Sachs, Jeffrey
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/1/economist_jeffrey_sachs_us_sanctions_have">https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/1/economist_jeffrey_sachs_us_sanctions_have</a></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font><h1><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Economist Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017</font></h1></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mo</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">re than 40,000 people
have died in Venezuela since 2017 as a result of U.S. sanctions,
according to a new report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research
co-authored by economists Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot. The report
examines how U.S. sanctions have reduced the availability of food and
medicine in Venezuela and increased disease and mortality. We speak with
Jeffrey Sachs in our New York studio. In the report, he writes,
“American sanctions are deliberately aiming to wreck Venezuela’s economy
and thereby lead to regime change. It’s a fruitless, heartless,
illegal, and failed policy, causing grave harm to the Venezuelan
people.”</font><hr class="hidden-xs" /><h5 class="transcript"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Transcript</font></h5><div class="grey_description fine_print"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.</font></div><div class="text"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong> This is <em>Democracy Now!</em>
I’m Amy Goodman. Our guests are Miguel Tinker Salas, a Venezuelan
professor at Pomona College in California; Jeffrey Sachs is with us here
in New York, leading economist and director of the Center for
Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He’s recently
co-authored a <a href="http://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela">report</a> for the Center for Economic and Policy Research headlined “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela.”</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So much is being used against the presidency of Maduro, saying he’s
brought the country to an economic standstill. You make a different
case, Jeffrey Sachs.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">JEFFREY</span> <span class="caps">SACHS</span>:</strong>
Well, it’s not an economic standstill. It’s a complete economic
collapse, a catastrophe, in Venezuela. There was a crisis, for sure,
before Trump came to office, but the idea of the Trump administration,
from the start, has been to overthrow Maduro. That’s not a hypothesis.
Trump was very explicit in discussions with presidents of Latin America,
where he asked them, “Why shouldn’t the U.S. just invade?” He said that
already in 2017. So the idea of the Trump administration has been to
overthrow Maduro from the start. Well, the Latin leaders said, “No, no,
that’s not a good idea. We don’t want military action.” So the U.S.
government has been trying to strangle the Venezuelan economy.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It started with sanctions in 2017 that prevented, essentially, the
country from accessing international capital markets and the oil company
from restructuring its loans. That put Venezuela into a hyperinflation.
That was the utter collapse. Oil earnings plummeted. The earnings that
are used to buy food and medicine collapsed. That’s when the social,
humanitarian crisis went spiraling out of control. And then, in this
year, with this idea, very naive, very stupid, in my view, that there
would be this self-proclaimed president, which was all choreographed
with the United States very, very closely, another round of even tighter
sanctions, essentially confiscating the earnings and the assets of the
Venezuelan government, took place.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now Venezuela is in complete, utter catastrophe, a lot of it brought
on by the United States deliberately, creating massive, massive
suffering. We know there’s hunger. We know there’s a incredible shortage
of medical supplies. We can only imagine, because we won’t know really
until the dust settles and careful studies are done, how much excess
mortality there is, but, surely, in a context like this, this is a
catastrophe largely created by the U.S., because, as was said earlier,
this is an all-or-nothing strategy. What the U.S.—what Trump just
doesn’t understand and what Bolton, of all, of course, never agrees to,
is the idea of negotiations. This is an attempt at an overthrow. It’s
very crude. It’s not working. And it’s very cruel, because it’s
punishing 30 million people.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong> How did you come up with the number 40,000 dead as a result of these crippling U.S. sanctions?</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">JEFFREY</span> <span class="caps">SACHS</span>:</strong>
Let me be clear: Nobody knows. This was a very basic, simple
calculation based on estimates of universities in Venezuela that
mortality had increased by a certain proportion after the sanctions. I
don’t want anyone to think that there is precision in these numbers.
What is certain, though, staring us in the face, is that there is a
humanitarian catastrophe, deliberately caused by the United States, by
what I would say are illegal sanctions, because they are deliberately
trying to bring down a government and trying to create chaos for the
purpose of an overthrow of a government.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong> Why?</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">JEFFREY</span> <span class="caps">SACHS</span>:</strong>
Why are they doing that? This is normal U.S. right-wing foreign policy,
nothing different. This is the same foreign policy that we saw
throughout Latin America in the 20th century. It’s the same foreign
policy that we saw catastrophically in the Middle East. This is Mr.
Bolton. This is Mr. Bolton’s idea of diplomacy. This is Trump’s idea of
diplomacy. You punch someone in the face. You crush your opponent. You
try whatever way you can to get your way. It’s very simpleminded. It’s
very crude. And, Amy, it never works. It just leads to catastrophe.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>
I want to bring Miguel Tinker Salas back into this conversation,
professor at Pomona College. As these protests were taking place in—or
this coup attempt was taking place in Venezuela, in Honduras there were
massive protests against privatization, also huge demonstrations in
Paris. You certainly don’t get the same kind of coverage.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">MIGUEL</span> <span class="caps">TINKER</span> <span class="caps">SALAS</span>:</strong>
No, you don’t. And the reality is that what’s happening in Honduras is
fundamental. You have an effort at privatization. You have layoffs of
doctors and of professors and of teachers. And there’s massive street
protests happening in Tegucigalpa and all the major cities. And the
attention is all on Venezuela. And the same thing is happening, in other
contexts, for Central America, the immigration that’s happening as a
result of failed U.S. policies. As a colleague was saying earlier, the
reality is this was tried elsewhere. The regime change that’s being
tried in Venezuela has been tried elsewhere in Latin America and has led
to humanitarian crisis throughout Central America—Honduras, Guatemala,
El Salvador, in Mexico until very recently. So, again, we know the
formula. We know it doesn’t produce the change that most people want.
And what it does is it aggravates conditions for the majority of the
population. So, you have, in the case of Venezuela, mistakes made by the
Maduro administration that are now exacerbated by the sanctions and
that take a toll on humans and on the population of the country.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>
We’ve been showing, for our radio audience, video, just to let you
know, of the tear-gassing of people in Paris and Honduras right now. Of
course, Honduras is a U.S. ally. We’re not getting as much coverage of
this. Finally, I wanted to ask Jeffrey Sachs about this issue you raise
of collective punishment, and saying that collective punishment of a
civilian population, as described by both the Geneva and Hague
international conventions, to which the U.S. is a signatory—in that way.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">JEFFREY</span> <span class="caps">SACHS</span>:</strong> And, I would say, of the <span class="caps">OAS</span>
also, which explicitly prohibits this kind of hostile action against
another country. U.S. sanctions are now being imposed to bring down
governments everywhere. You have, similarly in Iran yesterday, a big
announcement of the collapse of the Iranian economy, and the <span class="caps">IMF</span>
attributed it to U.S. sanctions. So, this is what the Trump
administration is trying to do also vis-à-vis Nicaragua. Trump said
yesterday, total blockade on Cuba, if they don’t smart up. This is pure
bullying. It is completely against international law. It creates havoc.
It’s hard enough to achieve economic progress, but when the U.S. is
using its political power to break other countries, the results
absolutely can be devastating.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And we see it in Venezuela, that it was the kick that pushed
Venezuela into this catastrophic, spiraling decline and hyperinflation.
It’s always blamed in our press on Maduro, but people don’t even look
and understand how the U.S. has the instruments of sanctions blocking
access to financial markets, pushing enterprises into default, blocking
trade, confiscating the assets owned by the Venezuelan government,
precisely to and with the design of creating this kind of crisis,
because the idea is, if the pain is enough—in the thinking of people
like Bolton—then there will be a military overthrow. So they’re trying
to create absolute disaster.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Well, what’s so stupid about these American policies, these neocon
policies, is they do create disaster, but they don’t achieve even the
political goals of these nasty people like Bolton. It’s not as if
they’re effective and nasty; they’re completely ineffective and totally
nasty at the same time. But Congress, in our country, nobody looks. It’s
unbelievable that you have this basically one-man show of Trump doing
damage, rampaging around the world. There is no oversight at all. And in
the international institutions, like the <span class="caps">IMF</span>,
the Inter-American Development Bank, people are scared to even say the
truth, that this bully, of the United States, especially with the kind
of president we have right now—no one wants to speak the obvious facts
of how much damage is being done, how many lives are being lost, how
much suffering is being created, how many refugees are being
created—deliberately. And then, of course, you get <em>The New York Times</em> or someone else saying it’s Maduro’s whatever, because they don’t even look at the obvious process.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong><span class="caps">AMY</span> <span class="caps">GOODMAN</span>:</strong>
And you Democratic leaders, as well, in Congress saying the same thing.
And so, we’re going to turn right now to a Democrat in Congress. We
want to thank Jeffrey Sachs, who is a leading economist, director of the
Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University. We’ll link to
your <a href="http://cepr.net/publications/reports/economic-sanctions-as-collective-punishment-the-case-of-venezuela">report</a>
that you put out with the Center for Economic and Policy Research
headlined “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of
Venezuela.” And, Miguel Tinker Salas, thanks for joining us, professor
at Pomona College in California.</font></p></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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