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The week's question
In December 2024, in the thread "Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?", BreckHutHigh asked the members: "What about the long road trips with kids?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Author: Lambo 🐝  😊 😞
Number: of 84357 
Subject: Re: Venezuala war plans
Date: 09/27/25 10:37 AM
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Nobody is happy about what has happened to Venezuela. Bolivarianism gave way to a dictatorship and the bolichicos, rule. (Bolivarianism is sometimes called banana socialism)

Expl:
"Based on reporting from recent years, Venezuela is not controlled by a traditional oligarchy of old elites, but rather by an authoritarian regime under Nicolás Maduro and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). This system has enabled the rise of a new, politically connected class known as the "bolibourgeoisie" or "bolichicos," (boliboys)who have enriched themselves through widespread corruption. (They pushed out the old elites.)

The corruption is thick; criminals and cocaine drug cartels cooperate and it's a big transit country for coke from neighboring Colombia. Most of the fentanyl comes from Mexico, so this will have little affect on the fentanyl trade to the US. If you look up cocaine deaths (~22k/yr) in the US, they're mostly cocaine mixed with fentanyl.

Drug transits are subject to the balloon effect. The balloon effect is a metaphor describing how attempts to suppress or eradicate a problem in one area can simply cause it to spread or intensify in another, much like squeezing a balloon causes the air to move to a different part of the balloon rather than disappearing. In other words - there may be a brief reduction in cocaine coming to the USA through Venezuela, but alternate routes are quickly found and it resumes.

It's a splash in the papers, serves Trump's purpose of looking strong, but it highly likely will have no effect on fentanyl coming into the USA from Mexico.
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This community has written 84,309 posts about US Policy. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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