TACO War

 

Photo from the wonderful collection "Paradise Lost" by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I'm sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. 

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump "Truthed" a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered "closed in its entirety"

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela's permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that's hardly "in its entirety". 

Wokey-dokey

I had to be reminded or in part informed (by Heather Cox Richardson) of a number of the cultural references in this "Truth" post: Trump's costume is that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, played by Robert Duvall, the character who says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and who leads a helicopter raid over the Vietnamese countryside to the sound of the prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (representing the flight through the skies of Wotan's warrior daughters, dashing over battlefields on their airborne horses, to gather the bodies of dead heroes for the afterlife in the Hall of Battles, Wallhall), evoked in the picture by the helicopters over the Chicago skyline; while the three helicopter emojis in the message are apparently used by a certain type of rightwinger to register approval of the Chilean dictatorship  of General Augusto Pinochet and its habit of dealing with dissidents by tossing them, from flying helicopters, into the sea. I don't know why it seems to have been shot somewhere miles away on Lake Michigan, from a boat that's violently on fire, leaving Trump-Kilgore in the position of the cartoon dog saying, "This is fine" when it clearly isn't.  

Dr. Google tells me that "Chipocalypse Now" is the title of an episode from the Disney animated series "Big City Greens", named not for Chicago but for the show's villain, Chip Whistler, a wicked capitalist who hopes to demolish the protagonists' apartment building and replace it with a giant supermarket, but I believe that's just a coincidence.

I'm reasonably confident I understand Trump's motive for changing the name of the department from Defense to War, as from a trope he might have inherited from his cranky rightwing father about the general decadence of the armed forces after they "lost" China, and subsequently North Korea and South Vietnam, to the Communists. Trump referred to it pretty explicitly (if confusingly, in his slippery "weave" style) when he was signing the executive order:

Venezuela note

.⁦@NicolasMaduro⁩ has made a terrible enemy. His name is ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩. Read here: https://t.co/3WX3zslAGg

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 24, 2019

Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks he's engineered a coup in Venezuela, and he's so thrilled he can't stand it, but I want to say that this doesn't mean people on the progressive side should believe him and come out to denounce whatever has just happened as a return to the old banana republic policy where the US government can "make the right decision for Venezuela" as triumphal Eli Lake puts it in the attached Bloomberg article, instead of Venezuela making its own decisions, because it's more complicated than that, and reducing it to a war between Trump and Maduro is exactly the wrong way to look at it (though exactly what Trump and Maduro would prefer you to do).

As indicated by the way the international community is reacting, with all but one of the members of the Lima Group founded in August 2017 to work toward a resolution of the Venezuela situation without the help of the Trump government (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru), as well as Ecuador (which hosts a couple of thousand Venezuelan refugees, see map below), backing the self-declared temporary president, Juan Guaidó against actual president Nicolás Maduro—while the exception, Mexico, is remaining neutral, as is the European Union.

Peeping into the future

Georges Méliès, Le Voyage dans la Lune , 1902, via Business Insider.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Future of the American Left", New York Times, 4 May 2018:

If the Democrats were smart, they would take advantage of their electoral edge to pursue an agenda devoted to redistributing wealth and ensuring economic security for all—like that of Dean Baker, enchanted with radical idealism, which I would strongly disagree with but nevertheless praise as positive, humane, and universalistic. Readers will remember how I always praise liberals when they adopt my recommendations. Unfortunately because of tribalism and identity politics they will not do this but instead offer a North American version of the Bolivarian socialism of the late Hugo Chávez, so I won't have an opportunity to praise them at all. Politicians on both sides no longer care about thinkers. This is a historical inevitability and it makes me sad.

Obviously unclear what he's trying to accomplish with this peculiar thesis. It could be a kind of Dr. William Kristol wish-fulfillment effusion, where you use the prediction format to describe your deepest and most implausible desire, in this case the hope that there's a a way for Republicans to hold on to Congress if Democrats can manage to out-crazy Trump. Or possibly a kind of bait-and-switch concern trolling, in which he employs the terrifying specter of chavismo to frighten us into the arms of Dr. Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and that's what he thinks will preserve Congress for the Republicans, kind of sneaking the Overton Window into the back yard.

Trump Gets CLAP From Maduro Regime

CLAP packages. Via Venezuelanalysis.

My UK tweep Paul Canning, an expert observer of, among other things, Venezuela, noticed something familiar in the Trump budget proposal to turn half of the SNAP program into church basement–style distribution of beans and rice, to stop the poor from indulging in their well-known habit of blowing all their food stamps on crab legs and pomegranate juice:

Shocking anti-hunger advocates, the Trump admin is proposing to replace half of food stamp money with a box of government-selected food they’d deliver monthly. They’d call it a “Harvest Box” even though it wouldn’t include anything fresh. https://t.co/jjc9Edgp0S

— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 13, 2018

Poo Apron. https://t.co/GYCCW9smAF

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) February 13, 2018

After decades, even centuries of claiming there was no need for government welfare programs because churches could take care of it, now they're saying government needs to run its own church food pantries. https://t.co/hbpSBTQbFV

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 13, 2018

This is what the Maduro regime does, it supplies (or rather often doesn't) a food box called CLAP (Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción). It's a scam that profits regime insiders https://t.co/G53t7cjwcR Maybe American opponents of this proposal could use that? https://t.co/QnWjmffVe0

— Paul Canning (@pauloCanning) February 13, 2018

I like my headline, but Republicans might prefer "Trump Picks Up On Bolivarian Socialism".