Whose Hemisphere?
Our hemisphere!
The only thing worse than the US forcing a regime change in a foreign country is that plus the reactionary backlash in the US and the domestic chaos it foments. As much as America needs loyal opposition to whichever administration holds the White House, we seem too much in thrall of derangements. Here, once again is the inevitability of the President’s bad breath funking up the room in which his words and deeds are hardly controversial to stoics like me.
I’ve often complained about, but also admired a certain amount of American pacifist restraint. The complaint comes from being lectured about how many people we are ‘killing’ by the reduction of the USAID budget. On the other hand, we have done nothing to ‘Free Tibet’ or stop the Janjaweed Militia from partitioning Sudan. Such things would require boots on the ground. This is precisely the formula of handwringing sclerosis described by Ezra Klein, and precisely the attitude (OK Boomer) that’s dismantling the effectiveness of liberal sentiment. I understand various postmodern cultural equivocations, but there are bad guys in the world that Democrats on the whole ought to acknowledge arise in foreign lands.
The simple fact is that Americans have been, since the Tea Party and Occupy, been willing to grant that one or two percent can screw things up for our all of us. We are certainly seeing that with Somali fraud in Minnesota. This latest executive decision is rather dramatically demonstrating how long we’ve let corrupt frogs fart around in our lukewarm soup. Unexpected consequences are sure to come, but yet action. Principled action. It’s bracing.
For almost a dozen years I’ve worked with Venezuelans in an IT consulting company. The boss helped move some of our crew out of Venezuela over into Colombia which is much more stable and less dangerous. We’ve heard the tales of woe, and of inflation forcing people to ‘chase chickens’ when it was literally easier to run one down in the backstreets than find one at a decent price in the market. My colleague Jose got into Bitcoin early. Anything was better than Bolivars.
Ganglands
I have never been an immigration hawk, but I certainly am aware of cartel and gang influence and action here in Southern California. As a teen, my neighborhood had Crips and Brims (later Bloods) on its outskirts and my highschool was in Clanton 14 and 18th Street territory. My bus to swim practice went through Venice 13. One night my brother and I missed our bus and walked from Santa Monica to Culver City. We still remember the graffiti of ‘Chupy Sotel’. One had to be very aware of where you were and whom you’re likely to encounter. It’s one of the reasons why nobody walks in LA.
Very few people talk seriously about the degradation of the Northern Triangle. It’s just not on the radar. It all boils down to Mexico and NAFTA in our political blather. Nobody on the national scene knows how nasty it gets in El Paso / Juarez. But we still have California elected officials reminding us about Cesar Chavez and the significance of table grapes (OK Boomer). I took Victor Davis Hanson seriously. I’ve driven through Salinas, but that’s nothing compared to Stockton. San Bernardino County? Yikes. This is more than just rowdy, this is generational corruption culture. It’s already here, but we in the mainstream find dozens of euphemisms, like ‘gun control’. You have no clue about the tattooed hands holding those guns and the degenerate minds that point them. One needs to be very specific and very action-oriented about murder zones. When will that happen? I don’t know what kind of politician sees straight and shoots straight. It’s not like San Bernardino is not American.
To Save A World That Is Destined To Die
I like to quote Niall Ferguson when he says that low lying beachfront property is the hardest land to hold. That is both a statement about military maneuvers and elites living in luxury. The former is more formidable, once the trigger is pulled. And now the US has pulled it against Maduro. Clutch the pearls. Why? Because it’s not fashionable for elites to support certain types of regime change. We haven’t nurtured a new generation who speaks to the heart like Marvin Gaye once did. So we just call each other fascists.
If somehow American impeachment actually booted the president from the White House, both parties would use it exactly the same way they use government shutdowns. You clowns don’t fool us. You only want to get your way, which more often than not is the way of your cronies and not the rest of us in flyover country. Yes I’m being arbitrarily cruel, scattershot and over-reaching. Then again, so is Congress with its bathwater bills.
Who Gets Real?
Speaking of which, it really annoys me that I don’t know anyone in Congress today who might be the equivalent of Sam Nunn of Georgia who took geopolitics and military appropriations seriously. Indeed, who can name the Congressional leader who would, under any circumstances draw up a resolution to declare war, you know like we did in the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. Who was suckered into believing in WMD? All of us. A term I never heard before 2001. How about you? The fact of the matter is that we have narco-states and terror regimes that fight asymmetrically in the media. So the very last thing the loyal opposition should do is grandstand in the MSM today. Rather they should find their own Sam Nunn and get down into the weeds over the US relationship to Venezuela. Please God let me hear somebody from Congress talk about how they loved or hated Hugo Chavez. Go back that far would you please?
I wrote a short piece on this several years back on Quora because I wasn’t born yesterday, and of course because I had friends who fled VZ.
But you have to understand that Venezuela was not a true multiparty democracy. When Chavez took over in 1999, he literally rewrote the constitution of Venezuela. His socialists ran everything. So when he said to PDVSA that they will produce gasoline at whatever price he decreed, those who resisted were sacked. Not just executives. The entire board of directors. They were replaced by his cronies. The employees went on strike, and he fired them all.
By the way, be on the lookout for anything written about this by David Sirota, who bragged about Chavez’ ‘economic miracle’ in Salon back in 2013. He’s a Bernie Boy. So when American engineers got run out of the newly nationalized refineries in Venezuela, there’s always somebody who thinks that’s a great idea por la raza. But it’s just another horror story that leaked toxic culture into South America from the one or two percent of crooks, criminals, crazies and cronies. Volodzko knows that deal first hand.
After Maduro - Flowers of Death (Volozko)
What About China?
Yes, I’ve long held that we ought to be better friends with our neighbors to the south. In fact I think we ought to lay a few more claims than we do with the Five Eyes. I happen to have thought that way since the invention of the ‘BRICs’. Remember that bald headed dude. Mark Mobius? He got us started on that investment path. He’s my father’s age and didn’t need AI to figure things out. Anyway, I liked the Brazilians and the Indians. Still do. Meanwhile the Chinese have tried to Belt and Road their way through Africa and it hasn’t worked out. And I hear that Vietnam is rather sick of them too. They don’t make good friends, those Han. But they do make good second-world business, as they should. We tend to forget how much second-world America remains. I appreciate the American second-world, that’s why I stand with the Peasants. We’re constitutional peasants, the best kind, but our elites are going to try to tell us this is a power move for the oil. Ahem. If Trump invented anything it was ‘Drill Baby Drill’. We’ve got plenty oil. We export oil. China is the one who needs oil.
The second world cannot live on oil alone. We could use some port automation, some shipbuilding and some open source manufacturing so that anybody with a half-million dollar machine shop could contribute to our national capability. Nobody knows that as much as Mexico, whose economy is bigger than Australia’s. Brazil is tied with Canada who almost edges out Russia. And yes Mexico’s GDP is bigger than Saudi Arabia and bigger than South Korea. So there are some wonderful things we might do other than tourism in alliances with South and Central America, but it cannot be based on corrupt economies or socialist / state capitalist cats paws of the CCP. What evidence do I have of that? I’m slowly putting it together, seeing as I read as much as any of us, especially when I find someone longitudinally credible.
What About Cuba?
I don’t know. Is it the Gulf of America yet? I’m really not particularly interested in Cuba for any political reasons. It doesn’t make sense to me that Trump of all people wouldn’t ink some kind of tourism deal. It would be of great comfort to me to see Haiti and Cuba get normal and do constructive exchange with the US. I mean Puerto Rico’s GDP per capita is six times that of Guatemala. I’m getting into economic water over my head but I feel strongly that a friendly USA can do better than USAID’s $23 billion of moral support and NGO stuff per year considering what we spend on external tourism.
I’m not sure there’s any kind of vibe in American society that makes us comfortable at large in the backyards of our Caribbean, South and Central American cousins. Not as much as we might for some trip to Royal Troon. But I’ve got to believe that essentially is a generational thing considering where my kids and family have liked to go. (OK Boomer) I can tell you that I have been super comfortable in Bogota and Medellin, and I would love to be in Caracas as well.
Have we been so static since the days of the Contras? Do Americans simply not care about international policy unless they can use it to beat up the domestic opposition? I’m keeping my eyes and ears open.