plutocracy

A New Unifying Issue: Just About Everyone Hates Data Centers

Spread the love

Original article by Dan Gearino republished from Inside Climate News under Creative Common License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

The construction site of an Amazon data center in Salem Township, Pa., on Oct. 10. Credit: Jason Ardan/Citizens’ Voice via Getty Images

It’s not a novel observation to say that supporters of President Donald Trump and supporters of U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders find common ground on many issues. They often share a skepticism of entrenched power and a desire to dismantle systems that they think have ceased to serve everyday people.

In Indiana, this agreement includes a distrust of data centers.

“The MAGA crowd and the Bernie bros have both figured out that they’ve been getting duped,” said Kerwin Olson, executive director of Citizens Action Coalition, an Indianapolis-based consumer and environmental advocacy nonprofit. “It was data centers that really brought it all together.”

Olson’s organization is running a campaign to persuade Indiana lawmakers to place a moratorium on new data centers and to redesign electricity rates to protect residential consumers from rate increases related to data center development.

He has received an emphatic response, with groups from the left, right and in-between booking him for speaking engagements and offering their assistance.

Election results last week confirm a similar dynamic in much of the country. Democrats won races for governor in New Jersey and Virginia and for two open seats on the Georgia Public Service Commission, campaigns in which data centers and rising electricity costs were issues. Media outlets noted this pattern, including in an insightful report from Jael Holzman of Heatmap and a look ahead to next year’s elections from Marc Levy and Jesse Bedayn of the Associated Press.

While much of the discussion is about data centers, the underlying issues are broader, touching on the power of tech companies. For people who live near proposed data centers, there is an additional sense of powerlessness, which Inside Climate News has documented across the country, including the backlash to a plan for a huge data center in Bessemer, Alabama.

“It’s about big tech,” Olson said. “To steal Bernie’s words, [it’s about] these big tech oligarchs that are calling all the shots at every single level of government right now.”

I also see some similarities with local opposition to large wind and solar projects, a subject I’ve written a lot about over the years. A common theme is that residents feel frustrated when powerful companies want to make changes that would alter local landscapes.

Olson said he agrees that there is some overlap between opposition to data centers and large renewable energy development, but he views the latter as more of a rural phenomenon, while concern about data centers is rising almost everywhere.

Google scrapped its plans for a large data center in Indianapolis in September amid local backlash. In northwest Indiana, residents in the small city of Hobart have organized to oppose two data centers, raising concerns about the projects’ electricity and water consumption.

It’s notable that the opposition tends to highlight concerns about high electricity bills, but doesn’t talk as much about data centers’ negative climate impacts. Indiana can see the ramifications as officials push to delay the retirement of coal-fired power plants so the state can meet an expected surge in electricity demand, driven, in part, by data centers.

Political candidates can harness this mounting opposition and data center companies will need to devote more resources to engaging with the public.

Vivek Shastry, a senior research associate at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told me that it’s important for the AI and data center industries to find ways to provide local benefits to host communities and to minimize any negative effects on household electricity costs.

He touched on these subjects in a recent blog post, co-written with his colleague Diana Hernández. When I read this, my first thought was, “Wait, there are local benefits?”

He explained that there are opportunities in terms of energy and money. He pointed to examples in Denmark and Finland of data centers harnessing their waste heat to contribute to district heating systems for local communities.

Beyond that—which I think would be a challenge to do in the United States—he said AI and data center developers can make community benefits part of their proposals. This could mean working with local leaders to find ways to address local needs through philanthropy.

“To the extent that there is a partnership with communities, and there are these pathways to enable tangible co-benefits,” he said.

The opposite can also be true, with local communities feeling like they are bearing the burden of a data center with few, if any, benefits.

Shastry’s larger point is that government officials and corporate leaders need to make sure that development does not harm the most vulnerable consumers by driving up costs of water and electricity. To do otherwise would feed into consumer unrest.

“It’s important to get those processes and protections right early on, because the pace of this growth is such that once you lock into certain kinds of rates and other pathways, it then becomes harder to reverse,” Shastry said.

Voters are already getting upset about electricity rate increases that they blame on data centers, even though the AI industry is in its infancy. The negative effects, if left to fester, could get much worse.

Original article by Dan Gearino republished from Inside Climate News under Creative Common License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Continue ReadingA New Unifying Issue: Just About Everyone Hates Data Centers

Who supports Reform and why? The charts that show who favours Farage’s party

Spread the love

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/13/who-votes-for-reform-and-why-charts-that-show-who-supports-farage-party

 Composite: Reuters/The Guardian

Based on the largest poll of supporters yet, these charts and maps show five distinct groups that could hand Reform a majority

 The real Reform voters have been revealed – it’s a slapdash coalition Farage will struggle to hold together

Research based on a poll of 11,000 Reform UK supporters, the biggest survey of its kind, tells us more about who is intending to vote for the party than has been previously known.

The in-depth polling analysis from Hope Not Hate reveals a voter coalition that stretches from struggling workers and frustrated graduates to wealthy retirees, in places from Hitchin to Runcorn.

While immigration is often viewed as the defining issue for Reform supporters, the data shows a far more complex picture. This diverse coalition is deeply divided on big issues such as the economy, the climate crisis and the role of government.

…

Who are the Reform supporters?

The research divides them into five groups, based on their attitudes towards different issues. These groups are the “working right”, “hardline conservatives”, “squeezed stewards”, “contrarian youth” and “reluctant reformers”. They differ in some key ways.

…

Anki Deo, who leads the policy and insights team at Hope Not Hate, says that in “an era of hyper-marginal politics where election results are decided by just a few percentage points”, identifying these groups and where they live is crucial.

She adds: “For those of us desperate to prevent a Farage-led government in 2029, this research shows us that not all is lost. Reform UK voters do not fit a single profile or ideology. Far from a homogenous group, it is a broad coalition, with many voters having quite different and contradictory views from each other.

…

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/nov/13/who-votes-for-reform-and-why-charts-that-show-who-supports-farage-party is recommended

Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Nigel Farage explains the politics of Reform UK: Racism, Fake anti-establishmentism, Deregulation, Corporatism, Climate Change Denial, Mysogyny and Transphobia.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he's the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
Nigel Farage reminds you that he’s the man that brought you Brexit and asks what could possibly go wrong.
Continue ReadingWho supports Reform and why? The charts that show who favours Farage’s party

No time to recover: Hurricane Melissa and the Caribbean’s compounding disaster trap as the storms keep coming

Spread the love
Hurricane Melissa tore off roofs and stripped trees of their leaves, including in many parts of Jamaica hit by Hurricane Beryl a year earlier. Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images

Farah Nibbs, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Headlines have been filled with talk of the catastrophic power of Hurricane Melissa after the Category 5 storm devastated communities across Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti in October 2025. But to see this as a singular disaster misses the bigger picture: Melissa didn’t hit stable, resilient islands. It hit islands still rebuilding from the last hurricane.

Jamaica was still recovering from Hurricane Beryl, which sideswiped the island in July 2024 as a Category 4 storm. The parish of St. Elizabeth – known as Jamaica’s breadbasket – was devastated. The country’s Rural Agriculture Development Authority estimated that 45,000 farmers were affected by Beryl, with damage estimated at US$15.9 million.

An aerial view of a city damaged by the hurricane. Mud is in the streets and buildings have lost roofs and walls.
St. Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica, suffered intense damage from both Hurricane Melissa in October 2025 and Hurricane Beryl a year earlier. Ivan Shaw/AFP via Getty Images

In Cuba, the power grid collapsed during Hurricane Oscar in October 2024, leaving 10 million people in darkness. When Melissa arrived, it struck the same fragile infrastructure that Cubans had barely begun to rebuild.

Haiti’s fragile situation before Hurricane Melissa cannot be overstated. The island nation was still reeling from years of cascading disasters – deadly hurricanes, political instability, gang violence, an ongoing cholera crisis and widespread hunger – with over half the population already in need of humanitarian assistance even before this storm hit.

This is the new reality of the climate crisis: Disasters hitting the Caribbean are compounding and can trigger infrastructure collapse, social erosion and economic debt spirals.

The compounding disaster trap

I study disasters, with a focus on how Caribbean island systems absorb, adapt to and recover from recurring shocks, like the nations hit by Melissa are now experiencing.

It’s not just that hurricanes are more frequent; it’s that the time between major storms is now shorter than the time required for a full recovery. This pulls islands into a trap that works through three self-reinforcing loops:

Infrastructure collapse: When a major hurricane hits an already weakened system, it causes simultaneous infrastructure collapses. The failure of one system – such as power – cascades, taking down water pumps, communications and hospitals all at once. We saw this in Grenada after Hurricane Beryl and in Dominica after Hurricane Maria. This kind of cascading damage is now the baseline expectation for the Caribbean.

Economic debt spiral: When countries exhaust their economic reserves on one recovery, borrow to rebuild and are then hit again while still paying off that debt, it becomes a vicious cycle.

Hurricane Ivan, which struck the region in 2004, cost Grenada over 200% of its gross domestic product; Maria, in 2017, cost Dominica 224% of its GDP; and Dorian, in 2019, cost the Bahamas 25% of GDP. With each storm, debt balloons, credit ratings drop and borrowing for the next disaster becomes more expensive.

Social erosion: Each cycle weakens the human infrastructure, too. More than 200,000 people left Puerto Rico for the U.S. mainland in Maria’s aftermath, and nearly one-quarter of Dominica’s population left after the same storm. Community networks fragment as people leave, and psychological trauma becomes layered as each new storm reopens the wounds of the last. The very social fabric needed to manage recovery is itself being torn.

The interior of a school that has been torn apart by hurricane winds. Desks and debris are scattered and light shines through the rafters
When schools are heavily damaged by storms, like this one in Jamaica that lost its roof during Hurricane Melissa, it’s harder for families to remain. Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images

The trap is that all three of these loops reinforce each other. A country can’t rebuild infrastructure without money. It can’t generate economic activity without infrastructure. And it can’t retain the skilled workforce needed for either when people are fleeing to safer places.

Rebuilding a system of overlapping recoveries

The Caribbean is not merely recovering from disasters – it is living within a system of overlapping recoveries, meaning that its communities must begin rebuilding again before fully recovering from the last crisis.

Each new attempt at rebuilding happens on the unstable physical, social and institutional foundations left by the last disaster.

The question isn’t whether Jamaica will attempt to rebuild following Melissa. It will, somehow. The question is, what happens when the next major storm arrives before that recovery is complete? And the one after that?

Without fundamentally restructuring how we think about recovery – moving from crisis response to continuous adaptation – island nations will remain trapped in this loop.

The way forward

The compounding disaster trap persists because recovery models are broken. They apply one-size-fits-all solutions to crises unfolding across multiple layers of society.

Breaking free requires adaptive recovery at all levels, from household to global.

A line of people pass bags of food items one to another.
Residents formed a human chain among the hurricane debris to pass food supplies from a truck to a distribution center in the Whitehouse community in Westmoreland, an area of Jamaica hit hard by Hurricane Melissa in October 2025. Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images

At the household level: Helping amid trauma

Recovery isn’t just about repairing a damaged roof. When families experience back-to-back disasters, trauma compounds. Direct cash assistance and long-term, community-based mental health services can help restore dignity.

Cash transfers allow families to address their own needs, stimulate local economies and restore control to people whose lives have been repeatedly upended.

At community level: Mending the social fabric

Repairing the “social fabric” means investing in farmer cooperatives, neighborhood associations and faith groups – networks that can lead recovery from the ground up.

Local networks are often the only ones capable of rebuilding trust and participation.

At the infrastructure level: Breaking the cycle

The pattern of rebuilding the same vulnerable roads or power lines only to see them wash away in the next storm fails the community and the nation. There are better, proven solutions that prepare communities to weather the next storm:

A man looks into an open drainage area that has been torn up out by the storm
Hurricanes can damage infrastructure, including water and drainage systems. Hurricane Beryl left Jamaican communities rebuilding not just homes but also streets, power lines and basic infrastructure. Ricardo Makyn/AFP via Getty Images

At the global level: Fixing the debt trap

None of this is possible if recovery remains tied to high-interest loans. There are ways for internal financial institutions and global development lenders to allow for breathing room between disasters:

The current international disaster finance system, controlled by global lenders and donors, requires countries to prove their losses after a disaster in order to access assistance, often resulting in months of delay. “Proof” is established by formal evaluations or inspections, such as by the United Nations, and aid is released only after meeting certain requirements. This process can stall recovery at the moment when aid is needed the most.

The bottom line

The Caribbean needs a system that provides support before disasters strike, with agreed-upon funding commitments and regional risk-pooling mechanisms that can avoid the delays and bureaucratic burden that slow recovery.

What’s happening in Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti today is a glimpse of what’s coming for coastal and island communities worldwide as climate change accelerates. In my view, we can either learn from the Caribbean’s experiences and redesign disaster recovery now or wait until the trap closes around everyone.

Farah Nibbs, Assistant Professor of Emergency and Disaster Health Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.
Nigel Farage urges you to ignore facts and reality and be a climate science denier like him and his Deputy Richard Tice. He says that Reform UK has received £Millions and £Millions from the fossil fuel industry to promote climate denial and destroy the planet.

Continue ReadingNo time to recover: Hurricane Melissa and the Caribbean’s compounding disaster trap as the storms keep coming

Jared Kushner and the age of modern buccaneering

Spread the love

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Jared Kushner, adviser to former US president Donald Trump, speaks during a panel at the annual Future Investment Initiative (FII) conference in Riyadh on October 25, 2023. [FAYEZ NURELDINE/AFP via Getty Images]

by Dr Sahar Huneidi

The classic 17th-century buccaneer was not a simple pirate; he was a hybrid figure who operated in the grey area between state-sanctioned privateering and outright piracy. He used his connections with powerful governments to secure a “Letter of Marque” that legitimised his plunder, all the while lining his pockets. This government-issued license authorised privateers to attack and capture vessels of a rival nation, distinguishing legal privateering from piracy.  Financial incentives also meant that privateers kept a large portion of the seized goods as compensation for their efforts, with portions going to the government that issued the commission. This form of state-sanctioned warfare, which blurred the lines between privateering and piracy was abolished internationally in 1856. And now it is back, dressed in a corporate suit and incarnated by Jared Kushner et al.

Just as the ancient buccaneer hid behind the flag of a nation to plunder, so Kushner and his ilk hide behind the flags of diplomacy and “economic development” to do the same. In recent years, Kushner, the deal-maker son-in-law of the American president, has made an entrance into the world of diplomacy and neo-colonial administration by actively meddling in Palestine and Middle Eastern politics. 

As his father-in-law’s chief advisor, Kushner oversaw Trump’s ludicrously monikered “Deal of the Century,” announced in January 2020 and then followed by the so-called “Abraham Accords” in September 2020, which bypassed the central issues of the Palestinian-Israeli ‘conflict’. In an early interview during Trump’s first administration, Kushner explained his qualifications in this area: he had been “studying [the Middle East] now for three years:  I’ve read 25 books on it, I’ve spoken to every leader in the region, I’ve spoken to everyone who’s been involved in this.” In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal (14 March, 2021) Kushner characterised the Arab-Israeli ‘conflict’ as a “real-estate dispute”. The limitations of his understanding of the roots of the conflict are clearly discernible here, including in the claim that “Arab leaders refused to accept the creation of the state of Israel and spent 70 years vilifying it and using it to divert attention from domestic shortcomings.”

READ: Washington and Tel Aviv deny Saudi report claiming Kushner met Abu Shabab

With no experience and a pronounced lack of grounding in the region’s historical and political complexities, Kushner owes his position entirely to nepotism, which has given him a diplomatic cover to attain “deal making” under the guise of diplomacy and peace, thus converting political access and diplomatic power into billions of dollars in Saudi-UAE-and Qatar-based branches of Sovereign Funds Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Blatant 21stcentury buccaneering in all its glory.

Fast forward to August 2025 and POTUS indicated that he had to bring in his son-in-law because no one can match his intelligence. Kushner’s “second coming” only became public knowledge when he (along with Tony Blair and others) attended an August White House meeting to plan for post-war governance and “redevelopment” of Gaza, when the president announced: “I put Jared on it because he’s a very smart person and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players.” In a New York Times interview, repeating his previously held views that he was “not quite interested in history,” and making it clear he saw himself and Witkoff, the Middle East envoys as “deal guys,” veterans of the New York real-estate scene who understood what made people tick. Kushner announced: “A lot of people who do this are history professors, because they have a lot of experience, or diplomats. It’s just different being deal guys – just a different sport.”  His only real knowledge comes from his father, Charles Kushner, who has decades-old close family ties with Netanyahu and has been a major donor to Right-wing pro-Israeli causes; a relationship so close that Netanyahu has stayed in the Kushner family home in New Jersey, according to the New York Times. One official commented that Kushner and Witkoff “stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel 100%”. Total and complete partiality. No questions asked.

Indeed, Kushner’s major imprint on Middle East policy since Trump’s second administration is his signature proposal that Gaza be “redeveloped” as a vast and “valuable waterfront” property, an idea that he first voiced at a Harvard event in 2024, in which he promoted “cleaning it up” and the forcible eviction of Palestinians.

Enormous conflict of interest and open corruption charges notwithstanding – and still with no formal role in the White House – Kushner took centre stage in getting the Gaza deal, which could bring him a huge bounty to “redevelop” Gaza. And lest Palestinians and other international observers declare anything other than undying gratitude to this hero of our times for his sacrifices in the cause of world peace, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt informed us earlier (in October) that “Jared is donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace, and that is a very noble thing.”

READ: Middle East on the brink as Gaza and Lebanon ceasefires face collapse

And now to the final scene in the act.  In a ceremony announcing the inauguration of the new civil-military cooperation centre in Kiryat Gat, Kushner, standing at the command centre said he was looking forward to a “new Gaza, to give Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live”.  This elicited a fierce response from Joshua Liefer, the leading Haaretz writer, on 23 October 2025, in which he excoriated failed “occupation management”, the chimera of “economic peace”, and the patronising assumption that Palestinians can be “bought off” with these scraps. All of this, previously said and indeed reiterated on multiple occasions, will however presumably entirely bypass Kushner.

Kushner’s soulless public persona, a masterpiece of strangely immobile features, presents a smooth deadpan surface to the world, giving little hint of emotion. This eerie wax-work quality of otherworldly detachment is profoundly disquieting, suggesting not inner peace but a deep disconnect and the ability to discuss the fate of millions with the same detached focus as if reviewing a real estate portfolio.  

In this new world, the language of “peace” and “ceasefire” is becoming ever more Orwellian, a “ceasefire” in which on one night alone in October more than 100 starved Palestinians – children, women and the elderly – were bombed and murdered in their tents, with hundreds more injured.  A “peace” with a new “Yellow line” reminiscent of Oslo-style administrative divisions of areas A, B, and C, and a West-Bankification of Gaza or, more bluntly stated, bantustans. This will bring more than half the territory of the Gaza strip under full Israeli control, raising serious concerns that this new policy could become a permanent partition of the devasted enclave, with Israel remaining the occupying force, promising more violence, carnage, death and destruction and the absence of any measure of genuine self-determination for Palestinians.

The age of buccaneering is well and truly back, led by Jared Kushner and his international allies, including Tony Blair, Ron Dermer, Steve Witkoff et al. Their land and resource grabbing is not a secret – they speak of it openly.  In the lexicon of the deal guy, peace is just another word for a very profitable acquisition. Plunder is now policy.

READ: The return of ‘Lord Blair of Kut-el-Amara’

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza's hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.
Orcas discuss Genocide-supporting and complicit Zionists. Donald Trump, Keith Starmer, David Lammy, Rachel Reeves, Angela Rayner and Wes Streeting are acknowledged as evil genocide-complicit and supporting cnuts.

Continue ReadingJared Kushner and the age of modern buccaneering

Venezuela Mobilizes Military as US Aircraft Carrier Approaches

Spread the love

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

A Venezuelan navy patrol boat escorts Panamanian flagged crude oil tanker Yoselin near the El Palito refinery in Puerto Cabello, Venezuela on November 11, 2025. (Photo by Juan Carlos Hernandez/AFP via Getty Images)

“The only reason to move it there is to use it against Venezuela,” said one policy expert of the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford.

White House officials have sought to walk back President Donald Trump’s repeated threats against Venezuela in recent days—even as the Department of Defense has continue to strike boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—but officials in the South American country on Tuesday took the arrival of a US aircraft carrier in the region seriously despite the administration’s claims that it won’t target Venezuela directly.

As the USS Gerald R. Ford entered waters near Latin America, accompanied by three warships, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said Venezuela’s entire military arsenal had been placed on “full operational readiness,” with President Nicolás Maduro ordering the deployment of nearly 200,000 soldiers.

The government also approved the “massive deployment of ground, aerial, naval, riverine, and missile forces,” López announced.

Venezuela’s military deployment comes weeks after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Ford to relocate from Europe to Latin America following several military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that the Trump administration has claimed are meant to stop drug trafficking out of Venezuela—despite the fact that US intelligence agencies and United Nations experts agree that the country plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl, the top cause of drug overdoses in the US.

At least 76 people have been killed in the strikes so far, and the Associated Press reported last week that the victims have included an out-of-work bus driver and a struggling fisherman—people who in some cases had turned to helping drug traffickers transport cocaine across the Caribbean, but were hardly the high-level “narco-terrorists” that Hegseth and Trump have insisted they’ve killed in the region.

With the carrier strike group entering the Caribbean region, the US now has about 15,000 troops in the area where tensions have escalated since the boat strikes began in September.

Mark Cancian, a senior defense adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Post that Venezuelan officials had good reason to mobilize forces.

“The only reason to move it there is to use it against Venezuela,” Cancian said of the Ford deployment. “The shot clock has started because this is not an asset they can just keep there indefinitely. They have to use it or move it.”

Since beginning the boat bombings, Trump has signaled the US attacks could move to Venezuela directly, with the Wall Street Journal reporting late last month that the administration was preparing to target “ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips.”

Trump also authorized Central Intelligence Agency operations last month, falsely claiming the country has “emptied” its prisons into the US and again asserting that “we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.”

Democratic senators have introduced two war powers resolutions aimed at stopping the US from striking inside Venezuela and at halting the boat-bombing campaign—but Republicans have voted them down after administration officials assured the caucus that the White House was not currently planning to attack Venezuela.

Maduro said last month that Trump’s actions in the region in recent months amount to attempts at “regime change,” adding that “if Venezuela did not possess oil, gas, gold, fertile land, and water, the imperialists wouldn’t even look at our country.”

Trump himself said publicly in 2023 that if he had won the 2020 presidential election, “we would have taken [Venezuela] over, we would have gotten all that oil.”

On Tuesday, both the United Kingdom and Colombia announced that they were halting intelligence sharing with the US in the region, saying that working with the US as it attacks small vessels in the Caribbean could make the countries complicit in violations of international law.

“All levels of law enforcement intelligence are ordered to suspend communications and other agreements with US security agencies,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said. “This measure will remain in place as long as missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean continue. The fight against drugs must be subordinate to the human rights of the Caribbean people.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Continue ReadingVenezuela Mobilizes Military as US Aircraft Carrier Approaches