Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby Elvis » Wed May 01, 2019 4:45 pm

Guardian says,
A military uprising appears to be under way in Venezuela


:lol: They so want it to be true! 'Planes are standing by to fly gov't leaders out of the country...'

I've been following the 'coup' on BBC, which is especially gawdawful in its characterizations.

I sensed that the joke may be nearly over when the NPR "A1" substitute host referred to Maduro as "the elected president." Just acknowledging that he's the elected president throws a damper on the silly claim that Venezuelans "want their democracy back" (Bolton).

Bolton is a bigger liar than Trump!
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby Elvis » Wed May 01, 2019 4:55 pm

I haven't seen mention here of "torture"; BBC has been pushing the notion, via sound bites and its own news hosts, that Maduro has been torturing opponents... in 'Venezuela's darkest prisons'... and references to "torture centers." :roll:

Of course zero evidence is offered. It reminds me of Saddam's "credit card shredding machine" but without the gruesome details. (That story was wholly made up by a Fox reporter.)
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby JackRiddler » Wed May 01, 2019 6:54 pm

As of April 30, Twitter has suspended a number of Venezuelan government accounts.

https://twitter.com/camilatelesur/statu ... 48448?s=21

I expect any number of accounts are allowed, as long as they are supporting the illegal foreign military aggression against the democratically elected Maduro government. (Note: always put the uncovered reality in a complete way, and find ways to add the following.) Which aggression is a planned crime against humanity, intended to lead to the destruction of a whole society and the violent deaths of thousands of people, for a start, for no reason other than the enrichment of criminal monsters and so as to set an example of what happens to countries that try to exercise their own sovereignty against the relentless depredations of capital.

Do people have a right to the Internet if it doesn't accord with US imperialist aggressions?

I found this link through Mr. Jeff Wells of Facebook, by the way. (And ironically enough.)
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby stickdog99 » Wed May 01, 2019 8:58 pm

Elvis » 01 May 2019 20:55 wrote:I haven't seen mention here of "torture"; BBC has been pushing the notion, via sound bites and its own news hosts, that Maduro has been torturing opponents... in 'Venezuela's darkest prisons'... and references to "torture centers." :roll:

Of course zero evidence is offered. It reminds me of Saddam's "credit card shredding machine" but without the gruesome details. (That story was wholly made up by a Fox reporter.)


And it is evil Cubans and RUSSIANS who are supposedly doing this TORTURING! Project much, Gitmo jailers?
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby stickdog99 » Wed May 01, 2019 9:00 pm

JackRiddler » 01 May 2019 22:54 wrote:As of April 30, Twitter has suspended a number of Venezuelan government accounts.

https://twitter.com/camilatelesur/statu ... 48448?s=21

I expect any number of accounts are allowed, as long as they are supporting the illegal foreign military aggression against the democratically elected Maduro government. (Note: always put the uncovered reality in a complete way, and find ways to add the following.) Which aggression is a planned crime against humanity, intended to lead to the destruction of a whole society and the violent deaths of thousands of people, for a start, for no reason other than the enrichment of criminal monsters and so as to set an example of what happens to countries that try to exercise their own sovereignty against the relentless depredations of capital.

Do people have a right to the Internet if it doesn't accord with US imperialist aggressions?

I found this link through Mr. Jeff Wells of Facebook, by the way. (And ironically enough.)


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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby Elvis » Thu May 02, 2019 1:47 am

Economist Jeffrey Sachs: U.S. Sanctions Have Devastated Venezuela & Killed Over 40,000 Since 2017
May 01, 2019
Watch Full Show

More 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.”




Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! 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 report for the Center for Economic and Policy Research headlined “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela.”

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.

JEFFREY SACHS: 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.

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.

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.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you come up with the number 40,000 dead as a result of these crippling U.S. sanctions?

JEFFREY SACHS: 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.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

JEFFREY SACHS: 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.

AMY GOODMAN: 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.

MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: 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.

AMY GOODMAN: 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.

JEFFREY SACHS: And, I would say, of the OAS 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 IMF 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.

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.

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 IMF, 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 The New York Times or someone else saying it’s Maduro’s whatever, because they don’t even look at the obvious process.

AMY GOODMAN: 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 report 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.


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Next story from this daily show
Ilhan Omar Speaks Out Against U.S. Sanctions & Bipartisan Support for Regime Change in Venezuela
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby JackRiddler » Sat May 04, 2019 5:34 am

.

Video of giant Bolivarian rally in Caracas.
https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/stat ... 9697566722
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby RocketMan » Sat May 04, 2019 7:40 am

What is going on at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington? Sounds like something awful. Code Pinkers being assaulted by fascist mobs while the Secret Service stands idly by?
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby DrEvil » Sat May 04, 2019 4:20 pm

Elvis » Wed May 01, 2019 10:45 pm wrote:Guardian says,
A military uprising appears to be under way in Venezuela


:lol: They so want it to be true! 'Planes are standing by to fly gov't leaders out of the country...'

I've been following the 'coup' on BBC, which is especially gawdawful in its characterizations.

I sensed that the joke may be nearly over when the NPR "A1" substitute host referred to Maduro as "the elected president." Just acknowledging that he's the elected president throws a damper on the silly claim that Venezuelans "want their democracy back" (Bolton).

Bolton is a bigger liar than Trump!


The Guardian seem to have drifted slightly closer to reality again, although they're still pretty shit on the issue. At least it's filed under the keyword "US foreign policy":

The plot that failed: how Venezuela's 'uprising' fizzled

When the coup was hurriedly launched a day early, defections from the regime failed to materialise, Maduro remained in power and the US government looked like it had badly miscalculated

by Patricia Torres in Caracas, Julian Borger in Washington, Joe Parkin Daniels in Bogotá and Tom Phillips in Mexico City Fri 3 May 2019 19.47 BST

The video that appeared on Tuesday morning had the appearance of history in the making. In the purple light of dawn, it showed a group of armed men and a military vehicle on a road leading to La Carlota airbase in eastern Caracas.

In the foreground, stood Juan Guaidó – the head of the national assembly recognised by most western countries as the rightful leader of Venezuela – declaring the “final phase of Operation Freedom” with oratory seemingly destined for legend.

“Today, brave soldiers, brave patriots, brave men loyal to the constitution have heard our call. We have finally met on the streets of Venezuela,” Guaidó said.

Behind him, was the country’s most prominent political prisoner, Leopoldo López who had been under house arrest since 2017. The fact that he was free as the uprising was being declared seemed proof that something significant was afoot.

We now know that there was indeed a plan designed to resolve the dangerous standoff in the country between Guaidó’s assembly and the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro, heir to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution.

Key members of the security apparatus were to defect. (Christopher Figuera, the head of the secret police, Sebin, had already done so, springing López from house arrest.) That was supposed to be a signal to the armed forces – the key to Venezuela’s future – to flip sides.

Maduro was to fly to Cuba “in dignity”. Everyone else from his regime would keep their jobs while Guaidó became interim president, pending new elections. All of this had been put down in writing, in a 15-point document, according to officials in Washington.

But it is still far from clear whether this plan had any chance of working – or whether some of the would-be defectors were simply laying a trap.

Even if the plan was real, it was already going awry when Guaidó made his speech to camera on Tuesday.

It was a day earlier than planned. Operation Freedom was supposed to reach a climax with mass protests set for Wednesday. And in retrospect it is clear the Tuesday video had been closely cropped to mask the fact that there were only a handful of troops standing with Guaidó.

Vanessa Neumann, who was appointed Guaidó’s envoy to the UK in March, said that his camp had heard reports that Maduro had got wind of the plan and was going to arrest the national assembly president.

“The decision to go on Tuesday rather than Wednesday was an operational decision, taken in reaction to new reports from the ground that we got,” Neumann told the Guardian. “But how it unfolded – in terms of the people, the military and calling on the people to join – that was foreseen.”

The rattle of hundreds of pots and pans being banged woke Julio Bianchi on Tuesday morning. The Caracas architect thought it was yet another power cut, but his bedside light was still on. Then he looked on his phone and saw the Guaidó video.

“We knew that this could be coming, but when I saw Leopoldo [López] in the video, I had no doubt that this was it: Maduro had fallen. If Leopoldo was free this had to be big.”

Mariana Otero, a young mother of three sons, got the call from a friend who lives near La Carlota: “Come now because the base has fallen.” With a Venezuelan flag draped around her shoulders like a cape, Otero quickly headed out to join thousands of others heeding Guaidó’s call.

“If Leopoldo is out there on the streets, I should be too. I want freedom in my country. The streets are ours and I want my children to be witnesses to the way we have come out to struggle for our liberty.”

She was not alone. As she headed towards Plaza Altamira in the affluent municipality of Chacao in eastern Caracas, hundreds of people were on the street around her.
(There's dozens of us!)

But there were fewer protesters from poor areas on the city outskirts – perhaps because of the air of uncertainty and fear spread by paramilitary groups loyal to Maduro which have snuffed out dissent in poor areas of the city.
(Obviously. Can't possibly be because many of them still support Maduro)

At midday, those who had crowded into Plaza Altamira could not believe their eyes: on top of a truck in the square, a group of rifle-toting national guardsmen surrounded Guaidó as he again told the crowd that the regime had fallen.

The troops wore blue ribbons on their arms to show they had defected to the opposition; one wore a bandanna across his face. López and several members of the opposition-controlled national assembly were also there.

“Valientes, patriotas, sí se puede,” chanted the crowd. “Brave patriots! Yes we can!”

But the momentum was already disappearing. After addressing the crowd, Guaidó and his team melted away – and the crowd which had expected to march on the Miraflores presidential palace were left milling in the square.
(Classic coward. Rile up the crowd and then slink away before anything bad happens. Just who you would want leading a country)

Apart from the secret service chief, Figuera, no big names from Maduro’s government had switched sides. One by one, the big fish tweeted out vows of allegiance.

Meanwhile, in downtown Cúcuta, a Colombian border town, a group of Venezuelan army defectors watched news of the uprising in a hotel room TV.

“When we saw our President Guaidó there with our brother soldiers and Leopoldo López, now free, at his side, we immediately coordinated with troops here to see what we could do,” said one defector.

Unarmed and in civilian clothing “out of respect to Colombia”, the defectors gathered by the Simón Bolívar International Bridge that separates the two countries in hopes of an ad hoc invasion. “We were ready to take San Antonio,” one defector said, referring to the town on the Venezuelan side of the bridge. “We were just waiting for the orders to join our brothers in arms on the other side.”

That order never came. Instead, defectors say, they received an order from Guaidó’s team to return to their hotels.

“It was a great letdown,” one soldier said. “We wanted to help free Venezuela.”

In Washington, Trump administration hawks who had hailed a moment of liberation watched in consternation as the uprising fizzled.

It is far from clear whether the US communicated directly with Maduro’s circle in the buildup to Operation Freedom. López, after seeking haven in the Spanish embassy in Caracas, told journalists that the key negotiations took place at his house over the past few weeks, but the claim has been treated by sceptics as grandstanding by an aspiring president anxious not to be outshone by Guaidó.

The Trump administration reacted as if it had been personally betrayed, and took the unexpected step of going public with its version of events, saying out loud the sort of details normally kept secret.
(We're not orchestrating things, but here's how we orchestrated things. If it wasn't so depressing it would be funny how fucking incompetent these people really are. They can't even overthrow one little socialist government. How far the US has fallen.)

John Bolton, the national security adviser, named the three powerful Venezuelan officials he claimed had been negotiating Maduro’s departure: the defence minister and head of the armed forces, Vladimir Padrino; the chief justice of the supreme court, Maikel Moreno and Iván Hernández, the head of the presidential guard and military intelligence.

Bolton called out the men three times outside the White House – and then again in a bizarre video that was supposed to be an appeal to patriotic Venezuelans but which was entirely in English apart from the single word “libertad”.
(Hoping Maduro will string up these people to get a pretext for more direct action. "Look, they arrested the people we tried to make commit treason!")

The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, claimed that Maduro’s plane had been on the tarmac waiting for takeoff, but that he had been persuaded not to leave at the last moment by the Russians, a claim the Russians denied.

Donald Trump himself went on Twitter to rail against Cuban support for Maduro. And the US envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, a veteran of Reagan-era US covert operations in Latin America, appeared on a independent Venezuelan television channel, giving a detailed account of the 15-point document the defectors were supposed to have signed.
(That's one way of putting it. Mass murdering war criminal would be another)

So while the official line was that the uprising was the work of the Venezuelan masses, everything the Trump administration did reinforced the message that it had been made in Washington.

It’s idiocy. I don’t know what they think they are doing but they are undermining the efforts of the opposition to achieve their goals,” said Eva Golinger, the author of several sympathetic books about Chávez.

By Tuesday evening, Maduro staged a show of unity and strength for the television cameras surrounded by a phalanx of soldiers, with defence minister Padrino, one of the supposed defectors, at his right shoulder.

María Corina Machado, the leader of the Vente Venezuela opposition group, which openly supports the idea of foreign military intervention to unseat Maduro, admitted temporary defeat.

“Of course, the final objective was not accomplished,” she said. “Our goal was to have an urgent transition to democracy in Venezuela because this human catastrophe will only stop or start to be solved the moment Maduro and his mafia regime leaves power.”

She partly blamed drug cartels and guerrilla groups that she said represent a shadow power network within the country for the failure of the uprising.

In Washington, Bolton and Pompeo have hinted at the possibility of direct US military intervention to tip the scales to oust Maduro, but have so far been restrained by the Pentagon. The Washington Post reported a confrontation in the White House, between Bolton’s hawks and the vice-chairman of the chiefs of staff, Paul Selva.

As Selva made the case against any risky US escalation, he was repeatedly interrupted by Bolton aides demanding military options, until the normally mild-mannered air force general slammed his hand on the table, and the meeting was adjourned early.

Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA expert on Latin America now at American University said he was concerned that the generals could not hold out indefinitely against the calls for action.

Armstrong said: “These [Trump administration] guys are so desperate for a win – and with so much testosterone in their veins, I am really worried they are going to do something really stupid.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ ... t-fizzled-

Also notice how the only people they talk to are opposed to Maduro, trying to frame it as if he has no popular support.

I think Maduro is a buffoon, but if they want rid of him then vote him out next election. Guaidó is no more the president of Venezuela than I am the prime minister of Norway. You don't gain power by just saying so, because that's fucking stupid.
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby alloneword » Sat May 04, 2019 4:59 pm

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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby JackRiddler » Sun May 05, 2019 4:17 pm

Maduro may or may not be a buffoon.

I think Chavez in his last years understood the US game would remain: to do with Venezuela what they have done with Libya, or to perform a variant of what they have done in Iraq, Colombia, Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, the Central American deathsquad states, and so many other places. There would be no compromise with these people. It had been made abundantly clear by the aggressions of the Bush regime, and did not change under Obama with his absurd finding that VZ presents a threat to U.S. national security. The imperialists do not wish to tolerate even half a Cuba more in "their" backyard. They wage a war, never-ending. As long as that is so, I expect Chavez wisely did not look for the smartest successor, or the most charismatic one, but for the one who would fight the necessary fight, the one who would not capitulate or accept some rotten deal that ended up in the same dark place. On this score, Maduro has proven a loyal defender of his country against the foreign aggressor, and he clearly maintains the support of a core Bolivarian movement that still dwarfs every other political grouping in the country. They still captured 68% of the vote in last year's fair and legitimate election. The margin could have been closer, but of course the extreme right-wing parties within the opposition, such as Guaido's, boycotted the election because they understood that even if they united with the more moderate (and less violent) opposition parties they would still lose. They know they will only ever come to power on the strength of a U.S.-backed coup.

.
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby Grizzly » Sun May 05, 2019 5:28 pm


Koch BROS, Venezuela, XL Pipeline, Agent ORANGE W/Greg Palast
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby stickdog99 » Mon May 06, 2019 3:06 am

JackRiddler » 05 May 2019 20:17 wrote:Maduro may or may not be a buffoon.

I think Chavez in his last years understood the US game would remain: to do with Venezuela what they have done with Libya, or to perform a variant of what they have done in Iraq, Colombia, Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973, the Central American deathsquad states, and so many other places. There would be no compromise with these people. It had been made abundantly clear by the aggressions of the Bush regime, and did not change under Obama with his absurd finding that VZ presents a threat to U.S. national security. The imperialists do not wish to tolerate even half a Cuba more in "their" backyard. They wage a war, never-ending. As long as that is so, I expect Chavez wisely did not look for the smartest successor, or the most charismatic one, but for the one who would fight the necessary fight, the one who would not capitulate or accept some rotten deal that ended up in the same dark place. On this score, Maduro has proven a loyal defender of his country against the foreign aggressor, and he clearly maintains the support of a core Bolivarian movement that still dwarfs every other political grouping in the country. They still captured 68% of the vote in last year's fair and legitimate election. The margin could have been closer, but of course the extreme right-wing parties within the opposition, such as Guaido's, boycotted the election because they understood that even if they united with the more moderate (and less violent) opposition parties they would still lose. They know they will only ever come to power on the strength of a U.S.-backed coup.

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Exactly. Regardless of one's position on the successes and failures of the Bolivarian revolution, any contention that a US backed coup of Maduro has anything to do with "restoring Venezuelan democracy" is patently Orwellian. Any honest rich Venezuelan who endorses a US invasion of Venezuela would admit that what he or she wants is for the United States' military to "save" Venezuela from democracy.
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby DrEvil » Mon May 06, 2019 10:29 am

^^Reminds me of George Carlin:

Fire fighters fight fire, crime fighters fight crime, freedom fighters fight...?
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave
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Re: Venezuela - U.S. Again Tries Regime Change...

Postby Grizzly » Mon May 06, 2019 11:31 am

^^Reminds me of George Carlin:

Fire fighters fight fire, crime fighters fight crime, freedom fighters fight...?


Contra's?! Wha'd I win? a FREE poop on Raygun's Grave? I hope I hope I hope.
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