Die feindliche Unternehmensübernahme eines ganzen Landes

Gisela Salim-Peyer: “Since shortly after the United States military’s 2 a.m. seizure of Nicolás Maduro from his bedroom in early January, people in Venezuela and Washington, D.C., alike have struggled to characterize what exactly the Trump administration was doing. *Regime change, finally!* was the chorus in Caracas, at least for a few hours. Then President Trump said he would back Maduro’s No. 2, Delcy Rodríguez, sidelining the democratic opposition. That was more like regime *management*, said the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. The U.S. had left pretty much the same people in power, but following orders from afar. *The Guardian* settled on *regime* *tweak*.

“The benefit of 11 weeks of hindsight suggests that a different framing might best explain what happened in Venezuela. Think of the whole drama as Chairman Trump’s hostile corporate takeover of a resources-extraction company (or country) with all the plot twists, headaches, and possibilities such foreign acquisitions typically entail. Trump is not the only president to see commercial opportunity in an overseas foray. But he may be the first to so blatantly eschew lofty goals—promoting democracy, countering terror—in favor of a playbook and vocabulary that are more Wall Street than Washington.

“The takeover of Venezuela Inc. wouldn’t even rank in the top five biggest acquisitions in U.S. history. The country’s entire economy is valued at about $80 billion, less than half the value of Time Warner’s merger with America Online in 2000 ($165 billion) and on par with the biggest corporate energy merger, between Exxon and Mobil in 1999.

“From the acquisitive president’s perspective, Venezuela was ripe for the taking, a once-promising operation sitting on rich assets that had been crippled by mismanagement. As recently as 2012, the enterprise (as measured by GDP) was valued at $370 billion, much of it generated by one business unit, the state-owned oil company. But under Maduro, the political class used Venezuela’s resources as its own private piggy bank, enriching its members while ordinary citizens suffered.

“As with other undervalued prospects, financial intermediaries sought to entice foreign interest. On Wall Street, these promoters are typically investment bankers; in Venezuela, they were leaders of the pro-democracy opposition … 

“Trump was a willing audience, keen on settling old business scores and reviving his Keynesian animal spirits. He has groused that ‘American talent, drive, and skill; built the Venezuelan oil industry, only for those assets to be ‘stolen’ from U.S. companies through two rounds of nationalization. (Chevron continued to operate there under a special license.) Months of negotiations with Maduro didn’t yield a deal on satisfactory terms. So Trump upped the ante. He bypassed Congress, the government’s equivalent of seeking shareholder approval. Then he launched what was, it must be said, a unique hostile-takeover campaign featuring an armada of Navy ships in the Caribbean. Takeover campaigns can be expensive; this one cost $31 million a day.”

Read more: [https://theatln.tc/gCoAu4a7](https://theatln.tc/gCoAu4a7)

Oh NOES! Venezuela is going to become South Korea. How horrible for them….

You should really be talking about stopping a war in Iran and destroying democracy.