AlfonsBech

De Nueva York para Minnesota “Los fascistas están destinados a perder” 👊🏽❤️

TODAY: Hundreds of thousands in Minnesota braved -10°F weather to march through downtown Minneapolis as part of the statewide general strike demanding ICE out of the Twin Cities.

Last week, the United States began negotiating with oil industry executives the terms under which companies would enter the Venezuelan oil sector. It also assigned lucrative contracts to sell Venezuelan oil to international oil trading firms. However, all of these transactions appear to be carried out in a legal vacuum that shields them from any type of oversight and accountability. This makes the processes of bidding and allocation of these contracts highly vulnerable to discretionality and corruption. The crux of the issue goes back to the January 9 executive order ("Safeguarding Venezuelan Oil Revenue for the Good of the American and Venezuelan People"), in which the United States establishes that the funds obtained from Venezuelan oil sales belong to the Government of Venezuela and not to the United States. This creates an unusual situation in which the US exercises discretion over sales that are not of its own property but rather of another state. Formally, these sales are being carried out by Venezuela, but in reality Venezuelan authorities have no discretion and are in fact forced to follow the dictates of the United States government. If these were sales of federal property, then federal procurement and contracting rules—such as the Federal Acquisition Regulation and the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act—would apply. These require federal property to be disposed of in a way that promotes competition, transparency, and value maximization, with public disclosures and accountability requirements that hold even when national security exceptions apply. Revenues from these sales would also have to flow into the US Treasury and be subject to audit by the Government Accountability Office. None of these rules apply because the property in question does not belong to the United States but rather to the government of Venezuela. This raises the question of what legal framework is being used to carry out this bidding process. Venezuela has a patchwork of laws on public sector procurement. These laws are, not surprisingly, very imperfectly enforced given the corrupt nature of the Venezuelan state. Yet perhaps most importantly, they have been superseded by the 2020 Anti-Blockade Law, which allows the government to impose secrecy and restrict transparency requirements. The law was intended as a response to the imposition by the United States of primary and secondary sanctions. Somewhat ironically, the US is now in effect lifting the sanctions through which it had stopped buying Venezuelan oil, while using Venezuela’s Anti-Blockade Law to shield these transactions from requirements of accountability. Between 1996 and 2003, the international community created an oversight mechanism for Iraqi oil sales under the Oil-for-Food Program administered by the United Nations. Even in that case, despite international oversight, the system ended up being rife with corruption. One can only imagine what is likely to happen if the Trump administration and the Delcy Rodríguez government strike a deal for the sale of billions of dollars of Venezuelan oil with absolutely no mechanisms to ensure transparency and oversight of those sales.