WAR CRIMES & CRIMINALS

The United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) won the November 21 mega-elections in a landslide, getting more votes in 20 of 23 states and the capital Caracas. So the US government responded by trying to discredit the vote. Venezuelan journalist Diego Sequera speaks about the elections, the historic victory of the ruling party of President Nicolás Maduro, and Washington’s attempt to delegitimize the process.

For more than a century the US has victimised Nicaragua and many other nations in Latin America, including Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil and so on. The object has always been the same, to overthrow those forces and leaders that would give the people a better deal in the share of their national wealth.  That wealth, in Washington’s view, has always belonged to the same super-rich individuals and corporations that own the American government and control its destiny. “Too bad for Latin America,” said Bolivar. “So far from God and so close to the United States.” 

JACQUES PAUWELS—The [Western] elites had made major concessions to the working population out of fear of communism, . . . in order to keep people quiet, and to counter the appeal of socialism behind the Iron Curtain. It is therefore not a coincidence that the social services began to be rolled back after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The threat was gone. It was no longer necessary to appease the working population.

In Western Europe and elsewhere in the Western world, the elite is still very much focused on this task, clearly in the hope that soon nothing at all will be left of the welfare state. The fall of the Berlin Wall made it possible that we are now witnessing a return to the unbridled, ruthless capitalism of the nineteenth century – a catastrophe for ordinary people, for the demos, and therefore a major setback for the cause of democracy.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—It’s hilarious that people still think the Democratic Party cares about winning elections. That’s not its job, children. That’s not why the Democratic Party exists. The Democratic Party exists to kill leftward progress in the world’s most powerful nation. That’s all it cares about doing.

The Democratic Party doesn’t care about winning elections. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about promoting popular policies. The Democratic Party doesn’t care about passing legislation. The Democratic Party only cares about doing things like this:

In his new book “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War,” scholar Samuel Moyn argues that post-9/11 efforts to reform the conduct of US military operations have ultimately sanitized and prolonged the underlying illegal warfare. Moyn discusses the Obama administration’s key role in sanitizing warfare and how it undermined the US anti-war movement. He also addresses criticism of how the legendary human rights attorney Michael Ratner factors into his book’s arguments. Guest: Samuel Moyn. Professor at Yale Law School and a professor of history at Yale University. His new book is “Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.