They have proposed a Euro-modeled currency, the SUCRE, for trade among members of the ALBA. Apparently it has only been used as a virtual currency so far.
How?
No , it isn’t. You like (as in, have relationships with) more of them than you don’t.
Lots more.
No, it’s not. Basically , post-WWII, the US never met a right-wing dictator it didn’t like. And those guys were all such paragons of respect for human rights (he said sarcastically).
I didn’t say the US shouldn’t oppose human rights violations. I said your reasoning given for why is bullshit.
No. I’m in favour of you also sanctioning your friends, especially when they’re so many more times worse than those you do sanction, in precisely those areas you say concern you, like human rights.
Well, that’s solely and entirely our fault, isn’t it? I’m sure the Venezuelans would be glad to be friendly with the U.S., if our government had not been unrelentingly hostile to theirs ever since Hugo Chavez first took office.
The US is currently pretty much in line with other industrialized countries in how they apply sanctions to abusers of human rights. If the criticism is that major powers balance their interests between promoting human rights, promoting national security, and promoting economic development, then the U.S. is pretty much upholding the same standards as virtually any other country.
Like Putin? A-ha! I found one reason why your statement is false, therefore it is bullshit! (Cue link to Wikipedia article.)
So setting aside your outrage at hipocrisy, do you think sanctions on Venezuela are justified or not? Remember that hypocrites can still be right, like the two-pack a day smoker who tells people they ought to quit.
Oh, get real. The U.S. imperialists would have been Chevez’s excuse to seize autocratic power no matter what Washington did, just like many other countries do. As shown time and time again, shitty countries will blame all their problems on other countries and various conspiracy theories simply to allow leaders to eliminate democratic processes.
Well, the USG did back the 2002 coup attempt. And all of Latin America remembers what happened to Salvador Allende.
Why on earth would the U.S. oppose a coup against an anti-American autocrat?
It doesn’t take a lot of resources to cause harm to a country. Even lone individuals like Timothy McVeigh and Lee Oswald manage it.
Tell that to the Swedes…
No, the criticism is pretending like the human rights issue is the reason you do what you do when it’s clearly the economic and political stuff that decides. I wasn’t criticising US foreign policy, I was criticising your statement.
Putin’s as Right Wing as Stalin was…
Personally? Not yet, no, not on pure human rights grounds.
Wait, the Swedes have sanctions on Saudi Arabia? Where does it say that in your article? All I can find is that two countries are having a tiff and with some strongly-worded exchanges of notes.
I never said that human rights was the exclusive means of determining our foreign policy. In fact, I specifically indicated that it wasn’t: once again, note the use of “tends.” If you’re going to argue against imaginary statements you attribute to me, you can just take this disagreement offline, because you’re probably not going to pay close attention to my responses anyway.
Billionaire oligarch grabbing power for his rich cronies? Do you see Putin going around nationalizing his buddies’ industries? Hell, no, you don’t. If Putin were in Guatemala, you’d be yelling “Banana Republic!!!” from the rooftops. I can’t think of a single thing that makes Putin a leftist, other than his friendship with countries like Venezuela.
Do you think Amnesty International is overreacting? When they say they’ve documented “scores” of cases of torture, you think they’re just being drama queens? Do you think they are lying? Or do you just not think it’s a big deal?
Because he was also a freely and fairly elected and constitutionally legitimate head of state. As is Maduro. And as was Allende.
Ravenman, you will, I hope, agree, at least in principle, that any nation should have socialism if socialism is what the majority of its people really want? That that is a legitimate choice that the voters should get to make, and should get to have realized, and that any non-electoral opposition or interference in that decision is illegitimate?
Well, I specifically indicate that Venezuela’s human rights record has been largely irrelevant to U.S. hostility to its government since Chavez took office. W never cared about that sort of thing, we can tell by his cozying up to SA; it was Chavez’ socialism he objected to, and apparently Kenyan-Muslim-Commie-Obama sees the matter no differently, or sees no reason to change course.
A democratically elected leader who then jiggers the system to become an autocrat is still an autocrat, whether his name is Chavez, Putin, or whatever. As Freedom House stated so succinctly in 2013: “Venezuela is not an electoral democracy.”
That is, of course, irrelevant to the 2002 coup attempt; nobody can deny that Chavez at that time had been freely and fairly elected, by a people who really wanted some form of socialism.
Maybe but Hugo Chavez has been unrelentingly hostile to the USA since before he took office. He uses the USA to excuse his own poor grasp on economics.
To be clear, that statement was about the general relations between Venezuela and the Western countries in general. And you are ignoring that I’m questioning what hppens after an election - Putin was fairly elected once, too.
But IIRC, you have said you though Chavez did a pretty good job, right? What are your thoughts on the recent human rights criticism of Venezuela? Overblown? A serious problem? Should other countries do something about it, or just leave Venezuela alone?
A guy at State told me we have a program to supply oil and gas to Caribbean countries so that they don’t take it from Venezuela and get friendly with them.
For crying out loud, even Daniel Larison at The American Conservative, who’s as hard-right as they come and no fan of Chavez, thinks Obama’s move here was utterly stupid (which is of a piece with his approach to interventionist policy and the “Freedom Agenda” more generally).
Whatever you think of the Venezuelan opposition (and as noted I think they asked for every bit of what they’re now getting, and deserve it in spades), their fate should be neither the business of, nor the concern of the United States government. We need to, for once, mind our own business, as we didn’t do in the Cold War nor in the War on Terror.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/obamas-venezuela-blunder/