Chris Hedges's Blog, page 359

The European Union May Not Survive the Euro

The euro is “celebrating” its 20th anniversary this month, but they aren’t popping corks across the continent. Except, perhaps, with the notable exception of delusional Eurocrats such Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, who argued: “The euro has become a symbol of unity, sovereignty and stability. It has delivered prosperity and protection to our citizens…”

Some prosperity!

Much of the continent is characterized by double-digit unemployment, rising inequality, political strife, and a virtual lost generation of youth, who have never experienced anything remotely approaching a robust, ebullient economy. Greed-based integration is giving the EU a bad name.

The worst thing about the Eurozone as a whole is the currency union itself. The euro reinforces structural inequalities between member states as well as between social groups within countries. It is also worth recalling that its creation was supposed to be an intermediate step toward the inevitable formation of a “United States of Europe” of a supranational fiscal authority—i.e., a federal union in which a central government for the whole of Europe becomes responsible for the economic stabilization and income redistribution for the whole of the EU, while the allocation of resources is left in the hands of the nation state governments. That is clearly a long ways away, given existing political tensions between the creditor nations of the Germanic north and the debtor southern periphery nations.

To quote Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Nor can a currency union minus a real fiscal authority to go with it. Since the latter seems politically impossible against a backdrop of Brexit, yellow vest protests in France, and a governing coalition in Italy that openly toys with abandoning the euro, a more likely outcome is the breakup of the currency union. Or a model of integration that isn’t simultaneously an enrichment program for the investor class.

In an ideal world, the euro’s end would come via coordinated action: reintroducing national currencies and immediately requiring all tax and other public contractual obligations within the nation to be denominated in that currency so as to create immediate demand for those currencies. Much more likely, however, is that the dissolution will occur via disruptive crisis.

That the euro has survived for 20 years is not a sign that we are moving closer to the day of “an ever closer union”: the longstanding aspiration of the fathers of the modern-day European Union (originally started as the six-nation European Coal and Steel Community). Rather, it is a sign of democratic subversion, a technocracy run amok that has survived by depriving elected national parliaments of control over fiscal policy: taxation, spending, and the core economic policies of the nation state. The euro has been both the method and the cause of this democratic disenfranchisement, by design, not by accident.

How, you ask? Because by substituting national currencies with a supranational currency, the euro’s creation severed the link between state and money, and with it the flexibility to confront economic crises of the magnitude that have been experienced throughout the euro’s history (especially post-2008). It has therefore become an instrument of greed as it has facilitated a massive wealth transfer toward the top tier of European society, along with an evisceration of the social welfare state.

National parliaments remain therefore constrained because without a national currency, they lack the fiscal capacity to respond (and they also faced potential bankruptcy, much like an American state, which is a user, not an issuer of the dollar). Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” speech in July 2012 alleviated the solvency problem of the national bond markets of countries in the Eurozone (because the European Central Bank is the only entity that can create the euros needed to backstop the national bonds credibly). That, along with some alleviation of fiscal austerity, induced a modest cyclical recovery from 2015 to 2018.

But the recovery, such that it was, has proved ephemeral. The GDP growth of the European Union as a whole has flamed out and is now experiencing its lowest growth in four years. The trillions of euros mobilized during successive crises have largely been devoted toward covert bank bailouts, and recycling money to creditors, rather than assisting the vast army of unemployed. Greed. And while each successive crisis since the euro’s inception has hitherto been enough to avert the ultimate blow-up of the currency union, the poor economic baseline has remained constant.

In fact, economist Michael Burrage recently compared the economic performance of the 12 founder Eurozone members with 10 independent countries, which are comparable in terms of economic structure, labor institutions, and productivity. Surprise, surprise, the Eurozone countries rank at the bottom. It is worth reiterating that this is not a “European Union” problem, but a Eurozone problem because high unemployment caused by austerity policy is an enduring Eurozone (EZ) characteristic. Consider that countries such as Norway, Switzerland and even the UK, beset by Brexit woes, are outperforming the EZ countries, especially on the unemployment metric.

The underlying assumption of a common currency—namely, that it would lead to a convergence of the member countries’ production, employment, and trade structures—has been proven false. Other than the currency itself, the only commonality in the EZ has been poor economic growth in virtually the entire region. A “one size fits all” currency union doesn’t work. There is a multiplicity of challenges—private debt, unemployment, automation, education, worker productivity—that can only be resolved via more socially inclusive (i.e., generous) national/supranational development strategies. But that is within the purview of fiscal policy, which in turn is constrained by the existence of each country effectively “borrowing” in a “foreign currency,” which is de facto what the euro is, given the institutional separation between the state and the currency itself. So going back to national currencies seems a necessary first step.

Why not simply attempt to devalue the euro?

For one thing, relying on external boosts to growth via currency devaluation depends on the willingness of other trading partners to adopt growth strategies that will accommodate the resultant increased imports (highly problematic in today’s increasingly protectionist environment). Furthermore, during previous periods of relative euro weakness, the biggest beneficiary by far in the Eurozone has been Germany, as evidenced by the fact that the country has a current account surplus now a shade under 8 percent of GDP, which largely comprises the bulk of the European Union’s external trade surpluses with the rest of the world. The rest of the bloc, particularly the Mediterranean members, are still registering subpar growth and substantially higher levels of unemployment. So in the first instance, a euro devaluation helps Germany, not the European Union as a whole.

Furthermore, the common currency means a common monetary policy, which has amplified the strains of the Eurozone, rather than mitigating them. In the period leading up to the 2008 global crisis, inflation rates in the Mediterranean countries were higher, which meant that real interest rates were lower. Hence, cheap credit fueled asset bubbles in countries such as Greece, Spain, and Portugal, which in turn provided the illusion that they were “converging” with the northern European economies. By contrast, post-2008 European Central Bank (ECB) interest rates remained too high for too long for those now debt-laden periphery countries, and they therefore have suffered greater fall-out from the financial crisis than Germany.

The economist Servaas Storm has quantified the impact:

“During the pre-crisis years 1997-2007, membership of EMU was beneficial for all countries…except Germany and Italy. EMU-membership is estimated to have increased per capita real incomes in Greece, Portugal and Spain by 8-10%…Things change considerably after 2008, however. Being part of the Eurozone has depressed the real incomes in Greece by 16%, in Italy by 8%, in Portugal by 4% and in Spain by 8% compared to the counterfactual. In contrast, most Northern ‘core’ economies…benefited from their EMU membership, as their actual per capita income levels are estimated to be higher than in the counterfactual scenario ‘without Eurozone membership’. Germany stands out in this post-crisis period 2008-2014, with the average German having an actual income which is about 5% higher than the estimated (non-EMU) counterfactual.”

The ECB’s monetary policy initially fomented asset bubbles in the periphery and then exacerbated debt deflation when these bubbles burst. In seeking to mitigate the southern debt deflation post-2008, however, the resultant low interest rates fueled a boom in Germany. This largely explains why Berlin’s actual income is higher than the estimated counterfactual, which would have occurred had Germany still been using the deutschmark, as the ever-vigilant Bundesbank likely would have raised interest rates sooner and more aggressively.

Even with a common monetary policy, had the Eurozone members existed in a federal union comparable to Canada, or the United States, policymakers could have mitigated regional divergences via fiscal transfers or equalization payments. And the issue of intra-regional trade imbalances would also be a non-issue (nobody in the U.S. really cares, for example, whether New York runs a “trade deficit” with Texas because of the overriding existence of this federal union we call the “United States of America”).

But even though there is no common fiscal union, the European Monetary Union custodians have nonetheless imposed a fiscal austerity straitjacket as a precondition of euro membership (i.e., the perversely named “Stability and Growth Pact,” which has delivered minimal growth and lots of instability). So countries that “earn” membership in “Club Euro” get the worst of all possible worlds: Minimal capacity to bolster growth via aggressive fiscal policy, just fiscal austerity. Like joining a religion that offers Hell, but no Heaven, fiscal austerity exacerbates productivity differentials (less money for investment, education, social welfare, higher unemployment, etc.), and locks the slow growth countries into debt trap deflation and perpetual economic stagnation (see Greece, as Exhibit A). And no means of “inflating away” the debt domestically, because there is no “national printing press.”

Last, but not least, the champions of the monetary union, notably those in Berlin, continue to preach the destructive myth that increased competitiveness via “structural reforms” (which usually means the ability to fire workers more easily, and cut social welfare programs) will somehow enable the afflicted countries to match Germany’s economic dynamism.

However, as Storm points out, countries can’t compete if the composition of exports in each country is different: “Germany is strong in medium- and high-tech manufacturing, and this strength shows up in a strong export performance as well as a limited vulnerability to external shocks” (emphasis mine). The strong export performance is in part derived from the fact that high-end goods are not particularly dependent on the low labor costs to compete globally. By contrast, the periphery countries are generally locked into low- and medium-tech activities, many of which compete with China and are therefore much more subject to its competitive threat (Italy’s textile industry being a classic case in point).

The upshot is that what’s good for Germany is not so for Italy or France, and vice versa. What is required are distinct national industrial policies, aiming at accommodating and diversifying the existing trade structures of the Mediterranean countries in particular.

Sadly, the Eurozone makes no provision for this largely because of the Eurozone’s deficit phobia. As I have written before:

“There is a broader philosophic problem embodied in the pact. Implicit in the drive to create a ‘stability culture’ is the belief that public debt is invariably an evil, the consequences of which must be stopped at all costs. But as events of the past decade have clearly demonstrated, excessive private sector debt build-up, notably in Asia and the United States, has played a far more destabilizing role in the global economy than fiscal profligacy, which undercuts one of the main rationales for retaining the Stability Pact in its current form. If we say that the government can run budget surpluses for 15 years, what we are ignoring is that this means the private sector will have to run deficits for 15 years—going into debt that totals trillions of dollars in order to allow the government to retire its debt. Again it is hard to see why households would be better off if they owed more debt, just so that the government would owe them less.”

There are very few instances of a controlled dissolution of a currency union and a concomitant re-establishment of national currencies. One recent example is what occurred after the breakup of the old Yugoslavian federation. Even though the re-establishment of national currencies occurred with minimal economic disruption, the dissolution did not come without cost, as many of the former members of the Yugoslavian federation engaged in a costly civil war. Shorn of Tito’s organizing genius, longstanding suppressed resentments (fostered in part by fiscal transfers from the wealthier regions to the poorer ones) erupted as the federation fell apart.

There’s no question that a coordinated dissolution among 27 different countries would be considerably more challenging. Consider what is happening now in the United Kingdom, where an ostensibly “friendly divorce” (aka “Brexit”) has been going on two years, has hitherto resolved nothing, and in the end, may still not occur, given the restrictions the UK Parliament is now placing on its negotiators. It is also worth remembering that the UK does not even share a common currency, as it retains the pound.

In the Eurozone itself, we would likely witness these same simmering resentments from the wealthier countries, which have long criticized the “Mediterranean scroungers.” Imagine what happens if the next eruption occurs in Italy, or France (with its “yellow vest” protests presaging trouble there). Greece or Cyprus are child’s play, by comparison.

In any conceivable outcome, benign or otherwise, there will almost certainly be widespread impositions of capital controls and bank holidays (to prevent runs on deposits), as well as recourse to industrial protection and government controls and supports to mitigate the resultant fall-out. To say nothing of endless international court challenges, given the widespread holding of euros by institutions across the globe.

But the alternative of the status quo is increasingly untenable, given the huge scale of youth unemployment, rising inequality, and the growing numbers disenfranchised, marginalized, impoverished, and dispossessed by this 20-year experiment in economic sadism. Less greed is needed for survival. If national currencies are to be re-established, this must come with the reclamation of a nation state more committed to genuine popular sovereignty, more democratic, less oligarchical control over the economy, full employment, and a robust network of social welfare provision.

We’ve had far too many examples of the alternatives to contemplate over the course of European history. “An ever closer union” is a worthy aspiration, but it should not be focused on one Brussels-based government, obsessing about fiscal austerity, budget discipline and focusing its priorities on safeguarding its banks at the expense of the broader population. Ideally, a reformed European Union should find its fullest manifestations via cooperative, yet independent sovereign nation states, grounded in the historically generous social welfare states that characterized the continent in the aftermath of World War II. The urgency reflected in Mario Draghi’s “whatever it takes” speech would have been more admirable if it had focused not on saving the euro at all costs, but rather on establishing a full employment economy that benefits all European citizens, not just its financiers and oligarchs. There is no point in preserving a currency union if it comes at a cost of sabotaging economic growth and the broad welfare of the EU’s citizens. Likewise the power of the nation state’s fiscal policy should not be restricted, but freely deployed alongside of, or if necessary, substituting “the market,” to ensure that equitable prosperity is achieved for the many, not the few.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Ralph Nader: Democrats May Be Surrendering the Rule of Law

Many Senate Democrats are throwing in the towel on the nomination of William Barr for Trump’s attorney general (a prospect assured by Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, declaring his personal vote against Barr). Let’s ask why?

One would think that Senate Democrats would be appalled at Barr’s long-time unyielding conduct and writings asserting that the President can start any wars he wants even if Congress votes against it! An example of this is the constitutionally undeclared criminal invasion of Iraq by George W. Bush. Barr was also George H.W. Bush’s Attorney General and has been a long-time defender of executive branch lawlessness.

One would think that Barr’s insupportable drive for more corporate prisons and more mass incarceration would upset these Senators.

One would think that Barr’s view of the separation of powers, which has meant separating Congress from its constitutional powers and handing them over to the “unitary presidency,” would alarm these Senators. (Didn’t James Madison believe that Congress would jealously guard its authority vis-à-vis any new emergence of a modern King George III?)

One would think that Barr’s inflexible position giving Presidents—including the embattled Donald Trump—effective immunities for obstructing justice and from blocking ongoing investigations, including limitless pardons even of himself and his family, would infuriate the Democrats.

One would think that this champion of corporate immunities—otherwise known as the deregulation of EPA, FDA, FTC, and OSHA—would anger Senate Democrats who tell their voters that such agencies are protecting our health and safety.

Needless to say, Barr’s legal positions are distinctly minority ones among legal scholars and practitioners, especially his fanatical argument, The New York Times points out, that “Congress has no authority in the area of foreign affairs.”

Barr’s view of the President as King ignores the clear meaning of article II, section 3 of the Constitution that obliges the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Barr and other right-wing ideologues defend the actions of Trump’s outspoken deregulators, exercising complete discretion to shut down law enforcement, not to mention the present government shut-down. The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee spent much time on what Barr would do regarding the Mueller investigation. Barr tried to disarm them by saying that Mueller was a great friend going back many years in the federal government and that he would certainly let Mueller complete his investigation and report. Big deal!

Would he make the report public, as supported by the overwhelming majority of Americans, and as urged by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa? Would he censor parts of it? Backed into a corner by Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Barr admitted the Mueller report would be treated like any other “prosecutive memo” with its full text kept secret. Really?

There is no broad presidential power of executive privilege to withhold information from Congressional Committees—subject to conditions of confidentiality—according to many constitutional law scholars who differ from Barr.

Keeping the Mueller report secret cannot stop a Congressional Committee from issuing a subpoena to Barr and Mueller to testify and leave the entire report in the Committee’s hands. If Mueller resists Barr’s opposition and appears as a witness, this conflict may end up in federal courts.

There is much more in Barr’s secretive, corporatist, anti-consumer, labor, and environmental record to get the Senate Democrats’ dander up and throw down the gauntlet. But, no, they prefer to be polite and in so doing let the American people down.  Please note the comment from the ranking Democrat on the Committee, California Senator Dianne Feinstein, during a break in the hearing: She said the hearing was “going very well” and expected Barr to be easily confirmed by the full Senate.

See why I’ve called the Republican and Democratic parties an inbred duopoly? Expect the further decay of a Department of Injustice, shielding a chronically lawless President and turning the rule of law on its head.

Leaked Memo Reveals Government Plan to ‘Traumatize’ Migrant Children

Following reports on Thursday that federal officials forcibly separated thousands more migrant children from their families than previously reported, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D.-Ore.) released a document to NBC News revealing the Trump administration intended to “traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border.”

I just released a NEW DOCUMENT showing that the @realDonaldTrump administration PLANNED to traumatize children and intentionally create a humanitarian crisis at the border. https://t.co/PBdXyDXgP8

— Jeff Merkley (@JeffMerkley) January 18, 2019

The December 2017 draft memo—which Merkley shared with NBC News after receiving it from a government whistleblower—shows that Trump administration officials wanted to deport children more quickly by denying them asylum hearings after taking them away from their parents.

“It appears that they wanted to have it both ways—to separate children from their parents but deny them the full protections generally awarded to unaccompanied children,” concluded ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt, who led a class-action lawsuit on behalf of migrant parents.

President Donald Trump’s “child immigration strategy is immoral and comes from a dark place in the heart of this administration,” Merkley declared, responding to the revelations on Twitter. “Children are NOT expendable commodities in political battles.”

The leaked document, as NBC reports:

also shows officials wanted to specifically target parents in migrant families for increased prosecutions, contradicting the administration’s previous statements. In June, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration did “not have a policy of separating families at the border” but was simply enforcing existing law.

The authors noted that the “increase in prosecutions would be reported by the media and it would have a substantial deterrent effect.”

The memo was shared with high-ranking members of DHS and the Justice Department before then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an ex-senator infamous for his anti-immigrant positions, officially unveiled the administration’s cruel “zero tolerance” policy in the spring.

Merkley, a vocal critic of Trump’s immigration policies, appeared on MSNBC‘s “All In With Chris Hayes” to discuss the developments:

Breaking NBC News Exclusive: “Trump admin weighed targeting migrant families, speeding up deportation of children” @SenJeffMerkley will be on #inners to discuss! https://t.co/wX6FqYxv7C #exclusive #breaking #inners

— All In w/Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 18, 2019

The L.A. Teachers’ Strike Is About So Much More Than Wages

Los Angeles public school teachers began a historic strike on Monday, for the first time in 30 years. Members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) walked out of contract negotiations with the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) that had dragged on for nearly two years. The specific battle is being fought over LAUSD’s refusal to tap into its record $1.86 billion reserve in order to reduce class sizes, hire more support staff, including counselors and nurses, improve infrastructure and more. But more broadly speaking, the L.A. teachers’ fight is symbolic of a bigger struggle to maintain and expand quality public education for all Americans and to secure the rights that the critical stakeholders—teachers, students, parents—have within that system.

The L.A. teachers’ strike comes after several high-profile fights last spring in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, where educators tired of poverty-level wages fought for raises and won. But the L.A. strike is broader than those others, not just in terms of the sheer size of the district and the union, but in the demands the union is making. Although LAUSD has offered a 6 percent raise over two years (not nearly enough of what teachers deserve), teachers want an overall better experience for their 600,000 overwhelmingly nonwhite students. They want more nurses and counselors, smaller class sizes and a halt to the expansion of charter schools.

In usually sunny Southern California, the 2019 teachers strike was launched during a week dominated by cold, windy, rainy weather, 30 years after the last such strike. In spite of the wintry conditions, tens of thousands of teachers, counselors, nurses, union organizers, and even some parents and students, marched and rallied in downtown Los Angeles and picketed in front of their schools across the sprawling district. I spoke with several teachers who told me about their large class sizes, aging books, leaking roofs and, most of all, paucity of support staff.

Students needing regular medical attention are attending schools where nurses are on staff for only one or two days a week. School counselors and psychologists are forced to work at numerous schools at once, handling emergencies whenever they can. Students who want to use the library have to wait for the brief weekly window during which the school librarian is on call. Meanwhile, charter schools are expanding across the district, drawing from the very pool of limited resources that the public school system relies on, but without being held to the same level of transparency and accountability. L.A.’s teachers are angry about how the district is treating their students—and they have good reason to be.

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Tens of Thousands of L.A. Teachers Cut Class to Strike



by Kasia Anderson

As first-grade teacher Louise McLorn explained to me, “It’s absolutely not about teacher salaries. That is the last thing that we are looking at.” News reports have cited the fact that the strike may have already cost the district millions of dollars because a majority of students did not attend school on the first day or two of the strike (the district’s funding depends on attendance rates). But what is missed in much of the coverage is the fact that each day educators are on the picket line, they lose pay. Union members turned down the modest pay raise they were offered, holding out instead for concessions centered on student welfare.

McLorn rattled off a list of her concerns, saying, “There is a hole in the roof of my classroom, so that needs to get fixed. We have students that need much more counseling than they’re getting, but psychologists have to go from school to school to school.” She added, “It’s less expensive to educate than incarcerate.” Over and over, the teachers I spoke with repeated some version of McLorn’s sentiments and echoed her struggles in the classroom.

Some teachers were pointedly critical of Los Angeles School Superintendent Austin Beutner, a man media outlets describe as “A former investment banker with no history working as an educator.” Andy Dowdell, from Fleming Middle School, said, “He’s kind of like some of those people that Trump’s hired to dismember, to take apart these bureaucracies, and he’s trying to do that to our district.” Dowdell suspects that Beutner’s real agenda is to privatize the school district.

In fact, LAUSD insists on keeping more than 25 percent of the budget as surplus instead of the required 1 percent, raising suspicions about its agenda (what would be enough of a reserve, one wonders?). Mike Fahy, a special education teacher at Le Conte Middle School, explained to me that the broken computers he needs to teach dyslexic students to read need to be replaced. But the district won’t fund the needed upgrade. “There’s simply no money for supplies for my school, so I end up buying the supplies myself, because I don’t want to run a ‘poverty program,’ ” he said.

Fahy has a theory. “We’re being set up to fail by the decisions of the district and the school board,” he told me. Le Conte shares its campus with a charter elementary school. “In my school the students come in and they’re 90 percent brown. At the charter school on our campus, the students are 90 percent white. So the white kids go over there and the brown kids come over to my school.” According to Fahy, “The other school is being run like a private school on the public dime.” In the long run, he fears that unregulated charter school growth will result in LAUSD becoming “a special-ed district for the ‘problem kids.’ ” He has good reason to issue such a dire warning. Examples abound in places like New Orleans, where public school systems embraced charter schools only to end up an even more segregated system that fails students and teachers.

But corporate-minded elites across the U.S. are hellbent on viewing education as a business, and they see teachers as ungrateful moochers who are looking for easy paychecks funded by taxpayers. The Wall Street Journal published a sneering editorial on the first day of the Los Angeles teachers strike, fixating on the increasing costs of teacher salaries and pensions as requiring new tax programs every few years. The paper’s editors did not even acknowledge the third-world conditions that L.A. schools struggle with—schools situated in the world’s fifth largest economy and within the world’s richest nation. They defended charter school expansion and laughably described such schools as a “refuge for low-income and minority students.” In contrast, New York Times contributing writer Erin Aubrey Kaplan explained last year that “[i]t’s partly because diversity can be managed—or minimized—that charters have become the public schools that liberal whites here can get behind.”

Fahy’s colleague, Helen Allen Jackson, who is also a special education teacher at La Conte Middle School, shared with me the daily trials and travails and she and other teachers struggle with. “Our students come with a lot of baggage, and they really need more help. We are counselors, we are nurses, we are everything [to our students], and it is overwhelming,” she said. When I asked if her workday ended when she got home, she exclaimed, “Absolutely not!” Other teachers who had gathered around us nodded their heads vigorously in agreement. “It never ends,” Jackson said, laughing slightly hysterically at the idea that her job was a “9-to-5” position.

Los Angeles teachers are telling the district and the world that their public schools have been deeply damaged by years of austerity. They are offering clear solutions to fix the damage and pointing to the money that the district already has in hand. They have the power of collective action through a union to make their demands, and ultimately, the district needs them more than it cares to admit. Thirty years ago, it took nine days for the district to acquiesce to the legitimate concerns of union members. How long will it take this time?

Watch “Rising Up In the Streets: Los Angeles Teachers Begin Historic Strike,” Sonali Kolhatkar’s broadcast segment on the L.A. teachers’ strike from “Rising Up With Sonali” via Vimeo:

 

Judge Acquits 3 Chicago Officers of Laquan McDonald Cover-Up

CHICAGO — A judge on Thursday acquitted three Chicago officers of trying to cover up the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald, dismissing as just one perspective the shocking dashcam video of the black teenager’s death that led to protests, a federal investigation of the police department and the rare murder conviction of an officer.

In casting off the prosecution’s entire case, Judge Domenica Stephenson seemed to accept many of the same defense arguments that were rejected in October by jurors who convicted officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder and aggravated battery. He is scheduled to be sentenced Friday.

The judge said the video showed only one viewpoint of the confrontation and that there was no indication the officers tried to hide evidence.

“The evidence shows just the opposite,” she said. She singled out how they preserved the graphic video at the heart of the case.

McDonald’s family questioned how the two cases could produce such different decisions. His great uncle, the Rev. Marvin Hunter, told reporters that the verdict means “that if you are a police officer you can lie, cheat and steal.”

“To say that these men are not guilty is to say that Jason Van Dyke is not guilty.” He added: “It is a sad day for America.”

Prosecutor Ron Safer tried to put a positive spin on the verdict.

“This case was a case where the code of silence was on trial,” he said, referring to the long tradition that officers don’t report wrongdoing by their colleagues. “The next officer is going to think twice about filing a false police report. Do they want to get through this?”

Special prosecutor Patricia Brown Holmes said she hoped the verdict would not make officers reluctant to come forward when they see misconduct. Her key witness, officer Dora Fontaine, described how she had become a pariah in the department and was called a “rat” by fellow officers.

The shooting has provoked periodic street protests since 2015, when the video came to light, and the acquittals could renew that movement.

“We will be down here tomorrow by the hundreds, and we will cry out for justice for Laquan,” activist Eric Russell said.

The trial was watched closely by law enforcement and critics of the department, which has long had a reputation for condoning police brutality.

Officer Joseph Walsh, officer Thomas Gaffney and detective David March were accused of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice. All but Gaffney have since left the department. They asked the judge, rather than a jury, to hear the evidence.

After the verdict, Walsh would say only that the ordeal of being charged and tried was “heart-breaking for my family, a year and a half.”

In her ruling, the judge rejected prosecution arguments that the video demonstrated officers were lying when they described McDonald as moving and posing a threat even after he was shot.

“An officer could have reasonably believed an attack was imminent,” she said. “It was borne out in the video that McDonald continued to move after he fell to the ground” and refused to relinquish a knife.

The video appeared to show the teen collapsing in a heap after the first few shots and moving in large part because bullets kept striking his body for 10 more seconds.

The judge said it’s not unusual for two witnesses to describe events in starkly different ways. “It does not necessarily mean that one is lying,” she said.

The judge also noted several times that the vantage points of various officers who witnessed the shooting were “completely different.” That could explain why their accounts did not sync with what millions of people saw in the video.

Both Van Dyke’s trial and that of the three other officers hinged on the video, which showed Van Dyke opening fire within seconds of getting out of his police SUV and continuing to shoot the 17-year-old while he was lying on the street. Police were responding to a report of a male who was breaking into trucks and stealing radios on the city’s South Side.

Prosecutors alleged that Gaffney, March and Walsh, who was Van Dyke’s partner, submitted false reports about what happened to try to prevent or shape any criminal investigation of the shooting. Among other things, they said the officers falsely claimed that Van Dyke shot McDonald after McDonald aggressively swung the knife at the officers and that he kept shooting the teen because McDonald was trying to get up still armed with the knife.

McDonald had used the knife to puncture a tire on Gaffney’s police vehicle, but the video shows that he did not swing it at the officers before Van Dyke shot him and that he appeared to be incapacitated after falling to the ground.

Attorneys for Gaffney, Walsh and March used the same strategy that the defense used at Van Dyke’s trial by placing all the blame on McDonald.

It was McDonald’s refusal to drop his knife and other threatening actions that “caused these officers to see what they saw,” March’s attorney, James McKay, told the court. “This is a case about law and order (and) about Laquan McDonald not following any laws that night.”

The lawyers ridiculed the decision to charge the three officers, saying they merely wrote what they observed or, in March’s case, what the other officers told him they saw. And they said there was no evidence that the officers conspired to get their stories straight.

“The state wants you to criminalize police reports,” McKay bellowed at one point.

City Hall released the video to the public in November 2015 — 13 months after the shooting — and acted only because a judge ordered it to do so. The charges against Van Dyke were not announced until the day of the video’s release.

The case cost the police superintendent his job and was widely seen as the reason the county’s top prosecutor was voted out of office a few months later. It was also thought to be a major factor in Mayor Rahm Emmanuel’s decision not to seek a third term.

The accusations triggered a federal investigation, resulting in a blistering report that found Chicago officers routinely used excessive force and violated the rights of residents, particularly minorities. The city implemented a new policy that requires video of fatal police shootings to be released within 60 days, accelerated a program to equip all officers with body cameras and adopted other reforms to change the way police shootings are investigated.

Center for American Progress, a Liberal Think Tank, Fires Two After Media Leaks

Two staff members from The Center for American Progress (CAP), a leading Washington think tank, were fired amid concerns that they were involved in leaking internal emails to the media, The Intercept reported Wednesday. Other CAP staff, who spoke to The Intercept anonymously, believed these emails “reflected improper influence by the United Arab Emirates within the think tank.”

Ken Gude, a senior national security staff member, and an unnamed employee were dismissed.

The emails, which The Intercept says were not leaked by the fired employees, revealed that CAP staff members argued over how CAP should respond in a public statement to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident, author and journalist for The Washington Post. According to a CIA report, Khashoggi was killed on the orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Initially, according to The Intercept, CAP’s public statement both condemned the killing and called for specific consequences for Saudi Arabia. Then, as The Intercept reports, “Brian Katulis, a Gulf expert at CAP, objected to the specific consequences proposed in an email exchange with other national security staffers.” Demands for Saudi Arabia to face specific consequences as a result of its role in Khashoggi’s killing were cut from the statement, replaced with a general, milder request to “take additional steps to reassess” U.S.-Saudi relations.

Katulis, The Intercept reports, is the link between CAP and UAE. It continues: “[He] is close with the UAE’s ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al Otaiba, who is the go-between for Emirati money flowing into Washington. Otaiba also played a key role in elevating Mohammed bin Salman to his position as crown prince of Saudi Arabia.”

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both come under scrutiny from international organizations for their human rights records. As Amnesty International wrote in its 2017–2018 report on the Kingdom, “Many human rights defenders and critics were detained … many more were sentenced to death following grossly unfair trials.”

The UAE is accused of running secret prisons in Yemen, at which, according to a report from the Associated Press, “abuse is routine and torture extreme—including the ‘grill,’ in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire.”

Gude was a critic of the UAE’s human rights record, but he was open about his views, including them in one of CAP’s own reports. Colleagues who spoke to The Intercept were adamant that even when Gude objected to organizational policy, or to the actions of CAP’s donors, he would never leak internal emails or other proprietary information.

In the end, Gude publicly praised CAP’s final statement, on Twitter, saying: “Great statement from ⁦@kellymagsamen⁩ for ⁦@amprog⁩ demanding the US hold Saudi Arabia accountable for the murder of Jamal #Khashoggi & MBS’s increasingly reckless actions that have killed thousands of Yemenis & jailed women’s rights advocates.”

The second employee was not named and did not comment, though a source tells The Intercept that the person was fired because they “forwarded the [email] exchange to a superior, concerned about the propriety of the debate around the Khashoggi statement.” The employee, according to The Intercept’s source, “had no intention of making the matter public.”

CAP, which The Nation called “Washington’s leading liberal think tank” in a 2013 article, was founded by John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and is now led by Neera Tanden, a former Hillary Clinton aide.

A CAP spokesperson told The Intercept that the two staff members let go as a result of the investigation were not fired for being whistleblowers. “We are not going to discuss internal personnel matters, but no one was fired at CAP for leaking or whistleblowing,” the unnamed spokesperson said.

The Intercept’s other sources contradicted the spokesperson’s statement, saying, “multiple members of CAP leadership have used the leak as the leading rationale for the firings in multiple settings,” and that the internal disagreement over the Khashoggi statement was “widely discussed within CAP, and people outside the organization also learned of it.”

Trump Grounds Pelosi After She Imperils His Big Speech

WASHINGTON — She imperiled his State of the Union address. He denied her an aircraft to visit troops abroad.

The shutdown battle between President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is playing out as a surreal game of constitutional brinksmanship, with both flexing their political powers from opposite ends of Pennsylvania Avenue as the negotiations to end the monthlong partial government shutdown remain stalled.

In dramatic fashion, Trump issued a letter to Pelosi on Thursday, just before she and other lawmakers were set to depart on the previously undisclosed trip to Afghanistan and Brussels. Trump belittled the trip as a “public relations event” and said it would be best if Pelosi remained in Washington to negotiate to reopen the government.

“Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative!” concluded Trump, who had been smarting since Pelosi, the day before, called on him to postpone his Jan. 29 State of the Union address due to the shutdown.

Denying military aircraft to a senior lawmaker is very rare and Congress was caught off guard. A bus to ferry the legislators to their departure idled outside the Capitol on Thursday afternoon.

Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said the speaker planned to travel to Afghanistan and Brussels to thank service members and obtain briefings on national security and intelligence “from those on the front lines.” He noted Trump had traveled to Iraq during the shutdown and said a Republican-led congressional trip also had taken place.

The political tit-for-tat between Trump and Pelosi laid bare how the government-wide crisis has devolved into an intensely personal clash between two leaders determined to prevail over one another. It took place as hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay and Washington’s routine protocols — a president’s speech to Congress, a lawmaker’s official trip — become collateral damage in the budget fight.

Pelosi would normally make such a trip on a military aircraft supplied by the Pentagon. According to a defense official, Pelosi did request Defense Department support for overseas travel and it was initially approved. The official wasn’t authorized to speak by name about the matter, so spoke on condition of anonymity.

The official said the president does have the authority to cancel the use of military aircraft.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump wanted Pelosi to stay in Washington before Tuesday, a deadline to prepare the next round of paychecks for federal workers.

“We want to keep her in Washington,” Sanders said. “The president wants her here to negotiate.”

Trump was taken by surprise by Pelosi’s move to postpone his address and told one adviser that it was the sort of disruptive move that he would do himself, according to a Republican who is in frequent contact with the White House and was not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations.

While he maintained a public silence, Trump grew weary of how Pelosi’s move was being received on cable TV and reiterated fears that he was being outmaneuvered in the public eye. Trump was delighted at the idea of canceling Pelosi’s trip, believing the focus on the resources needed would highlight her hypocrisy for cancelling his speech, according to the Republican.

While Pelosi did not directly respond to being denied her trip, the No. 2 Democrat in the House, Rep. Steny Hoyer, called Trump’s action “petty. It is small. It is vindictive.”

And Rep. Adam Schiff of California slammed Trump for revealing the closely held travel plans. (The president’s trip to Iraq was not disclosed in advance for security reasons.)

“I think the president’s decision to disclose a trip the speaker’s making to a war zone was completely and utterly irresponsible in every way,” Schiff said.

Some Republicans also expressed frustration. Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham tweeted: “One sophomoric response does not deserve another.” He called Pelosi’s State of the Union move “very irresponsible and blatantly political” but said Trump’s effort was “also inappropriate.”

Trump has still not said how he will handle Pelosi’s attempt to have him postpone his State of the Union address until the government is reopened so workers can be paid for providing security for the grand Washington tradition.

Pelosi told reporters earlier Thursday: “Let’s get a date when government is open. Let’s pay the employees. Maybe he thinks it’s OK not to pay people who do work. I don’t.”

Trump declined to address the stalemate over the speech Thursday during a visit to the Pentagon, simply promising that the nation will have “powerful, strong border security.”

Pelosi reiterated she is willing to negotiate money for border security once the government is reopened, but she said Democrats remain opposed to Trump’s long-promised wall. “I’m not for a wall,” Pelosi said twice, mouthing the statement a third time for effect.

While the shutdown dragged on, the State Department instructed all U.S. diplomats in Washington and elsewhere to return to work next week with pay, saying it had found money for their salaries at least temporarily.

In a notice to staff, the department said it can pay most of its employees beginning Sunday or Monday for their next pay period. They will not be paid for time worked since the shutdown began in December until the situation is resolved, said the notice.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had raised eyebrows among the U.S. diplomatic corps last week when he proclaimed that morale at the State Department was “good” despite the shutdown and the fact that 40 percent of its employees in the U.S. and nearly 23 percent overseas had been furloughed and the rest were working without pay.

Trump Administration Likely Split Up Thousands More Migrant Families

WASHINGTON — It seems likely that thousands more migrant children were split from their families than the Trump administration has acknowledged, in part because officials were stepping up family separations long before the border policy that prompted international outrage last spring, a government watchdog said Thursday.

It’s unclear just how many family separations occurred at the U.S.-Mexico border. Health and Human Services, the agency tasked with caring for migrant children, did not adequately track them until after a judge ruled that children must be reunited with their families, according to the report by the agency’s inspector general.

Ann Maxwell, assistant inspector general for evaluations, said the number of children removed from their parents was certainly larger than the 2,737 listed by the government in court documents. Those documents chronicled separations that took place as parents were criminally prosecuted for illegally entering the country under President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy.

“It’s certainly more,” Maxwell said. “But precisely how much more is unknown.”

Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who sued on behalf of a mother separated from her son, said the separation policy “was a cruel disaster from the start. This report reaffirms that the government never had a clear picture of how many children it ripped from their parents.”

Most of the tens of thousands of children who come into government custody cross the border alone. But the report found that in late 2016, 0.3 percent of children turned over to Health and Human Services had crossed with a parent and were separated. By the summer of 2017, that percentage had spiked to 3.6 percent, officials said. The watchdog did not have exact numbers, but the total number of migrant children who passed through the agency’s care during the 2017 budget year was 40,810. The separated children had already been released to sponsors, who are generally parents or other close relatives.

The inspector general did not say why the children had been separated before the zero-tolerance policy. Immigration officials are allowed to take a child from a parent in certain cases — serious criminal charges against a parent, concerns over the health and welfare of a child or medical concerns. That policy has long been in place.

Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for Homeland Security, said the report reinforced what officials have long said. “For more than a decade it was and continues to be standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk” or there’s a record of a “serious criminal activity by the adult,” she said.

In some cases, however, Homeland Security officials said a parent had a criminal history but did not offer details on the crimes, the watchdog reported.

The Administration for Children and Families, the division under Health and Human Services that manages the care of unaccompanied minors, said it generally agreed with the findings and noted the report did not find that the agency lost track of children under its care. It also noted new policies were in place to help track newly separated children. And the court never instructed officials to determine the number of children separated before the June 26 ruling.

Last spring, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions said anyone caught crossing the border illegally would be criminally prosecuted. Families were brought into custody by U.S. Border patrol officials, then their parents taken to criminal court. If the parents were gone longer than 72 hours — the length of time Border Patrol is allowed to hold children — the children were transferred to the custody of Health and Human Services.

The practice prompted a massive outcry, with church groups and lawmakers calling the separations inhumane. Trump ordered an end to the separations on June 20. At the time, a federal judge who was already hearing the case of a mother separated from her son ruled that children must be reunited with their parents.

Despite “considerable” effort by Health and Human Services to locate all the children placed in its care, the report said officials were still finding new cases as long as five months after the judge’s order requiring reunifications.

“There is even less visibility for separated children who fall outside the court case,” investigators concluded.

They said it’s not clear the system put in place to track separated children is good enough. And the lack of detail from immigration authorities continues to be an issue.

The border remains a crucible for the Trump administration, with a partial government shutdown that has dragged on nearly a month over the president’s demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall that congressional Democrats are unwilling to provide.

The inspector general’s office was also looking into other aspects of the separations, including the health and mental well-being of the children who had been separated. It expects to have other reports on the topic.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Condemns Shutdown in Stirring Address

Using her first floor speech as a member of Congress to highlight the severe financial pain and insecurity the government shutdown has caused for millions of ordinary Americans, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday castigated President Donald Trump for holding “800,000 workers’ paychecks hostage” and argued that the record-long lapse in federal funding is emblematic of a systemic crisis of democracy.

“It is actually not about a wall, it is not about the border, and it is certainly not about the well-being of everyday Americans,” Ocasio-Cortez said of the shutdown, which is now in its fourth week with no end in sight. “The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.”

“It is not normal to shut down the government when we don’t get what we want. It is not normal for public servants to run away and hide from the public that they serve,” the New York congresswoman declared, referencing her unsuccessful search for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in the Senate building on Wednesday. “And it is certainly not normal to starve the people we serve for a proposal that is wildly unpopular among the American people.”

Watch Ocasio-Cortez’s full remarks:

First House Floor speech from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC): “The truth of this shutdown is that it’s actually not about a wall…The truth is, this shutdown is about the erosion of American democracy and the subversion of our most basic governmental norms.” pic.twitter.com/r8tmsGSNtT

— CSPAN (@cspan) January 17, 2019

To illustrate the shutdown’s impact on the daily lives of federal workers, the New York congresswoman told the story of one of her constituents, a Yemeni-American who works as an air traffic controller—a profession that has been deeply harmed by the partial government closure.

“He and air traffic controllers like him across the country missed their first paycheck this past week,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “He was telling me about how stressful his job is. Every single day air traffic controllers have thousands of people’s lives in their hands. And it is terrifying to think that almost every single air traffic controller in the United States is currently distracted at work because they don’t know when their next paycheck is coming.”

As Common Dreams reported, a representative of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association warned in an interview with CNN on Wednesday that flying is “absolutely” less safe due to the government shutdown, which has forced air traffic controllers to work unpaid and “with bare-bones crews.”

“Federal workers’ jobs are stressful enough,” Ocasio-Cortez said during her floor speech. “The rise in New York City’s cost of living is stressful enough. His several-thousand-dollar-a-month Bronx mortgage is stressful enough. The anti-immigrant sentiment of this administration is stressful enough.”

The New York congresswoman concluded that Trump and “every member” of Congress has a responsibility to bring the prolonged shutdown to an end and “maintain the basic functioning of the United States government.”

Ocasio-Cortez’s first remarks on the House floor came just hours after she and a group of her fellow House Democrats marched to the Senate building to demand that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) hold a vote to reopen the government.

“He seems to be running away from us,” Ocasio-Cortez said after looking for and failing to find McConnell in his office or on the Senate floor.

Ultimately, the group of House Democrats left McConnell a letter calling for a vote to “end this manufactured crisis and allow our devoted federal workers to get back to work for the American people.”

The U.S. Has Venezuela in Its Crosshairs

Last Thursday—on January 10—Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for his second term as president of Venezuela. “I tell the people,” Maduro said, “this presidential sash is yours. The power of this sash is yours. It does not belong to the oligarchy or to imperialism. It belongs to the sovereign people of Venezuela.”

These two terms—oligarchy and imperialism—define the problems faced by Maduro’s new government.

Oligarchy

Despite 10 years of governance by the socialist forces—first led by Hugo Chavez and now by Maduro—the Venezuelan oligarchy remains firmly intact. It dominates large sections of the economy, holds immense amounts of the country’s social wealth and controls the main media outlets. A walk through the Altamira neighborhood in eastern Caracas is sufficient to gauge the resilience of the wealthy, most of whom have homes in Spain and in Florida as well. Pelucones is the name used to define them—bigwigs, a term with aristocratic connotations. They have resisted all attempts by the socialist Bolivarian movement to expand political and economic democracy in the country.

This oligarchy, through its media, controls the political and social narrative, defining the nature of Venezuela’s crisis to its advantage. For this small sliver of the population, all of Venezuela’s serious problems are blamed on the Maduro movement. None of the problems are laid on the doorstep of their long domination of Venezuela nor do they cast an eye at the United States, which has tried to suffocate the Bolivarian revolution since 1999.

Imperialism

Imperialism is a word that is rarely used these days. It is relegated to histories of colonialism in the distant past. There is little understanding of the suffocating way that financial firms and multinational businesses drive their agenda against the development aspirations of the poorer nations. There is even less understanding about the muscular attitude of countries such as the United States, Canada and the Europeans against states that they deem to be a problem.

The gunsights were once firmly on West Asia and North Africa—on Iraq, Libya, Syria and Iran—but now they are focused on Latin America—on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. These countries face economic sanctions and embargoes, threats of annihilation, covert operations and war. The definition of imperialism is simple: if you don’t do what we tell you to do, we’ll destroy you.

Pressure on Venezuela has been intense. U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for the overthrow of the Bolivarian government, led by Maduro. Sanctions have been ratcheted up. Economic warfare has become normal. Threats of a military invasion are in the air.

Lima Group

On January 4, the Lima Group of 13 Latin American governments and Canada said that it would not recognize Maduro as the president of Venezuela. Behind them sits the U.S. State Department, which has put pressure along the hemisphere for the isolation of Venezuela as well as Cuba and Nicaragua. The U.S. State Department characterized the inauguration of the new president as “Maduro’s illegitimate usurpation of power.” Diplomatic language has dissolved into this kind of crudity.

The Lima Group was set up for one reason: to overthrow the current government of Venezuela. It has no other purpose. Sanctions and diplomatic withdrawals are part of the Lima Group’s arsenal. Buoyed by the election of far right-wing politicians such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and enthused by the fulminations of Trump, the Lima Group has tightened the pressure.

Argentina’s Mauricio Macri went to Brasilia to meet Bolsonaro, where he condemned the “dictatorship” of Maduro, and accused him—personally—of being responsible for the difficulties in Venezuela. This is harsh language, rhetoric that sets in motion a dangerous push toward regime change in Venezuela.

The Lima Group’s violations of the UN Charter have been helped along by the Organization of American States, which held an extraordinary session to push its members to take economic and diplomatic steps for the “restoration of democratic order” in Venezuela. It perhaps needs to be emphasized that “restoration of democratic order” is a euphemism for regime change.

When U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley tried to draw the UN Security Council into such language—of dictatorships and regime change—she was rebuffed by the other members. In November 2017, for instance, Bolivia, China, Egypt and Russia boycotted an informal meeting called by Haley. No other such meeting has been possible. There is worry that the Trump administration will attempt in Venezuela what the Obama administration conducted in Honduras, or worse, what the Bush administration conducted in Iraq.

It Begins

Maduro was not permitted to take his oath in the National Assembly. He was blocked by Juan Guaidó, leader of the opposition. That is why Maduro took his oath in the Supreme Court, a procedure that is validated by the Constitution.

Strikingly, the head of the Organization of American States—the Uruguayan politician Luis Almagro—sent out a tweet that welcomed Juan Guaidó as the president. Guaidó, to his credit, had not claimed the presidency. It was, instead, a foreign official from a regional body that has superseded the Venezuelan people and attempted to install a new president in Caracas.

More chilling has been the words from the U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his department. Pompeo, in a tweet, wrote, “The time is NOW for a return to democracy in Venezuela.” The word “now”—in capitals—suggests that Pompeo is clear that there needs to be no procedures, only a coup. The day after this tweet, Pompeo’s department said, “It’s time to begin the orderly transition to a new government.” One does not need to read between the lines to know that this is a call for regime change, for a coup, and that it comes from Washington, D.C.

Trump’s national security adviser—John Bolton—coined the phrase “troika of tyranny” that includes Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. It is plain as day that the United States wants to overthrow the governments in each of these countries, and perhaps Bolivia as well. These are dangerous portents.

Those troops that Trump is withdrawing from Syria might not be going home anytime soon. They might find themselves deployed soon enough on the beaches of Punto Fijo, facing a Bay of Pigs style resistance from the Chavistas.