Yeah, so the USA took Venesualia's oil. So what?

"Thou shalt not steal.”
         Exodus 20:15

Are we really OK with taking Venezuela’s oil? 

We are strong. They are weak. They cannot stop us.

But is expropriating oil from poor countries because we can -- is that the kind of country we understand ourselves to be?

Trump:

We took over Venezuela very successfully. And they’ve sent me as a gift a boatload of a million barrels of oil, and I’m giving that to the United States of America. We’re going to accept a million barrels of oil, and I’m going to give it to you people to use it the way you want.

In January the U.S. invaded Venezuela and arrested its president, Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. did not then install María Corina Machado, leader of the popular opposition and winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for that work. It installed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, as interim leader, keeping the same corrupt regime in place. The U.S. got a compliant Venezuelan leader.

Trump makes a cursory effort to put a veneer of justice or mutual benefit on our taking control of Venezuelan oil. The deal gives the U.S. the right to buy a fifth of the output “at cost,” from fields the White House says are concessioned for 100 years. At the United Nations in September he called it an oil “deal.” Then he proudly described it as plunder:

Last month, we signed the largest oil deal in history, covering 65 billion barrels of oil, which will benefit both Venezuela and the United States enormously and helped drive down the cost of energy all over the world. And that is starting to perk right now. It’s coming out. The biggest oil companies in the world are going in, and the numbers are absolutely incredible. When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world. So it’s perhaps the biggest deal. It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belongs the spoils, you’ve all heard that.

Some of Trump’s wealth-seeking is private. He made some $600 million from selling a crypto coin with no intrinsic value. Individual investors lost some $3.8 billion as the coin fell from a peak of about $75, days after launch, to about $1.58 today. He simply cheated his loyal supporters: a private matter, not a matter of state. The large buyers are different. Their purchases were bribes in disguise. They were buying influence or “protection” for themselves and their businesses, a corruption of the public interest for private gain. Americans can observe this open corruption and be disgusted by it. I am. Trump is selling the public trust.

This oil “deal” is different. It directly involves every American citizen, and it changes the polarity of benefit. Trump is plundering Venezuela for us. In his telling, Venezuela is “giving” him oil, a personal gift, and he is re-gifting it to Americans.

Americans need to sit with this and decide if we are OK with it. The U.S. has been openly exploitive of smaller countries throughout our history, most openly in Latin America -- the Banana Republics, as we called them. But the way that history is taught in school, and framed today, says that is the past. Yes, the CIA or the U.S. Army did bad things, but we have learned our lesson. We are good and well-disciplined now. We are the good guys. There is enormous hypocrisy and self-delusion built into that framing, but at least it was hypocrisy. Plunder wasn’t the stated norm.

Now it is. Trump identifies the U.S. as a predator. We are the danger that the rest of the world protects against. We are the smash-and-grab criminal.

I am not OK with that. It makes me feel ashamed of my country, and I don’t want to feel ashamed of it.

And if it seems naive to cite morality in matters of state, I will cite practicality. I have enough experience in business to trust the childhood chant when a player cheats on the playground: “Cheaters never prosper.”

At least not for long. Bad behavior and a bad reputation catch up to them.



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Spoiler alert: It might work

Who is this Clay Bearnson guy?

Republicans in the Oregon Senate District 3 race just changed tactics.

If Democrats don’t want Republican Brad Hicks, there is an alternative: Vote for a third-party candidate.

Clay Bearnson website photo

Regular readers of this blog know the situation well by now. Democratic state Senator Jeff Golden did not run for reelection. Denise Krause won a contested Democratic primary to replace him. Brad Hicks won an uncontested Republican primary. After a few weeks this summer of soft, positive ads introducing the two candidates, both switched to “comparison ads,” i.e., harsh characterizations of the other candidate’s values and future positions. (Hicks claimed Krause started it. No. He is being dishonest. I received a nasty Hicks door-hanger on September 8, five days before the TV slugfest began on September 13.) It does not surprise me that both candidates might want to distance themselves from the ad war. Between Hicks’ $2.5 million from Republican and corporate PACs and Krause’s $1.3 million from Democratic party and union sources, voters may feel exhausted by the vitriol. I do.

That is the opportunity for a third-party spoiler. Clay Bearnson, a Medford bar owner and former Medford city councilor, filed as a candidate and got onto the ballot with the endorsements of the Independent Party and the Pacific Green Party. I have heard repeated rumors that a few local Democrats, disappointed that Krause narrowly defeated Tonia Moro in the primary, encouraged him to run. It looked to me like a bit of score-settling involving very few people, and I saw almost no activity from Bearnson, so I dismissed his campaign. His candidacy was being buried by the huge campaigns of Hicks and Krause.

Recently the situation changed. Republicans sent a postcard to Democratic households, pretending to "warn" them that Bearnson was positioned to the left of Krause. The gist: Don’t vote for this person who wants healthcare for all! 

Sent as a text to Democrats

Now Republicans are promoting Bearnson openly. Democrats are getting text messages praising him for not taking campaign donations, contrasting him with Krause, and identifying him as the Pacific Green candidate.

You learn who paid for the texts by unsubscribing from more texts. It is The Leadership Fund, the campaign arm of Oregon’s Senate Republicans, which funds Republican Senate candidates, Hicks included.

Paid by: The Leadership Fund

Irony is not dead. Republicans who have helped pour more than two million dollars into Hicks’ campaign are praising Bearnson for not stooping to raising money like that terrible Denise Krause.

Will this tactic work? It does have potential with late voters who may have developed a “pox on both houses” feeling about the campaign. I suspect it is an admission that Hicks cannot get Democrats to vote for a Trump-supporting Republican this year. The national GOP has a message: Democrats are communist, socialist, tax-wasting, police-hating, baby-killing freaks. Democrats know when they are held in contempt.

A vote for Bearnson has only half the value of a vote for Hicks, since it is only a vote denied to Krause. But in a close election, those lost votes can be decisive. Word has gone out to local Republican activists to start promoting Bearnson. Former Republican County Commissioner Dave Dotterrer now has a Bearnson sign in front of his house, along with a Hicks sign.

My own sense is that this is too little, too late. And their messages contradict themselves. Republicans are now selling Bearnson as a good choice for Democrats after spending enormous sums to call Krause as “just another loyal Democrat,” cementing the message that Krause is the Democratic choice. 

I recognize that the Hicks campaign is gigantic. If you can sell anything by spending enough on advertising, then Hicks can win this election. This is a natural experiment for that proposition.

I might be wrong, of course, but I still expect Krause to win. Why? Because Hicks ended up sending an implicit message that no amount of money can sell this year, and he did it with his own advertising. He demonstrated that he is a Republican soldier in a Republican army that will spend whatever it takes to win for the party. Mr. Republican. He sold the wrong thing.

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Regime fatigue: What could go wrong for Democrats in Oregon

Oregon and Texas have one-party rule.

Parties that hold power a long time get careless. 

Oregon Democrats will probably escape the consequences this time. 

Opinion journalist Matthew Yglesias said it so well I will simply quote him:

Beyond that, Abbott’s problem is that he’s been in office a long time and he’s the third Republican governor in a row and there’s been a G.O.P. trifecta for a long time and it’s just hard to govern for a really long time without eventually overreaching and pissing people off. The longer any party coalition governs, the more scandals accumulate and the more undisciplined its leaders become. It gets easier for voters to take for granted whatever they like about them and harder for aligned interest groups to take “no” for an answer about their most unsound ideas. You see a version of this in the relatively tight polling for the Oregon governor’s race. I think Tina Kotek will probably pull it off, but if there were a Democrat in the White House, she’d be in real trouble.

Texas has been reliably red for decades. With no real opposition, the party’s allied interest groups and its demands for loyalty have let Texas be carelessly extreme. Take abortion. Texas violated its own culture of Western independence with a law that puts a bounty on anyone who helps a woman get an abortion. Some counties went further, making it illegal to transport someone along county roads on the way out of state to get one. The anti-abortion lobby felt unrestrained so it got a policy it could hold up as a trophy.

One-party rule also closes ranks. The Texas House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton on corruption charges. The Republican state Senate refused to convict him. His power intact, and with Trump’s backing, he won the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate, ousting John Cornyn. He is a weak candidate with a giant flaw, and he got there because of one-party solidarity.

Too much strength becomes a weakness. It covers up mistakes of policy and personnel.

I support Governor Tina Kotek. I have donated to her campaign. I consider a Republican governor too big a risk for Oregon, at least while President Trump is in office and keeps making demands on state and local officeholders.

It was different when Mark Hatfield, Tom McCall, and Vic Atiyeh were governor. They were Republicans, and I considered that no great problem. Having both parties in positions of real power meant both parties had buy-in. Each had to act like a responsible governing party. 

A party that sees itself as part of the government does not pretend Oregon roads will maintain themselves. Republican opposition to the Democrats’ transportation package was good politics. Nobody likes a higher gas tax or registration fee, and voters threw the package out in May. But someone, somehow, has to pay to maintain the roads. 

I suspect Kotek will win reelection, but by a closer margin than Democrats usually enjoy. The argument for “bringing balance to Oregon” will make sense to some swing voters. Oregon interest groups that back Democrats -- unions, environmental groups, LGBTQ groups, reproductive rights groups -- have not faced hard opposition. Unions pushed through a law that pays unemployment benefits to striking workers, public employees included -- an idea at the far edge of union aspirations.

Democratic billboard. Drazan did a joint appearance with Ron DeSantis

Still, I am supporting Tina Kotek, even though I wish Republicans had buy-in in Salem. The problem is that gubernatorial candidate Christine Drazan, and Republican legislative candidate Brad Hicks, have not separated themselves from the national Republican brand. They don’t dare say they aren’t Trump-obedient -- or at least they have not done so through months of campaigning. Trump might notice. MAGA voters might notice and be disappointed. The active partisans in the GOP want a loyal Republican, not a RINO.

The race may be close, and incumbency-fatigue gives Drazan a real shot, but the 2026 election is about the man who demands to grab center stage from Kotek: Donald Trump. 

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Brad Hicks caught a break, then threw it away

---

Republican state Senate candidate Brad Hicks had the formula for victory: Say he isn’t a Republican soldier. 

But there was all that money. So much!

He fell into the same trap that buried Republicans before him in Oregon Senate District 3. 

Character reveals itself.

The Beatles sang about getting by with a little help from your friends. The irony of this campaign is that help from so many friends seduced Hicks into sabotaging himself. His friends meant well. Republican PACs, corporate PACs, industry trade association PACs and generous individual donors poured money into the Hicks campaign. At some point that money became a weapon he turned on himself.

The Hicks campaign started out with a Mr. Nice Guy bipartisan message. It wasn’t wholly implausible. He had been president and CEO of the local chamber of commerce, and most chambers of commerce steer clear of overt partisanship. The Medford chamber is an exception, effectively a Republican lobby with its own PAC, but that isn’t obvious to the general public. If pressed, Hicks could have said he was just the CEO and the board set the politics.

Hicks could have run a brute-force campaign, spending two-plus million dollars telling us what a nice guy he is. It would have gotten tiresome. How much Andy of Mayberry can we stand? How many rainbows, puppies, and testimonials from friends? Still, it would have been a consistent message, and a welcome note of comity in politics, a contrast to the slugfest in the governor’s race between Democratic incumbent Tina Kotek and Republican challenger Christine Drazan.

The problem was excess. The GOP money machine made ads that vented its frustration with Democratic majorities in Oregon. The result was angry, hostile, contemptuous ads. Take THAT!

A new brand emerged. Hicks became a Republican warrior. He hardened the partisan lines. Several times every hour, voters in a district with a Democratic majority hear that Democrats and their leaders are wasteful, incompetent, corrupt, evil and dangerous. It isn't how to win friends.

The race became a slugfest just like the governor’s race. Democrat Denise Krause’s campaign switched to nasty ads too. Don’t trust Hicks. Hicks would sell public land to corporations. Hicks won’t protect women’s reproductive rights. Hicks is a Trump toady.

The ugly battle clarified what the campaign is about: Republicans versus Democrats, both full of rancor. This year, with an all-too-visible Trump defining and damaging the Republican brand, a partisan brawl helps Democrats. Voters move to their respective corners of the ring.

As with Drazan’s campaign for governor, I think there is a public appetite for an independent-minded Republican who would offer an alternative to decades of Democratic control in Salem and the fatigue that comes with it. Hicks started with that message of independent bipartisanship. In my opinion, he could have won. He had the money to sell it, even if it wasn't remotely true.

But the richer his campaign got, the more capacity he had to show the underlying reality. Character reveals itself when given enough time and money. By campaigning as a Republican brawler, Hicks demonstrates to voters he would legislate like the loyal Republican his original message claimed he was not.  

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Christine Drazan can't catch a break

"You can go by foot
You can go by cow
Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now."
       Theodor Geisel, as "Dr. Seuss," 1972

President Trump won’t go.

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, the Democratic incumbent, won’t let us forget it.

Trump said it himself: “Pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” He meant it as a favor to Republican candidates. It is a curse.

Christine Drazan, the Republican candidate for governor in Oregon, is one of the victims of Trump’s narcissism. Trump is not sending out bipartisan signals, nor is he doing anything to ease Democratic suspicion of a repeat of 2020, when he tried to overturn an election. He is still posting up a storm and talking about ballrooms and a triumphal arch. He is promising $5,000 payoffs if Republicans win, an offer so outrageous that even some Republicans dismiss it. He keeps insulting and picking fights with Canada. Canada! Our peaceful, reasonable, no-trouble neighbor and ally. He confirms every suspicion Democrats carry that Trump is careless and desperate. The moment they wonder whether they are being alarmist, whether everything is normal after all and they have simply fallen into a habit of derangement, Trump says something crazy at a rally. He praised Vivek Ramaswamy’s Ohio ad featuring his opponent’s estranged mother! It is as if he is trying to sabotage Republican candidates.

                               

Poor Christine Drazan.

Governor Kotek is vulnerable. Oregon has its own problems, made worse by Trump, Kotek argues. Democrats have been in charge, and Kotek carries the malaise that hangs over every incumbent in this period of high prices and low consumer confidence. Bad feelings still linger from the Covid shutdowns. Nike and Intel are laying off people, and Portland office buildings have empty floors. Oregon has lost some of its luster.

Kotek has a Trump card: Drazan has been a good Republican. She isn’t aggressively MAGA, and she has not promised to bring Oregon into sync with Idaho and Alabama,  but she is Trump-compliant. She is on the Trump team bus, even if she isn’t waving pom-poms and shouting “attaboy!” Kotek has seized on that compliance. A Kotek TV ad drives the point home, and it appears to be her closing argument. A mother talks about her daughter who was born with Down syndrome, and about how the family relies on the Oregon Health Plan. It puts a sympathetic face on Trump’s Medicaid cuts. The mother says:

     "President Trump tried to cancel that funding. It would be catastrophic. Christine Drazan follows everything Trump wants to do. She tried to cut Medicaid, too. The most vulnerable are left in the dust, scrambling to survive. That's not right. That's the difference for governor. Christine Drazan will never stand up to Trump."

Drazan won’t stand up to Trump. Frustration with Oregon government falls to insignificance next to Trump, who would do God-knows-what and doesn’t even pretend otherwise. Oregon is a target.

Drazan has an escape route but does not take it. Apparently Republicans think they cannot. Look at Mike Pence and Liz Cheney. Better to lose as a Republican than break free of Trump. Suppose Drazan were to denounce Trump forcefully -- his Medicaid cuts and tariffs and the harm they do Oregon, his crypto grift, his sale of pardons. Suppose she said Oregonians won’t tolerate Trump's blatant corruption, and said it so clearly that Trump condemned her as a RINO turncoat. Then I suspect she would win this race. I think there is a public appetite for an independent-minded Republican with the spunk to stand up to Trump. She might not need to take the scary step of breaking with Trump if he would just disappear for a while.

But Trump stays front and center, a wild card menace, but he won't go now.

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Picking the Malbec grapes

[Skip this post if you want politics, not agriculture.]

 

Monday we pick the Malbecs.

The starling pressure has gotten overwhelming. 

The grapes are netted, but the starlings come in swarms and they are doing what they can to get into the nets. 

I drive my tractor up and down the rows and ten or fifteen birds flush out and fly away in alarm. It works for the moment, but then they return. They are looking at the seams of the nets, trying to find a way in.

I set up a flopping man scarecrow on Sunday, but it won't work for long. 

Nets work, but imperfectly. What works to protect grape clusters is picking them, getting them into bins, and driving them to Valley View Vineyard's winery and out of harm's way. 

Picking involves cutting the grape clusters with hand clippers and placing clusters in a bucket.

Here is what they look like, freshly picked and still in the field. These are the Pinot Noirs we picked last week.

Then at the winery, fermentation started, a small pump recirculates the juice, pouring it back over the grape skins to extract color and grape-skin flavor notes.

My vineyard froze hard on Thursday and Friday nights. The vineyard is colder than most of the Rogue Valley because my place is along the Rogue River, i.e., the point of lowest elevation, where the coldest air settles. Here is one of the alarm notices I was texted every half hour from my electronic thermometer.

A freeze this hard doesn't ruin the grapes, but it finishes off the still-greenish living grape leaves that were delivering carbohydrates to the grapes. The Malbec and Cabernet grapes are as ripe as they will get, although as they dehydrate on the vines they will get sweeter.

The Valley View Vineyards owners and winemaker are attempting to make excellent wine, not just good wine, so their plan for now is to leave the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on the vines for another few days. The crew is hand-picking the grapes, not machine-picking, because, again, the quality if better. Machine-picking shakes frosted grape leaves along with the grape clusters; the leaf fragments cannot be separated out and they change the taste of the wine. 

I share these posts about growing wine grapes because many people who drink wine have no clear idea about where those nicely finished bottles come from. Wine is an agricultural product. Every agricultural product in every region on Earth addresses problems getting stuff grown and marketed. Melons have their problems. Grapes have different ones. Farming is complicated.

I have a second purpose. Grape prices are down. Wine sales are down. We don't have a wine-glut problem; we have a drink-imported-wine problem. There is more wine consumed in Southern Oregon than is produced in Southern Oregon. The boycotts of American wines by foreigners retaliating to Trump tariffs are damaging the grape and wine markets, and wine exports are down.  That is part of the problem. Nationwide  domestic wine consumption is down because of the ebbs and flows in consumer tastes. (Maybe wine isn't health food after all.) Markets will settle out at some new equilibrium over the next few years. The U.S. is a net importer of wine. American wines, including ones grown here in Southern Oregon, do not need to apologize for their quality on world markets. Local wines are fully equal to imported wines and those from California. We are a high-quality wine region, recognized by wine experts, but less so by local residents. People who consciously "buy local" when buying other food forget that policy when shopping for wine. Local restaurants showcase foreign wines. What a shame. Southern Oregon is a superb wine-growing area, and I am trying to show how that is accomplished. 

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Easy Sunday: That Ramaswamy ad

 Readers respond.

-- Some thought it impossible that the ad helped Ramaswamy.

-- Others complained that I was unfairly insulting Republicans to suggest that many of them liked the ad.

-- Others thought it insightful to have recognized the MAGA populist resentment of bureaucratic expertise.

Yesterday's post made a brief reference to Dr. Amy Acton's earlier job as director of the Ohio Department of Health. It is relevant. She was the Covid czar. 

Dr. Acton was the face of Covid-era school closures in Ohio. In those early weeks, when little was known about a new disease, she made public projections of how many Ohioans could be infected. Those fears and warnings were revised downward, in Ohio and nationally, and the impression that left became partisan. Republicans said Democrats lied and exaggerated the danger. Acton, like Dr. Anthony Fauci nationally, became associated with overreaching, controlling bureaucrats. The MAGA conclusion: Covid experts lied to us. The ad treated her Covid warnings as a character flaw, not as a mistake made while understanding of the disease was still evolving.

Again, I am disgusted by Ramaswamy’s ad. I think it probably hurts him more than it helps him in this year’s governor’s race. But Trump’s strong endorsement of the ad is a “tell.” The ad helps Ramaswamy with a decisive segment of the Republican base. A majority of Ohio voters chose Trump in 2024, knowing exactly who he is. They resent the smarty-pants experts who sent their jobs to China and shut down their schools unnecessarily over Covid.

Here is an example of the comments I received, edited for brevity. Joe Yetter is a retired physician and a former candidate for Congress.

Joe Yetter:

Peter, you really have the ability to see through others' eyes. It's not what I see, at all.

I see Ramaswamy and Trump as stone-cold liars willing to hurt anyone, any place, any time in service of their own aggrandizement. And who believe enough voters will side with them, seeing the world through those eyes.

It is stomach-churning for me to think there are any voters--let alone many voters--who will find this ad appealing. I hope you are wrong.

My response:

Joe, this speaks well of your character, but it is a political liability for you.Their stone-cold lying is the asset in this contest you if you start with a premise that the world is rigged in favor of everyone else. Trump is the anti-hero. He is Dirty Harry.  I am disgusted, not admiring, of the ad but I think I recognize Ramanswamy's strategy.

As with evolution, if something unintuitive exists it is a huge opportunity to consider what is really going on. The peacock's tail is such a thing. Ramaswamy's ad is the same thing.

Joe Yetter's response: 

What science teaches us is the triumph of cooperation. The way to win is to work for all to win.

We--and all multicellular life--exist because our single-celled ancestor ingested a bacterium and, instead of digesting it, provided it shelter, and so mitochondria were born. 

It's a story that can be retold in detail and in broad sweeps, like the co-evolution of insects and flowering plants. Wolves and grizzlies and beavers have the power to change geology and hydrology to the benefit of whole ecosystems.

The current rapacity of humans is putting us on track to destroy much of the beauty and diversity of the natural world, and its ability to sustain us.

It will profit us not at all to hire "Dirty Harry." But (as in War Games), the only winning move is not to play that game. I say this not merely because it's the kind thing to do, but because I think it really is the way to win. For everybody.

I often recommend books. Narrowing down, I'd recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass; Richard Powers' The Overstory; Terry Tempest Williams' The Glorians; Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer; Zoë Schlanger's The Light Eaters.  And hat tip to the late Lynn Margulis, the evolutionary biologist who taught us the significance of symbiosis in evolution.

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