Why the US is interested in Venezuala

The Saker interviews Michael Hudson to learn why the USA is suddenly so interested in Venezuela, of all places:

The Saker: Could you outline the various reforms and changes introduced by Hugo Chavez? What did he do right, and what did he do wrong?

Michael Hudson: Chavez sought to restore a mixed economy to Venezuela, using its government revenue – mainly from oil, of course – to develop infrastructure and domestic spending on health care, education, employment to raise living standards and productivity for his electoral constituency.

What he was unable to do was to clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad – while running away themselves.

This was not “wrong”. It merely takes a long time to change an economy’s disruption – while the U.S. is using sanctions and “dirty tricks” to stop that process.

The Saker: What are, in your opinion, the causes of the current economic crisis in Venezuela – is it primarily due to mistakes by Chavez and Maduro or is the main cause US sabotage, subversion and sanctions?

Michael Hudson: There is no way that Chavez and Maduro could have pursued a pro-Venezuelan policy aimed at achieving economic independence without inciting fury, subversion and sanctions from the United States. American foreign policy remains as focused on oil as it was when it invaded Iraq under Dick Cheney’s regime. U.S. policy is to treat Venezuela as an extension of the U.S. economy, running a trade surplus in oil to spend in the United States or transfer its savings to U.S. banks.

By imposing sanctions that prevent Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citco, the United States is making it impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This is forcing it into default, which U.S. diplomats hope to use as an excuse to foreclose on Venezuela’s oil resources and seize its foreign assets much as Paul Singer hedge fund sought to do with Argentina’s foreign assets.

Just as U.S. policy under Kissinger was to make Chile’s “economy scream,” so the U.S. is following the same path against Venezuela. It is using that country as a “demonstration effect” to warn other countries not to act in their self-interest in any way that prevents their economic surplus from being siphoned off by U.S. investors.

The Saker: What in your opinion should Maduro do next (assuming he stays in power and the USA does not overthrow him) to rescue the Venezuelan economy?

Michael Hudson: I cannot think of anything that President Maduro can do that he is not doing. At best, he can seek foreign support – and demonstrate to the world the need for an alternative international financial and economic system.

He already has begun to do this by trying to withdraw Venezuela’s gold from the Bank of England and Federal Reserve. This is turning into “asymmetrical warfare,” threatening to de-sanctify the dollar standard in international finance. The refusal of England and the United States to grant an elected government control of its foreign assets demonstrates to the entire world that U.S. diplomats and courts alone can and will control foreign countries as an extension of U.S. nationalism.

The price of the U.S. economic attack on Venezuela is thus to fracture the global monetary system. Maduro’s defensive move is showing other countries the need to protect themselves from becoming “another Venezuela” by finding a new safe haven and paying agent for their gold, foreign exchange reserves and foreign debt financing, away from the dollar, sterling and euro areas.

The only way that Maduro can fight successfully is on the institutional level, upping the ante to move “outside the box.” His plan – and of course it is a longer-term plan – is to help catalyze a new international economic order independent of the U.S. dollar standard. It will work in the short run only if the United States believes that it can emerge from this fight as an honest financial broker, honest banking system and supporter of democratically elected regimes. The Trump administration is destroying illusion more thoroughly than any anti-imperialist critic or economic rival could do!

In short, Venezuela is another crisis point for US financial imperialism. The inability of Venezuela to take possession of its own gold in London is yet another indication that the neo-liberal world order is increasingly unstable. It’s not about the oil, it’s about the debt.

It certainly doesn’t help that US officials are doing incredibly stupid things, like the Secretary of State calling Juan Guaido “duly-elected” when the man has never even run for President of Venezuela! The two candidates who lost the 2018 election to Nicolás Maduro were Henri Falcón and Javier Bertucci, while Henrique Capriles was the losing candidate in the 2013 election that was also won by Maduro.

1MB is NOT a bug

If you are experimenting with (the thing that shall not be named but will be announced Friday), the 1MB limit on image storage is most certainly NOT a bug. Free accounts get 1MB, which is just enough for an avatar and a header, and not very much more.

More importantly, this approach allows us to defang a major attack vector utilized by anonymous trolls, serial harassers, and monkey-wrenchers on social media sites.

One more thing. If you are an Infogalactic supporter – and thank you very much, all of you – you need to email me BOTH your @name and your support level. I may write 900-page epic fantasy novels without an outline, but nevertheless, I am entirely incapable of remembering every single supporter’s precise support level on the basis if their email account. Telling me “my name is X” is great, but it does not tell me whether you are a Bronze, Silver, or Gold supporter.

The support badges and additional text limits are expected to arrive before we announce publicly on Friday.

UPDATE: our payment processor is suddenly taking belated issue with our subscription model because it is technically on a different site, so we have taken down the products from the store while we resolve the matter. If you are already a Burn Unit member, please continue to provide me with your username and support level in order to have your status upgraded.

Maximal mutations

As I promised last night, here are the numbers I utilized in last night’s debate on the theory of evolution by natural selection with biologist JF Gariepy:

BACTERIA
Years: 3,800,000,000
Years per generation: 0.000071347 (37.5 mins per generation)
Generations per fixed mutation: 1600
Years per fixed mutation: 0.114
Maximum fixed mutations: 33,288,000,916

Source: Sequencing of 19 whole genomes detected 25 mutations that were fixed in the 40,000 generations of the experiment.
NATURE, 2009

NOTE: These 25 mutations were fixed in parallel. The 1600 generations per fixed mutation represent an average. So, JF’s appeal to massive parallel propagation is already accounted for, at least with regards to observed fixation in bacteria.

MAMMALS
Years: 200,000,000
Years per generation: 4.3
Generations per fixed mutation: 1600
Years per fixed mutation: 6880
Maximum fixed mutations: 29,070

NOTE: the bottom number represents the maximum number of fixed mutations from Morganucodontid to Homo sapiens sapiens.

CHLCA
Years: 9,000,000
Years per generation: 20
Generations per fixed mutation: 1600 (Note: 8170 generations fastest Y-chromosomal lineage observed and extrapolated.)
Years per fixed mutation: 32000
Maximum fixed mutations: 125

NOTE: the 9 million represents the latest average estimate for the Chimpanzee-Human Last Common Ancestor, which estimate has ranged from as little as 4 million years on the basis of the molecular clock to 25 million years.

Now, the primary problem with JF’s appeal to parallel gene propagation is that it requires a minimum of 15,000,000 mutations to become fixed in the human population, and another 15,000,000 mutations to become fixed in the chimpanzee population, and to do so in an amount of time that permits 125 fixed mutations in series.

In other words, there must be 120,000 genes simultaneously fixing throughout the entire population in parallel at all times, and the same process has to happen TWICE. This does not strike me as credible, even if we don’t bother questioning JF’s claim that the observed genetic differences between human and chimpanzee lie on a spectrum and that not all humans will possess the 15 million mutations that separate Homo sapiens sapiens from Pan troglodytes and that not all chimpanzees possess the additional 15 million mutations that separate Pan troglodytes from Homo sapiens sapiens.

Or, to put it more simply, there have been 450,000 chimp and human generations since the CHLCA. Based on the number of mutations observed fixing in parallel in the Nature study, that would permit 562 total fixed mutations in that time frame. Which is only 29,999,438 short of the approximate number observed.

I understand that some people are disappointed that I did not drive these points home during the debate, or that I did not answer JF’s rhetoric with any rhetorical killshots of my own. But JF is not, and has never been, my target. I’m hunting much bigger game. That being said, I will analyze his program and make use of it at some point in the not-too-distant future.

Evolution debate tonight

Just a reminder that I’ll be debating biologist JF Gariepy tonight at 7 PM EST on The Public Space. Place your bets; JFG’s fans appear to be of the opinion that I will be, and I quote, “rekt”.

I am, to the contrary, entirely confident that I will be presenting a critique of TENS that is, at the very least, an uncommon one, and possibly even a unique one, seeing as how it comes from an economics perspective. The only question, as far as I can tell, is if I am somehow failing to account for a critical component, otherwise, I see as little likelihood that orthodox biologists will be able respond to my critique any more successfully than free trade economists responded to my labor mobility argument.

UPDATE: buckle up. Here is the link to the debate.

VERDICT: It was a very interesting and useful conversation, in my opinion, more of a mutual exploration than a debate per se. JF quickly understood where I was going and correctly focused on the point that the simple statistical model does not address, which is the rate of parallel propagation of the mutations that become sufficiently fixed to become an ongoing part of the population. What I felt that he failed to grasp was that we were talking about maximum possible propagations, so even the addition of the parallel propagating is unlikely to provide enough padding to allow the theory to fit within the time limits.

And, as I noted, if the parallel propagating is happening as quickly as it is required in order to account for the necessary changes, we should be able to observe it more readily in the laboratory as well as in the wild.

I’ll post the summary of the crude fixed mutation model tomorrow.

The Boston Herald scalps Warren

Big trouble for Fauxcahontas. HEAP big trouble:

Stick a fork in cold crab omelette — the fake Indian is all done now.

She speak-um with forked tongue one time too many, and now The Washington Post, of all places, has scalped her. The smoke signals went out last night — as early as 1986 she was lying on a Texas bar application that she was “American Indian.”

Lieawatha admit-um she talk with forked tongue, only she use white-eye language, calling it “furthering confusion.”

No confusion anywhere. You are an utter fraud. Fake Indian, you will have many moons to reflect on your serial lies. Never will you be great white father.

Never live-um in white tee-pee. Heap big fraud since buffalo roam the plain, blue-eyed squaw lie about DNA, to make-um more wampum.

So the Boston Globe story last fall claiming she’d never tried to pass as an honest injun, was as phony as a Kevin Cullen column. But hey, it’s the Globe — right, Mike Barnicle? Jason Blair? Patricia X. Smith? Why do you think the fake Indian went to a fake news rag to print her buffalo excrement?

Ugh. And that’s not the only bad news. The incredible bunko artist is busted on this morning. In an unrelated develop, Sen. Elizabeth Warren may be getting sued over some more of her despicable lies.

Because this time she put her shameful falsehoods in a tweet, not in an employment application to Harvard or UPenn law school. Hard to deep-six a tweet, especially one as perniciously false as the one she sent out last month about the Covington Catholic High School students who was accosted first by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites in D.C., and then by a nutty Indian — a real Indian, to be clear, but a fake Vietnam veteran, like Sen. Richard “Stolen Valor” Blumenthal.

This is good news for Horrible Harris, and by extension, for the inevitable Trumpslide 2020.

76 percent approval

The news media is in shock:

CBS News and CNN released instant polls taken immediately after President Trump’s State of the Union address with both polls finding 76 percent of those who watched approved of the speech. The CBS poll 72 percent approved of Trump’s immigration proposals while the CNN poll showed 76 percent approval with 59 percent “very positive.”

Hence all the civnattery in the State of the Union. The fact that civic nationalism is both incoherent and nonexistent doesn’t take away from the fact that it is very, very popular among the electorate, especially the white electorate. And the God-Emperor is, and has always been, a civic nationalist.

This is precisely why I have said, from the days before the South Carolina primary that established him as a serious candidate, that Trump was the best that the USA could hope for, although he would probably not be capable of preserving the USA as a viable, singular political entity. But at least he is moving in the right direction, which marks a sea change in every president since Eisenhower.

What he is accomplishing here is expanding his base, leashing the Republican Establishment, and strangling Never Trump prior to the 2020 election. This will give him more leverage for Building the Wall and Draining the Swamp during that time.

God and the pursuit of happiness

Religious faith is not a psychological problem. To the contrary, it is the lack of religious faith that appears to be the psychological problem.

In the United States, 36 percent of the actively religious describe themselves as “very happy,” while only 25 percent of the inactively religious and 25 percent of the unaffiliated self-identify in this way, Pew revealed.

Similarly, in Japan, those who are religiously active are significantly happier than the religiously inactive and the unaffiliated, with 45 percent, 34 percent, and 31 percent respectively being “very happy.”

In Australia, the gap is wider still, with 45 percent of the religiously active reporting being very happy, as compared with only 33 percent of the religiously inactive and just 32 percent of the unaffiliated.

Man is not made to live without limits, purpose, or meaning. And religion provides all three.

Sweet journo tears

Learn to code, baby. Just learn to code. The ride never ends.

Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.

Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”

I looked at the mentions of my editors, who had been laid off after years at HuffPost, and of other journalists who had lost their jobs. There they were, the swarm of commentators, with their same little carbuncular message: “Learn to code.”

On its own, telling a laid-off journalist to “learn to code” is a profoundly annoying bit of “advice,” a nugget of condescension and antipathy. It’s also a line many of us may have already heard from relatives who pretend to be well-meaning, and who question an idealistic, unstable, and impecunious career choice. But it was clear from the outset that this “advice” was larded through with real hostility—and the timing and ubiquity of the same phrase made me immediately suspect a brigade attack. My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.

Color me dubious

The US Left appears to be protesting too much:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg appeared in public Monday night, her first public outing since her lung cancer surgery last December. Ginsburg, 85, attended a concert celebrating herself titled, Notorious RBG in Song, that featured her daughter-in-law, soprano Patrice Michaels. Attendees said Ginsburg looked, “glam”, “magnificent” and “great”. One man who said he spoke with and was hugged by Ginsburg said she looked “resplendent”.

Actually, she does look pretty great. I wouldn’t say convincing, quite, but she does resemble a living human being. More or less.