While Maduro’s reelection in 2018 has been rejected by the United States because of record low turnouts, Maduro is rejecting the idea of a new snap election, saying the international demands amount to blackmail, and that the vote should wait until 2025.
Interim President Juan Guaido, who declared himself president last week, is said to intend to ultimately call for fresh elections. Protesters backing Guaido have taken to the streets to try to get Maduro removed from power.
There is a near-term focus on trying to get the military to stop backing Maduro’s government. While the Trump Administration has suggested the Venezuelan military could easily impose regime change on their own, they also seem to be able to block the US-backed Guaido regime change.
Maduro, for his part, is pushing for the military to maintain unity, and is blaming neighboring Colombia for recent desertions. Colombia has been backing regime change and was recently tapped as potentially hosting 5,000 US troops aimed at Venezuela.
“Interim President Juan Guaido” So you agree with the coup attempt?
This Mr violent protester/stooge of the USA is NOT elected.
Half-true. Venezuela has a sort-of Constitutional crisis already resolved by its Supreme Court in favour of Maduro. The court allegedly being stacked with Maduro sympathizers notwithstanding the soundless of their verdicts.
Guaido was elected President of the National Assembly; not President of Venezuela. Nor can he call himself Interim national President, as the office is not vacant as Guaido supporters claim.
Confusion arises because the National Assembly is Constitutionally trumped by the Constituent National Assembly; The National Assembly presently has no legal powers.
The 2018 Presidential elections were boycotted by the opposition, resulting in low turnout.
However, as there is no quorum requirement to validate any national elections, Maduro is legally President. The office is not legally vacant; if no-one voted but one Maduro supporter, the election would be valid.
That’s certainly one way of looking at it.
Morally, Maduro’s level of cheating doesn’t justify a level of intervention that violates Venezuelan sovereignty and endangers lives far worse than Maduro’s crony socialist economics.
There also aren’t any convincing legal arguments that say Maduro’s presidency isn’t legit within Venezuelan law, any arguments countering what the Venezuelan Supreme court has ruled.
As far as anti-war considerations go, recognizing Maduro with an asterisk is better than fostering the casus belli of illegitimacy.
“There also aren’t any convincing legal arguments that say Maduro’s presidency isn’t legit within Venezuelan law, any arguments countering what the Venezuelan Supreme court has ruled.”
Convincing to whom?
The country’s constitution gives the Assembly the power to appoint is leader president if that office is vacant.
The Assembly held that the previous election was void/invalid and that therefore the office was vacant.
That’s just as much “Venezuelan law” as the counter-arguments.
Should the US be intervening either way? No.
Is deciding which of the claimants to recognize for purposes of e.g. diplomatic recognition “intervening?” Not really.
Freezing assets, etc. is “intervening.” The US government shouldn’t have the power to do that. At all. Period. Not for Maduro, and not for you. It’s not their money and it’s not their business.
The Venezuelan National Assembly is overruled by the Constituent National Assembly and Supreme Court, both of which are solidly on Maduro’s camp, as are a large number of Venezuelans and their military.
The illegitimacy argument is part of the emotional faux-moral pretext to justify the interventions you rightly oppose.
Maduro being illegitimate, is not so simple for us to conclude. The original National Assembly wasn’t designed for honest representation of all Venzuelans, either, just to rubber stamp their ruling elite. Chavez slipped past and changed things up a little.
Except the position wasn’t really vacant and it was pushed by the US interference you pretend to be against.
Maduro has some cover from the courts for his continued rule but so what? The whole country knows he packed the court with his cronies. He isn’t the legitimate leader because he locked up the opposition and the elections were boycotted because of this. It’s wasn’t just “record low turnout” and like you say, it’s at best half truth.
In reality what happened was that they were not even going to have elections because nobody would run against Maduro after he locked up the opposition. They were All just going to boycott the whole thing until he released them and allowed them to run. Instead Maduro got a shill to come in and pretend to run against him. So the choice was to vote for Maduro or vote for the guy who was providing cover for Maduro. The people boycotted him too because of this agreement.
That would be like Trump locking up the Democratic nominee and then talking someone into running as a Democrat who was not the nominee into running just to make it all look legit.
If the Democrats boycotted the election, resulting in “record low turnout” and making Trump President again would we really just say that the blame is “record low turnout” and not the fact that he locked up the opposition? Now lets say that Trump also fired the entire Supreme court and packed it with his guys who would then claim the election was just fine. Would that really cut it with the people?
I’m not in favor of the US doing anything in regards to Venezuela but why should we pretend this guy is a the legitimate leader? And for that matter why should the US do business with them after they were found guilty by courts of law for having expropriated the property of American companies? They freaking stole all this stuff and we still bought their oil. We continued to buy from them even when they refused to allow guys like me to sell stuff there. They sanctioned our companies and wouldn’t let them sell, they stole American corporations property etc. I’m not going to pretend Maduro is a good guy just because that the line anti-war people want to take. I think it’s a mistake to take the side of every tin pot dictator who waves his sword at the US. Most of them are shitbags like this guy. I get it that the US likes to first demonize people before attacking them and you have to watch out for that, but come on. Sometimes a shitbag is just a shitbag. I don’t have to support him to be against the US doing anything and neither does anyone else in the anti-war movement, but for some reason they think they do. Personally I don’t get it. I think that every single time the anti-war party makes excuses for shitbags that it makes us look ridiculous.
I’m against sanctions because they violate my ability to freely trade with someone and vice versa. Neither I nor the person I want to trade with are hurting anyone, so sanctions are immoral. But is it really moral to do business with an individual who stole from people and refuses to pay them back even after the courts have found against them? In other words is anyone obligated to do business with government thieves even after they no longer have the support of the people? We should be allowed to trade with them, but we have no obligation or moral duty that’s for sure and what exactly did they expect? Was Exxon going to continue to invest after they stole their stuff? Were banks going to offer them loans when they refuse to stop printing money like crazy or to even honor the rulings of the international courts? And yet we still did continue to do business with them and companies still continued to invest in the hopes it wouldn’t collapse completely and they got blamed anyway.
I see a whole lot of conspiracy theory stuff going around about how this is the US’s fault but each time I drill down to find out if it’s true or not I’m coming up empty. If the US is actually responsible for all this mess they have actually done a very good job hiding it, whereas Maduras and Chavez’s role is right there in plane sight for everyone to see. When it comes to the blame the US crowd I can’t fault them completely. We do a lot of nasty stuff, but I’m just not seeing it here at least not in any way that makes the US more responsible for this mess than Chavez and Maduro. I read a lot of third party accounts of money supposedly flowing into the opposition but I have yet to see how any of that money actually did anything but fund a few opposition groups who never really got popular and I’m not seeing any facts showing links with this new guy and the CIA that are not very sketchy at best. As far as I can tell this new guy is the real deal, he put himself out there and it wasn’t the US who first saw the appeal in supporting him at all. In fact it seems that the US was a bit slow on this one. Almost everyone else had already agreed to calling him the new president before the US made their position clear.
Trump weighed in when I don’t think he should have, but jumping into it late like we did isn’t the same thing as a coup at least not to my eyes. And as far as I can tell Maduro should hold elections or step down, he can’t really call himself the legitimate leader after doing what he did. Yes it might have been a trap that he ended up in, but he didn’t just fall in, he jumped in with both feet.
Respecting the way the locals game their laws in their nation-state sandbox is an important feature of sovereignty, that should take precedence. Arrests fall short of death squads, assassinations, and coup.
To at least half of Venezuelans, Maduro is their legit President. This makes it morally difficult for any outsider, especially those with skin in the outcome, to take sides other than to recognize the process, however flawed. In any case, it seems Maduro is acting within the letter of Venezuelan law.
Saudi Arabia has no national electoral process at all beyond municipal elections, regularly arrests dissidents, but King Salman and MbS are still recognized however dubiously KSA is run, even as a monarchy.
Sanctions are intended to control who trades with whom; ordinary middle class business competes with elite access to places like Venezuela, China or Russia. Sanctions protect the elites and their special access.
If there’s a problem with Trump’s sanctions war, its that its increasingly clear from his most recent tweets that he expect China to fully surrender access to U.S. financial services and manufacturing, effectively opening up the country to neoimperialism. Under present arrangements, smaller players and entrepreneurs benefit more as they can’t be crowded out by far larger corporations and their benefactors.
So its about about elite access, holding ordinary people who just want to do business hostage.
Guaido came out of nowhere and declared himself President, and Venezuelan corruption is such that the jailed leaders were probably not going to be much better than Maduro. The Court may have been stacked, but did render a legit judgements, or the arguments would also highlight the legal contradictions of their findings.
Right now the U.S. Supreme Court is being ‘stacked’ with conservatives; they will have a bias about how they handle technicalities in the law, but their judgements can’t make stuff up.
Maduro is probably legit enough. Realistically, Hilary should not have been allowed to run, but politically, she had a get out of jail free card, and that’s not right either.
I’m not really dis-agreeing with you too much, more like talking about two different things. Although the people have had enough of Maduro, you say his rating are half the country but that’s not close to true anymore and hasn’t been for a while. He only has about 20% support right now, that’s it. But the same was true for any of the individual opposition groups. There are several of them actually, they seem to have now united under Guaido. If elections were held today, I don’t think there is any doubt at all that he would win, which is another reason why Maduro will not agree and instead blame the West for throwing a coup. Trump might have helped the opposition more by just staying out of it actually. Trump makes a good boogieman for Maduro.
Now I’ll agree that as far as international law goes the US would normally treat him as the legit leader, but we would do that if he shot the opposition leaders if we felt like it. But this is Venezuela we are talking about a nation that owes our oil companies a lot of money for kicking them out. So obviously Trump’s reaction and that of his cabinet isn’t driven simply because the guy stole the election. The election is their excuse, but there does seem to be a bunch of leading from behind on this one.
Guaido had the support of the elected national assembly and they declared him leader, it’s not quite accurate to just say, he declared himself leader. He did it with the support of a first time united opposition front. He then snuck out of the country and visited several leaders before he came to the US. So I’m not so sure this is even a US led push, so much as something they saw as an opportunity to push an agenda, that was ready and waiting. Does this really seam all that organized to you? It doesn’t seem like one of the regime change pushes to me, it just doesn’t. Not that are not trying to take advantage, just that they didn’t push for this. If they wanted to they could have stopped importing oil a long time ago and really screwed them, but they didn’t. Even now they are trying to make deals to keep the oil flowing.
Think about this one though. What if Rex Tillerson was still Secretary of State? Venezuela owes Exxon a ton of money. What a conflict of interest that one would be.
Well, Tillerson is conveniently out of the picture.
My viewpoint is geostrategic, so my conclusion is that the U.S. doesn’t want China or Russia getting in too good with Venezuela.
Venezuela owes money to a lot of parties; its like that saying if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem, if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. U.S. oil companies still received Venezuelan oil at a good price. Nationalization in the 1970s simply removed the overhead of maintaining the operation themselves.
If you have a problem with nationalization in and of itself, too bad, its a very common local reaction to foreign businesses that get too extractive and forget they are guests on foreign soil. Vale of Brazil would be facing anti-foreigner nationalization were it not already (passably presentable as) locally owned after the tailings dam disaster.
If Venezuela ever recovered under Eurasian aid, the U.S. would likely get paid off well, if only to avoid trouble. If the U.S. gets its coup, Eurasia is out in the cold and has to write off its debts [and local/regional influence].
I don’t have a problem with nationalization per se, but I do have a problem with people who steal and that’s what they did. They should have agreed to buy them out, they refused and instead expropriated it all. No, I’m not cool with that at all. If every country in the world did that then where is the money going to come from to develop anything? Oh I know, the world bank and IMF right? That’s better? Not to my mind it isn’t.
The oil business is unbelievable capital intensive. It takes a ton of money to run and only pays off when the going is good. Chavez should have either bought them out or demanded better terms under legal conditions, then he wouldn’t have been such a pariah.But you can’t blame people for not wanting to do business with someone who rips you off. That isolated him to a degree from day one.
And did you know he fired 19,000 people who actually knew how to run it all and replaced them with inexperienced workers. Can you imagine doing
something that stupid?
They are sitting on massive known reserves but it’s really lousy oil, it’s heavy crude and cost a ton to refine. It’s barely profitable when oil prices are low and that’s when a company is run the best it can be. A company that invests in oil is making a decades long investment, Chavez took that investment away by force when it was finally really paying off. Even then he ran it into the ground.
As for Europe; Unless someone comes up with the money to invest in oil production European aid will at best be a stop gap. They need money to fix their oil production, it’s a mess, seriously. Even if oil prices went through the roof they still need investors just to get back into full production or even close to it. Where is the money going to come from? China? I don’t know that they want to get in any deeper, same for Russia who has their own reserves to tap. Until prices go up that oil just isn’t as fantastic of a resource as people seem to think. And it’s half the way around the world from them, not right next door. And it’s not a great investment considering how much it’s now doing to cost
to get them back up to speed. It’s not light sweet crude, that’s for sure, it’s not an investment that automatically pays off even when oil prices are moderately high, let alone low.
Would you invest in a nation who stole their infrastructure and ran it into the ground, while
it continues to have the problems it does? And another thing, with the US pumping as much oil as it does this makes us less of a customer no matter what happens and the further the oil has to be transported the less it’s worth. That’s a huge investment for a payoff that might never come if they change their minds again.
Well anyway, it’s none of our damn business and the people in charge play games we can only guess at.
Sure, I can imagine Chavez doing that. What does he know about oil? Nothing. What does he know about political survival? Enough to actually have survived.
That’s part of the problem; the people in charge play games we don’t know about and we get the bill most of the time, including nationalizations of stuff by angry foreigners that had been, ultimately, subsidized by taxpayers.
Capital is a problem; we’ve got more global debt than GDP. The pension liabilities alone are $224 trillion against around $75 trillion GWP. I’m not sure they – or we- could pay what oil is really worth. There is a price to pay for distorting the market, though, especially once economies go to far to walk distortion back.
When the music stops, the most chairs will be in Eurasia. Maybe that’s why they’re so hot after Venezuela’s nickles and dimes. In a Mad Max world, the ‘wrong’ people would be secured there.
It’s an ongoing coup of another country in South America no matter how you look at it.
You’re either against global hegemony or you’re not. This whole bullshit narrative that it’s OK because Trumps clowns are behind it is very revealing for some of us.
It’s in no way shape or form our business and it should be left to the people of Venezuela to figure it out. So funny how after repeated failed coups in this country people can’t figure out why anyone elected to lead would try to secure their position……..It’s not uncommon for countries who are overthrown by outside forces over and over again to empower themselves.
How many times do I have to say that I think it’s wrong for us to interfere at all? Strawman much?
And no it’s not uncommon for the US to unseat dictators, it’s also common for us to deal with them for decades. It’s also common for dictators to F
up their countries and to get deposed, with or without help from other nations. What that doesn’t prove is that anything I said above isn’t also true.
It’s none of our business but it also doesn’t mean that we created the mess. Nor does it mean that Maduro is a legitimate leader just because we oppose him.
And damn do I get sick and tired of the anti-war left holding up tin-pot lefty dictators as hero’s. Just because a nation is opposed to our imperialism doesn’t make them good, or decent or anything really. Often it’s total nonsense anyway. Maduro waves his sword around and yacks about anti-Imperialism but he still sells us his oil doesn’t he? The guy wants to have his cake and eat it too. He expropriated an entire industry, in other words he stole it. And instead of maintaining that industry with the profits he pissed them away and along with it he screwed up his country. He printed money like it was going out of style and set up his own government as a criminal enterprise on almost every level.
Why should the anti-war movement in this country align itself with people like him? He restricts his own people’s ability to trade every single day and in every single way, but it’s bad when other nations sanction him? Think about that for a second. This
guy who you stand up for has been sanctioning his own people since day one, but it’s an act of war when the US imposes sanctions? Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s wrong to sanction the people of Venezuela or it’s not. I say it’s wrong for us to do it to them and it’s wrong for their leader to impose the same thing on their own people. And I know who has actually done far more damage and that is not the US, who continued to be their number one customer regardless of the sanctions that Chavez and Maduro put on US businesses as a matter of policy.
Honestly you can oppose US intervention without pretending that some asshole who locked up the opposition and stacked the courts is a good guy. You can be anti-war without acting like everything that happens in the world is our fault too.
The US is under zero obligation to do anything with Venezuela. If every single American did NOTHING and we completely isolated ourselves from them would they be better off without us? No, they would not. So how can the US be to blame for their problems, when in reality we have helped prop them up with all the money that flows into their economy from us? They are essentially saying that if the US doesn’t keep them afloat by buying their crappy oil that we are the bad guys. And yes it is crappy oil too, not only is it heavy crude, their quality is the worst around and continues to get worse all the time.
But whatever, pretend that it helps to support every authoritarian POS on the planet who opposed the US if you want to. I’ll call it as it is instead. It’s none of our business, nor is it our responsibility to keep this ass in power. It’s also not our fault that a government who stole the golden goose starved it to death.
“This guy who you stand up for has been sanctioning his own people since day one, but it’s an act of war when the US imposes sanctions? Which is it? You can’t have it both ways. Either it’s wrong to sanction the people of Venezuela or it’s not. I say it’s wrong for us to do it to them and it’s wrong for their leader to impose the same thing on their own people.”
True.
Now apply it to Trump’s tariffs.
I have never been in favor of any tariff, so I don’t know what you are talking about. But if you want to bring it up, then I’ll say this. I don’t remember there being anyone on the ballot, who had a chance of winning, who wasn’t in favor of tariffs. If you remember history differently, well that’s just odd.
And I also don’t believe that I should have to favor any individual policy of any president to support or disapprove of other parts of their platform. Do you know why? Because in the real world, where real people live, there is never going to be a perfect president. It’s always going to be a choice of the lessor of two evils and you get to support some of their policies and not others. That’s the real world that most adults inhabit. Then we have dreamers and pie in the sky individual purists who boycott everything so they can remain Pure and True and blah blah barf. It’s just another version of virtue signaling all the time and it gets so freaking old because I’ve seen it all before.
But anyway,
I don’t believe any Socialist has any business complaining about sanctions. It’s the height of hypocrisy. Don’t you agree? And it’s really not that complicated or shouldn’t be.
“I don’t believe any Socialist has any business complaining about sanctions. It’s the height of hypocrisy. Don’t you agree?”
Yep.
Sorry, I could have sworn that you defended Trump’s sanctions on US workers and consumers, aka tariffs. Sometimes I get commenters mixed up.
To the best of my knowledge and recollection, Gary Johnson opposed tariffs. And all that had to happen for him to win was for more voters to decide they didn’t hate America.
If only were as simple as your “All that had to happen” line. In the real world there were only two people who realistically stood any chance at all and you can thank me for doing my part to save you from Hillary any time you like.
Oh, yes, thank you for saving me from the standard-issue northeastern progressive with the worse pant suit in favor of the standard-issue northeastern progressive with the worse hair.
You’re welcome, someone had to do it.
Which means you miss the bigger picture of how we ended up stuck choosing between the current turd and the turd sandwich with mustard we could have had.
Now we have a Christian fascist back up and a con man mob associate in the drivers seat.
You’re arguing me from false equivalence. Box of Vapor had a problem with sanctions and I generally agreed for the reasons I’ve always had. Tariffs in the name of the little guy are more often used against them to cheat in favor of larger competing actors.
Trump’s tariff war was initially introduced to deal with China’s IP infringements and open China up to more trade in goods, which would help middle class American business.
Even then I was concerned about the potential for the tariff war to become just about who has best access to China; the middle class versus a privileged business elite.
Therefore I am consistent in arguing that tariffs control who trades with whom, and the focus of benefactors is shifting to the U.S. financial and manufacturing aristocracies at the expense of middle class business and enterprise. This invalidates the trade war as a war for the middle class Trump claims to be fighting for.
That’s actually a very interesting point about the effects of Trump’s tariffs on China and the possibility of it ushering a new economic elite. What I was generally worried about in that area, was not being able to get cheap parts for my business/hobbie from China and thinking how there are probably a million little guys like me making their living in one way or another on cheap stuff from China. Over the years I have imported a crap load of stuff from them for use in my own manufacturing of stuff I sell and I’ve had things made to spec while talking to people on the factory floor. Aliexpress opened that market up to individuals and I jumped on there before aliexpress was around. Aliexpress is cool but it’s still not the same experience as alibaba, which is truly amazing to me. It’s impressive to see how easy it is to do business with them. You can do it all on-line in the chat section or get a phone call and do it that way. I do not want to see that come to and end not just for me but for everyone else who does the same thing. It’s an amazing tool for little guys and medium people as well.
On the other hand I do not want to see them getting unfair perks from our post office either. Sure I love the cheap shipping and I use it as much as I possibly can, but I also ship far more than the average person and it kills you on most things. All in all, I’d be better off with the US ending all shipping treaties actually. On the whole I lose more than I gain, even though I buy as much as I can directly from China to make up for it.
What I’d be afraid of is anything that gets between me and people like me and those factories in China. I’m tiny compared to most but a million guys like me adds up and most guys are a lot bigger than me anyway. But they are not big enough to be lobbying congress that’s for sure. They could crush an entire industry of small guys if they put up barriers between guys like me and the factories in China.
If you have never had a chance to have something made specifically to your specs at one of these Chinese factories, you are missing out, it’s cool and often amazingly cheap. If you have a club or a group that’s bigger than a handful of people it’s pretty easy to get them to special make something just for you.
… And the established manufacturing aristocracy can’t stand what you are doing, while Amazon wants to displace Alibaba, the Chinese Amazon.
Middle class business is more of an enemy to the political-financial aristocracy than straight workers and consumers because by necessity business people have more knowledge and experience of how the system really works and could be more productive.
Dividends off the Alibaba’s NYSE presence don’t count as much in ego points and regional political influence as physically dominating and occupying the Chinese marketplace.
Trump’s trade war has steadily been hijacked by the same ‘surrender or else’ mentality that didn’t work for the hard power imperialists’.
After spending decades eroding the middle class to consolidate power, the Deep State is naturally very reluctant to reverse course and let the civilian middle class recover via China and elsewhere.
Whatever you think the purpose of tariffs is or should be, it remains a fact:
Tariffs are sanctions on the workers and consumers of the country levying them.
A tariff on US consumers who buy Chinese flip-flops is no different than a sanction making it harder for Iranian consumers to buy iPhones.
Sanctions are a tax, sure, but most people used to pay them more willingly.
Workers willingly go on strike, losing income and job experience in hopes of a better deal.
Consumer organizations promote boycotts of products when they are unhappy with the way a producer behaves.
Workers and consumers don’t mind if the State backs them up in a mass protest, though a minority may disagree with the protest and any costs associated with it.
Everyone minds if the State shafts them pretending to look out for them, which happens all too often.
Yup, I noticed that too. Unfortunately, Mr. Maduro is no Fidel Castro, or even Chavez, and may not last very long with the GNE (greatest nation ever) breathing down his neck.
And I noticed it as well. Try “Head stooge of the Neocon mail-order coup”, or “Bigus Dickus Guaidó”, or “Bolton’s Venezuelan butt buddy”, or (insert your honorific of choice here).
Puleeese!
“Reelection in 2018 has been rejected by the United States because of record low turnouts”.
So there should also be a Reelection in the US because of low turnouts in 2016, in the meantime, opposition leader Pelosi should be installed as President.
The USA has much lower participation in elections than other “democracies”, partly because of the voter suppression and gerrymandering but also because the people know their votes do not mean much as the Congress votes laws which help the rich and the corporations. To interfere in other countries is also profitable for the rich, not the “normal humans” in the USA or their victims like Syria, Venezuela.
Agree, spot on.
Too add, though, Americans have the right not to vote.
Ironically, this means partisans desperately want non-partisans out of the voter pool, and if non-partisans voted, Americans collectively would have much more impact on platform development and implementation by political parties.
Real democracy requires that people be informed and engaged. Ergo, we’re not a democracy except in name.
Our low voter turnout is not only because many feel their votes do not matter, but also because many are just plain lazy to vote. Peoples’ opinion of Congress is very low, yet the same charlatans keep getting re-elected. Go figure.
The low turnout was a feature of American plans to make Maduro’s last win appear illegitimate. Blame it on thhose paragons of democratic virtue, NED, DNI and IRI.
BTW, we are told that the new “president” has popular support in Venezuela, so why hasn’t he brought it on to the streets to protest against the real president. If it really existed, he wouldn’t be asking for intervention from Washington and its poodles
Also, the opposition where told to demand early elections. When elections where held, the opposition where told to boycott.
“BTW, we are told that the new ‘president’ has popular support in Venezuela, so why hasn’t he brought it on to the streets to protest against the real president.”
Like this, you mean?
Of course, you may not have heard too much about it, since he’s having his secret police raid newsrooms, shut down television stations, and abduct journalists and his telecom authority prang Internet access, when they’re not busy disappearing protesters in midnight raids.
How many paid protestors got arrested ? Who’s behind those TV stations Thomas ? Do you think the NSA might be trolling Venezuela during a coup attempt ?
Funny how people in this thread act as if the opposition is somehow legit despite being blatantly funded by the usual western war mongers.
I guess seeing governments fall is far more important than human lives or sovereignty of a nation.
“Funny how people in this thread act as if the opposition is somehow legit”
Um, no. I don’t have any particular reason to think that either of the competing gangs is any more “legit” than the other.
It’s possible to argue against US meddling in Venezuela without pretending that Maduro is anything but the standard-issue thug/caudillo he is.
Then it’s possible to perhaps not take things out of context while doing so ? Like forgetting the US sanctions and interference that led up to this guy being the cleanest shirt in the hamper ??
When thugs run the empire then it means it suddenly takes a thug to stand up against them.
I suppose it’s possible that you forgot the US sanctions and interference that led up to this guy being in power. I certainly didn’t.
That doesn’t mean I have to pretend that he’s necessarily “the cleanest shirt in the hamper,” let alone actually clean. In fact, sanctions tend to bring out the worse guys, not the better guys (see “who came to power on complaints about Versailles” for more information).
“Like this you mean?”
There is good evidence that gang warfare, a real problem in Venezuela and the rest of Central America, is being presented by western MSM as political riots.
As for the rest of your allegations, provide examples, but the “evidence” presented in the western MSM is not what it seems.
For example, during the last period of unrest, a major cause of death were Chavistas who were murdered by the more violent elements in the opposition using “necklacing”. The western MSM present any deaths related to the current troubles as being murder by the government just as they did with Syria when in reality most of the people actually killed by the government were violent jihadists and their camp follower and the western MSM counted deaths on the government side caused by those violent jihadists as being the responsibility of the goverment.
Another example, I guess the “shut down TV station” you mention is RCTV which the government refused to renew the operating licence for when it came up for renewal after the support it gave to the putschists in 2002. Any sane government would have closed down any TV station that supported a putsch after the putsch was put down but Chavez allowed it to go on broadcasting for several years.
It’s the same with the recent presidential election, there were some opposition parties that participated and their candidates lost but accepted it was a fair election. There were independent election observers present who said it was a fair election but the UN, the EU and various other parties refused to send their own observers. Parts of the opposition even called on the UN not to send observers because before the event they were claiming it was rigged. And now we’re told that the number of votes cast was abnormally low but the obvious explanation, parts of the opposition were boycotting the election, is never mentioned. How would the MSM have reported the US presidential election if the Democrats had announced they were going to boycott it because of all the actual vote rigging by the Republicans? As an illegitimate election? LOL.
I was again floored by NPR’s coverage of this, somehow managing to not mention that Maduro overwhelmingly won a democratic election. Immediately thereafter, NPR whined for donations, complaining that doing all this legwork and digging to bring us “news we trust” is very expensive. In effect, NPR’s coverage was screaming for the coup attempt to be successful. I guess they think that we are entitled to chose who rules any country in our hemisphere, especially when there is oil wealth to steal.
That Trump has surrounded himself with crazy psychopathic neocons like Pompeo, Bolton, and now Abrams sends a message to Maduro and his loyal Chavistas, the Venezuelans who lived in abject poverty under US-supported regimes before Chavez came into power. They know what’s in store for them if Guaido ever comes to power. They’ll form the indigenous resistance that will fight hard to keep the rights and means they acquired during the Chavez years.
Hope those 5000 US troops scheduled to be deployed to Columbia know that they won’t be greeted with flowers and smiles when they invade. It will be like Vietnam or Afghanistan all over again. It’s the neocon way of making war, where everybody loses accept for the MIC and the banksters.
Just what in tarnation gives the USA a right to determine another nation’s leader? All the fuss about “Russian collusion” after Trump won the election and here we have those same “collusion theorists” jumping on the bandwagon to ATTACK Venezuela, not just collude! If the Earth is a body, it has a serious cancer problem with the USA and its many “allies” reaping havoc on innocents on this planet!
Since Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaido declared himself president on January 23, it has become obvious to all intelligent onlookers that this “people-power color revolution” is not directed by Trump at all but rather by what has been exposed as the trans-national “Deep State”.
The main puppet architect who works behind the scenes is Canada, its Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland ( a close friend of George Soros) and her Oxford cohort Ben Rowswell, a former Canadian Ambassador to Venezuela who set up the opposition….thats what Ambassadors do…right?
Canada is also the founder of the Lima Group, a coalition of 14 Latin American nations (11 of whom endorsed the Venezuelan color revolution on January 4) which was founded in August 2017.
The corrupt EU leaders, a bunch of Neocons and Neoliberals are puppets and tools for the Trans-National Deep State.
Read this great article.
http://theduran.com/british-deep-state-of-canada-caught-steering-venezuelan-coup/
Thanks for the info and the Duran article. Freeland is a perfect FM, being biased in every way to cause damage. I knew about her Ukrainian heritage and influence for harm, but this extra section, plus Rowswell, help to explain why Trudeau jumped in so quickly to the US plan.
your welcome rosemerry. 3 countries voted against the Russian draft to ban Nazism and Neo Nazi at the UN General assembly…..the US, Canada and Ukraine.
More of the same US hegemony. So much for being a peace president……