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Democrats float impeachment in wake of illegal Trump attack on Venezuela
Congressional Democrats erupted in fury in the wake of Trump's illegal attack on Venezuela, with Rep. Delia Ramirez calling for his impeachment and Rep. Jared Huff calling for his removal via the 25th Amendment. Either sounds fine for us!

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Trump has started carving up the world. Now it’s Putin and Xi’s turn
Brynn Tannehill, The New Republic: "The U.S. invasion of Venezuela late last Friday shocked the world for many reasons. It represents another fundamental departure from the post-WWII order supported by the United States for the last 50 years. It was also an unprovoked, naked act of aggression based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Congress was not consulted, and the executive branch has far exceeded the 60 days allowed by the 1973 War Powers Act to get congressional approval for ongoing military action. Far worse than these shattered norms are the horrifying possibilities this action raises. President Donald Trump and the GOP have laid bare their desires for hegemony, colonialism, and empire, and the dangerous global consequences of America pursuing these cannot be understated. Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro was an unpopular kleptocratic dictator, and this article should not be in any way interpreted as a defense of him; but it is a warning of what this invasion means, and what is to come. Perhaps the most blatant of all the recent acts is Trump’s own declaration that the U.S. will 'take control' of Venezuela 'for a while' to seize and exploit the oil resources of the country. He will undoubtedly place a right-wing dictator beholden to him in charge of the country, opening the door to yet another avenue for foreign money flowing to him. Similarly, oil companies will compete with one another for access to the seized assets, meaning more money being laundered to Trump, his family, and other supporters in this spoils-of-war system. This act has also sent a chilling message to the world that the United States is beginning the process of carving up the world into spheres of influence run by dictatorships (namely the U.S., Russia, and China). Russia was Venezuela’s benefactor and ally but has been strangely quiet. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Fiona Hill testified to Congress in 2019 that Russia was 'signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap agreement between Venezuela and Ukraine.' In other words, the U.S. could have Venezuela if we let Russia have Ukraine. This strongly suggests that the price for letting the U.S. go after Venezuela without any protest was, and will be, Ukraine. It also suggests that Tawain may already be on the table as a bargaining chip with China, in order to secure its acquiescence to further U.S. regional hegemony in the Americas. Trump has signaled that the global order of the past 80 years means nothing, and the U.S. is back in the business of colonial empire-building as if it was a pre-World War One great power. Canada and Greenland should be extremely alarmed by this. Both of these countries have been put on notice since the beginning of the second Trump administration that he intends to annex them, and this overt, over-the-top act of war against Venezuela confirms that there’s nothing stopping him from finding some pretextual casus belli to justify a U.S. annexation of Greenland. Denmark, Canada, and Greenland are all NATO members, and it appears the U.S. is barreling toward a confrontation with that organization. Leaders of democracies around the world need to understand this for what it likely is: the opening salvos of a broader campaign of modern Lebensraum and Anschluss. History teaches that the best time to say no in concrete terms is early, and not after despotic nations are deciding who gets to keep which parts of countries they invaded."

Bitter winter heaps new hardships on the women and girls of Gaza
UNFPA: A shaky ceasefire is in place, but 700,000 menstruating women and girls that live in the cramped displacement camps of Gaza are still facing desperate shortages of the most basic necessities — and a bitter winter looms. 10 million menstrual pads are needed every month, but less than a quarter of that is available to ease the indignity and discomfort of Gazan women. UNFPA is leading a drive to provide 2,500 Dignity Kits to women and girls in Gaza, making sure they have menstrual products, soap, toothbrushes, and clean clothing so they can live with dignity, even in the darkest of times. Each kit costs just $15 to produce – Will you chip in to ease the suffering of some of the world’s most vulnerable women?

The Narco-Terrorist Elite
Maureen Tkacik, The American Prospect: "If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. “I dealt to support my animal habit,” Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio’s job, according to Manuel Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of the then-senator, to build the cages. Rubio has sworn he knew nothing about the drugs. He was only 16. Today, Marco Rubio is the Trump administration’s most formidable liar. Rubio’s approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels. In September, Rubio hailed Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa, who leads a country whose homicide rate has risen eightfold since 2016, as an 'incredibly willing partner' who 'has done more just in the last couple years to take the fight to these narco-terrorists and these threats to the security and stability of Ecuador than any previous administration.' Just five months earlier, a damning investigation revealed that Noboa’s family fruit business had trafficked 700 kilos of cocaine to Europe in banana crates between 2020 and 2022. Rubio has tirelessly promoted the cause of convicted (alas, just-pardoned) drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández. In 2018, Rubio personally and publicly commended Hernández, then president of Honduras, for combating drug traffickers (and supporting Israel), just seven months before his brother was indicted for trafficking 158 tons of cocaine in containers stamped 'TH,' for Tony Hernández. Rubio has raved about the crime-fighting efforts of Salvadoran and Argentine junior strongmen Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, in spite of the former’s documented alliance with MS-13 and the various Miami cocaine trafficking scandals that enveloped his libertarian political party last fall, as well as both leaders’ slavish devotion to the drug cartels’ single favorite mode of money laundering. Rubio has been one of the Beltway’s biggest backers of newly elected Chilean president José Antonio Kast, the son of a literal Nazi war criminal who has spent his entire political career lionizing, whitewashing, and promising a restoration of the brutal reign of Augusto Pinochet, who personally ordered the Chilean army to build a cocaine laboratory, consolidated the narcotics trade inside his terrifying secret police, and then allegedly 'disappeared' key conspirators like his secret police chemist Eugenio Berríos. As historian Greg Grandin pointed out in a recent podcast appearance, whereas in many realms the scale and breadth of the Trump administration plunge into mafia rule is truly unprecedented, in Latin America it is more of a continuation of policy that dates back at least a century. 'Behind every single horror that Donald Trump represents exists a long train of U.S. presidents that have first put in the policies that make what Trump does today possible,'” Grandin said. Few Americans learned this lesson the hard way at so tender an age as Marco Rubio."

The US Is a weakened and dangerous empire
Ben Burgis, Jacobin: "In the depths of a winter night, US airborne forces scream over Caribbean waters. Jets rain fire on key infrastructure, while attack helicopters deliver raiding parties of special operatives to targets on the ground. Amid the spectacle of shock and awe, a president is kidnapped and indicted on drug-trafficking charges. It’s a key test case for how an ambitious Republican administration intends to handle an era of seismic change. This was December 20, 1989; the operation in question was the ouster of strongman Panamanian leader and erstwhile CIA asset Manuel Noriega. But there’s an unmistakable parallel with Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife. It illustrates everything that has changed, and stayed the same, in the three decades separating these two acts of aggression. The first occurred at the start of a new age of American hyperpower. The second is a symptom of that age’s chaotic and violent decline. George H. W. Bush’s deposition of Noriega signaled a new, post–Cold War age of American world-making. Within a few years, the United States let rip in the Persian Gulf (like Noriega, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein would quickly learn that serving US interests is no guarantee of protection), alongside new wars on three continents. The collapse of the Soviet Union surely watered down the appeal of anti-communism as a rationale for constant warfare. But the War on Drugs had already been built up as a replacement justification for forever wars, devouring lives and resources on a global scale. Soviet retreat brought Latin America little peace from US militarism. If anything, the reverse was true, with Washington playing a key role in feeding Colombia’s civil war. The region also provided a unique study in leftist resurgence during a period of neoliberal dominance. Venezuela’s barrios delivered Hugo Chávez to power in 1998 and a new, indigenous-led alliance brought Evo Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) to power in Bolivia in 2005, in the continent’s so-called Pink Tide. That project saw a revival at the start of the 2020s but has faced severe setbacks: the collapse of MAS rule in Bolivia; economic and political fragility in Venezuela producing one of the world’s largest displacement crises; and the victories of staunch Trump backers such as José Antonio Kast in Chile, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, and Javier Milei in Argentina. US support is just one variable in these complex processes, but a significant one. In the waning days of Joe Biden’s administration, it became clear that simultaneous arming of Ukraine and Israel was stretching US military-industrial capacity to its limit, despite absurdly bloated military budgets. The rapid redeployment of the Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, from the Middle East to the Caribbean last autumn underscores this impression of a flailing empire running from place to place putting out (or in reality, starting) fires. So, too, does the United States’ willingness to tear up its traditional social-military contract with Europe, where it contributed disproportionately in return for European acceptance of its strategic priorities and dependence on its matériel. A common critique of the attack on Venezuela is that the United States has given up on any pretense at maintaining the liberal world order. This is true but misses the point. That order, where the United States promises steadfast support for allies, economic aid when needed, and the maintenance of global financial and political architecture, in exchange for consent for its preeminence, is no longer structurally capable of existing. Empires do not go gently into the good night. The European imperial age was cut decisively short by World War II–era destruction. Even then, its exit was decades-long, bloody, and in many places remains unresolved. It’s de rigueur among leftists to talk about the decline and fall of the US empire, but that decline is relative to others and descends from an age of historically unprecedented hyperpower. Even US strategic defeats such as Vietnam and Afghanistan shattered the countries they took place in. Meanwhile, the United States does not exist in a vacuum. Clearly, Trump faces few internal constraints, and many of his opponents fall in line on foreign affairs. For all of Brussels’s carping, the EU cannot and will not exert a moderating influence. Among everyone else, this will inevitably strengthen the incentive for a cynical, Hobbesian view of international relations, where constant imitative displays of aggression and unpredictability are necessary for survival. Through the fires in Caracas, myriad bleak futures can be glimpsed. Amid such bleakness, it’s worth mentioning something else that has happened in the United States in the last few days — new democratic-socialist local leaders like Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson taking office, based on stridently internationalist campaigns. In the United States and beyond, the forces of rampant militarism have attempted to insist that their destructive, nihilistic approach to the world is the only thing that can protect people at home in dangerous times. It will take locally rooted leadership with a firm grasp of the national and international dimensions to prove that the opposite is true, to provide better ways of navigating the world’s rapid and traumatic convulsions, and to imagine a different world order."

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