The U.S. and Russia Almost See Eye to Eye on Venezuela

The U.S. and Russia Almost See Eye to Eye on Venezuela

By: Analysis | Stratfor.com / Bill O’Reilly.com

The political interests of Russia and the United States intersect in nations across the world, and Venezuela is no exception. Both global powers want political stability in the country, although for different reasons. The United States wants to avoid an escalation of violence there, and the Russians, as well as the Chinese, want to protect oil investments and the repayment of loans. And Washington and Moscow have ample reason to be concerned about Venezuela’s stability. A confrontation between government elites and a dissident faction of the ruling party is threatening to balloon into a wider conflict. Opposition-led protests have lasted more than 100 days, and unrest spurred by food shortages, inflation and deep dissatisfaction with the government is spreading. And because of the growing risk of a coup, middle-ranking officials in the armed forces are under increased surveillance. To further complicate matters, oil prices remain low and Venezuela's public finances are depleted, meaning that an economic recovery will take decades. In short, there is no simple way out of the crisis.

However intractable the country's long-term economic problems are, Russia or Cuba – a security ally to Caracas — may eventually provide some relief for Venezuela's immediate political problems through an offer of political asylum. Venezuela's deeply unpopular president, Nicolas Maduro, risks losing his office in an election scheduled for November 2018. The country’s ruling elites see this potential loss of power as an unacceptable risk to their political privileges and personal safety. In response, Maduro and political and military elites are pushing to rewrite the country’s constitution and purge dissenters from their ranks in an effort to cling to power. However, reports from Stratfor sources indicate that Maduro has also explored seeking political asylum. For more than a year, Stratfor has received persistent reports that he has considered asking for refuge in Russia or Cuba. He may have sweetened his request to Russia with offers of mineral concessions. But even if Maduro eventually secures an exile deal with Russia or Cuba, other military and political officials at risk of arrest in Venezuela or extradition to the United States will rely on the constitutional rewrite to improve their chances of political survival.

The talks on asylum appear to be part of larger discussions in which the interests of the United States, Cuba, Russia and China converge. According to a Stratfor source, Cuba is a key part of indirect talks between Russia and the United States on Venezuela. The government of Raul Castro conveys Russian and Chinese positions (as well as Maduro's) to the United States. And former Spanish prime minister and mediator Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero represents U.S. interests. Maduro ordered the release of opposition politician Leopoldo Lopez from prison on July 8 after months of negotiations involving Cuba and Zapatero. His decision, an apparent concession to the United States and the opposition, did not include input from key Venezuelan leaders like Vice President Tareck el Aissami or Diosdado Cabello, leader of the ruling party. Lopez's transfer to house arrest – a minor move compared to the larger forces affecting Venezuela — was likely intended to soften street protests. Lopez's release could also help Cuba curry favor with Venezuela's opposition. Given Cuba's reliance on access to Venezuelan fuel, Havana may hope that Lopez's release will help it curry favor with Venezuela’s opposition in case the Maduro government falls and the opposition finds itself in control.

For Moscow, its desire for a peaceful resolution in Venezuela likely lies in its vested interest in the country's resources. Russian oil company Rosneft owns stakes in joint ventures with the Venezuelan government in the Orinoco Belt. Separate reports from Stratfor sources suggest that the Russian government would like additional mineral concessions, although their nature and location are unclear. And an asylum deal may also have strategic implications. Brokering the departure of Maduro may give the Russians leverage in their broader negotiations with the United States on other contentious topics, such as Syria, Ukraine or the European borderlands. On the other hand, China is willing to work with any government in Caracas, as long as it respects China’s investments and repays loans made to the Venezuelan government, according to a source.

In contrast, specific U.S. interests in Venezuela are far clearer than those of the Russians. Although Venezuela is a secondary issue for Washington, a peaceful resolution is better than a violent confrontation. The United States would also like to see timely, fair elections in Venezuela, and the drug trafficking conduit through the country is also a continuing concern. However, Washington has few policy tools with which it can directly influence the political confrontation in the country. Aside from indirect discussions with Venezuela, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump appears to be relying on the limited avenues its predecessors used. In February 2017 the Department of the Treasury sanctioned Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami for his suspected role in cocaine trafficking to the United States. Additional sanctions may be implemented against individual Venezuelan political leaders. The Trump administration is still deciding whether to adopt a more aggressive stance, and the possibility of sanctions against the oil sector have been floated as a means of pressuring the government to hold free elections. The White House has also moved to tighten sanctions on Cuban entities controlled by its armed forces. In the near term, that move will drive the Cubans to continue to support the Maduro government.

A negotiated transition from the Maduro government — in which power passes to the vice president — could temporarily reduce confrontation between the opposition and the government. However, it is no guarantee of long-term political stability. According to a Stratfor source, the Russian or Cuban governments would be willing to accept the president and his wife, Cilia Flores, but not other political figures. Cuba may be willing to take in Maduro and his entourage, but large numbers of Venezuelan political figures could become a liability, given the potential for U.S. demands for extradition. In the absence of a political solution that protects their interests, vulnerable officials, who include El Aissami, Cabello, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol and members of the Francisco de Miranda Front, will keep pushing for an assembly to rewrite the constitution. And barring a drastic event, such as a successful military coup, this drive will move forward and remain a trigger for unrest. So, despite U.S. and Russian hopes, there is no easy way out of the turmoil in Venezuela.

This article originally appeared on Stratfor.com

The Tyranny of Pseudo-Science

 

Contributed by Mark Morton...

The Tyranny of Pseudo-Science
By Bruce Walker, American Thinker


The hysterical reaction of the left to Scott Pruitt's plan to create two competing teams of scientists to study from opposite positions the left's pet myth, man-made global warming, shows just how anti-science the left has become.  The left is a single, stupid collective mind that is utterly incapable of truly independent and free thought.  The left is very much like the Inner Party in Orwell's classic, 1984, where party members believe things that are obviously not true and in which dissent is – quite literally – unthinkable.

All totalitarianism purports to rest upon "science," and all totalitarian science slavishly follows what the state and the party of statism desire.  Institutions are inevitably infiltrated by leftists and used to rubber-stamp whatever the state wants.  Ben Stein in his documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed showed how any academicians who question Darwin's increasingly silly theory of evolution by natural selection are hounded, denied tenure, and even fired for questioning authority and deviating from orthodoxy.

The drones turned out by academia who willingly put on blinders and indifferently accept as scientific dogma whatever the left wishes are not scientists, whatever credentials institutions may give them.  They are simply cadres or hacks who reject scientific inquiry and embrace political correctness by blessing it as "science."

Global warming is a perfect example of how this works.  Leftists parrot the line of "settled science," oblivious to the fact that "settled science" is murdered science.  Science is a process, not a result, and science demands that conventional opinion be rigorously questioned.  The true scientists are those who do just that, but institutions vomit these true scientists out and recoil in horror that anyone dare question the party line.

The history of science has often been the history of a Newton or Maxwell or Kelvin or Einstein or Heisenberg proposing new explanations for phenomena that turned "settled science" on its head.  The consensus opinion of scientists has been wrong so often that it is a wonder that anyone who professes to be a "scientist" would ever present this sort of "majority rules" science as anything but comedy.

It is a sad commentary on life today that the will of the majority permeates almost everything we do as social creatures, including, now, the pseudo-science of institutionalized "science."  As sad as that is – because it means the death of real science – it is frightening that so many political leaders have so suspended any critical thinking or independent reflection that they follow the herd mentality even in this area.

What conservatives ought to do is push hard for Scott Pruitt to produce two teams that critique seriously global warming.  Conservatives also ought to push this approach for a whole raft of issues that have been presumably resolved by scientists dedicated to and beholden to institutions.

Why not have two teams of biologists and related disciplines each marshal the best arguments for and against evolution by Darwinian natural selection?  Why not have the Department of Education create two opposing teams to study the relative merits of public education and homeschooling?  Why not have two teams of economists, historians, and statisticians examine the success or failure of Keynesian economics?

So many things have been foisted on us without any real scientific method at all simply to conform to the party line of leftism.  Homosexuality is deemed normal, though psychologists and psychiatrists several decades ago believed just the opposite.  DDT was banned (and hundreds of millions of innocents in the Third World doomed) because the pop science of Rachel Carson went unchallenged – why not review that finding through competing arguments of teams of zoologists and related experts?  Many other topics could be put on this list.

The real benefit of this that if it can be shown that again and again, "science" is simply the tyranny of pseudo-science, then the whole rotten structure of modern academia can be forced into contrition and reform, assuming that we even need academia any longer.  All the awful and failed government policies based upon this pseudo-science could be thrown into the dustbin of history, along with the racial "science" of the Nazis and the bogus botany of the Soviet charlatan Lysenko.

At the federal level and at the state level, where Republicans dominate most states, this ought to be a high priority.  The danger of going with the slothful, craven flow of pseudo-science is great, and the blessings of debunking it are profound.

The Day the Music Died

The Day the Music Died  BillOReilly.com Staff

A stunning – and stunningly disturbing - event took place this past weekend.  But unless you were scouring the news very carefully, chances are you didn't even hear of it.  The annual Bravalla Festival, one of the most popular summer music concerts in Sweden, was abruptly canceled.  There will be no festival next year.  Or ever.  Given that tens of thousands of tickets were sold, the problem was not attendance.  Nor was there any difficulty booking big-name rap and rock stars.  No, this festival was canceled because of something far more ominous – Bravalla has become synonymous with rape and sexual assault.  Festival officials, as they announced the end of Bravalla, complained that "certain men" don't know how to behave.  You might wonder if those "certain men" are strapping blonde Swedes with names like Erik, Viktor, and Gustav.  But in fact, the assailants are allegedly immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, and other predominantly Muslim areas of the world. One year ago the Bravalla Festival gained a measure of infamy when police reported five rapes and a dozen cases of molestation.  The story got minor coverage in some media outlets, including the New York Times, which described the assailants as "foreigners" and "refugees."  Predictably, the Times also warned of a "far-right" backlash.  This year the situation was even more sickening, with four reported rapes and 23 instances of sexual assault.  And the Times?  The "paper of record" chose to run a brief Associated Press dispatch noting that the festival has been shut down.  Nowhere was there any mention that Muslim immigrants were the likely perps.  Sweden, like many European socialist paradises, has been in a state of deep denial about its refugee crisis.  If you believe authorities and tourism officials, immigrants are fitting in quite nicely in the world's most liberal nation.  But what about those rumors of "no-go zones," where crime is rampant and where police fear to tread?  Well, we're assured that's just "fake news" perpetrated by anti-immigrant groups. But earlier this year a courageous British reporter named Katie Hopkins decided to take a look for herself.  She ventured into some of Sweden's imaginary "no-go zones" and spoke with women who are absolutely terrified of going out alone, day or night.  They know that crossing onto the wrong street in some cities is an invitation to harassment, assault, even rape. These women are also afraid of feminists and liberals, who accuse them of being racists if they speak the truth.  Hopkins wrote this about one woman she met in Stockholm:  "The migrant men scare her.  But it is the Swedish women who have silenced her."  Bravalla is not the only music festival where women are in jeopardy.  There were dozens of rapes and assaults at another concert a few years ago, allegedly committed by young Afghan men who had been embraced by Sweden's outstretched arms.  And of course it's not just Sweden.  In Germany, New Year's Eve of 2016 was marred by sexual assaults and rapes in many cities.  Police reported that more than one-thousand women were victimized by hordes of young men.  Again, the perps weren't Wolfgang, Hans, und Dieter.  They were described by the women as men of "Arab or North African appearance." Governments in Europe and a compliant media do their best to ignore the unending and escalating threat of violence.  It simply does not fit the liberal narrative, which dictates that all cultures and all religions are pretty much the same.  But reality has a very harsh way of prevailing over fantasy.  Sweden has the highest rate of immigration in Europe, having taken in tens of thousands of refugees from Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere.  So you can think of the country as the canary in the coal mine.  That proverbial canary is now gasping for air as European bureaucrats turn a blind eye.  Most Swedes still embrace their reputation for tolerance and liberalism.  Many even seem quite willing to sacrifice a music festival or two if that's what it takes to display their virtue.  And they willingly pay exorbitant taxes to subsidize refugees who despise Sweden's libertine culture and sexual permissiveness.  Let's put it this way:  The world's most tolerant people are inviting the world's most intolerant people into their nation and their cities.  The Swedes believe it's a noble experiment.  But whether noble or foolish, it is an experiment doomed to fail.  The Bravalla Music Festival was just one casualty.  There will be many more.  Ironically, the festival urged fans to "choke hatred and violence and let the music win."  Well, hatred and violence won and the music lost.  In the process, another small part of Europe has vanished, thanks to cowardly ideologues who so desperately cling to their open-border, one-world fantasies.  A once-great continent and its cultures are slowly dying.  To be more accurate, they are committing suicide.

What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?

Somewhere along the route...

What if Major Causes of Poverty Are Behavioral?


George Will, National review 

Following the success sequence — getting an education, a job, and a spouse before begetting children — acts as insurance against poverty. 

The Bronx, the only one of New York City’s five boroughs that is on the American mainland, once had a sociological as well as geographical distinction. In the 1930s it was called, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, “the city without a slum.” It was “the one place in the whole of the nation where commercial housing was built during the Great Depression.” In the third quarter of the 20th century, however, there came, particularly in the South Bronx, social regression that Moynihan described as “an Armageddonic collapse that I do not believe has its equal in the history of urbanization.” 

Of the several causes of descent, there and elsewhere, into the intergenerational transmission of poverty, one was paramount: family disintegration. Some causes of this remain unclear, but something now seems indisputable: Among today’s young adults, the “success sequence” is insurance against poverty. The evidence is in “The Millennial Success Sequence,” published by the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies and written by Wendy Wang of the IFS and W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and AEI. 

The success sequence, previously suggested in research by, among others, Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution, is this: First get at least a high-school diploma, then get a job, then get married, and only then have children. Wang and Wilcox, focusing on millennials ages 28 to 34, the oldest members of the nation’s largest generation, have found that only 3 percent who follow this sequence are poor.

A comparably stunning 55 percent of this age cohort have had children before marriage. Only 25 percent of the youngest baby boomers (those born between 1957 and 1964) did that. Eighty-six percent of the Wang-Wilcox millennials who put “marriage before the baby carriage” have family incomes in the middle or top third of incomes. Forty-seven percent who did not follow the sequence are in the bottom third. 

One problem today, Wilcox says, is the “soul-mate model of marriage,” a self-centered approach that regards marriage primarily as an opportunity for personal growth and fulfillment rather than as a way to form a family. Another problem is that some of the intelligentsia see the success sequence as middle-class norms to be disparaged for being middle-class norms. And as AEI social scientist Charles Murray says, too many of the successful classes, who followed the success sequence, do not preach what they practice, preferring “ecumenical niceness” to being judgmental. 

In healthy societies, basic values and social arrangements are not much thought about. They are “of course” matters expressing what sociologists call a society’s “world-taken-for-granted.” They have, however, changed since President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed “unconditional” war on poverty. This word suggested a fallacious assumption: Poverty persisted only because of hitherto weak government resolve regarding the essence of war — marshalling material resources. 

But what if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral — bad choices and the cultures that produce them? If so, policymakers must rethink their confidence in social salvation through economic abundance. 

What if large causes of poverty are not matters of material distribution but are behavioral — bad choices and the cultures that produce them? Reversing social regression using public policies to create a healthy culture is akin to “nation-building” abroad, an American undertaking not recently crowned with success. Wang and Wilcox recommend education focused on high-level occupational skills, subsidizing low-paying jobs, and “public and private social marketing campaigns,” from public schools to popular media, promoting marriage toward the end of the success sequence. 

Success is, of course, more complex than adherence to the sequence. Much cultural capital often is unavailable to poor people. In J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, his memoir of his rise from Appalachian poverty to Yale Law School, he recounts his experience in the recruiting process with prestigious law firms, during which he learned, among many other things he did not learn at home, “use the fat spoon for soup” and “your shoes and belt should match.” These may seem trivial matters; to upward mobility, they are not. 

Much more important, however, is the success sequence. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s day, as in ours, it was said that problems were so daunting that old principles must yield to new realities. Perhaps, however, unfortunate new realities are the result of the disregard of old principles. Hawthorne recommended consulting “respectable old blockheads” who had “a death-grip on one or two ideas which had not come into vogue since yesterday morning.” Ideas like getting an education, a job, and a spouse before begetting children. 

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449233/millennials-poverty-success-sequence-must-be-followed

— George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. © 2017 Washington Post Writers Group