On Saturday morning, Trump bombed Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, and forcibly captured President Maduro in an illegal military operation conducted without congressional authorization. The U.S. military killed dozens of civilians, military personnel, and officials in the strikes.¹
Trump isn’t even hiding why he bombed Venezuela. At his press conference, he said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela, “rebuild the oil infrastructure,” and “take out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.”² He openly discussed U.S. oil companies going into Venezuela to extract and sell the country’s oil—the largest proven reserves in the world.³
This war is about seizing Venezuela’s wealth and handing it to Big Oil corporations like Chevron, which are already being enriched by rising stock prices after Trump’s attack.⁴ All in the interest of U.S. imperialism.
Chevron is first in line to profit from Trump’s oil grab. The same corporations that donated millions to Trump’s campaign.⁵ The same corporations that have been lobbying for access to Venezuela’s oil for decades. Trump’s aide Stephen Miller explicitly framed Venezuela’s nationalization of its oil industry in the 1970s as “the largest recorded theft of American wealth,” revealing this administration’s true goal: corporate plunder.⁶
Yeah most of that is right I think. I’d caveat that the attack was more about the naked imperialism in Trump’s publicly articulated “Donroe Doctrine” than drugs or oil specifically.
I don’t really think the Chevron stuff Trump did is odd. Chevron has a longer history operating in Venezuela than any of the other companies. Bad, certainly. I have no love for Trump or Chevron. but not odd.
I kinda miss Chevron deference. As an aside, it is ironic that the namesake for a legal theory providing more administrative authority to the federal government was a private oil company, instead of, like, “administrative deference.”