Guest Editorials: Intervening in Venezuela, Usurping the Ukraine

Diane Gee on two (expanding) fronts of US mischief and wholesale skulduggery
Meanwhile the hypocrisy meter goes off the charts

The various drooling mouthpieces owned entirely by those who seek US economic domination of the world have begun their propaganda once again with a vengeance re: Venezuela.  Oh, and by “US” domination, this doesn’t mean you and me.  We won’t see a penny.  I mean domination, subjugation, manifest-fucking-destiny-bitches, global hegemony by the extreme richest in our Country.  You know, the entity which isn’t really an entity that the more paranoid among us like to call a shadow government?  It really isn’t in the shadows, and it really isn’t government.  It’s all a business transaction, following whatever market is available in order to exploit it to their benefit.  Buying politicians and political coups are never the ends, merely a means to get a larger chunk of the planetary pie.

It’s those 85 people that own more than 3.5 billion of we poorest. It’s the Waltons, who own more than 43% of the rest of Americans combined. It’s the Koch brothers who never miss a chance to wage war on the poor.  Here.  There. Anywhere.  They want their share, and their share, according to them is, “ALL OF IT.”  Molly Ivins always told us to “follow the money” in the Bush years, Chomsky has warned us about how they “manufacture consent.”

Think about it.  If it was about “freedom of the people” or “human rights” we would be invading our BFF’s the Saudis.  While their jet-setting Royal family lives large, and their people scramble to stay afloat (1), while they still chop off hands of those whole steal a loaf of bread and stone women to death for being raped – BUT!!! They play nice with our oil men.  They agree to rig prices, create shortages, and give that reach-around to our 1%. And never mind that they are also a significant force for fanaticism and jihadism —read Al-Qaeda, here, too—around the world, meddling, naturally, in the Middle East to destabilize Iran, Syria, Libya, Iraq and other nations they view as “threats.” Warmongering comes easy to them, since they have billions to indulge their egomaniacal whims, and, like Israel, enjoy complete impunity as they have the Washington mafia in their pocket.

So when the 6 corporations that own 90% of our media send out, as proven, their scripts and have the bobbing bottle bleach blonds that come on at 5 tell us that some “color revolution” is taking place in the Ukraine or in Venezuela how can we give them any credibility?

Why the fuck do we believe them?  As we sit here getting poorer, while they get richer, having our benefits cut, minimum wage raped by right to work, and jobs eliminated… why the fuck again, do we think that we should back rich capitalists paid by the CIA to give them our version of “Democracy and Capitalism?”

Its not working out so well for us.

Ukraine
The Ukraine doesn’t have a lot of energy reserves.  What it does have is pipelines that connect cheap Russian reserves with Europe.  The US and EU —the NATO gang—strove to bring it unto our “economic side” in order to castrate the growing power of those attempting to break the Western throttle-hold on world money and power.  The BRIC nations are a threat.  (Brazil, Russia, India and China)  They trade without our bankers taking their Shakespearean pound of flesh. They are talking about moving away from the petrodollar.  And, allied, they are too big to take on directly without the threat of nuclear war.  So, what’s a savvy richie-rich to do, but strip them of allies and trading partners, isolate them monetarily?

We know for certain that Washington plays against its own ally the EU in order to try and create exclusive control of the Ukraine.  This is part of a longstanding American goal of encircling and containing Russian power.  It’s both a plutocratic-nationalist and class question, all neatly bundled in sanctimonious jargon that few in the media understand or care to decipher for the benefit of their hapless audiences. If it is mentioned at all, which is like: rarely, if ever.  Russia may be under the thrall of some savage brand of capitalism, directly provoked and imported from the US, but it’s still a complex, proud nation that will not be easily dominated. Class struggles still smoulder right under the surface. It represents danger to the Master of the Universe. Hence all the demonization. So we are employing methods of international gangsterism, including violence, all of it wrapped in the long-perfected language of lofty rhetoric that defines US propaganda, to effect a political coup aimed at installing a regime that is fully subordinate to US geostrategic interests, even by supporting racists and fascists who use language like, “Russians, Germans, kikes and other scum” in the Ukraine.

Still think this is about supporting “people power?”  Human rights?  Our NGO group CANVAS was caught redhanded giving weapons, training and money to try and overthrow a democratically elected Government.

It backfired.  They signed with Russia.  Just as in Syria, when we found out that the gas used was ours, used by the mercenaries we hired there.

Despite all the money thrown at it, all the scripted media lies, it seems we-the-people and the world communities aren’t buying the bullshit any more.  The carte blanche for war is bouncing like a single mother’s the day after rent is due, despite working 3 jobs.

Venezuela
Central and South America have been colonized, used as pawns and treated with bewildering chutzpah by the US, that has called them “our backyard” for hundreds of years.  (As they call the entire Caribbean, “our lake,” or, better, “our playground.”). It is like to our equally colonized minds, they have not their own autonomy, their own histories, their own rights to be anything other than servants of our empire.  Although they inhabit the Americas, we are Americans, but they are not. They don’t qualify. Hell, the rich think they should be grateful for it.  Short of outright slavery imposed on African Americans here, I can think of no example more inherently racist and elitist.

There is a reason that the media, from news to film has always treated Hispanic peoples in ways that breed distrust (if not contempt) toward them.  They are painted as backwards, bandits, and bloodthirsty.  Or as caricatures, kowtowing inferiors. (See Señor! (2)) We are taught nothing of their varied cultures, let alone a basic understanding of their geography and governments.  Or their true, gallant history. Challenge a random American to name two Central American countries, three South American. The blank look, followed, by, “Uhhh, Cancun?  Mexico?” will tell the tale.  They play our carefully cultivated ignorance against our carefully cultivated racism and fear.

So, the question remains:  Will it be easier to manufacture consent to invade and/or overthrow the Chavista government of Maduro in Venezuela than it is their white counterparts in the Ukraine?  Let’s face it, racism sells in the old knuckle-dragging US of Dumberikka.

We got away with it in Chile in ’73, in the bloodiest and first 9/11 – installing Pinochet, the murderer, one more of many military thugs cultivated by the US diplomatic mission.  We got away with it in Honduras in 1963, and again in 2009.  We got away with it in the tiny island of Grenada in 1983.  One of the cowardliest acts of the20th century, albeit immortalized as some sort of heroic deed by Reagan admirer Clinto Eastwood in his ludicrous film, Heartbreak Ridge. Nicaragua,  Panama, Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala…. hell, it would be easier to list the countries south of us we have not invaded or meddled in: “None.”

Beyond the mass graves of dictators we installed, lie the millions of instances our black ops boys have assassinated, threatened and bribed the people to betray their own.

This is partly the genesis of alliances like Mercosur, (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Venezuela) ALBA (Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Venezuela and Saint Lucia) and UNASUR (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay, and Venezuela. *Panama and Mexico hold observer status) – to stand united to protect the interests of the People from US intervention, be it military or economic.

Mercosur has already issued a strong statement against the criminal insurgents committing atrocities against the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Our own National Lawyers Guild has as well. Will it make a difference? The media, as usual, have said nothing about it. Don’t hold your breath.

You see, the bait is there and too tempting for our 1% to overlook.  Venezuela has oil.  Shitloads of oil.  The most oil reserves anywhere.  Think of the many times we have tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Cuba, who has little resources.  (Well, there we feared the “demonstration example,” the idea that a non-capitalist society could actually prosper and surpass the US in its well-being index.) Do you think that we have not been repeatedly doing the same to Venezuela?  Not just in 48, 58, and 2002, either.  Not just in the last November election where tapes of our State Department proved we wanted to fix the election, or overthrow it.  In June of last year, we had a documented “destabilization plan.”

It is always present.  In 2012, we threw 20 million dollars at the election in Venezuela (a huge amount in a poor country; for far less you can buy the services of thousands of thugs to do our bidding) as our own economy was crashing, to try and ensure that Chavez was not reelected.

Chavez was never a demon.  He had more voting, and more honest polls than anywhere else in the world, according to Jimmy Carter and the people who oversee such things.  Not just for officials, for policy decisions. When one of Chavez’ ideas failed to be voted in, he would just smile and say, “I have more work to do.  I have to prove that this will help all the people.”

Chavez arranged the release of the backpackers from the US, who may or may not have been spies, from Iran.

Chavez had entirely free press, short of calling for violent overthrow.  Unlike ours, owned by those 8 corporations?  The majority are owned there by the rich class, who oppose any Socialism—any attempt any sort of real democracy— for the people – despite the fact it hasn’t affected their riches at all. Instead, he issued more licenses, making media accessible to the people.

In Venezuela, literacy has gone up, poverty declined, and their child mortality rates are better than ours.  I guess that’s what happens when health care is free, rather than money-laundering business between hospitals and insurers with our blood as the suds.

While people in the Dakotas are freezing to death from fictional and manipulated propane shortages, Venezuela’s CITGO offers OUR poor free heating oil.

Our fight with Venezuela has never been, and will never be about human rights.  Oh wait, it is exactly about that.  Its about SUPPRESSING human rights, so that rather than a whole country benefit from its oil reserves with free health care and free laptops, a very few of them, and a very few of ours can get rich beyond our wildest dreams.  We are blatantly LIED TO about what really happens there.

Maduro has less charisma than Chavez did.  Yet, the same Bolivarian fire burns in his belly.  He has shown restraint with the few right-wing mobs that have burned several free hospitals and clinics operating in conjunction with Cuban doctors.

The same “opposition” under fascist Leopoldo Lopez that have hijacked shipments of food and sundries, driving them over the border and leaving them to rot; or warehousing them to sell at black-market prices in order to create shortages and punish the people for supporting Maduro.  His rich supporters eat, his poor opposition has their toilet paper stolen by them. We saw this strategy in full display during the preparation for the anti-Allende coup in 1973. It’s an old recipe dusted off time and again, with some adjustments for location and time, by the CIA and who knows how many other US agencies at the service of injustice around the world.

Video explaining that in detail here:

Carbon Copy: The Economic War in Venezuela (video) from Red ALBATV on Vimeo.

As the class war comes to a head in our own country, nothing is more dangerous than an idea, the idea that people should share, rather than hoard, have rights, rather than obey a ruling class… nothing is more dangerous than that idea unless it includes oil.

The question is not whether or not we will intervene.  We already have and are.  The question is what form the opposition will take next.

Venezuela is closely tied with BRICs in trade, as have been Syria, Iran, and Libya who we are also intervening in.  Their people have already tasted the fruits of socialism, and will not go lightly into becoming landless, powerless serfs for an elite class again.  Their regional allies may support them. They will not just roll over.  It remains to be seen if they can manufacture our consent for an outright attack.  It remains to be seen if their greed is so vast, they will use our military (again!) to slaughter people just to install a complacent and subservient elite to the Washington Wealthy.  All that really stands between that and real freedom is us.

As the attempt to control Internet communication and peer to peer reporting, remember… it is our duty to speak the truth, to stop consent of these things being done in our name.

Viva Chavez!  Viva Maduro!

Viva Venezuela!

Viva la Revolucíon!

DIANE GEE causes trouble for the plutocrats and their shills at The Wild Wild Left and other venues. She does not take kindly to being had. 

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NOTES

(1) The following info was filed by an Arab (Saudi) citizen.

• AlphaOne answered the question of Saudi “average income” about a year ago.