Close, but not quite right. Castro nationalized assets and resources that belonged to various people all of whom now live in Florida and vote as a bloc. Note that Obama actually tried to end the Cuban embargo, but was stopped due to politicians afraid of upsetting the various people-who-hate-Cuba-for-this-specific-reason.
Funny how left leaning voters call out imperialism but forget that Cuba, Russia and China have been doing that in Venezuela the last 30 years
While it’s only one state in the US it cannot be downplayed that it has an outsize influence compared to, say, Wyoming.
The two largest states reliably vote the same way in each election, but Florida is at least somewhat up for grabs. So Florida is one of the most important opportunities to make a big impact with a small advantage.
If this seems like an incredibly stupid way to run things... yes, we know.
The modern image of Cubans in the U.S. is effectively of white people, on account of the particular classes of Cubans which emigrated to the U.S. This also belies Cuba's own racial hierarchy, which mirrors that of most of the Americas.
A bloc that resides in Florida is not responsible for the US policy against Cuba over the last 60+ years. Not to say it's not an element, but it's simply impractical as a flat reasoning. The nearby danger narrative is useful is another aspect. There are a few in aggregate.
1. Florida has (3 times IIRC) voted to legalize recreational marijuana. All of those have been thrown on by a court on procedural grounds; and
2. In 2018, Floridians voted to restore the right to vote to the state's estimated 1.5 million felons, which would've been an amazing step forward. The response? DeSantis basically waited until the last possible moment of the next election and instituted a poll tax, that is that any felon would have to pay full restitution to the state. Not enough time to challenge this before the election. Felons tend to skew poor so having to pay several thousand dollars in, say, court costs and probation "costs" acted as an effective barrier to the will of the people.
One should remember that as horrible as almost every Republican state government is, most of them are minority governments that are kept in power by extreme gerrymandering. Wisconsin is a prime example, where Democrats lead by 10 points but the Republicans hold an unassailable super majority in the state legislature.
Fun fact: Texas has more registered Democrats than registered Republicans.
Change is inevitable. REpublican voters like to hold onto to the past (up to and including chattel slavery, sorry "state's rights"). These people skew older and religious. The former is dying off from old age (and Covid) and the latter is in historical decline.
I mention this because despite Florida's reputation, voting to restore voting rights to felons passed and is remarkably progressive for the US and we can draw some comfort from that.
Also set up one party states which ideologically align with every US enemy out there including USSR/Russia while completely ruining their own countries.
> We have absolutely no problem propping up horrific dictators as "allies" when it suits us (eg Pinochet, MBS, Saddam Hussein until it didn't suit us, even Erdogan, arguably even Netanyahu)
MBS doesn't even rule Saudi yet, despite having a lot of power. Erdogan is likely to lose the next election. Nethanyahu is out of office and facing charges. Leaders can suck without being dictators or preventing fair elections.
>And with Russia's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine now threatening the energy sector, suddenly the Venezuelan sanctions aren't as important as we made out
Don't make too much of it. The admin will soon find out that Chaves/Maduro ruined the energy sector so thoroughly there isn't any oil to pump in the next decade.
It is unclear if you're referring to Cuba or to Venezuela or both. What exactly does "ideologically aligning" mean? Also does actions taken by a global superpower's military on behalf of elites in that superpower (I'm referencing the article here, "Invade Haiti, Wall Street urged, the US obliged") to steal, confiscate, block trade count towards "ruining their own countries"? My guess is that you're kind of trying to imply they caused their own ruin and deserved it by not being "ideologically aligned" with the US (does that mean Wall Street?), is that inaccurate?
There's making different choices and there's 'being friendly to the Soviets which were also very much into overthrowing the US' or 'Driving double digit percentage of your own population out to the point you're a foreign policy problem' or 'undermining neighbouring states due to your 'wrong' ideology'.
"Ideologically align" ==> Bequeath all ownership of a developing country's national resources from citizens to NATO corporations. You have to be really blind to not have realized what Ideological alignment with United states actually means. Hint: it's not democracy.
NATO places world wide economic sanctions on small countries that are "ideologically misaligned" with NATO to devastate their economy, reduce it to ruins while simultaneously organizing coups. They have no option to trade with the other block to survive. Its either gives us control over all of your natural resources OR trade with Russia to survive.
Yes they definitely work for three new-money tech billionaires and not the old money generational wealth families that nobody talks about.
Because then it would be, "The US government works for the Clarks of the world," and we'd all be going, "Huh?".
I see two big factors in play here:
1. The widespread belief in American exceptionalism, once characterized as every American thinks of themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire [1]; and
2. The power of propaganda. The number of low-income people who will fight to the hilt that Jeff Bezos shouldn't pay slightly more taxes to pay for the society that made his wealth possible and continues to make it possible is astounding.
I’d like to see something that specifically targets the loophole of borrowing against stocks & repaying by taking additional loans and selling only assets which have declined in price.
He's not a dictator for the israelis, but let's not forget that he rules over an apartheid state and for the palestinians (who don't get to vote, don't get to have their own country and yet get opressed by his rule) he is a dictator.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/02/most-cuban-...
Ethnic voting blocs are truly powerful. Religious fanaticism waxes and wanes, but strong ethnic identity endured for a few generations. That’s why southern baptists are suddenly sucking up to Catholic judges - it’s seen as a way to connect to Hispanic voters as conservative boomers die off.
> Ethnic voting blocs are truly powerful.
I'd generalize this further. Any substantial voting bloc is powerful, ethnic or otherwise. The NRA and, anti-choice lobbies and the pro-Israel lobby, for example. There is generational voting patterns (as you mention) but this seems to a subset of single-issue voters.
There's a reason we can precisely draw Congressional maps to gerrymander the electorate: voting patterns are highly predictable.
But a voting bloc can be a double edged sword. Cubans in Florida only hold power because they're the difference between the state being red and blue. It's why certain states are completely ignored in the election. One party or the other will comfortably win. Nothing will change that.
Disproportionate power only comes when you're the balance of power.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.te...
the tax department maybe but America's billionaire tech entrepreneurs have barely any relationship with America's foreign policy establishment. It's not clear to me what Bill Gates gains out of subduing Latin American countries and Musk and Cook seem to be pretty positive on China given that they make and sell a lot of their stuff there.
America's foreign policy establishment consists of think tanks, intellectuals, politicians, paperbelt types, ideologues and so forth but America's tech sector is to a large extent disconnected from this stuff if not straight up an alternative power center which routinely makes foreign policy hawks very mad.
The energy/construction/resource extraction sector is very closely tied with US foreign policy.
It’s not like this is new. John Bagot Glubb talks about this in “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival”. Our ruling class is showing the same patterns of those ruling an empire at the end of its days. Squabbling over the riches earned by those who came before with no regard for their people or the future.
This is pure cynicism. It is both lazy and false.
Democratic goals: - address climate change - extend the social insurance programs that are foundational to the welfare state: social security, the ACA, medicare, etc. - election integrity: ensure equal access to the ballot, eliminate gerrymandering, eliminate the electoral college - legislative reform: eliminate the filibuster - education: address educational debt - address inequality through tax measures and public expenditures - appoint liberal judges - preserve access to abortion and contraception - reform policing, making it more community based, less punitive, more accountable in the case of police wrongdoing, etc. - etc.
Republican goals: - facilitate resource extraction - privatize public assets - roll back environmental protections and regulations of all sorts - roll back the social insurance programs that are foundational to the welfare state: social security, the ACA, medicare, etc. - reduce taxes, particularly on the wealthy - roll back commitments to international agreements and organizations - enshrine Christian morality and customs in law - roll back protections for historically disadvantaged groups - reduce ballot access for constituencies that tend not to vote Republican - preserve the electoral college and gerrymandering (see previous point) - prevent the teaching of anything touching on diversity or historical prejudices or injustice - appoint conservative judges - prevent access to abortion and contraception - reform policing, making it more lethal, more punitive, less accountable in the case of police wrongdoing, etc. - etc.
This lists could be much longer. There are thousands of passionate politicians and activists for both parties who work on these things all the time. However, people are more motivated by negative partisanship than anything else. It turns out listing good stuff you intend to do on behalf of your voters is much less motivating than detailing the perfidy, real or imagined, of the other party and promising to punish it.
False equivalence is the way you create oligarchy, not how you fight it.
> Democratic goals: ...
This is propaganda I'm afraid. The goals of the Democratic Party are to systematically erase any progressive element from the party (eg Bernie, AOC) while positioning themselves as being not as bad as the Republicans for pure fundraising reasons without ever actually having to do anything.
Roe v. Wade was handed down 49 years ago. There have been multiple opportunities since then to codify this in Federal law. Most recently Obama the candidate campaigned on doing this as his #1 priority. Obama the new president, who had a super-majority in the Senate and thus didn't even need to repeal the filibuster (which he should've anyway) decided it wasn't that important. To the contrary, Obama actually made abortion less accessible [2].
The Democrats are absolutely feckless and are quite happy to do so as long as they can maintain office. The Republicans are straight up monsters but they are effective in that they give their base what they want.
Example: compare whipping efforts by the GOP and disciplining its members (eg Kevin McCarthy and Madison Cawthorn) vs the Democrats. If the GOP was faced with a Manchin or Sinema they would be primaried and stripped of key committee positions (most notably Manchin's on Energy) to bring them into line.
Don't for a second think the Democrats actually want to do anything.
[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fox-news-g...
The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. The Republicans have 50 seats. The Democrats have control only because Kamala Harris provides a tie-breaking vote. Sinema and Manchin are actively being courted by the Republicans ceaselessly. So if the Democrats try to whip them into line they can just withdraw their support from the Democratic caucus and then Mitch McConnell has the power. This isn't to say that the everything the Democrats have done to try to control the situation has been perfect, but these are the parameters they're working with. The story that the Democrats are feckless and happy to achieve nothing is the propaganda. It is spread both by idealists working with a fantasy notion of US politics and agents provocateurs who prefer the left stay cynical and demoralized.
Another element of this fantasy version of politics: the "Obama had a super majority" story, which echoes endlessly. Obama had this super majority for a number of weeks. First Republicans prevented the seating of Al Franken for months. Finally he was seated. Several weeks later Ted Kennedy has to withdraw entirely from his job because he was dying of a brain tumor. Then he died. During this time the legislative priority was passing the ACA. They wasted vast amounts of time with the Republicans playing a Lucy-and-the-football delaying tactic. But ever since defeatists trot this out as though Obama could have passed virtually everything during this brief window and the fact that he didn't proves his fecklessness. This is the propaganda. The Democrats have failed to achieve more not because they as a party don't want to achieve anything but because they are a relatively disunited party with different people pulling in different directions and they have only had very brief moments when they could exercise significant power. This is why everyone but Sinema and Manchin want to reform or abolish the filibuster: they realize that it prevents their ever achieving anything because at this point the Republicans will never work with them except on trivial matters.
Use Occam's Razor. It isn't secret cabals and epicycles that govern the political universe. It is exactly what you see: disunited people, some of whom are corrupt (Sinema and Manchin, e.g.) or stupid (Sinema and Manchin, e.g.), working with brief windows of opportunity within the campaign cycle. If you actually want leftist ideas enacted, working with a fantasy version of politics is worst way to go about it. It may make you feel individually virtuous and important, which is a great temptation for everyone, but it doesn't get anything done.
P.S. Obama could not abolish the filibuster. This is something the Senate has to do by amending the rules they are organized by. They can do it with a simple majority, but it has to be a majority of senators. And Obama's chief priorities when he came in were the ACA and enacting carbon pricing, not codifying Roe v. Wade into law. He managed to achieve one of these things largely because Nancy Pelosi gave up the House's more progressive plans when Ted Kennedy was gone and she realized further negotiation was fruitless. And despite herculean efforts on the part of all the Democrats in power at the time (well, except certain assholes), the circular firing squad devotees paint them all as feckless.
Even that is an exaggeration. There was never a Democratic supermajority.
He was able to cobble together a super majority on one issue. One of the Senators making up the supermajority that passed ACA literally spoke at the RNC convention and endorsed Obama's opponent[1].
The problem with this theory is that it doesn't account for all of the nationalizations that the US didn't respond to with sanctions or invasions. Which is, I believe, larger in number than the reverse.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nationalizations_by_co...
For Sri Lanka, it seems it wasn’t oil production but merely the domestic petrol distribution? Also unclear how much of it was British and not American.
For Turkey I can’t find the company at issue, but it apparently happened before the Second World War and I’d guess American interests just weren’t very substantial at the time? The article suggests the US was supporting Turkey in getting out from under existing relationships with the old powers of Europe.
It's fun to demonize, isn't? But in the glare of attention we all say stupid things at point or another. In her own words (per WP):
Albright later criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda", saying that her question was a loaded question.“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.” She wrote, "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean",[127] and that she regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel".[121] She apologized for her remarks in a 2020 interview with The New York Times, calling them "totally stupid".[128][122]
Here is the actual strategy laid out in an official government document: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/10/20/2017-22...
This policy was released in 2017. In 2021, there was a brief and ineffective attempt at a color revolution in Cuba.
It is not surprising that US reacts more harshly when a foreign country violates human rights of US citizens than when it 'just' opresses their own citizens.
They work for banks and resource mining corporations. They don't work for software technology new money titans.
> Section 1. Purpose: The United States recognizes the need for more freedom and democracy, improved respect for human rights, and increased free enterprise in Cuba
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/10/20/2017-22...
> Sanctions on Venezuela? Again, Venezuela took the unacceptable step of nationalizing their oil assets.
But is this not saying that the real issue with Cuba is [actual] communism? This requires no conspiracy, it is the root of publicly-cited reasons for US policy towards the island.
I think the reason these statements have the allure of revelation despite not being so is an unresolved dissonance in the American civic religion.
Capitalism and property have displaced most other rights of the liberal pantheon, old and new. Merely to discover the once unremarkable fact that capitalism in inherently unjust, and that neither property nor free enterprise are actually its synonyms, is lamentably revelatory.
I suppose the deliberate destruction of any rational, shared understanding of what communism actually entails, enacted by demagogues attacking Democratic politicians and policy, has also helped break the prior clarity of these embargoes' official justification.
China?
So a country that lets it's capital get destroyed is pretty much fucked.
This is the fundamental issue with most forms of communism, socialism and theocracy: they're perpetually short of capital.
Places like Northern Europe work very hard to simultaneously protect capital and human assets. And that's good. And we should emulate that. But all to often people try to down grade capital instead of upgrading people.
The places people so often think of as alternatives (Venezuela as a recent example) all too often fall for this error and doom themselves.
Iran, Afghanistan and the Vatican are the only modern theocracies.
For all the polarizing division in US politics on the issue of foreign policy (and even on many domestic issues) the two major parties are completely aligned to protect and benefit the capital-owning class.
Sanctions on Cuba? This is not because Cuba or Castro is "bad". We have absolutely no problem propping up horrific dictators as "allies" when it suits us (eg Pinochet, MBS, Saddam Hussein until it didn't suit us, even Erdogan, arguably even Netanyahu). What's the real issue with Cuba? Castro nationalized assets and resources that belonged to US corporations.
Sanctions on Venezuela? Again, Venezuela took the unacceptable step of nationalizing their oil assets. And with Russia's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine now threatening the energy sector, suddenly the Venezuelan sanctions aren't as important as we made out [1].
Sanctions on Iraq following the first Gulf War? Consider the words of our then UN Ambassador later Secretary of State Madeline Albright [2]:
> In that now-iconic interview, veteran journalist Lesley Stahl questioned Albright – then the US ambassador to the United Nations – on the catastrophic effect the rigorous US sanctions imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait had on the Iraqi population.
> “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”
> “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”
The US government works for the Bezoses, Gates, Buffetts and Musks of the world. Never forget that.
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/17/venezuela-oi...
[2]: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-m...