Donroe Doctrine 😱🤡 ✡️🌻😱🤡

Hola Venezuela: Over the weekend without getting Congressional approval or even giving a heads up to the Gang of Eight, Trump invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife Cilia Flores. They are now sitting in a federal prison in NYC.  No one should cry for Maduro, he is bad and corrupt guy.  He lost but then overturned Venezuela’s last presidential election and has furthered Venezuela’s decline but the legality and motivation for his abduction are highly questionable to say the least. After all Trump tried to overturn our 2020 election and one of his besties, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is currently in jail in Brazil for trying to do the same so overturning elections is not a problem for Trump. As to Maduro’s drug trafficking, the purported reason for his forced extradition, putting aside that Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl and most of its cocaine doesn’t make it to the US, if Trump was so concerned about Latin American leaders running drugs into the US he wouldn’t have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who’d been serving a 45 year sentence in a federal jail for drug trafficking and weapons charges.  The Venezuela operation and the abduction of Maduro are all about securing control over the country’s substantial oil reserves which represent around 17% of the global total. Trump wants the reserves to be “managed” by US companies, many of whom not so coincidentally were significant contributors to his campaign.  When not nodding out during his press conference, he asserted that profits from all that oil would pay for our Venezuela venture.  Venezuela’s oil reserves are largely untapped due to a combination of failing infrastructure, bad management, and sanctions. Estimates are that it would cost more than one hundred billion dollars to build out and access the oil so that money won’t be forthcoming anytime soon so unless Trump hands the oil industry a bigly upfront bill that’s not happening.  Moreover, we don’t really need Venezuela’s oil but that’s beside the point to Trump, who remains stuck in the past when it comes to energy.  His mantra: fossil fuels are good, conservation and alternative sources like solar and wind very bad. As to what to do with Venezuela now that he “owns it,” master businessman Trump who mostly runs his assets into the ground, doesn’t seem to have a plan.  He says “he” is going to run the country “for now” because the Nobel Prize winning leader of Venezuela’s opposition, Maria Corina Machado, “doesn’t have the respect to govern,” a surprise to her and many Venezuelans who thought that Trump was their savior.  For now, Trump seems to believe that Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez will step into the leadership role as his puppet. Rodríguez is into the same systemic corruption as Maduro so moving her to the top will hardly placate the Venezuelans who voted for change. She first condemned Maduro’s abduction but has since softened her statements, probably to avoid getting snatched or worse by Trump and company. According to some reports she’s now in Russia but even if she’s still in Caracas or has returned to Caracas it’s fair to assume that she’s neither team change nor team Trump, although for the right incentive maybe she could be Team Trump.         

¿Que Pasa Ahora?  The Venezuela operation is fully supported and likely was ginned up by Secretary of State Marco Rubio who like Trump doesn’t seem to have fully thought out what to do with Venezuela now that we “own” it except perhaps to use it as a stepping stone to Cuba, the country that he’s wanted to free from “Marxist oppression” his entire life.  While Rubio would probably be okay with stopping at Havana, Trump not so much.  He’s now also threatening Columbia even Mexico.  He’s also been talking tough to Iran, which once again appears on the precipice of chaos. Those countries aside, the one he appears to have in his crosshairs the most is once again Greenland.  Over the weekend, after Katie Miller, the podcasting wife of Stephen “Goebbels” Miller who just announced that she’s pregnant with their fourth tweeted out a picture of a map of Greenland with the US flag emblazoned over it with the word “Soon” in the title, Trump doubled down on Greenland being his next acquisition. Denmark isn’t happy, nor are just about all the other members of NATO. Trump’s moves, particularly his seizure of Venezuela, have definitely piqued the interest of China and Russia because if Trump’s Donroe Doctrine, his version of the Monroe Doctrine, can be used to justify taking what he deems to be in his sphere of influence, why shouldn’t China grab Taiwan and why shouldn’t Russia go after the rest of Ukraine, not to mention a few of those Eastern European countries that used to be part of the USSR?  And naturally, though a few Republicans aren’t happy with Trump’s actions, many of the rest appear cool with it, ready to free their inner neocon, because if Trump says Venezuela is the new Iraq and Afghanistan, then our Iraq and Afghanistan ventures must have gone well.  One more thing, somewhere between 350,000 and 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US have recently lost their Temporary Protected Status, meaning that they are deportable despite the upheaval we’ve just unleashed in Venezuela.  Kristi Noem says her INS guys still plan to round them up and that if they want to stay, they should apply for asylum, which in Trump speak means they should pack their bags now.     

More 💩:  The Obamacare subsidies have expired. Absent another continuing resolution the government runs out of money again at the end of the month. Pursuant to the Epstein file legislation, the DOJ was supposed to provide Congress with an explanation for the Epstein file redactions on January 3.  They haven’t, nor have they released the millions of remaining files.  Funny thing about wars and abductions is that they provide cover for all things Epstein.