Developers are Crabgrass

Friday, September 04, 2026

Would you buy a used car from Donald John Trump if he promised you it was in tip top shape?

Indirectly suggesting an answer =

Slate, Aug. 31, 2026, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/pete-hegseth-generals-worried-reserves-military.html

Beginning:

A remarkable story in Monday’s Washington Post dramatizes how deeply the Iran war has degraded the U.S. military’s ability to fend off attacks by adversaries elsewhere in the world. The story is based on the leak of a little-known classified document, which itself signifies that we’ve reached a new stage in the growing turmoil among the senior officer corps over the chaotic reign of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

The leaked document reveals that the three four-star commanders in charge of U.S. military operations in Europe, the Pacific, and South America, as well as the Navy’s top admiral, all informed Hegseth that because so many of their planes, ships, and other weapons systems have been diverted to the war in Iran, they could no longer perform their tasks if a war broke out in their part of the world.

These senior officers were responding to the Aug. 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book. As Post reporters Alex Horton and Tara Copp describe the book:

The SDOB, typically produced twice monthly, outlines the worldwide availability of U.S. warships, aircraft, personnel, and weapons systems. It reflects the president’s priorities for the force, which are carried out by the defense secretary.

In response to that August edition, the top officers issued a comment of “non-concur.” This means they no longer had the number of ships, planes, personnel, or other weapons systems that, according to the SDOB’s calculations, would be needed to carry out the president’s priorities in the event of a war. These priorities spell out what steps the commanders should be able to take if, say, China assaulted or blockaded Taiwan, or North Korea invaded South Korea, or Russia mounted an incursion in the Baltics, or an attack of a certain scale was mounted against Israel.

Two other senior officers, the top generals in the Army and the Air Force, concurred with the estimate of resources at their disposal but still noted that the risks involved in carrying out missions had grown.

The Post story comes as the United States and Iran resumed firing missiles at each other’s ships after a month of relative calm, though it tracks conditions from weeks prior.

It has been widely reported that in the six months of this war (and even over the course of its first month), the U.S. depleted a high percentage of its most vital munitions, including more than half of its cruise missiles and advanced air-defense missiles. The military has had to redeploy one of the most advanced weapons—its Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles—to the Middle East from South Korea. It has also had to reposition the USS George Washington vessel and its escort warships to the Persian Gulf from Japan—thus removing the Navy’s only aircraft carrier in the Pacific.

The SDOB specified that the 50,000 U.S. troops and much of their hardware must remain in the Middle East at least through September, and in some cases well into next year. The subsequent “non-concur” statements warned that U.S. military readiness couldn’t be sustained if the war in Iran goes on for much longer.

Parallel coverage, Jerusalem Post, Aug 30, 2026, https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/iran-news/article-907059 -- ending:

The Washington Post reported that the navy’s top admiral, along with the leaders from America’s European Command, Pacific Command, and the Southern Command, responded with “non-concur,” which means that they do not agree with Hegseth’s order, but will execute it regardless.
Leaders from the US Army and Air Force both noted that the extension of their forces comes with significant risks.
One person familiar with the matter said that US military leadership believes that the war in Iran has been “too much for too long.”
“Decisions regarding the scope and duration of specific force commitments to any Combatant Command are made based on the current threat assessment, strategic priorities established by the President, and the advice of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Combatant Commanders,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to the Washington Post.
He added that the Pentagon “does not discuss internal operational processes,” such as the SDOB, “or specific concurrences, non-concurrences, or risk assessments provided by the Services or Combatant Commands during force allocation deliberations.”

IBT reports a trade war with Canada and renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America are unpopular with American poll respondents.

https://www.ibtimes.com/most-americans-dont-want-trade-war-canada-poll-shows-14-percent-support-lake-america-3807022

In part, from the start of the report:

Most Americans do not support President Trump's tariffs on Canada or his order to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America," according to a new survey.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll, which was conducted over three days and concluded on Sunday, found that the vast majority of respondents did not think a trade war with Canada was a good idea.
Only 20 percent of respondents supported Trump's tariff hikes on Canadian goods, while 57 percent opposed them. Another 27 percent were uncertain about the policy.
Trump's order to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America was also unpopular. Only 14 percent of Americans said they support the action, which only applies to U.S. federal usage and has no bearing on what Canada, other organizations, or international bodies call the lake.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 1,023 U.S. adults and had a margin of error of 4 points.
Last month Trump imposed 50 percent tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods. Foreign countries do not pay the tariffs; domestic importers pay them when the goods arrive. The costs usually are recouped through higher prices passed along to consumers.
A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that 90 percent of the cost burden of Trump's 2025 tariffs was passed along to U.S. companies and consumers.

One Crabgrass idea is to rename Lake Ontario after Trump, Lake Schmuck, and see whether that would be more popular.

Thursday, September 03, 2026

MinnReformer published an item of local Minnesota news, with implications nationwide.

https://minnesotareformer.com/2026/09/03/gop-senate-candidate-michele-tafoya-reports-assets-totaling-10-7m-to-37-9m/

Sideline Susie is rich.

From the start of the item:

When Michele Tafoya said Americans could handle higher gas prices caused by the war in Iran with a “stiff upper lip” and “one less trip to Starbucks,” she likely wasn’t talking about herself.

The retired sportscaster and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has assets worth between $10.7 million and $37.9 million, according to her financial disclosure, putting her near or in the top 1% of wealthiest Americans.

Conventional wisdom says an electorate deeply concerned about the cost of living doesn’t want to be told by a multimillionaire to buck up and buy fewer lattes — especially after years of inflation going back to the pandemic and now exacerbated by President Trump’s tariffs, war in Iran and cuts to safety net programs.

“If (candidates) can’t understand and show some connection with voter worries, they’re not going to get very far,” said David Sturrock, a political science professor at Southwest Minnesota State University who has been active in Republican politics.

But Sturrock also said he doesn’t think voters are casting ballots based on a close review of financial disclosures. They’re persuaded by “fleeting impressions” of candidates and their platform.

Cut down on the lattes and make it through tariff times rings hollow from a millionaire.

That is the message, nationwide, to not be an asshole in what you say to paycheck to paycheck voters, unless you don't get called out for it. Given opposition research, expecting to not be called out for that kind of trash talk, particularly from a Republican, where feelings of privilege and entitleent are more prevalent while Dems hid such things as a policy, as best they can, or they speak more sensitively.

Tafoya also is pushing that bogus $9 billion in fraud bullshit, so, her mouth might be her biggest problem.

But, in fair judgment, Tafoya has a snowball's chance in hell with Peggy Flanagan as her general election opponent. Flanagan's been in government before, and done things well, while not blathering on the sideline while viewers are bellowing in frustration at their TVs, "Show the fucking field! The game's going on. Show the field"

(Or is that just me?)

______________UPDATE____________

Debunking that $9 billion alleged fraud game is important to having a fact based election. Citing for that a Dan Burns' left.mn post from a few months ago about the $9 billion fraud about fraud, is bolstered by left.mn's Steve Timmer on Sept 1, 2026 writing:

Looking for fraud in not all the right places

I wrote back in January about a December ’25 press conference held by Acting United States Attorney Joe Thompson to offer a briefing, with seven other members of his office standing in a phalanx, to describe what he said was perhaps $9 billion in social services fraud committed by the local ethnic Somali community. I thought it was frankly racist and speculative, and I also believe it violated ethical rules about prejudicial pretrial publicity and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.

My story was a lonely voice for a long time, and federal and state Republicans candidates have tried to fatten up on the Thompson presser ever since it was given, including recently in ads for Démuth for governor. The fallout has been immense and odious. Here’s part of what I said in January about the fallout:

A month of right-wing social media bloviating, a mainstream media that ran with the nine billion dollar fraud figure as a fact, Donald Trump’s ranting that Somali people are “garbage” and initiating and exacerbating Metro Surge, Nick Shirley’s puerile, defamatory video (extolled by the Ovoid Sorehead, Tom Emmer), Tim Walz being driven from a re-election campaign, the fact that Somali and Latino U.S. citizens have to cower in their homes, and the sad little bullshit performance [his first one] in Minneapolis by Jake Lang on Saturday, January 17th, can all be laid at the feet of Joe Thompson. It’s quite a legacy.

It obviously only got worse from there. The Republican vocabulary has been reduced to two words: “nine billion.” It’s a good thing for them that it isn’t a tongue twister, or they’d be in big trouble.

But mirabile dictu, in recent weeks even somnolent media have begun to catch on.

Tom Hauser quote

[...] Based on all the gibbering Republicans, including Donald Trump, one would think that Minnesota was the only place where pandemic-era fraud took place and that Somalis (who Trump calls “garbage”) were the only people to have committed it. You would be wrong if you thought that. It was a widespread national problem. Here is just a small collection of other examples I have found.

[...] The Paycheck Protection Program. While Feeding our Future was intended to keep kids from going hungry during school closures – and the program did feed a lot of kids – PPP was intended to help employers meet payroll and keep employees on. It was administered by the Treasury Department and the SBA: the feds. [Timmer than catalogs PPP frauds in millions of dollar amounts documented via links]

Medicare/Medicaid fraud. These have always been the big ones, and since they involve white collar criminals, Donald Trump has a soft spot for them. Here are some of his pardons and commutations.

Lawrence Duran – American Therapeutic Corp, Medicare (psychiatric partial-hospitalization fraud), ~$87 million ordered in restitution. Trump commuted his sentence in May 2025, and the clemency order itself states Duran would be subject to “no further fines [or] restitution” related to his case.

The WellCare Five – (Todd Farha, Thaddeus Bereday, William Kale, Paul Behrens, Peter Clay), a Medicaid case. Convicted of a scheme involving widespread Medicaid overcharging of at least $35 million, in a case that began with a 2007 FBI raid on WellCare’s Tampa headquarters. They were convicted in 2013 and granted full pardons in January 2021, as Trump was headed out the door of his first term.

Philip Esformes — The largest figure by far. He ran nursing homes in Florida, Illinois, and Missouri used to perpetrate a Medicaid fraud scheme involving about $1.3 billion in fraudulent claims. His sentence was commuted by Trump, but he’s been arrested for new crimes.

Trump has pardoned plenty of other white-collar crooks, not involving medical or social services.

Michael Milken – The “junk bond king” pleaded guilty to securities fraud and related charges from his 1980s Drexel Burnham Lambert insider-trading scandal, and was pardoned in February 2020, during Trump’s first term.

There are many more. Trump seems to favor financial criminals and crypto crooks, especially.

-oOo-

It is obvious that Donald Trump does not like Minnesota. Well, we don’t like him either. The Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas, and Ron Schultzs of Minnesota not only bray the Republican line, but they’d also leave the state supine in the face of the hyenas in the Trump administration. We’d be complete fools to put these Republican pimps in charge.

[...] There that has never been an ethnic group that moved to the United States in numbers and didn’t encounter difficulty in fitting in for a generation or two: Irish, Polish, Eastern European Jewish, Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Jamaican, Vietnamese, Hmong. [...] These are eternal themes in the American experience, but I don’t think you can build an immigrant nation without them. Well, I know you can’t.

The law-abiding Somali residents of my hometown, most of whom are citizens, and their kids who work at the grocery store after school, who certainly are citizens, have a job made more difficult for them because of the Lisa Démuths, Michele Tafoyas (who shares my hometown), and Ron Schultzs. These tightly packed balls of grievance and resentment do not deserve support and lifting up from us. Quite the opposite.

[...] One note Johnny Republican politicians do it because it’s all they have. On virtually every national and state issue: war, the economy, tariffs, immigration enforcement, guns – and this list goes on, too – the Republicans cower behind the quivering Donald Trump.

Moreover, the managing editor of MinnReformer days ago opined:

The most pressing issue for the next Minnesota attorney general will be the ongoing fight to force the Trump administration to govern by the rule of law and the U.S. Constitution.

When Trump’s minions were withholding evidence from state and local law enforcement in the federal killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Attorney General Keith Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty sued the feds. Last month, they announced that the feds had turned over key evidence, like Good’s car.

After prosecutors charged ICE agent Christian Castro, alleging he shot an innocent man in the leg and then lied about it, Trump’s ally Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has been holding up Castro’s extradition. Ellison again sued.

On another front, when Trump assumed monarchical powers and levied tariffs, which has raised the price of nearly everything for American consumers, Ellison was among the attorney generals who successfully sued to stop him (though Trump is at it again on that front).

Minnesotans have been in the fight of our lives against the Trump administration, which has to rank among the most lawless in American history. It’s gotten so bad that — as ProPublica reported recently — federal judges across the country have called Trump’s Justice Department at various times “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest.

Which is why it wouldn’t make any sense to elect a Trump ally to the job of attorney general, who is Minnesota’s chief legal officer. [...]

And, to be sure: Republican nominee for attorney general Ron Schutz is very much a Trump ally.

The Republican Attorneys General Association is dropping a seven-figure ad buy against Ellison. Check out this photo of Don Jr. Trump with association leaders.

RAGA, as it’s known, is connected to the mastermind of the Trump Supreme Court, Leonard Leo.

Leo, who is co-chairman of the board of the Federalist Society, is closely connected to RAGA and various big money GOP groups, which shrewdly see state attorneys general as a key policy, political and legal lever.

Schutz, a successful trial lawyer and fixture of the Minnesota conservative legal establishment, has been a member of the Federalist Society for more than 30 years.

The group has successfully implanted their right-wing judicial philosophy on the federal bench, including the current supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

We’re talking overturning Roe v. Wade, giving President Donald Trump immunity from criminal prosecution and gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Beyond the company he keeps, what Schutz has said he’ll do as attorney general is not comforting — insofar as he’s said anything.

How did Schutz react to ICE’s lawless assault on the constitutional rights of Minnesotans? He attacked Ellison for “wasting taxpayer money suing the Trump admin to block ICE from doing their job — enforcing immigration laws in Minnesota.”

[...] I asked Schutz’s campaign what he would do as attorney general to get Castro back here to face justice. And which, if any, of the more than 70 lawsuits filed by Ellison against the Trump administration that Schutz would drop or continue.

Schutz didn’t respond.

I also asked about another high-profile Ellison case, in which he alleges Big Oil defrauded Minnesotans by lying about what they knew about climate change. As multiple investigations have found, the oil companies knew humans burning fossil fuels were causing climate change but then seeded the information atmosphere with phony doubt while the problem only worsened.

Again, no response from the Schutz campaign, but he did tweet that the lawsuit was part of a “radical green agenda.”

Crabgrass notes that Schutz was a Tabacco lawyer back when Tabacco firms were in denial over the connection between smoking and lung cancer, and Schutz sang the song. It light of that, Coolgan continues to opine:

There’s nothing radical about expecting the world’s largest and most powerful corporations to be truthful with the public.

I’ve written critically of Democratic-Farmer-Labor elected officials’ lackadaisical initial response to the raiding of our state and federal treasury by fraudsters. Including Ellison’s foolish decision in the fall of 2021 to meet with people who sought his help getting the executive branch to go easier on what we politely call program integrity, just weeks before the raids that finally put an end to the Feeding Our Future debacle.

[...] Every year the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General puts out a statistical report on states’ Medicaid fraud control units, and Minnesota has ranked in the top 10 in fraud convictions, despite our relatively low population compared to places like other top-ranking states like Florida and California.

[...] As for Schutz, here’s what he said during a TV interview when asked what he would do in the case of an “unlawful decision” on the part of the Trump administration.

“What I can tell you is my goal is to protect the citizens of Minnesota.”
[...] But then this: “I, I doubt if President Trump is going to be, you know, taking some action that would be blatantly illegal. I know Dems think he has done that. I can tell you from having spent a lot of time in the courtroom, there can be differences of opinion on this.”

With a man who gives two consecutive non-answers in a row to a direct question, what's good about him?

There can be differences of opinion, he said that. True enough. But the guy will not directly tell you his opinion, because it is Trump speaks, saying whatever, that's great, move along, nothing to sue here.

Or prove me wrong.

Trump again displays a perverse {nearly pathological} bend toward blaming Joe Biden for anything/everything. That is coincidental to a so-called "FACT SHEET" about Venezuelan oil dealings -- which specific to the Betencort firm states, "NABEP has granted the U.S. Department of State the right to purchase, at production cost, a guaranteed 20% of the off-take from all current and future fields NABEP will operate—ensuring a stable supply of low-cost oil that can facilitate refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which Joe Biden depleted to historic lows, and to provide supply for military and other sensitive uses." Begging the question of who guarantees what, for how long, etc.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-announces-historic-oil-agreement-to-secure-american-energy-dominance-and-drive-venezuelas-economic-recovery/

The headlined language seems to say Betencort's firm guarantees at least 20% availability at extraction cost (which may well be above market price for Brent landmark levels due to expensive extraction complications with viscous sour stock) and the State Department has a right but not an obligation.

Since it's Trump, things do need further pinning down, Trump too often misspeaks/miswrites.

More could be quoted but Crabgrass will let the item speak for itself, with one exception. The ending segment states:

REASSERTING THE MONROE DOCTRINE & EXPELLING FOREIGN ADVERSARIES FROM OUR HEMISPHERE: The majority of the incremental oil fields to be operated by NABEP were previously controlled or operated by Russian and Chinese firms, or by corrupt cronies of Maduro and Chavez. These malign foreign actors looted Venezuela’s resources for the benefit of American adversaries like Cuba, Russia and China and failed to invest in Venezuela’s infrastructure or development.

President Trump has re-established the Monroe Doctrine, purging foreign malign influence from our backyard and ensuring American dominance in our hemisphere is never again questioned.
By working with both new and old partners, President Trump’s Administration is forging new robust, strategic and defensible supply chains in our hemisphere to support the revitalization of our manufacturing and energy sectors after years of globalist decline.

In the bulleted highlighted clause, re-established is a misnomer, re-asserted being correct. Pigs will fly before China dismantles its Mexican electric auto factory infrastructure at Trump's behest. How it is.

FURTHER:Hat tip to AJ for its item linking to and analyzing the White House post, while also ending:

It has amplified fears that the Trump administration is entrenching former Maduro loyalists, like Rodriguez, who have shown no readiness to hold democratic elections eight months after Maduro’s overthrow.
Trump on Wednesday rebuffed calls from several Republican lawmakers for quick polls in Venezuela.
“I just don’t think they’re ready yet. You know, it’s very new. We took them out of a dictatorship, and we’re getting along great with the government,” he said.
Rodriguez took a similar line, saying there would be “an electoral process” when “Venezuela is ready”.

FURTHER: AJ published recently about Iran - China.

FURTHER: The "FACT SHEET" is unclear about much, but at the outset refers "The deal, signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, * * * " so truly interested readers may track down that text. Presumably it is unclassified. And somewhere in the Federal Register.

So, was it signed as a treaty requiring Congressional approval, or as something else? Trump again, so pin things down. The norm seems to have been signing with Congress than putting approval on ice so that implementation proceeds, but it's never fully official and can be repudiated by executive will. As with Obama's nuclear deal, which presumably never reached a Congressional vote, but check that, as here it is only a guess. Something got signed by Rubio and Hegseth, seemingly.

Wednesday, September 02, 2026

Krugman, bless his heart, throws real shade at Trump's Venezuelan oil wet dream. Who's to benefit, crap oil, crap infrastructure? Well, who's got a stake already? A dark question, but Krugman first.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-plot-to-steal-venezuelas-oil -- subtitle:

A scam that is both vile and deeply stupid
Paul Krugman
Sep 01, 2026

For those who need a refresher, in January U.S. forces raided Venezuela and kidnapped Nicolas Maduro, the nation’s brutal, corrupt dictator. Maduro surely deserved his fate. But the Trump administration made no move to help Venezuela’s democratic opposition. Instead, it made a deal with former members of the Maduro cabal, effectively installing a new regime that may well be even more brutal and corrupt than its predecessor. (There’s widespread suspicion that the kidnapping of Maduro was in part an inside job, engineered by his fellow cabalistas.)
In return, Trump got an agreement — details are scarce — that apparently will allow U.S. oil companies to extract and sell large quantities of Venezuelan oil but only if they put tens of billions of dollars into investments in Venezuela’s decrepit oil infrastructure.
[...] In one stroke, Trump has just validated everything the Latin American left has ever said about U.S. imperialism. And we’ll be paying for that, diplomatically and strategically, for decades to come.
[...] Even if the deal holds, oil experts are extremely doubtful that Venezuela can significantly increase its oil production soon, if ever. It would take years to rebuild the oil infrastructure even if corporations are willing to sink in the necessary billions of dollars. There are also issues with the quality of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela appears on paper to have huge oil reserves. But much of these reserves are what I called a “black, sticky fantasy,” created by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez, when he reclassified oil in the Orinoco Basin that will be difficult if not impossible to recover as “proved” reserves.
But let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Trump really does manage to seize 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan oil. That sounds like a big number. Is it?
Venezuelan oil currently sells for around $70 a barrel on world markets. But as I said, getting that oil out will require huge investments in infrastructure. Nor does Venezuela oil come gushing out when you drill a well: As one expert put it, “it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter.”
So the profit margin on Venezuelan oil will be at most a small fraction of its market price. Surely $20 a barrel would be a highly generous estimate. So let’s go with that, in which case Trump’s deal might be worth $20*65 billion barrels = $1.3 trillion, a sum extracted over many years.
How big a deal would that be for the United States? Since this would be a many-year process if it happens at all, you want to compare it with U.S. wealth, not GDP (which is only the value created in a single year.) And total U.S. wealth is about $167 trillion.

[...] Oh, and what about Trump’s claim that this will “substantially lower Gas Prices for all Americans”? Since any significant rise in Venezuelan production would take a long time, even crude oil prices won’t show any effects from this deal for years at best. And in any case the prices of gasoline and diesel — which are what people actually burn — have become increasingly disconnected from the price of crude.
So Trump’s Venezuela deal will do nothing for ordinary Americans, while solidifying our reputation for rapacious, short-sighted imperialism.

Even more concerning, Krugman links here.

Levine is the Eugene E. and Catherine M. Trefethen Chair in Business Administration at the Haas School of Business. His research focuses on understanding and overcoming barriers to improving health and economic well-being in poor nations.

Haas News: How do you view the actual economic potential of Venezuela’s 300 billion barrels of oil today?

David Levine: When I heard about the Trump Administration’s actions in Venezuela, I assumed there was money to be made from what we’ve all read are the world’s biggest oil reserves. So I wanted to do a quick estimate of how much money we were talking about. I was surprised that the answer is not very much, and not easily. I want the people of Venezuela to prosper, but it’s not obvious how this will happen.

Venezuela’s oil reserves are largely “stranded” by chemistry. Most of it comes out of the ground with the consistency of cold peanut butter. To even move it through a pipe, you must mix it with costly imported diluents (such as naphtha), which adds roughly $15 per barrel to your costs before you’ve even reached a port. And when it gets onto a tanker, it’s still some of the hardest crude on the planet to turn into something useful. It requires specialized equipment and it emits a lot of carbon for each gallon of gasoline or other useful product. Because it requires complex “coker” refineries to process, it currently sells at a $12–$20 discount compared to global benchmarks like Brent.

Haas: In the past, Trump actually called it garbage oil and the “worst oil probably anywhere in the world.”

DL: I hadn’t seen that line, and it’s not entirely inaccurate. It’s not actually garbage—it has economic value. Once it’s turned into gasoline, it’s just gasoline, but it’s really expensive to do that. And at $60 a barrel, it’s not very economical to ramp up production quickly in spite of the incredible potential for sheer output.

Haas: On Friday, President Trump told American oil executives that he expects their companies to invest $100 billion to restore Venezuela’s broken infrastructure. Do you think that amount would do it?

DL: Nobody knows exactly what it takes to restore Venezuela’s power grid plus the entire energy infrastructure for pumping and distribution. We don’t know whether it’s $75 billion or $150 billion, but I think we can safely say it’s going to be a number with that many zeros. Generations ago, Venezuela was producing more than three times as much oil as it does now, but it would be very hard for it ever to get up to that level. Even doubling production from one to two million barrels a day is going to take an enormous investment.

The above-ground risks are also staggering. Even with Nicolás Maduro in U.S. custody, the nation now is at risk of ongoing civil war, gang violence, or continued conflict with the United States. Beyond civil unrest, Venezuela has a history of nationalizing assets when prices are high and begging for help when they are low. And Venezuela need not nationalize, it can just increase the fees and taxes it charges.

Fiduciary duty makes it hard for a CEO to explain to shareholders why they are sinking billions into a jurisdiction that has historically treated foreign capital as a piñata.

Even if Venezuela were politically stable, it’s a very scary place to invest. It’s hard to think that an oil company exec can look at that spreadsheet and tell their shareholders, “This is the highest risk-adjusted return I have on the planet.” Right next door in Guyana, there’s enormous new discoveries of light crude. [...]
Haas: What was your calculus on how long it would take oil companies to turn a profit?

DL: If oil stays at $60/barrel, a new massive project in Venezuela’s Orinoco Belt might never hit a risk-adjusted break-even. The exception would be if the U.S. government provides unprecedented sovereign guarantees, meaning a taxpayer subsidy guarantees the investments. This approach means it might be profitable for the oil company, but not profitable for the nation because United States taxpayers are at risk.

The story changes if oil prices return to $100 for a decade or more, and we cannot rule out new technologies that substantially reduce the cost to pump and refine Venezuela’s heavy crude. But it’s very hard to see the medium-term trends making Venezuela into a serious oil exporter on a significantly larger scale than they are today. [...]

It’s possible that the price of Venezuela’s heavy crude will rise for a decade or more far above current levels, but it’s at least as likely that the already-unfavorable economics of that investment will worsen over time.

Posted in:

Faculty News Perspectives Research

So, Trump's "deal" is Big Oil spending big, or the USA subsidizing something, and that highlighted "power grid *** " touches upon Alejandro Betencort and Derwick, and ProEnergy Services, as discussed in updating an earlier post. So, Trump is using Betencort as a key lever in the "35%" deal and there's money Betencort and Derwick and ProEnergy Services can make, for themselves, from subsidized or bullied US public or private money going in such directions, with little real chance today to see any payout to justify sinking capital into this "artful deal." Artful for some, but not the USA public.

35% of nothing is - nothing. 35% of a Betancort business venture is ?? Holding the snipe hunting bag?

It is worrisome how the business is being promoted, and Marco does have ties to and expectations of the Venezuelan exile community in Florida, some of whom might be friends of Trump, personally. As at one time Jeffrey Epstein was. As Paul Singer still is. There is that stake in things, which would get a substantial pecuniary boost from Trump's proposed USA/Betencort mischief.

There is a miasma to things. As in, why promote that? Circumstantial inferences can reach in many untoward directions. Crabgrass can only guess.