USA News and Poland - part 18

The US doesn't need to trade, import, and export...and get advice, lectures, and shlt from its vassals and parasites...

Do you mean business partners?

parasite - he who receives more than it gives back

In NYC bus and train fares going up under the new socialist mayor. Promises broken. Consistent with socialism and comunism.

Consistent with improving run down infrastructure.

Geez, I didn't realize you were dissing the US. It figures you support Russia, diss the US.

Up 10 cents - I'm sure the beginning of the end

This raise was decided before he entered office - but took effect today

And anyway he doesn't have direct power over the transit authority

But like all MAGA types, you will believe any old ****

PAK doesn't care about truth and certainly doesn't care about honesty or decency.


So in fact not a raise but a decrease given inflation.

@cms neuf
He promised to eliminate fares all together. It has nothing to do with deals negotiated before and everything to do with this assclown making promises to win in a campaign that he could never keep and people being dumb enough to fall for it. Like the leftards who are complaining about Trump taking Maduro out, but people from Venezuela are parading and dancing in the streets of the US.

@PolAmKrakow
Forget NY, what do you think is a fair rate for the bus service between Caracas and San Fernando? Surely Trump has thought about that. Now that he has taken control of Venezuela the frequency and price of bus services is on him or is he going to redact those files just as he tries to hide the Epstein files.

@Barney
Go grab a Venezuela flag and start marching with your new cause. Fvck Venezuela, Maduro asked for it, and he got it. He is indicted legally and this was completely legal. Now lets watch Cuba collapse and the US rescue those citizens. Trump just turned every Venezuelan person who gets citizenship into a MAGA supporter. Biden and the democrats were big pussies allowing the drugs and illegals into the country. Now, everything is heading in the right direction.

BRICS is what lost in this. No more buying oil in anything other than dollars from Venezuela. No more oil to China, or India. Russia cant make up for the shortfall with its shadow fleet. This is a master class on how to play the big board.

@PolAmKrakow
That's all grand but I want to know the bus timetable to San Fernando. You spend trillions upon trillions and can't work out a bus timetable, it's time Trump got off the golf course and did a bit of work.

Do you imagine they have made no preparation for such an eventuality ?

Do you think they might have commodities that they could stop selling to the US ?

In any given society you have the following breakdown - which I just made up completely while sitting on the toilet:

1) 80% of people who just want to be left alone and live their lives.

2) 20% that are ideologically active. They follow the news, get angry about world events, participate in protests and what not.

Now I agree that North Korea has a pretty rotten system, and that many people would jump at an opportunity to escape - but there's also then a cohort of "true believers" that would go down with the ship.

In Venezuela - this cohort of "true believers" - people that got their first housing from the Chavistas, people that first got a chance at a university education, or simply people that were given power by them - constitute about 25-30%. I have no doubt that if organized and properly led they would constitute a strong resistance on the ground.

In Cuba it is likely the same.

In Iraq it was the same.

Hell even in Poland and Russia it was the same - and in Russia they actually staged a revanche 30 years after being seemingly defeated.

-//-

Life is not some game of Monopoly. If you break something, then you will own it.

We want to own Ukraine - eyes wide open - knowing what a potential cancer we will import consisting of Ukrainian nationalists and all sorts of other people that can't stand Russia. Ukraine is simply too important for us, and we're willing to swallow these costs.

Are you willing to deal with the Chavista and Cuban remnants, just as you dealt with ex-Saddam functionaries and Sadr militias, or Shadow Taliban?

Do you expect these people to simply disappear overnight, or fly to Mars?

This idea - that the serfs only want to hoe their fields and get sloshed at the weekend - is the most North Nigerian thing you ever wrote

Normal people have aspirations and want better things for themselves and their kids.

@Bobko
Have you been to Cuba? I have. No one wants the current system. Things have not improved so much that Cubans are happy. The Cuban lobby in Florida is very powerful, Marco Rubio. Venezuela is loaded with Russians, Chineese, ISIS, and other terrorist groups. 8 million people have left Venezuela, millions more trying to leave. This is not some stronghold of socialism, its a shithole.

Cuba putting up a fight in Venezuela against the US? Really? It took two hours and twenty minutes to invade and remove a sitting president. Thats precision. Cuba doesnt want any part of the US military, they lost 32 in just this operation. This isnt Iraq where its half way around the world, this is the US backyard. Funny to read justifications to remove Zelensky and then be critical of removing a man who was indicted legally five years ago.

I wrote no such thing.

What I wrote is that most people are completely apolitical.

They don't care who rules them - Maduro or Rodriguez or Gonzalez - so long as services work, the economy hums along, and they can have confidence that tomorrow will be better than yesterday.

That is - these are "America's customers". They will cheer the end of the regime, and they will not think in categories of:

1) Our sovereignty was trampled and this is not good.

2) What does this mean for security in our region and the world at large.

...and so on, and so forth.

These are NORMAL people. Good people. I am not saying anything bad about them.

-//-

I think you missed my other point, that there are also people for whom bread, a roof over their head, and access to consumer goods doesn't mean nearly as much as ideas. And Latin America seems to produce a lot of such people.

-//-

This is just my conjecture of how things may further unfold there.

I reread my own message several times to try to understand what you were reacting to, but in the end I failed.

My point was simple - countries can be very ****** in the way they are run, and in the quality of life available to the citizens - but there will always be a sizeable cohort of "true believers" that are strongly ideological and if guided by an able hand will put up resistance.

-//-

Here - I will spell it out for total avoidance of doubt:

1) If the remaining Venezuelan leadership pivots to continued resistance (perhaps following some displays of solidarity by neighboring Leftist governments like Colombia and Brazil)

2) Continues to do so for ten days or so, or some weeks - enough time to embarrass Trump, basically.

3) And finally forces Trump to do what he doesn't want to do - and deploy US troops on the ground to effect a full occupation with a US administration

4) Thereby pulling America into another expensive and lengthy exercise of "nation building"

5) There is then a high likelihood that a powerful resistance movement will emerge of disenfranchised Chavistas and other people loyal to the former regime. As happened in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and practically everywhere where such a thing was attempted.

Ditto for Cuba - if you invade - and occupy them.


I'm realizing I may be wasting my time.

@Bobko
Wasting your time? My point is not based simply on one ot two posts here. You justify the invasion of Ukraine by Russia for mystical reasons, yet criticize the US taking action on an arrest warrant. Hypocritical. As for Trump not wanting to put boots on the ground, I think your wrong and he wants to do just that. I think he wants to be provoked into taking all the scumbags out, and is only looking for an excuse. He wants to send a message that he can do this anywhere any time. There is no cohort of true believers other than those who will try to hang on to power. Cut off the head of the snake, and watch all the baby snakes eventually scatter.

Cuba is a shell of what it could be. And the Cuban people know it. Resistance in Cuba would be nothing but old communist men. Cubans hate the government, even in todays Cuba where people can make some moeny, the government has its hands involved and fvcks everyone. The only reason people dont rise up is because they are not starving. YET. No oil money from Venezuela will choke the Cuban government.

Time is long over due for these POS countries to be told to get in line. Sorry, not a believer in any kind of socialism being good for anyone anywhere. Fvck them and anyone supporting them.

Suicide?

He Jon you toxic coxucker, I cant read what you write but you need to STFU and get a life. Fvcking fagqots commenting on anything is a joke.

Yes you can, jailbird.

Trump is a stain on humanity and a disgrace to a supposedly democratic system.

The sooner the midterms happen the better.

Ehh, what?

I threw that out as a crazy hypothetical... but you actually think this is something to be desired?

Only because I don't want innocent Venezuelans to suffer needlessly - I hope that the vice president will actually play nice with Trump - and that this whole story will end with a peaceful transition of power.

If I wanted more for America to simply suffer and be embarrassed - I would advocate exactly what you seem to want.

Are you sure you thought this through?

I have arrest warr3nts for loads of people, means nothing. The US only does what it does because like you it doesn't believe in the rule of law. It gets away with it because it has lots of guns not because it's right.

Trump has said several times now that he is running Venezuela when is he going to fix anything like bus timetables.

Wrong!!!


Correct.

I'm 36 years old - so to me this is all Bush's fault.

At least that's when the veneer started to rub off the shining city upon a hill - for me.

Then I feel it gave our leadership the feeling that it was acceptable to do things like Georgia and Ukraine. Those events led in turn to other spiraling problems.

-//-

But if you talk to people in Eastern Europe that are in their mid 40s - you'll hear instead that it was Clinton who opened the Pandora's Box with Yugoslavia.

Go further back - and people will say it was the Iran-Contra affair that erased the limits on accountability and shaped an unaccountable type of executive behavior.

-//-

In the end - Ironside is probably right - and there never were any truly "happy days". It was always a dog eat dog world.

I'm 46 and I can confirm this. Bombing Serbia, reinforcing Albanian separatism and then conducting the referendum in Kosovo really opened the Pandora's Box.
I remember being shocked at the impudence with which a country almost in the middle of Europe was bombed to submission and their ancestral lands taken away from them. Darn, I still have my "Kosovo je Srbija" t-shirt somewhere.


Of course, to different degrees it always was, but the Serbia-Kosovo case showed that a distant superpower can start a war in the middle of Europe, organise "referenda", and redraw post-WW2 borders. Shocking.

@GefreiterKania

An alternative explanation is that this is all a result of American "hyperpowerdom".

Operation Desert Storm was the last "good" war from the era of two superpowers.

Then the USSR collapsed, and America felt justified in its righteousness and superiority - and stopped taking into account the views of others. Deciding simply that it knows what's best - better than everyone else.

This hubris allowed it to take on the responsibility for things like Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan - without bothering to seek consensus through the UNSC.

This insulted and humiliated countries like Russia and France (Chirac especially) and Germany (Schroeder). Britain, of course happily played role of loyal poodle - and got exactly zero recognition for it.

Trust was destroyed. Suspicion spread.

And here we are in 2025.

Every system in nature requires balance. If Russia cannot supply it any longer through its weakness, then maybe China should.

This can be good not just for the world, but the US itself. Because it was always at its best when it felt challenged to compete in a "market of ideas".

That's exactly what happened. In addition, with Soviet socialism no longer being an ideological opponent, it allowed the worst aspects of liberal capitalism to flourish. What followed was a huge move of capital upwards to the rich and away from the middle classes and the poor in most Western countries. All one has to do is to compare the disparity in salaries between workers and CEOs in 1980s and today.


I thank you for repeating Pawian's wisdom during his absence here. ;)


You already know what I think about China.

*crosses himself*


I think I'd rather see the Soviet Union reborn than a rise of China.

Ridiculous. It is better for Poland if China rises than if the Soviet Union does.