The U.S. uses sanctions all the damn time. Biden lifted SOME sanctions for a bit, then put them back and now there are calls for yet MORE sanctions. Sanctions all around! IMO, this hasn’t worked, won’t work, hurts the populace more than the leaders, leads to dangerous migrations that end up turning the U.S. more authoritarian as it freaks out about these refugees seeking relief from the policies the U.S. itself put in place, encourages a coalition of dictators who are all facing U.S. sanctions to trade with one another since we won’t trade with them, and is bad for so many more reasons.

From Washington Post (archive):

U.S. sanctions have surged in the past two decades and are in effect in some form in almost a third of all countries. In the case of Venezuela, U.S. officials were — and remain — sharply torn over the financial fusillade.

The Biden administration temporarily lifted key sanctions on Venezuela last year in exchange for promises from Maduro to allow a competitive presidential election, … But because Maduro has failed to follow through on most of his commitments, the Biden administration reimposed the sanctions.

If you prefer Al Jazeera:

Since 2014, output has contracted by 70 percent, more than twice the hit the United States suffered during the Great Depression…Over that period, some 7.7 million Venezuelans – a quarter of the population – have left the country in search of work.

Biden inherited a strategy of maximum pressure on Venezuela from President Trump. But despite applied pressure, consecutive rounds of sanctions failed to dislodge Maduro.

Biden, meanwhile, pursued a different approach. Under the 2023 Barbados Agreement, he eased some sanctions – notably on oil and debt – for political guarantees, namely free and fair elections and the release of detained US citizens.

The deal allowed Venezuela to earn an additional $740m in oil sales from last October to March. But after Maduro blocked Machado from running, and following the revival of a territorial dispute with Guyana, Biden re-imposed US sanctions in April.

Quick Post election status: https://www.axios.com/2024/07/30/biden-gop-sanction-venezuela-election-maduro

Congressional Republicans are pressing the Biden administration to impose harsh sanctions on Venezuela’s government for allegedly “subverting” the results of the country’s presidential election on Sunday.

Decades ago, before the internet, when your local radio stations and newspapers paid for service to a special machine that constantly churned out stories from stringers and main branches, there was a saying that I no longer remember but went something like, “Associated Press gets the story first; United Press gets it right.”

We never doubted that AP/UP/Reu/(etc.) were feeding most the news. The sources were right there in print.

It is good to remind people that while there are an endless number of websites, most news still comes from a handful of sources. I will even agree that our sources are all biased.

That said there are some stories where bias should be expected; where there aren’t really two sides. Example: “Locals outraged by villian’s kicking puppies!” Good reporting might include the reasoning, but the public is not going to side with the puppy-kicker. Surely there was a better way to handle the situation before it got to that.

The public does not side with Hitler, either. Personally, I am thankful that the larger public has been ‘brainwashed’ into thinking Hitler was ‘bad’. It saddens me that there are Nazis (or neo-Nazis) in countries that fought to end that vile cause. The citizenry should know better. More than that, the citizenry should know that all autocrats are bad. Any benevolent dictator is still mortal and will cede the position to someone else, and it won’t be long before the ‘someone else’ is not benevolent.

So: thank you for posting the link reminding everyone to be critical of all news sources, but also remember that some things are fairly reported. Sometimes a point of view is valid. Sometimes there is an actual solid truth that is being told. Yes, sometimes that truth is getting sensationalized, but that doesn’t it make it less true.

For this particular case, I will re-iterate that I am worried about potential strife. If my family was living in Venezuela, I would want a stable and well funded government without corruption and without dictatorship. I don’t think the people had that as a ballot option, and I don’t trust any of the players. I do miss Chavez, though. The U.S. gave him a raw deal.

I just love it when someone posts propaganda and then goes into their own thread attempting to discredit everyone else as propaganda.

I’m anticipating strife and reporting from additional sources. This could get ugly and people should be aware of it.

Note that al-jazeera itself reported this in the article you linked:

“Everything we have seen so far indicates the results of the government are just produced,” Phil Gunson, International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Venezuela, told Al Jazeera. He claimed the tallies announced by the government-controlled electoral authority did not correspond to the votes cast.

“The result that the opposition claims is the correct one … corresponds very closely to what opinion polls have been saying for the last several months,” Gunson said. “All the partial results we have seen so far indicate the opposition got something like three-fifths of the vote.”

Maybe. APnews says:

Authorities delayed releasing the results from each of the 30,000 polling booths nationwide, promising only to do so in the “coming hours,” hampering attempts to verify the results.

After finally claiming to have won, Maduro accused unidentified foreign enemies of trying to hack the voting system.

Per bbc:

• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was among those expressing his scepticism after the result was announced by the National Electoral Council, a body which is dominated by government loyalists.

• The UK Foreign Office also expressed concern over the results

• The Chilean president, Gabriel Boric, also said he found the result “hard to believe”.

• Uruguay’s president said of the Maduro government: “They were going to ‘win’ regardless of the actual results.”

• In a congratulatory message, President Vladimir Putin told Mr Maduro: “Remember, you are always a welcome guest on Russian soil.”

That said, I didn’t really want Maria Machado “—derided by the Chavista leadership for her pro-market views and her upper-class background“ — to lead a puppet government after getting kicked off the ballot.

yeah yeah yeah, and not just there and not just the U.S. DoD. I think we all understand that psyops are a common military tactic. We can’t even be assuaged by the idea that the U.S. government isn’t ‘allowed’ to run such campaigns on its own citizens because: why would they even worry about that when they can just ask a dark-money PAC or the media to do it for them?

lol!

Edit: ok, I laughed, but I wanna be clear: not at you. I don’t think any of it SHOULD work like that, but in my imagination, I can visualize it happening, and some of the crap that went down what with the National Weather Service agreeing with a sharpie edit to their map… I just can’t exclude the idea that such craziness could have happened.

– but I totally admit I was just riffing on a concept

No, but I think he likes to order the military around and might give a rambling ‘order’ like, ‘China bad. China vaccines bad. Why send good vaccines to those sh-thole countries for free?’ – and then in so many words telling the Pentagon to make them all f-off and die.

The U.S. admission followed a June 14 Reuters investigation that revealed how the Pentagon launched a secret psychological operation to discredit Chinese vaccines and other COVID aid in 2020 and 2021, at the height of the pandemic. As a result of the Reuters investigation, the Philippine Senate Foreign Relations Committee launched a hearing into the matter and sought a response from the U.S.

According to the June 25 document, Pentagon officials concluded its anti-vax campaign was “misaligned with our priorities.” It says the U.S. military told Filipino officials that operatives “ceased COVID-related messaging related to COVID-19 origins and COVID-19 vaccines in August 2021.”

… so Trump?

I imagine Biden had a lot of fires to put out once he became President in January 2021, but it would have been nice if this scheme ended sooner.

True, but I’d still rather infrastructure to be publicly held utilities. Energy suppliers are a strange case because any company can become part of the grid, but the power lines to our homes are generally controlled by one entity. I want at least that entity to be responsive to the public, but I also don’t want random suppliers taking down the grid.

I’m paranoid that if/when governments get in an argument, foreign infrastructure will either shut off or escalate pricing such that the public suffers (and yells at their local leaders to ‘do something!’).

Chinese-backed companies have distinct advantages over competitors in the U.S., such as heavily subsidized supply chains for raw polysilicon and unfinished solar modules, as well as low-cost government financing.

U.S.-based Convalt, for example, is struggling to bring online 10 GW of U.S. capacity at a factory it started building in upstate New York in 2022.

“If we are to succeed, we need American manufacturers like Convalt to survive this onslaught of low prices, to build factories with capacities that allow us to compete against the largest global firms, with Chinese beneficial ownership,” CEO Hari Achuthan said

This is one of the many reasons it is a bad idea to privatize utilities/infrastructure. That said, U.S. subsidies helped destroy economies across the globe (like Jamaica’s dairy farmers via world bank loan rules), so it is basically ‘fair play’ for China to play a similar game.

Whoooosh!

I love Amy Good, I love Democracy NOW! That said, Russian disinformation in the US is always going to be different from US disinformation in the US. At the very least, when the US does it, it’ll benefit a rich American rather than a rich Russian.

Too soon