Lemdro.id

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7094104

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/14596

Donald Trump has openly admitted that he wants to take Venezuela’s oil. Top US officials have made it clear that this is a key reason for their war on the South American nation.

Trump declared an illegal naval blockade of Venezuela on December 16. The US government aims to prevent Venezuela from selling oil to China, to starve Caracas of export revenue.

The Trump administration is also illegally blocking Venezuela from importing crucial goods, including the light crude and chemicals needed to process and refine its own heavy crude.

The US goal is to bring about an extreme crisis in Venezuela — to “make the economy scream” — hoping it leads to regime change.

Trump says US corporations should control Venezuela’s oil

On December 17, a journalist asked the US president, “Is the goal of the blockade of Venezuela regime change?”

Trump replied:

It’s just a blockade. We’re not going to let anybody going through that shouldn’t be going through.

You remember, they took all of our energy rights. They took all of our oil, from not that long ago. And we want it back.

Another reporter then asked Trump, “On Venezuela, sir, you mentioned getting land back from Venezuela. What land is that?”

The US president stated:

Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. They took it away, because we had a president that maybe wasn’t watching. But they’re not going to do that. We want it back.

They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back.

Donald Trump imposed a naval blockade on Venezuela and admitted that he wants to take the country's oil and give it to US corporations:

"They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out, and we want it back". pic.twitter.com/JQhJRNFeIy

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) December 18, 2025

Trump imposes a naval blockade on Venezuela

In these questions, the journalists were referencing a December 16 post on Trump’s website Truth Social, in which the US president announced “A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela”.

These US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry are unilateral coercive measures and do not have the approval of the UN Security Council, and are therefore illegal under international law.

In his post, Trump demanded “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they [Venezuela] previously stole from us”.

He was referencing Venezuelan oil, Venezuelan land, and Venezuelan assets, which Trump believes are the property of the United States.

Hugo Chávez’s full nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry

Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves.

US corporations have been desperate to get access to the country’s crude since 2007, when leftist former President Hugo Chávez fully nationalized Venezuela’s oil industry.

The Venezuelan government passed a policy mandating that the state oil company PDVSA must have majority ownership of all projects. Foreign firms were only allowed to have a minority stake, in joint ventures.

Major US corporations like ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and ExxonMobil refused to accept these terms, and thus left the country.

The Trump administration has portrayed this nationalization from 18 years ago as an attack on the United States.

Trump boasted of trying to take Venezuela’s oil

This is by no means the first time that Trump has targeted Venezuela’s natural resources.

During his first term as US president, in 2019, Trump launched another coup attempt in Venezuela. He appointed a little-known right-wing opposition politician, Juan Guaidó, as he supposed “interim president” of Venezuela.

Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaidó in the White House with US President Donald Trump in February 2020

Although that coup attempt failed, Trump later admitted that the goal was to “take over” Venezuela and pillage its oil — treating the sovereign, independent country like a US colony.

In a 2023 speech at a Republican Party rally, Trump declared:

Venezuela, how about we’re buying oil from Venezuela? When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over. We would have gotten all that oil. It would have been right next door.

Trump’s first secretary of state was CEO of ExxonMobil

In his first administration, Trump’s initial secretary of state was Rex Tillerson, who served as the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil from 2006 to 2016.

ExxonMobil was one of the major US oil corporations that left Venezuela in 2007, following the full nationalization of the industry under Hugo Chávez.

Ever since, ExxonMobil has been desperate to get back into Venezuela.

In fact, ExxonMobil sued the Venezuelan government in the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a corporate tribunal run by the World Bank Group, which is dominated by the US government.

Tillerson served as ExxonMobil’s CEO when the corporation sued Venezuela. Soon after, he was ushered through the revolving door to the head of the State Department, overseeing US foreign policy.

Top Trump aide Stephen Miller claims Venezuela’s oil belongs to the USA

It is not just Trump but also his top aides who insist that Venezuela’s oil belongs to the United States.

Trump’s notorious, far-right deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, is helping to supervise the US war on Venezuela.

In a Twitter post on December 17, Miller claimed that “American sweat, ingenuity and toil created the oil industry in Venezuela”.

“Its tyrannical expropriation was the largest recorded theft of American wealth and property”, he wrote.

Miller’s extremely misleading claims earned a community note on Twitter, which pointed out that Venezuela’s oil infrastructure was actually built by Venezuelan workers on Venezuelan land.

The community note added that US investors had been compensated after Venezuela’s oil industry was initially nationalized in 1976.

Miller’s false accusation that Venezuela is responsible for drug production was likewise debunked by the Twitter community note, which pointed to the US government’s own reports, from the DEA, showing that it is actually longtime US ally Colombia, not Venezuela, that is responsible for cocaine that is trafficked into the US.

US naval blockade cuts of Venezuelan exports and imports

The Trump administration launched a war against Venezuela in September. As of December 19, the US military had killed more than 100 people in strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean.

Throughout this war, the Trump administration gradually escalated its aggressive tactics, seeking to destabilize and overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

In December, the US government started to seize oil tankers off the coast of Venezuela, in blatant violation of international law.

When Trump was asked what the US government would do with the Venezuelan oil in these tankers, his response was, “We keep it”. This is piracy.

Reuters reported that several supertankers that had planned to collect crude oil in Venezuela were forced to make U-turns and avoid the region, because the US military threatened to steal their cargo.

However, the Trump administration did make one exception: it allowed tankers from the US oil corporation Chevron to go through.

This US naval blockade immediately led to a significant fall in Venezuela’s oil exports.

The Trump administration also blocked Venezuela from importing goods like naphtha, which is used to refine Venezuela’s heavy crude.

The goal of the naval blockade is clear: the Trump administration wants to prevent Venezuela from exporting oil to starve the government of revenue. It also has the supplementary geopolitical effect of denying crude to Washington’s main adversary, given that around 80% of Venezuela’s oil exports are bought by China. With his blockade, Trump wants to cut off Venezuela’s access to hard currency, cause hyper-inflation, and collapse the economy.

Washington is also trying to block Venezuela from importing crucial goods that would be needed to maintain economic stability. This not only includes the materials needed to refine Venezuela’s heavy crude, but also food.

Venezuela is dependent on importing much of its food. So, with its naval blockade, the US government aims to use hunger as a weapon, to cause mass chaos and social instability in the country, and to destabilize and overthrow the government of President Maduro.

Even the US business press, like Fortune magazine, warned that the US blockade could “devastate” the Venezuelan economy.

The US government’s imperial strategy: “make the economy scream”

In other words, Trump is bringing back the infamous US imperial strategy known as “make the economy scream”. This phrase originated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

In 1970, US President Nixon and his top advisor Kissinger met at the White House with Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms.

They convened to discuss the election of socialist Salvador Allende as the president of Chile (who went on to nationalize some of the world’s largest reserves of copper, angering US corporations and their representatives in Washington — just as Chávez would do with Venezuela’s oil a few decades later).

The CIA was given a clear mission to destabilize and ultimately overthrow Allende’s elected government.

“Make the economy scream”, CIA Director Helms was told.

The CIA was ordered to use the “best men we have”, in a “full-time job”. It was given a budget of $10 million, promising “more if necessary”. That was equivalent to nearly $83 million as of late 2025.

The US ultimately succeeded in sabotaging the Chilean economy, causing high rates of inflation and chaos. The CIA even worked with right-wing labor unions to carry out strikes that paralyzed the country.

Then, on September 11, 1973, the CIA backed a military coup that overthrew Chile’s elected President Allende, and put in power the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet.

US coup attempts, illegal sanctions, and economic war on Venezuela

This is precisely the imperial strategy that the US empire has used to try to topple Venezuela’s left-wing government, over more than two decades.

Washington has sponsored many coup attempts in Venezuela, including a briefly successful putsch in 2002, which was overturned by the Venezuelan people.

After these coup attempts failed, the US government resorted to economic war.

The Barack Obama administration started imposing sanctions on Venezuela in 2015. The White House even passed an executive order “declaring a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela”.

When Trump came into office in his first term in 2017, he levied heavy sanctions against the Venezuelan government and the state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

In 2019, Trump escalated this hybrid war into a full economic embargo on Venezuela.

UN experts made it clear that these unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela were illegal.

The UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, Alena Douhan, wrote that the US sanctions “constitute a violation of international law”.

“The announced purpose of the ‘maximum pressure’ campaign – to change the Government of Venezuela – violates the principle of sovereign equality of states and constitutes an intervention in the domestic affairs of Venezuela”, Douhan stressed.

As the US government steadily increased the number of illegal sanctions, Venezuela’s oil production crashed. The South American nation not only found it difficult to export its crude, but it was unable to import the technologies, parts, and products needed to repair and modernize its oil infrastructure.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) boasted in 2019, during the previous Trump administration’s coup attempt, that Venezuelan crude oil production had collapsed.

The EIA admitted that one of the main reasons for this was the “U.S. sanctions directed at Venezuela’s energy sector and PdVSA”.

The coup attempt that Trump initiated in 2019 failed. So in his second term, under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump launched another putsch.

This time, they used the US military to try to directly force President Maduro from power.

The post Trump admits he wants to take Venezuela’s oil – and give it to US corporations appeared first on Geopolitical Economy Report.

From Geopolitical Economy Report via This RSS Feed.

When the first wave of Epstein files appeared online, survivor Jess Michaels didn't look for revelations — she searched for her own name.

She clicked and scrolled for hours, trawling for recognisable details of her own abuse suffered at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein. But she found nothing.

"It was exactly what we expected," she said.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40483416

At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.

The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7083636

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/14456

As President Donald Trump continues his march toward a US war on Venezuela, the South American country's defense minister on Wednesday blasted his "delusional" and "completely incoherent" claims, and echoed warnings from around the world that "it's all about the oil."

In addition to killing nearly 100 people by bombing alleged drug smuggling boats, Trump has authorized covert Central Intelligence Agency action in Venezuela and repeatedly threatened attacks on land. Late Tuesday, Trump declared a naval blockade that he said will continue until the nation returns to the US "all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us."

Trump appears to be referring to the presence that US companies had in Venezuela before the country nationalized its oil industry in the 1970s. On Wednesday, the Republican president told reporters: "Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had—they took it away because we had a president that maybe wasn't watching. But they're not gonna do that. We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. As you know, they threw our companies out, and we want it back."

In a Wednesday speech, Venezuela's defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, pushed back against Trump's blockade, threats of military action, and "delirious" claims that the country stole its own oil, land, and other assets from the United States. The minister also reiterated a declaration from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that the US seizing oil tankers is "piracy."

— (@)

As CNN reported, Maduro—whom Trump aims to oust from power—gave a similar speech about the US administration's purported goal of combating drug trafficking in Caracas on Wednesday.

"It is simply a warmongering and colonialist pretense, and we have said so many times, and now everyone sees the truth. The truth has been revealed," Maduro said. "The aim in Venezuela is a regime change to impose a puppet government that wouldn't last 47 hours, that would hand over the Constitution, sovereignty, and all the wealth, turning Venezuela into a colony. It will simply never happen."

According to Anadolu Agency, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said on social media this week: "We will continue to be free and independent in our energy relations. Together with President Nicolás Maduro, we will continue to defend the homeland.”

Although the Republican-controlled US House of Representatives on Wednesday night narrowly defeated a pair of war powers resolutions aimed at reining in Trump's actions toward Venezuela, lawmakers from both major parties have also called out the administration's drug claims and argued against launching another US war for oil.

Responding to a clip of Trump's comments to reporters on Wednesday, US Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY), who sponsored one of the resolutions, wrote on social media: "I've said it many times before: This is not about drugs. If the goal were stopping narcotics, this administration would not be talking about oil rights or seizing tankers. That is not a lawful basis for war."

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), one of the few Republicans who supported the resolutions, took to the House floor ahead of the votes on Wednesday to denounce Trump's march toward an unconstitutional war and declare that "this is about oil and regime change."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.

The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

https://xcancel.com/Sec_Noem/status/2002481990755627050#m

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-interdicting-sanctioned-vessel-off-venezuelan-coast-officials-say-2025-12-20/

https://archive.is/e8WBm (reuters)

edit // changed the title from "Venezuelan oil tanker" to "oil tanker near Venezuela". nytimes says the ship was flagged with Panama. the reuters article seems to say that the oil was headed to China.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/7083635

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/14457

As voters across the country begin to rally against the unchecked construction of data centers, artificial intelligence companies are panicking and investing millions into propaganda to paint the energy-sucking facilities in a more positive light.

By 2030, the amount of energy demanded by US data centers is expected to more than double, according to the International Energy Agency.

Energy costs have spiked considerably in the states with the most data centers. And as the industry continues its breakneck expansion, one watchdog report found that consumers on America's largest electric grid are expected to pay hundreds of dollars more to meet increased power demand from now until 2027.

These costs became an unexpected point of emphasis for Democrats in November, whose calls for greater transparency from tech companies seeking to build data centers propelled them to victory in elections from New Jersey to Virginia.

But tech companies want to keep building, and as AI threatens to become a central villain of the 2026 midterm elections, Politico reports that companies are putting the wheels in motion to portray themselves "as job creators and economic drivers rather than resource-hungry land hogs."

As Gabby Miller wrote on Wednesday:

A new AI trade group is distributing talking points to members of Congress and organizing local data center field trips to better pitch voters on their value. Another trade association, the Data Center Coalition, nearly tripled its lobbying spend in the third quarter of this year from the previous quarter, according to US lobbying disclosures.

The social media giant Meta, with billions invested in its own fleet of data centers from Stanton Springs, Georgia, to Richland Parish, Louisiana, has been running a multimillion-dollar ad campaign depicting data centers as a boon to agricultural towns in Iowa and New Mexico. It has spent at least $5 million nationally in the past month on TV ads plugging Meta’s $600 billion pledged investment in tech infrastructure and jobs.“

"There’s a very bad connotation around data centers. And this is something that, frankly, the data center industry needs to figure out,” said Caleb Max, president and CEO of the National Artificial Intelligence Association, a new trade group established in January to accelerate AI infrastructure development.

Tech giants are also putting focus on swaying policymakers. Max told Politico that his group has been making the rounds to talk with elected officials in critical battlegrounds for the AI future, like Georgia, Ohio, and Texas, to craft a "positive pro-data center campaign message for elected officials, for businesses, for current lawmakers who are going to be up for reelection in 2026."

Meanwhile, Meta reportedly aired its 30-second TV spots "featuring small-town imagery of farming equipment and mom-and-pop diners" in Washington, DC, and nine state capitals. Miller says this suggests "that policymakers might be Meta’s real target audience, rather than the rural Americans impacted by these energy-hungry server hubs."

AI and tech firms plan to ramp up the lobbying and ad blitzes as the next election draws nearer, and their attempt to reframe the narrative about data centers comes as no surprise, as communities across the US in recent months have increasingly come out in force to push their representatives to halt the construction of the facilities.

In Saline Township, a small community just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, more than 800 residents descended upon a public input session earlier this month to protest against the construction of a $7 billion center—predicted to consume as much energy as the entire city of Detroit—fearing it would raise energy costs, pollute groundwater, and force the state to abandon its nation-leading climate policies.

The town initially blocked the plans, but reversed course following a lawsuit from a real-estate billionaire closely aligned with President Donald Trump, whose administration has backed the $500 billion "Stargate" initiative by OpenAI, SoftBank, and Oracle to expand data centers.

On Tuesday, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel joined Saline residents at a gathering outside the state Capitol, where they called for a statewide moratorium on data centers.

Data center projects have run into similar resistance nationwide. As of March, the group Data Center Watch found that more than $64 billion worth of projects had been blocked or delayed due to local opposition since May 2024. This opposition has reached a fever pitch in recent months.

Last week, after it received hundreds of angry comments from residents, the city council of Chandler, Arizona, unanimously rejected plans for a $2.5 billion data center that had been pushed by former US Sen.-turned lobbyist Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

Even in Trump country, backlash has been fierce. Last week, the planning commission of Starke County, Indiana, voted unanimously to recommend a one-year moratorium on the construction of centers bigger than 5,000 square feet after residents flooded a meeting to raise concerns about water pollution and energy costs.

"In Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk's AI company has built a data center whose energy demands have outgrown the region's energy capabilities," said one resident, Sophia Parker. "We've heard from everyone else saying that our infrastructure does not have the capacity to support a data center. And as a result, gas turbines are emitting nitrogen oxide to the point where residents cannot breathe. Their community is being used as a sacrifice for others to get rich. We cannot allow that to happen to us."

Last month in Montour County, Pennsylvania—a state where electric prices have surged by 15% this year, double the national average—environmentalists formed an uncommon alliance with conservative farmers and the Amish to stop the county planning commission from rezoning 1,300 acres of agricultural land for a massive new center.

“Stay out. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation without federal involvement,” said Craig High, a 39-year-old Trump supporter quoted by Reuters. “Both parties are pushing data centers and giving regulatory relief—water permits, permitting, all of it.”

“This is part of an experience that America and the world is having around tech billionaires who are seizing power and widening the gap between those who have much too much… and the working and middle classes,” Yousef Rabhi, a former Democratic state legislative leader from Michigan and clean energy advocate who opposes the construction of data centers, told The Guardian. “That’s what these data centers are symbolic of, and they’re the vehicle for the furtherance of this divide."

From Common Dreams via This RSS Feed.

https://media0.giphy.com/media/v1.Y2lkPTZjMDliOTUybHNkd2c2cWl5cndiYnlwMXY0d2k3ODcyanM3MWd6dHhvdXJvazJwMyZlcD12MV9pbnRlcm5hbF9naWZfYnlfaWQmY3Q9Zw/VSoRPmlMaKR8xCmq7F/giphy.gif

All of the major review websites for gaming hardware conspicuously did not include the smaller handheld OEMs in their head-to-head rankings/comparisons. Unfortunate it is only these smaller OEMs that support external GPUs.

I know that a bunch of ayaneo and onexplayer devices can run bazzite, can you folks recommend any (relatively ) unbiased reviews sites that can provide head-to-head comparisons that include the major OEMs and the smaller OEMs too?
I've been out of touch with the PC review scene for a while now and idk who is trustworthy and would still bother with the smaller brands.

I'm looking to pick up a new bazzite handheld that I can dock to an eGPU.

Archive sites for wsj.com don't work for me.

Artist: Milin | twitter | danbooru

Holy hell what a masterpiece! Cameron fucking did it again.

I don't even know what to say. I just came home from the movie theater and I'm still shaking.

Also, Varang is easily waifu of the year. Stole every scene she appeared in. I am legitimately sad I'll never have a 4 meter tall, lanky pyromaniac girlfriend to make homemade flamethrowers with ;_;