WMD Redux

[C C]

After talking tough and saying Maduro was their only president, Maduro's VP is now saying she wants to work with the US.

While fear of being snatched and carried away like Maduro is likely one component, some members of the establishment may finally be waking up to the opportunistic possibilities arising for them.

Although faulty reforms, decentralization, and ethnic separatism were key to the Soviet Union collapsing, another factor toward the end of the 1980s was its micromanaging bureaucrats becoming addicted to their privilege. And not only wanting to maintain it, but grow it in a profitable direction (their personal transitions from being ideological protectors to the potential to become wealthy oligarchs). Ergo, the indifference of the ruling regime in allowing the old socialist system to tumble apart, because applicable members could make more money and retain special advantages for themselves under capitalism.

Revolution From Above
https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400....798718.pdf

EXCERPT: The Old Guard leaders who sought to preserve the old system with only cosmetic changes found little support within the elite. As a result, the coup plotters of the summer of 1991 soon found themselves very isolated. But Gorbachev and the others promoting the reform of socialism also had difficulty rallying the elite to their program, as the elite grew increasingly skeptical of their reform plans.

The bulk of the elite concluded that a democratized form of socialism had little to offer them. That direction of change threatened to reduce their power and material privileges. Once the future course of the Soviet system was opened to serious internal debate by the policy of glasnost (openness), support for capitalism grew with astonishing speed within this elite, because that path appeared to offer the only way to maintain, and even increase, its power and privileges.

Members of the party-state elite played various roles in the process of abandonment of socialism in favor of building capitalism. Some, as early as 1987, used their connections and access to money and other resources to start private businesses. Others became political leaders of the drive to bring capitalism to the USSR. The switch from defense of socialism to praise for capitalism appeared to require a drastic change of worldview for the old elite.

[Magical Realist]

Revolution From Above = "meet the new boss, same as the old boss!"--The Who

[Magical Realist]

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled gasless yearning to be topped off.."

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[C C]

US oil companies were interested in beefing up the Venezuelan oil industry in the early 1990s, but not after Chávez's policies ruined the infrastructure. Now they're not all that eager to invest in rebuilding such again. So Trump may have to offer incentives. They'd surely want guarantees that another socialist regime won't take over the country again in the future, too. That would seem to require either a military presence or forbidding that kind of party in a Venezuelan constitution.
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Trump says U.S. might pay oil companies to rebuild Venezuela’s energy sector: ‘They’ll get reimbursed’: President Donald Trump said American taxpayers might be on the hook for rebuilding Venezuela’s dilapidated oil sector. [...] Moreover, he said, the U.S. may subsidize an effort by oil companies to rebuild the country’s energy infrastructure — a project he said could take less than 18 months. “I think we can do it in less time than that, but it’ll be a lot of money,” he said. “A tremendous amount of money will have to be spent, and the oil companies will spend it, and then they’ll get reimbursed by us or through revenue.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/...r-AA1TCIM9
https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/eu-...r-AA1TBUZH
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/04/busin...-venezuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/...ion-gamble

EXCERPTS (blend): [...] "We need total access," Trump said. "We need access to the oil and to other things in their country that allow us to rebuild their country."

According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, American control will be exercised through a military "quarantine" over the country's oil exports, rather than by boots on the ground.

[...] Bringing Venezuela’s oil production - now around 1 million barrels a day - back to its glory-days' height of 3 million barrels a day would require at least $183 billion and more than a decade of effort, industry analyst firm Rystad Energy said Monday. While the Venezuelan government might supply some of that money, international companies would need to spend $35 billion in the next few years to reach that goal.

[...] Longtime Republican foreign policy hand Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela during his first term, said the president is “exaggerating” the likelihood that companies will return to the country, given the risk and capital required.

[...] President Donald Trump said he’s counting on American companies to rebuild Venezuela’s battered oil industry. But the world’s largest proven oil reserves, tantalizing as they seem, may come with more risk than reward for the US oil giants, energy-industry watchers told CNN.

Extracting more oil from Venezuela would require rebuilding the country’s gutted oil infrastructure, which would cost, by Trump’s own telling, billions of dollars. And crude isn’t fetching the kind of prices that would make this kind of investment an easy call. Plus, refining Venezuela’s particular brand of crude oil is an expensive undertaking in itself.

It would be a hard sell in a politically stable country, let alone one in the throes of a political crisis following the ouster of its authoritarian president.

[...] in the early 1990s Venezuela introduced a set of new policies aimed at further incentivizing more investment in the oil sector.

But when socialist Hugo Chávez took office in 1999, he took direct control of PDVSA and allowed Venezuela’s oil infrastructure to fester and crumble. That prevented oil companies in the country from producing as much crude as they were capable of, and the country’s production fell by more than a third over the past quarter century.

“We built Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” Trump said Saturday.

[...] Years of corruption, underinvestment, fires and thefts have left the nation’s crude infrastructure in tatters. Rebuilding it enough to lift Venezuela’s output back to its peak levels of the 1970s would require companies to invest about $10 billion per year over the next decade, said Francisco Monaldi, director of Latin American energy policy at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy.

[Magical Realist]

Good points! We will have to wait and see if Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of capitalism works just as well in a pro-socialist colonialized economically-delipidated banana republic.

[Yazata]

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[Magical Realist]

Isn't it interesting how nobody is talking about fentanyl anymore? Not one word about it-- that godawful WMD they claimed was being used to kill hundreds of thousands of helpless Americans. Why it's almost as if it wasn't a real issue at all! Ah well..we all know MAGA has the attention span of an intoxicated fruit fly. On to more shiny and noisy things! In Trump we trust!

[Syne]

Fentanyl was actually never the issue with Venezuela (my bad). Fentanyl largely comes from Mexico, but the cocaine from Venezuela does fund actual Hezbollah terrorists in Venezuela, at the behest of Iran. So fentanyl or not, the drug boats were still a legit narcoterrorist target. Instead of the US deaths from fentanyl being the primary motive, the combined harm of cocaine and Hezbollah terrorism was.

[Magical Realist]

Trump lied and said the fishing boats he was blowing up were carrying fentanyl, which he declared by executive order was a WMD being used to kill Americans. They were not. If you're going to kill random people in the dark for the alleged crime of drug smuggling, you should at least get the drug right. And maybe the country too. Trump is a damn liar. Who knows what he's lying about now?

[Syne]

The Trump administration has described strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific as attacks against terrorists attempting to bring fentanyl and cocaine to the US.
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8484p7ggmo


Vice President Vance, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. intervention abroad in other cases, took on that critique on social media.

"[C]ocaine, which is the main drug trafficked out of Venezuela, is a profit center for all of the Latin America cartels," he wrote on Sunday. "If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall. Also, cocaine is bad too!"

He noted that "a lot of fentanyl is coming out of Mexico," a reason that Trump "shut down the border." That raises questions about what's next, too.
- https://www.npr.org/2026/01/05/nx-s1-566...-democrats


Yes, Mexican drug cartels are heavily reliant on South and Central American drug traffic, particularly for cocaine from Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, using Central America as a crucial transit corridor to move these drugs north to the U.S., often via established routes through Mexico. Mexican cartels act as primary distributors, taking control of the supply chain from South American producers, especially as U.S. pressure shifted routes from Caribbean/Florida to Mexico and Central America.
- Google AI