THE NEW MESS WE ARE SURPRISINGLY IN: VENEZUELA

The problem with most discussion about Venezuela is that it is insanely politically charged. Conservatives like to pretend that Venezuela is the inevitable outcome of socialist policies (while pointedly ignoring, for example, Denmark), while leftists who are quite right about how Western governments who want access to Venezuela’s natural resources for their own businesses to exploit wilfully choose to forget the first rule of foreign policy, which is: in any international conflict, it is possible for more than one side to be the assholes. Tack on a public who isn’t entirely sure if Hugo Chavez is still in charge of the country (HINT: he died almost six years ago) and you’ve got a sterling recipe for ill-informed takes from all sides of the political spectrum. I can say that, writing as someone who is definitely on the leftward side of the political spectrum, watching other leftists refer to Nicholas Maduro as a “democratically elected socialist leader” never fails to make me slightly nauseous.

So, a primer on recent Venezuelan history! Warning: this one will take a while.

Okay, so Maduro took over in 2013 following Chavez’ death, being elected to office with 50.6% of the vote. (For comparison purposes, Chavez was never elected with less than 56%.) Venezuela’s economy wasn’t doing that well before Maduro - mostly because Chavez focused national revenues around oil prices and when they dropped there was suddenly a lot of money missing, but also because the most generous view that can be taken of Chavez’ tenure is that he meant well but was a bit of a fuckup and the least generous view is that he allied himself with Venezuelan crime syndicates in order to be able to carry out state functions. He certainly assigned state power to the collectivos, which are basically irregular militias with no accountability, and allowed them to carry weapons, and if you think “that sound sort of like giving gangs the power to enforce laws but only when they want” that is exactly what happened, with all the bad side-effects you might expect. Under Maduro’s tenure, they’ve also effectively let gangs run the prison system, which has worked out as splendidly as you might expect. Actually, under Maduro’s tenure organized crime has flourished throughout Venezuela, far more than it did under Chavez. (It is probably fair to say that Chavez gave much more of a damn about the average Venezuelan than Maduro does.)

Anyway, the economy wasn’t doing great when Maduro came into office and under his reign - and I say “reign” because the Venezuelan National Assembly granted him what are effectively dictatorial powers after he was elected - it got much, much worse, with inflation skyrocketing and poverty spreading. (Also, you know, all of that crime happened.) He became really unpopular, and the National Assembly flipped to the opposition (an alliance of centrist and centre-left parties; there really aren’t a lot of conservative parties in Venezuela) in 2016.

In response to that, Maduro and his United Socialist Party neutered the National Assembly’s legislative powers in a lame-duck Assembly session on the way out of the door. The Supreme Tribunal (the highest court in the land), who are politically allied with Maduro, immediately ruled three opposition Assembly members out of office, claiming there were “irregularities” in their elections, and wouldn’t you know it, three was the number needed to prevent the opposition from having a supermajority in the Assembly and therefore the ability to impeach Maduro. (The Tribunal also assigned more political powers to Maduro, because of course they did.) The Assembly responded by organizing a recall referendum against Maduro - which was immediately cancelled by the National Electoral Council, who are politically allied with guess who. Widespread public protests started up almost immediately, because - and I need to keep stressing this - Maduro wasn’t popular in the first place and most people can tell when something is bullshit. In March of 2017, the Tribunal went so far as to essentially cancel all of the National Assembly’s powers and assigned those powers to… the Tribunal, but they cancelled their ruling two days later when it started to look like most of Venezuela was going to start rioting.

Maduro’s next move was to create a new electoral body, the Constituent Assembly, whose job was ostensibly to write a new constitution, and called an election to elect them into office. The opposition parties, not unreasonably, took the position that Venezuela already had a constitution and did not need a new one just because Maduro was unpopular, and boycotted the election. However, just to play it safe, state employees were warned that if they didn’t vote in the election for the USP, they would be fired. (This promise was kept as much as possible, by the way. Thousands of employees were fired immediately after the election.) The Constituent Assembly was elected with about 95% of the seats going to the USP, with Maduro’s government claiming massive electoral turnout that plainly did not exist, and with the company that handled the electronic voting stating that the USP had just manufactured a million votes out of thin air. Then, the Constituent Assembly, whose job was supposedly to write a new constitution, decided that they were now the final arbiters of legislative power in Venezuela, which was terribly convenient for the USP.

As a result of all this, everybody figured that the state elections in late 2017 would result in opposition parties winning the overwhelming majority of races. Certainly all of the polling indicated that Team Maduro was going to get crushed. Instead, the opposite happened, with Maduro’s United Socialist Party winning not only their safe states but indeed most of the states, including some in which the opposition was polling with double-digit leads. Was this because Maduro and the USP were secretly much more popular than anybody realized or was willing to admit? Or was it because the government moved around polling places with little or no warning, printed large numbers of incorrect ballots, and engaged in so much voter suppression it would make a Republican Congressman say “wait, that’s a little much”? We may never know, but it was the second one.

So, with all of that history, that brings us up to the current crisis, which is that last year Maduro won his re-election for President in a campaign where he decreed that the largest opposition parties would be banned from running candidates because they boycotted previous elections. The opposition parties boycotted this one too, in part because they didn’t recognize the power of the Constituent Assembly to call the election six months early and part because, let’s be honest, there is no real point in running in Venezuelan elections any more.

After Maduro won in an election with turnout a little more than half of what most Venezuelan elections manage, the leader of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, declared himself President, invoking a constitutional clause which states that when there is no valid President, the leader of the National Assembly becomes President - arguing that since Maduro’s victory was “clouded,” that therefore there was no valid President. Now, this is certainly a case of legal word-wrangling at its finest, but that’s not really the point: the point is that there is no real law in Venezuela any more that is worthy of being called such. There is the USP and Maduro - who are neck-deep in organized crime - and there is the military. Those are the only sources of power left in the country, because at the end of the day power comes from the barrel of a gun and they’ve got all the guns. Guaido’s declaration was not any serious claim that the law says he should be President; it’s simply a call for help, appealing to both the military and to foreign powers. (I am not trying to suggest that Guaido is a saint or a hero for doing this; he’s a politician. But he’s a politician doing something that is, honestly, pretty dangerous in his situation.)

Finally, I want to make one thing clear about all of the above: while I was doing my research I was relying pretty heavily on left-wing and centre-left sources: Election Integrity, Insight Crime, the Guardian, that sort of thing. I did this because leftists who complain that conservatives want to demonize Venezuela for being avowedly socialist in name (if not really in practice) aren’t wrong: just this past weekend notable twatwaffle Bret Stephens wrote a column in the New York Times stating that the real problem with Venezuela was, wait for it, the dreaded socialism. But Venezuela’s problems and Maduro’s shittiness do not have to be a left/right partisan disagreement, for two reasons: firstly, people on your side of the political spectrum can be shitty! It happens! And secondly, socialism is above all an egalitarian philosophy, and Venezuela isn’t an egalitarian society no matter how many businesses the state owns: it’s a deeply corrupt, deeply violent society where the powerful have made bedfellows with crime at every level imaginable, and where secrecy runs rampant in order to protect the powerful. (Venezuela doesn’t have public audits or recordkeeping for state companies. How much money could you skim off the top if you knew you were never going to be audited?) Between one and two million people have fled Venezuela in the past three years; that’s between three and six percent of the entire population. So don’t talk about how Maduro is a “democratically elected socialist leader,” because he isn’t; he’s about as illegitimate as politicians get.

So, with all of that said, let’s turn away from Venezuela for a second and look at how Canada and the USA and a few other countries publicly expressed support for Guaido’s Presidency. On one level, yeah, I get it: Maduro is a piece of shit and it would be really great if he was gone, and there was a reasonable argument for expressing support for Guaido in the hopes that it would have convinced the military to switch sides. (Which did not happen, so oh well.) But the problem with this is that the United States is currently being run by some of the dumbest, shittiest people in the world, and so any call that might even seem vaguely humanitarian in scope is compromised, because it’s the dumbest shittiest people in the world, and dumb shitty people don’t, as a rule, do things to be nice. I mean, the USA has appointed Elliott Abrams as a special envoy to Venezuela, and Elliott Abrams is most noteworthy for bullshitting Congress about US-supported massacres in El Salvador. He is not the guy you put in charge to get a happy ending.

Venezuelan oil reserves and mineral resources probably have a lot to do with why Canada and the USA chose to express support for Guaido; that much is obvious. The Orinoco Belt is the largest remaining oil reserve on the planet and Venezuela has it, and despite the fact that we really, really need it, as a species, to stay in the fucking ground, it’s going to get drilled and used. As for the mineral resources, there’s a ton of them too (well, millions of tons actually, but you get what I mean) and if there’s one thing Canadian industry traditionally loves, it’s mining in other countries and taking the money.

So what now? Well, the Venezuelan military has expressed their support for Maduro for the time being, so Guaido is probably quite nervous. Maduro has demanded that American diplomats leave Venezuela; in response the USA has said “we just said we don’t recognize your presidential authority” and left them there, so technically they’re now an occupying force, kind of? Not with any guns or soldiers worth mentioning, but technically, you know. I don’t think Maduro is stupid enough to attack the American diplomats and force a war with the USA he can’t possibly win; that said, I do think Team Trump is stupid enough to try to force a war themselves, both because of The Dreaded Socialism and because Trump is going to want a distraction from all the criminal investigations of him, as well as political leverage to get his way on future budget negotiations with the Democrats.

Basically, there aren’t a lot of good ways out of this, and if the first rule of foreign policy is “in any international conflict, it is possible for more than one side to be the assholes,” the second rule of foreign policy is “you don’t get into an international conflict in the first place unless you absolutely have to.” But we’re all in one now. Hooray.

SHUTDOWN OVER LET’S ALL GET ICE CREAM

Not a lot to say about this, mostly because it’s not really over yet; it’s just on hold for three weeks and then the USA is off to the races again. The GOP and Donald Trump unambigiously are the losers of this round, because everybody except their diehard supporters thinks that they picked a fight nobody wanted for a useless wall nobody wanted, and they more or less just admitted it by caving, even if only on a temporary basis.

In a sane world, the result of this would be a new round of budget negotiations and a continuing resolution to fund the government, but the more Trump gets called a pathetic loser for caving, the less he will be willing to cave unless he gets his wall, because he is an enormous toddler. So I expect that, come the next round, we’re going to see some combination of another shutdown and Trump declaring a national emergency so he can build the wall with defense funds and Puerto Rico aid money, which will then get challenged in court and most likely lose.

THE PROTESTS IN SUDAN ARE BIG (…ENOUGH NOW FOR ME TO NOTICE THEM, LET’S BE HONEST)

Protests against Sudan’s leader, Omar Al-Bashir, have been growing very rapidly; they started in late December and since that time the protests have grown into the tens of thousands at any given protest. Which, given that Sudan is geographically speaking pretty big (it’s about as big as, say, all of the prairie provinces in Canada, or 90% of the part of the USA east of the Missisppi) and doesn’t have that tremendous a level of population density, should maybe get a protest handicap and we should treat it like, say, hundreds of thousands attending the protests instead.

The protests are happening because, not to repeat myself from the Venezuela thread, but President Omar Al-Bashir is really unpopular because the economy is in the toilet, partially because he devalued the Sudanese pound and it’s hit Sudanese people hard with major inflation (seriously, there are shortages of cash in addition to food and fuel), partially because he’s a brutal dictator and nobody really liked him to begin with (he probably bears primary responsibility for the genocide in Darfur that led to the creation of South Sudan), partially because when South Sudan left the economy collapsed because they had most of the country’s oil reserves, partially because he had promised to step down in 2020 and recently announced that he had changed his mind and would run for President again, partially because he’s been in charge since 1989 and people are more than ready for a change, and partially because he’s a dickhead.

But, mostly, it’s because food prices have skyrocketed recently, because people will put up with a lot of shit from their elected leaders, but they won’t take not being able to eat food. People like food. And not dying of starvation.

Al-Bashir is claiming that the media is making the protests seem more dramatic than they are and that Arab Spring protesters have infiltrated the country (from… 2011?) and are radicalizing otherwise peaceful Sudanese, and when you get to those excuses you’re usually at the bottom of the barrel. However, on the bright side, every shitty Middle Eastern oil monarchy has pledged their support for Al-Bashir, because he said “Arab Spring” and they’re fucking terrified of that.

THE TTC IS RAISING FARES AGAIN

Because the city of Toronto is governed by children and by people wholly in the pocket of real estate developers, who never ever ever want property taxes raised, instead of raising property taxes to properly fund the TTC we’re getting another fare increase! Ten cents on all fares (other than the adult hard cash fare of $3.25), because conservative municipal politicians are always, always willing to stick it to transit riders whenever possible. I’ve written here before about transit death spirals, in the context of the New York City transit system being a model of transit finance that no sane jurisdiction should want to repeat, but welcome to Ontario, I guess.

YOUR BAD CLIMATE NEWS OF THE WEEK IS…

The melt rate of Greenland’s ice is so dramatic that scientists are now predicting it could affect global sea level rise within the next twenty years, continuing our global warming trend of “all that awful stuff that seemed far away will now actually probably happen while you’re alive.” There is enough overland ice on top of Greenland to raise the global sea level by six meters; although it probably won’t all melt within the next twenty years, you really only need a couple of extra feet to cause havoc in a whole lot of places (Florida, Shanghai, the Nile delta, more than a few cities in Japan).

The scientists of course emphasized that nothing is written in stone and that we can reverse carbon outflows and maybe even decarbonize the atmosphere if we’re willing to spend the money, because that is what climate scientists do now when they’re not doing science: beg everybody else to listen to them about the massive impending doom we’re creating.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

The January Man (1989, Pat O’Connor, Hoopla) - 0.5/5

The Tall Blond Man With One Black Shoe (1972, Yves Robert, Kanopy) - 3/5

We started watching Cavendish on CBC and it’s a little off-kilter, but pleasantly so; Mark Little and Andrew Bush have been funny for a long time and it’s good to see them getting to the point where they’re consistent as well as inspired. Oh, and the Royal Rumble this year was certainly overlong but otherwise pretty solid, if you like pro wrestling.

See you in seven.