GILBERT MERCIER—Nicolas Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez, had in Fidel Castro a source of inspiration and the guidance of a father figure. Chavez, like other neo-Marxists, looked up to Fidel for leading a successful revolution, through military action, which had toppled the corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista. This regime was not only a docile servant of the US government but was also directly associated with the Mafia’s criminal activities in Cuba in the era of Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. With Batista’s complicity, American gangsters had turned Cuba into a gambling and prostitution paradise where the US’ unscrupulous rich went to play. Castro shut down the bordello that had become Cuba and proudly rebuilt his island, and he consciously set out to transform Cuba slowly and steadily into a socialist country.
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Venezuela Blitz – Part 2: Press Freedom, Sanctions And Oil
DAVID EDWARDS—Since March 2015, a ‘coalition’ of Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia, and supported by the US, Britain and France, has been dropping bombs on neighbouring Yemen. In 2016, the independent journalist Felicity Arbuthnot reported that in one year, 330,000 homes, 648 mosques, 630 schools and institutes and 250 health facilities had been destroyed or damaged. In December 2016, it was reported that more than 10,000 people had died and three million had been displaced in the conflict. According to Patrick Cockburn in the Independent, the death toll now likely exceeds 60,000. In August 2016, Oxfam reported that in excess of 21 million people in Yemen, out of a total population of around 27 million, needed humanitarian aid, more than in any other country. In December 2016, a new study by UNICEF, the UN children’s agency, reported that at least one child was dying every 10 minutes in Yemen. As far as we are aware, nobody in the UK parliament or press has called for the overthrow of the Saudi regime, nor indeed of the UK government, for creating poverty and suffering that far exceeds anything seen in Venezuela.
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Ilhan Omar Smacks Down Elliott Abrams In Front Of Everybody
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The difficulty for our rulers, though, is that warmongering is a very difficult thing to paint a pretty picture of, especially with our newfound ability to quickly share ideas and information around the globe. I mean, look at Elliott Abrams. Seriously, just watch him talk. That demonic grimace is the prettiest face they could find to put on their Venezuela agenda. I find that very encouraging.
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The appalling hypocrisy of US human rights concerns
The document author, Brian Hook, as is to be expected from a guy working for the State Department, speaks perfectly the language of educated imperial flacks and global capitalism. His mind is marinated in the self-serving historical goo served up by any number of leading US academic and private institutions, starting with the Ivy League contingent, long a shameless accomplice to imperial designs as an intellectual enabler of the first order. In their (by now official) view, the US is always interested in doing the right thing, and always has the most honorable intentions, although within the limits permitted by the supposedly “legitimate” defense of its “interests”, which of course are practically infinite, and never specifically defined, but understood to represent those of every American, which is a cruel and unchallenged joke indeed.
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