Venezuela, There She Blows

Posted on April 10, 2016April 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Statement of Secretary Lew on the Venezuela Executive Order
3/9/2015

U.S.Treasury: We are committed to defending human rights and advancing democratic governance in Venezuela through the use of financial sanctions.

We will use these tools to target those persons involved in violence against anti-government protesters, serious human rights abuses, and those involved in the arrest or prosecution of individuals for their legitimate exercise of free speech.

Corrupt actions by Venezuelan government officials deprive Venezuela of needed economic resources that could be invested in the Venezuelan people and used to spur economic growth. These actions also undermine the public trust in democratic institutions and the human rights to which Venezuelan citizens are entitled. This Executive Order will be used to protect the U.S. financial system from the illicit financial flows from public corruption in Venezuela.

Beginning in 2013, perhaps earlier:

Venezuela is running out of money fast and has started selling its gold

CNN: The cash-strapped country could default by next year when lots of debt payments are due. Venezuela’s reserves, which are mostly made up of gold, have fallen sharply this year as the country needs cash to pay off debt and tries to maintain its social welfare programs.

Venezuela owes about $15.8 billion in debt payments between now and the end of 2016.

But it doesn’t have enough to make good on its payments. Venezuela only has $15.2 billion in foreign reserves — the lowest amount since 2003. A lot of those reserves are in gold.

Less than $1 billion of Venezuela’s reserves are in cash, and it has a couple billion in reserves at the IMF.

Venezuela risks a descent into chaos

©AFP

Police arrest students during a protest against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in San Cristobal. Two officers died and four more were hurt

FT: At the main morgue of central Caracas, the stench forces everyone to cover their nostrils. “Now things are worse than ever,” says Yuli Sánchez. “They kill people and no one is punished while families have to keep their pain to themselves.”

Ms Sánchez’s 14-year-old nephew, Oliver, was shot five times by malandros, or thugs, while riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle. His uncle, Luis Mejía, remarked that in a fortnight three members of their family had been shot, including two youths who were shot by police.

An economic, social and political crisis facing Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s unpopular president, is being aggravated by a rise in violence which is prompting fears that this oil-rich country risks becoming a failed state.

“What can we do?” Mr Mejía asks. “Give up.” The morgue employee in charge of handling the corpses notes that a decade ago he received seven or eight bodies every weekend. These days, he says, that number has risen to between 40 and 50: “This is now wilder than the wild west.”

Critics say that the Venezuelan government is increasingly unable to provide citizens with water, electricity, health or a functioning economy which can supply basic food staples or indispensable medicines, let alone personal safety.

Last month alone, Venezuelans learned of the summary execution of at least 17 gold miners supposedly by a mining Mafia, the killing of two police officers allegedly by a group of students who drove a bus into a barricade, and a hostage drama inside a prison at the hands of a grenade-wielding criminal gang. On Wednesday, three policemen were killed when an armed gang busted a member out of a lock-up in the capital.

At least 10 were killed in a Caracas shanty town after a confrontation between local thugs armed with assault rifles, while a local mayor was gunned down outside his home in Trujillo state last month. There are widespread reports of lynchings.

All this is creating a broad unease that Mr Maduro is unable to maintain order. Venezuela has the world’s fastest inflation and its dire recession is worsening. Mr Maduro last week declared every Friday a holiday for the next two months to save electricity as a prolonged drought has exacerbated chronic power shortages. There is a lack of basic goods. Analysts warn that the economic crisis risks turning in to a humanitarian one.

The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves– Moisés Naím, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

“Failed state is a nebulous concept often used too lightly. That’s not the case with today’s Venezuela,” says Moisés Naím a Venezuelan distinguished fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The evidence of state failure is very concrete in the country that sits on top of the world’s largest oil reserves.”

Venezuela is already one of the world’s deadliest countries. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local think-tank, says the murder rate rose last year to 92 killings per 100,000 residents. The attorney-general cites a lower figure of 58 homicides per 100,000.

In 1998, a year before former leader Hugo Chávez took office, the rate was 19 per 100,000, says the think-tank’s director Roberto Briceño León, adding that after 17 years of socialist “revolution”, it is the poor who make up most of the victims.

Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela's president, gestures while speaking at a rally to commemorate the 24th anniversary of former Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's failed military coup in Caracas, Venezuela, on Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016

©Bloomberg

“I think it is evident that the Venezuelan state cannot act as a state in many areas of the country, so it could be considered failed,” says Mr Briceño, adding that the state now “lacks a monopoly on violence”.

But the state is indeed to blame for some of that violence, according to a report by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and the Venezuelan Human Rights Education-Action Programme presented to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

“Venezuelans are facing one of the highest murder rates in the hemisphere and urgently need effective protection from violent crime,” said José Miguel Vivanco HRW’s Americas director. “But in multiple raids throughout the country, the security forces themselves have allegedly committed serious abuses.”

Their findings show that police and military raids in low-income and immigrant communities in Venezuela have led to widespread allegations of abuse, including extrajudicial killings, mass arbitrary detentions, maltreatment of detainees, forced evictions, the destruction of homes, and arbitrary deportations.

Country’s bitter power struggle reflects institutional weakness across the region

The government usually blames violence within its borders on Colombian rightwing paramilitaries engaged in a war against its revolution. But as David Smilde and Hugo Pérez Hernáiz of the Washington Office on Latin America, a think-tank, recently wrote: “Attributing violence in Venezuela to paramilitary activity has been a common rhetorical move used by the government over the past year, effectively making a citizen security problem into a national security problem.”

For many Venezuelans it no longer matters who is to blame. “It is a state policy of letting anarchy sink in,” says a former policeman outside the gates of a compound in Caracas.

That former police station now houses the Frente 5 de Marzo, one of the political groups that consider themselves the keepers of socialism’s sacred flame. The gates bear the colours of the Venezuelan flag and are marked with bullet holes. The man believes there is something akin to a civil war going on.

“Venezuela is pure chaos now. It seems to me there is no way back,” he says.

****

Iran has been outsourcing for many years and that includes to Iran:

Iran’s ambassador to Venezuela said Tuesday that a check worth about $70 million, found by German authorities in the luggage of Iran’s former central bank chief, was going to be used by an Iranian company for its expenses while building public housing in Venezuela.

Iranian Ambassador Hojattolah Soltani made the remarks in an interview with the Venezuelan television channel Globovision, saying the check for 300 million Venezuelan bolivars was to be used for the expenses of the Kayson Company, a Tehran-based construction business that is building thousands of homes for the Venezuelan government.

The Iranian ambassador noted that the man with the check whom German authorities stopped last month is not currently a government official. Soltani said that Tahmasb Mazaheri, a former chief of Iran’s central bank and former economy minister, has been working as an adviser to the Iranian company.

Venezuelan authorities had to comment on the issue, and stressed that everything was above board (link is external). The Iranian Ambassador to Caracas would later recant his opinion, as cited by AP above, saying about the caught check-courier (link is external) “[he] is by no means an official of the Government (of Iran); neither has his name been affixed to the confiscated check”, and adding that the check “was signed in Iran and Mr. Mazaheri was on his way to Venezuela to bring the check to cash it in Banco Venezuela.”

So Mazaheri, who is not an official of the Government of Iran as per Iran’s Ambassador to Venezuela claims, was entrusted to carry a check worth $70 million, just like that? Mazaheri was a director of Banco Internacional de Desarrollo (link is external), an OFAC-designated entity targeted by the U.S. Treasury Department “for providing or attempting to provide financial services to Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL). (link is external)” The European Union also included the bank in its list of sanctioned entities involved in “nuclear or ballistic missiles activities

– See more at: http://infodio.com/250414/venezuela/corruption/kayson/tahmasb/mazaheri#sthash.8z4z99bY.dpuf

Recall the Chatter About Being Prosecuted as a Climate Changer Denier?

Posted on April 10, 2016April 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

The standing is being set for this to happen. How did we get here?

Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming

By Megan McArdle

Bloomberg: The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”

My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.

(I pause to note, in the interests of full disclosure, that before we met, my husband briefly worked for CEI as a junior employee. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.)

Speaking of the law, why on earth is CEI getting subpoenaed? The attorney general, Claude Earl Walker, explains: “We are committed to ensuring a fair and transparent market where consumers can make informed choices about what they buy and from whom. If ExxonMobil has tried to cloud their judgment, we are determined to hold the company accountable.”

That wasn’t much of an explanation. It doesn’t mention any law that ExxonMobil may have broken. It is also borderline delusional, if Walker believes that ExxonMobil’s statements or non-statements about climate change during the period 1997 to 2007 appreciably affected consumer propensity to stop at a Mobil station, rather than tootling down the road to Shell or Chevron, or giving up their car in favor of walking to work.

State attorneys general including Walker held a press conference last week to talk about the investigation of ExxonMobil and explain their theory of the case. And yet, there sort of wasn’t a theory of the case. They spent a lot of time talking about global warming, and how bad it was, and how much they disliked fossil fuel companies. They threw the word “fraud” around a lot. But the more they talked about it, the more it became clear that what they meant by “fraud” was “advocating for policies that the attorneys general disagreed with.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman gave the game away when he explained that they would be pursuing completely different theories in different jurisdictions — some under pension laws, some consumer protection, some securities fraud. It is traditional, when a crime has actually been committed, to first establish that a crime has occurred, and then identify a perpetrator. When prosecutors start running that process backwards, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re looking at prosecutorial power run amok.

And that approaches certainty when attorneys general start sending subpoenas to think tanks that ExxonMobil might have supported. What exactly would the subpoena prove? That ExxonMobil supported opinions about climate change? That the opinions tended to be congruent with its own interests? That this opinion might have been wrong, and if so, might have encouraged wrong beliefs in others? This is a description of, roughly, every person or organization in the history of the world, not excluding attorneys general. It’s also not illegal. Especially since, as the New York Times points out, “the company published extensive research over decades that largely lined up with mainstream climatology.” This isn’t preventing consumers from buying into a Ponzi scheme; it’s an attempt to criminalize advocacy.

I support action on climate change for the same reason I buy homeowner’s, life and disability insurance: because the potential for catastrophe is large. But that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to drive people who disagree with me from the public square. Climate activists have an unfortunate tendency to try to do just that, trying to brand dissenters as the equivalent of Holocaust deniers.

It’s an understandable impulse. It seems easier to shut down dissenters than to persuade people to stop consuming lots and lots of energy-intensive goods and services.

But history has had lots and lots of existentially important debates. If you thought that only the One True Church could save everyone from Hell, the Reformation was the most existentially important debate in human history. If you thought that Communist fifth columnists were plotting to turn the U.S. into Soviet Russia, that was also pretty existentially important. We eventually realized that it was much better to have arguments like these with words, rather than try to suppress one side of them by force of law.

Unfortunately those who wield the law forget that lesson, and we get cases like the CEI subpoena, intended to silence debate by hounding one side. The attorney general doesn’t even need to have the law on his side; the process itself can be the punishment, as victims are forced to spend immense amounts on legal fees, and immense time and money on complying with investigations. (And if the law were on the attorney general’s side in a case like this, then that’s a terrible law, and it should be overturned.)

Prosecutors know the damage they can do even when they don’t have a leg to stand on. The threat of investigation can coerce settlements even in weak cases.

The enemies of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil should hold their applause. In a liberal democracy, every guerrilla tactic your side invents will eventually be used against you. Imagine a coalition of Republican attorneys general announcing an investigation of companies that have threatened state boycotts over gay-rights issues, and you may get a sense of why this is not such a good precedent to set.

The rule of law, and our norms about free speech, represent a sort of truce between both sides. We all agree to let other people talk, because we don’t want to live in a world where we ourselves are not free to speak. Because we do not want to be silenced by an ambitious prosecutor, we should all be vigilant when ambitious prosecutors try to silence anyone else.

Invest in Gold, Documents: bin Ladin Agreed

Posted on April 10, 2016April 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Newly released documents show bin Laden encouraged Al Qaeda leaders to invest ransom money in gold

BusinessInsider: Notorious terrorist leader Osama bin Laden was bullish on gold, telling Al Qaeda leaders in a 2010 letter to invest in the precious metal while “overall price trend is upward,” The New York Times reported this week.

The letter was part of a trove of documents released by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence last month. In it, bin Laden implores Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, Al Qaeda’s general manager, to earmark $1.7 million of a $5 million ransom for gold bars and coins.

Bin Laden also advocated buying euros, Kuwaiti dinars, and Chinese yuan. He outlined specific instructions on how to spend the money.

“As for the money you received in local currency, it should be gotten rid of, because its value has been declining and it continues to go down,” bin Laden wrote. He then detailed how much of the ransom money should go to various currencies and said al-Rahman should “use the euros first, then the dinars, the yuan and then the gold.”

He then goes on to analyze the outlook on gold.

“The overall price trend is upward,” bin Laden wrote. “Even with occasional drops, in the next few years the price of gold will reach $3,000 an ounce. Right now it is at $1,390 an ounce, but before the events in New York and Washington it was $280 an ounce.”

The Times noted that this would have been a “bad bet,” because on the day the letter was dated, December 3, 2010, gold closed at $1,414.08 an ounce. Today gold is at about $1,230 an ounce.

It’s unclear whether al-Rahman followed bin Laden’s instructions in this case, according to The Times.

Bin Laden wasn’t alone in his assessment of gold’s potential. The Times said:

Bin Laden may have lacked investing acumen — gold peaked at $1,900 an ounce five months after his death in 2011 — but he seems to have had a keen sense of the financial zeitgeist. His belief in gold’s bright future was shared at the time by many Americans and a number of financial luminaries, including George Soros and John Paulson, both of whom were investing heavily in the precious metal. Demand was so high that in 2010, JPMorgan Chase reopened a long-closed vault used to store gold under the streets of downtown Manhattan.

Read the full letter below:

Osama Bin Laden gold letter by Pamela Engel

POTUS Made the Guarantee Twice, Not Political Cover

Posted on April 10, 2016April 10, 2016 by Denise Simon

Chris Wallace asked Obama about Hillary’s email and server. In Obama’s answer he made the guarantee twice there would be no political cover for Hillary. He went on to describe that the White House never got involved in cases where there were ongoing investigations. What???

Barack Obama also defended his decisions to play golf….and his timing was not in question. Too bad Chris could not ask him about not joining other leaders in Paris and instead sent John Kerry later accompanied with James Taylor to perform ‘You’ve Got a Friend’. Sheesh really?

EXCLUSIVE: Obama vows no influence in Clinton email probe, defends terror fight

FNC: President Obama repeatedly vowed there would be no political influence over the Justice Department’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state — in a wide-ranging interview with “Fox News Sunday” in which he also ardently defended his efforts to defeat the Islamic State and other terror groups amid criticism about his perceived indifference.

“I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI, not just in this case, but in any case,” Obama told “Fox News Sunday.” “Nobody is above the law. How many times do I have to say it?”

His remarks came less than three months after White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest publicly downplayed a possible indictment for Clinton.

Obama praised Clinton’s tenure running the State Department from 2009 to 2013 and said he still doesn’t think the emails to and from her private server breached national security.

However, he acknowledged, as Clinton has done, that her using the private server was not a good idea, in part after revelations that roughly 2,000 of the emails included classified information.

“There’s carelessness in terms of managing emails, that she has owned, and she recognizes,” Obama told Fox News’ Chris Wallace, in his first interview with the cable network since 2008.

Obama defended efforts to stop the growing international terror threat and his response to terrorists.

“My No. 1 job is to protect the American people,” Obama said, in an interview taped Friday at the Unversity of Chicago, where he was a professor. “My No. 1 priority right now is defeating ISIL (the Islamic State.) … I’m the guy who calls the families, or meets with them, or hugs them, or tries to comfort a mom, or a dad, or a husband, or a kid, after a terrorist attack. So let’s be very clear about how much I prioritize this: This is my No. 1 job.”

Obama also defended his actions after several deadly attacks, including playing a round of golf after American James Foley was beheaded and going to a baseball game in Cuba after the Brussels terror bombings last month, for which the Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

“In the wake of terrorist attacks, it has been my view consistently that the job of the terrorists, in their minds, is to induce panic, induce fear, get societies to change who they are. And what I’ve tried to communicate is, “You can’t change us. You can kill some of us, but we will hunt you down, and we will get you.

“And in the meantime, just as we did in Boston, after the marathon bombing, we’re going to go to a ballgame. And do all the other things that make our life worthwhile. … That’s the message of resilience. That we don’t panic, that we don’t fear, we will hunt you down and we will get you.”

The president also dug in on his position that the GOP-controlled Senate should vote on whether to confirm his nomination to the Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.

He argued lawmakers have a constitutional responsibility and suggested that Garland would pass the confirmation process.

“I think that if they go through the process, they won’t have a rationale to defeat him,” Obama said.

The president nevertheless acknowledged that congressional Republicans are in a tough election-year position, considering he’s out of office in about nine months, with the possibility the next president could be a Republican who will make his own nomination.

He Did it, He Turned Over the Fast and Furious Documents

Posted on April 8, 2016April 8, 2016 by Denise Simon

Maybe the whistleblowers will receive some vindication like Sharyl Attkisson.

Obama relents in fight over Fast and Furious documents

Politico: Four years after asserting executive privilege to block Congress from obtaining documents relating to a controversial federal gun trafficking investigation, President Barack Obama relented Friday, turning over to lawmakers thousands of pages of records that led to unusual House votes holding Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt in 2012.

In January, a federal district court judge rejected Obama’s executive privilege claim over records detailing the Justice Department and White House’s response to Operation Fast and Furious, a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigation that may have allowed as many as 2,000 firearms to pass into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson did not turn down Obama’s privilege assertion on the merits. Instead, she said authorized public disclosures about the operation in a Justice Department inspector general report essentially mooted the administration’s drive to keep the records secret.

Both sides had until midnight Friday to file an appeal. Instead, the Obama administration turned over a set of documents to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

“In light of the passage of time and other considerations, such as the Department’s interest in moving past this litigation and building upon our cooperative working relationship with the Committee and other Congressional committees, the Department has decided that it is not in the Executive Branch’s interest to continue litigating this issue at this time,” Justice Deparment legislative liaison Peter Kadzik wrote in a letter Friday to House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Justice Department spokesman Patrick Rodenbush confirmed that the administration does not plan to appeal. He argued that Jackson’s ruling validated Obama’s initial claim of privilege.

“The Department of Justice is pleased that the district court … continued to recognize that the deliberative process component of the executive privilege exists and was a valid basis for the Department to withhold certain documents when requested by the House in 2011. Although the Department disagrees with the district court’s conclusion that the privilege was overcome in this particular case by disclosures and statements made in other contexts, the Department has decided not to appeal the court’s judgment and has provided a production of documents to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,” Rodenbush said in a statement.

While the House largely won in the January decision, it did file an appeal earlier Friday afternoon, apparently unaware of the administration’s plans to comply with the judge’s order. The appeal suggested that House leaders were dissatisfied with aspects of Jackson’s rulings that narrowed the set of documents the administration had to turn over.

“As we’ve long asserted, the Committee requires and is entitled to these documents,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “They are critical to the Committee’s efforts to complete meaningful oversight. The Committee has a duty to understand and shine light on what was happening inside DOJ during the time of this irresponsible operation. Yet DOJ has obstructed our investigative work for years.”

After getting word that the Justice Department was turning over records, Chaffetz updated his statement, indicating that the House plans to press its appeal to get records beyond the ones the administration is providing.

“Today, under court order, DOJ turned over some of the subpoenaed documents. The Committee, however, is entitled to the full range of documents for which it brought this lawsuit. Accordingly, we have appealed the District Court’s ruling in order to secure those additional documents,” Chaffetz said.

Guns sold by dealers or informants used in the ATF operation wound up at numerous crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. In December 2010, two of the weapons were found at the scene of the murder of a Border Patrol agent in Arizona.

Obama’s privilege claim in the Fast and Furious fight was broad-ranging, seeking to cover not only internal deliberations about how to respond to congressional inquiries but also discussions about media strategy related to the congressional probes.

T he June 2012 claim in the Fast and Furious case was the only formal assertion of executive privilege by Obama to try to defeat a congressional demand for records or testimony, though the administration has raised executive privilege concerns when declining to comply with other congressional inquiries. Most of those were resolved through negotiations. The administration has also asserted executive privilege in response to a variety of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits.