PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS—Most of the world sees this as “US gangsterism.” But no one does anything about it.John Wight asks: “Does anybody really think that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, Elliott Abrams care one bit about the welfare of the Venezuelan people? These are thugs in tailored suits whose views are far closer to Al Capone than to Thomas Jefferson.” https://www.rt.com/news/452274-venezuela-us-intervention-gangsterism/President Maduro’s failure to arrest Juan Guaido, the puppet chosen by Washington to be the Empire’s front man in Venezuela, might spell the end of Venezuelan democracy. The Venezuelan military will wonder why they are at risk when all Maduro has to do is to arrest Guaido, try the traitor, and execute him.
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Controlling The Message, Controlling The World: From Vietnam to Venezuela
SCOTT PATRICK—Complaints about authoritarianism and the quashing of dissent ring hollow when the U.S. just conducted a major sales deal with Saudi Arabia, a repressive monarchy that only just months ago had one of its most prominent critics, journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in Turkey.
It is also unreasonable to expect either Chavez or Maduro to have diversified the economy, fulfilled their promises to help the poor, and heal the country’s social divisions while the Venezuelan opposition was simultaneously attempting to overthrow their democratically-elected governments (with not-so-clandestine U.S. support). Yet this is implied in U.S. media coverage as the path they should have taken, and no alternative view is investigated or offered.
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Is Putin Too Polite?
Today, we the people tend to ignore the fact that Russia is the only country in the world capable of reducing the United States and/or Europe to ashes within 30 minutes. We lack any sense of the risks of war that arise from the operations of our military forces in close proximity with Russian and their proxy forces in Syria, in Ukraine…and possibly soon in Venezuela. This, under conditions of near absence of reliable communications between our civilian and military leaderships and total lack of mutual trust between all parties.
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F.W. ENGDAHL: Why NATO Wants to Destroy Putin’s Russia—the Cold War that Never Ended
F W ENGDAHL—With even a primitive missile defense shield, the US could theoretically attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with far less fear of effective retaliation; the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a sufficiently destructive response. That, at least, was the idea behind US missile defense. It was not defensive in any way, rather extraordinarily offensive.
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