Would You Trust Trump Not To Foment Violence In Venezuela To Enhance His Own Collapsing Electoral Prospects?

Before retiring and joining the shady international private equity firm, the Carlyle Group, Admiral James Stavridi had been Commander of U.S. Southern Command and then Supreme Allied Commander at NATO. Yesterday he penned an OpEd for Time, I Commanded the U.S. Military in South America. Deploying Soldiers to Venezuela Would Only Make Things Worse. His attitude towards the Chavez and Maduro governments is as negative as you would expect from someone at the center of the Military Industrial Complex. But even he knows how catastrophic a Trump invasion of Venezuela would be.

It is clearly time for Maduro to go. But America should be cautious. Even though he is repressing the population and rounding up opponents, a full-blown invasion by the U.S. would foment rage in the region and internationally.

Everywhere I went as a four-star Admiral in the region while commanding U.S. Southern Command, I would be reminded of America’s history of intervention. A good example was the reaction there when we created the Navy’s Fourth Fleet in 2008. We intended for it to focus on disaster relief, humanitarian operations, medical diplomacy and counter-narcotics. But from Brasilia to Havana, the negative responses were stunning... Even the Colombian Minister of Defense (and later President of Colombia) Juan Manuel Santos-- my best friend and partner in the region-- counseled me against the initiative. Too many people there truly felt that standing up a new fleet was a return to gunboat diplomacy and a prelude to military action in Venezuela. Good intentions do not make old ghosts disappear.

...There may come a time for more dramatic military activities, perhaps an international peacekeeping force. But for the moment, our efforts are best served by supporting the brave Venezuelans fighting the Maduro regime through the overall efforts of the international community. As Simon Bolivar, the liberator of Venezuela and a revered figure there, said, “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion is a right.”

Today Pence and top Florida Republicans were in Miami at a rally to show off the Trump Regime's anti-Maduro stance. Marc Caputo wrote that the rally is "an opportunity to open a door with Hispanic voters in a state that’s critical to the president’s reelection. The Hispanic vote here is far from monolithic: About 17 percent of Florida’s active registered voters are Hispanic, about a third of whom are estimated to be of Cuban-American descent and a third of Puerto Rican descent, followed by those whose families have roots throughout Latin America: Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico."

Between ongoing strife in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega and the unrest in Venezuela under dictator Nicolás Maduro-- which has also led to troubles in neighboring Colombia-- Republicans see a window to send a hardcore anti-socialist message-- one that, some say, helped the GOP win just enough of the overall Hispanic vote in November’s midterm elections to keep Florida’s governorship in Republican hands and take a Senate seat from the Democrats.

The Friday event-- which could feature Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart and Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott-- follows the Trump administration’s decision last week to lead a multinational coalition to formally recognize Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez as the legitimate acting president of Venezuela amid what many nations see as an unconstitutional power grab by Maduro.

In Florida, Trump’s decision was cheered by Republicans as well as Democrats. But some Florida Democrats fret that Trump could politically benefit both from the policy and from the critical reaction to it by a few national members of their party-- including Sen. Bernie Sanders, a likely presidential candidate-- who have raised the specter of a U.S.-led “coup” taking place in Venezuela.

...Diaz-Balart (R-FL) is co-sponsoring legislation with Democrat Darren Soto (New Dei-FL) to extend Temporary Protected Status to Venezuelans, about 3 million of whom have fled amid food shortages and hyperinflation of more than 1 million percent under Maduro.

Amid the crisis in Venezuela, Maduro last year held what critics say was a sham election and took office Jan. 10. But since they don’t see his election as legitimate, the Venezuelan opposition, democracy activists, the Trump administration and most South American countries say there’s a vacancy in the Venezuelan presidency, thereby elevating Guaidó to acting president under the country’s constitution because he’s the leader of the National Assembly.

The day after Trump’s recognition of Guaidó, Sen. Sanders issued a three-tweet thread on Twitter that urged caution while criticizing Maduro’s “violent crackdown.”

“But,” Sanders wrote, “we must learn the lessons of the past and not be in the business of regime change or supporting coups-- as we have in Chile, Guatemala, Brazil and the Dominican Republic. The US has a long history of inappropriately intervening in Latin American nations; we must not go down that road again.”

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, also a Democratic presidential hopeful, warned on Twitter that the “United States needs to stay out of Venezuela.” Of the Democratic responses, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar’s tweet most outraged Venezuelan exiles by suggesting Guaidó was part of a “US backed coup” in Venezuela and saying he was part of “Trump's efforts to install a far right opposition” in the country.

Guaidó isn’t a conservative politician. He’s a member of the social-democratic Popular Will Party, which would look far left in the U.S. political system.

“I am disgusted by some of the statements Democrat lawmakers around the country have made,” said Helena Poleo, a Florida Democrat and Venezuelan exile and commentator, citing the “ignorant and damaging statements” from Omar, Gabbard and Sanders.

“When it comes to facilitating democracy in Venezuela, my party has historically dropped the ball,” she said. “This will absolutely help the Republicans in Florida if this keeps up. In Florida, Democrats are saying the right things. But nationally, some of them don’t know what they’re talking about and the damage they’re doing to our party.”

To Venezuelan exiles in Florida, the national Democrats criticizing Trump sound as if they’re echoing Maduro, who took to social media Wednesday with this message: “People from #USA, I ask for your support in order to reject the interference of Donald Trump's administration which intends to turn my Homeland into a ‘Vietnam war’ in Latin America. Don't allow it! today compared US intervention with Vietnam.”

Also on Wednesday, Trump congratulated Guaidó in a phone call, according to a White House spokeswoman.

Juan Escalante, an undocumented immigrant and activist whose family fled the Chavez regime 19 years ago, has little love for the Trump administration’s policies on immigration, but he said its actions in Venezuela and the “wall-to-wall” coverage on Spanish-language media lauding the work of Rubio, Diaz-Balart, Scott and DeSantis could have an impact in 2020.

“If you compare and contrast actions and say who showed up at the end of the day, people remember these things,” he said. “It’s going to be imprinted in a lot of people’s minds.”

Another Trump critic, former Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo of Miami, said he doesn’t like the president’s position on immigration but no one can ignore the positive effect that administration’s policy on Venezuela could have in 2020.

“For all those people bewildered that so many Hispanics in South Florida are Republican-leaning, now we’re seeing why,” Curbelo said.

“There’s a great camaraderie with different groups that have been victims of leftist movements: Colombians who fled FARC, and Nicaraguans who fled Ortega twice,” Curbelo said. “So yeah, there are just a few thousand Venezuelan voters. But everyone in Miami hates Nicolás Maduro. And if Trump wins by 20,000 votes, this will be why.”

Yves Smith's Naked Capitalism post on Thursday is based on the article, U.S. Push To Oust Venezuela's Maduro Marks First Shot In Plan To Reshape Latin America Wednesday inWall Street Journal by reporters Jessica Donati, Vivian Salama and Ian Talley. Rubio is eager to turn Venezuela into a fascist state like Bolsonaro's Brazil. "The Trump Administration," wrote Smith, "has apparently decided to embark on a large-scale interventionist campaign to reverse supposed undue influence of Russia, China, and Iran in Latin America. Venezuela and Cuba are the first targets, and Nicaragua is next on the list. John Bolton, in too obvious a nod to Bush’s 'axis of evil' has called them the 'troika of tyranny'. One would think the fact that our 'remake the world in our image' plans worked out so well in the Middle East might curb US adventurism. And it isn’t just that we made a mess of Iraq, failed to break Iran, and failed to install new regimes in Afghanistan and Syria. The New American Century types are deep in denial that this geopolitical tussle not only cost the US greatly in terms of treasure, but it also wound up considerably enhancing Russia’s standing."

Consider another bad outcome from US war-making in the Middle East: the rise of the radical right in Europe. American nation-breaking had produced a flood of refugees trying to enter Europe. In a misguided show of humanitarianism, European countries welcomed the over one million migrants that arrived in 2015, with the upsurge due mainly to the civil war in Syria. Angela Merkel in particular backed the idea of taking in the refugees, in part because German has a lower-than-replacement birth rate, and Syrian has a high level of public education. However, the EU members had patchy and generally poor programs for helping the migrants assimilate and find jobs. The result was what one hard core left wing political scientist who has spent a considerable amount of time in Germany calls “Merkelization”: a rise of nativist right wing parties like AfD in response to large-scale, poorly-managed migrant inflows.

Consider how this tendency might play into US nation-breaking near our border. Many readers have pointed out that the “caravans” from Central America are heavily populated with people from countries like Honduras that our tender ministrations have made much worse. My colleague was warning of Merkelization of the US even before the US launched its coup attempt, that it is one thing to have an immigration process that is generous towards asylum-seekers, and quite another to have open borders when political and economic conditions in countries to the South are unlikely to get better.

Bernie Sanders was browbeaten into holding his tongue after pointing out early in his Presidential campaign that “open borders” is a Koch Brothers position, and that the top 10% professional class that has become the base of the Democratic party are now heavy employers of servants, in the form of nannies and yard men. When I was a kid, even the few times we lived in middle/upper middle class suburbs full of senior corporate managers and professionals, no one had servants. Men worked full time and wives did the housework; the most you’d see would be a housekeeper in once a week to give the wife some relief.

As Peter Beinart pointed out in The Atlantic in 2017:

In 2005, a left-leaning blogger wrote, “Illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” In 2006, a liberal columnist wrote that “immigration reduces the wages of domestic workers who compete with immigrants” and that “the fiscal burden of low-wage immigrants is also pretty clear.” His conclusion: “We’ll need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.” That same year, a Democratic senator wrote, “When I see Mexican flags waved at pro-immigration demonstrations, I sometimes feel a flush of patriotic resentment. When I’m forced to use a translator to communicate with the guy fixing my car, I feel a certain frustration.”

The blogger was Glenn Greenwald. The columnist was Paul Krugman. The senator was Barack Obama.

Prominent liberals didn’t oppose immigration a decade ago. Most acknowledged its benefits to America’s economy and culture. They supported a path to citizenship for the undocumented. Still, they routinely asserted that low-skilled immigrants depressed the wages of low-skilled American workers and strained America’s welfare state. And they were far more likely than liberals today are to acknowledge that, as Krugman put it, “immigration is an intensely painful topic … because it places basic principles in conflict.”

A larger explanation [for the change] is political. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge...

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers...

According to a comprehensive new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, “Groups comparable to … immigrants in terms of their skill may experience a wage reduction as a result of immigration-induced increases in labor supply.” But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

Many of the immigration scholars regularly cited in the press have worked for, or received funding from, pro-immigration businesses and associations.

...I had really hoped that Trump would tire of Bolton’s aggressiveness and need for the limelight, but that clearly isn’t happening fast enough, if at all. In the meantime, kicking small and poor countries who pose no threat is not the behavior of a confident superpower. And grabbing Venezuela’s oil because we can is theft. It’s been depressing to be an American for a very long time, and there’s no prospect for improvement.