Jamie Galbraith on the US escaping "from the deadweight of mainstream economic thought" (hopefully!)

In the previous post, I quoted economist James Galbraith on how much China is embedded in the world economy. Since I don't quote him nearly enough on this blog, I thought I would add another reference here.

This is from an article of a year and a half ago, a few weeks before the world weren't yet terribly worried about the news reports of a new strain of coronavirus causing deaths in Wuhan, China: The Dismal Forecasts of the Dismal Scientists The American Prospect 01/10/2021. The economic expansion in the US and Europe was becoming old and feeble by historical standards. And Galbraith was reporting on how mainstream economist were making dreary predictions at a conference he mentions here. One of the main motivations of their predictions, he wrote, was "the natural human desire not to be embarrassed—yet again—by failing to have warned that things may go bad."

The COVID-19 shutdowns obviously depressed economic activity all over the world. Although it's important to note that the official dating of the current recession from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) dates the start of it to February 2020. The mass lockdowns in the US didn't begin until mid-March.

One of the fretting economists Galbraith mentions is "an obscure young Finn, Tuomas Malinen, should however be considered for a prizewinning doomsday scenario." The latter characterization is an ironic one, as he proceeds to explain:

Malinen has a free-market streak, and his main scenario leans toward an Andrew Mellon–style mass liquidation, followed by recovery of the survivors. He would prefer this, for all the carnage, including physical death and destruction, to a “Green-Left fascism, suppressing both individual rights and unpopular economic activities.” Even if it were true that “Nature could be saved ... but at the expense of humanity reverting to slavery and oppression.”

To which Galbraith remarks drily, "This seems a bit over the top."

But he continues in a comment that includes an important observation about China's economic system:

Europe may well be at extreme risk as Malinen fears; the experience of Greece in the financial crisis shows that the financial and political leadership of the European Union is ruthlessly self-protective and predatory; there is no accountability for the suffering caused or recourse for the victims. China is, however, different. The government may be authoritarian but it responds quickly—and massively—to crisis because otherwise it would not survive. Financial analysts have a bit of a blind spot with respect to China; many see that country’s banking sector through Western eyes. In reality, China’s banks are backed by the government and protected by capital controls, making them essentially inseparable from the Chinese state. (my emphasis)

And he expresses a hope that the Biden-Harris Administration has intially fulfilled, in part, if still in relatively small part:

And in the next crisis, the United States may finally be moved to free itself from the deadweight of mainstream economic thought, to retire a worn-out generation of policy advisers, and to move on with the great social, economic, and environmental project known as the Green New Deal. There is a history of radical experiment and popular mobilization in this country, from which democracy emerged stronger, not weaker, than it ever was before. And for many Americans, to escape from the debt trap and from domination by bankers and billionaires into a world of work and public purpose would be the very opposite of slavery and oppression. A better word would be liberation, along with a new freedom, and a new hope. (my emphasis)

Paul Krugman and the coming fight with Republicans over austerity economics

Ron Wyden, the incoming chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the only Democrat quoted on the record by Greg Sargent in this column, A hidden reason that Joe Biden is trying to go big Washington Post 01/15/2021. But I hope they all recognize the lesson from 2009 and the following years:

[M]any Democrats have lived through what happened when former president Barack Obama inherited another major economic crisis from another Republican president.

As has been endlessly hashed out, Obama opted for a stimulus that fell short of what was needed. Putting aside why that happened, what everyone now knows is that it was a serious mistake. Democrats lost the House in 2010 and spent the remainder of Obama’s presidency locked in brutal fiscal trench warfare with a GOP determined to starve the recovery with austerity to cripple his presidency under the guise of fake concerns about spending and deficits.

The actual position of Republicans in the Senate and House is the one Dick Cheney articulated back during his (and Bush II's) Presidency: "Reagan proved deficits don't matter."

That's their position. When they say something different, they are just trying to sucker Democrats into deals they then won't honor. As this article recounts, that was a successful *partisan* strategy for the Republicans during the Obama-Biden Administration because the economic results were so damaging.

Paul Krugman was warning about exactly that in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration. His current analyses are certainly worth following.

Neither defunct ideology, nor bogus economic concerns, nor the vain hope of comity should be allowed to stand in the way of delivering the policies America needs 1/ https://t.co/tWt0uHEq6r

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 15, 2021

His four rules are:

1. Don’t doubt the power of government to help.
2. Don’t obsess about debt.
3. Don’t worry about inflation.
4. Don’t count on Republicans to help govern.

That last point is especially important, and something even the most left-leaning Members of Congress would say in that form: The Republican Party has no interest in bipartisanship as any kind of governing principle. Democrats may be able to pick off some Republican votes in Congress on particular issues. But the notion that make the hearts of TV pundits go pitty-pat that we will see some kind of Bipartisanship consensus on major issues is just wrong. The only exception would be issues on which a large number of Democrats are willing to capitulate to a Republican position.

Krugman caught some deserved criticism from the left for his seeming to pooh-pooh the importance of the $2,000 check issue last month. To his credit, he recognized that he was being tone-deaf on the politics of it. His larger economic argument wasn't wrong: extended unemployment insurance is more important to economic recovery than immediate $2,000 payments. But, as he recognized, that debate was taking place in a very particular political context.

Krugman has actually generally been good on the political side of economic issues. He even uses the term "political economy," which was what economics was called in the 19th century.

The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites 1/ https://t.co/R9CO8GK2kz

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 1, 2018

In current economic trends, Krugman is a "neo-Keynesian," not a post-Keynesian or an adherent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Although Keynesian is generally identified as a left-leaning economic theory, it's not inherent left or progressive. Keynesianism is a way of understanding how economies work. It can be employed for conservative as well as liberal/progressive ones. Andrés Velasco, who was Michelle Bachelet's Finance Minister in Chile 2006-2010, explains in Are We All Keynesians Again? (Project Syndicate 08/25/2020), "we must remember what Keynes taught: fiscal policy should be tightened during good times, precisely so that it can be expansionary during bad times."

That concept is known as balancing the budget across the business cycle with deficits during recessions and surpluses during expansions. But the idea of running surpluses during expansions is particularly inappropriate to the United States today. Jamie Galbraith provides an accessible description of why in his book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too (2008). Short version: as long as the US is a net importer and the dollar is still the de facto world reserve currency, the collective federal, state, and local government spending will be in surplus only in years in which the private sector is in deficit, i.e., investing more than earning.

That is an accounting definition that is based on real-world phenomenon. But it means that assuming that government surpluses are automatically needed in expansionary periods would make for really bad policy. But Jamie Galbraith's father John Kenneth Galbraith had explained in The Affluent Society (1958) a very practical political reason that balancing the budget across the business cycle is near-impossible. That is because lowering taxes or increasing spending during recessions is much easier politically than raising taxes or cutting spending during an expansion.

After the $2,000 flap, I saw some progressive/social-democratic dismissals of Krugman as being just another neoliberal. At least on Twiiter ...

If you look at some of his columns from the 1990s, that might seem plausible, because he is an authority on international trade and he was generally friendly to the neoliberal deregulation trade treaties. But politically, he was one of the most visible critics of the Iraq War and the dishonest claims around it in his New York Times column. And on one of the most spectacular neoliberal fiascos, the imposition of brutal austerity policies on Greece in the 2015 euro crisis, he was severely critical of it. And more generally, he was intensely critical of austerity economics and its adherents' false claims after the 2007-8 crisis. He was also very specific in real time during the Obama-Biden Administration of warning about exactly what Greg Sargent write about in that recent column.

He also popularized the concept of the Very Serious People (VSPs), his mocking term for people like Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles of Simpson-Bowles Commission fame, officially the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, aka, the Catfood Commission, as in let-Grandma-eat-cat-food, because of their focus on cutting Social Security and Medicare. In Krugman's use of the term VSPs, he saw them as people who were accepted by political and media elites because the VSPs repeated familiar ideas they found comfortable, even when there was little real-world basis for them. (See: Joe Wiesenthal, PAUL KRUGMAN: Alan Simpson Is 'All Wrong' And Conventional Wisdom On Economic Policy Is 'Stark Raving Mad' Business Insider 07/14/2012)

Krugman was particularly scornful of the media reverence for Paul Ryan, a once-prominent radical Republican Congressman who pimped austerity policies for years and was treated as a VSP by the media. "Look, the single animating principle of everything Ryan did and proposed was to comfort the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted." He called Ryan "an obvious con artist" who nevertheless managed to "get a reputation for seriousness and fiscal probity." (The Paul Ryan Story: From Flimflam to Fascism New York Times 04/12/2018)

Krugman has also been notable in stressing for years that the asymmetric partisan polarization in American politics was overwhelmingly due to the still-ongoing radicalization of the Republican Party. He was no friend of the lazy mainstream media convention of Both Sides Do It. (Joe Wiesenthal, KRUGMAN: It's Entirely One-Sided: Republicans Are To Blame For Today's 'Nightmarishly Dysfunctional Political Situation' Business Insider 07/12/2012)

In the column on Paul Ryan quoted above, he also addressed one of the key points in Sargent's 2021 column:

Some commentators seem surprised at the way men who talked nonstop about fiscal probity under Barack Obama cheerfully supported tax cuts that will explode the deficit under Trump. They also seem shocked at the apparent indifference of Ryan and his colleagues to Trump’s corruption and contempt for the rule of law. What happened to their principles?

The answer, of course, is that the principles they claimed to have never had anything to do with their actual goals. In particular, Republicans haven’t abandoned their concerns about budget deficits, because they never cared about deficits; they only faked concern as an excuse to cut social programs.

As Sargent puts it:

Many Democrats who lived through that, a lot of whom are still in Congress and some of whom are advising Biden — who himself experienced it as vice president — must be wary of a repeat.

Making them even more wary, one hopes, is the fact that Republican deficit concerns evaporated once a Republican (Donald Trump) became president. Indeed, the Trump economy was good (at least until the coronavirus shattered it) precisely because it was fueled by stimulus. [my emphasis]

So, yes, there are areas, especially on neoliberal deregulation "trade" treaties, where progressives will disagree with Krugman. But on some of the biggest and most urgent issues - the radicalization of the Republican Party and the damage of austerity economics - he has a solid record.

Jamie Galbraith and Yanis Varoufakis on the Coronavirus Recession

James K. Galbraith and Yanis Varoufakis: Another Now #7 DiEM25 TV 05/26/20020:

This is a discussion between my two favorite living economists, Jamie Galbraith and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. They talk some about Jamie's father, John Kenneth Galbraith, at the start. But it's mainly about the COVID crisis and the economic fallout; how it has been handled in various places including China, the US, and Europe; and some about the US Presidential election.

(Trigger warning for conservative Democrats! They say nice things about NATIONAL HEALTH INSURANCE!!!)

Varoufakis asks Galbraith if he's going to vote for Joe Biden. Jamie responds, "I am a religious Democrat. Which is to say, it's the type of a relationship that many people feel toward their church. However ambivalent about it, it's exceedingly hard to leave. So the answer to that is yes, I will vote for Biden. Of course I will."

And he proceeds to say:

I'm not the sort to think that these problems and the kind of crisis that we're facing is the work of a late arriving individual. ... [T]he reason the US economy has crumbled under the impact of the coronavirus is not simply that it had a federal government in the hands of this particular *gang*. It really has to do with the way in which the economy has been engineered over the last 40 years, and in particular in the return from the financial crisis of 13 years ago.

Varoufakis mentions that for him a choice between Angela Merkel and Trump would be a "no-brainer" in choosing Merkel. Given his clashes with Merkel during the last euro crisis, that's a real "jumping the shark" comment for him!

Both of them are careful about excess optimism, it's safe to say. Galbraith quotes here a comment he attributes to William of Orange, "It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere." There's also this very Galbraithian comment relating to the flexibility of free-market dogma when big corporations are threatened with going under: "The US is sustained by its willingness to suspend all pretence of principle in an emergency."

His father took a similar cautious note in the final paragraph of his The Culture of Contentment (1992):

In the past, writers, on taking pen, have assumed that from the power of their talented prose must proceed the remedial action. No one would be more delighted than I were there similar hope from the present offering. Alas, however, there is not. Perhaps as a slight, not wholly inconsequential service, it can be said that we have here had the chance to see and in some small measure to understand the present discontent and dissonance and the not inconsiderable likelihood of an eventual shock to the contentment that is the cause.

That was in 1992, at a relatively early stage of the 40-year stretch of bad economic engineering that Jamie mentions in the video. The political and economic system of the US has had some serious disturbances of contentment in the decades since: Muslim terrorism including 9/11; the Iraq War; the Great Recession that begin in the US in 2007; the Afghanistan War: Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans in 2005; Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017; increasingly obvious manifestations of the climate crisis like the California wildfires; and, now, the COVID-19 crisis.

The more chronic disturbances to public contentment include the decreasing trend on wages and reduced opportunities for retirement pensions that have been an integral part of the neoliberal order that we now conventionally date from St. Reagan's first administration. The state of both major political parties in the US in their state of asymmetric partisan polarization that has produced a Trumpified Republican Party and a quasi-paralyzed Democratic Party is also a serious crisis, although the extent to which it so far as disturbed the "culture of contentment" that J.K. Galbraith described in 1992 is rather hard to say.

Austerity economics, of course, was already well established as the norm for both parties in the Reagan and Bush 1 Administrations. As the senior Galbraith noted:

In a time of economic recession such as that of the early 1990s, there is a strong case not only for low interest rates but also for increased public expenditure, especially on roads, bridges, airports and other civic needs, and on unemployment compensation and welfare payments, all to employ or protect the unemployed and those otherwise adversely affected.

But there is here a conflict with the tenets of the age of contentment: it is not the comfortable who would thus be aided. And lurking also is the eventual tax effect. During the 1980s, the burgeoning years of contentment, there was the large continuing deficit in the federal budget. Though a topic for voluble discourse, it was less of a threat to the contented than the taxes that would have reduced it. In the ensuing recession a deliberate addition to the deficit, a benefit primarily for those outside the community of contentment and one which might later renew the call for higher levies on those inside, was strongly resisted.

This chronic (and bipartisan) under-investment in public goods has continued until this day. I was a little surprised in the video discussion to hear Jamie Galbraith suggested that not only the European Union but the United States might be confronted in the foreseeable future with a Yugoslavia scenario, i.e., the disintegration of the current political entities. We have seen a concrete example of that with Brexit. It seems less obvious for the United States. And the Yugoslavia scenario to which Jamie refers doesn't necessarily imply some replay of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. But he's actually framing that in the historical context of how the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was a major inflection point in the Soviet political system.

But is could be a useful metaphor. If Republicans want to claim that basic social-insurance measures will turn the US into Venezuela, we can respond that Ronald Reagan economics is actually turning us into Yugoslavia!

Demobilizing the base - standard operating procedure for corporate Democrats

Jamie Galbraith did an essay for Jacobin's academic journal Catalyst 1:3 (Fall 2017) titled The Predator State that points to an important part of how the Democratic Party during the Obama-Biden Presidency consciously weakened itself as an organization willing and capable of responding to popular pressure against the policies associated with the neoliberalism that became the dominant economic paradigm in the US and Britain during the Reagan-Thatcher years in the early 1980s.

Neoliberalism is characterized by its general orientation toward business deregulation, financialization of the economy, reductions in government services and social insurance, privatization of government property and key functions including education, a priority for reducing taxes on the wealthiest while accepting a radical increase in the maldistribution of wealth and income, and an negative emphasis on "individual responsibility," so that the weak and the poor are condemned for their failure to successfully manage their own personal "portfolio" of skills. It is associated with political demobilization and a dominant media with a strong affinity for oligarchical interests.

Galbraith gives us this summary:

This political dispensation [neoliberalism] was initiated in the late 1970s, strongly advanced under Reagan, and fully formed by the middle years of the Clinton administration. It was the heart of politics in the Bush years. There might have been some reason to hope, when President Obama was elected, that it would be contained if not reversed in the wake of the financial crisis. Unfortunately there was no such luck either in the financial sphere or in the way health care reform was designed. The result has been an embedding of predatory encroachment of corporate interests in government on a bipartisan basis, with intellectual consequences that include the subsumption of public administration into such topics as outsourcing, transparency issues, civic engagement, performance metrics, and the like - anything to disguise and distract from the erosion of an autonomous public power. Related phenomena include the public-private “trans-actors” - a wonderful word - and “shadow elites” which have been described by the anthropologist Janine Wedel. [my emphasis]

The Obama-Biden version of the neoliberal approach was not as grim, vicious, and lawless as that of Trump. Although Obama and Biden and their Attorneys General were adamant that there would be no priority on criminal prosecution of members of the Bush-Chene3y Administration for criminal actions they committed in office. And the Obama Administration was also famously unwilling to seek criminal prosecution of criminal actions by major bank executives that originated the financial crash of 2008 and left millions of people with the homes foreclosed.

And Galbraith describes how the Obama team consciously went about guarding against an activist party base being able to bring intra-party pressure against such policies. It's important to remember here that Howard Dean as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee 2005-2009 had pushed hard to develop a "50-state strategy" aimed at challenging the Republicans even in conservative congressional districts and building a new bench of Democratic office-holders, political leaders, and activists at the local and state levels.

President Obama was elected on a surge of pan-racial popular enthusiasm in 2008, and he assembled a very adept campaign at the time, effectively using new technologies with every prospect of building a renewed popular and participatory base for the Democratic Party. However, that prospect would have been lethal for Wall Street. It would have put in place a power base that was not prepared to tolerate the preservation or resurrection of conditions that had led to the financial crisis, and therefore for that and perhaps other reasons, it was not pursued.

Instead, over eight years the party was allowed, even encouraged, to wither away, abandoning whatever popular organization and base it could have developed or was developing in the last years of the Bush administration. What was left by the time Hillary Clinton assumed her role as the party’s nominee was largely a coterie of policy professionals, of in-and-outers from finance, law, the Ivy Leagues, and the think tank world, whose focus was largely on mission-specific, career-building trajectories, and backed by a political operation whose major focus was advertising and polling. [my emphasis]

Marshall Ganz, a longtime organizer for the United Farm Workers union, headed Obama's field operation in 2008 and took a movement-building approach that helped Obama successfully bypass much of the "coterie" of party operatives and cautious campaign professionals that Galbraith describes. But once elected, Obama quickly folded his "Obama for America" campaign organization into the regular party structures. And ousted Howard Dean as DNC chairman in favor of safe corporate Democrat Tim Kaine, who became Hillary Clinton's running mate on the 2016 ticket which they lost to the Malicious Orange Clown Donald Trump.

Back in late 2010, Ganz argued in How Obama lost his voice, and how he can get it back Los Angeles Times 11/03/2010 that the times in which Obama became President called for transformational leadership. But what the Obama Administration has provided had been transactional leadership: "The nation was ready for transformation, but the president gave us transaction. And, as is the case with leadership failures, much of the public's anger, disappointment and frustration has been turned on a leader who failed to lead."

Obama and his team made three crucial choices that undermined the president's transformational mission. First, he abandoned the bully pulpit of moral argument and public education. Next, he chose to lead with a politics of compromise rather than advocacy. And finally, he chose to demobilize the movement that elected him president. By shifting focus from a public ready to drive change - as in "yes we can" — he shifted the focus to himself and attempted to negotiate change from the inside, as in "yes I can." [my emphasis]

"Yes I can" instead of "Yes we can" is a good brief definition of the neoliberal ideological meaning of "personal responsibility."

During the presidential campaign, Obama inspired the nation not by delivering a polldriven message but by telling a story that revealed the person within - within him and within us. In his Philadelphia speech on race, we learned of his gift not only for moral uplift but for "public education" in the deepest sense, bringing us to a new understanding of the albatross of racial politics that has burdened us since our founding.

On assuming office, something seemed to go out of the president's speeches, out of the speaker and, as a result, out of us. Obama was suddenly strangely absent from the public discourse. We found ourselves in the grip of an economic crisis brought on by 40 years of antigovernment rhetoric, policy and practices, but we listened in vain for an economic version of the race speech. [my emphasis]

One week anniversary of the kinda-sorta coup in Venezuela

The strange coup attempt in Venezuela nominally headed by Juan Guaidó on Wednesday marked one week after Guaidó's self-proclamation as head of government. Of course, the process had been underway for a long time, with US policy having been adverserial in its least hostile moments to both the government of Hugo Chávez and that of his successor Nicolás Maduro, i.e, from 1999 to the present. The Cheney-Bush Administration backed a more traditional kind of coup in 2002 that fizzled out within a couple of days. But regime change efforts seem to have always been considered a viable option.

Jamie Galbraith wrote about how US pressure on the Chávez government continued after the failed coup attempt of April 2002 (Lötterdämmerung The American Prospect 12/16/2002):

[President George W.]Bush may be losing on another front. It appears that Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is holding out in a tense struggle over the fate and future of democracy in that country. Chavez is bitterly opposed by Venezuela's upper crust, just as he is strongly supported by the poor. But as I write, the oil lockout has been at least partly broken; tankers have filled and sailed for the United States. The military has remained loyal, shops are open, subways are running and (mostly) peaceful crowds have gathered around the pro-coup commercial television stations. Perhaps most importantly, a sniper (like the provocateur most likely responsible for three killings at an anti-government rally last week) has not yet found President Chavez's range.

Clearly the United States is involved. A Uruguayan politician blew the whistle on a request for help from the administration in support of a coup. In a desperate move, Bush issued a public statement on Dec. 13 calling for early elections. But why? Unlike Bush himself, Chavez was elected. There is no reason for him to step down other than the intransigent opposition of the Venezuelan upper classes. The "rebellion of the spoiled brats," they are calling it. Canada quickly distanced itself from Bush's statement.

The American press has been even more than usually disgraceful on this matter, aligning itself uncritically with official disinformation. (my emphasis)

Pushing for regime change in Latin America has practically become an American tradition. Which Obama's conservative Latin American policy - which took a dim view of any Latin American government far enough to the left to use Keynesian economic policies - continued. The Obama-Biden Administration formally declared Venezuela a national security threat to the US. (Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton, U.S. declares Venezuela a national security threat, sanctions top officials Reuters 03/09/2019)

This was a ridiculous level of threat inflation. It was true then and still true now that the consequences of US regime change efforts in Venezuela are likely to be far more damaging that any threat Veneuela has ever actually presented to US national security.

I wrote in mid-2017 about regime change indications in Venezuela under the Trump-Pence Presidency, "Zero hour" in the Venezuelan crisis? 07/22/2017:

Now the New Cold Warriors are publicly linking Venezuela to Russia. And the Cuban anti-Communists groups sometimes collectively referred to as "Miami" are pushing the idea of a US oil boycott aimed against Venezuela. They long since adopted Venezuela as a target for regime change efforts. Familiar names pop up among the Republicans prominent in the latest push to overthrow the Maduro government: Congressman Carlos Curbelo, Congressman Mario Diaz-Balart, Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Sen. Bob Menendez, Sen. Marco Rubio. And also one of our bestest Democratic friends, the payday loan industry's BFF, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. New York Democratic Congressman Gregory Meeks is also joining the (anti-Maduro) party.

And here we are, with the US having recognized a Veneuelan government that doesn't actually exist, i.e., has no control over the military or any other executive power. We could think of it as a government-in-exile, except that Juan Guaidó is still in Venezuela.

It's entirely possible that in the coming weeks, this coup attempt may turn out to be yet another neocon cluster****. It may be that the coup planners in Washington expected it to go more-or-less this way and that recognizing a figurehead as the head of government was just a prelude to sharply escalating sanctions and military intervention accompanied by covert activities by the US. In other words, the public can't tell right now if this is theater or a coup attempt gone wrong. The fact that John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Elliot Abrams as the "special envoy" to the coup operation are both involved is a virtual guarantee that the results will be bad.

This contemporary report on the failed 2002 coup gives some useful background on Special Envoy Abrams (Ed Vulliamy, Venezuela coup linked to Bush team Guardian 04/21/2002):

But the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for 'democracy, human rights and international operations'. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as 'Hemispherism', which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.

It led to the coup in Chile in 1973, and the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere. During the Contras' rampage in Nicaragua, he worked directly to [Oliver] North.

Congressional investigations found Abrams had harvested illegal funding for the [Contras'] rebellion. Convicted for withholding information from the inquiry, he was pardoned by George Bush senior.

One bit of progress in the last couple of years in the US is that it's now common to at least think about how the pardon power can be used as a tool to obstruct justice.

I hope some part of the quality press in the US and elsewhere pay close attention to how resources publicly called "humanitarian aid" are actually used. I don't think anyone doubts that actual humanitarian aid is needed in Venezuela. But current and future US sanctions also imposes additional hardship on ordinary people in Veneuela. Because, let's face it, squeezing the civilian population is the actual goal of most such punitive sanctions, particularly when the countries imposing the sanctions are actively and publicly engaged in a regime change operation.

Nick Wadhams reports for Bloomberg News, U.S. Considering Humanitarian Corridor for Venezuela Aid, Envoy Says 01/30/2019:

“We’re making a big and growing humanitarian effort,” Elliott Abrams, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo’s special representative for Venezuela, told reporters in Washington on Wednesday. “The humanitarian corridor is something we are looking at, but of course it requires the cooperation of the regime. I don’t know how practical that is -- it hasn’t been possible to date.”

Abrams said the aid would be in addition to the $20 million Pompeo promised last week after the U.S. recognized National Assembly leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president. He said there were two needs: immediate humanitarian relief and money to rebuild the country.

When Elliot Abrams starts talking about "humanitarian" aid, the safest assumption is that some dirty business is afoot. Actually, when Elliot Abrams starts talking about anything, the safest assumption is that some dirty business is afoot.

No government is likely to allow a hostile foreign power to put troops onto its territory under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Especially when the hostile power is pubicly threatening military intervention, which the Trump-Pence Administration is now doing.

One important diplomatic indicator to watch is the Grupo de Lima (Lima Group) was established in 2017 as an anti-Venezuelan bloc pressing for the removal of Nicolás Maduro as President of Venezuela including ón: Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, México, Panamá, Paraguay y Peru. At this point, they are declining to sign up for military intervention, at least in public.

Other important factors to watch: the refugee issue and how it impacts Colombia and Brazil, in particular; the positions of Mexico and Uruguay, both of which still recognize Venezuela's real existing government under Maduro and are pressing for a negotiated settlement; what far-right Venezuelan and Cuban groups in the US are saying and doing (Jake Johnston, The “Cubanization” of U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela 03/26/2014); the positions of the pro-Maduro governments of Russia and China; and, moves to seize Venezuelan assets, particular Citgo, which is the US subsidiary of Venezuela's state-on oil company, PDVSA (Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.).

On the latter point, things like this are worth keeping in mind (Tim Johnson, U.S. yanks bank assets from Venezuela, lays ground for battle over Citgo McClatchy News 01/29/2019):

[F]ormer PDVSA executive, Horacio Medina, said less focus should be placed on the legalities of the Citgo seizure on behalf of the interim government.

“This is a problem that cannot be resolved 100 percent by legalistic means because it is a political problem,” Medina said.

Keeping creditors at bay and Citgo’s financial head above water is equally as important, Medina said. Among the major creditors are two Canadian mining companies, Cristallex and Rusoro Mining, both of which have sought to auction off parts of Citgo, and ConocoPhillips, which has seized some PDVSA assets in the Caribbean as part of efforts to be repaid by Venezuela.

Medina said he believed that Guaido should use some Venezuelan assets at his disposal now to make payments to the creditors. “I think this would be a tremendously important confidence-building gesture,” he said.

Payments to Rosneft [a government-controlled Russia oil company] on its secured collateral will be due in March, putting more pressure on Citgo’s finances. (my emphasis)

Maroc Cartolano asked a good question in the 01/29/2019 piece, Where Are Democratic 2020 Hopefuls on the Trump-Backed Coup Attempt in Venezuela? In These Times. Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard have both criticized the Trump-Pence regime change operation. So have Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren. Daniel Marans provides a more recent update in Where Democratic Presidential Contenders Stand On The Venezuelan Crisis Huffpost 01/30/2019. Kirsten Gillibrand supports recognizing Juan Guaidó, i.e., supports the Trump-Pence policy.

But this is the Democratic Party we're talking about. So if leading Democrats are being reserved in endorsing this regime change operation, that's a good sign. Not as good as publicly oposing a regime change. But definitely better than reflexively endorsing a policy that is sure to produce bad results, even terrible ones.

Here are a couple of notable Democratic tweets on the regime change operation:

Say it with me.

The President can’t take military action in Venezuela - or anywhere else - without congressional authorization.

The President can’t take military action in Venezuela - or anywhere else - without congressional authorization.

The President can’t take military...

— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) January 29, 2019

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi kept it vague and safe:

America stands by the people of #Venezuela as they rise up against authoritarian rule and demand respect for human rights and democracy.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) January 24, 2019