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notices and features - Date published:
6:00 am, January 4th, 2026 - 64 comments
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Open mike is your post.
For announcements, general discussion, whatever you choose.
The usual rules of good behaviour apply (see the Policy).
Step up to the mike …
Team Amerika : World Policeman. Criminal arrests criminal.
It was never about narco (did anyone actually believe that?)….they had Amerikan oil in their country !
And Trump will also try and send all the Venezuelans in the US "home" on the grounds that they no longer need to be in the US.
Only the non MAGA ones….
First they steal Venezuela's gold; now their oil.
Spain and the USA.
They being European nations taking over areas to acquire the resources.
AI
Ruhr and Donbas?
Russia has no shortage of coal and steel .Sanctions make them less profitable for export.Sanctions would also apply on coal and steel from Russian controlled Donbas .But for domestic use , there is plenty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_Russia#:~:text=Coal%20is%20an%20important%20part,about%2063.9%25%20of%20electricity%20generation.
The Russian response is interesting,
Other responses in that Al Jazeera link are quite nuanced.
I'm seeing this as a play in a much wider global picture and the next moves could be interesting.
Said without a trace of irony! (or, for that matter, self awareness!)
I was glad I'd swallowed my coffee at that point
But yeah, I think one of the objectives of the exercise
Was Venezuela threatening the US? It's news to me if it was. Is Russia attempting to steal oil from Ukraine? That's news to me if it was.
AI
Ruhr and Donbas?
Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), Europe's largest.
My reaction too.
Some pots and kettles there!
Edit: I look forward to Pablo’s response to this incursion.
Comparisons of apples with oranges come to mind.
In so far as the claimed excuses for the illegal incursions of Ukraine by the Putin regime and now Venezuela by the Trump regime I agree. But I have never bought into Putin's excuses and I don't buy into Trump's excuses.
In its broadest sense both are about power and control by two psychopathic despots and their lackeys, and that is where the pots and kettles enter the discourse – imho.
There may be more to this story than greed for oil.
But there is more to the story: a revolutionary process over the last quarter-century that envisions a viable alternative to the capitalist world order, a peaceful transition to a form of socialism based on a truly bottom-up democracy in which decisions are made by the people in their communities. That is an outcome that the United States’ government is sworn to prevent.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/01/03/venezuelas-communes-socialism-of-the-twenty-first-century/
Iraq, Libya and Venezuela – socialist states not selling oil in $US.
POTUS 47 wants a peace in Ukraine, so Russian oil and gas can be sold for $US (end of sanctions).
(Regime change in Iraq, Libya and Venezuela so …).
The US ideal is oil sold by US owned companies. But sales in $US sustains the global reserve currency system.
Looking at that….Secretary of State Marco Cuban Rubio sent a non veiled threat to Cuba..
And quite frankly, very worryingly, after the US Presidents illegal precedent, would China see Taiwan as fair game? Strike while the time is right? Fuck, I hope not…
This is making extremely blatant what the US govt has been doing for decades but it was previously done with some subterfuge and an attempted veneer of respectability.
But what can be done to stop Trump on his alarming extremist trajectory? The UN and ICC don't seem to have much teeth in the face of naked power & aggression. And this latest action gives a greenlight to China & Russia and any other powerful international actor to do as they wish.
How do we get to create a stable rules-based international order?
Absolutely. And Trump has no filter…or semblance of respectability. Re UN. I, knowing a bit of History, sadly see similarity with the League of Nations. And re China/Russia, as I linked in 1.3.2…the warning is there.
I fervently hope we in NZ stand up against the war mongers…..
Agreed. It is important for as many people as possible denounce Trump's latest actions.
I have tweeted Peters and Luxon to that effect, but I fear it's a pretty lame effort.
There needs to be mass protests and denounciation by heads of govts. It is pleasing to see several heads of govt have done that, including Mexico, some Sth Am govts, Spain, some Scandanavian govts, from what I've seen so far – and also from some elected US reps, including Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders & others.
I signed some international petition some weeks back calling for an improved & more effective UN, or failing that a replacement of the UN with a better organisation (with a nod to what happened to the League of Nations).
The latter is probably the better way to go ie start again from scratch with a better international organisation.
Well..there is this now? (I am following this closely, NZ and Worldwide..)
Well the US plainly..isnt. So…what now?
International law expert Professor Alexander Gillespie (who I have read before..) asks Peters the question….
And re my 1.3.2, again a warning..
As ever the propaganda machine is in full swing, and words are important. RNZ is using the word 'captured', not kidnapped.
The term is rendition, via extraction.
AI says of the term
In the context of international law and government operations,
rendition via extraction refers to the seizure and transfer of an individual from one jurisdiction to another outside of formal legal processe
The is no rules based order, if a UNSC veto power is involved in the illegal action.
Something Peter Fraser noted back in 1945.
Maduro may now be wishing he'd just accepted the 2024 election result and let the winner take power. At least, I hope he is.
Karolyn_IS
Re Peters and Luxon…yes, unlikely to be doing F all. Labour? Greens? Hope someone steps up….(and yes I follow Helen Clarks sage words..)
Re US Democrats…I did earlier see Zohran Beacon Mamdani speak up…
Anyway, I hope for the best..or some sanity?
Peters has made a very weak statement.
RNZ:
Robert Patman:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/583145/kiwi-expert-on-venezuela-attack-time-that-we-made-our-voice-clear
Wise words, but don't expect this 'weakling government' to take heed.
Sunday Star-Times of 4 Jan has a good article on the government's cynical misuse of the funds raised by the international visitor levy: https://www-pressreader-com.aucklandlibraries.idm.oclc.org/new-zealand/sunday-star-times/20260104/page/6
Rather than prioritise conservation of the environment the tourists want to see and improving infrastructure like sewerage plant, the emphasis is on marketing NZ as a tourist destination so more people come here. We are back to the numbers game.
I guess the government figures the ratepayers can pick up the tab for better waste water facilities, track maintenance in national parks etc.
They’d better get a move on before the CoC's rates cap kicks off and regional councils are scrapped 🙁
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/580529/government-announces-4-percent-council-rates-rise-cap
Unfortunately your link goes to Auckland Library, which isn't much use to anyone outside Auckland…
But yeah, par for the course with the Nats and Tourism. Inbound tourism is finding it a bit hard to attract punters right now with China subtly putting the brakes on overseas spending, the Trump dynamic and hebbie jebbie's in Europe. Add to that loss of the buzz we had in the market up to 2023 with LOR, Jacinda, and just being cool to nearly everyone, and it's not quite as busy as it was. Wouldn't take much and we'd see a nasty collapse in the industry which could tip over some big players who currently are big National "supporters". Nat's are going to everything they can to stop that support going elsewhere.
Also bear in mind the biggest metric in NZ tourism is AIA, and that's 100% dependant on bums on seats, and preferably bums they can heard through their concessionaires.
Apologies about the link. Sunday Star-Times is on Stuff but is a subscription paper, it seems.
The SST article is really interesting There are some mayors around who don't want more tourists, as their regions can't deal with the numbers currently arriving.
Yeah, Twizel is having issues and there's plenty more like it. Tourism is much more driven by word of mouth, particularly on the domestic (>50% of the market), backpacker and independent side of the industry. And an influx / inundation can happen very quickly leaving affected communities struggling to meet the sudden demand. It can also disappear just as quickly leaving businesses with no longer sustainable debt incurred to cater for the demand, and communities with facilities they can no longer justify. Que the promotion organisation to try and get the punters back.
Here in Queenstown the problem is a combination of becoming the regional centre with the airport and big box retail cluster, and doubling our resident population in 10 years, the spoken figure is 50,000 in the basin now and only dispute is that's a bit light. To say it's getting a bit tight is an understatement, especially around Frankton this week.
The take of a US historian.
I assume this "Maduro is linked to narco-terrorist" stuff is just a rehash of 2002's "Saddam Hussein is linked to Al Qaeda" bollocks, and with the same intent. I'll be very surprised if he gets tried in an open court where people get to see the actual evidence for his alleged control of a cartel.
It is the Noriega playbook. After a contested election result. As if that gives foreign actors the right to make a regime change.
Noriega was involved with drugs, but was also a long time CIA asset (and a long before the Iran Contra era).
The Venezuela psy ops
Blockade of sanctioned ships (the second ship seized was not on the list).
Destroying fishing boats involved in moving less than 1% of cocaine into the USA – and with no proven link to Maduro (as with Canada, limited drugs across their border into USA, more was/is the other way into Canada).
A cover of the rendition (and later regime change operation) extraction.
(and
a longbefore the Iran Contra era).moving less than 1% of the Colombian cocaine into the USA
Iraq was a classic sting.
Ignoring the 1979-1990 side of it (which is a story in itself).
Liberation of Kuwait in 1991 and then the UN cease-fire regime.
Hussein would block the required arms inspections, as if he had something to hide, this deterred any rebellion by Kurds or southern Shia, even though they were under no fly zone protection.
Then it was decided that the regime was non compliant with the cease-fire terms – because of hidden WMD.
Simply because there was a civilian consequence from the sanctions and the desired regime change had not happened internally.
Q Venezuela.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/venezuela-maria-corina-machado-releases-letter-read-text-maduro-capture/
So the exiled opposition leader welcomes the US intervention, from the very little reading I've done Venezuelan resididents live in misery, convince me that chucking meduro out isn't the right thing to do?
The current situation in Venezuela.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/03/americas/delcy-rodriguez-venezuela-leader-atl-latam
Global reaction
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd9enjeey3go
If you really think the USA installing another Pinochet, Shah Pahlavi, or similar will improve life for Venezuelans, I have a bridge to sell you.
Agree. The USA govt is doing nothing to improve the lot of the high proportion of USians living in poverty. They won;t do anything to improve the lives of ordinary Venezuelans.
They’d have to work pretty hard to make it materially worse.
Venezuela’s GDP has collapsed by something like 70%, savings were annihilated by hyperinflation, millions have fled, and basic services barely function.
That’s not a defence of U.S. regime change. Just a reminder that “worse” is a very high bar when you’re already dealing with a failed state.
A state destroyed, on the USA's own admission (“Squeeze their economy until it bleeds”) by US sanctions and theft of their overseas assets.
Why does anyone think the cause of the "failed state" is going to fix it?
I think US sanctions hurt. But they weren’t the root cause of Venezuela’s collapse. The crisis started years before the major sanctions regime really bit.
The economy was already coming apart as oil revenues fell and the state didn’t adjust, while corruption and mismanagement hollowed out PDVSA and investment collapsed.
Sanctions can absolutely make a bad situation worse. But they don’t explain why the state was already overleveraged, why production and governance capacity were already decaying, or why the institutional ability to manage the economy was already failing long before the heaviest measures
"Before the heaviest measures".
You cannot deny that USA has been deliberately depriving Venezuela of expertise, finance and markets, as well as outright stealing of their foreign reserves, since Venezuala Nationalised oil.
It has been a "long game" which didn't start with Trump.
The 6 year term of Maduro (2024-2030) would be completed by Rodriguez.
If Northland farmers had economic sanctions applied where would you be in 5 years?
Show trials are fun for all. It's a shame they don't give Stalin's pioneering extravaganzas of the late '30s a media re-run. Will civil rights exponents queue up to defend Maduro in court? Will the US govt have to manufacture regime insiders to establish Maduro's instructions to his drug gang? What part will Tom Cruise play?
It is a brutal situation.
There’s no serious doubt that the Maduro regime is morally and economically bankrupt: an authoritarian government sustained by repression, corruption, and the systematic hollowing-out of the state. Material conditions matter.
But being awful doesn’t automatically make external regime change wis. Or even workable.
Leaving international law aside, the practical problem is legitimacy. There’s little evidence that the opposition has the broad, durable support or institutional capacity to govern if Maduro were removed by force.
If the regime collapses without a credible successor, you don’t get liberation.
You get a power vacuum. It’s a tale as old as time: nobody else knows how to govern because they’ve never been allowed to.
At that point the U.S. either occupies the country directly or ends up propping up remnants of the existing system under a different name. We’ve seen how both of those stories end, and they don’t end with stable democracy.
Wanting Maduro gone is understandable. Pretending that forcibly removing him guarantees a better outcome isn’t.
Really? Or is that the propaganda we are being fed to justify the removal of the a Government that doesn't toe the USA line? Which hasn't allowed US corporates to burgle the place. A repeat of US "Banana republics".
It is not like the USA hasn't done that many times to justify their actions.
Installing, "repressive authoritarian dictatorships" is more of a US thing than removing them.
83 enforced "regime changes" since WW2, on my last count!
Some….
Just imagine for a moment if all news reports from NZ in 2023 came from David Seymour, Peters, Willis. They would paint a picture quite removed from the truth. That's how propaganda works. That's what we are seeing at the moment – only one side of a complex story about Venezuela.
If this were just US propaganda, people wouldn’t be voting with their feet. And the central bank wouldn’t have given up publishing basic economic data to hide the truth.
You don’t get 7–8 million people leaving a country because of media narratives. People migrate at that scale when wages no longer buy food, when public services collapse, and when everyday survival depends on remittances and informal work.
That’s not ideology. It’s material reality.
Working people don’t abandon their homes, families, and communities because of abstract geopolitics. They leave when the conditions of life become unsustainable. Propaganda doesn’t empty supermarkets, erase wages, or make medicine disappear. State failure does.
That’s why independent economists have had to replace official statistics, why international datasets go blank, and why repression increases as conditions worsen. Even heavily sanctioned states like Iran or Russia still publish inflation figures because functioning governments need price signals to govern. When a state stops measuring reality, it isn’t resisting empire. It’s losing control.
The same logic applies to repression. There are hundreds of documented cases of opponents being beaten, jailed, or forced into exile, reported not just by US media but by outlets like Al Jazeera. People don’t flee healthy states or risk prison because of propaganda.
You can oppose US imperialism and still hold a basic left principle: solidarity is with people, not governments. When a regime can no longer provide material dignity, democratic voice, or even truthful data about prices and wages, defending it isn’t anti-imperialism. It’s denial.
If you genuinely cared about the fate of ordinary Venezuelans, you’d at least engage with the actual data, instead of reflexively protecting a regime that brutalises dissent and drives its own people into mass poverty.
Whose "protecting" them!
It doesn't mean that Venezuelans economic collapse is not due to US economic warfare however.
It seems no matter how repressive the dictatorship, or how people are suffering the USA criteria is if US oil companies can extract revenue.
I did acknowledge Venezuela is a complex story. The point about the tidal wave of propaganda to justify the illegal actions taken stands.
OK
I think here on this site we all find the Coalition govt to be pretty appalling and amplifying misery for the poor and degrading our country in every metric rapidly.
Shall we call in some external country to fix it all for us ?.Would you think a foreign intervention would be a great idea with super outcomes?
Do you think it possible that a foreign country would have only our best interests at heart?
And how much do you think we, a small country with minimal defence, relies on international law?
I mean, sure the US can come and kidnap Christopher Luxon if they want. There's a better than even chance it'll make the government a lot better. Or, at worst, achieve nothing because he was never really the PM in the first place.
Well I'm sorry , but once law becomes selectively followed, ok if its our allies breaching it , law becomes meaningless, and bang goes any protection .A foreign power, removing the head of our govt, will not be a result for democracy .Yes this govt is also terrible for democracy , but its up to us to remove it, not a rogue state like the US who doesn't have democracy in mind, only its own greed and wish to remain top dog.
Pablo hasn't yet published his take on the Maduro extraction but this from prior to New Year is pertinent: https://www.kiwipolitico.com/2025/12/the-hollow-hegemon/
Dominance and submission have been an operational dyad for humans since forever, but dramatic exhibits of same are a useful reinforcer of such driving power relations in geopolitics. I suspect the Iranian supreme honcho will be mulling over his options. Extraction there will be a way tougher assignment – attack drones crucially in sync.
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine gave the timing of the op.
So Maduro's extraction took 4 hours 43 minutes, about double what a dentist would do it in. Not bad, I guess. Beating that next time will be quite a challenge.
Prof Robert Patman. A Voice of Reason. And time indeed…
And the orange Amerikan fascist ramps it up…
And very relevant to my comment/link @ 7
Fuck Trump and fascist Amerika. Time to stand up !
Ok, so at first the economic collapse was “propaganda”. Now you have accepted as real, but we’re told it doesn’t matter because Trump’s intentions aren’t pure.
I agree the US intervention is illegal, morally suspect, and transparently designed for domestic political consumption. None of that requires pretending the Chavista regime has been good for ordinary Venezuelans at any point since around 2010, or that the collapse was solely the result of US political and economic pressure.
We can absolutely argue that US is completwly wrong while at the same time acknowledge the regime lost it's moral legitimacy a long time ago
I don't think its up to us (or Trump ) to declare "moral legitimacy " or otherwise
https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/venezuela-latin-american-countries-jointly-condemn-us-attacks-as-interim-govt-backs-maduro/