By Rick Manning

President Donald Trump’s decision to grant waivers to U.S. oil interests from Venezuelan sanctions looks particularly brilliant in light of the recent attack on Saudi Arabian oil refineries which temporarily shut down the availability of more than 5 percent of the world’s oil supplies.

Given the United States’ status as the world’s top oil producer, the impact on America is less than in China which has become increasingly dependent upon Saudi oil supplies.  In 2018, China was the top overall importer of oil in the world with Saudi Arabia being the Middle Kingdom’s second largest oil source. Overall in 2018, the Middle East exported more than $107 billion of oil to China, out of the overall $239 billion they imported, meaning 44 percent of China’s oil imports were from the Middle East.

Somewhat surprisingly, the United States remains the second largest importer of Saudi oil with Canada topping the list, Mexico coming in behind Saudi Arabia and Venezuela fifth just behind Iraq.  The United States, which currently exports nearly as much oil as it imports, gets 55 percent of our foreign oil from Canada, Mexico and Venezuela.

Why does this matter? 

Venezuela has the largest known oil reserves in the world.  Middle Eastern oil supply line fragility puts the Chinese economy at extreme risk.  While last year Venezuela supplied about $7 billion of oil to the Chinese, abandonment of the United States’ integral position in Venezuelan oil production would open the door for the Chinese government to grab, along with the Russians, the primary position in the huge Caribbean oil fields, utilizing their possession of the Panama Canal to easily create a non-stop flow of their economic lifeblood. 

Add to the Chinese immediate interest in dramatically expanding their Venezuelan oil supply line, a recently released report on Russia’s increased influence in Venezuela and you have a double warning shot proving the wisdom of the Trump oil sanctions waiver. 

The Atlantic Council report details Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing and increasing interest in establishing Venezuela as a forward threat to the U.S.  The study found that, “Kremlin policy seeks to undermine the international liberal order by supporting a friendly authoritarian ruler fraudulently ‘re-elected’.”

This influence extends to military, economic and direct support for the flagging Venezuelans oil industry where the Atlantic Council reports, “Under Kremlin guidance, Gazprom and other Russian hydrocarbon firms formed the National Petroleum Consortium, which in 2010 signed a contract with Petroleos de Venezuela to set up a joint venture to extract heavy oil reserves in the Orinoco River Basin. In 2014, Rosneft, the largest oil producer in Russia and the number two gas producer, bought out Gazprom and the other Russian firms to take control of the National Petroleum Consortium.  Led by Putin intimate Igor Sechin, Rosneft’s activities frequently reflect the Kremlin’s geopolitical ambitions. Rosneft’s role in Venezuela was to provide a major subsidy to the government in the form of $6.5 billion in loans to Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).”

While the Venezuelan government has not been able to provide more than half of the oil which underlay this subsidy, Russia continues to double down in their support for Maduro even as the economic conditions continue to crumble in Venezuela. It is clear that Russia, with their own robust petroleum industry, will move, along with the Chinese to fill any void created by a U.S. government mandated withdrawal of U.S. companies.

On top of the obvious need to prevent hostile foreign powers from gaining a stronghold in the Western Hemisphere, America cannot plan for a successful restoration of Venezuela without the ongoing involvement of U.S. energy companies.  These companies have decades-long presence in this now desperately poor country.

As Venezuela moves forward beyond Maduro, these companies will be crucial partners in the revival of the economy by helping to ramp-up energy output, rebuild the infrastructure of the nation, and provide humanitarian relief. The oil fields in Venezuela, if properly managed and further developed, could match or exceed those of the Permian Basin in Texas, and now is the exact wrong time to abandon them to the Russian and Chinese interests which view them not only as an expansion of their global footprint, but as a source of future reliable energy wealth.

President Trump has been right to extend the waiver for U.S. energy companies to operate in Venezuela, and now he would be wise to extend these waivers indefinitely to create a certain offset for Chinese and Russian influences in this geo-politically important South American country.

Rick Manning is the President of Americans for Limited Government.

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ALG urges Congress to slash NLRB funding to match caseload

Sept. 19, 2019, Fairfax, Va.—Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning today issued the following statement urging Congress to slash the funding of the National Labor Relations Board as part of Americans for Limited Government’s program to identify wasteful federal spending:

“Although union membership and the National Labor Relations Board’s caseload have declined over the past three decades, the NLRB’s budget has grown. Fewer labor complaints are being filed, and fewer unionization elections are being requested. It’s time for Congress to right-size the NLRB and save taxpayers over $100 million a year. With any luck, trimming the payroll will dislodge some ‘Resisters’ from the Administration.”

To view online: https://getliberty.org/2019/09/alg-urges-congress-to-slash-nlrb-funding-to-match-caseload/

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ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured editorial from the DNS Decrypt, after the U.S. has relinquished oversight of the DNS system, the free and open internet could be in danger:

Keeping a free and open internet starts at the root

Dynamics at the Internet’s core erode stakeholder legitimacy and aid Sino-Russian efforts for multilateral control.

At the beginning of what became a prolonged process for privatization, the U.S. Government established a framework of fundamental guiding principles for governance of the Internet’s root.  These principles were designed to work to preserve a free and open nature for a global network that was to be elastic, extensible, and — at more than two decades — enduring.  Chief among these working principles were:

• private sector leadership;

• private property respect, namely IP;

• bottom-up policymaking;

• consensus-based decision-making; 

• diverse stakeholder representation;

• competition and consumer choice.

Adherence to these principles may strengthen legitimacy but don’t confer infallibility upon the multistakeholder model of Internet governance and there are many areas needing significant improvements.  Borrowing from Winston Churchill, private sector-led multistakeholder Internet governance may well be a poor form of governance — except there is no better alternative.  But some would disagree and multistakeholderism has its detractors, particularly among a certain subset of Communist, Left-leaning, and authoritarian nation-states that, having been shown to have some skill at playing the multilateral system for geopolitical gain, are frustrated to discover that governance is trending towards multistakeholderism just as they are arriving to take a seat at the multilateral table.   

This means that the longevity of a free and open Internet is heavily dependent on the legitimacy of Free World governance remaining intact.  Consider that, every two years the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union (ITU) convenes a plenipotentiary of its members, all of whom are government representatives of sovereign nation-states.  The effective control of the Internet’s root and/or other Internet governance items are always on the agenda and the conclave serves as a sort of biennial focal point for an ongoing campaign — led by authoritarian Russia and Communist China and which includes a growing ecosystem of their allies and client states — that seeks to supplant private sector leadership of Internet governance with multilateral government control and thereby reserving to dubious sovereign states the policy-making prerogatives at the Internet’s root.   

Anyone who thinks this seems alarmist might consider brushing up on recent history.  The IANA transition — an effort lasting from 2014 to 2017 whereby the US Government removed itself as the historical guarantor of legitimacy for governance at the Internet’s core — was justified by the Obama Administration as necessary, following Edward Snowden’s surveillance disclosures, for U.S. diplomats to maintain support for the status quo from middle states (undecideds who are open to being persuaded) at the ITU plenipotentiary in 2016. 

So, on one hand there is an ongoing campaign to subvert control of the Internet’s root by two antagonists, authoritarian Russia and Communist China, who argue that it is illegitimate for the private sector to lead over sovereign nation-state governments. On the other hand, the Free World’s superpower that was the historical guarantor of legitimacy for multistakeholder Internet governance has removed its protective umbrella.  Thus, the governance model and its stakeholder participants are left to shoulder the burden of sustaining legitimacy of governance and blunt insurgent attempts to wrest policy-making into the multilateral arena — where “free and open” has a different and diminished meaning than now.   

This is a critical lens for any sincere examination of the current dynamics in play at the Internet’s root, where systematic corruption and intimidation are being used by what appears to be a corporate monopolist cartel to capture and hold in thrall the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).  This undermines the legitimacy of policy-making at the Internet’s root and — by calling into question the fundamental premise of private sector-led multistakeholder governance — is a clear and present danger to the free and open Internet.    

A typical rank-and-file stakeholder participating in DNS-related governance or commerce may be only peripherally aware of the heavy-handed habits of the monopolists that rule the root. But fearfully whispered testimonies — alleging such improprieties as outside counsel retained as henchmen for questionable and highly irregular purposes, of casting defamatory aspersions that interfere with customer and partner relationships, of deceptively and knowingly making false claims of non-existent intellectual property rights, of bad-faith re-purposing of the civil tort for frivolous voyages of discovery, and of threatening potentially existential jeopardy through the weaponization of seemingly benign and supposedly non-discriminatory economic incentives, amongst others — reveal that immense market power is being wielded in a manner that runs counter to the aims of multi-stakeholder governance, competitive markets, and the free flow of information and ideas; in other words, a manner that runs counter to the core principles of the Internet itself. 

This sort of behavior is nothing new — indeed, it has become normalized which is why protest is so muted, if there is ever any at all.  In the current environment — where fear is a feature, not a bug — publicly-available examples abound, including: 

• Becky Burr, a current ICANN board member and former Clinton Administration official who was instrumental in privatizing the DNS, described the atmosphere surrounding the early Internet as“hostile.”(beginning at the 10:00 mark and ending at 13:30). 
• In 2006, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged“strategicabuse of the antitrust laws”;
• A 2009 settlement of a lawsuit involving the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN);
• Delays to roll-out of new generic top-level domains;
• Lawsuits against competitors; and

Sending a letter characterized, again, as“hostile” to think tank scholars immediately prior to their Congressional testimony.

The heavy casualties of the current rot at the root include an independent press, free speech, private property rights, open and competitive markets, innovation, along with any modicum of ethics, fairness, and common sense.  Such things as these are what formed the cornerstones of liberty and have served as xxxxxxs safeguarding against tyranny.  Many people took for granted that a dial tone would always be there — except when it wasn’t.  Similarly, there has only ever been a free and open Internet and, despite its vulnerability, many will assume that it will always be so — right up until the moment that it isn’t.  It is unrealistic to hope that authoritarian Russia and Communist China will adhere to original principles in their attempts to force multilateral control of Internet governance or that they will overlook the erosion of legitimacy that is resulting from the mockery being made of private sector leadership.  Nor is it reasonable to assume that Leftist middle states such as India and Brazil will be idle observers on the sidelines of this 21st century Great Game tug-of-war.  

There is a story in American folklore of a woman who stopped Benjamin Franklin on his way out of the Constitutional Convention and asked what form of government had been selected for the new nation.  His answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”  Today, Dr. Franklin might say: 

“A free and open Internet, if you can keep it.”

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