The people there have suffered enough. They'll figure it out. The plutocrats are just afraid the Communists will figure it out first, and they want that oil.

Stupid asses never seem to realize most communist countries don't stay that way forever.

resulted in profits for American corporations.

But you're right, we should stay the fuck out.

I do not understand the impulse of some adults to tell other adults what they "should" do and feel.

Nor do I see the need for it here. Is there a run of posters who think that the ouster of Maduro should come at the hands of Donald Trump?

It's not possible to persuade anyone to anything by saying "here's something you might eventually think about doing, if it's not too much trouble".

And I didn't claim anybody was yet saying we ought to back a Trump-imposed coup in VZ. But there is a large faction in this party that has always been obsessively anti-Chavez and anti-Bolivarian, and it is a reasonable assumption that a significant number would buy into the myth that any military intervention the US did there would be about "freedom".

what to do.

How limiting.

You can't change people's minds by speaking in the passive voice, or through bland indirection or by politely offering suggestions.

And if you are already against military intervention, why do you even care how I phrase it?

The only way anyone ever argued for change is to argue that people needed to adopt a different course of action. That can only be done in active voice. You have to convey the concept of "should", at a bare minimum, to do active voice. Nobody was ever won over by any argument that used passive voice, which is what any framing other than "should" or "must" is. Polite suggestions are always ignored.

Although it would, in fact, be a change if we agreed never to intervene in Latin American countries again-and a change for the better, since every intervention we ever staged there brought nothing but misery to the vast majority of people living there.

We never had any right to try and force any of those countries to obey our leaders' demands.

But will bring about more responses.

The "should" part is in the educated argument put forward. Some can't distinguish that. Or they are looking to bring about the emotional response over the rational debate.

Why is anybody being a stickler about the phraseology I used?

I just didn't want to do passive voice.

He was picking apart my phraseology for no good reason.

What is so intolerable about using the word "should"?

and did so with a very nice turn of phrase.

I said nothing for which I deserved to be effectively told to STFU.

and he will order trump not to do anything.

n/t.

He's posturing.

The US and Venezuela no longer even have much oil ties anymore.

Trump would be giving Maduro a big hug right now if he didn't need a distraction every fucking day.

Who were on the verge of turning their countries into Marxist shitholes to maintain their power like Maduro is doing now. Chile and Panama are the best functioning economies in their regions. The longer they let this continue, the more people will suffer without food or medicine. Will it collapse? It might. The danger is a North Korea situation, where the people become so powerless and brainwashed that they are slaves.

Maduro and his band of scumbags should be hunted like animals, tried and executed for the human rights violations they have committed. It's best to find a way to do that without using troops. A coup would work wonders right now. But we shouldn't allow this to go on for years. Eventually someone has to put Venezuela's dictatorship out of its misery.

You do realize thousands of people were killed by Pinochet just for being part of his democratic government, or in some cases just for being trade unionists or activists, or in some cases just for voting for his coalition. Tens of thousands more were arrested and sometimes tortured. A much larger number spent years in exile.

Chile was a fascist dictatorship for eighteen years after the coup. The dictatorship only ended because huge numbers of Chileans riske d their lives to dare to go and defy the junta by actually voting against the junta's rigged referendum.

Salvador Allende was a democratic socialist, not a Communist. And his policies made life massively better for the Chilean people, especially the poor. He was freely elected and was going to stand down when his term ended.

We had no right to do that to his country, or to do what we did to Guatemala, Brazil, Nicaragua or any of those other countries.

You would agree, I hope, that nothing could justify subjecting Venezuela to a Pinochet or a Somoza or what Argentina went through under the generals.

He crashed the country's economy. Good riddance to him and his supporters. Pinochet did what he had to do.

Don't ignore it and continue to spread disinformation, no one sane is going to thank you.

Earlier comments at D.U.

(Far, far more is available from DU threads, available in any search, of course.)

"Make the economy scream"
Catherina
Fri May 17, 2013, 03:22 PM

https://www.democraticunderground.com/110817411

~ ~ ~

Chile 1964-1973

A hammer and sickle stamped on your child's forehead

excerpted from the book

Killing Hope

by William Blum

When Salvador Allende, a committed Marxist, came within three percent of winning the Chilean presidency in 1958, the United States decided that the next election, in 1964, could not be left in the hands of providence, or democracy. Washington took it all very gravely. At the outset of the Kennedy administration in 1961, an electoral committee was established, composed of top-level officials from the State Department, the CIA and the White House. In Santiago, a parallel committee of embassy and CIA people was set up.

"U.S. government intervention in Chile in 1964 was blatant and almost obscene," said one intelligence officer strategically placed at the time. "We were shipping people off right and left, mainly State Dept. but also CIA, with all sorts of covers." All in all, as many as 100 American operatives were dedicated to the operation.

They began laying the groundwork for the election years ahead, a Senate investigating committee has disclosed, "by establishing operational relationships with key political parties and by creating propaganda and organizational mechanisms capable of influencing key sectors of the population." Projects were undertaken "to help train and organize 'anti-communists"' among peasants, slum dwellers, organized labor, students, the media, etc..

After channeling funds to several non-leftist parties, the electoral team eventually settled on a man of the center, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, as the one most likely to block Allende's rise to power. The CIA underwrote more than half the party's total campaign costs, one of the reasons that the Agency's overall electoral operation reduced the U.S. Treasury by an estimated $20 million-much more per voter than that spent by the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns combined in the same Year in the United States. The bulk of the expenditures went toward propaganda.

More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Chile_KH.html

~ ~ ~

The Price of Power
Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile


SEYMOUR M. HERSH DECEMBER 1982 ISSUE


Yeoman Charles E. Radford did not want to be reassigned to Washington, but it was the fall of 1970 and he was in the Navy and his country was at war. Radford, twenty-seven years old, had been hand-picked by Rear Admiral Rembrandt C. Robinson to serve as his confidential aide and secretary on the National Security Council staff in the White House. The bright and ambitious Radford was an obvious choice for the sensitive job: he was married and had young children; he was a devout Mormon who did not drink and would never consider using drugs; and he was fierce in his determination to earn a commission and become a Navy officer. Radford reported for duty on September 18, replacing a civilian secretary who was being transferred. There was obvious tension in the office, and Admiral Robinson, in one of their first meetings, demonstrated why, Radford recalls: “He made it clear that my loyalty was to him, and that he expected my loyalty, and that I wasn’t to speak outside of the office about what I did in the office.”


Admiral Robinson was the liaison officer between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council, and his office was a sensitive one: the White House’s most highly classified documents, including intelligence materials, routinely flowed through it. By mid-1970, Henry A. Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, had developed complete confidence in Robinson’s discretion and loyalty.

It was not surprising, therefore, that Robinson was deeply involved in the secret Kissinger and Nixon operations against Salvador Allende Gossens, of Chile, who had astounded the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House by winning the September 4 popular election for the Chilean presidency, although Allende received only 36.6 percent of the vote in a three-way race. Radford, who arrived at his new post a few weeks after the Chilean election, vividly recalls the sense of crisis: “This wasn’t supposed to happen. It was a real blow. All of a sudden, the pudding blew up on the stove.“ Admiral Robinson and his superiors were “wringing their hands” over Chile, Radford says, “almost as if they [the Chileans] were errant children. ” Over the next few weeks, Radford says, he saw many sensitive memoranda and options papers, as the bureaucracy sought to prevent Allende from assuming office. Among the options was a proposal to assassinate Allende.

One options paper “discussed various ways of doing it,“ Radford says. “Either we have somebody in the country do it, or we do it ourselves. I was stunned; I was aghast. It stuck in my mind so much because for the first time in my life, I realized that my government actively was involved in planning to kill people.”

More:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/12/the-price-of-power/376309/

~ ~ ~

THE CIA'S COUP IN CHILE






THE ELECTION OF ALLENDE

In 1960, the CIA funneled in $21 million to help elect Eduardo Frei, a conservative Christian Democrat, in order to continue American pro-corporate relations with Chile. The major bulk of the American money was designated to promote a disinformation campaign on radio and television. This enabled Frei to defeat Allende by 56 to 39 percentage points.

However, in 1970, the tide turned when a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, campaigned for the presidency. His primary goal was to transform the country from an oligarchy to a true functioning republic by initiating social programs. Allende took unused land from the big estates and divided it among the peasants. This was part of a 1967 statute which never was carried out by the previous rightist regimes. Allende was able to obtain property for one-third of the country's 100,000 landless peasants. As a result agricultural production increased; inflation was cut in half; and beef and bread consumption jumped by 15 percent between 1971 and 1972. Additionally, the government provided one-half liter of milk each day to every Chilean baby. The country's economy quickly improved, as the GNP increased by 8.5 percent in two years, enabling Chile to rank as the second highest Latin American country. Allende also abolished the death penalty, and became the first head of state to recognize all political parties, most of which leaned to the far right.

Not only did these social and economic reforms anger the United States, but the nationalization of American Anaconda Copper Mine and IT&T was intolerable to corporate America. Senator Jesse Helms stated, "$10 million is available, more if necessary. ...Make the economy scream." President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made it clear that an assassination would not be unwelcome.

The United States first planned for the 1970 election in June of that year when the Forty Committee convened. CIA Director Richard Helms promised John McCone $400,000 of CIA funds to assist the anti-Allende news media. The CIA also contributed $1 million to Allende's opponents. Allende's election went to the Chilean congress sitting as an electoral college, where an additional $350,000 was paid out by the CIA in an attempt to buy votes.

More:
http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/BOOK3Ch3Part5.html

ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC., ETC.

in collusion with the Chilean wealthy.

Salvador Allende was ELECTED president.

He never "seized the country" or even tried to. The man was a committed democrat. It's just that, for whatever reason, you can't accept that a person can be a committed democrat AND a committed socialist.

The most socialist policy Allende ever implemented, nationalizing the copper mines, was kept in place by Pinochet, and the proceeds that went to the state from that arguably subsidized whatever economic success the "Chicago school" free market fascists achieved.

And the day Allende was overthrown, he was scheduled to go on Chilean television and propose a national referendum on the question of whether he should stay in power for the last three years of his term

Had the referendum been held and gone against him, Allende would simply have stood down.

Why would anyone, in this day and age, share the foreign policy views of Nixon and Kissinger?

Why would anyone defend killing thousands of people and stripping a country of democracy and free speech in the name of forcing that country to have a capitalist economic policy and to make massive cuts in social benefits?

Democracy MEANS having the right to vote for what you actually WANT.

Was Francisco Franco also doing what he had to do?

No one has the time to tell you what you should have learned for yourself years ago.

Repeating what has been the product of perception molding for the masses, pretending you're speaking the truth, trying to rage against people who don't support right-wing greed-driven treachery won't win converts, as there's nothing there to respect.

Only truth-based comments ring through as real, as solid, and they can all be researched and studied by anyone with a conscience.
Everything else is beneath people of honor.

Before we decided he was a bad man. But hey, keep rewriting that history shit, we can always use another fiction writer.

-yeah, it was a bad complexion joke, but the guy deserved it-

Which begs the question. The guys enabling him deserve? That question never gets answered.

n/t.

and Jamaica.

I agree with you. No to any attack on Venezuela - remember though it's TIllerson who wants that oil.

I still remember Bob Marley getting shot while trying to calm the street-fighting tensions that U.S. intervention caused in Jamaica. It's entirely possible that the stress of those times, times that drove Bob to move his family to Britain to guarantee their physical safety, was partially responsible for the rapid progress of his cancer.

with all these guns.

The files on Guyana were opened some years ago and the Guardian recently had a link showing that Churchill was behind that coup in then British Guiana.

n/t.

It's not even the case right now and it dismisses the players assisting in what's going on. You should learn a little about destabilization of the region outside of the negatives of historic US involvement.

"It's time everyone in this nation accepted these realities;

1) The future of Venezuela must be decided solely BY the people of Venezuela-which they will figure out a way to do;"

That is not a decision of ours and current realities show that. It completely ignores the reality of the situation.

After everything that has happened between our leaders and Latin American between the proclamation of the Monroe Doctrine(a doctrine that was about nothing at all but creating a hemispheric order in which U.S. leaders acted as if they had the right to lead a regional empire), there's no point in even trying to create a "we can do it better" position on Latin American intervention.

The Cuban Revolution, Sandinismo, and Bolivarianism exist because the U.S. has always refused to leave Latin America alone. Had our country accepted, as it should have, that every country in the Americas has the right to chart its own course and to dedicate its wealth are resources to the good of the people if that's what that country wishes to do, none of those movements would have happened. There would simply have been democratic socialism, implemented by the free will of the voters.

And there is nothing any U.S. president could ever bring to a Latin American country through military intervention or economic coercion that ever has been or ever could be for the greater good of the peoples of that country.

Look most recently at the tragedy we imposed on Nicaragua in the Eighties and Nineties as proof of that. Our leaders organized and armed a bandit army which killed 20,000 people, refused to recognize an election result in 1984 that all other observers accepted as free and legitimate, and tightened the screws further by imposing a brutal economic embargo. In 1990 the people of that country voted, out of sheer desperation to end their revolution and put the rich back in power. The result was mass unemployment and crushing poverty. All in the name of "the right of private property".

That kind of outcome is the only possible result of any U.S. efforts to cause "regime change" in Venezuela.

It is not our place to be the hemispheric enforcers of market economics, WW. Never was. Never will be. And market economics is all our leaders have ever meant by "democracy" in Latin America.

I hope all progressives will do the same.

Authoritarianism is not the answer. And the rise of populist left-wing demogogues in American politics is beyond troublesome.

When are we going to learn?

American military intervention in Venezuela isn't the answer. But the sooner the people of Venezuela sweep the Chavez-Maduro populists from power the better.

and btw, the main problems in Venezuela came from the collapse of international oil prices, not the ideology of the Venezuelan government-you need to be backing the right of democratic economic self-determination for Latin America and the rest of the world.

Chavez-who was democratically elected and re-elected several times, btw-only came to power and only held power in the way that he did because the U.S. had repeatedly demonstrated that it would not tolerate the people of Venezuela or any other Latin American country voting for democratic socialism in free elections.

Had we as a nation accepted from the outset that the resources of the Americas existed first for the common good of the peoples of the Americas, rather than for the short-term individual enrichment of the North American, European, and British upper classes-there would have been no Sandismo, no Fidelsmo, and no Bolivarianismo.

We can only prevent movements like that from emerging by accepting the right of the peoples of the Americas to put governments into office that place human need and human dignity above, or at least on the same level as, the short-term self-interest of the few.

If we as a country don't learn that lesson, if we keep on insisting that the poor of the Americas "know their place" and accept that their lives, their needs, and their dignity must always defer to the greed and arrogance of the few, there will simply be Chavez after Chavez after Chavez, on down the line.

It really is that simple.

while steadfastly opposing left-wing socialist populism (and right-wing nativist populism).

Populism is a pox on humanity. Autocrats can come to power via the election box. Liberals must resist populism and the authoritarianism that always comes with it.

Btw, that "I'm against populism of the right OR left" thing is bogus. Whatever you might say about Chavez or any of the other Latin American leaders you'd oppose, they have nothing in common with anybody like Trump or any other authoritarian of the right. If you take that argument to its extreme, you'd end up arguing that there was no difference between Fidel and Batista.

It happens when desperate people believe there's nothing else that might work. If the U.S. had allowed Latin American countries to bring in redistributionist, egalitarian policies through conventional democratic elections, there wouldn't have been anybody like Fidel or like Chavez.

Those movements happened because, in every country where they happened, there was simply no other way.

In Venezuela before Chavez, for example, all of the "mainstream" parties were committed to keeping brutal, choking austerity in place for the rest of eternity. Perez, the supposedly "social democratic" president who was in office, had thousands of trade unionists massacred in downtown Caracas simply for staging a peaceful march against austerity.

It's not as though we, watching all of this in privilege and comfort here in El Norte, are entitled to judge what the poorest and most desperate peoples of the earth choose to do in order to survive.

The only way to prevent the emergence of Chavez-like figures is for the U.S. to accept the right of the peoples of Latin America to establish whatever economic systems they want by normal democratic means. It's none of our business whether the rest of the hemisphere adopts socialist models of life-especially since our rulers have no superior alternatives to offer them.

Both rely on demagoguery and scapegoating segments of the society as a means to claim power "in the name of the people."

It's always a cover of dictatorship and authoritarianism (or totalitarianism).

Your conclusions are too pat at too reductivist.

Frankly, seeing Jermy Corbyn in your sig gives me creeps every time I see it.

Britain doesn't need Chavezismo anymore than the United States does.

Excusing dictatorial movement just makes you look bad.

The man's a committed democrat, is impeccably decent and honest, was twice elected leader of his party by landslide margins.

He's got his party in a solid lead in the polls.

He's the only party leader young people in the UK trust.

The policies he supports are about peace, justice, equality, freedom and the common good.

How does any of that give you "creeps"?

Really?

As you said, Chavez was democratically elected multiple times. It seems that Venezuela is a good example of the people choosing "whatever economic systems they want by normal democratic means" -- yet that literally produced Chavez, and led to Venezuela's current economic and political conditions.

Of course the people of Venezuela should be able to pick their leaders. And of course we should not intervention militarily (at least, based on what is currently going on).

But that doesn't mean one should wilfully blind themselves to the disastrous effects of Chavez-style socialism (of which Venezuela is merely one of many examples), and it doesn't mean we shouldn't hope that the people of Venezuela realize this as soon as possible (if it isn't already too late).

Nothing can be improved there by giving the oil wells back to the foreign oil companies, or by cutting social benefits, or by raising prices on food and fuel.

And nothing that benefits the poor can happen there if things like that are done.

The key problem was the Saudi-engineered global oil price collapse. That would have crashed the economy just as badly if VZ was capitalist.

This was made worse by the wealthy hoarding everything-including the toilet paper. The class who did that were never going to be willing to negotiate with the PSUV government-they will settle for nothing short of the restoration of the pre-Chavez status quo-a state of affairs that was a dead zone for everybody in VZ who wasn't born a millionaire.

The third factor was the refusal of the police in Venezuela's cities to actually do their job and fight crime after Chavez came to power. How was that the PSUV's fault?

It's a bad situation, but it's not bad because the country had policies that treated the lives of the poor as being just as important as the lives of the billionaires.

I think the much bigger problem was establishing an economic system that would ordinarily cause chaos and misery, and was only propped up for so long BECAUSE of high oil prices. A more resilient economy would obviously be hurt by the collapse in oil prices, but it would be far better than what they are currently experiencing. Modern economies do not have economic shocks that destroy the entire country.

The arguments you are making are exactly the same types of arguments made to justify every single failed attempt at socialism (the traditional definition, not the new more modern definition that conflates socialism with social democracy). At some point, you need to ask whether a system that "works in theory," but in practice always causes the same outcome (surely with blame heaped on everything other than the system), is actually worth continual consideration.

The alternative to the current misery in Venezuela is the type of government/economic system present throughout Europe. Such a system is fundamentally a market economy, but one with significant redistribution and regulation to tame its excesses.

Even if that alternative is not on offer at the present, the "what's the alternative?" argument is a very poor justification for (metaphorically) shooting yourself in the face. This "everything else hasn't worked, therefore let's try something known to be much worse" style of argument has caused a scale of human suffering that rivals the two world wars.

They only thing Trump and Co. would accept would be "shock therapy", of the sort that was unjustly imposed on the peoples of Eastern Europe. Those people brought down police states all by themselves, and the West rewarded them for it by imposing mass unemployment and crushing austerity.

BTW...socialism is not Soviet Communism, and it can't be progressive in any sense to treat the idea of socialism as if it is evil.

2. The horrendous outcomes of such a system are regrettable, but are certainly in no way caused by the system, and are in fact due to wrongdoing by X and Y. To mitigate such outcomes, see rule 1.

Rinse and repeat.

This is literally the same logic that is used to defend Soviet Communism. I have seen countless people make exactly those types of arguments. Perhaps that is because we now now have so much evidence that such systems lead to chaos and misery, that it is all such defenders have left.

The reason such systems do not get to the point of full Soviet-style communism is that most countries eventually see the light and reverse course -- not because of some mythical American boogeyman that is used as a deus ex machina to explain all inconvenient facts.

would be intolerable and unacceptable, though, right? That it is essential to make sure that nobody on the bottom loses any more ground?

As to Eastern Europe, the people who overthrow the police state regimes by sheer force of nonviolent courage should have been allowed to go immediately to social democracy, with no intervening period of austerity and mass unemployment. It was unconscionable to subject them to "shock therapy".

BTW, I'm as anti-Stalinist as you are...I just don't accept that despising the Soviet Union should obligate me to be entirely antisocialist or to support market economics. The problem with Stalinism was that Stalin was a murderous bastard-not that he pretended to be a socialist to justify his, uh, bastardity.

To be antisocialist, to reject the very idea that life could ever be run by cooperation rather than competition, is to give up on any hope of a life run on humane and democratic values. It means you stand with the rich against the poor. Sorry, but I can't do that. I could live with a mixed economy, but the mix should be worker managed industries and co-ops with a tiny handful of state industries-not life run mainly by billionaires, mainly on hierarchical management, and mainly for short-term gain for the few.

!!! That is the lesson you draw from this? That they were just unlucky enough to have a murderous bastard? Frankly that kind of logic speaks for itself.

"despising the Soviet Union" -- it is illuminating how you jumped to the idea that criticism of socialist or communist economic systems has anything to do with "despising the Soviet Union." I believe you were the one that brought up the Soviet Union. The only reason it is relevant to this conversation is because it is one of many textbook examples of hellholes that inevitably result from too much concentrated government power over the economy. Believe it or not, I don't go around all day seething with rage about the Soviet Union, or even think about the Soviet Union much. It is only relevant as a lesson to be learned from history.

"to reject the very idea that life could ever be run by cooperation rather than competition"

One of the biggest problems with nearly ALL of your arguments over the years is neatly encapsulated in that paragraph. You start out by immediately assuming your conclusion -- that being against socialism is "to reject the very idea" etc, then assuming another conclusion (that rejecting such idea implies contrary systems are inhumane or undemocratic), then assuming another conclusion (to be antisocialist is to be for the rich at the expense of the poor). Of course, after this exercise in straw man inflation, who could possibly disagree with you?

In reality, the idea that a market economy implies total competition and zero cooperation is utterly divorced from reality. In an ACTUAL system for which there was no cooperation, everyone would be constantly at war with each other. Cooperation is a keystone of all economies (and frankly all civilizations). That's why cooperation has evolved in every species.

Cooperation and competition are not mutually exclusive. Giant cooperations by definition (of "giant" and "corporation" ) have huge number of employees that are cooperating with each other, in order to compete with other corporations that have huge numbers of employees cooperating with each other.

If by "mixed economy", you merely mean a mix of cooperation and competition, then congratulations. Every economic system (from our system to the Soviet Union and North Korea) has a mix of both.

If, in the other hand, you mean "a world where many industries are not subject to and accountable to competition, or at least the threat thereof," history has already rendered its verdict on such systems. It is not pretty. Decentralization of economic power (relative to absolute power concentrated in a supposedly benelovent government or other entity) is what has increased our standard of living from the hunter gatherer stage of evolution until now.

Of course, competition does naturally produce winners and losers, and left to it's own devices would produce intolerable inequality. That's why it is not left to its own devices -- redistribution reduces inequality, and regulation mitigates against market failures and bad social outcomes. Furthermore, no one is saying that competition is ALWAYS the answer. There are a few industries (such as medicine, or utilities) where the traits of market competition that make it work well generally, do not work in specific cases. That's why most market economies have something like single payer (for example). But that is because of specific and unique facts about those industries -- not because "competition bad" or "competition best in small doses." The opposite of competition is consolidation, and too much consolidation does exactly what anyone with any knowledge of history would think it does.

The other issue, other than Stalin's personal characteristics, was the lack of democratic decision-making in the process, the lack of actual workers' control of the means of production. If they'd had a democratized economy rather than a command economy, the small number of positive effects of a market economy without any of the ugliness. There would be competition, but it would be positive competition, based on creativity, the natural human desire to innovate(a desire totally independent from the desire to become wealthy), and the wish to create useful things at a fair price.

Nobody, even people on the left, even the Venezuelan government, are arguing for everything or even most things should be under bureaucratic state control. And I myself have NEVER argued for that. So please stop trying to paint me as an apologist for the Warsaw Pact.

What I'm saying here is that, while Maduro is a bad leader, removing him from office isn't, in and of itself, going to make anything better. And doing so can't possibly lead to social democracy. Why even pretend that it could?

Social democracy cannot result from the MUD taking power. It can't be built from mass privatization, benefits cuts, the weakening of unions and "measures to attract foreign investment". Venezuela doesn't need "shock therapy" and neither did Eastern Europe. The pre-eminent need was and is a democratization of decision-making, not the restoration of the old politics, with the meaningless rivalry between the Conservative and Liberal parties.

Removing him from office will make it less likely Venezuela degenerates further into an authoritarian state. (I'm not saying the U.S should do it -- I'm saying that I hope the people and institutions of Venezuela make his continued governance untenable.)

Perhaps the opposition will take power, at least in the short term. So what? Do you think that democracy only makes sense when its outcomes align with your political views? If the opposition takes power in a hypothetical world where Maduro is forced out by the people, they will have taken power of a state whose accountability to the people has been reinforced. They will be on a short leash.

When Trump was elected, I did not feel that Obama should use extralegal means to keep power. It didn't matter to me that Trump has views diametrically opposed to mine, and would likely be the worst president in our several-hundred-year history. A world where Obama used extralegal means to stay in office or oppress the opposition is a world that would be far worse off than the world we have today, for everyone (poor and rich).

It's THEIR country, after all.

My point in this has been that nobody BUT the Venezuelans should be part of resolving this.

Our rulers refused to let things be resolved that way in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, and many other places IN the Americas. They always insisted that everything be done exactly their way.

You and I can't treat this as though that historical tradition doesn't matter here. The "caudillismo" characteristics of Bolivarianism and the Cuban Revolution developed largely in response to the history of U.S. intervention.

While I do not by any means have an absolutist non-intervention view, I do not think Venezuela is currently at (or in the same ballpark as) the point where that would make any sense.

Almost every fucking thing wrong in Venezuela is due to crony capitalists using socialism as a disguise to rape the Venezuelan people of their wealth. See every single Chinese contract ever made to "help the people" there.

It's socialism in disguise.

I absolutely oppose U.S. Military intervention in Venezuela.

since they're the only party in VZ that cares about the poor-the community councils they set up in poor neighborhoods would be abolished if the "opposition" came to power-but I think Maduro has made a lot of wrong moves. Whatever happens has to be decided by the Venezuelan people, not the Delta force or the 101st Airborne.

U.S. involvement in Venezuela's internal affairs cannot have anything but right-wing effects-especially if it's Trump doing the intervening.

I'm appalled, but not surprised given your posting history. At least it is out in the open.

I wish Maduro was not leading the PSUV.

It's not as though the only way to be against him is to be against everybody in the PSUV. That party is not an intrinsically illegitimate party.

And unfortunately, it's the only party in VZ politics that has social justice in any meaningful form as part of its program. The MUD wants to focus on "attracting foreign investment"-which is code for agreeing to screw over the working poor and to cut benefits for the non-working poor down to nothing. Once austerity and privatization are imposed, life is over and hope is gone if you are poor.

I can't be on the left and support anything that makes life worse for those on the bottom.

The PSUV takeover of Venezuela has been a victory authoritarianism via the ballot box.

It's what scares me (and most Democrats) about so-called "democratic" socialism.

If supporting Marxist authoritarian dictatorships is your thing, why troll a forum for liberals who support the Democratic Party?

I just don't want this to end with the rich controlling everything again.

And it can't be the place of privileged North America leftists to tell impoverished Latin Americans what their choices should be.

Chavismo ended up in power because there was no other way for the poor and the non-European majority in VZ ever to have any power.

No other party in Venezuela in the Nineties was on the side of the impoverished majority.

What were they supposed to do, just stick with the old, meaningless choice between the "approved" parties..The Conservatives and the party that pretended to be The Liberals? Were they just supposed to accept Nineties-style austerity as their station in life?

This is what people who claim to be on the left but are anti-PSUV never address...the complete lack of any alternative to it for the working and non-working poor.

If you want to delegitimize Chavismo, you have an obligation to offer some other path to them that would be on the side of the working and non-working poor, while remaining within whatever your personal bounds of democracy are. You can't JUST "The PSUV is evil and the only thing that matters is removing Maduro from the presidency".

try again the next time.

You are acting as if one political viewpoint is entitled to achieve political victory, ideally through winning elections, but through force if it comes to that. However morally justified you believe your views are, that isn't how it works. (And the idea that the US is somehow dictating who the "approved parties" are is laughable. Something tells me that in a completely imaginary world where political candidates needed approval to run from the US state department, Chavez would not have been put on the list.)

And you really need to read up on the U.S. role in Latin America.

It's naïve to think "elections" are actually allowed to mean anything in most of Latin America. If you were indigenous or Afro-Latino in the countries with governments the U.S. approves of, you would feel you had no hope. Same if you were working class.

It's a cosmic fluke that neither the PSUV nor Evo Morales' party in Bolivia(the only party in that country that stood up for the poor and the indigenous majority)have not as yet been victims of U.S.-backed coups.

But there is only one reason that there would be and it has nothing to do with politics or human rights. It's oil. That's it.

As Phil Ochs put it, half a century ago:

"We own half the world, O Say Can You See,
And the name for our profits is 'democracy'
So like it or not, you will have to be free.
'Cause we're the cops of the world, boys,
we're the cops of the world".

From what I've seen, even the most harsh critics of Maduro don't seem to be in favor of such actions by the US. If anything, this sort of talk from Trump just gives Maduro more fuel and a rallying cry for his supporters, and helps delegitimize any legitimate opposition from within Venezuela.

I don't even understand why the talk of military action is even be discussed. For what? Venezuela hasn't threatened the US as far as I know.

n/t.

...and it’s obvious he never follows up on his tweets/threats

Oh, yeah, because there's an insane man in the White House who just says any crazy fucking thing that pops into his head at any given moment.

n/t.

I think Maduro is exactly what Venezuela does NOT need right now. A nasty, egoistic paranoid dictator who is in the process of dismantling the few remaining vestiges of democracy left in a country that knows there will be none in their immediate future.

However, at this point there is only one thing we could do by intervening, and that is make things worse. Just like Obama said about Syria in 2012--if we go in militarily, we will have to take one side in a conflict where all sides hate each other and all of them hate us. The human tragedy is horrible to witness, but no intervention by us will make anything better.

At some point in the future, things will have to change. The way things are going, the change will begin with Maduro being shot by his own troops in his office or out in the street for the people to see, but it had better be done by Venezuelans, and not by us or any paid surrogates.

One thing for sure is that Putin and the Chinese are fully aware of Venezuela's vast mineral wealth, and would have no twinges of conscience about developing them, absconding with the riches, and leaving behind an ecological disaster for the Venezuelans to clean up. My daughter witnessed the Chinese doing exactly that in Sierra Leone. However, things are so unstable right now, if they try that in Venezuela, Russia's personnel and China's personnel would need more protection than the Earth intruders on Pandora in the film "Avatar."

Tragic and awful as this is, and will be, for the Venezuelans, we should not only refrain from meddling as a government, but make it clear that we expect our big private corporations to do likewise, and heavily penalize them if they insist. If there is a shooting of Venezuelans by "security forces" of some private American enterprise, even if they were nothing more than kidnappers looking for someone to take for ransom money, it will be "yanqui imperialismo" in the minds of the people there on the ground. The truth won't matter--dead Venezuelans at the hands of armed Americans will be the only thing that matters. Our own national interest depends on that not being given the chance to happen.

We can't change what previous administrations did in 1823, 1911, 1915, 1973, 1979 or even 1985. We CAN influence what happens in 2018. Here's hoping, though I'm not holding my breath.

If Madura is their elected a President, that is what he is, until Venezuela decides that he is not, via their democratic principles, not ours.