simon’s two-week trip was billed as a tour of economic diplomacy across Europe and the Middle East, full of the customary meet-and-greets and evening banquets. But the real mission, kept in strict confidence within President Richard Nixon’s inner circle, would take place during a four-day layover in the coastal city of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

The goal: neutralize crude oil as an economic weapon and find a way to persuade a hostile kingdom to finance America’s widening deficit with its newfound petrodollar wealth. And according to Parsky, Nixon made clear there was simply no coming back empty-handed. Failure would not only jeopardize America’s financial health but could also give the Soviet Union an opening to make further inroads into the Arab world.

It “wasn’t a question of whether it could be done or it couldn’t be done,” said Parsky, 73, one of the few officials with Simon during the Saudi talks.

At first blush, Simon, who had just done a stint as Nixon’s energy czar, seemed ill-suited for such delicate diplomacy. Before being tapped by Nixon, the chain-smoking New Jersey native ran the vaunted Treasuries desk at Salomon Brothers. To career bureaucrats, the brash Wall Street bond trader—who once compared himself to Genghis Khan—had a temper and an outsize ego that was painfully out of step in Washington. Just a week before setting foot in Saudi Arabia, Simon publicly lambasted the Shah of Iran, a close regional ally at the time, calling him a “nut.”

But Simon, better than anyone else, understood the appeal of U.S. government debt and how to sell the Saudis on the idea that America was the safest place to park their petrodollars. With that knowledge, the administration hatched an unprecedented do-or-die plan that would come to influence just about every aspect of U.S.-Saudi relations over the next four decades (Simon died in 2000 at the age of 72).

The basic framework was strikingly simple. The U.S. would buy oil from Saudi Arabia and provide the kingdom military aid and equipment. In return, the Saudis would plow billions of their petrodollar revenue back into Treasuries and finance America’s spending.

It took several discreet follow-up meetings to iron out all the details, Parsky said. But at the end of months of negotiations, there remained one small, yet crucial, catch: King Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud demanded the country’s Treasury purchases stay “strictly secret,” according to a diplomatic cable obtained by Bloomberg from the National Archives database.

Special Report: Where Next for Saudi Arabia?

With a handful of Treasury and Federal Reserve officials, the secret was kept for more than four decades—until now. In response to a Freedom-of-Information-Act request submitted by Bloomberg News, the Treasury broke out Saudi Arabia’s holdings for the first time this month after “concluding that it was consistent with transparency and the law to disclose the data,” according to spokeswoman Whitney Smith. The $117 billion trove makes the kingdom one of America’s largest foreign creditors.

Yet in many ways, the information has raised more questions than it has answered. A former Treasury official, who specialized in central bank reserves and asked not to be identified, says the official figure vastly understates Saudi Arabia’s investments in U.S. government debt, which may be double or more.

The current tally represents just 20 percent of its $587 billion of foreign reserves, well below the two-thirds that central banks typically keep in dollar assets. Some analysts speculate the kingdom may be masking its U.S. debt holdings by accumulating Treasuries through offshore financial centers, which show up in the data of other countries.

(Taps mic, “For those in the back:”)
Excerpt:

The U.S.-Venezuela Aid Convoy Story Is Clearly Bogus, but No One Wants to Say It

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/22/us-venezuela-aid-convoy-story-clearly-bogus-no-one-wants-say-it

At best, you are helping provide cover for a campaign designed to starve the Venezuelan people; at worst, you are enabling a military conflict that will drag on for years.
byAdam Johnson

No one actually thinks the same Donald Trump who kicked off his run for the White House by calling Mexicans rapists, and subsequently, as president, left Puerto Rico for dead after Hurricane Maria, cares at all about the Venezuelan poor. No one actually thinks the murderers row of Cold Warriors—led by two of the most extreme right-wingers in American politics, Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams and national security adviser John Bolton—cares at all about the starving people in Venezuela or their plight. No one reading this, be they right, left, center, libertarian or communist, actually buys the prevailing narrative that the U.S. is sending “aid” to Venezuela as a humanitarian gesture.
So why is everyone pretending otherwise?

There are a number of reasons why these superficial narratives take hold, but I’d like to speculate on two of them.

First, the crisis in Venezuela is very real and very daunting. Without litigating who’s responsible for what, whether U.S.-led sanctions and economic sabotage are more to blame or the economic policies of Nicolás Maduro, one simple fact is true: The status quo is untenable. Perhaps, then, the instinct to “do something” is understandable. But as with previous crises, both organic and contrived, what that “something” is remains unclear. Liberals—as they did in the build-up to the invasions of Iraq and Libya—are easily pressured into this “do something” posture.

The way these things work, however, is that this vague moral directive often involves a combination of CIA and U.S. military intervention. During the Syrian conflict, for example, it meant U.S.- and NATO-led bombings of Syrian forces and a tacit declaration of war under the guise of “no-fly zones.” What’s never considered is a reduction or cessation of U.S. involvement, be it CIA weapons running, wide-scale bombing campaigns, or the imposition of sanctions—all of which prolong a given conflict or simply make it more violent.

The fact that the bulk of the international aid community has either distanced itself from this PR stunt or outright opposes it has been widely ignored by the mainstream media.
Because a core tenet of American liberalism is to avoid assigning blame—at worst, its adherents believe, the U.S. is run by a bunch of bumbling do-gooders—what the American empire is actually doing to fuel a conflict cannot be debated, much less censured. And so the notion that we could simply cease our crippling sanctions, which even the pro-opposition Economist acknowledges are designed to “starve” the Venezuelan people, is simply not an option.

The current “something” in Venezuela we’re all compelled to “do” is ensure the arrival of a humanitarian aid convoy. The fact that the bulk of the international aid community has either distanced itself from this PR stunt or outright opposes it has been widely ignored by the mainstream media. One exception is NPR, which recently reported this inconvenient truth:

The U.S. effort to distribute tons of food and medicine to needy Venezuelans is more than just a humanitarian mission. The operation is also designed to foment regime change in Venezuela — which is why much of the international aid community wants nothing to do with it. Humanitarian operations are supposed to be neutral.

That’s why the International Committee of the Red Cross, United Nations agencies and other relief organizations have refused to collaborate with the U.S. and its allies in the Venezuelan opposition who are trying to force President Nicolás Maduro from power.

“Humanitarian action needs to be independent of political, military or any other objectives,” Stéphane Dujarric, the U.N. spokesman, told a press briefing last week in New York. “The needs of the people should lead in terms of when and how humanitarian assistance is used.”

In fact, no neutral observer of international aid thinks Bolton and Abrams’ convoy is anything but a mechanism to foment civil war and regime change. We know this because high-level administration officials and their allies on the right keep telling us that’s the case. As the New York Post recently proclaimed, “U.S. delivers aid to town bordering Venezuela to undermine President Nicolas Maduro.”

Determined to maintain U.S. hegemony and control over the world’s largest-known oil reserves, the Trump officials plotting this latest coup aren’t even bothering to take its humanitarian pretext seriously.
Donald Trump delivered a long and rambling speech in Miami last week and didn’t once mention human rights, instead railing against the evils of socialism. Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe reflects in his new book that Trump has openly fantasized about overthrowing Maduro, something he has discussed in White House meetings. “That’s the country we should be going to war with,” Trump said, according to McCabe. “They have all that oil, and they’re right on our back door.”

Yes, sending food to starving people is good. Not publicly, forcefully opposing the dictator starving them is bad.

The irony of a Trump supporter calling someone’s grasp of reality into question is something I’m 100% sure is lost on you.

No. You're OK. Our plans aren't compromised.

It frustrates the left when I post facts.

I'm sure that there are also articles on the internet exposing how the US faked the moon landings.

It is chilling that the same leftists who proclaim that socialism is good are already trying to use arms to prevent starving people from getting food and medicine.

Leftists are bad news.