DL Open Thread: Monday, January 5, 2025
You may have missed it, but we now have our Hitler. A deranged madman bent on taking over countries aided by a supplicant press and fellow criminals running the government. And destroying anybody who doesn’t belong to the male Aryan race. Not to mention courts dominated by the madman’s chosen minions. The Republican Party is no longer a political party, but an amplifier for fascism. All funded by billionaires and trillionaires.
This has, for the most part, been normalized. It simply can’t become the new normal. If it isn’t already.
Trump Threatens, Let’s See, Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, Cuba. Oh, and the new ‘leader’ of Venezuela. Perfectly normal.
“We’re going to have our very large U.S. oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.
The capture of Maduro and Trump’s comments comes at a time when even a country like Venezuela — with one of the biggest oil resources in the world — isn’t a sure bet for attracting major oil companies.
Not all crude oil is the same — some oil is physically lighter and easier for refineries to process. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and dense, and requires special refineries. Burning any type of oil contributes to climate change, but Venezuela’s oil is “among the dirtiest oils in the world to produce when it comes to global warming,” says Paasha Mahdavi, associate professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In an email, ConocoPhillips spokesperson Dennis Nuss wrote, “ConocoPhillips is monitoring developments in Venezuela and their potential implications for global energy supply and stability. It would be premature to speculate on any future business activities or investments.”
ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.
Still, this isn’t the best time to add to the global oil supply, Monaldi says. There’s currently a worldwide glut of oil. Also, because Venezuela’s oil is particularly bad for the climate, that makes it less attractive for European oil companies with climate goals, Monaldi says.
Some increase in Venezuela’s oil production could happen fairly quickly with more financial support and improved management, according to an analysis by Wood Mackenzie, an energy consultancy.
But Mahdavi says the Trump administration’s plans to jumpstart the industry will be difficult. He notes that it took nearly two decades to revitalize Iraq’s oil industry after the U.S. invasion, though corruption and mismanagement remain pervasive.
And ultimately, notes Kepes, if it’s unclear who is in charge in Venezuela, oil companies will have concerns about the long-term viability of their contracts. “No one’s going to start investing on the ground in a place where there’s no legal contract and viable permission to operate or if there’s concerns about political stability and violence,” he says.
Here’s Why Chris Coons’ Lamentations About ‘Process’ Are Worthless:
HuffPost spoke with Columbia University professor Elizabeth Saunders about what to expect next for U.S. policy on Venezuela and the dire implications of Trump running what she calls a “personalist” foreign policy, as global affairs takes up what she calls a surprising level of his second presidency.
“It’s bad that he didn’t brief Congress, but I think that it’s a bit of a red herring in terms of focusing on the big picture here, which is the utterly chaotic ― and not just poorly planned, but not-planned ― aftermath and the incompetence at every level of this administration with the fate of millions of Venezuelans in the balance. They will suffer for these events.
If they had gotten a briefing ahead of time, it still wouldn’t have made it OK. It still wouldn’t have solved the problem that they had no idea what they were going to do on the day after. It’s better they brief because processes matter, but it’s not a cure-all. I often think of congressional criticism of process questions, like the War Powers Act or repealing the AUMF as things that are like flypaper. They’re a place you can stick your angst … it’s a safe thing to do, complaining about process. It obscures the real issues.
It’s not that process isn’t important, but in this case … Congress is out. So let’s talk about how there’s no White House or national security process, because there used to be one ― and Trump broke it. It’s not that this operation would have gone well if there had been a great process, but it might not have ever happened at all, because in the first term, the advisers did constrain him from his worse impulses. Now he’s in a permissive environment where there’s nothing to stop his whims when he wakes up in the morning from being translated into policy that affects millions around the world. No amount of congressional briefing is going to fix that without serious action.”
It’s about the lawlessness, Chris, not the process.
Donald Trump and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth are mounting an aggressive push to politicise the top ranks of the US military – a push that smacks of Stalinism and could take years to repair, the former infantry chief who trained troops to invade Iraq has warned.
Maj Gen Paul Eaton has sounded the alarm, saying in an interview with the Guardian that the effort to bend the higher echelons of the military to the US president’s will was unparalleled in recent history and could have long-term dire consequences. He warned that both the reputation and efficiency of the world’s most powerful fighting force was in the balance.
“There is an active effort to politicise the armed forces,” Eaton said. “Once you infect the body, the cure may be very difficult and painful for presidents downstream.”
I know you guys can walk and chew gum at the same time. For today, though, I just can’t take my focus off of this.
What do you want to talk about?
Is violence justified now? And if not now, when?
Eh, as satisfying as it might seem, if it’s not organized it’s just going to lead to more backlash.
So…violence is acceptable, provided it is organized…
Didn’t say it was acceptable, just more effective. If random, not so much.
We need a law enforcement group to step up.
There are few groups more conservative than law enforcement.