Author: admin

Volkswagen has been the latest automaker to be hit hard by the semiconductor shortage that is sweeping its way through the auto industry. 

The company has reportedly lost “tens of thousands” of vehicles in production in China as a result, according to Bloomberg. 

VW’s China head, Stephan Wollenstein, commented Wednesday: “It was hurting us already in December and we lost some 10,000 cars since then simply because we lost 50,000 cars in production in December because of some chips.”

For VW, the impact has been felt the most in vehicles that use the automaker’s Electronic Stability Program, “a system of sensors that works with a car’s Anti-lock Braking System to prevent the wheels seizing up after an unexpected swerve.”

“You see how vulnerable our industries are if only one chip is missing. This will unfortunately continue in the first quarter,” Wollenstein continued. 

China is the world’s largest auto market and a critical market for VW, who has about 40% of its vehicle operations in the country. In China, VW delivered 3.85 million cars in 2020, down 9.1% from the year prior as a result of the pandemic. 

2021 was thought to be a year where many automakers could play catch-up, but the chip shortage could stand in the way of an easy recovery for some automakers. Recall, we reported just days ago that the ongoing global chip shortage was wreaking havoc with the auto industry, which has become far more reliant on semiconductors due to “smart cars”, than it ever has been.

Last Tuesday, it was reported that Toyota has stopped its factory lines in Guangzhou, China as a result of lack of semiconductors. This came just hours after the company said it would have to cut production of its Tundra, being manufactured in Texas, by 40% for the same reason.

“The [Chinese factory] suspension could result in as much as a 30% cut in January’s output depending on how long it drags on,” Bloomberg noted early Tuesday morning. The company has told some of its suppliers that the halt could last about 4 days. 

Meanwhile, Toyota was unable to provide concrete information as to when production would restart. The Japanese automaker operates the Guangzhou factory with Guangzhou Automobile.

Toyota spokesman Scott Vazin told the Chicago Tribune last week: “This is absolutely an industry issue. We are evaluating the supply constraint of semiconductors and developing countermeasures to minimize the impact to production.”

Kristin Dziczek, vice president of industry at the Center for Automotive Research, commented: “There have been warning signs about his for months.”

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

During the Trump administration, I pointed to a problem with the American presidential system: it provides presidents with essentially unchecked power when it comes to launching a nuclear holocaust. Presidents can initiate nuclear war whenever they like. They need not be acting in a defensive capacity. This should strike any sane person as a rather insane policy, and as a huge hole in the so-called checks and balances on which the US political system is allegedly premised. 

Because of the Washington Beltway hysteria over Trump, the Congress—possibly for the first time—considered measures to rein in the president in this regard. It’s a shame it required Trump Derangement Syndrome to make this an issue, but we should take what we can get when it comes to admitting some of the grave threats to common sensical governance that plague the American national security state. 

Naturally, these lukewarm attempts at reform failed, likely because the Pentagon was surely opposed to them. While the president’s power is essentially unrestrained in this manner, the loosey goosey approach to controlling launching power also empowers the Pentagon. Surely, the Pentagon’s generals wanted to make sure they can have a big role in launching WWIII on a whim as well. 

Moreover, Trump supporters opposed the idea as well. When I published the 2020 article on the problem of unchecked presidential power in this regard, I was savaged by Trump supporters in social media for allegedly being a “never Trumper” and failing to understand that the power of the president must never be limited in any way, lest it get in the way of Trump “owning the libs.” Now that Trump is an ex-president, however, both Washington and the hero-worshipping Trump backers will completely forget about the issue. As far as Washington is concerned, the nuke codes are now being controlled by one of their own. And few Trump supporters ever cared about limiting presidential power, anyway. 

So, the power to incinerate a billion or more human beings over morning coffee remains in the power of the president. This morning, Biden supporters on Twitter were ecstatic over the video of the nuclear “football”—the device which enables the president to launch the nukes—was handed over to Biden:

Football incoming. pic.twitter.com/Ww4wz1GbIE

— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) January 20, 2021

But this should be little comfort to anyone who’s paying attention, especially given the launch codes are now under the thumb of a man who may not even know what year it is. 

But regardless of who is president, the fact is the only thing that stands between a president and his launching of nuclear missiles is his own moral compass. Anyone who isn’t hopelessly naïve about politicians and political institutions will find this deeply disturbing.

A Brief History of the Nuclear Launch Process

But why has there been no significant effort to develop some sort of check or veto to this process? Part of this lies in the fact the US military establishment maintains a posture very much in favor of erring on the side of aggression rather than restraint. In the early days of the nuclear-armed Cold War, there were essentially no safeguards in place. A man claiming to be the president, if he had access to the right people, could theoretically call for a nuclear strike, and there was no set way of remotely verifying his identity.

A more robust process was put in place by President Kennedy:

Although its origins remain highly classified, the Football can be traced back to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Privately, John F. Kennedy believed that nuclear weapons were, as he put it, “only good for deterring.” He also felt it was “insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.” Horrified by the doctrine known as MAD (mutually assured destruction), JFK ordered locks to be placed on nuclear weapons and demanded alternatives to the “all or nothing” nuclear war plan.

Kennedy began asking questions about how a nuclear strike might actually take place, and specifically asked:

• “What would I say to the Joint War Room to launch an immediate nuclear strike?”

• “How would the person who received my instructions verify them?”

Kennedy felt that it was important to ensure that only the president—whose identity could somehow be verified—could authorize a strike.

According to some critics of the Pentagon, however, the military was committed to making it easy to launch the missiles. The Air Force has even been accused of using “00000000” as a code that could enable the launch of a nuclear missile. According to Foreign Policy:

Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert and former launch officer…[and] now a scholar and author at Princeton University, first raised the idea in a piece published in 2004. He accused the Air Force of circumventing President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 order to install extra security codes to safeguard against accidental or unauthorized launch by putting them in place, but making them painfully simple to the missile launch officers who manned underground bunkers. Doing so, Blair said, effectively eliminated the codes’ usefulness.

Blair contends this easy-code protocol persisted for at least a decade, including the period when he was a launch officer.

For its part, the Air Force denies using the specific code “00000000.” Nonetheless, the prolaunch posture of the Pentagon has long been evident. As noted by Jeffrey Lewis at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies:

Bruce is correct about the major historical narrative at stake – the United States Air Force, particularly Strategic Air Command, generally resisted the introduction of technical safeguards out of concerns that such measures might make it more difficult to use the weapons in the event of a conflict….Like many other practices of the period…the Air Force’s emphasis on readiness at the expense of safety at that time seems, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, unwise in the extreme.

Other potential sources of human error or sabotage have surfaced over the years as well.

Military personnel close to President Clinton have claimed that he misplaced the so-called biscuit, the card on which nuclear launch codes are printed. Presidents have often carried them in a coat pocket. But they can be misplaced. According to one of the men who carried the football:

“[Clinton] thought he just placed them upstairs,” Patterson recalled. “We called upstairs, we started a search around the White House for the codes, and he finally confessed that he in fact misplaced them. He couldn’t recall when he had last seen them.”

Other cases have reputedly occurred. President Carter allegedly “left his biscuit in a suit that got sent to the dry cleaners.”

One instance that has been confirmed, however, is when Ronald Reagan’s codes were left discarded and unattended following his attempted assassination:

During the chaos that followed the shooting, the military aide was separated from the president, and did not accompany him to the George Washington University hospital. In the moments before Reagan was wheeled into the operating theater, he was stripped of his clothes and other possessions. The Biscuit was later found abandoned, unceremoniously dumped in a hospital plastic bag.

While mere loss of the biscuit does not trigger any sort of launch, it is not difficult to predict how access to the codes could be abused by someone else in a chaotic wartime situation. Scholars have suggested several potential problems with verification and authorization.

For example, what if a president refused to launch missiles in opposition to the emphatic urgings of his subordinates? Could he then be incapacitated by his subordinates and his launch codes used under the authorization of another person?

It is unknown how this would play out. According to Ron Rosenbaum in How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III,

the whole question of nuclear command authority, and of who takes control of that authority if the president is killed in a nuclear attack, has frustrated experts and politicians for decades. Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar has called the confusing succession problem “a disaster waiting to happen.”

This suggests problems whether a president is killed, thought to be killed, or is unreachable for a period. If the vice president assumes office and the original president later resurfaces, who then controls the nuclear weapons? Conspirators could also attempt to actively wrest control of launch authorization from presidents through deception. This could include having the president declared incapacitated for reasons of insanity under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. But Rosenbaum writes:

By then we’d be in coup territory, or inside an episode of 24. And what is sanity or insanity? What if the president refuses to carry out the deterrent threat of genocidal retaliation once it’s failed to deter a strike on us? Can those around him force the president to give them the Gold Codes and in effect give the launch order? Who determines who is sane and who is insane?

This strategy, of course, could be used by either side: a prolaunch vice president might ally with a secretary of defense to declare an antilaunch president mentally incompetent. Or, anti-launch underlings could seek to declare the president insane so as to prevent a launch.

Either way, its clear that this is uncharted territory and well outside the bounds of any orderly process of checks and balances on executive power.

Problems extend down the chain of command as well. In 1973, launch officer Major Harold Hering asked his superiors for clarification on how he could know if the president giving the order was sane. The military brass had no answer. Instead, Hering was forced out of the Air Force. Although the military likes to claim personnel are required only to follow legal orders—i.e., not planet-destroying orders issued by insane people—all that really mattered was that Hering be willing to launch missiles without question.

The fact of the matter is that there is no way to confirm a president has consulted any facts on the necessity of nuclear war, or that the president is in his (or her) right mind when ordering a nuclear strike.

Last December, we reported that an unlucky containership – the ultra-large ONE Apus – suffered a historic incident when it lost a record number of containers overboard as it sailed across the Pacific Ocean towards Long Beach after hitting severe weather; the ship lost some 1,816 container units, of which 64 are were Dangerous Goods containers.

It now appears that this was just the start of a unfortunate series of incidents because as Maritime Executive reports, heavy weather in the North Pacific was again blamed for the loss of containers aboard one of Maersk’s containerships. This was the third container loss incident recently reported in the Pacific.

Maersk said that approximately 750 containers were lost overboard from the Maersk Essen, a 148,723 dwt vessel with a capacity of 13,100 TEU. The loss occurred on January 16, but the line did not supply details on the vessel’s location. The vessel had departed Xiamen, China on December 26 and was due to arrive off Los Angeles on January 22; the ship operates on Maersk’s TP6 Asia/US West Coast route and as such would have made calls in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Yantian, China before arriving in Xiamen.

Cargo claims consultancy WK Webster is saying in its initial casualty report, that “it is very likely that some containers will have collapsed or have been damaged in the affected stacks, but remain on board. These containers will need to be removed or repositioned.” Webster reports that it is making arrangements for surveyors to be in place in order to investigate the cause of the incident and to attend to any cargo surveys. They are urging anyone who might have had cargo aboard to make contact to protect their position.

“We view this as a very serious situation which will be investigated promptly and thoroughly,” Maersk said in its statement. They reported that all of the crew was safe and that a detailed cargo assessment is ongoing. In addition, the US Coast Guard, flag state and relevant authorities have been notified.

The Maersk Essen is proceeding to Los Angeles on its scheduled route. Maersk’s vessel tracking system shows that the vessel was scheduled to be on the terminal in Los Angeles from January 28 to February 5 before departing for Yokohama, Japan.

As noted above, there have been several other incidents in recent month also on the North Pacific. On November 30, the ultra-large containership ONE Apus lost approximately 1,800 containers overboard and damaged scores more during reports of severe weather approximately 1,600 nautical miles northwest of Hawaii. In that incident, the vessel reversed course and sailed to Kobe, Japan, where the recovery operation is still ongoing.

In another recent incident, at the beginning of November, the ONE Aquila also suffered a container loss in the North Pacific. One Line did not provide details on the number of containers, but WK Webster in its casualty report said that it believed the number exceeded 100 containers. That vessel diverted to Washington state to offload damaged containers and reposition lose containers before proceeding to Long Beach, California.

These recent events are counter to a report issued by the World Shipping Council last summer that said the incidents of containers lost overboard has been on the decline and is a small percentage of the total annual volume. The WSC reported that the three-year moving average was declining, amounting to an average annual loss of 779 containers overboard between 2017 and 2019.

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“You have such a fervent, passionate, evangelical faith in this country…why in the name of God don’t you have any faith in the system of government you’re so hell-bent to protect? You want to defend the United States of America, then defend it with the tools it supplies you with—its Constitution. You ask for a mandate, General, from a ballot box. You don’t steal it after midnight, when the country has its back turned.”

– Seven Days in May (1964)

No doubt about it: the coup d’etat was successful.

That January 6 attempt by so-called insurrectionists to overturn the election results was not the real coup, however. Those who answered President Trump’s call to march on the Capitol were merely the fall guys, manipulated into creating the perfect crisis for the Deep State—a.k.a. the Police State a.k.a. the Military Industrial Complex a.k.a. the Techno-Corporate State a.k.a. the Surveillance State—to swoop in and take control.

It took no time at all for the switch to be thrown and the nation’s capital to be placed under a military lockdown, online speech forums restricted, and individuals with subversive or controversial viewpoints ferreted out, investigated, shamed and/or shunned.

This new order didn’t emerge into being this week, or this month, or even this year, however.

Indeed, the real coup happened when our government “of the people, by the people, for the people” was overthrown by a profit-driven, militaristic, techno-corporate state that is in cahoots with a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations.”

We’ve been mired in this swamp for decades now.

Every successive president starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt has been bought lock, stock and barrel and made to dance to the Deep State’s tune.

Enter Donald Trump, the candidate who swore to drain the swamp in Washington DC. Instead of putting an end to the corruption, however, Trump paved the way for lobbyists, corporations, the military industrial complex, and the Deep State to feast on the carcass of the dying American republic.

Joe Biden will be no different: his job is to keep the Deep State in power.

Step away from the cult of personality politics and you’ll find that beneath the power suits, they’re all alike.

Follow the money.  It always points the way.

As Bertram Gross noted in Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, “evil now wears a friendlier face than ever before in American history.”

Writing in 1980, Gross predicted a future in which he saw:

…a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades. In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, open and hidden unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…

This stealthy, creeping, silent coup that Gross prophesied is the same danger that writer Rod Serling envisioned in the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, a clear warning to beware of martial law packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

Incredibly enough, almost 60 years later, we find ourselves hostages to a government run more by military doctrine and corporate greed than by the rule of law established in the Constitution. Indeed, proving once again that fact and fiction are not dissimilar, today’s current events could well have been lifted straight out of Seven Days in May, which takes viewers into eerily familiar terrain.

The premise is straightforward.

With the Cold War at its height, an unpopular U.S. President signs a momentous nuclear disarmament treaty with the Soviet Union. Believing that the treaty constitutes an unacceptable threat to the security of the United States and certain that he knows what is best for the nation, General James Mattoon Scott (played by Burt Lancaster), the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and presidential hopeful, plans a military takeover of the national government.  When Gen. Scott’s aide, Col. Casey (Kirk Douglas), discovers the planned military coup, he goes to the President with the information. The race for command of the U.S. government begins, with the clock ticking off the hours until the military plotters plan to overthrow the President.

Needless to say, while on the big screen, the military coup is foiled and the republic is saved in a matter of hours, in the real world, the plot thickens and spreads out over the past half century.

We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’ve been on that fast-moving, downward trajectory for some time now.

The question is no longer whether the U.S. government will be preyed upon and taken over by the military industrial complex. That’s a done deal, but martial law disguised as national security is only one small part of the greater deception we’ve been fooled into believing is for our own good.

How do you get a nation to docilely accept a police state? How do you persuade a populace to accept metal detectors and pat downs in their schools, bag searches in their train stations, tanks and military weaponry used by their small town police forces, surveillance cameras in their traffic lights, police strip searches on their public roads, unwarranted blood draws at drunk driving checkpoints, whole body scanners in their airports, and government agents monitoring their communications?

Try to ram such a state of affairs down the throats of the populace, and you might find yourself with a rebellion on your hands. Instead, you bombard them with constant color-coded alerts, terrorize them with shootings and bomb threats in malls, schools, and sports arenas, desensitize them with a steady diet of police violence, and sell the whole package to them as being for their best interests.

This present military occupation of the nation’s capital by 25,000 troops as part of the so-called “peaceful” transfer of power from one administration to the next is telling.

This is not the language of a free people. This is the language of force.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that labelled right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans as extremists (a.k.a. terrorists) and called on the government to subject such targeted individuals to full-fledged pre-crime surveillance. Almost a decade later, after spending billions to fight terrorism, the DHS concluded that the greater threat is not ISIS but domestic right-wing extremism.

Meanwhile, the police have been transformed into extensions of the military while the nation itself has been transformed into a battlefield. This is what a state of undeclared martial law looks like, when you can be arrested, tasered, shot, brutalized and in some cases killed merely for not complying with a government agent’s order or not complying fast enough. This hasn’t just been happening in crime-ridden inner cities. It’s been happening all across the country.

And then you’ve got the government, which has been steadily amassing an arsenal of military weapons for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

So you see, January 6 and its aftermath provided the government and its corporate technocrats the perfect excuse to show off all of the powers they’ve been amassing so assiduously over the years.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry.

Brace yourself.

There is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we are at our most vulnerable right now.

All of those dastardly seeds we have allowed the government to sow under the guise of national security are bearing demon fruit.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

While Silicon Valley tech giants spent the last two weeks purging President Trump and tens of thousands of his followers over ‘dangerous conspiracy theories’ and ‘inciting violence’ during the so-called “Capitol insurrection” on January 6, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube have yet to remove a video by far-left Russiagate conspiracy theorist Dan Winslow which is the definition of incitement.

“They are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns. “They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls, doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”

The video, which has over 4 million Twitter views in two days, calls for “an army of citizen detectives” to identify Trump supporters – who he calls Trump’s ‘army of domestic terrorists,’ – who should be reported to authorities.

This is so dangerous it’s hard to sum up in a tweet. It puts a target on the head of every conservative, calls for war and propagandizes to form a vigilante group that would narc on neighbors. If Hitler or Stalin we’re alive today, they’d proudly use your video. Sick and evil.

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 19, 2021

The video, which one would think clearly violates Silicon Valley’s arbitrary rules against incitement and hate speech, continues to be viewable on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Would big tech allow a conservative video claiming Biden voters are left-wing terrorists who need to be watched to remain on their platforms?

Winslow’s video appears to be designed to stoke maximum division between Americans (which, as we were told for four years during ‘Russiagate’ and have known for decades, is straight out of the Kremlin’s playbook).

As Caitlin Johnstone noted on Tuesday, and is worth repeating:

“On or before January 20th, Donald Trump will no longer be the Commander-in-Chief: he will lose control of the Army, Navy, Airforce, Marines, Special Forces and America’s nuclear arsenal,” Winslow’s voice begins ominously. “On January 20th Donald Trump will become Commander-in-Chief of a different army: this army.”

Viewers are then shown footage from Trump rallies while being told that they are looking at “radical extreme conservatives, also known as domestic terrorists”.

“They are hidden among us, disguised behind regular jobs,” Winslow warns.

“They are your children’s teachers. They work at supermarkets, malls, doctor’s offices, and many are police officers and soldiers.”

Winslow talks about white supremacists and the Capitol riot, warning that Trump will continue escalating violence and fomenting a civil war in America.

“We have to fight back,” Winslow declares.

“In this new war, the battlefield has changes. Computers can be more valuable than guns. And this is what we need now more than ever: an army of citizen detectives. I’m proposing we form a citizen army. Our weapons will be computers and cellphones. We, who are monitoring extremists on the internet and reporting our findings to authorities. Remember, before the Navy Seals killed Osama Bin Laden, he had to be found. He was found by a CIA analyst working on a computer thousands of miles away. It’s up to you.”

* * *

In addition to the usual suspects on the left using Winslow’s video to incite a new witch hunt, the Biden Administration is now focusing on ‘Domestic Terrorism’ as a key priority. And as Johnstone also notes, and which is worth repeating, these people are batshit crazy.

Johnstone continues:

This is as insane and scary as I have ever seen these people get, and I was in the thick of peak Russiagate hysteria. An aggressively manufactured push to get an army of citizens spying on each other calls to mind the Stasi informants of East Germany, the patriotism-fueled digital “digging” of the QAnon psyop, and the NatSec LARPing of Louise Mensch Twitter, all rolled into one great big ball of crazy.

Veteran CIA officer and former deputy DNI Sue Gordon calls for a “9/11 Commission kind of activity” to apply “lessons that we learned in the fight against foreign terrorism” to battle domestic extremism https://t.co/Dor0GMZmfm pic.twitter.com/MGmdNoMZ1f

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) January 19, 2021

This comes out as we are being bombarded with mass media punditry from literal CIA veterans like Sue Gordon and Elissa Slotkin forcefully hammering home the message that domestic terror is the new frontier for combating violent extremism, meaning of course that new Patriot Act-like solutions will be needed. Winslow himself spent six years traveling and doing research for a novel about a former CIA operative, and if some government agency didn’t recruit him during that period they clearly should have.

This will get frightening if it keeps up. Just as a relatively low-profile lefty blogger I routinely get liberals online falsely claiming I’m a Russian agent and saying they’ll report me to the FBI, and that’s without an aggressive campaign urging them to join a powerful digital army. The fact that Winslow stays very vague about what he means by “Trump’s new army” and constantly conflates rank-and-file Trump supporters with white supremacist terrorists means people are effectively being pointed at all Trump supporters, especially when normal Trump rallies are what he points to in the video. If this takes off it can very quickly lead to a volunteer army of power-worshipping snitches against literally anyone who is critical of US foreign policy or the Democratic Party, whether they actually support Trump or not.

* * *

Does Winslow want actual civil war?

Authored by Tom Luongo via Gold, Goats, ‘n Guns blog,

I’m relieved Donald Trump is no longer President. In fact, I’m downright ecstatic. This is the best I’ve felt in weeks.

Trump was four years of faint hope, failed promises and false narratives.

Oh, don’t get me wrong he was also entertaining as hell, did many things I fundamentally agreed with and accelerated the collapse of the biggest, most corrupt organization ever created in human history.

He made a mockery of the media, stood tall until the final days of his presidency against a self-congratulatory bureaucracy and forced out into the open the depths of the depravity of our ruling class.

I friggin’ love the guy for that.

But I’m also over it. It’s time to move on.

Today I feel no nostalgia for Trump or America 1.0.

I refuse to go into the same hysterical theatrics the Left did four years ago. Biden’s the president. The restoration is complete. He was selected no different than every president other than Trump since Reagan.

I have as much emotion for him as I had for Bush the Lesser, Clinton the Rapist or Obama the Enigma.

He’s just a placeholder for a system I no longer have any affinity for. Trump always represented a big two-fingers up to that system, which too many conservatives helped Trump prop up for four years.

One of my patrons posted a stray thought in our community on Slack that sums things up perfectly:

“Just think if Trump had won fairly and the “steal” hadn’t happened. We’d have had another 4 inept years of placeholding and false hope.

What a godsend that the steal happened as it has decoupled the people from the political establishments and freed them. Ok, so the Great Reset’s happening but who cares?

Everybody knows about it.

Necessity is the mother of invention and as long as people “feel” free then they aren’t free. That’s how it’s worked up until now. The decoupling had to happen somehow.”

This is the law of unintended consequences writ large. Today should be looked at with relief for the clarity of vision we have for the future. It will suck, but at least there is symmetry.

In the end they stole the election to regain control and doing so set the stage for a wholesale rejection of their authority.

Too many conservatives still believed in the Myth of America. That should stop today.

The lead up to the inauguration with all of the pearl clutching, troop movements, breathless headlines portending a violent assault on the Capitol was the height of political theater.

And they know this. There’s no putting that genie back in the bottle.

This is a picture that encapsulates everything wrong with post-Trump America. Symbols of America but no Americans.

Military and pols everywhere but no governed giving their consent.

Image systems matter folks and the world is watching the U.S. transition from a Republic into an Autocracy.

I guess Gil Scott Heron was wrong, the revolution will be televised after all.

The two weeks since the staged assault on the Capitol saw Trump pile-driven in the ground by a vengeful GOP leadership while obviously having his arm twisted behind the scenes.

People who should know better can’t see through their own coping.

What did they think trust-fund Donald was going to do? Fall on his sword for a whistleblower/journalist? Trump is, after all, still just Trump.

This was the plan. Trump needed to finally be defeated. His followers humiliated. There was never going to be an Assange pardon.

There was never going to be a big declassification.

He was never allowed to burn the place down.

If any of that was going to happen it would have happened ages ago.

And this is why I’m happy Trump is gone. Because did you really want to live through another four years of pathetic virtue signaling, bureaucratic inertia, media lies and shameful pandering?

No, today the collapse of the U.S. will be on the watch of the people who orchestrated it. It won’t have the consent of a majority of the people, but if we were really honest with ourselves that’s how it was under Obama, Bush the Lesser and Clinton.

Trump was a guy who made things interesting but he also ensured we would be disabused of any notion of dissidence.

Today is the day Trump supporters can finally grow up. He wasn’t Orange Jesus sent to save America from itself. There was never a plan.

Trump was just a guy in over his head doing something no President did since Calvin Coolidge, giving a shit about what America means for Americans.

That’s why he had to be destroyed and that’s why we ultimately have to put him behind us.

As the U.S. sinks and what’s left of the legal protections we’ve enjoyed are taken away under the guise of ‘domestic terrorism’ we are also, strangely, free.

That’s why I’m ecstatic a man more fit for Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Death Parlors is president today rather than Trump.

Everyone’s eyes are now open. A fungus is president.

Absent the false hope of Trump people are now free to conclude what I always have — politics got us into this, politics will not get us out.

We can finally put the childish Red vs. Blue behind us.

That false duality is gone. The GOP is dead. The Democrats are ready to knife each other climbing to the pinnacle. They both hate us.

The Capitol knows it is under siege, not from right-wing militias and neo-Nazis but from their own fear of our not feeling anything for them anymore…

… except maybe pity.

So, raise a glass to Trump, wish him well, accept his limitations. The Empire is back with a vengeance. The Brave New Post-Trump World is here.

And that has never been a more exhilarating thought.

*  *  *

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China’s central bank added the most cash to the financial system via open-market operations since Sept. 22 as companies finalize some tax payments, according to Bloomberg’s John Liu.

The People’s Bank of China added a net 248 billion yuan of seven-day reverse repurchase agreements, a day after a similar move involving 278 billion yuan, which in turn followed 75 billion yuan.

The operation is intended to offset the impact of tax payments and ensure that liquidity in the banking system is reasonably ample, the PBOC said in a statement on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, money markets rates are climbing, with the benchmark seven-day repo rate on Wednesday increasing for the sixth session to 2.55%, in line for the highest since Nov. 13. Chinese companies need to wrap up certain tax payments for last quarter, such as corporate income taxes.

“The big injection today will help banks soothe liquidity tightness caused by the tax payments,” said Xing Zhaopeng, an economist at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group.

“We estimate the size of tax payments to be about 700 billion yuan, and the impact will last three to four days from January 19 to 22.”

The yield on government bonds due in a decade fell as much as 2 basis points before trading little changed at 3.16%.

Proponents of the QAnon “conspiracy theory,” which the NYT can’t seem to stop writing about, are going to love seeing this.

A memo that has reportedly been circulating among policymakers on both sides of the aisle for weeks was finally released to the press on Tuesday when Dealbook editor and CNBC “Squawk Box” host Andrew Ross Sorkin got the scoop: a memo penned by a group of senior-level bureaucrats, including – who else? – Henry Kissinger and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has provided a kind of “blueprint” for the Biden Administration to undo all of President Trump’s trade-war tactics and other policies that didn’t exactly help promote free trade.

As Trump recounted in his farewell video published earlier Tuesday afternoon, his administration dramatically altered the American trade landscape, pulling the US out of the TPP, renegotiating Nafta into the USMCA, and – most consequentially, at things would turn out – the trade war with China, which inspired waves of hysterical lobbying by the Chamber of Commerce and special-interest groups from Big Tech to Wal-Mart and other major retailers, and others.

So, as Biden prepares his first 100-day blitz of policy directives, many of the architects of the globalist system created by groups like the Trilateral Commission are joining with a gaggle of former cabinet-level officials (both Dems and GOP) along with the CEO of one of America’s largest banks, former British Labour Party Prime Minister Tony Blair and – who else? – Henry Kissinger, have essentially penned a manifesto that is being circulated among lawmakers, along with top-level officials in the cabinet and the West Wing, to help restore the globalist system that Trump helped to disrupt.

Who better to leak the story to than Andrew Sorkin, who first brought up the existence of the memo during an interview during Tuesday morning’s episode of “Squawk Box” on CNBC during a conversation with Harvard economist Austan Goolsbee.

“The problem the critics of @JoeBiden‘s program have is that we tried the approach they’re describing. What they want Joe Biden to do is what Donald Trump has been doing for 4 years and it’s a failure. It’s a failed presidency,” says @Austan_Goolsbee on the Biden economic plan. pic.twitter.com/VQLw4GJwEP

— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) January 19, 2021

According to Sorkin’s column, “the memo comes from an under-the-radar group of global boldfaced names that act as a private advisory committee to JPMorgan Chase. They include Tony Blair, the former British prime minister; Condoleezza Rice and Henry Kissinger, two former secretaries of state; Robert Gates, the former secretary of defense; Alex Gorsky, chief executive of Johnson & Johnson; Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH; and Joseph C. Tsai, executive vice chairman of Alibaba, among others.”

The group, which even Sorkin concedes is exclusively staffed with members of the “globalist part of the globalist establishment that fell out of favor during the Trump years, typically meets once a year in a far-flung location with JPMorgan’s chief, Jamie Dimon.”

Dimon hasn’t shied away from sharing his idealistic political prescriptions for saving American capitalism from itself. Most of these screeds, published in recent annual letters to the bank’s shareholders, mostly focus on the need to raise taxes on the rich and make the American education system more meritocratic, among other proposed “reforms”.  Though whenever a rich person says they support raising taxes on the rich, one almost can’t help but feel skeptical.

These discussions are usually kept quiet, filtering out through the shadowy nexus where corporate interest meets public policy meets Capitol Hill. But “given the precarious state of the world during a pandemic and change in leadership in Washington, the group put its views on paper in hopes of persuading policymakers to address what it sees as the most pressing priorities.”

Though Sorkin didn’t share the memo, he described it as “a manifesto or sorts”. Without explicitly saying so, it advocates for a “reset” – a return to the pre-Trump days, essentially turning back the clock to a time before Trump dumped the TPP, retooled Nafta and started the aggressive trade war/economic confrontation of China.

Why? Because, as Tony Blair explains to Sorkin at one point, “enlightened self-interest” – ie working closely with other countries to build better products and more efficient supply chains etc – actually helps lift all boats. In other words, backing down from the trade confrontation with China and other Trump policy rollbacks would actually help put “America First”.

Without saying it in so many words, the group argues that engaging in policy and commerce with other countries isn’t a sign of weakness or against the interests of the country. In many ways, it is actually “America First.” “The purpose of cooperation is not to put someone else’s interest before those of your own country,” Mr. Blair told me about the discussions among the group. “Enlightened self-interest is best satisfied by people working together.” On this point, Mr. Gates, who was the secretary of defense under President George W. Bush, added that the government has failed to “bring home to the American people why international cooperation and engagement on the international front and the relationships with our allies, why that all serves Americas self-interest.”

In an example of just how out-of-touch this memo’s authors apparently are, it argues that the COVID-19 outbreak is an example of the shortcomings of those who are skeptical of the globalist system.

“The near-total absence of American leadership, coupled with the nationalist approach of too many countries, have come at the expense of a strategically coherent, international response to the pandemic,” the paper contends. Mr. Blair said that, while everyone involved in the group didn’t agree on every point in the document, it reflected the broad consensus.

Even as Mike Pompeo labels China’s treatment of the Uyghers a “genocide”, the paper argues for greater cooperation on everything from saving the climate to “issues of global health”.

The memo calls for a return to engaging with China, especially on climate issues and global health, while acknowledging the “significant challenge” the country poses. “The best outcome for US-China relations is likely managed competition — an accommodation that avoids military conflict while allowing for limited cooperation,” it reads. “It is impractical to think that supply chains and manufacturing can be moved simply, affordably or comprehensively out of China.”

Sorkin acknowledges that Trump-aligned voters, as well as many on the Democratic Party’s left flank, might have serious problems with the memo, given the fact that it was written by the very architects of the free-trade system that hollowed out American factories.

The document also calls for placing renewed importance on the G7 and G20. It urges the creation of “trusted supply chains” and places responsibility on the business community to engage with policymakers “from the point-of-view of the public interest, not simply narrow business interests.”

Some will fairly question the group’s intentions. After all, a message being delivered by the nation’s biggest bank – and a group of chief executives and former senior policymakers – may only encourage the idea that there is a supersecret cabal of puppeteers steering policy.

The idea that the Biden administration might take this group’s advice might be considered anathema to his supporters on the far left just as much as it is to his opponents on the far right.

Tony Blair says he understands why people are skeptical, or even furious at, the globalist elite. But they’re not so bad, he says. In reality, the system they’re advocating is simply “common sense”. Dimon says that involving the business community and other stakeholders can help undo some of the mistakes of the past.

Mr. Blair said he understood the skepticism of the motives of the global elite. “Politically this is my view: You’ve had genuine grievances, which populism has exploited, but too much of those opposed to populism have simply stood for better management of the status quo,” he said. Mr. Dimon said that one of the few ways that the status quo, and the inequality it created, can be undone is if his peers start advocating for policies that may be against their own short-term business interests.

“I’d like to criticize business for a second,” he said in an interview, describing how he had witnessed some executives lobby for their business or themselves, knowingly at the expense of society. “I’ve been to a lot of meetings with presidents and prime ministers and senators and congressmen, and the selfishness and parochialism with the business folks is just absolutely outrageous.”

“The first thing businesses should do is separate their company’s interests from what’s in the interest of the country,” he added.

As an example, he took a shot at the private equity industry, which happens to provide some his bank’s biggest clients. “I mean, we still have carried interest in this country?” he said, questioning the special, lower tax rate that private equity executives enjoy. “When you look at those things, I feel like the American public says, ‘It’s a swamp.’ And they’re saying ‘I’m not getting my piece of it,’ you know?”

Mr. Dimon said that, ultimately, many of the big challenges the country faces during and after the pandemic will require private-sector investment from around the world, and gaining the trust of the public is crucial.

“It’s unlikely to be fixed without business, particularly when you get around to things like work skills, property and building infrastructure,” he said.

Sorkin’s column ends with an analogy, reportedly sourced to Dimon, about FDR overcoming his hostilities with big business to build the War Production Board and staff it with captains of industry like Walter Chrysler.

If nothing else, the memo and the slick way it was leaked to the press after making the rounds in Washington, is a harbinger of how business will be done in the Biden area, as the same old foreign policy and economy wonks from the Clinton, Bush and Obama years reemerge like the living dead.

By Philip Marey, senior US strategist at Rabobank

Summary

• Today, Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States. In his first ten days in office, President Biden is expected to sign a flurry of executive actions aimed at Covid-19, the economy and climatechange.
• The two Democratic victories in the Georgia run-off elections have opened the door to expansive fiscal policy in the next two years. For the near-term, Biden has proposed the American Rescue Plan. For the remainder of his term he is expected to announce a Recovery Plan next month. According to our calculations, Biden’s plans would provide a boost to economic growth, also in the long run.
• However, the question is how much of his plans can be realized, given the minimal Democratic majority in the Senate. It would take only one centrist democratic senator to block a Biden initiative. Consequently, the internal divisions in the Democratic party will come to the forefront in the coming two years. In this sense, Biden’s style may be more reminiscent of that of a prime minister trying to hold together a broad and shaky coalition.
• Under a Biden administration foreign and trade policy will remain focused on meeting the challenge of China as the main rival of the US. However, Biden is likely to return to a multilateral approach.
• The contested elections have left the United States with legitimacy issues regarding Biden’s presidency.In fact, a majority of Republican voters does not even believe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States.While we expect Biden’s policies to boost economic growth, we do not expect them to end the vicious cycle of polarization and social unrest that is undermining the country

Introduction

Today, Joe Biden was inaugurated as President of the United States. In his first ten days in office, President Biden is expected to sign a flurry of executive actions aimed at Covid-19, the economy and climate change.Biden intends to sign orders expanding testing for Covid-19, protecting workers from the pandemic and establishing public health standards. He also wants to mandate the use of face masks on federal property and for interstate travel on airlines, trains and transit systems.Biden is also expected to keep in place restrictions on evictions and foreclosures and to extend a suspension of interest-free student loan payments.Biden wants to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord and put an end to the Keystone XL pipeline.The reversal of the deregulation of the Trump year swill have an early start.

Biden’s growth impulse

The two Democratic victories in the Senate run-off elections in Georgia on January 5 have opened the door to expansive fiscal policy in the next two years. In the near term, this means a substantial additional Covid relief package. But it also means an expansive fiscal policy in the next two years, aimed at stimulating economic growth. Biden wants to invest more in education, R&D, and infrastructure. The Democrats want to pay for this partly through higher taxes. The budget deficit is likely to increase further. But our calculations show that Biden’s plans could provide a substantial impulse to economic growth, also in the long run. Biden’s fiscal policy initiatives are split up in a near-term covid relief plan (American Rescue Plan) and a medium-to-long term plan (“Recovery Plan”). He presented the first on January 14 and is expected to release the second in February.

The American Rescue Plan

While it took Congress relatively little time to agree on the well over $2 trillion CARES Act back in March last year, it took until December to come up with a $900 billion follow-up. However, the two Democratic victories in the Senate run-off elections in Georgia on January 5 have opened the door to more covid relief.On January 14, Biden presented his American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion package that includes additional direct payments of $1400 to Americans (in addition to the $600 from the December package), an increase in federal unemployment benefits to $400 (from $300) per week and an extension through September(from March), and increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour(from $7.25 since 2009). The rescue package can be divided in three large chunks: $1 trillion in direct relief to households, $440 billion for small businesses and communities that were hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and $415 billion for virus response. At present, it is uncertain how much of this plan will be approved by the Senate. For example, there is doubt about the effectiveness of sending people checks without knowing if they really need it. Not only Republicans have their doubts, but also a centrist Democratic senator such as Joe Manchin.

The American Recovery Plan

As for the coming years, Biden is expected to present a Recovery Plan in February. Biden is expected to invest more in education, R&D, and infrastructure. Even if only part of Biden’s plans materialize -the Democratic majority in the Senate is minimal-, we expect a boost to GDP growth in 2021 and beyond.While there may be some common ground between Democrats and Republicans on infrastructure, for a large part they are thinking about different forms of infrastructure. While Republicans may be willing to spend federal money on highways, bridges and airports, Democrats are thinking of green infrastructure facilitating clean energy and electric vehicles.

Although markets are focusing on Biden’s spending spree, we should not forget that tax hikes are also part of his plans. They may not be at the top of his list given the covid crisis, but once the economy regains momentum tax hikes may come back to the surface. Meanwhile, we should not lose sight of the fact that not all businesses and households have suffered due to the covid outbreak. Some have actually done quite well, so they should be able to absorb a higher tax rate.During her Senate confirmation hearings for the position of Treasury Secretary, on January 19, Janet Yellen said that the Biden team does not immediately plan to pursue tax increases, but would consider them as part of a later package that focuses on long-term investments.

Getting plans realized

The question is how many of Biden’s plans are going to be realized. After all, the Democratic majority in the Senate is minimal. The Republicans have 50 seats and the Democrats 48. However, independent senators Bernie Sanders and Angus King caucus with the Democrats and the Vice-President is the tie-breaker in case of a 50-50 outcome. This means that Kamala Harris is going to be busy and is likely to spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill. Her main contact may very well be Joe Manchin, who is considered to be the most conservative Democratic senator. He will be able to block the more leftist plans of the Democrats on his own. So we cannot simply assume that Biden can realize all his plans just because the Democrats have majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the next two years the differences within the Democratic Party will come to the forefront, instead of the differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as in the last four years. How many of Biden’s plans are going to be realized no longer depends on Senate Republicans after the Georgia elections, but on centrist Senate Democrats.In this sense, Biden’s style may be more reminiscent of that of a prime minister trying to hold together a broad and shaky coalition,ranging from centrists to democratic socialists.

Increasing polarization

While Biden’s economic plans are expected to boost the economy, they will probably not reduce the polarization in politics and society. The ever increasing polarization of US politics and society has reached a level that poses a serious threat to the stability of the country. The question is now: is this the culmination of the civil unrest in the United States, or is this just another warning signal that the country is heading toward something worse? If we look at the underlying mechanism of polarization, it appears tobe self-reinforcing. New events or information will be interpreted through two different filters, such as CNN and Fox. What’s more, economic policies aimed at income redistribution will not appease Trump supporters, as we explained in Economy or identity. The Trump vote is not about the economy, it’s about identity. Biden’s plans do not offer a solution to these anxieties. If the US does not find an off-ramp from this route of increasing polarization, we are only going to see a further escalation of civil unrest.

In fact, a majority of Republican voters does not even believe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States.As we argued in Election meltdown, this was going to be the case no matter who would be sworn in. With Trump claiming in advance that the elections were rigged and the Democrats spurring their voters to go to the polls to avoid all kinds of nightmare scenarios, how much trust in the election outcome were voters supposed to have if their side would lose? Meanwhile, foreign adversaries such as the Russians, Chinese and Iranians, are likely to amplify the mutual distrust through cyber warfare. As we concluded in Civil unrest, no matter who would have won the elections, the turbulence in US politics and society is not likely to pass. This was only the beginning.

Return to multilateralism

When it comes to foreign policy, trade policy and international climate policy the Biden administration intends to return to the multilateral approach of the Obama years. Multilateralism does not necessarily mean that the US will go soft on all its rivals and enemies. Rather it means that it will not go at them alone, but instead (re)build coalitions.During his Senate confirmation hearing for the job of Secretary of State, on January 19, Antony Blinken said that he will work to revitalize damaged American diplomacy and build a united front to counter the challenges posed by Russia, China and Iran.However, we should note that America’s leadership of the free world has credibility issues after four years of Trump’s go at it alone approach. What’s more, America’s moral leadership has also lost credibility after the insurrection. In fact, it is already being exploited by America’s adversaries.

During his Senate confirmation hearing Blinken said that there was no doubt China posed the most significant challenge to the US of any nation, and believed there was a very strong foundation to build a bipartisan policy to stand up to Beijing. While the US is heavily polarized on domestic topics, there is a broad consensus on China. According to the Pew Center, the percentage of survey respondents who say they have an unfavorable opinion of China has risen in the last 15 years from a minority to a majority. And this is true of Democrats and Republicans, even though Republicans always score higher than Democrats on this topic. So there is some common ground abroad for Democrats and Republicans. However, on other issues, such as international climate agreements, Biden  – feeling pressure from left wing Democrats – will be at odds with the Republicans.

Conclusion

Biden has an ambitious agenda, but he has only two years with the certainty of a Democratic majority in the Senate. If the Republicans flip just one seat in the November 2022 midterms, it will all be over by January 2023 and the Republican Senate will shoot down most if not all of Biden’s remaining plans. And during these first two years he only has a minimal majority in the Senate, which means that just one centrist Democratic senator can block an initiative. What’s more, the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives has been reduced. Meanwhile, the country is heavily divided and a majority of Republican voters does not even believe Biden is the legitimate president of the United States. Biden’s plans do not address the anxieties that fuel this divide. So while we expect Biden’s policies to boost economic growth, we do not expect them to end the vicious cycle of polarization and social unrest that is undermining the United States

The Biden administration has said it will continue to formally recognize Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, despite Nicolás Maduro clearly being the actual leader of the socialist country.

Biden’s nominee for secretary of state Anthony Blinken told Senators on Tuesday that Guaido will be the recognized leader, a policy which began in January 2019 when the opposition leader dubbed himself ‘Interim President’ and also ‘Acting President’ at the encouragement of Washington during Trump admin attempts to foment a military and popular uprising against Maduro.

During his remarks Blinken also indicated the new administration will keep up the sanctions. “We need an effective policy that can restore Venezuela to democracy, starting with free and fair elections,” he said.

He said Biden will seek “more effectively target” economic punitive measures in efforts to make Maduro step aside and allow Juan Guaido to take up position, according to Reuters. 

Blinkin further said he believes the US should not enter into negotiations with Maduro for the end of sanctions or some kind of relief, but instead vowed that Caracas must “really feel the pain”.

Blinken says he agrees with Sen. Rubio, still supports failed coup leader Juan Guaido and regime change in Venezuela.

“Maybe we need to look at how we more effectively target the sanctions we have so regime enablers really feel the pain” pic.twitter.com/qtYDm0hn0O

— Kevin Gosztola (@kgosztola) January 19, 2021

Currently the OPEC nation is gaining help from Iran and Russia in circumventing a US oil and fuel blockade. US sanctions aim to prevent crude being exported out and gasoline being imported for domestic use (Venezuela’s derelict refineries have been incapable of processing enough fuel to keep up domestic demand).

While Guaido is also recognized as president by over a dozen US allies, the majority of countries – including powerful Russia and China – do not. He’s long claimed Maduro’s 2018 reelection was “rigged” – something which the US has also maintained.