alanjjohnstone
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One more sign that peaceful elections are not on the agenda
Maduro proposed early parliamentary elections on Saturday.
Maduro said the Constituent Assembly would debate calling elections this year for the National Assembly parliament.
Despite this,
Opposition lawmaker Armando Armas said in a statement that proposing bringing forward the parliamentary elections, which were scheduled for 2020, was just another act of provocation.
Livingstone, rather than listen to the Venezuelan Ambassador should have read this report by the UN rapporteur and he would have been able to refutes Neil’s claims that sanctions were only a week or two old.
https://undocs.org/A/HRC/39/47/ADD.1
I had to suppress a smile when Livingstone tried to divert attention from his ignorance by saying he was a pensioner
Matt, Had to wait until another source arose due to foreigners are unable to use BBC iplayer. Relevant section of interview on Twitter here
"If all that's true, it would be appalling, but I have watched America impose sanctions… an appalling impact on their country" @ken4london on how Alan Johnson & Esther McVey reacted to his #bbctw film
"As we speak tonight, children in #Venezuela are starving to death" @afneil pic.twitter.com/Bl8zJfRZF7
— BBC This Week (@bbcthisweek) February 1, 2019
Livingstone certainly made a buffoon of himself by being unprepared for this interview. But there were financial sanctions imposed on Venezuela that impacted on their ability to raise credit for trading.
Executive Order 13.808, issued on August 25 of 2017, barred U.S. persons from providing new financing to the Venezuelan government or PDVSA, it stopped the country from issuing new debt or selling previously issued debt currently in its possession.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) on September 20, 2017, warning financial institutions that “all Venezuelan government agencies and bodies, including SOEs [state-owned enterprises] appear vulnerable to public corruption and money laundering” and recommending that several transactions originating from Venezuela be flagged as potentially criminal.
These had the effect of closing the door on any possibility of a Venezuelan debt restructuring. Since the sanctions impeded the nation from accessing new financing, they also impeded it from issuing new bonds in exchange of old ones.
The President of the anti-Maduro National Assembly was writing letters to international banks warning them that if they lent money to Venezuela they would be not only violating Venezuelan law but favoring a government that was recognized as dictatorial by the international community. When Goldman Sachs Asset Management purchased $2.8bn of bonds in May from the Venezuelan government through an intermediary, angry Venezuelans gathered to protest outside its New York office and the opposition vowed not to pay the bonds if it reached power. By the time that sanctions were approved in August, Venezuela had all but lost access to international financial markets. Institutions proceeded to close Venezuelan accounts, reasoning that the compliance risk of inadvertently participating in money laundering was not worth the benefit. Venezuelan payments to creditors got stuck in the payment chain, with financial institutions refusing to process wires coming from Venezuelan public sector institutions.
Crude Realities: Understanding Venezuela’s Economic Collapse
Livingstone would have been on stronger ground if he blamed deliberate economic sabotage than merely sanctions.
Again who is the side that is not willing to seek a peaceful resolution of the impasse.
The US has rejected a new initiative by Uruguay and Mexico to restart dialogue in a bid to de-escalate the political standoff in Venezuela. A senior US official said that countries would “ultimately see it is in their interests to recognize” Guaido.
Mike Pence, the US vice president, said “This is no time for dialogue. This is time for action,”
EU Ex-pats
“MEPs want them to have rights including ongoing inflation-linked pensions and healthcare rights, and residency and employment rights, such as so-called frontier worker rights that would allow British nationals living in one country to take a job or offer a service in another member state after Brexit…The letter said they would urge the UK to do the same for EU citizens in Britain… they are worried member states are working at different speeds and that the UK will rely on 27 bilateral agreements, which may not be signed in time or be uniform in nature…”
To Marcos earlier question about who are the Venezuelan people everybody keeps referring to, this article reveals the biased application of the term.
‘…This continues a longstanding media policy of treating “the Venezuelan people” as a term that exclusively means “anyone who agrees with US policy.”… ‘
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/02/01/venezuelan-people-are-whoever-agrees-donald-trump
“President Maduro is unpopular, with approval ratings consistently below 30 per cent. Yet 31 per cent of the entire electorate voted for him in 2018, a higher percentage than Trump or Obama received in 2016 and 2012, respectively…Venezuela certainly does need radical change, but erasing the voices and even existence of the people, as the media has done, will only hinder public understanding of the issue and hamper reconciliation.”
The Return of Farage – The Brexit Party
Farage’s new party has received pledges of support worth £1m and has more than 200 potential candidates on standby for elections, it has said.
The Brexit Party was registered with the Electoral Commission three weeks ago by former Ukip activist Catherine Blaiklock.
Cory Booker jumped into the already busy field of Democratic candidates running for the White House in 2020 in a bid to turf out Trump. The New Jersey senator and former mayor of Newark emailed supporters promising to “channel our common pain back into our common purpose”. Booker is the second black candidate in the race.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/feb/01/cory-booker-announces-run-for-presidency-in-2020
Maduro expressed readiness to hold negotiations with the opposition in the presence of international mediators
Guaido indicated that there would be no dialogue with Maduro or anyone in his government.
Now, how often is this going to be reported as it is a sign of intransigence of their saintly democrat and a signal of flexibility from their devil-incarnate.
My apologies to both Wez and to the OP EM for mistaking Wez as another person.
Wez is indeed a member of the SPGB and not the ex-member who became an anarchist. I got confused with their respective forum pseudonyms .
Once again, my humble and genuine regrets at my error.
ALB, I find that this article is more or less a hatchet job from someone who is committed to representative democracy and not delegatory form.
But even KS does legitimately raise the issue of micro-management.
His model of political parties is not ours and we would also be heavily criticized by him on much the same grounds as he accuses SA/KS of. I wonder what he would make of our knowledge test before any applicant is accepted, for instance.
I have a strong feeling that for the author, that our claims of Party control of our elected members and SA’s would be a distinction without a difference for him. For him it is his smoking gun.
The lesson is that we ourselves will have to face similar attacks. As would the overlap in the general politics when we share the similar language as SA.
I had little complaint about KS’s letter to AOC, a letter AOC totally ignored going against KS advice and endorsing Pelosi.
We also had experience of Trots in politics, the SSP at Holyrood. Also Militant in control at Liverpool and Lambeth(?). Our issues was less about Party procedures and processes but much more about policies (plus questions over personality over-riding Party rules.)
Robbo, further to your earlier message on NHS and BREXIT
Serkan Bayram, a member of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and chairman of the Turkey-Venezuela Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group, says there are political and economic reasons for the increasingly close relationship between both countries.
Turkey, says Bayram, is working to boost trade in general and Venezuela falls within this policy. According to the Turkish government statistics, Turkey in 2018 imported $900 million (€780 million) in precious metals from the Latin American country. Much of this is believed to be gold. And Venezuela announced last year that it intends refine its gold in Turkey, rather than Switzerland, to bypass international restrictions.
https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-and-venezuela-the-rise-of-a-new-alliance/a-47302588
Chomsky’s view on Venezuela
Q. Venezuela seems to be in the throes of a civil war. The US backs Juan Guaidó as interim president, in turn forcing Nicolás Maduro to consider expelling US diplomats, a decision he eventually backed away from, all while the leaders of China, Russia and Turkey slam Trump’s stance in Venezuela. First, what’s your assessment of what’s happening in Venezuela, and, second, why is it that much of the left worldwide continues to support Maduro when it is obvious that he has been a complete disaster?
A. Maduro has been a disaster, and the best the opposition has to offer is the self-declared President Juan Guaidó. About him little is known, apart from his great admiration for the neo-fascist Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, whom Guaidó praised for his commitment to “democracy [and] human rights,” as illustrated, for example, by his criticism of Brazil’s military dictatorship — because it … didn’t murder 30,000 people as in neighboring Argentina, the worst of the vicious military dictatorships that swept across South America from the ‘60s.
The roots of the Venezuelan disaster go back to failures of the Chavez administration, including its failure to diversify the economy, which is still almost entirely reliant on oil export. Venezuelan opposition economist Francisco Rodríguez, former chief Andean economist for the Bank of America, notes the failure of the government to set aside reserves during the period of high oil prices so it was at the mercy of international financial markets when prices dropped sharply in 2014 — and has been blocked from access to credit by harsh US sanctions, which have exacerbated the effects of what Rodríguez describes as the “atrocious” mismanagement of the economy under Maduro. Writing in Foreign Policy, Rodríguez observes that the policy of “Starving the Venezuelan economy of its foreign currency earnings risks turning the country’s current humanitarian crisis into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe.” Arguably that is the purpose, following the Nixon-Kissinger script of “making the economy scream” to undermine the Allende regime. (That was the soft track; the hard track, soon implemented, was brutal military dictatorship.)
The drift toward civil war, with outside interference, is all too apparent. There is still room for negotiations among the contending parties, but it diminishes daily as the crisis deepens. Maduro is digging and Washington is intensifying its intervention, imposing new sanctions and selecting the egregious Elliott Abrams to join Bolton and Pompeo in what has been called “Trump’s axis of evil.” If skeletons can shudder, many must be doing so in the Central American countries that Abrams helped to ravage during Reagan’s terrorist wars.
Chomsky: Ocasio-Cortez and Other Newcomers Are Rousing the Multitudes
Kamala Harris and her support for Israel
