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Author: Roger D. Harris

  • Human Rights Watch Outflanks Trump

    It’s been over 100 days since Donald Trump’s return to the presidency. Most NGOs to the right of the Heritage Foundation are alarmed about his confrontational international posture and related erosion of the rule of law.

    Human Rights Watch (HRW), a supposedly liberal organization, is also concerned. But their problem is that the president hasn’t gone far enough – at least in the case of Venezuela. HRW’s latest report on Venezuela calls for intensified illegal measures that cause misery and death, outflanking Trump from the right.

    Ignoring the US hybrid war

    At issue for HRW is last July’s Venezuelan presidential election that saw Nicolás Maduro declared the winner. Beyond issues with supposed electoral irregularities lies the elephant in the room that is utterly disregarded by HRW. The US hybrid war against Venezuela was the biggest obstacle to free and fair elections. Venezuelans were under economic siege with coercive measures aimed at pressuring them into backing the US-backed opposition.

    Also telling is the opposition’s refusal to submit their electoral records to the Venezuelan supreme court, when summoned to do so because they do not recognize the constitutional order in Venezuela. Legally, there was no way for them to claim victory even if they had legitimately won.

    Post-election protest demonstrations were predictable. The opposition, which has a long history of anti-democratic street violence, threatened them if it lost. HRW characterizes the riots as mostly peaceful, while accusing the government of responding with a “brutal crackdown.”

    Yet the widespread damage of public property such as health clinics, government offices, schools, and transportation facilities – along with murders of government security personnel and party members – were inconvenient facts entirely ignored in HRW’s over 100-page report. Such actions can hardly be called peaceful, nor blamed on the government.

    A cure worse than the disease

     For argument’s sake, let’s not contest HRW’s claim that the books were cooked in Venezuela’s presidential election in order to examine the NGO’s solution.

    On April 29, the US State Department celebrated 100 days of “America first” accomplishments, highlighting the revocation of oil importing licenses and the establishment of potential secondary tariffs on countries that still dare to import Venezuelan oil.

    The next day, HRW’s report demanded even harsher punishment. Frustrated that the “Trump administration appears to be prioritizing cooperation” with Venezuela, HRW called for expanding sanctions and deepening pressure. And this is despite Washington’s plans to further maximize its maximum pressure campaign to achieve regime change in Caracas.

    Specifically, HRW urged the US and other states to “counter Maduro’s domestic carrot-and-stick incentives that reward abusive authorities and security forces, making them loyal to the government” by imposing even more “targeted sanctions.”

    Further compounding the impact of individual targeted sanctions is the reality of overcompliance. Even individual sanctions end up contributing to collective punishment. A 2019 statement by HRW recognized that “despite language excluding transactions to purchase food and medicines, these sanctions could exacerbate the already dire humanitarian situation in Venezuela due to the risk of overcompliance.”

    But now the 1,028 existing unilateral coercive measures (the correct term for sanctions) on Venezuela by the US and its allies apparently aren’t enough for these sadists.

    HRW admits that these coercive measures have “failed to make a dent” in correcting what they see as bad behavior. Why then persist if ineffective? Perhaps, because they’re very effective in punishing errant states and warning others.

    HRW also lobbied for yet more foreign intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs: “Foreign governments should expand support for Venezuelan civil society groups… a sustained and principled international response is crucial.”

    Selective sanctimony on sanctions

    HRW criticized the Trump administration’s sanctions targeting the International Criminal Court (ICC) because they might potentially “chill” the tribunal’s ardor to go after Venezuela.

    Revealingly, this particular HRW report shows no concern that Trump’s sanctions might stifle the court’s prosecution of the US/Zionist genocide in Palestine. What HRW is instead focused on is having the court “prioritize its investigation” of Venezuela.

    HRW never mentions in this report that the US does not accept the ICC’s jurisdiction over itself. In other words, this report fails to criticize Washington’s evading accountability as long as the ICC can be weaponized against Venezuela.

    The ICC has, in fact, been blatantly politicized regarding Venezuela. Caracas has requested in vain that the ICC investigate US coercive measures that have caused over 100,000 civilian deaths in Venezuela, constituting a crime against humanity.

     The HRW report is sanctimonious about the “brave efforts of [opposition] Venezuelans who risked—and often suffered,” but is callously unsympathetic regarding the devastating effects on the population at large of the very measures it is advocating.

    HRW laments the US administration’s cutting funding to astroturf “humanitarian and human rights groups” promoting regime change in Venezuela. But it does not express sympathy for ordinary Venezuelans suffering economic hardship, food insecurity, or lack of medicine due to broader US sanctions. Notably absent from this report is acknowledgement of the humanitarian consequences of Washington’s unilateral coercive measures.

    The human rights organization’s primary critique of the enormous humanitarian toll of the unilateral coercive measures is that they have “failed to produce a transition.”

    Sanctions kill

     The HRW report frames US sanctions as supposedly justified efforts to enforce imperial restrictions on Venezuela and not as part of a regime-change hybrid war.

    As Venezuelanalysis reported: “US economic sanctions against Venezuela are a violent and illegal form of coercion, seeking regime change through collective punishment of the civilian population.” Investigations by the UN’s high commissioner for human rights found “sanctions that threaten people’s lives and health need to be halted.”

    Even HRW’s own World Report 2022 cited UN findings that sanctions had exacerbated Venezuela’s economic and social crises. Yet HRW apparently considers the burden warranted, which invokes Madeleine Albright’s infamous defense of Iraq sanctions: “we think the price is worth it.”

     Follow-the-flag humanitarianism

     HRW has long maintained a “revolving door” relationship with the US government personnel. The organization is also significantly associated with George Soros and his Open Society Foundations. UN Independent Expert and human rights scholar Alfred de Zayas describes how HRW and similar NGOs have become part of what he calls the “human rights industry,” instrumentalizing human rights for geopolitical agendas.

    Unilateral coercive measures are a major component of the US imperial tool kit. But HRW opportunistically fails to note that such sanctions are illegal under international law. In fact, Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits collective penalties against protected persons.

    As Mark Weisbrot with the Center for Economic and Policy Research observes, HRW has “ignored or paid little attention to terrible crimes that are committed in collaboration with the US government in this hemisphere,” while it “has repeatedly and summarily dismissed or ignored sincere and thoroughly documented criticisms of its conflicts of interest.”

     HRW recognizes that the coercive measures against Venezuela, which impact the general populace, have not succeeded in imposing an administration subservient to Washington – what they euphemistically call “restoration of democracy.” So why continue advocating more sanctions and support for Venezuela’s far-right opposition? The answer is that Washington’s NGO epigones talk “reform” but aim at fomenting insurrectionary regime change.

    The post Human Rights Watch Outflanks Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ICE Contracts Avelo Airlines to Fly Deportees

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

    Avelo Airlines has entered into a controversial agreement with US immigration authorities to operate deportation flights, sparking protests from coast to coast. Activists, legal organizations, and local communities are mobilizing against the carrier’s role in deportations. The controversy reflects a broader reckoning with the US’s long and bipartisan history of immigration enforcement.

    Ultra-low budget airline flies gamblers, Hillary Clinton, and now deportees

    Avelo Airlines started off flying gamblers in 1989 as Casino Express. Rebranded in 2005 as Xtra Airlines, it provided air transport for the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign among other ventures. Current CEO and former United Airlines CFO Andrew Levy acquired the carrier in 2021, renamed it Avelo, and expanded from charter flights to low-cost commercial operations.

    Following its California launch on a Burbank-Santa Rosa route, Avelo developed a hub at Tweed New Haven Airport in Connecticut. Avelo continued to expand destinations, most notably with its recent agreement to make federal deportation flights from Arizona starting in May. The “long-term charter” arrangement for the budget airline headquartered in Houston, TX, is with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration Control and Enforcement Agency (ICE).

    Chilling realities of ICE deportation flights

    Research by the advocacy group Witness at the Border tracks ICE flights. Costly military deportation flights have largely been discontinued, leaving the dirty work to charter carriers such as Avelo.

    An exposé by ProPublica revealed appalling conditions on ICE deportation flights by a similar charter carrier, GlobalX. The report states: “Flight attendants received training in how to evacuate passengers but said they weren’t told how to usher out detainees whose hands and legs were bound by shackles.

    Leaving aside the issue of human decency, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) “90-second” rule for accomplishing a full evacuation from an aircraft is impossible to achieve with passengers in chains.

    Private security guards and an ICE officer accompany these ICE Air flights and are the only ones allowed to interact with the deportees, including even talking to them. But only the professional flight attendants, who are FAA certified, are trained in how to evacuate passengers in an emergency.

    So if a plane crashes on the runway, ProPublica cautions, the rules are for the flight attendants to leave the aircraft for safety and abandon the shackled prisoners. Unfortunately, this grim scenario is not hypothetical.

    Snoopy’s airport

    On April 26, protesters lined the entrance to what locals affectionately call Snoopy’s airport. The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport, named after the late cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, is an Avelo Airlines hub. The Democratic Party-aligned Indivisible called the “profiting from pain” protest at the California wine country airport against Avelo’s plan to carry out deportation flights.

    One protester flew an upside-down US flag, a signal of “dire distress in instances of extreme danger,” according to the US Flag Code. A sign proclaimed: “planes to El Salvador are just like trains to Auschwitz – a prison without due process is a concentration camp.”

    “Boycott Avelo,” was the message on one young woman’s sign that implored, “travel should bring families together, not tear them apart.”

    An Immigrant Legal Resource Center activist passed out wallet-sized “red cards” at the demonstration. She reported that nearly a thousand northern Californians have taken their training in recent weeks to defend their friends and neighbors who, regardless of immigration status, have certain rights and protections under the US Constitution.

    At the grassroots level, communities are organizing and resisting. The North Bay Rapid Response Network hotline for reporting immigration enforcement activities dispatches trained legal observers and provides legal defense and support to affected individuals and families. Other resources include VIDAS, Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Legal Aid of Sonoma County, and Sonoma Immigrant Services.

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, New Haven Airport, CT, April 17. (Photo by Henry Lowendorf)

    New Haven no-fly zone

    Blowback against the nativist anti-immigrant wind was also evident across the continent in New Haven, CT. This Avelo Airlines hub city along with the state capital, Hartford, are both designated sanctuary cities. The state of Connecticut itself has also enacted measures limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.

    These politics reflect the demographics of urban Connecticut, which are now largely Latino and African American. Non-Hispanic whites, using Census Bureau terminology, are an urban minority.

    According to local organizer Henry Lowendorf with the US Peace Council, the vast majority in New Haven are “adamantly opposed to the airline massively violating human rights with no judicial process and dumping people in a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

    Over 200 protested Avelo Airlines on April 17 for the second Tuesday in a row, responding to a call by Unidad Latina en Acción, the Semilla Collective, and others. Led by immigrant rights activists, speakers included local and state officials. Even US Senator Richard Blumenthal spoke out against Trump’s immigration outrages.

    Avelo currently benefits from a Connecticut state exemption from fuel taxes, which subsidizes its hub operations in New Haven. The pressure is on for Avelo to either cancel the deportations or pay the fuel levy.

    The state Attorney General William Tong demanded that Avelo confirm that they will not operate deportation flights from Connecticut. But the airline has refused the AG’s request to make public their secret contract with the Homeland Security.

    The continuity of US deportation policy

    Aside from the heated rhetoric, the New York Times reports “deportations haven’t surged under Trump” although he has taken “new and unusual measures.” These have included deporting people to third countries far from their origins and invoking the eighteenth century wartime Alien Enemies Act.

    The NYT concludes that deportations “fall short” from being the threatened mass exodus and, in fact, “look largely similar” to what was accomplished by Joe Biden. Despite all the drama and an initial surge of arrests, the pace of deportations under Trump has been slower than under Biden.

    Barack Obama still retains the title of “deporter in chief” with 3.2 million individuals expelled. And Joe Biden still holds the recordfor the most expulsions by a US president in a single year if migrant removals under the Title 42 Covid-era public health provision are included (technically “expulsions” but not “deportations”).

    Going forward, however, we can rest assured that Trump will try to beat those records. Lost in the mainstream discourse on the migrant controversy is the reality that US policy, such as sanctions, are a major factor driving migration to the US. This takes place in the context of the largest immigration surge into the US ever, eclipsing the “great immigration boom” of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

    Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26. (Photo by Roger D. Harris)

    Protests expand to other Avelo cities

    A petition is circulating with some 35,000 signatures to-date demanding cessation of the Avelo deportation flights. According to the petition, a leaked memo discloses that Avelo’s decision to enter the deportation business was financially motivated to offset other losses.

    Boycott Avelo protests have expanded to other destinations served by the airline, including Rochester NY, Burbank CA, Daytona Beach FL, Eugene OR, and Wilmington DE. The campaign against Avelo is growing – locally, regionally, and nationally.

    As the sign at the boycott Avelo protest in Santa Rosa reminds us: “immigration makes America great!”


    The author at the Boycott Avelo Airlines protest, Santa Rosa Airport, CA, April 26.

    The post ICE Contracts Avelo Airlines to Fly Deportees first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • The Failures of Occupy Prefigured the Successes of Trump

    “The economy is great! You can go home to watch TV now. The 1%,” Oakland Occupy satire, November 2, 2011.

    Like the proverbial spark that ignited a prairie fire, the Occupy movement that began on September 17, 2011, in New York City went viral. Rallying around the slogan, “We are the 99%,” the movement initially mobilized large numbers of what might be called the newly dispossessed. They were looking for remedies to a neoliberal order which was not working for them.

    Elements of this same constituency of the dispossessed today are in the Trump camp in part due to the failure of the Democrats to embrace and address their issues. Trump, if there is any upside, presents an opportunity to organize against an increasingly exposed imperial/neoliberal order. Popular protests are called for on April 5. But will they speak to the causes and not just the symptoms, repeating the mistakes of the Occupy movement?

    Occupy swept the nation

    At its peak in fall 2011, hundreds of thousands participated in Occupy rallies, marches, and encampments across the US.

    By early October 2011, Occupy reached the San Francisco Bay Area, where I participated. On October 5, a rally was held at the Federal Reserve Building in San Francisco. Just five days later, protesters demonstrated at Oscar Grant Plaza (so renamed by the protesters after a Black victim of police violence) in Oakland, soon to become an epicenter of militance.

    As a handmade sign under the “official” tree of Oakland declared: “An oak tree is just a little nut that decided to hold its ground.”

    By October 25, Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen was injured by police at a demonstration in Oakland, generating more publicity and support for the movement. A massive “general strike” on November 2 brought out tens of thousands and temporarily shut down the huge Port of Oakland.

    The children’s brigade calls for a general strike, Oakland Occupy.

    Baby boomer leftists, such as myself, were beside ourselves. It looked like the glory days of the anti-Vietnam War movement had returned. We had seen a temporary resurgence of anti-system sentiment eight years before with opposition to the Iraq War runup. Back then, on February 15, 2003, we had marched in the largest international anti-war demonstration in history.

    When that supposed apostle of hope Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush, the latter’s secretary of war Robert Gates continued and so did the Iraq War. Overnight, the Democrats became the party of war, and the peace movement dissipated. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

    Returning to the euphoria of the early Occupy Days, I went to rallies and chatted people up. What I discovered was that very few of the newly mobilized had ever been in an anti-Iraq War demonstration, let alone marched against the US military in Vietnam. This younger cohort did not even identify with the former protest movements. But they were angry.

    These were folks who were under- or unemployed. Who had lost their homes, their jobs, or their health insurance. They had dependents they could not care for.

    And they were resentful. The signs proliferated: “Banks get bailed out, we get sold out.” Or “Trickledown economics is a fancy way for to describe the rich pissing on the poor.” In short, “the system is not broken, it’s fixed.”

    While the rich and privileged – the so-called 1% – were the main target of this upwelling of mass antipathy, other culprits were identified. In my mixing with the multitudes, I also heard another undercurrent. This was resentment of immigrants, expressed not only by middle-income Anglos but by people of color of lesser means, including immigrants themselves.

    The genius of the Trump phenomenon is that it has been able to opportunistically scapegoat anti-immigrant resentment, thereby assuming the mantle of populism. At the same time, ironies of ironies, the reactionaries are represented by literally the 1% of the 1% in the form of Elon Musk.

    Eclipse of Occupy

    Failing to address the concerns of the dispossessed, Occupy faded into a historical footnote in less than one year. The anarchist-infused zeitgeist of Occupy was both its great strength and its ultimate fatal flaw. Horizontal decision-making and consensus-based assemblies were appealing and, initially, the participatory spaces filled.

    The innovative call-and-response “mic-check” amplified voices where sound equipment was banned. However, “mic check” was fetishized. Slow and inefficient, it favored slogans over examination of complex subjects, leading to frustration. Confident speakers with loud voices were privileged. What was meant to be inclusive reinforced subtle exclusions.

    In prefiguring the future, Occupy became untethered from the immediate needs of the present.

    Living in a tent camp or even sitting on cold concrete through marathon meetings limited the participatory pool. Folks had jobs they had to go to and dependents to care for.

    Most lethal of the deadly faults was avoidance of specific demands. The theory was that making demands of a corrupt system would legitimize that system. Prefiguring the future was counterposed to addressing immediate concerns.

    The prevailing mistrust of reforms characterizing the Occupy movement lacked the strategic sophistication of, say, Lenin who explained: “We support every revolutionary movement against the existing order of things… we must work for reforms and use them to prepare for revolution.”

    Occupy became plagued by a lack of strategic focus. This refusal to issue concrete demands alienated those dispossessed by the prevailing order who had concrete problems. People, especially those who had never protested before, got disillusioned and drifted away.

    Yes, the coercive arm of the state also contributed to the demise of Occupy. But the violent clearance of the encampments, in my experience, came after the tide had ebbed.

    The Black Bloc or Antifa (short for anti-fascist) elements, at least in Oakland, also contributed to the expiration of Occupy by driving away supporters who had no interest or ability to militarily skirmish with the police. Occupy’s shunning of designated leaders left the Antifa unaccountable even when the confrontations that they provoked were used as an excuse by the state to shut Occupy down.

    Fighting Oligarchy and Hands Off initiatives

    With its preoccupation with prefiguring the future, the fundamental failing of Occupy was its inability to address the immediate concerns of the working class. More recently, in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, Bernie Sanders gathered attention with a similar observation regarding his political affiliation: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”

    This discovery of the class loyalties of the Democrats is correct, though not exactly a revelation to many of us.

    Sanders, accompanied by congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been drawing larger crowds than his previous presidential campaigns on a Fighting Oligarchy tour. This is a positive indication of mass discontent with the slash and burn tactics of the present US administration.

    Similar to the earlier Occupy movement, the Fighting Oligarchy tour opposes authoritarianism, in the present case, in the form of Trump. Their focus on the current occupant in the White House, however, suggests that a mere change of personnel is the solution to a far more systematic degeneration.

    Like Occupy, they are short on advocating for hard-hitting specifics such as repeal of Taft Hartley, issues that would materially appeal to and benefit working people. Unlike Occupy, they are not in the least bit concerned about cooption. Quite the opposite for this pair, who the Black Agenda Report calls “sheepdogs” for the Democratic Party. Herding disaffected voters back into their party is their mission.

    Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, along with a broad mélange of anti-Trump interests, are organizing for nationwide “Hands Off” protests on April 5. Among the leading groups making the dump-Trump call are MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party. These well-funded 501(c)(4) NGOs, while posing as grassroots, are appendages of the Democratic Party, albeit mostly with its “progressive” wing.

    The explicitly anti-billionaire initiative accepts funds only from supposedly nice billionaires like George Soros and not nasty ones. An earlier anti-Trump initiative, Families Over Billionaires, also part of the present Hands Off coalition, also received substantial billionaire funding. Their ad hominem critiques of extreme wealth focus on the personal characteristics of the exploiters and not on the neoliberal system (the current form of capitalism) which produces great inequities.

    While the Hands Off coalition primarily addresses domestic issues, key among the Democrats’ demands is full reinstatement of military aid to Ukraine. However, waving the Ukrainian flag while suppressing the Palestinian one is not exactly a winning formula for appealing to a polity that just gave the Republicans a trifecta of the White House and both chambers of congress on the (insincere) platform of ending endless wars.

    With record low public approval ratings, the Democrats are also promoting restoring USAID regime-change programs. And when they dare murmur a critical comment about Israel, it is about the person of Netanyahu and not about the Zionist enterprise.

    Reflecting genuine grassroots peace sentiment, an entirely different coalition will also be in Washington on April 5. The Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, Jewish Voice for Peace, and others will be demonstrating against genocide in Palestine and for a US arms embargo of Israel.

    The time is ripe to regroup and reorganize a counter movement to the prevailing order. The signs paraded by the Occupy movement are ever relevant today: “Imperialist America is [still] humanity’s number one enemy.”

    On the march to close the Port of Oakland.

    The post The Failures of Occupy Prefigured the Successes of Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Détente with Venezuela

    Trump’s corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – “speak loudly AND carry a big stick” – has not been applied full force on Venezuela… as of yet. Instead, the new administration appears to be testing a more nuanced approach. In his first administration, he succeeded in crashing the Venezuelan economy and creating misery among the populace but not in the goal of changing the “regime.”

    Back in 2019, the Bolivarian Revolution, initiated by Hugo Chávez and carried forward by his successor, current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, was teetering on collapse under Trump’s “maximum pressure” offensive. The economy had tanked, inflation was out of control, and the GDP was in freefall. Over 50 countries recognized Washington-anointed “interim president” Juan Guaidó’s parallel government.

    In the interregnum between Trump administrations, Biden embraced his predecessor’s unilateral coercive economic measures, euphemistically called sanctions, but with minimal or temporary relief. He certified the incredulous charge that Venezuela posed an immediate and extraordinary threat to US national security, as Trump and Obama had before him. Biden also continued to recognize the inept and corrupt Guaidó as head-of-state, until Guaidó’s own opposition group booted him out.

    Despite enormous challenges, Venezuela resisted and did so with some remarkable success, bringing us to the present.

    Run-up to the second Trump administration

    In the run-up to Trump’s inauguration, speculation on future US-Venezuela relations ran from cutting a peaceful-coexistence deal, to imposing even harsher sanctions, to even military intervention.

    Reuters predicted that Trump’s choice of hardliner Marco Rubio at secretary of state augured an intensification of the regime-change campaign. Another right-wing Floridian of Cuban descent, Mauricio Claver-Carone was tapped as the special envoy for Latin America. He had been Trump’s senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs and credited with shaping Trump’s earlier aggressive stance toward Venezuela. Furthermore, on the campaign trail, Trump himself commented: “When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over; we would have gotten to all that oil.”

    At his Senate confirmation hearing on January 15, Rubio described Venezuela as a “narco-trafficking organization that has empowered itself of a nation state.” He was unanimously confirmed the very first day of the new administration.

    The supposedly opposition Democrats all stampeded in his support, although Rubio severely criticized the previous Biden administration for being too soft on Venezuela. Rubio’s criticism was largely unwarranted because, except for minor tweaks, Biden had seamlessly continued the hybrid war against Venezuela.

     Grenell Trumps Rubio

     The first visit abroad by a Trump administration official was made by Ric Grenell, presidential envoy for special missions. Grenell briefly served in Trump’s first administration as acting director of national intelligence, becoming the first openly gay person in a Cabinet-level position.

    Grenell flew to Caracas and posed for a photo-op, shaking hands with President Maduro on January 31. This was a noteworthy step away from hostility and towards rapprochement between two countries that have not had formal diplomatic relations since 2019.

    The day after the Grenell visit, Rubio embarked on an uninspiring tour of right-wing Latin American countries. That same day, General License 41 allowing Chevron to operate in Venezuela automatically renewed, which was a development that Rubio had advocated against.

    Diplomacy of dignity

    Maduro entered negotiations with Grenell with a blend of strategic engagement and assertive resistance, aiming to navigate Venezuela’s economic challenges while maintaining sovereignty. The approach had win-win outcomes, although the spin in the respective countries was quite different.

    Grenell claimed a “win” from the meeting with the release of six “American hostages” without giving anything in return. Venezuela, for its part, got rid of a half dozen “mercenaries.” Neither country has released the names of all the former detainees.

    Grenell took a victory lap for getting Venezuela to accept back migrants who had left the country, a key Trump priority. Maduro welcomed them as part of his Misión Vuelta a la Patria (Return to the Homeland Program), which has repatriated tens of thousands since its inception in 2018.

    Trump’s special envoy boasted that Venezuela picked up the migrants and flew them back home for free. Maduro was pleased that the US-sanctioned national airline Conviasa was allowed to land in the US and transport the citizens back in dignity. Congratulating the pilots and other workers, Maduro said: “The US tried to finish off Conviasa, yet here it is, strong.”

    Evolution of imperialist strategy

    Trump’s special representative for Venezuela in his first administration, Elliot Abrams, believes his former boss sold out the shop. He criticized Grenell’s visit as functioning to help legitimize Maduro as Venezuela’s rightful president, which it did.

    In contrast, Robert O’Brien believes, “Grenell scored a significant diplomatic victory.” What is noteworthy is that O’Brien replaced John Bolton as Trump’s national security advisor in 2019 and had worked with Abrams as co-architect of the “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela, yet now acknowledges it is time for a shift.

    Speaking from experience, O’Brien commented: “Maximum economic sanctions have not changed the regime in Venezuela.” He now advocates: “Keeping sanctions against Venezuela in place, while at the same time, granting American and partner nation companies licenses.”

     According to Grenell, Trump no longer seeks regime change in Venezuela, but wants to focus on advancing US interests, namely facilitating deportations of migrants, while halting irregular migration to the US and preventing inflation of gas prices.

    Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis suggests that Trump’s strategy is to adroitly use sanctions. Rather than driving Venezuela into the arms of China and Russia, Trump wants to incrementally erode sovereignty, compel sweetheart deals with foreign corporations such as Chevron, and eventually capture control of its oil industry.

    Venezuela’s successes force imperial accommodation

     Not only did “maximum pressure” fail to achieve imperial goals in the past, but the Bolivarian Revolution’s accomplishments today have necessitated a more “pragmatic” approach by the US.

    Venezuela has resolutely developed resilience against sanctions, achieving an extraordinary economic turnaround with one of the highest GDP growth rates in the hemisphere. Venezuelan oil production is at its highest level since 2019. The oil export market has been diversified with China as the primary customer, although the US is still prominent in second place.

    However, if Chevron operations in Venezuela get completely shuttered, that would take a bite out of the recovery. The announced withdrawal of the company’s license departed from the initial engagement approach. But at the same time, it might be a short-term concession to foreign policy hardliners in exchange for domestic support. The license’s six-month wind-down period offers plenty of room for the two governments to negotiate their future oil relationship.

    The government is incrementally mitigating the economic dominance by the oil sector. It has also made major strides towards food self-sufficiency, which is an under-reported victory that no other petrostate has ever accomplished.

    It has reformed the currency exchange system reducing rate volatility, although a recent devaluation is worrisome. Tax policy too has become more efficient.

    Further, the collapse of the US-backed opposition leaves Washington with a less effective bench to carry its water. The opposition coalition is divided over whether to boycott or participate in the upcoming May 25 elections. The USAID debacle has now left the squabbling insurrectionists destitute. (Venezuela never received any humanitarian aid.).

    Washington still officially recognizes the long defunct 2015 National Assembly as the “legitimate government” of Venezuela. At the same time, Trump inherited the baggage of González Urrutia as the “lawful president-elect” (but not as “the president”), leaving the US with two parallel faux governments to juggle along with the actual one. Lacking a popular base in Venezuela,  González Urrutia abjectly whimpered: “As I recently told Secretary of State Marco Rubio: We are counting on you to help us solve our problems.”

     Although US sanctions will undoubtedly continue, Venezuela’s adaptations blunt their effectiveness. Venezuela’s resistance, bolstered by its natural oil and other reserves, have allowed that Latin American country to force some accommodation from the US. In contrast, the imperialists are going for the jugular with resistance-strong but natural resource-poor Cuba.

     The future of détente

    Shifting political forces can endanger the fragile détente. Indeed, on February 26, Trump announced that oil licenses would be revoked, supposedly because Venezuela was not accepting migrants back fast enough. The Florida Congressional delegation, it is rumored, threatened to withhold approval of his prized Reconciliation Bill, if Trump did not cancel.

    Clearly there is opposition from his party, both at the official and grassroots levels, against détente with Venezuela. As for the Democrats, elements have distinguished themselves from Trump by outflanking him from the right. The empire’s newspaper of record, the New York Times, recently ran a piece calling for military intervention in Venezuela.

    According to Carlos Ron, former Venezuelan deputy foreign minister, the issue of détente between Washington and Caracas goes beyond this particular historical moment and even beyond the specifics of Venezuela to a fundamental contradiction: the empire seeks domination while the majority of the world’s peoples and nations seek self-determination. Until that is resolved, the struggle continues.

    The post Trump’s Détente with Venezuela first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Venezuelan President Maduro Assumes a Third Term

    Roger D. Harris views wanted poster for González at the Caracas airport. Photo: Roger Harris.
    Roger D. Harris views wanted poster for González at the Caracas airport. Photo: Roger Harris.

    The first thing greeting me as I disembarked from my flight in Caracas was a wanted poster for one Edmundo González Urrutia. The reward was $100,000. Not to be outdone, the US had slapped a $25 million bounty on the head of President Maduro and lesser amounts on other Venezuelan leaders.

    Both González and the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, claimed that he would be the one to be inaugurated in two days. I had come to accompany the inauguration and for the concurrent antifascist festival.

    History repeats itself – first tragedy, farce, and then silliness

    From its inception with the election of Huge Chávez in 1998, the US has interfered in and attempted to overthrow by extra-legal means Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Tragically, US unilateral coercive measures (i.e., sanctions) alone have caused an estimated 100,000 deaths.

    A short-lived US-backed coup in 2002 temporarily deposed Chávez. And all three elections of Nicolás Maduro (2013, 2018, 2024) were deemed “fraudulent” prior to the actual votes, on the unspoken grounds that only a candidate suitable to Washington could be legitimate.

    Farcically, in 2019, the US recognized a 35-year-old security asset, who had never run for national office and was unknown to 80% of Venezuelans, as “interim president.” That lasted until 2023, when Juan Guaidó’s own opposition bloc gave the corrupt puppet the boot.

    Washington’s machinations in the runup to the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election degenerated into just plain silliness.

    The US designated María Corina Machado, from the opposition’s far-right insurrectionary fringe, as the “unified leader” of what in fact is a fractious gaggle of warring politicians.

    Machado, as the US knew in advance, had been disqualified from running for office back in 2015 because of constitutionally mandated offenses. So she personally chose the completely unknown González, who had no political experience, as her surrogate without even the pretense of some public vetting process.

    The infirm surrogate candidate spent the 2024 campaign convalescing in Caracas, running on the supremely unpopular platform of privatizing everything and realigning Venezuela’s foreign policy to mirror the US’s.

    Unsurprisingly, the Venezuelan electoral authority, which was subsequently verified by their supreme court, found González lost with 43% of the vote compared to Maduro’s 52%. After all, shuttering public schools and hospitals, while cheering genocide in Palestine, is not exactly a winning ticket.

    Equally unsurprisingly, Washington called “fraud.” González’s handlers claimed that they had “overwhelming” evidence that he won, which has been echoed in the corporate press. But to this day, González has failed to present that evidence to the Venezuelan authorities even though he was summoned to do so by their supreme court.

    Instead, González voluntarily left Venezuela on September, undermining the already deflated far-right opposition.

    The silliness continued four months after the election, when the Biden administration woke up and declared González to be “president-elect.” On cue, the hapless González pledged to return to Caracas on inauguration day to receive the presidential sash.

    Massively pathetic

    The far-right opposition had called for “massive” demonstrations the day before Maduro’s inauguration. Proof that these fizzled was the non-reporting in the western press of their pathetically small turnout and the huge demonstrations that same day in support of Maduro throughout the country.

    World Antifascist Celebration was held concurrent with the presidential inauguration in Venezuela. Photo: Roger Harris.

    Instead, the State Department-sycophantic press went into a hilarious frenzy reporting that Machado had been kidnapped, her guard mortally shot, etc…all of which proved to be embarrassingly fake news. Machado herself did make a brief public appearance before returning to self-imposed hiding.

    Antifascist celebration

    Meanwhile on January 9, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez addressed over two thousand delegates from over 100 countries who had been invited to accompany the presidential inauguration and the concurrent World Antifascist Celebration. Elder westerners, such as myself, actually added diversity to the youthful and predominantly Global South assemblage.

    Rodríguez warned: “There is no time to waste; we must fight united against fascism.” She cited the spread of fascism in Europe along with more local manifestations such as Argentine President Javier Milei and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

    She contrasted this to a “new world being built” with BRICS and other Global South initiatives. Concluding with “we were born anti-imperialist, and our future is anti-imperialist,” she pledged support for the Palestinian struggle.

    Inauguration day

    >The next day, January 10, the presidential inauguration proceeded without incident. Maduro proclaimed: “I have never been, nor will I ever be, president of the oligarchies, of the richest families, of supremacists, or of imperialists. I have one ruler: the common people.”

    On his much ballyhooed international “victory tour” of right-wing countries (including the US), González had repeatedly pledged to be in Caracas to be inaugurated. Instead, he returned to Washington where he reportedly got hit by an e-bike.

    Washington and the folks that play-act as the “free press” continue to obsess about the results of last July’s election. In contrast, sentiment on the street in Venezuela is affirmative with a desire to move on.

    President Maduro comments on the beauty of the flags and banners at the antifascist festival, especially the Palestinian.

    Maduro addresses the internationals

    The following day, Maduro addressed the anti-fascist celebration, including large delegations from Russia, Cuba, and Iran. Looking out at a sea of wildly waving international flags, he commented on its beauty.

    His address was repeatedly interrupted by spontaneous chants. He mentioned Cuba and soon the entire auditorium echoed “¡Bloqueo No! ¡Cuba Sí!” His very mention of the Middle East provoked “Free, Free Palestine!”

    Maduro explained that history is written by the conquerors, but they have not been able to hide the resistance. Then he gave a history lesson on the anti-fascist struggle, starting with a homage to the Indigenous women leaders against Spanish colonialism. The US and the EU, he commented, do not like to be reminded of their colonial background “yet they still see us in the Global South as their servants.”

    The Venezuelan president recalled the heroic victory over fascism, symbolized by planting the Soviet flag over the Reichstag 80 years ago. He commended the civil-military unity achieved in Venezuela.

    Concluding, he pledged support for the liberation of Puerto Rico. He then invited representatives of the Cuban and Puerto Rican delegations on stage with their nearly identical flags to sing “Son de Cuba a Puerto Rico” on the deep connections between the two countries.

    Following his address, the Venezuelan president awarded medals of honor to the supreme court president, ministers of defense and transportation, and other government officials who had been illegally sanctioned by the US the day before. They had had the temerity to support their constitutionally elected president, instead of González.

    Puerto Ricans and Cubans at the antifascist festival with Pres. Maduro. Photo: Roger Harris.

    The antifascist celebration continued even after the official party departed. The auditorium erupted into a spirited mosh pit of people waving their national flags and dancing to “Nicolás Maduro el Gallo Pinto del Pueblo Venezolano,” the unofficial Maduro campaign song.

    Propitious prospects for Venezuela

    Forecasts are favorable for Venezuela’s quarter-century-old Bolivarian Revolution. Initiated by Hugo Chávez and seamlessly carried forward by Nicolás Maduro, it is threatened by an increasingly aggressive Yankee hegemon. Venezuela’s regional role will be pivotal with key left-leaning presidents in Brazil and Colombia up for reelection in the next two years.

    The Venezuelan economy grew by more than 9% in 2024, the Venezuelan president reported in his annual address to the nation on January 15. “We have recovered the productive capacities of the country.” Alex Saab, the minister of industry and former US political prisoner, was credited with attracting $52 billion in new investments.

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  • US-backed Venezuelan Opposition Never Tried to Win the Presidency

    “On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.

    Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.

    Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed by the US. Her platform of extreme neoliberal shock therapy was rejected by the electorate. Most Venezuelans oppose her call to privatize nearly all state institutions serving the people – schools, hospitals, public housing, food assistance, and the state oil company, which funds social programs. Nor is there any popular appetite for Machado’s plan to radically reorient foreign policy to subordination to Washington and support of US imperial wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

    A hagiography, such as this one by the Times, includes an investigation into the life and miracles attributed to the would-be saint. The article on Machado, penned by one Julie Turkewitz, does just that and more. The article also unintentionally reveals that the far-right opposition advocates foreign intervention to overthrow the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. Its title clearly states: “Trump to Save Her Country.”

    It took the US until November 19, nearly four months, to declare González as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela. The recognition likely signals a shift in the lame-duck Biden administration’s policy from negotiation to all-out hostility towards Venezuela, paving the way for a smooth handover to the new Trump team. Previously, Washington simply called for a “peaceful transition.”

    The miraculous opposition primary

    Turkewitz reported that Machado won “an overwhelming victory in a primary race.” She uses the weasel-construction “a primary” rather than “the primary,” because Machado’s “primary” was not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate. That NGO, as the article admits, is funded by the US.

    Machado prevailed in a crowded field of 13 candidates with a miraculous 92% of the vote. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.

    The Times intimates that Machado “galvanized a nation” around an opposition agenda. That is something Uncle Sam has so far failed to achieve despite a quarter of a century of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

    The empire’s newspaper of record reports that Machado is “wildly popular.” But that’s in the halls of the US Congress, where she was vetted and then anointed “leader of the opposition” even before the so-called primary in Venezuela. Unfortunately for Machado that popularity with the Yankee politicos did not travel as well back home. In Venezuela, even within her corner of the far-right, Machado is resented. Far from unified, the opposition in Venezuela is today ever more divided.

    Contested election results

    The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ).

    González, the person whom the Times declared the winner, came in second with 43% of the vote, according to the official count. González claimed that he had evidence that proved he won the presidency, but he refused to show it to the TSJ, even when he was summoned to do so.

    Moreover, the Times reports that the US-backed opposition has tallies from some 80% of the precincts, which were published on a private blog site. Sources supporting the Venezuelan government then published analyses showing that evidence to be bogus, while counter claims from those favoring regime change purport to confirm their validity.

    The problem of privately posting evidence, while refusing to submit it to official channels, is that it leaves the Venezuelan authorities no constitutional path for accepting it even if it were valid. The question ignored by the article is: If “their team collected and published vote-tally receipts” proving its victory, why did they not settle the matter by submitting them?

    The answer, not one that the Times would admit to, is that the far-right opposition and its US handlers never made a good faith attempt to win the election.

    Washington’s strategy was to delegitimize the election, not to win it

    The opposition’s platform could never be a winning ticket, which they knew. The only way to achieve it would be an extra-legal regime-change operation predicated on delegitimizing the democratically-elected government. And that is precisely what is being played out today in Venezuela.

    There were a number of more moderate opposition figures with experience and popular followings. Had the US been interested in simply an electoral defeat of the ruling Socialist Party, they could have backed a less extreme candidate and offered to ease their punishing “sanctions” on Venezuela. Instead, Washington backed the far right, which took the supremely unpopular position of advocating for yet more sanctions on their own country to precipitate regime-change.

    With nine other contenders on the presidential ballot, name recognition was important. Literally nobody had heard of González until Machado personally chose him as her surrogate. She had been disqualified from running back in 2015 for constitutionally mandates offenses.

    Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, lacked ballot status because her party had boycotted recent Venezuelan elections in keeping with the far-right’s stance that the Venezuelan state is not legitimate. Once the party decided to again participate in the electoral arena in 2024, she could have petitioned for recognition of her party. But she didn’t bother.

    González, who had been in retirement, had no political following or experience. He had been a Venezuelan diplomat to El Salvador back in the 1980s, where he had been implicated in supporting US-backed death squads.

    Maduro crisscrossed the country in an all-out campaign effort, exhaustingly visiting over 300 municipalities. His ruling Socialist Party, in power since 1999, had cadre in every corner of the country who were mobilized. They didn’t need to be told that an opposition victory could mean not only loss of a job, but they might face retribution from the far right.

    In contrast to Maduro’s strong ground game, the US-backed opposition was weak in the streets. González himself sat out the campaign in Caracas, while Machado barnstormed the hinterlands with a paper poster bearing his visage. Indicative of popular following were the turnouts at political rallies, both during the campaign and after, where Maduro attracted many times more supporters than González.

    Forecast

     The Times not only maintains that González “won the July vote by a wide margin” but he “should be taking office in January.” González, too, claims he’ll be back in Caracas for the inauguration. After the election, he voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain in a transfer negotiated with Caracas and Madrid governments.

    The Times further reports that Machado predicts Maduro will voluntarily “negotiate his own exit.” Even more fantastic, the Times asserts González “garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.”

    In a revealing lapse from her otherwise editorializing, Turkewitz correctly reported that Machado “has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.” Conveniently omitted is that effort included a number of coup attempts, including the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed then President Chávez. Machado signed the infamous Carmona Decree then, which voided the constitution and disbanded the courts, the legislature, and executive.

    That 2002 coup lasted less than 48 hours because the people of Venezuela spontaneously rose up and confronted the traitorous military. If Machado indeed had the backing of 7 in 10 Venezuelans, she too could have taken the presidential palace regardless of the official election report.

    The Times calls her Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” for her “steely resolve.” Meanwhile Hinterlaces, reporting from Venezuela, speculates Machado has fled the country:

    The failure of the insurrectionary strategy in the absence of a social explosion or a rupture in the Bolivarian civic-military alliance, the lack of convincing evidence on Edmundo González’s alleged electoral victory, since they do not really have the minutes to demonstrate it, convinced Machado to leave the country.

    Nicolás Maduro will be inaugurated on January 10. As confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court, the majority voted for him to continue Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

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  • Why Cuba Hasn’t Adjusted to US Sanctions after Six Decades

    For the thirty-second time in so many years, the US blockade of Cuba was globally condemned at the UN General Assembly’s annual vote in October. Only Tel Aviv joined Washington in defending the collective punishment, which is illegal under international law.

    For the vast majority of Cubans, who were born after the first unilateral coercive measures were imposed, life under these conditions is the only normalcy they have known. Even friends sympathetic to socialism and supporters of Cuba may question why the Cubans have not simply learned to live under these circumstances after 64 years.

    The explanation, explored below, is that the relatively mild embargo of 1960 has been periodically intensified and made ever more devastatingly effective. The other major factor is that the geopolitical context has changed to Cuba’s disadvantage. These factors in turn have had cumulatively detrimental effects.

    Cuba in the new world order

     The Cuban Revolution achieved remarkable initial successes for a small, resource-poor island with a history of colonial exploitation.

    After the 1959 revolution, the population quickly attained 100% literacy. Life expectancy and infant mortality rates soon rivaled far richer countries, through the application of socialized medicine, prioritizing primary care. Cuba also became a world sports powerhouse and made noteworthy advances in biotechnology. At the same time, Cuban troops aided in the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa, among many other exercises of internationalism.

    Cuba did not make those advances alone but benefitted from the solidarity of the Soviet Union and other members of the Socialist Bloc. From the beginning of the revolution, the USSR helped stabilize the economy, particularly in the areas of agriculture and manufacturing. Notably, Cuba exported sugar to the Soviets at above-market prices.

    The USSR’s military assistance in the form of training and equipment contributed to the Cuban’s successfully repelling the US’s Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. In addition, the Socialist Bloc backed Cuba diplomatically in the United Nations and other international fora. East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, for example, also assisted with economic aid, investment, and trade to help develop the Cuban economy.

    The implosion of the Socialist Bloc in the late 1980s and early 1990s severely impacted Cuba.

    No longer buffered by these allies, the full weight of the US-led regime-change campaign sent Cuba reeling into what became known as the “Special Period.” After an initial GDP contraction of about 35% between 1989 and 1993, the Cubans somewhat recovered by the 2000s. But, now, conditions on the island are again increasingly problematic.

    A new multipolar world may be in birth, but it has not been able to sufficiently aid Cuba in this time of need. China and Vietnam along with post-Soviet Russia, remnants of the earlier Socialist Bloc, still maintain friendly commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuban but nowhere the former levels of cooperation.

    Ratcheting up of the US regime-change campaign

     The ever-tightening US blockade is designed to ensure that socialism does not succeed; to strangle in the cradle all possible alternatives to the established imperial order.

    The initial restrictions imposed by Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 banned US exports to Cuba, except for food and medicine, and reduced Cuba’s sugar export quota to the US. Shortly before the end of his term in 1961, the US president broke diplomatic relations.

    He also initiated covert operations against Cuba, which would be significantly strengthened by his successor, John Kennedy, and subsequent US administrations. Since then, Cuba has endured countless acts of terrorism as well as attempts to assassinate the revolution’s political leadership.

    John Kennedy had campaigned in 1960, accusing the Eisenhower-Nixon administration of failing to sufficiently combat the spread of communism. Kennedy was determined to prevent communism from gaining a foothold in America’s “backyard.” He made deposing the “Castro regime” a national priority and imposed a comprehensive economic embargo.

    After Kennedy’s failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year, he initiated Operation Mongoose. The president put his brother Robert Kennedy in charge of attempting to overthrow the revolution by covert means. This CIA operation of sabotage and other destabilization methods was meant to bring to Cuba “the terrors of the earth.”

    Post-Soviet era

    Subsequent US administrations continued the policy of blockade, occupation of Guantánamo, and overt and covert destabilization efforts.

    Former CIA director and then-US President George H.W. Bush seized the opportunity in 1992 posed by the implosion of the Socialist Bloc. The bipartisan Cuban Democracy Act passed under his watch. Popularly called the Torricelli Act after a Democratic Party congressional sponsor, it codified the embargo into law, which could only be reversed by an act of congress.

    The act strengthened the embargo into a blockade by prohibiting US subsidiaries of companies operating in third countries from trading with Cuba. Ships that had traded with Cuba were banned from entering the US for 180 days. The economic stranglehold on Cuba was tightened by obstructing sources of foreign currency, which further limited Cuba’s ability to engage in international trade.

    The screws were again tightened in 1996 under US President Bill Clinton with the Helms-Burton Act. Existing unilateral coercive economic measures were reinforced and expanded.

    The act also added restrictions to discourage foreign investment in Cuba, particularly in US-owned properties that had been expropriated after the Cuban Revolution. The infamous Title III of the act allowed US citizens to file lawsuits in US courts against foreign companies “trafficking” in such confiscated properties.

    Title III generated substantial blowback and some countermeasures from US allies, such as the European Union and Canada, because of its extraterritorial application in violation of international trade agreements and sovereignty. As a result, Title III was temporarily waived.

    Later, US President Barack Obama modified US tactics during his watch by reopening diplomatic relations with Cuba and easing some restrictions, in order to unapologetically achieve the imperial strategy of regime change more effectively.

    But even that mild relief was reversed by his successor’s “maximum pressure” campaign. In 2019, US President Donald Trump revived Title III. By that time, the snowballing effects of the blockade had generated a progressively calamitous economic situation in Cuba.

    Just days before the end of his term, Trump reinstated Cuba onto the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) after Obama had lifted it in 2015. The designation has had a huge impact on Cuba by reducing trade with third countries fearful of secondary sanctions by the US, by cutting off most international finance, and by further discouraging tourism.

    President Joe Biden continued most of the Trump “maximum pressure” measures, including the SSOT designation, while adding some of this own. This came at a time when the island was especially hard hit by the Covid pandemic, which halted tourism, one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign currency.

    In the prescient words of Lester D. Mallory, US deputy assistant secretary of state back in 1960, the imperialists saw the opportunity to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

    US siege on Cuba perfected

    In addition to the broad history outlined above of incessant regime-change measures by every US administration since the inception of the Cuban Revolution, some collateral factors are worthy of mention.

    Major technological advances associated with computer technology and AI have been applied by the US to more effectively track and enforce its coercive measures. In addition, the fear of US fines for violation of its extraterritorial prohibitions on third-country actors has led to overcompliance.

    Uncle Sam has also become ever more inventive. Visa-free entry (VWP) into the US is no longer available to most European and some other nationals if they stopped in Cuba, thereby significantly discouraging tourism to the island.

    The internal political climate in the US has also shifted with the neoconservative takeover of both major parties. Especially now with the second Trump presidency, Cuba has fewer friends in Washington, and its enemies now have even less constraints on their regime-change campaigns. This is coupled by a generally more aggressive international US force projection.

    Under the blockade, certain advances of the revolution were turned into liabilities. The revolution with its universal education, mechanization of agriculture, and collective or cooperative organization of work freed campesinos from the 24/7 drudgery of peasant agriculture. Today, fields remain idle because, among other factors, the fuel and spare parts for the tractors are embargoed.

    Cuba’s allies, especially Venezuela, itself a victim of a US blockade, have been trying to supply Cuba with desperately needed oil. Construction of 14 oil tankers commissioned abroad by Venezuela, which could transport that oil, has been blocked. Direct proscriptions by the US on shipping companies and insurance underwriters have also limited the oil lifeline.

    Without the fuel, electrical power, which run pumps to supply basic drinking water, cannot be generated. As a consequence, Cuba has recently experienced island-wide blackouts along with food and water shortages. This highlights how the blockade is essentially an economic dirty war against the civilian population.

    Cumulative effects on Cuban society

    Life is simply hard in Cuba under the US siege and is getting harder. This has led to recently unprecedented levels of out migration. The consequent brain-drain and labor shortages exacerbate the situation. Moreover, the relentless scarcity and the associated compromised quality of life under such conditions has had a corrosive effect over time.

    Under the pressure of the siege, Cuba has been forced to adopt measures that undermine socialist equality but which generate needed revenue. For example, Obama and subsequent US presidents have encouraged the formation of a small business strata, expanding on the limited “reforms” instituted during Raúl Castro’s time as Cuba’s president.

     The Cubans will surely persevere as they have in the past. “The country’s resilience is striking,” according to a longtime Cuba observer writing from Havana.

    Besides, the imperialists leave them little other choice. A surrender and soft landing is not an option being offered. The deliberately failed state of Haiti, less than 50 miles to the east, serves as a cautionary tale of what transpires for a people under the beneficence of the US.

    Now is an historical moment for recognition of not what Cuba has failed to do, but for appreciation of how much it has achieved with so little and under such adverse circumstances not of its making.

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  • A Third Party Perspective on the Rightward Lurch of the US Body Politic

    The chickens that the Democrats hatched in 2016 came home to roost in 2024. Back then, the Democratic National Committee (DNC), representing the party’s establishment, promoted Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. They thought him to be an easy mark who would be opposed by both the Republican Party establishment and most US voters.

    That stratagem turned out to be correct about the Republican establishment but wrong about the electorate. In any case, Trump went on to not only capture the GOP but the archaic Electoral College as well.

    The DNC reprised that strategy with the same suicidal results this year, putting all their deplorable eggs into the one basket of running on a platform of “not-Trump.”

    Trump campaigned on the gambit of asking whether Americans felt they were better off now after four years of Joe Biden. The populace roared back a resounding “NO.” Pitching to a disaffected and dispossessed citizenry, he threw them reactionary red meat, scapegoating immigrants and others.

    Kamala Harris flew the blue banner but her woke message that she was “not Trump” was less convincing. A red tsunami has swept the Democrats not only out of the White House but congress and many governorships. Trump is on track to win the popular vote.

    This “triumph of the swill,” borrowing from the Dead Kennedys, will have consequences for the Supreme Court and the larger makeup of the US politics going into the future. MAGA has now firmly infected the body politic and threatens to metastasize. Hillary Clinton’s smug words in 2016, “Trump is the gift that keeps on giving,” turned out to be unintentionally prescient.

    Would it have been any different had the DNC not rigged the 2016 presidential nomination for establishment candidate Clinton by sabotaging Bernie Sanders, who campaigned on issues of empowerment and economic benefit that also appealed to Trump voters? For them, the fear that Sanders could activate and organize genuine grassroots discontent into a social movement was greater than the risk of a Trump presidency.

    But the faux independent senator from Vermont had a fatal flaw – “though shalt not do anything that harms the Democratic Party.” This was all the DNC needed to crush his campaign. His “Our Revolution” was domesticated, while Bernie shepherded progressives into the big blue tent.

    Green Party campaign manager Jason Call, speaking personally on election night, said it was better to vote for a third party candidate who was opposed to the genocide in Palestine. Even if one accepts the bogus argument that doing so throws the election to Trump, in the larger picture, that would still be preferable to telling the Democrats, who are the party in power, that their conduct is acceptable.

    Democratic Party supporters, of course, disagree. They claim that Trump is even more pro-Zionist than their candidate, which may be true. Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we will have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats spout a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although their walk is not as good as their talk.

    Yes, things will get worse under Trump. But things would also get worse under Harris. This is because the entire political discourse has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power.

    In contrast, the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war. By any objective measure, Jill Stein’s Green Party campaign was middle of the road compared to her corporate party competitors.

    The lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide. By unconditionally supporting the Democrats, progressive-leaning voters become a captured constituency to be ignored. They incentivize the Democrats to scurry even further to the right to try to pick up the votes of the undecided and to further cater to the class interests of their corporate funders.

    Wednesday morning quarterbacks (election day is on Tuesday) are saying that the Democrats should have given more emphasis in their campaign messaging to economic issues affecting working people. This ignores the fact that Harris, and Biden before her, had claimed that they had turned the economy around.

    The debate on how much better the post-Covid economy is and who benefited leads to a deeper question. The current incarnation of capitalism, what is popularly called “neoliberalism,” has failed to meet the material needs of working people. This structural problem, not simply a question of policy, begs for another economic model.

    The now manifest failure of the Democrats to offer a platform beyond “not Trump” exposes their bankruptcy. They do not even pretend to have an agenda to address the underlying economic distress, because the limits of the economic system that they embrace provides no succor.

    In fact, neither of the major parties offer an alternative to neoliberalism. Both duopoly wings tend to campaign on cultural rather than substantive economic issues precisely because neither have solutions to the erosion of the quality of life for most citizens.

    The Republican’s capitalized on popular discontent with the incumbents. But come the mid-term elections in two years, the tables will be turned. This drama is being played out abroad with social democrats getting the boot in places like Argentina and Austria, part of a larger blowback filling the sails of an international far-right insurgence.

    A major left-liberal concern is the supposed imminent threat of fascism. Their fear is focused on Trump’s dysfunctionality and his “deplorable” working class minions; not on the security apparatus of the state, which they have learned to love. However, fascism is not a personality disorder. The ruling class – whether its nominal head wears a red or blue hat – has no reason to impose a fascist dictatorship as long as people embrace rather than oppose the security state.

    The New York Times reported: “US stocks, the value of the dollar, and yields on Treasury bonds all recorded gains as Mr. Trump’s victory became clear.” That is good for the ruling class but not so much for the rest of us.

    Lesser-evil voting contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics at this time when structural change is needed. Absent a third-party alternative, the two-party duopoly doesn’t even recognize existential threats, such as global warming or nuclear annihilation, let alone address them.

    Meanwhile, the US military launched a test hypersonic nuclear missile right after the polls closed on November 5. The scariest thing about their “reassurance” to the American public regarding this practice run for World War III was that it was “routine.”

  • Roger D. Harris is on the state central committee of the Peace and Freedom Party, the only ballot-qualified socialist party in California. The views expressed here are his own.
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  • Venezuelan Dissidents Supporting Israel Receive Human Rights Award: European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize Goes to US-backed Opposition

    The world’s peoples recoil in shock over the previously unimaginable barbarity of the US-Zionist assault on Palestine. The European Parliament is not impervious to what is transpiring. On the contrary, the body normalizes the cruelty by awarding its highest human rights award, the Sakharov Prize, to dissident Venezuelan genocide supporters.

    This is an example of how Western “democracies” fail to respect democracy in the Global South. “Human rights” are weaponized and used to repudiate Venezuela’s right to choose its own leaders, while rewarding those who sell out their country. The US-aligned camp has a clear double standard on when and where upholding “democratic institutions” apply, considering their stances on Venezuela compared to Israel, described below.

    The European Union functions as a factotum of the US empire, as is evident regarding its treatment of Venezuela. The European Parliament is a legislative body of the European Union (EU). Of the 27 member states, 23 are also members of the empire’s praetorian guard, aka NATO. The EU and NATO are official “partners” with integrated planning capabilities, closely linking security to the dictates of the US.

    EU’s relationship with Venezuela

    The EU is Venezuela’s fourth largest trading partner, but the relationship is abusive. The EU punishes Venezuela for being independent of the US empire when they are unwilling to do so themselves.

    In 2019, the EU recognized the unelected and US-selected “interim president” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó. In the same resolution, they imposed additional sanctions on Venezuela, hypocritically lamenting the “need of humanitarian assistance,” while making it more difficult for Venezuela to receive vital food, fuel, and medicines.

    Following earlier extensions, in November 2023, the EU further extended its sanctions on Venezuela through May 2024. Then, a day before those sanctions were to expire and two months before the Venezuelan presidential election, the EU again extended their sanctions until January 2025.

    The implicit message to the Venezuelan people was that they had better vote for the right candidate. Otherwise, when the new president is inaugurated on January 10, 2025, the sanctions would be extended yet again if not enhanced.

    Defying foreign intervention, Venezuelans reelected incumbent President Nicolás Maduro on July 28. But from the EU’s perspective, the only possible explanation for the Venezuelans making what they viewed as the wrong choice is fraud. The EU consequently recognized the runner-up in the election, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, as the “legitimate president” of Venezuela. That individual was then awarded the EU’s Sakharov Prize. The Venezuelan opposition had itself renounced the corrupt Guaidó, who had been the EU’s earlier designated president of Venezuela.

    A week later, the EU plus 33 individual countries signed a US-led “joint statement” expressing “grave concerns about the urgent situation in Venezuela” and calling for a political “transition” in Venezuela.

    The Sakharov Prize

    Gonzalez and his co-awardee Maria Corina Machado are typical recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Such folks are usually dissidents from countries that are targeted for regime change by US – and by default echoed by the European Parliament – such as Venezuela, but also Russia, Syria, Belarus, Cuba, and China.

    Previously, the “democratic opposition of Venezuela” received the award in 2017. Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace commented on this “bizarre example of the reactionary nature of the European left [awarding]…a group that has openly attacked journalists and burned alive two dozen people of primarily Black or dark complexions who they assumed were probably government supporters because they were poor and Black.”

    This year, beating out semi-finalist Elon Musk (I’m not making this up), the award again went to Venezuelan dissidents. Machado and Gonzalez were honored as fighters for “freedom and democracy.”

    Machado’s “democracy” credentials include signing the infamous Carmona Decree, which shuttered Venezuela’s parliament, courts, and executive in a short-lived US-backed coup in 2002. After President Hugo Chávez was returned to his elected post by a popular uprising, he pardoned the coup plotters, including Machado.

    Gonzalez’s “freedom” credentials include being implicated in the US-backed death squads in the 1980s when he was a Venezuelan diplomat in El Salvador. TeleSUR reported on Gonzalez’s “past of crimes against humanity.”

    According to the EU’s announcement: “Machado won primary elections in 2023 to run as the candidate of the democratic opposition (Unitary Platform) in the 2024 presidential elections, but after she was arbitrarily disqualified by the Venezuelan regime, González became the candidate.”

    Machado did in fact win a primary election, but not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of funds from the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA-cutout.

    As Washington’s prechosen candidate, Machado won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.

    True, Machado had been barred from running, but that was back in 2015; the disqualification was reconfirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court this year. Far from “arbitrary,” she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign power in order to testify against her own country while serving in the Venezuelan parliament. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.

    For the US and its junior partner, the EU, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. They could claim that their candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Their intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.

    Sakharov winners’ “strategic alliance” with Zionists

    Venezuela’s far-right opposition, along with their international counterparts, support the US/Zionist campaign of extermination and regional domination in the Middle East.

    Literally nothing is known about the political positions of Sakharov-winner Edmundo Gonzalez. Long retired, Gonzalez was personally chosen to run for the presidency by the other Sakharov winner, Maria Corina Machado. While the infirm “grandpa,” as the press dubbed him, convalesced in Caracas, Machado campaigned around Venezuela as his surrogate. After he lost the election, the EU’s designated president of Venezuela voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain.

    In comparison, Machado is a well-known scion of one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela. Fluent in English, the photogenic Machado was first vetted for the Venezuelan presidency before the US Congress and given a bipartisan nod before running in her ersatz “opposition primary.”

    Machado is a darling of the international far-right with close ties to Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. In a leaked document signed by her, Machado requested military support from Netanyahu to overthrow the Venezuelan government in December 2018.

    A month later, after Juan Guaidó self-appointed himself “interim president” of Venezuela, Machado publicly thanked Netanyahu for recognizing the US puppet and specifically called on Jews who had left Venezuela to return and help overthrow the elected government.

    Machado gushed: “Prime Minister Netanyahu joins our many allies…We certainly have a common enemy with Israel: the criminal forces that undermine freedom and peace in the world.”

    Later that year in an interview with the Israeli news outlet Haaretz, Machado appealed for help from Israel in “our goal of dismantling” Venezuela.

    Machado’s Vente Venezuela and Netanyahu’s Likud parties publicly signed a cooperative agreement in 2020 to collude on “political, ideological and social issues.”

    Venezuelan government supports Palestine

     In contrast to the dissidents, the elected Venezuelan government is distinguished as a recognized world leader for, in President Maduro’s words, “unconditional support to the Palestinian cause.” Hugo Chávez cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009 in response to response to Israel’s military operations in Gaza back then.

    The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, including Venezuela, perhaps more than in any other region have expressed their solidarity with Palestine. Quite the reverse, on September 18, thirteen EU countries either abstained or voted against the UN General Assembly resolution demanding Israel end its “unlawful” occupation of Palestine. Meanwhile, the preponderance of humanity, 124 countries, voted to condemn the Zionist state.

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  • What Venezuelans Think about their Presidential Election

    It’s been nearly three months since the Venezuelans went to the polls on July 28, and there is still contention domestically and abroad regarding the winner of the presidential election. This is not unexpected.

    The US has not recognized the legitimacy of the previous two presidential elections in Venezuela and had announced way before this election that if Washington’s chosen candidate lost, it could only be because of fraud.

    The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. The nearest contender, the US-backed Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, got 43% of the vote.

    That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ). Gonzalez claimed that he had evidence that proved he won, but refused to show them to the TSJ, even when he was summoned.

    Washington contests the vote

    US President Joe Biden had quickly called for new elections in Venezuela. Just as quickly, Biden’s handlers walked that back. The current US position is that the election was for sure fraudulent, but they are waiting for Caracas to issue data on individual polling places before declaring Washington’s designation of the actual president.

    The Venezuelan electoral authority has not published detailed vote-count data. Their supreme court’s audit appears to be considered sufficient by the government. As Misión Verdad has noted in various Spanish-language social media, it is common in Latin America for courts to resolve electoral disputes:

    • Peru 2021 – Keiko Fujimori claimed fraud against Pedro Castillo. The national electoral court certified Castillo a month and a half later.
    • Brazil 2022 – Jair Bolsonaro challenged Lula da Silva’s victory before the superior electoral court. The court certified Lula 43 days later.
    • Paraguay 2023 – Two candidates did not recognize Santiago Peña’s victory. The electoral court ratified the results certifying Peña a month later.
    • Guatemala 2024 – Bernardo Arévalo was certified 5 months after winning the elections, when challenges in the first and second round were settled by the supreme electoral court.
    • Mexico 2024 – Xólchit Gálvez challenged Claudia Sheinbaum’s victory. The electoral court certified the winner two months later.

    Even in the US, when Donald Trump claimed fraud against Joe Biden in several states in 2020, the courts rejected the complaints, and Biden was certified 41 days later.

    Moreover, it is a near certainty that the US will not recognize a Maduro government as legitimate irrespective of how well the election is documented. As a UK blogger observes, “The CIA has reacted with disappointment after the world’s largest oil reserves ended up with the wrong leader again.”

    Meanwhile, an over enthusiastic Western press claims that the US has already recognized Gonzalez as the legitimate president of Venezuela, despite any such declaration from Washington…yet.

    But what do the Venezuelan people think? 

    Addressing that question was Oscar Schemel, head of the respected Venezuelan polling firm Hinterlaces. Schemel spoke at a webinar on October 24 sponsored by the Venezuelan Solidarity Network and organized by the Alliance for Global Justice.

    Schemel is arguably among the most qualified people regarding public opinion in Venezuela. His firm, Hinterlaces, takes the pulse of the nation every two weeks. Their polls have been correct, calling most elections in the country within a few points, while most of Venezuela’s other polls have been distorted and politically biased.

    Schemel himself is an independent, known for his objectivity. He has not been shy about criticizing the Venezuelan government. On the other hand, he fiercely opposes US unilateral coercive economic measures – euphemistically called sanctions – on his country.

    What Schemel reports is that the number one issue on the minds of Venezuelans is not who won the electoral horse race but rather the state of the economy and, more to the point, their personal income. Hinterlaces reports 72% of Venezuelans want to “close the electoral stage and continue working.”

    Venezuelans have conflicting views on who won the election. According to a Hinterlaces poll taken on August 9, a significant majority of 59% believe Maduro won. A very divided opposition, Schemel explained, did not have the capacity to mobilize voters.

    Both pro-government chavistas and disaffected sections in the broader population are weary of the polarization, longing for national peace.

    Polls show a consistently loyal 35% support for the government Socialist Party (PSUV). But even the party faithful seek a more effective and productive socialism.

    A hardcore 14% fall into the committed opposition camp. But despite Washington anointing Gonzalez as the leader of a “unified opposition,” there is no one opposition politician that appears to have a dedicated following on the ground, according to Schemel.

    Washington’s designated opposition leader, Edmundo Gonzalez, was completely unknown before he was personally chosen to run for the presidency by another US-anointed opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado. She was ineligible to hold public office due to past offenses.

    In any case, Gonzalez voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain on September 8, taking the wind out of the opposition’s sails. His departure on a Spanish military plane was negotiated with the Venezuelan government.

    US intervention in Venezuela

    Gonzalez and Machado have welcomed US sanctions on their country and have called for even harsher measures to force Maduro out of office. In contrast, Hinterlaces reports 63% of Venezuelans believe that leaders who called for sanctions should be prosecuted.

    Gonzalez ran on a platform of privatizing nearly everything, which runs contrary to most popular sentiment. Hinterlaces reports, for example, that 61% of Venezuelans reject the idea of privatizing PDVSA, the state oil company.

    Schemel condemned the nearly one thousand sanctions by the US. What amounts to a blockade has devastated PDVSA, the primary source of funds for public services. Under the impact of US unilateral coercive economics measures, Schemel reports that the role of the state as a guarantor of social welfare has been eroded.

    Washington’s “multi-dimensional war,” in Schemel’s words, has led to a decline in the quality of life. This “unfair and unequal” assault has generated anxiety and rage in the population.

    The majority, Schemel reports, still favor a mix of socialist and private economic measures consistent with the chavista vision. Some 70% do not believe the opposition can solve the country’s economic problems. This majority wants to see the chavista model work more fruitfully, according to Schemel’s data. They do not want regime change but rather yearn for reconciliation and union.

    In about six weeks from now, Venezuela will inaugurate its next president on January 10. Gonzalez, incredibly, claims that he will be back in Caracas to receive the presidential sash.

    And what will Washington do? US Vice President Kamala Harris says “we’re not going to use US military” on Venezuela if Maduro doesn’t voluntarily leave office. Such a statement from the vice president of the world’s hegemon is to be welcomed. But the fact that she even thinks that the violent overthrow of a sovereign state is something worth explicitly ruling out itself speaks volumes.

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  • Cuba under Intensified US Sanctions Confronts its Greatest Challenge

    The majority of Cubans support Castro…every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.

    — Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, 1960


    Despite draconian coercive measures by the US – overwhelmingly condemned every year by the UN General Assembly, with the next vote slated for October 29-30 – the Cuban Revolution has had extraordinary successes. This small, impoverished, formerly colonized island nation has achieved levels of education, medical services, and performance in many other fields, including sports, that rival the first world, through the application of socialist principles.

    Cuba has rightly become a model of internationalism and an exemplar of socialism. As a consequence, every US administration for over six decades has targeted this “threat of a good example.” Back in its early days, the Cuban Revolution was bolstered by socialist solidarity, particularly from the Soviet Union.

    The contemporary geopolitical situation is very different. Most notably the socialist bloc is defunct. Meanwhile, Cuba continues to be confronted by a still hegemonic US. In turn, the Yankee empire is now challenged by the hope of an emergent multipolar order. Cuba has expressed interest in joining the BRICS trade alliance of emerging economies and will attend their meeting in Russia, October 22-24.

    Successes turned into liabilities

    Today, Cuba is confronting perhaps its greatest challenge. The ever intensified US blockade is designed to perversely turn the successes of the revolution into liabilities.

    For example, the revolution achieved one hundred percent literacy, created farming collectives and cooperatives, and mechanized cultivation, thus freeing the campesinos from the drudgery of peasant subsistence agriculture.

    But now, most tractors are idle, in need of scarce fuel and embargoed spare parts. Agricultural production has subsequently contracted. In May, I was on a bus that traveled the length of the island. Mile upon mile of once productive agricultural fields lay fallow.

    Historical yields of key crops are down nearly 40% due to lack of fertilizers and pesticides, according to a Cuban government statement. The daily bread ration has been slashed, Reuters reports.

    In order to feed the nation, the state has had to use precious hard currency to import food; currency which otherwise could be used to repair a crumbling infrastructure. Broken pipes have caused widespread shortages of drinking water.

    Under siege, some 10% percent of the population, over a million Cubans, have left between 2022 and 2023. This has, in turn, led to a drain of skilled labor and a decrease in productivity, contributing to a vicious cycle driving out-migration.

    Le Monde diplomatique cautions: “Cuba is facing a moment that is extraordinarily precarious. While numerous factors have led to this…US sanctions have, at every juncture, triggered or worsened every aspect of the current crisis.”

    The Obama engagement

     Of the some 40 sovereign states sanctioned and slated for regime-change by Washington, Cuba is somewhat unique. Until recently, the island did not have the domestic social classes from which a counter-revolutionary base could be recruited.

    In Cuba, most bourgeoisie under the Batista dictatorship left the country shortly after the revolution. The large US corporations that they had operated were expropriated. Similarly, when the government nationalized many small businesses in the 1960s, others fled to US shores.

    By 2014, then-US President Obama lamented that Washington’s Cuba policy had “failed to advance our interests.” Obama’s new strategy was to engage Cuba in the hope of fostering a counter-revolutionary class opposition.

    Obama reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba after a hiatus dating to 1961. Travel and some trade restrictions were lifted. And more remittances from relatives living in the US could be sent to Cuba.

    In his famous March 2016 speech in Havana, Obama proclaimed to rousing applause: “I’ve called on our Congress to lift the embargo.” This was an outright lie. The US president had only remarked that the so-called embargo (really a blockade, because the US enforces it on third countries) was “outdated.”

    Obama lauded the cuentapropistas, small entrepreneurs in Cuba, and pledged to help promote that stratum. He promised a new US policy focus of encouraging small businesses in Cuba. “There’s no limitation from the United States on the ability of Cuba to take these steps” to create what in effect would be a potentially counter-revolutionary class, Obama promised.

    Obama warned the Cubans, “over time, the youth will lose hope” if prosperity were not achieved by creating a new small business class.

    While normalizing relations with Cuba, Obama took a more adversarial stance toward Venezuela. He declared the oil-rich South American nation an “unusual and extraordinary threat” and imposed “targeted sanctions” on March 2015. The successes of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution in promoting regional integration were challenging US influence in Latin America, prompting Washington to adopt a “dual-track diplomacy” of engagement with Cuba and containment with Venezuela.

    Obama spoke of the “failed” US policy on Cuba, which had not achieved “its intended goals.” Often left unsaid was that the “goal” has been to reverse the Cuban revolution. Obama’s intent was not to terminate the US regime-change policy, but to achieve it more effectively.

    His engagement tactic should not be confused for accord. Obama still championed the three belligerent core elements of the US policy: a punishing blockade, occupation of the port of Guantanamo, and covert actions to undermine and destabilize Cuba.

    Trump undoes and outdoes Obama

     Donald Trump assumed office at a time when the leftist Pink Tide was ebbing. Taking advantage of the changed geopolitical context, the new president intensified Obama’s offensive against Cuba’s closest regional supporter Venezuela, while reversing his predecessor’s engagement with Havana. His “maximum pressure” campaign against Venezuela devastated their oil sector, thereby reducing Cuba’s petroleum subsidies from its ally.

    Trump enacted 243 coercive measures against Cuba. He ended individual “people-to-people” educational travel, banned US business with military-linked Cuban entities, and imposed caps on remittances. In the closing days of his administration, he relisted Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, which further cut the island off from international finance.

    Biden continues and extends Trump’s policies

     Joe Biden, while campaigning for the presidency, played to liberal sentiment with vague inferences that he would restore a policy of engagement and undo Trump’s sanctions on Cuba.

    By the time Biden assumed the US presidency, Cuba had been heavily impacted by the Covid pandemic. Temporary lockdowns reduced domestic productivity. Travel restrictions dried up tourist dollars, a major source of foreign currency.

    Once in office and Cuba ever more vulnerable, Biden continued and extended Trump’s policies, including retaining it on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

    At the height of the Covid pandemic, Belly of the Beast reported how scarcities in Cuba fueled anti-government demonstrations on July 11, 2021. Eleven days later, Biden imposed yet more sanctions to further exacerbate the scarcities.

    As an article in the LA Progressive explained, “Cuba’s humanitarian crisis – fueled by the sanctions maintained by Biden – seems to have only encouraged his administration to keep tightening the screws,” concluding “his policy remains largely indistinguishable from that of Trump.”

    Biden, however, continued the Obama policy of empowering the Cuban private sector. He allowed more remittances, disproportionately benefiting Cubans with relatives in the US (who tend to be better off financially). He also facilitated international fund transfers involving private Cuban businesses. Amendments to the Cuban Assets Control Regulations enhanced internet access to encourage development of private telecommunications infrastructures for “independent entrepreneurs.”

     What about Democratic Party presidential hopeful Kamala Harris?

    “When evaluating the impact of a possible Kamala Harris electoral victory on the United States’ Cuba policy,” On Cuba News admits, “the first thing that should be recognized is the lack of evidence or antecedents to form a well-founded forecast.” Likewise, the Miami Herald finds Harris’s current Latin American policies a mystery with “few clues and a lot of uncertainty.”

    Going back to when she was on the vice-presidential campaign trail in 2020, Harris commented about the possibility of easing the blockade on what she called the “dictatorship.” She said that won’t happen anytime soon and would have to be predicated on a new Washington-approved government in Cuba.

    Alternative for Cuba


    If Cubans want to see what an alternative future might be like under Yankee beneficence, they need only look 48 miles to the east at the deliberately made to fail state of Haiti.

    In the US, the National Network on Cuba, ACERE, and Pastors for Peace are among the organizations working to end the blockade and get Cuba off the State Sponsors of Terrorism list.

    As the US Peace Council admonished: “No matter how heroic a people may be, socialism must provide for their material needs. The US blockade of Cuba is designed precisely to thwart that and to discredit socialism in Cuba and anywhere else where oppressed people try to better their lot…The intensified US interference in Cuba is a wakeup call for greater efforts at solidarity.”

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  • The Most Important US Presidential Election of Our Lifetime

    Left-liberals plea every four years that this really is the most important election ever and time to hold our noses and send a Democrat to the White House. The manifest destiny of US world leadership, we are told, is at stake, as is our precious democracy which we have so generously been exporting abroad.

    Let’s leave aside the existential threats of climate change or nuclear war. However important, these issues are not on the November 5 ballot. Nor are they addressed in even minimally meaningful ways by the platforms of either of the major parties.

    The USA, with its first-strike policy and upgrading its nuclear war fighting capacity, bears responsibility for Armageddon risk.  And, in fact, the land-of-the-free has contributed more greenhouse gases to the world’s stockpile than any other country.

    But the US electorate never voted these conditions in, so is it realistic to think that we can vote them out? The electoral arena has its limits. Nevertheless, we are admonished, our vote is very important.

    But do the two major parties offer meaningful choices?

    Apparently, the 700 national security apparatchiks who signed a letter endorsing Kamala Harris think so. They fear that Trump is too soft on world domination. They find a comforting succor in Harris’s promise “to preserve the American military’s status as the most ‘lethal’ force in the world.” And oddly so do some left-liberals who welcome the security state, largely because they too don’t trust Trump with guiding the US empire.

    Although a major left-liberal talking point is the imminent threat of fascism, their fear is focused on Trump’s dysfunctionality and his “deplorable” working class minions; not on the security apparatus of the state, which they have learned to love.

    But fascism is not a personality disorder. The ruling class – whether its nominal head wears a red or blue hat – has no reason to impose a fascist dictatorship as long as left-liberals and their confederates embrace rather than oppose the security state.

    Not only were the left-liberals enamored with the FBI’s “Saint” Robert Mueller, but they have welcomed the likes of George W. Bush and now Dick Cheney, because these war criminals also see the danger of Trump.

    The Democratic Party has been captured by the foreign policy neoconservatives who are jumping the red ship for the blue one. It’s not that Donald Trump is in any way an anti-imperialist, but Kamala Harris is seen as a more effective imperialist and defender of elite rule.

    The ruling class is united in supporting US imperial hegemony, but needs to work out how best to achieve it. The blue team is confident that the empire has the capability to aim the canons full blast at both Russia and China at the same time. And they tend to take a more multilateral approach to empire building.

    The red team is a little more circumspect, concerned with imperial overreach. They advocate a staged strategy of China as the primary target and only secondarily against Russia. This suggests why Ukraine’s president-for-life, who is at war with Russia, in effect campaigned for Kamala in the swing state of Pennsylvania.

    The inauthenticity of the left-liberals

     While some left-liberals support a decisive Russian defeat in Ukraine, their overall concern is beating Trump.

    The Democratic Party was transformed some time ago by the Clintons’ now defunct but successful Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which advocated abandonment of its progressive constituencies in order to more effectively attract corporate support.  While both parties vie to serve the wealthy class, the Democrats are now by a significant margin the ones favored by big money.

    The triumph of the DLC signaled the demise of liberalism and the ascendency of neoliberalism. Much more could be said about that transition (viz the Democratic Party has always been capitalist with neoliberalism being its most recent expression), but suffice it to say the Democratic Party is the graveyard of progressive movements.

    Liberals no longer even pretend to have an agenda other than defeating Trump. Their neglect of economic issues that benefit working people has created a vacuum, which opens the political arena for faux populists like Trump.

    The now moribund liberal movement is thus relegated to two functions: (1) providing a bogus progressive patina to reactionary politics and (2) attacking those who still hold leftist principles. “Progressive Democrat,” sociologist James Petras argues, is an oxymoron.

    Left-liberals have the habit of prefacing their capitulations with a recitation of their former leftist credentials. But what makes them inauthentic is their abandonment of principles. No transgression by the Democrats, absolutely none – not even genocide – deters this inauthentic left from supporting the Democratic presidential candidate.

    We can respect, though disagree, with the right-wing for having principled red lines, such as abortion. In contrast, left-liberals not only find themselves bedfellows with Cheney, but they swallow anything and everything that the Democratic wing of the two-party duopoly feeds them.

    Consequences of supporting the lesser of the two evils

     Although today the Democratic Party is arguably the leading war party, we would have cold comfort with the Republicans in power. And domestically the Democrats talk a better line on some social wedge issues that don’t threaten elite rule, such as women’s reproductive rights, although – as will be argued – their walk is not as good as their talk.

    Getting back to “this year more than ever we have to support the Democratic presidential candidate,” the plea contains two truths. First, the “more than ever” part exposes a tendency to cry wolf in the past.

    Remember that the world did not fall apart with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. No lesser an authority than Noam Chomsky is nostalgic for Tricky Dick, who is now viewed as the last true liberal president. Nor did the planet stop spinning in 1980 when Ronald Reagan ascended to the Oval Office. Barack Obama now boasts that his policies differed little from the Gipper’s.

    Which brings us to the second truth revealed in the plea. The entire body politic has been staggering to the right regardless of which wing of the duopoly is in power. This is in spite of the fact that the voting public is well to the left of them on almost every issue, from universal public healthcare to opposition to endless war.

    Moreover, the left-liberals’ lesser-evil voting strategy itself bears some degree of responsibility for this reactionary tide.

    The genius of the Clintons’ DLC was that the progressive New Deal coalition of labor and minority groups that supported the Democratic Party could be thrown under the bus with impunity, while the party courts the right. As long as purported progressives support the Democrats no matter what, the party has an incentive to sell out its left-leaning “captured constituents.”

    Thus, we witnessed what passed for a presidential debate with both contestants competing to prove who was more in favor of genocide for Palestinians and an ever expanding military.

    The campaign for reproductive rights aborted

     But one may protest, let’s not let squeamishness about genocide blind us to the hope that the Democrats are better than the Republicans on at least the key issue of abortion.

    However, this is the exception that proves the rule. As Margaret Kimberley of the Black Agenda Report noted, after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, there were protests everywhere but at Barack Obama’s house, “the person who could have acted to protect the Roe decision.”

    When Obama ran in 2008, he made passage of a Freedom of Choice Act the centerpiece of his campaign. Once elected with majorities in Congress, he could have enshrined abortion rights into law and out of the purview of the Supreme Court. Instead, he never followed through on his promise.

    This was a direct outcome of the logic of lesser evilism in a two-party system. The folks who supported abortion rights had nowhere to go, so they were betrayed. Why embarrass Blue Dog Democrats and antagonize pro-lifers when the progressive dupes will always give the Democrats a pass?

    Angst is not a substitute for action

     The Republican and Democratic parties are part of the same corporate duopoly, both of which support the US empire. Given there are two wings, there will inevitably be a lesser and greater evil on every issue and even in every election.

    However, we need a less myopic view and to look beyond a given election to see the bigger picture of the historical reactionary trend exacerbated by lesser-evil voting. That is, to understand that the function of lesser-evil voting in the overarching two-party system is to allow the narrative to shift rightward.

    If one’s game plan for system change includes electoral engagement, which both Marx and Lenin advocated (through an independent working class party, not by supporting a bourgeois party), the pressure needs to be applied when it counts. And that might mean taking a tip from the Tea Party by withholding the vote if your candidate crosses a red line. But that requires principles, which left-liberals have failed to evidence. Angst, however heartfelt, is not a substitute for action.

    The left-liberals’ lesser-evil voting, which disregards third-parties with genuinely progressive politics, contributes to the rightward trajectory of US politics. It is not the only factor, but it is a step in the wrong direction. As for November 5, we already know who will win…the ruling class.

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  • How the US Could Have Won the Venezuelan Election

    Don’t ask what business the US had in backing a candidate in Venezuela’s July 28 presidential election. Certainly that was not a question that the corporate press ever asked.

    Of course, the US should never have been meddling in Venezuelan elections in the first place. But given the machinations of the hemisphere’s hegemon, it is instructive to examine why and who Washington backed.

    Insurrectionary rather than democratic strategy

    It came as no surprise that the US-backed opposition called the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election fraudulent when they lost. They had announced that intention before the election.

    Cries of fraud have been the far-right’s practice in nearly every one of the 31 national contests since the Bolivarian Revolution began a quarter of a century ago, except for the two contests lost by the Chavistas, the movement founded by Hugo Chávez and carried on by his successor Nicolás Maduro.

    That is because this far-right opposition, funded and largely directed by Washington, pursues an insurrectionary strategy, rather than a democratic one. Neither they nor the US have recognized the legitimacy of the Venezuelan government since Maduro was first elected in 2013.

    The US-backed opposition boycotted the 2018 election in anticipation of what appeared to them as an imminent governmental collapse under US assault. But in 2024, they were compelled to contend in the presidential contest. Conditions had changed with the successes by the Maduro administration in turning around the country’s economic freefall, largely precipitated by US unilateral coercive measures. In addition, Washington had failed to diplomatically isolate Venezuela by such stunts as recognizing the self-proclaimed “interim presidency” of Juan Guaidó.

    US picks its candidate

    The reentry of the US-backed opposition into the electoral arena was not based on democratic participation that recognized the constitution or the institutions of the Venezuelan state. The US-backed opposition’s “primary” was not conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE, as had previous ones. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate, a recipient of US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funds, a CIA-cutout.

    Washington’s prechosen candidate, Maria Corina Machado, won in a crowded field of 13 candidates with an incredulous 92%. When some of the other candidates in the primary called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do that because Súmate was her personal organization.

    Ms. Machado was despised by much of the other opposition. A faux populist, she is a member of one of the richest families in Venezuela, went to Yale, and lived in Florida. While the populace suffered under US unilateral coercive measures, she championed them and even called for military intervention. Internationally, Machado has strong ties with the international far-right, notably Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

    Washington backed Machado knowing full well that in 2015 she had been barred from running for office. Back then, while she was a member of the National Assembly, she had accepted a diplomatic post with a foreign country in order to testify against her own country. Such treason is constitutionally prohibited in Venezuela as it is in many other countries.

    For the US, Machado’s disbarment was a bonus. The State Department could claim that its candidate was unfairly disqualified, when that was a given to begin with. Washington’s intent was not to encourage a free and fair democratic process, but to delegitimize the one already in place.

    Disbarred, Machado then personally chose her surrogate, Edmundo González. The former diplomat from the 1980s was completely unknown and with no electoral experience. The infirm surrogate literally had to be propped up by Machado at campaign rallies, although most of the time he convalesced in Caracas while she barnstormed the country.

    An alternative strategy

    Contrary to the nonsense in the corporate press of a “unified opposition,” the non-Chavista elements have been anything but unified. Had they been, they may have made the most of the 48% of the electorate that did not support Maduro according to the count by the CNE.

    The assertion by Machado/González that they had won the 2024 election by a margin of 70% lacks credibility. That seven out of ten Venezuelans supported them was not proven in the streets. Machado called her followers out on the 3rd and again on the 17th, but the turnout was smaller than even her pre-election rallies. Meanwhile pro-Maduro rallies dwarfed the opposition’s. This was an indication of the high level of organization and popular support for the Bolivarian Revolution.

    Still, in retrospect, the US could have tried to galvanize support for an alternative project. There were politically moderate state governors and legislators, who might have unified the fractious opposition. Instead, the US, anticipating a Maduro victory, obstinately clung to the disqualified Machado with her surrogate González.

    The Machado/González platform was not a popular one, calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency. A far more attractive and winning platform would have been to retain the social benefits of Chavismo with the promise of relief from US unilateral coercive measures.

    In backing someone as unattractive, unknown, and unpopular as González, the US showed its disinterest in a good faith engagement in the democratic electoral process.

    The real obstacle to free and fair elections in Venezuela

    That brings us to the heart of the matter. Truly free and fair elections in Venezuela were impossible – not due to the supposed conspiracies of the ruling Chavistas – but because of conditions imposed by Washington by their hybrid war against Venezuela.

    The 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on Caracas by Washington – euphemistically called sanctions – are no less deadly than bombs, causing over 100,000 casualties. This form of collective punishment is illegal under the charters of the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) and even US law.

    In short, the Venezuelan people went to the polls on July 28 with a gun aimed at their heads. If they voted for Maduro, the coercive measures would likely continue and even be intensified. This fundamental reality was ignored by the Western press and other critics.

    The narrative on Venezuela has been shifted by Washington and echoed in the corporate press. The paramount interference of US’s coercive measures was ignored, while attention was shifted to the intricacies of Venezuelan electoral law. The larger picture got lost in the statistical weeds. This shifted narrative is designed to place the burden of proof on the sovereign government to prove its legitimacy.

    Solutions are being proffered by outside actors calling for new elections in Venezuela and establishment of a “transitional government.”  However, there are no constitutional mechanisms for doing that in Venezuela. Nor are there any such mechanisms in most countries, including the US. More importantly, this is a gross violation of Venezuelan sovereignty. Even the far-right opposition in Venezuela rejected these as unacceptable.

    The CNE has by law 30 days after the election to release the official results. Meanwhile in response to the accusations of fraud, the Maduro administration turned the matter over to the Venezuelan constitutional institution designed to adjudicate such matters, which is the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice (TSJ).

    On August 22, the TSJ affirmed the CNE’s count, confirming Maduro’s victory. A Hinterlaces poll found that 60% of Venezuelans trust the CNE’s results.

    President Maduro commented: “Venezuela has the sovereignty of an independent country with a constitution, it has institutions, and the conflicts in Venezuela of any kind are solved among Venezuelans, with their institutions, with their law and with their constitution.” The US responded with a call for a regime-change “transition.”

    Insistence on its right to defend national sovereignty in the face of continued US imperial aggression will make for tumultuous times ahead for Venezuela.

    The post How the US Could Have Won the Venezuelan Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Venezuelans Re-elect Maduro

    July 29, 2024, Caracas, Venezuela.  Shortly before midnight, the president of the National Electoral Council (CNE), Elvis Amoroso, announced the re-election of Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, the US-backed and funded opposition cried fraud.

    Maduro won with 51.2% of the vote. His nearest rival, the US-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez trailed by 7%.

    While the US corporate press refers to the “opposition” as if it were a unified bloc, eight other names appeared on the ballot. Unlike the US, where most of the electorate is polarized around two major parties, the fractious opposition in Venezuela is split into many mutually hostile camps whose dislike of the ruling Socialist Party is matched by their loathing for each other. And this is despite millions of US tax-payer dollars used to try to unify a cabal that would carry Washington’s water.

    Sore losers

    In the quarter century since Hugo Chavez initiated the Bolivarian Revolution when he was elected president in 1998, the Chavistas have won all but two of some thirty national elections. The opposition celebrated when they won a national referendum and the 2015 National Assembly contest. But every other time, they lost to the coalition led by the PSUV (United Socialist Party of Venezuela).

    All of these contests employed the same electoral system of multiple public audits, transparent counting, and an electronic vote backed with paper ballots. The system is incontrovertibly fraud-proof with over half of the ballot stations audited for verification of the electronic and paper results.  Former US President Jimmy Carter, whose electoral monitoring organization observed over ninety elections,  declared Venezuela’s system the best in the world.

    Beyond the accusations, concrete proof of fraud had not been forthcoming in the past even though the data was publicly available.

    July 28, 2024 Election

    I was one of 910 internationals representing over one hundred countries invited to Venezuela to accompany this election. On July 28  I visited polling stations in the state of Miranda.

    I observed long but orderly lines of people going to the polls. At each one of the individual mesas (rooms at a polling station), representatives of political parties sat to monitor the process. I spoke to representatives of Maduro’s Socialist Party (PSUV) as well as other parties. All expressed confidence in the fraud-proof nature of their electoral system. In fact, they are very proud of their system regardless of political affiliation.

    According to news reports, there were cyberattacks on the electoral system. At some polling stations, far-right opposition elements reportedly attacked electoral workers in attempts to disrupt the process.

    By my experience and observation,  the polls can best be described as festive. Seeing our international invitee credentials, which we wore on lanyards around our necks, we were universally greeted with shouts of bienvenido (welcome), V-signs, and applause. These were clearly a people with great civic pride.

    This reception was the same in “popular” Chavista neighborhoods as well as wealthier ones. Some hoped for “change” and others for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution. But all freely and enthusiastically participated in the electoral process.

    The accusations of fraud were not reflected by the actions of the people on the ground as evidenced by their participation and enthusiasm.

    Days before the election

    July 25, the last day of official campaigning, was marked by the final political rallies. The far-right drew an estimated 100,000. I attended the Maduro rally of some one million. As far as I could see, people had jammed the main boulevards of Caracas. Clearly the Chavistas have a vast and dedicated base.

    And they are wildly supportive of their current president Nicolas Maduro, who is seen as carrying on the legacy of the deceased founder of the Bolivarian project, Hugo Chavez, whose birthday is the same as this election day.

    But it goes deeper than that. As the slogan yo soy Chavez (I am Chavez) indicates, the base sees the Bolivarian project not simply as one of their political leadership but more so as a collective endeavor.

    The real electoral interference

    Far greater than any accusation of fraud manufactured by the opposition is the much more significant interference in the electoral process by Washington.

    The vote for continuing the Bolivarian Revolution represents a mandate for national sovereignty. Venezuelans went to the polls knowing that a vote for the incumbent means no relief from US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called “sanctions” have been part of Washington’s regime-change campaign explicitly designed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy and turn the people against their government.

    President Maduro says, “We are not anyone’s colony” and the majority of Venezuelans evidently agree.

    The post Venezuelans Re-elect Maduro first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Venezuelans to Vote on Continuing the Bolivarian Revolution

    The future of Venezuela’s 25-year-old socialist movement will be decided in the upcoming July 28 election. Venezuelans will go to the polls knowing that a vote for incumbent President Nicolás Maduro means no relief from US unilateral coercive measures.

    These so-called “sanctions” have been central to Washington’s regime-change campaign explicitly designed to asphyxiate the Venezuelan economy and turn the people against their government; what Venezuelanalysis calls “a war without bombs.”

    Venezuela, with some 930 unilateral coercive measures imposed on it by the US, is the second most sanctioned country in the world after Russia. “Washington singled out Venezuela for special treatment,” observes political economist Steve Ellner.

    The Bolivarian Revolution

    Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution began with the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998. Having a proud Afro- and indigenous-descendent from a poor background as president, infuriated racist and classist elite sentiment. Chávez’s successor, Maduro, a bus driver and union leader who never went to college, was no more palatable to this elite.

    Under Chávez’s leadership, Venezuela became “a beacon of hope for the struggle against neoliberal immiseration and imperialist pillage for the world over,” according to Francisco Dominguez with the UK-based Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.

    Approximately three-quarters of Venezuela’s current discretionary budget goes to social expenditures; about the same proportion of the US budget going to the military and related expenses. Some five million houses for the poor have been built, health care is free, and food for the poor is subsidized. Mass popular organizations and communes flourish.

    A quarter century of US regime-change efforts

    Chávez survived a US-backed coup in April 2002 that lasted only 47 hours, when the people spontaneously arose and demanded his reinstatement. That was followed by a “boss’s lockout” during the Christmas holidays, which failed to create an uprising but did cause a 29% GDP loss.

    A referendum, openly backed by the US, to recall Chávez in 2004 was decisively defeated. He won the 2006 presidential election by a large margin, although the opposition continued to foment lethal street violence. A military coup in 2008 by dissident officers was aborted.

    Chávez was reelected in October 2012 but died from cancer shortly thereafter in March 2013. His chosen successor, Maduro, won the constitutionally mandated snap election by a margin of less than 2%. Sensing weakness at this moment of national mourning, the US offensive intensified, trying to provoke a civil insurrection.

    The main opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, immediately charged fraud and called on his followers to show their rage. Violent street demonstrations by the US-backed far-right opposition followed. The so-called guarimbas continued periodically through 2017 in an attempt to achieve by extra-parliamentary means what they failed to do democratically.

    The US was the only country to deny the legitimacy of the Maduro government in 2013. A subsequent audit done in public, which compared the electronic count to the paper ballots, reaffirmed the electoral outcome. Former US President Jimmy Carter, incidentally, commented: “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” Venezuela was the first country to have both an electronic vote and a paper backup.

    After Maduro won the presidency, the international oil market tanked, which severely impacted an economy dependent on petroleum sales. With the deteriorating economic situation, the opposition won a majority of the National Assembly in December 2015. The Maduro government immediately recognized the electoral results. Today, Washington considers the 2015 National Assembly the only legitimate government of Venezuela, even though the legislators’ terms have long ago expired.

    Hybrid war intensifies

    That same year, 2015, US President Obama incredulously declared Venezuela to be “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to US national security as a pretext to impose illegal unilateral coercive measures. That year, too, marked a regional geopolitical shift to the right with the election of Mauricio Macri in Argentina.

    The coercive measures were harshly intensified by Trump and continued with some minor relief with Biden in a bipartisan effort to defeat the Bolivarian Revolution.

    The US took no chances in anticipation of the 2018 presidential election in Venezuela. Washington declared the election fraudulent a full half year before the vote and ordered its funded proxies to boycott. When opposition politician Henri Falcón ran, Washington threaten him with sanctions. Maduro easily won reelection. The far-right opposition sat out the election, still banking on a military coup, a popular rebellion, direct US intervention…or a successful assassination.

    While at a public ceremony, Maduro survived an exploding drone attack in August 2018. In October of that year, the former US ambassador to Venezuela, William Brownfield, opined, “At this moment perhaps the best solution would be to accelerate the [county’s] collapse, even if it produces a greater period of suffering.”

    By January 2019, the Venezuelan economy, plagued with runaway inflation, was teetering on breakdown precipitated by the economic blockade imposed by the US and its allies. Washington then recognized the unknown new head of the national assembly, 35-year-old Juan Guaidó, as “interim president” of Venezuela. Over 50 US allies recognized the US security asset and handed Guaidó’s team billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets held abroad.

    Venezuela was also subject to paramilitary attacks launched from Colombia across its western border. A cyber-assault on Venezuela’s electric system triggered a nationwide blackout in March 2019. Among the continuing assassination and coup attempts was the May 2020 so-called “bay of piglets” fiasco involving two former US Green Berets, who Biden subsequently repatriated in a prisoner exchange.

    Also in 2020, the US officially designated Maduro as their “new target” and put a $15 million bounty on his head. Washington’s unilateral coercive measures had by then produced a precipitously declining economy plus the collateral damage of tens of thousands of deaths. Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic contraction in recent world history.

    Of course, corruption, inefficiencies, and plain mistaken policies also plagued the economy. But to be fair to the victims of the sanctions, these were hardly conditions unique to Venezuela and would not have been devastating absent the sanctions. Otherwise, the US would not have needed to have been so inhumanely aggressive. Further, secondary effects of sanctions, such as the need for secrecy to circumvent them by using back channels, became fertile grounds for dishonest officials.

    Venezuela resists

     Although the US hybrid war continued, Venezuela began to reverse the economic freefall around 2021-2022. This could not have been done without a combination of an unflinching political will under the leadership of President Maduro coupled with strong grassroots popular support; plus vital help from Russia, China, and Iran.

    GDP growth during the first four months of 2024 exceeded forecasts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are projected to be 4% for this year, compared to IMF figures for the US at 2.7% and China at 4.6%.

    After a series of corruption scandals, even the hardline opposition abandoned “interim president” Jaun Guaidó. Today only the US, Israel, and a handful of Washington’s most sycophantic allies fail to recognize the Maduro administration.

    A recent internal house cleaning on the government’s side saw former oil minister Tareck El Aissami along with 54 others arrested for corruption; a development much celebrated by the Chavista base (i.e., supporters of the Bolivarian Revolution).

    Contrary to the US strategy to isolate Venezuela, Venezuela may soon join BRICS+ and was recently elected to a vice presidency of the UN General Assembly. Another game-changer was that Venezuela’s two immediate neighbors, Brazil and Colombia, went from US client states to friendly allies.

    The regional integration organizations initiated by Chávez, such as ALBA and CELAC, remain robust. Meanwhile Biden was humiliated when Mexico led a boycott after he excluded Venezuela along with Cuba and Nicaragua from his planned Organization of American States “democracy summit” in 2022.

    Election campaign homestretch

    The fact that all opposition factions will compete on the ballot is de facto recognition of the government’s legitimacy. And the fact that there are nine such candidates is proof, despite Washington’s best efforts, that the US could not unite a fractious opposition around Maria Corina Machado’s far-right candidacy.

    The aforementioned Ms. Machado had been thoroughly vetted in DC and was Washington’s chosen candidate. Appearing before a US congressional committee, she threatened not to have “a system of impunity” for the Chavistas when she’s president. However, she is not on the ballot.

    Back in 2015, Machado had been disqualified from running for office until 2030 for multiple wrongdoings. The US ordered her to contest before the Venezuelan supreme court, but the ban was upheld. Machado’s NGO, Súmate, was funded by the NED, a CIA cutout. Her current campaign activities reportedly received $3.2 million from a US lobbying firm.

    Machado personally chose surrogate candidate Edmundo González to run in her place. The elderly González has mainly stayed home, while Machado hit the campaign trail with a paper poster of González. This arrangement gives the US the option to claim victory if González wins and to claim fraud – because of Machado’s disqualification and other concerns– if he doesn’t.

    All but González and another far-right presidential candidate pledged to abide by the results of the election.

    Meanwhile, the government reported sabotage of a bridge and the electrical grid, while multiple assassination attempts on Maduro have been thwarted. A Colombian paramilitary group, ACSN, reportedly was contacted by opposition elements to attack infrastructure and even the president in the contingency of a Maduro victory.

    Election outcome not at all certain

     Although the US still does not formally recognize the Maduro government, Washington and Caracas – this time with the Venezuelan opposition excluded – engaged in direct dialogue as equal sovereigns just a month before the election. This signals that the US strategy for regime change now has to be different from the 2018 election.

    The far-right opposition cannot be ordered to boycott the election in anticipation of the government collapsing. Venezuela’s economy is no longer on the ropes, despite Washington’s best efforts.

    However, Venezuelan political commentator Clodovaldo Hernández cautions about ongoing issues of inadequate healthcare delivery, salaries and pensions that have not kept pace with inflation, erratic electric power, and dysfunctional police and judicial services. All of these disproportionately impact the Chavista base of poor and working people, who are wearied by so many years of Yankee siege. On the other hand, much of the opposition is discredited and detested precisely because they supported the US hybrid war that contributed to those conditions.

    As ever, polling in Venezuela produces highly partisan and unreliable results. Both Chavistas and opposition/Voice of America cite polls showing overwhelming support for their side.The whole world will be watching on July 28. Venezuela has strived to offer an alternative to the imperialist world order and endured decades of attacks as a consequence. Will the majority of Venezuelans vote to continue their independent path despite such heavy costs?

    The post Venezuelans to Vote on Continuing the Bolivarian Revolution first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    — Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty

    The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.

    The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.

    According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.

    Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:

    + Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

    + George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”

    + George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”

    And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.

    Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared

    On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.

    Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”

    While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.

    Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.

    In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)

    Alternative views on immigration excluded

    Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.

    Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”

    Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.

    Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.

    These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”

    From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”

    Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.

    Future of US immigration policy

     For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”

    Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.

    The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    — Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty

    The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.

    The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.

    According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.

    Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:

    + Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

    + George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”

    + George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”

    And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.

    Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared

    On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.

    Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”

    While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.

    Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.

    In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)

    Alternative views on immigration excluded

    Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.

    Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”

    Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.

    Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.

    These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”

    From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”

    Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.

    Future of US immigration policy

     For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”

    Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.

    The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

    The post How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

    The post How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Biggest Obstacle to Free and Fair Elections in Venezuela is the US

    For all the hullabaloo about “free and fair elections” in Venezuela by the US government, its sycophantic corporate press deliberately ignores the elephant in the room – namely, the so-called sanctions designed to make life so miserable that the people will acquiesce to Washington’s plan for regime change.

    As Foreign Policy puts it, “Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro values his political survival above his country’s economic well-being.” Translated from Washington-speak, the US government is blackmailing the Venezuelan electorate with, in the words of Foreign Policy, “the looming threat,” of continuing unilateral coercive measures unless they vote against the incumbent in the presidential election on July 28.

    The New York Times reports that a Maduro win will “intensify poverty,” conveniently omitting the cause will be tightening of US sanctions. Typical of such coverage, the article blames Maduro for the “dire” economic situation, but not until the 25th paragraph is there even a passing reference to US sanctions.

    Such outside electoral meddling by the use of sanctions is orders of magnitude greater than the supposed “Russiagate” interference in the 2016 US presidential contest. Washington brazenly leaves no ambiguity about its intent to punish the Venezuelan people for choosing a government not to its liking. With no sense of shame or irony, the State Department imperiously calls this bullying “democracy promotion.”

    US hybrid war on Venezuela

    As documented by Venezuelanalysis, US sanctions against Venezuela are “a war without bombs.” These actions, more correctly called coercive economic measures by the United Nations, are killing Venezuelans. Never mentioned in the corporate press is that these unilateral measures are a form of collective punishment, considered illegal under international law.

    The over 930 US sanctions are designed to crash the Venezuelan economy and, above all, to prevent any recovery. Initially they succeeded in the former objective and, equally importantly, failed in the latter.

    The bipartisan offensive was initiated in 2015 by President Obama, who incredulously declared “a national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security” posed by Venezuela. (Note, none of the corporate press subjected this extraordinary claim to any kind of scrutiny.) Coercive measures were intensified by President Trump, targeting the vital Venezuelan oil industry. Seamlessly, President Biden continued the “maximum pressure” campaign with minor adjustments, mainly designed to benefit US and select foreign business interests.

    As a result, Venezuela experienced the largest peacetime economic contraction in recent world history. The free-falling economy suffered triple-digit inflation, again, the highest in the world. Some seven million economic refugees fled the country.

    The US continued other “hybrid warfare” measures including recognizing Juan Guaidó as the self-proclaimed “interim president” of Venezuela in 2019. The then 35-year-old far-right US security asset had never run for national office and was at the time unknown to over 80% of the population. Nevertheless, some fifty US allies initially recognized his government.

    Further, US-backed coups have continued since the 2002 one that lasted only 47 hours. Recent capers included the “bay of piglets” operation in 2020. Biden recently repatriated two of the US mercenaries, who had been captured in that failed coup, in a prisoner exchange that resulted in freeing Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

    Coup attempts are ongoing according to the Venezuelan government. US official policy on such extra-legal measures is “plausible deniability.”

    Venezuela successfully resists

    Contrary to all odds and most predictions, President Maduro has turned the Venezuelan ship of state around against such unfavorable winds. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction. GDP growth during the first four months of 2024 exceeded forecasts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and are projected to be 4% for the year, compared to IMF figures for the US at 2.7% and China at 4.6%.

    Today, on the diplomatic front, only the US, Israel, and a handful of other Washington vassals still fail to recognize the democratically elected government of Venezuela. Even the US-backed opposition has itself renounced the Guaidó presidency.

    Until recently, Colombia (then a hostile US client state) served as a launching pad for paramilitary incursions onto Venezuela’s western border. In 2022, President Gustavo Petro, the first leftist in the entire history of Colombia, replaced the right-wing Iván Duque. The next year, the friendly Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva replaced the hostile government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil on Venezuela’s southern border.

    Meanwhile, progressive regional governments such as Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Mexico have continued to support Venezuela. Most significantly and indicative of a shifting world order toward multipolarity, Venezuela has strengthened ties with China, Russia, and Iran. This, in turn, has only intensified hostility by the US.

    Lessons from the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinista’s in Nicaragua

    Conditions in Venezuela today, in the run-up to the July presidential election, bear some parallels to a similar situation in Nicaragua in 1990. In 1979, the Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. By the 1990 presidential election, polls looked favorable for the reelection of their FSLN party’s Daniel Ortega.

    Everyone, including the US president, who was bent on overthrowing the Nicaraguan Revolution, anticipated a Sandinista victory, according to Dan Kovalik’s book on Nicaragua. But the vote was unfavorable, issuing in seventeen years of neoliberal regression.

    Both the State Department and the US ambassador to Managua had made it abundantly clear that the Nicaraguans had best vote the “right way” or the US-sponsored contra war would continue. The contras were mercenaries recruited largely from Somoza’s former army who were waging an armed terror campaign against the population.

    In addition, the country was under US economic sanctions and suffering from hyperinflation. Brian Willson, who lost his legs in civil disobedience protesting the US contra war in Nicaragua, reported that the US funded opposition parties and NGOs in the 1990 election. The CIA alone poured in $28-30 million. Willson concluded that the US “purchased the 1990 Nicaragua elections.”

    Prospects for the Venezuelan presidential election

    While Venezuela is not under siege by US-paid mercenaries as was Nicaragua, it is nonetheless subject to Washington’s hybrid war of coercive economic measures, funding of opposition forces, international diplomatic belligerence, and covert actions.

    An assessment in February by the US intelligence community found Maduro “is unlikely to lose the 2024 presidential election.” A May 3 Encuesta Nacional Ideadatos opinion poll reported a 52.7% preference for Maduro. Other polls give the lead to opposition candidate Edmundo González with the Unitary Platform who allegedly worked with the CIA.

    Within the Chavista core – those who support the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez and its current standard bearer Nicolás Maduro – it is only to be expected that there is a certain level of weariness. Venezuelan political commentator Clodovaldo Hernández cites ongoing issues of inadequate healthcare delivery, salaries and pensions that have not kept pace with inflation, erratic electric power, incompletely addressed corruption, and dysfunctional police and judicial services, all of which disproportionately impact the Chavista base of poor and working people. How this will translate come July 28 is uncertain.

    The propaganda campaign by the US state and its stenographers in the press to delegitimize the Venezuela election process is ramping up. For example, the US “newspaper of record” reports that “the last competitive election was held in 2013.” Not “fit to print” is the news that the presidential term is six years, or that the US literally ordered the opposition not to run in 2018. The leading opposition candidate at the time, Henri Falcón, was threatened with sanctions when he chose to ignore Washington’s demand.

    The very fact that any of the US-backed opposition is contesting in the upcoming election rather than boycotting indicates that they are no longer relying on an extra-parliamentary overthrow of the government. This itself represents a significant victory for the Chavistas.

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  • US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III

    The US Congress authorized a $95 billion military aid package for continuing the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as well as for war preparations against China. This represents, in effect, a downpayment on World War III. US President Joe Biden, reading from a playbook that could well have been scripted by George Orwell, announced: “it’s a good day for world peace.” And in order to dispel any doubt, he added, “for real.”

    Biden proclaimed: “It’s going to make the world safer.” In fact, the bipartisan authorization, passed on April 23, could nudge the doomsday clock a little closer to midnight.

    Lest there be any confusion about what the head of the US empire means by making the world safer, Biden explains: “it continues America’s leadership in the world.”

    US leadership is the crux of the matter. That is, at a time of increasingly challenged US hegemony, the official US strategy is still global “full spectrum dominance.” No longer does the empire justify itself as leading the crusade against communism, or even against what it considered “terrorism,” or its “war on drugs.” Today, the official national security doctrine is naked “great power competition.”

    Continuing the Orwellian theme, the US president backed up his claim about US world leadership, saying, “everyone knows it.”  This was not reflected in the UN General Assembly vote on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, where the US side was trounced by an overwhelming 153 in favor. Besides the US and Israel, only eight others voted against and a mere 23 abstained.  On any number of issues, the majority of the world’s population opposes the US.

    Biden’s boast that “Ukraine has regained over half the territory that Russia took from them” is not particularly reflected by the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community, which concluded that the current deadlock “plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.”

    Hailing the “brave Ukrainians,” Biden overlooks that 650,000 Ukrainian men of fighting age have fled the country.

    Diminishing prospects for a decisive US/NATO victory in Ukraine have precipitated a particularly dangerous response from Washington, which rejects a negotiated settlement. The current administration’s plan is not to pull for peace but to push for more war. This is spun as a strategy “to stop Putin from drawing the United States into a war.” Yet it is the US, which is doing its part feeding the conflict by giving yet more armaments to the military effort.

    The expansion of NATO, contrary to earlier US assurances not to advance east, is hailed in Biden’s speech. Yet, this march of NATO toward the Russian border is the very cause that Russian President Putin gave for his country’s incursion into Ukraine. This abundantly articulated Russian “redline” should be well known in Washington.

    Yet, Biden in his speech goes on to ominously raise NATO’s Article Five for mutual defense which declares “an attack on one is an attack on all.” This is plainly a taunt for a war with another nuclear power. Veterans for Peace antiwar activist and author Dee Knight calls the military aid package “an open-ended commitment to the NATO war against Russia.”

    In yet another spin on reality, Biden condemns “a brutal campaign” that has “killed tens of thousands” and “bombed hospitals.” If you think he is referring to Israel’s US-enabled war on Gaza, guess again.

    Biden is not about to call a halt on the genocide of the Palestinians, though he could. In 1982, for instance, Israel bombed civilians. Then US President Ronald Reagan called his counterpart in Tel Aviv and told him to stop what he explicitly called a “holocaust.”

    Twenty minutes later Israel ordered cessation of its bombardment. In contrast, The New York Times reports that a member of Israel’s war cabinet predicts the current war may last “a year, a decade or a generation.”

    “My commitment to Israel, I want to make clear again, is ironclad,” says the US politician who is by far the “biggest recipient in history of donations from pro-Israeli groups.”

    The aid package schizophrenically commits tax-payer dollars to both lethal weapons and humanitarian aid for “the innocent people of Gaza, who are suffering badly.” No recognition is given to what is obvious – that an immediate and permanent ceasefire is the first step for relieving the suffering.

    War may not be good for most of humanity, but it is bonanza for US military contractors. As Biden brags, the weapons are “made by American companies here in America…in other words, we’re helping Ukraine while at the same time investing in our own industrial base.” That is, our own merchants of death are making a killing.

    Biden has over-performed in his promise to make sure the weapons shipments “start right away.” Without legal pre-authorization, the US has supplied both Ukraine and Israel with proscribed weaponry.

    Most of the funds, according to economist Jack Rasmus, are for weapons that have already been delivered or from military stocks that are in the process of being shipped. “Only $13.8 billion of the $61 billion is for weapons Ukraine doesn’t already have!” In a tweet embarrassing to the US-backed war effort and subsequently deleted, CBS News suggested only about 30% of US military aid for Ukraine ever reaches the front lines, in part due to pervasive corruption.

    “Everything we do,” the US president explains is, “setting the conditions for an enduring peace.” The question his proclamation raises is what does this vision of a militarily imposed pax Americana look like?

    Is it Haiti, where under Yankee benevolence they do not even have a government and even the disgraced appointed prime minister just resigned? Or is it Libya, where a US-led colonial coalition overthrew a major force for African unity and replaced it with military factions allowing slaves to be openly bartered on the streets? Or is it Afghanistan, where the US engineered the overthrow of a socialist government that stood for women’s emancipation, occupied the land for two decades, and then withdrew leaving a humanitarian disaster?

    In short, the Biden’s promise of “enduring peace” looks a lot like chaos and “endless war.” “History will remember this moment,” he predicts. And well it may.

    The post US Congress Makes Downpayment on World War III first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US Reimposes Illegal and Inhumane Oil Sanctions on Venezuela

    A minute after midnight on April 18, the US reimposed coercive economic measures designed to cripple Venezuela’s oil industry. Later that day, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a new sanctions bill on Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Cuba protested the US’s six-decade blockade as talks resumed between the two countries on migration.

    At a time of challenged US dollar hegemony and questioning of the neoliberal order, the three countries striving to build socialist societies in the Americas pose a “threat of a good example.”

    Also on April 18,  Biden announced new sanctions on Iran. Globally, Washington has imposed sanctions on some forty countries. Because these unilateral coercive measures are a form of collective punishment, they are considered illegal under international law.

    Even the US Congressional Research Service recognizes sanctions have “failed” to achieve their regime-change goals. Yet the empire’s perverse response is to do more of the same rather than reverse course. “Once they are imposed, they become politically impossible to lift without getting something in return,” observed The New York Times.

     Times runs cover for US sanctions on Venezuela

    The empire’s “newspaper of record” bewailed that Uncle Sam had “no choice” but to reign more misery on the people of Venezuela even though sanctions do not achieve their purported purpose.

    Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Times, had “promised to take steps toward holding free elections… with the lifting of some American sanctions as an incentive. But the ink was hardly dry before his government upheld a ban on running for office that had been placed on María Corina Machado.”

    In fact, the Barbados agreement, negotiated last October, said nothing about Ms. Machado, who had been proscribed from holding public office for fifteen years back in 2015 for financial and treasonous misconduct. There was little chance that the notorious politico would have her conviction reversed by Venezuela’s supreme court which, as in the US, is an independent branch of government not under the dictates of the president.

    The US knew this when the agreement was signed, but has subsequently used it as an excuse to delegitimize the upcoming Venezuelan presidential election. Why? One reason may be that the US Intelligence Community’s Annal Threat Assessment anticipates that Maduro will win the contest on July 28.

    The article correctly reports that Machado was the “overwhelming victor” of a primary, but omits that her incredulous 93% margin in a crowded and highly contested field raised doubts about its credibility. Another leading opposition figure in the primary accused the process of being a fraud.

    The primary was held privately, not by the official election authority as other primaries were. Machado’s own NGO, one that had received funds from the CIA front group, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), had administered the primary. And after Machado was declared the winner, the ballots were destroyed. This news, apparently, was not “fit to print” in the Times.

     Times laments the downsides of US sanctions…to the US

    The article raises a concern dear to the Times, which is that the “immigration crisis,” precipitated by the US sanctions, pose “a major political problem for Mr. Biden during an election year.” In addition, the Times noted, the sanctions “pushed Venezuela further into the arms of Russia and China.”

    The article, concluding with a hackneyed observation that “dictators do dictatorship,” gripes that “US sanctions can do great harm but rarely delivers the political results that American officials seek.”

    However, the US didn’t completely close the door on Venezuelan oil industry for select corporations in the US and abroad. The new policy, while revoking the general license, will allow companies to seek individual licenses. The change, the Wall Street Journal noted, “is likely to benefit large oil companies with lobbying power in Washington.”

    More distortions

    A second Times editorial on Venezuela appeared the next day, this time masquerading as a news story. “One opposition party was allowed to officially register” in the presidential race, the article reads, inferring that there is only one opposition candidate on the ballot, when Reuters reports there are eleven others.

    “Many Venezuelans living abroad,” carps the Times, “have been unable to register to vote because of expensive and cumbersome requirements.” Unreported is the biggest barrier for Venezuelans living in the US to vote remotely in their country’s election. Washington does not recognize the legitimate Venezuelan government, which means no functioning consular services and, therefore, no way to vote.

    The Times reporter also complained that deportation of Venezuelan migrants were suspended “without explanation.” While the newspaper’s articles are protected behind a paywall, one would think that staff would have access to a February Times report that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez warned that the flights would be discontinued in response to the US’s reimposition of sanctions on Venezuelan gold sales.

    Times acknowledges the purpose of US sanctions

     The Times at least no longer blames the “economic free fall” of the Venezuelan economy on the socialist government but fully admits the economic sanctions have “crippled the country’s crucial oil industry.” Further, the Times acknowledges that the Biden administration’s action, “could carry significant consequences for the future of Venezuela’s democracy, for its economy, and for migration in the region.”

    In short, the Times reported that US sanctions, “intensified…the single largest peacetime collapse of any country in at least 45 years.”

    Finally, the Times implicitly acknowledged that the sanctions were never to promote democracy, but were “meant to force the Maduro government from power.” An earlier 2019 Times opinion piece included the suggestion that while sanctions “may make the humanitarian crisis worse” they are still desirable as a “source of leverage to remove Maduro.”

    Venezuela’s response

    The week before the oil sanctions were reimposed, Venezuelans celebrated the anniversary of the defeat of the 2002 unsuccessful 48-hour US-backed coup. Neither the tactics – the continuing coup attempts – nor the US policy of regime-change have changed.  The Venezuelan president’s response: “We are going to keep moving forward with a license or without a license…we are not your colony.”

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  • The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point

    The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”

    Palestinian, Muslim and Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have been in the forefront of the anti-imperialist peace movement. With strong youth components, they are not confused by either relying on sell-out liberal Democrats (e.g., anti-Iraq War) or by utopian calls for leaderless organizations without concrete demands (e.g., Occupy). Nor have been distracted by individualistic expressions of anger by trashing small businesses or in adventuristic confrontations with the police.

    The Palestinian resistance has radicalized millions worldwide. The popular demand for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine is leading to a still larger project to cease the US-led imperialist order.

    The overall consciousness of the resurgent peace movement reflects the normalization of anti-imperialism as a leading current; antiwar sentiment is becoming explicitly anti-imperialist.

    Evolving understanding of the Ukraine conflict

    The peace movement recognizes that, although Hamas’s action of October 7 came as a surprise, it did not simply erupt out of the blue. The uprising had a 75-year gestation starting with the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the settler colonialist State of Israel.

    Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict did not begin that day. The supposedly “unprovoked” Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.

    A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a proxy war by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a “full proxy war” by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.

    Likewise, opinions are coalescing around recognizing that there is just one superpower with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.

    The antiwar movement may differ on whether to call February 24 an invasion, an incursion, or a special military operation to protect ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine under attack. But unity has been forged that the solution to the conflict is a negotiated settlement and that the US/NATO project of “winning” the war is a threat to world peace. The outlier is the Ukraine Solidarity Network (USN).

    Still using the language of anti-imperialism, USN’s  left-leaning intellectuals and activists are opposed to a negotiated peace but champion a “victory” backed by the US and NATO. Further, they uphold the “right” of the US to fund what they personalize as a war against Putin. Their statement on the second anniversary of the war accuses Washington of having a “double standard” for supporting imperialism in Palestine but being on the side of justice in Ukraine. Other peace activists see USN’s opposition to the US involvement in Palestine, but not to its complicity in Ukraine, as a double standard.

    The USN’s call for a Ukraine victory is consonant with the Democratic Party’s. In contrast, for example, the United National Antiwar Coalition’s (UNAC) position on Ukraine is: “No to NATO’s proxy war and Biden’s $80 billion military aid to Ukraine! No to Ukraine’s joining NATO!” Similarly, the Peace in Ukraine Coalition demands: “”STOP the weapons! START the talks!”

    The emerging anti-imperialist peace movement sees the nature of US imperialism as systematic and not elective. The US empire is fundamentally imperialist; it is not a matter of choice.

    First major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic

    In the first major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic, UNAC brought together 400 activists in Saint Paul, MN, on April 5-7, under the banner of “decolonization and the fight against imperialism.”

    Among the some fifty groups participating were the Alliance for Global Justice, American Muslims for Palestine, Black Alliance for Peace, CodePink, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, US Palestinian Community Network, and Workers World Party. Local organizations included Students for Justice in Palestine, Twin Cities Students for a Democratic Society, and the venerable Women Against Military Madness, who have been protesting weekly in the streets since 1982.

    The immediacy of militant organizing was reported by Danaka Katovich of CodePink, Cody Urban of the Resist US Wars, Wyatt Miller of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, and a number of other youthful leaders.

    Palestinian liberation against colonialism was a major focal point of the conference. Mnar Adley, editor of MintPress News, movingly described her experience of living under Israeli suppression. Today, she explained, “the Intifada has been globalized,” adding that the Palestinian resistance and the movement in its support have exposed the Democrats as the “bloodthirsty war-hungry party that it is.”

    With the US presidential election imminent, conference participants had no illusions that either corporate party stands for peace. The initiative to cast ballots in the Democratic primary for “uncommitted” (to signify opposition to Biden’s complicity in the war on Gaza and to demand a ceasefire) received considerable support. Spontaneous chants of “shame” erupted throughout the conference whenever the Democrats’ conduct was raised.

    K.J. Noh of Pivot for Peace warned about US preparations for war against China. Michael Wong of Veterans for Peace described the world struggle as not one of democracy versus authoritarianism but of national liberation versus imperialism.

    Ambassadors Lautaro Sandino from Nicaragua, whose government is taking Germany to the World Court for facilitating Israel’s genocide, and Dr. Sidi M. Omar of the Polisario Front of Western Sahara addressed the conference. International solidarity was affirmed in workshops on Zones of Peace in Our Americas, opposition of coercive economic measures, and NO to NATO.

    Combating repression against the movement was highlighted by Efia Nwangaza’s presentation on the campaign to “Stop Kop Cities” and Dr. Aisha Fields’ on resisting the attacks on the African People’s Socialist Party. Mel Underbakke addressed FBI frame ups of Muslims, and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley briefed the conference on the mobilization for Julian Assange. Lessons were also drawn by speakers from the successful defenses of the Antiwar 23 and the freeing of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

    Tasks ahead

    Janine Solanki with the Mobilization Against War and Occupation in Vancouver spoke about the “unfolding antiwar and pro-Palestine movement that has a potential to go beyond the Vietnam antiwar movement.” She advised that what has been a mass spontaneous movement now needs to progress into a more coordinated and structured form. “We have humanity on our side…our role is to really organize these forces.”

    Black Agenda Report (BAR) executive editor Margaret Kimberley concluded the conference with the mandate to stop the wars at home and abroad. The current context is a neoliberal economic regime failing to meet basic domestic needs and a global pax Americana becoming increasingly contested. In reference to the workshop on climate change, she observed, “we are in a battle for survival; that’s not hyperbole.”

    In short, the conference was indicative of the larger movement that is melding youthful demographics – buoyed by the mass protests against the war on Palestine – with the mature understanding of the gravity of the tasks ahead. Kimberly closed with the guidance to “engage in principled struggle with our comrades; if you’re not struggling with someone you’re not doing enough work.”

    Prospects for the anti-imperialist movement

    Will the Democratic Party’s formula of “Trump trumps everything” quash the antiwar initiative? Back in 2015, the late BAR editor Glen Ford presciently wrote: “The Democrats hope the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, will disappear amid the hype of the coming election season.” What will happen to the 2024 antiwar protest movement when another US presidential election looms five months from now?

    Resisting being absorbed into what Ford called the Democratic election blitz to bury the movement will be the People’s Conference for Palestine, May 24-26, in Detroit, which will bring together anti-imperialist groups including the Palestine Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda, and Healthcare Workers for Palestine. The ANSWER Coalition, associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is a leading element. ANSWER and some of these other groups had also been instrumental in building major pro-Palestine demonstrations in Washington DC, the biggest ever in the US.

    Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, is among the faith-based groups that have carved out a new and implicitly anti-imperialist identity for their followers. Surely JVP, along with other Jewish activist organizations, like IfNotNow and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, will continue to militantly protest US support for Israel’s apartheid system in unity with Palestinian and other activist groups.

    Come this summer, CodePink, Bayan, and others will be confronting the largest joint war exercises in the world with Cancel RIMPAC. Protests are also scheduled for NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, July 6-7, in Washington DC; the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 19-22.

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  • Biden’s State of the Union Address Exposed by US Intelligence Threat Assessment

    President Biden used the bully pulpit of the annual State of the Union Address to describe a world that significantly differed from the picture presented just a month earlier in the Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community.

    Information fed to the general public is deliberately spun to sell the imperial project. In contrast, intelligence assessments for elite policy makers are designed to sustain the endeavor. That the president’s pronouncements diverge from the conclusions reached by his own intelligence community highlights the chasm between what is foisted on the public compared to what is understood within the bowels of the state.

    Unlike Biden’s bullish and bellicose pronouncements about “our leadership in the world,” the Assessment’s view was less triumphal. It states: “The United States faces an increasingly fragile global order.”

    The fraying US-imposed “rules based order” and its discredited neoliberal economic system are more and more being challenged by “states engaging in competitive behavior,” according to the Assessment. The report adds, fallout from the Gaza crisis, in particular, serves to “undermine” the US.

    Both pronouncements, however, have similar biases. Biden’s address to the nation was overtly political, accusing Trump of “bowing down” to Putin. But the supposedly neutral and objective “collective insights of the Intelligence Community” were likewise predisposed in favor of Democratic Party memes. Both blame Russian electoral interference for Trump’s ascension to the Oval Office in 2016. As proof, the so-called intelligence community again offered nothing more than its own assessment, lacking better evidence.

    “Ambitious” China

    Biden bragged in this address: “For years, all I’ve heard from my Republican friends…is China’s on the rise and America is falling behind. They’ve got it backward!” Contrary to his bravado about “we’re in a stronger position to win the competition for the 21st Century against China,” the World Bank predicts 4.5% GDP growth in China compared to 1.6% for the US in 2024.

    China has surpassed the US as the largest world economy by purchasing power parity. The Assessment forecasts slowed – but still greater than for the US – economic growth in what it labels as an “ambitious” China.

    The Assessment reports that China “now rivals” the US in DNA-sequencing and is the “world leader” in voice and image recognition and video analytics. Biden’s claim that, “I’ve made sure that the most advanced American technologies can’t be used in China,” is contradicted by the Assessment’s finding that China is “making progress” in producing advanced chips on its own.

    The Assessment notes: “China views Washington’s competitive measures against Beijing as part of a broader US…effort to contain its rise.” In this context, the Chinese perceive an increased likelihood of a US first-strike nuclear attack, according to the Assessment. Nevertheless, China has shown growing “confidence” in its nuclear deterrent capabilities against US aggression, also according to the Assessment.

    China is disadvantaged militarily, according to the Assessment, because it “lacks recent warfighting experience,” something the US has in excess. US intelligence estimates that China will only “fully modernize” its national defense by 2035 and will not become a “world-class military” until 2049.

    The Assessment anticipates increased Chinese push-back over Taiwan. Although Biden claimed that the US is “standing up for peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” the US has done the opposite by continuing to destabilize and militarize the region. To wit, Biden said in his address, “I’ve revitalized our partnerships and alliances in the Pacific.”

    “Confrontational” Russia

    The Assessment labels Russia “confrontational,” projecting Washington’s own posture. In a fit of made-for-popular-consumption Russophobia, Biden warned in his address: “Putin of Russia is on the march…If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not!”

    While the Assessment warns of many threats, Russian expansionism – as Biden fear mongered  – is not one of them. In fact, the Assessment notes that Russia stepped down from intervening in neighboring Azerbaijan regarding the Nagorno-Karabakh territory. The Assessment assures us: “Russia almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with US and NATO forces.”

    The Assessment notes that Russia “maintains the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile.” But it adds that Russia sees its stockpile as “necessary for maintaining deterrence” (presumably from a US first strike). The Assessment, while describing Russia as a “capable and resilient adversary,” takes the contrary view to Biden’s, seeing Russia’s posture as mainly “defensive.”

    As the US proxy war against Russia drags on, Biden continues to campaign for expanding the US funding for Ukraine with no hint of a peace. For its part, the Assessment does not contest what it describes as Putin’s belief that Russia is winning the war in Ukraine.

    Rather, the Assessment sees no victory in sight for the US: “This deadlock plays to Russia’s strategic military advantages and is increasingly shifting the momentum in Moscow’s favor.” Not surprisingly, this huge admission of the futility of the US war effort in Ukraine coming from its own intelligence institutions has not been prominently reported by the follow-the-flag corporate press.

    The Assessment describes how Russia is strengthening and leveraging ties with China, Iran, and North Korea. Russia is mitigating the impacts of US-led sanctions, while “rebuild[ing] its credibility as a great power.” Russia’s deepening ties with China in particular have afforded it significant “protection from future sanctions.”

    Despite US-led coercive economic measures, the Assessment projects “modest” Russian GDP growth. Moscow has “successfully diverted” its oil exports and largely evaded the US/G7 price caps, retaining “significant energy leverage” as the second-largest supplier of liquefied natural gas to Europe. In short, Russia is “offsetting its decline in relations with the West” with a pivot to the Global South.

    Other global flashpoints

    Biden’s policy of “containing the threat posed by Iran” is elaborated in the Assessment. US-led sanctions are credited with putting “brakes on” Iran’s economy. In response, the Assessment reports, Tehran has “expanded its diplomatic influence” by improving ties with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.

    The Assessment correctly notes that Iran uses its nuclear program “to build negotiating leverage and respond to perceived international pressure,” pointing out that Iran would “restore JCPOA limits if the United States fulfilled its JCPOA commitments [emphasis added].”

    On the one hand, the Assessment preposterously accuses Iran of seeking to “block a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.” On the other, Iran is absolved of orchestrating or having any foreknowledge of the Hamas attack on Israel. This is a notable admission.

    The Gaza conflict, according to the Assessment, poses the “risk of escalation” into regional interstate war. Uncle Sam’s “key Arab partners,” the Assessment laments, face hostile domestic sentiment because their citizens (correctly) see the US and Israel as responsible for “the death and destruction.” Although the US is recognized as the “power broker” that could “end the conflict,” the Assessment (also correctly) implies that the US has not played that role.

    The Assessment foresees Israel needing to confront “armed resistance from Hamas for years to come.” While acknowledging that Hamas enjoys “broad support,” the Assessment questions Israeli President Netanyahu’s “viability” and “ability of rule.”

    Similar to the case of Iran, the Assessment explains, North Korea’s nuclear program is pursued as a “guarantor of regime security” and to “deter outside intervention.” North Korea’s missile launches, the Assessment admits, are responses to counter hostile US-South Korea military exercises. North Korea’s development of nuclear capabilities, the Assessment further acknowledges, are defensive to “enhance second-strike capabilities” in the contingency of a first strike by the US and its allies.

    In regard to immigration, Biden touts his “comprehensive plan to fix” our system. Given the current dysfunction on the US border, claiming credit there sounds more like a Republican talking point than one favoring the incumbent. Largely ignored in Biden’s address, the Assessment is concerned with global warming and its potentially destabilizing effect on the US-imposed global order by generating climate refugees.

    “Poor socioeconomic conditions and insecurity” further drive cross-border migration, warns the Assessment. While admitting that “lack of economic opportunities” are among the factors that drive Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan emigration, the Assessment incredulously rejects blaming US sanctions for driving people away from their homelands.

    Conclusion

    Unlike the upbeat “greatest comeback story never told” of the State of the Union address, the Assessment cautions:

    “Strains in US alliances and challenges to international norms have made it more difficult…to tackle global issues…. The world that emerges from this tumultuous period will be shaped by whoever… [is] most effective at advancing economic growth and providing benefits for more people, and by the powers…that are most able and willing to act on solutions to transnational issues and regional crises.”

    Meanwhile, the Assessment reports that Putin’s “Russia has increased social spending…and increased corporate taxes.” Also reported, Xi’s China is prioritizing “a more equitable distribution of wealth – replacing the focus on maximizing GDP growth.” Back home, Biden promised in his address “to end cancer as we know it” and prophesized that he will “save the planet from the climate crisis.” (For starters, I would settle for just stopping the genocide in Palestine and a negotiated peace in Ukraine.)

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  • US Military Projection in Latin America and the Caribbean Intensifies

    Upon assuming the US presidency, Joe Biden asserted in his first major foreign policy address, “America is back!” For Latin America and the Caribbean, this has meant an “aggressive expansion” of the US military in the region.

    In just the last year, US Marines and special forces landed in Peru in May 2023, brought in by the unelected rightwing government to address internal unrest. In October, the US got the UN Security Council to approve the military occupation of Haiti using proxy troops from Kenya. Also in October, the rightwing government of Ecuador resorted to deploying US troops to deal with their domestic insecurities. This month, Mexico and Peru joined the annual US naval exercises in mock war against China. And that just scratches the surface of US military engagement in the region.

    Militarizing diplomacy

    The Pentagon, along with the National Security Council and even the CIA, have taken on an increasingly pronounced role in diplomatic relations formerly the purview of the State Department. Former CIA agent and current US ambassador to Peru Lisa Kenna, for instance, was implicated in the overthrow of the elected leftist president there a year ago.

    This drift in diplomatic function to the military became more pronounced with the appointment of Laura Richardson as head of the US Southern Command in October 2021. When asked about her interest in the region, she unapologetically admitted that the US seeks hegemony over the region and possession of its rich resources.

    In January 2022, General Richardson signed a bilateral agreement with Honduras. She met with Brazilian and Colombian military brass last May. Previously, she had visited Argentina, Chile, Guyana, and Surinam. From August to September 2022, US and Colombian militaries conducted joint NATO exercises, while Richardson made a five-day visit to meet with the newly elected Colombian president. This week, she is meeting with the president of Ecuador, who declared his country is under a state of “internal armed conflict.”

    Status of US military forces in the region

    Washington is by far the largest source of military aid, supplies, and training in the region. The US has twelve military bases each in Panama and Puerto Rico, nine in Colombia, eight in Peru, three in Honduras, and two in Paraguay, along with military installations in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru.

    In total, the US has 76 bases in the region as of 2018, plus numerous “unconfirmed operational bases.” All function as military centers as well as cyberwarfare posts. Among the problems associated with these bases are displacement of resources that otherwise would be used for social programs. These installations are notorious for their lack of transparency and accountability. In addition, they cause ecological damage with little or no provisions for environmental cleanup.

    The US also has, in addition to bases, major military operations in Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Mexico. Colombia is a “global NATO partner” and Brazil is an “extra-NATO preferential ally.” The State Partnership Program of the US National Guard joins eighteen states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia in active partnerships with militaries in 24 regional countries.

    Evolving US military mission

    The post World War II mission of the US military has evolved: first, the fight against communism ending around 1991; then the “drug wars” continuing to the present; followed by the “war on terror” and combatting transnational criminal networks of the early 2000s; and now great power competition.

    Thus, US regional military strategy has pivoted from fighting communism, terrorism, and drugs to containing China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and even Iran. China is now the leading trading partner with South America and the second largest with the region as a whole, after the US. Some 21 or 31 regional countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Southern Command’s budget, which had declined in the 2010s, is now ballooning as the US gears up to confront China.

    The Latin American “theater” is pitched by the Southern Command as a “nearby test bed” and “prime location for experimenting with and testing new technologies” to be used particularly against China. General Richardson warns that China is “a communist country that’s spreading its tentacles across the globe so far away from its homeland.”

    The Southern Command has especially targeted Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua because of their friendly relations with China and Russia. Key to the command’s strategy is disrupting regional unity in the Americas.

    Development of US military tactics

    In the bad old days of 1898-1934, Washington simply and nakedly sent its troops to take over the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. In the post-World War II years, the US still overthrew governments not to its liking the old fashioned way in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. But for the most part, the US has developed more sophisticated means of asserting its control.

    Proxy armies using mercenaries were deployed against Cuba in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in Nicaragua in the 1981-1990 contra war– both unsuccessful.

    Increasingly in the last 75 years or so, covert operations have been employed. The CIA was created in 1947. By 1954, the agency helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in what has become known as the first of many CIA coups in the Americas.

    From 1975 to 1980, the US-coordinated Operation Condor installed military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the US sponsored “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Then in 1991 and again in 2004, Washington backed coups in Haiti, followed by coups in Honduras in 2009 and Boliva in 2019.

    The US also fomented numerous unsuccessful coup attempts against Venezuela, most notably in 2002, but continuing to the present. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro revealed that four assassination plots were made against him and other high-ranking officials in 2023; the CIA and the DEA were accused. The US has posted a $15M bounty on Maduro’s head. Nicaragua, too, has been targeted, including a major coup attempt in 2018. Cuba, as well, has noted a recent uptick of US terror attacks.

    Expanding scope of military missions

    Combatting forest fires and other climate-driven disasters have recently been incorporated into the expanding US military scope. The militarists are not so much concerned about the environment as they are about perturbances that can upset the existing political order.

    In October 2022, Colombia invited US and NATO military forces into the Amazon on the pretext that they could be repurposed to protect the environment. These new ecological tasks are best understood not as non-military functions but as the militarization of environmentalism. These environmentally “woke” missions operate under such cover as the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program and even the UN Environmental Program, which cooperates with NATO.

    So-called “humanitarian missions” have also been incorporated into the expanding military scope. Former head of the Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller, described such missions as an important component in strengthening military ties with “partners” in the region. He boasted of 25 countries participating in the US military’s regional “warfighting-focused exercises” in 2021. By the next year, his successor General Richardson referenced 28 regional “like-minded democracies.”

    Perhaps the prime non-traditional mission for the US military in the region is “counter-narcotics.” A US military Security Force Assistance Brigade was sent to Panama and Colombia last May to curb drug smuggling as well as migration. The US troops work with other US agencies already in the region, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security.

    Hybrid warfare

    In addition to the explicitly military exercises, described above, the US has increasingly employed “hybrid warfare” to try to maintain its dominance in an emerging multipolar geopolitical context. Unilateral coercive economic measures are now imposed on over a quarter of humanity. Also known as sanctions, these tactics can be just as deadly as bombs.

    Sanctions on Venezuela – started by Obama, intensified by Trump, and seamlessly continued by Biden – have taken their toll: over 100,00 deaths, 22% of children under five stunted, and over 300,000 chronic disease patients without access to treatment. Despite the UN nearly unanimously condemning the US blockade of Cuba for its devastating effects on civilians and as a violation of the UN Charter, ever-tightening economic warfare has left the island in crisis. Washington is also escalating the hybrid war against Nicaragua.

    Return to gunboat diplomacy

    With the new year and with Washington’s blessings, a British warship cruised into waters contested between Venezuela and Britain’s former colony, Guyana. The disputed Essequibo territory between Venezuela and Guyana became an international flashpoint in December.

    The US Southern Command announced joint air operations with Guyana. US boots are already reportedly on the ground in Guyana. What is in essence an oil company landgrab by ExxonMobil is disrupting regional unity and is a Trojan horse for US military interference.

    Waters at the southern end of the continent are also troubled with US-NATO nuclear submarine exercises around the Malvinas and the Southern Ocean. The US Army is working on the Master Plan for the Navigability of the Paraguay River.

    With the new presidency of devotedly pro-Yankee Javier Milei in Argentina a month ago, the US is again pushing to install new military bases in the strategic triple border region of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Milei has maintained strong support since taking office…as Argentines so far embrace austerity measures.” [emphasis added] The WSJ is referring to the financially secure elites who are not among the 40% below the poverty line in Argentina. The trade unions mounted a general strike on January 24.

    In conclusion, the enduring extra-territorial protection of Yankee military power has always been for the purpose of controlling its southern neighbors, but has become more sophisticated and pervasive. In this two-hundred-first year of the Monroe Doctrine, Simón Bolívar’s words are ever more prescient: “The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague America with misery, in the name of freedom.”

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  • Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela

    Even the US business magazine Forbes expressed surprise at the reimposition of US sanctions on Venezuela’s gold sales and its threat to do the same with oil. The oil sanctions especially, if reinstated, would precipitate higher gas prices and further debilitate the Venezuelan economy, forcing more people to leave the country out of economic necessity.

    The Venezuelan government, for its part, has not been contrite. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez protested “the wrong step of intensifying economic aggression against Venezuela.” She warned that if Washington takes the threatened measures, Venezuela will cancel repatriation flights returning Venezuelan immigrants back from the US.

    Is Biden shooting himself in the foot in an election year with major vulnerabilities from inflation and unpopular immigration? The New Times describes these weaknesses as a “major crisis” for the incumbent US president. Adding to the Democrats’ woes, many Venezuelans in the US – driven here by sanctions –support Republicans.

    Barbados agreement temporarily eases sanctions

    The State Department accused the Venezuelan government of actions that are “inconsistent” with Barbados agreement, negotiated last October. This accord arranged a prisoner exchange with the US and the issuance of licenses allowing Venezuela to sell some of its own oil and gold. The agreement promised temporary and partial sanctions relief for Venezuela, although major coercive economic provisions were still left in place.

    Even with limited sanctions relief, Venezuela anticipated a 27% increase in revenues for its state-run oil company. Experts predicted a “moderate economic expansion” after having experienced the greatest economic contraction in peacetime of any country in the modern era. Venezuela was on the road to recovery.

    Then on January 30, the US rescinded the license for gold sales and threatened to allow the oil license to expire on April 18, which could cost $1.6B in lost revenue. The ostensible reason for the flip in US policy was the failure of the Venezuelan supreme court to overturn previous prohibitions on Maria Corina Machado and some other opposition politicians from running for public office.

    The Barbados agreement was predicated on “electoral guarantees.” But there was no mention of specific individuals who had been legally barred from running for office due to past offenses. In fact, these cases were well known. Venezuelan officials had repeatedly insisted that those disqualified would continue to be ineligible. According to Héctor Rodríguez, a member of the Venezuelan government’s delegation to Barbados, forgiveness for crimes was never on the negotiating agenda.

    The case of opposition politician Maria Corina Machado

    Machado’s treatment by the Venezuelan government has arguably erred more on the side of leniency than severity. In most other countries, a person with her rap sheet would be behind bars. In the US, for example, 467 individuals involved in the 2021 Capitol riot have been sentenced to incarceration for offenses far less egregious than Machado’s.

    Back in 2002, Machado signed the Carmona Decree, establishing a coup government. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez had been deposed in a military coup backed by the US. The constitution was suspended, the legislature dismissed, and the supreme court shuttered.

    Fortunately for democracy in Venezuela, the coup lasted less than three days. The people spontaneously took to the streets and restored their elected government. Machado, who now incredulously claims she signed the coup government’s founding decree mistakenly, was afforded amnesty.

    Machado was subsequently banned from running from public office after she served as the diplomatic representative for Panama in order to testify against her own country. She was also implicated in tax evasion and fraud along with coup attempts. In addition, the hard-rightist had called for a military intervention by the US and for harsh economic coercive measures.

    Machado had adamantly refused to contest her electoral ineligibility before the Venezuelan supreme court. But when Washington instructed her to go before the tribunal, she obediently complied. That Machado’s appeal would be denied was “obvious” even to Luis Vicente León, president of the pro-opposition Venezuelan polling company Datanalisis. He explained: “If we are honest, the US government knew full well this was going to happen.”

    The New York Times described the supreme court’s decision to uphold her ban as “a crippling blow to prospects for credible elections…in exchange for the lifting of crippling US economic sanctions.” In other words, the Venezuelans did not bow to blackmail and allow a criminal to run for public office.

    Venezuelan opposition

    Under-reported is how Machado became the unofficially designated opposition candidate according to the corporate press. Normally in Venezuela opposition presidential primaries are run by the national election authorities, as they are in the US. Machado, however, engineered the primary election to be run privately.

    The primaries were riddled with irregularities, and other opposition leaders are livid with Machado. Not only did her political alliance (Plataforma Unitaria) omit some opposition parties from the primaries, but voting records were destroyed after the election. This prevented any accounting when some members of her own coalition claimed fraud. Further, the administration of the opposition primary involved Súmate. Machado was the founder and first president of this private non-governmental organization, a recipient of NED funds.

    The opposition has lost credibility with even conservative political commentators in the US such as Ariel Cohen, associated with the Atlantic Council and the Heritage Foundation. He describes the US seizure of the Venezuelan-owned oil subsidiary Citgo as part of its “asphyxiation tactics.” Handed over to the opposition, they ran Citgo to the ground and used their country’s assets for personal gain.

    Sanctions “don’t work”

    Washington has a problem. Geoff Ramsey with the Atlantic Council revealingly laments: “How do you threaten a regime that’s endured years of crippling sanctions, multiple coup attempts and a failed mercenary invasion?” The unfortunate Yankee solution is more of what Forbes calls “Washington DC’s heavy-handed response” knowingly causing “enormous” human suffering.

    As a recent US Congressional Research Service report admitted, the US sanctions “failed” in their implicit goal of regime change but have exacerbated an economic crisis that “has prompted 7.7 million Venezuelans to flee.” The Hill ran an opinion piece stating that “sanctions are still hurting everyday Venezuelans – and fueling migration.”

    Some Congressional Democrats have called for ending US sanctions. Domestic corporations, such as Chevron, have been clamoring to reopen the Venezuelan market. The UN has roundly condemned sanctions, which they call “unilateral coercive economic measures.” Mexico insists that Biden address the root causes of migration. Other governments in Latin America and beyond are pressuring the US to lift sanctions. Meanwhile, experts in international human rights law censure Washington for illegal collective punishment.

    Arguably, the US economy would benefit more by promoting commerce with some 40 sanctioned countries than from restricting trade. And the surest remedy for the immigration crisis on the country’s southern border is to end the sanctions, which are producing conditions that have compelled so many to leave their homes. Even US mainstream media has nearly universally concluded that sanctions “don’t work.”

    The underlying purpose of sanctions on Venezuela

    If sanctions “don’t work,” if they are economically counterproductive, and if they cause so much suffering and ill will, why impose them? The regrettable answer is that sanctions do “work” for the purposes of the US empire.

    In 2015 President Obama declared a “national emergency.” Venezuela, he claimed, posed an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the national security of the US. That was not fake news. The imperial hegemon recognizes the “threat of a good example” posed by a country such as Venezuela. As Ricardo Vaz of Venezuelanalysis observed, Venezuela is “a beacon of hope for the Global South, and Latin America in particular, an affront to US hegemony in its own ‘backyard.’”

    Washington’s self-proclaimed “rules-based order” is threatened, especially with the emergence of China as a major world economic power. In the imperial worldview, it is better to have failed states like Libya and Afghanistan than the anathema of a sovereign and socialist Venezuela.

    In short, sanctions are a tool to prevent states striving for socialism from succeeding. The US-imposed misery on Venezuela is used by Washington as a cautionary warning of the consequences for a sovereign socialist project in defiance of Yankee domination.

    The post Why the US Is Reimposing Sanctions on Venezuela first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Washington Promotes Opposition Candidate Setting the Stage for Delegitimizing the Venezuelan Presidential Election

    Despite continuous US-led hybrid warfare to overthrow the socialist project, this month marks the 25th anniversary of the Bolivarian Revolution. The Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro has successfully forced the US to de facto engage with it, although Washington still maintains the fiction that the defunct 2015 National Assembly is the “last remaining democratic institution” there.

    While still egregiously interventionist, the imperial power has been relegated to vetting candidates for the upcoming Venezuelan presidential election, having failed to achieve outright regime change. The appearance of Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado before a US congressional committee is the latest in the empire’s quest for a trustworthy confederate. Hopes are high among Republicans that she is the right collaborator. The Democrats may have another endgame.

    The opposition to the ruling Venezuelan socialist government is composed of many small and fractious sects, usually associated with a dominant personality, such as Machado’s Vente Venezuela party. The US spends millions each year meddling in the internal affairs of Venezuela in what it euphemistically calls “democracy promotion.” USAID alone pledged $50M to “push” the presidential elections, scheduled for later this year.

    Washington’s efforts to force a unified opposition have been so far unsuccessful in Venezuela. But that has not deterred the Yankees from imperiously selecting the candidate they think ought be Venezuela’s leader.

    Farewell to Venezuelan “interim president” Juan Guaidó

     The last contender for the role of the empire’s factotum was the now disgraced Juan Guaidó. Despite his popularity abroad as the “interim president” of Venezuela, the hapless security asset was not as well received at home and was dismissed by his own opposition bloc in 2022.

    The US and its allies gave Guaidó and his cronies illegally seized Venezuelan assets such the Monómeros agrochemical complex in Colombia and the Citgo oil franchise in the US. They used the enterprises to grossly enrich themselves while running them into the ground. According to the Venezuelan attorney general, an estimated $19B was embezzled by Guaidó’s “fictious government.”

    With his deer-in-the-headlights visage and stilted oratory, Guaidó appeared every bit like a puppet. In the case of Mr. Guaidó, appearances did not deceive. In contrast, the new contestant is photogenic and with a quick wit. Besides, Machado speaks fluent English.

    Machado auditions before the “bipartisan roundtable”

    The February 7th House Foreign Affairs Committee “bipartisan roundtable” was entitled “The Fight for Freedom in Venezuela.” Streamed live, committee chair Maria Salazar (R-FL)

    gushed in support of featured guest María Corina Machado as the sole opposition presidential candidate. Salazar asserted that no other opposition candidate will be tolerated: “There is no plan B!”

    In what amounted to an audition, Machado painted a dire picture of today’s Venezuela as the “largest torture center in Latin America.” She accused the Maduro government of “intentionally destroying the quality of life.”

    When asked how she would solve Venezuela’s problems, Machado said she would “open markets.” Not mentioned was that the very US economic sanctions, which she had championed, had closed the markets and imposed an asphyxiating blockade immiserating Venezuela’s less fortunate citizens. Machado comes from one the richest families.

    Alluding to current president Nicolás Maduro and National Assembly leader Diosdado Cabello, Machado said she would not be for “a system of impunity” when she’s president.

    Although no one else had brought Nicaragua up, she pledged to work for a “transition” there too. Statements like this prompted the Perú Libre party, reflecting leftist sentiment throughout Latin America, to warn that Machado “constitutes a threat to continental peace.”

    Machado’s political baggage

     Machado comes with considerable political baggage. In 2002, she signed the infamous Carmona Decree, establishing the short-lived coup government that temporarily deposed Hugo Chávez. Machado received amnesty for supporting that coup, but has continued to be associated in coup attempts. She was active in promoting the violent guarimbas in 2014 and 2017 to overthrow the elected government and has called for a US military invasion.

    In 2014, she was barred from running for public office, in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution, when she served as a diplomat for Panama in order to testify against Venezuela before the Organization of American States. She had initially refused to contest her barring before the supreme court (TSJ), which she regarded as illegitimate. But when Washington wanted to use her electoral disqualification as an excuse for reimposing some sanctions, she obediently complied, though she still remained barred.

    Other congressional initiatives

    Last December, Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) introduced House Resolution 911 designating Machado as the “official presidential opposition candidate.” Besides being a blatant interference in the internal affairs of another country, the resolution is tone deaf to the opposition in Venezuela, which does not recognize Machado as the sole legitimate candidate.

     On January 30, after Machado lost her appeal to have her electoral eligibility reinstated, Republican Senators Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, and Bill Cassidy sent Biden a letter urging him to immediately reimpose sanctions on Venezuela in order to maintain US “credibility.” That same day, the Biden State Department issued a statement revoking sanctions relief on Venezuelan gold sales and threatened to do the same on gas and oil.

    Four days before, the Congressional Research Service reported that US sanctions on Venezuela have “failed” to achieve regime change but have caused profound human suffering. This is the same “humanitarian crisis” that Machado claims was deliberately precipitated by the Venezuelan government.

    How popular is Machado off of Capitol Hill?

     Most knowledgeable analysts identify Machado as the opposition politician in Venezuela with the greatest name recognition and the single most popular one. But she does not command the unanimity of support in Venezuela that she is receiving inside the beltway.

    Venezuelan sociologist Maria Paez Victor, now residing in Canada, reports that Machado is deeply resented by most in the opposition. “She is a hated figure among the people because of her enthusiastic support and plea for more sanctions that have caused such suffering.”

    To begin with, Machado’s much vaunted opposition primary was problematic. Machado swept a crowded field of contestants with a suspicious 92%. The October contest excluded some opposition parties, while others chose not to contend and still others participated but subsequently claimed fraud.

    The primary was not conducted by the national election authority (CNE) as they usually are, but was a private affair run by Machado’s own non-governmental organization Súmate, which has received NED funding. Some of the polling places were in private homes rather than public venues such as schools. And after the ballots were counted manually, they were quickly destroyed so that there was no way to verify the validity of the count.

    Reflecting the primary’s questionable nature, the US press usually refers to it as “an” opposition primary rather than “the” opposition primary, although a close and critical reading is needed to detect the weasel-word usage. Due to the irregularities, the Venezuelan supreme court subsequently suspended the primary results.

    Machado’s prospects

     Although Maduro has yet to announce his candidacy, it is widely believed that the incumbent president will be his party’s choice. For her part, Machado says, “there can be no elections without me.” The European Union agrees, saying they will not recognize the election unless Machado runs.

    The Orinoco Tribune reports that the White House does not especially care who the opposition candidate is in Venezuela. According to Biden official Juan González, “the process and not the candidate” is most important.

    This translates to the White House anticipating a Maduro victory and, accordingly, planning to pronounce the election fraudulent. In the last Venezuelan presidential election, the US took no chances when it declared the contest fraudulent a half a year in advance and even threatened opposition candidate Henri Falcón with sanctions for running.

    The manufactured drama around Machado’s electoral eligibility has a purpose that has little to do with the far-right opposition politician. Washington knew with near certainty that she would not be allowed to run for political office due to manifest past transgressions. That is precisely why she was not named in the Barbados Agreement’s electoral roadmap negotiated between the US and Venezuela. Rather, the charade is being played out to cast doubt and calumny on the upcoming election. If Maduro wins, the US will surely pronounce the contest illegitimate.

    The post Washington Promotes Opposition Candidate Setting the Stage for Delegitimizing the Venezuelan Presidential Election first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • US Congressional Resolution Calls for Annulling the Monroe Doctrine and Ending Sanctions

    Now, 200 years after President James Monroe first promulgated his dictate giving the Yankees dominion of the rest of the hemisphere, a congressional resolution calls for annulling the Monroe Doctrine and replacing it with a “new good neighbor” policy. The intent is to “foster improved relations and deeper, more effective cooperation” with our neighbor nations.

    Led by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Chuy García (D-AZ), and Greg Casar (D-TX), House Resolution 943 notably calls for ending unilateral coercive economic measures against Cuba and other regional states. Initially introduced on December 19, 2023, Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Hank Johnson (D-GA) added their co-sponsorships on January10. Others may join them.

    Rap sheet on Monroeism

    While the Monroe Doctrine ingenuously claimed to protect hemispheric independence from foreign interference, HR 943 charges that the policy has, in fact, been used as a “mandate” to give the US license to interfere in the internal affairs of other states to promote its own narrow interests.

    The resolution forcefully begins with noting the “massive, forced displacement and genocide of Native peoples” by the North American colonialists.

    The resolution goes on to enumerate the further progression of the US imperium on the hemisphere. Back in the 1840s, the US took 55% of Mexico. In 1898, Puerto Rico (still possessed) and Cuba (Guantánamo still controlled) were seized. From 1898-1934, Washington intervened militarily in Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic.

    In 1904, “international police power” to protect US and foreign creditors in the region was claimed under the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In 1947, the CIA was created with authorization for covert action in the region. Then in 1953, Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz was overthrown in the “first” CIA coup.

    In 1961, the US facilitated a 21-year military dictatorship in Brazil. The following year, the still continuing embargo (really a blockade) of Cuba was initiated. In 1973, Washington backed a coup in Chile and the succeeding 15-year military dictatorship.

    From 1975-1980, the US coordinated Operation Condor with terroristic military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In 1983, the US invaded and overthrew the government of Grenada. And in the 1980s and early 1990s, the US backed “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

    In 1991, the US covertly financed a military coup in Haiti. Another coup in Haiti was precipitated in 2004. Starting in 2000, billions were provided for Plan Colombia, implicated in massive human rights abuses. Meanwhile, from 1941-2003, US Naval operations in Vieques, Puerto Rico, caused deaths and lethal illnesses. In 2002, the US supported an unsuccessful coup in Venezuela. US-backed coups in Honduras in 2009 and in Bolivia in 2019 were both followed by Washington’s support for the subsequent illegitimate governments.

    Although this amounts to an appalling rap sheet, the resolution just highlights some of the more obvious transgressions. Omitted, for instance, is the 1989 US invasion of Panama and overthrow of that government.

    US-imposed institutions of regional control

    The resolution notes that the Washington-based and largely US-controlled Organization of American States (OAS) ignores “the many egregious abuses perpetrated” by the US and its client states.

    Similarly, the largely US-dominated International Monetary Fund is implicated in the regional debt crises, which has resulted in austerity and stagnant development. Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, which are often imposed by the US in free-trade agreements, are also criticized in the resolution.

    The resolution blames the massive regional immigration of displaced persons partly on Washington’s own policies. The Central American “dirty wars” in the 1980s and 1990s and more recently the US-sponsored US drug wars and free trade agreements are cited among the problematic contributing causes.

    Regarding foreign intervention in the hemisphere, although not noted in the resolution, has been the US’s actual abetting of foreign interference; that is, when it aligns with its interests. Just this month, the British sent a warship to Guyana. At the same time, a US deputy secretary of defense was meeting with the Guyanese, backing the claims of a US oil company in territory disputed between Guyana and Venezuela.

    Further, the US fully backs what amount to European colonies, regardless of whether they are called dependencies, overseas territories, or even departments. France claims French Guiana, Guadeloupe Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, and Martinique. Netherlands possesses Aruba, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten. The UK has Bermuda, Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the Malvinas. Washington, too, has its own de facto colonies of Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.

    Remedies

     Following this devastating bill of particulars, the resolution calls for remedies. The first of which is for the State Department to “send a strong signal” by annulling the Monroe Doctrine. A “good neighborhood policy” is proposed to replace it.

    That sounds nice. But, as the resolution notes, then US Secretary of State John Kerry mouthed similarly soothing words in 2013 and nothing came of that.   Notably, this resolution adds a bite to the bark, specifically calling for terminating all unilateral coercive economic sanctions. These measures are a form of collective punishment and as such are illegal under international law and condemned by the United Nations.

    Regarding the recidivist US practice of backing “extraconstitutional transfer of power,” the resolution urges Congress to legislate automatic reviews of assistance to coup governments. Aid would only be reinstated after the both the US and the majority of regional states agree that constitutional order has been re-instituted.

    Interestingly, the resolution calls for the “prompt” declassification of all US secret documentation on coups, dictatorships, and human rights abuses. Cover-ups from the past would be exposed.

    In terms of regional governance, the resolution insists that the OAS be reformed. Without naming US-sycophantic Luis Almagro, the resolution requests accountability for unethical and criminal activities by the organization’s secretary general plus full transparency on financial and personnel decisions (not explicitly named, but including his girlfriend). An ombudsman’s office is proposed. Human rights rapporteurs and electoral observation would be independent. Similarly, the US is asked to work cooperatively with other regional bodies such as CELAC, CARICOM, and UNASUR.

    Unspecified reforms of the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions are proposed to ensure equity for loans to developing countries. International Monetary Fund Special Drawing Rights are cited, which would help regional development and climate adaptation. Contributions are also recommended to the Amazon Fund.

    Citizen initiatives

    Of the sponsors of the resolution, three had been on a delegation to Brazil, Colombia, and Chile in August facilitated by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), where they met with high-level officials. CEPR’s Director of International Policy Alexander Main commented that the delegation sought to “promote a fresh approach to US relations.”

    CEPR publishes the monthly Sanctions Watch, which reports on the asphyxiating impact of the unilateral coercive economic measures. Longest sanctioned, Cuba is in dire need of humanitarian relief from Uncle Sam. Particularly debilitating for Cuba was President Trump’s inclusion of the island nation on the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, which cuts it off from otherwise available aid.

    The SSOT policy has been continued by President Biden. A call to reverse the policy is absent from the proposed congressional resolution, which is sponsored by Biden’s fellow Democrats. However, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) and the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE) are among the many organizations working to get Cuba off that list. These include faith-based groups such as the Presbyterian Mission and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Even the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which is the DC-based think tank that serves to give a liberal gloss to State Department policies, wants Cuba removed from the list.

    The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition (NSC) works on reversing US sanctions there and is gearing up against a new congressional initiative to extend the grueling collective punishment. Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice (FTT) and the Venezuela Solidarity Network are among the North America groups working to take the US sanctions burden off of Venezuela.

    The SanctionsKill campaign opposes all economic coercive measures, including those imposed by the United Nations. The Latin America and the Caribbean Policy Forum, spearheaded by CodePink, is working for an “Americas without sanctions” with the Alliance for Global Justice (AfGJ) and others. CodePink and World Beyond War hosted a mock “funeral” for the Monroe Doctrine in December.

    Counter initiative

    Earlier on December 1, María Elvira Salazar (R-FL) and Chip Roy (R-TX) had introduced a resolution, which was opposite of the intent of the resolution led by Velázquez. This other resolution celebrated the Monroe Doctrine’s bicentennial and was joined by fourteen other Republican representatives as cosponsors. They asserted that the need is greater than ever to protect against “malign overseas influence.” Salazar warned, “China, Russia and Iran are trying to invade the Western Hemisphere.”

    Although Velázquez’s and her fellow Democrats’ HR 143 calls for annulling the Monroe Doctrine and ending sanctions, we should have no illusion that their resolution will end US imperialism any time soon. Unfortunately, many on the blue team including their standard bearer have developed a fervor for American exceptionalism similar to the wing-nuts on the other side of the aisle.

    But, given the seemingly unlimited bipartisan appetite for foreign intervention, it is at least a step in the right direction and a platform that can be used for organizing, particularly against sanctions. As the Spanish daily El País commented, the resolution to annul is a “charge against two centuries of US expansionist policy.”

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  • Contrasting Strategies of the US and China

    Xi Jinping: “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other… the planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed.”  

    Joe Biden: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.”

    In the latest salvo preparing the US for confrontation with China, Nicholas Burns flat out said, “I don’t feel optimistic about the future of US-China relations.” Burns should know. He is Washington’s ambassador to Beijing.

    The US stance on bilateral relations with China, according to Burns, is one of “strategic competition in the coming decades… vying for global power as well as regional power.” Indeed, the US is preparing for war with China. High-ranking US Airforce General Mike Minihan foresees war as early as 2025.

    This contrasts with the Chinese approach of cooperation for mutual benefit to solve the most pressing global problems. In short, each country’s leadership presents different paradigms of relations. The Chinese strategy is compatible with a socialist mode of collaboration and community. The US construct reflects a capitalist fundamentalism of competitive social relas.

    Which paradigm may prevail is discussed below based on observations made in China on a recent US Peace Council delegation where we met with our counterpart, the Chinese People’s Association for Peace and Disarmament.

     View from Beijing

    The Chinese view, based on what they call “Xi Jinping Thought,” is that the US-China association as the most important bilateral relationship in the world. As Chinese President Xi Jinping has explained: “How China and the US get along will determine the future of humanity.”  This view is predicated on the acceptance of a high degree of integration between the two countries’ economies. They see this “entwining” as something to be promoted because both countries stand to benefit from each other’s development.

    Overarching the bilateral relationship from the Chinese perspective is a stance of friendly cooperative relations. A “common prosperity,” they believe, can be built on three principles. First is mutual respect. A critical aspect of that pillar of mutual relations is not crossing the red lines of either of the two global powers. Second is peaceful coexistence. This entails a commitment to manage disagreements through communications and dialogue. And third is win-win cooperation. For example, increased trade with China boosted the annual purchasing power for US households.

    That the US and China occupy such dominant positions in the world entails concomitant responsibilities. According to the Chinese, major countries have major responsibilities to humanity. They point out that global problems, such as climate change, cannot be solved without US-China cooperation. Indeed, the US and China together contribute to 40% of the planet’s current greenhouse gas emissions.

    Beijing contrasts their posture with what they explicitly criticize as the Biden administration’s “zero-sum mentality.” In a zero-sum game, one player’s gain is equivalent to the other’s loss. This differs from the Chinese vision of “win-win” relations based on cooperation for mutual benefit. The Chinese take exception to the US definition of bilateral relations as one of antagonistic “strategic” competition.

    Biden-Xi faceoff

    The opposing paradigms were displayed at the APEC summit in San Francisco on November 15, where the two world leaders met face-to-face for the first time in two years. We do not know what was discussed in the closed-door meeting. But in a press conference afterwards, US President Joe Biden said of the person he had just spent four hours: “Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours.”

    Even neo-con US Secretary of State Antony Blinken winced at the press conference. His grimace was captured in a video that went viral.

    Later that day, Chinese President Xi calmly instructed, as if responding to Biden’s indiscretion, “It is unrealistic for one side to remodel the other.” Peaceful coexistence for the Chinese necessitates a tolerance and acceptance of different social systems and modes of being. Xi further commented, “the planet Earth is big enough for the two countries to succeed.”

    Fortune acknowledged that Xi offered a vision different from what it characterized as Biden’s “winner-take-all” mentality. The business magazine noted that Biden has continued Trump’s tariffs on some Chinese products while tightening export controls and investments in high-tech areas such as advanced chips.

    Thinking through the unthinkable

    It is not an accident of geography that China is surrounded by a ring of some 400 US military bases. Biden has strengthened (1) the Quad military alliance with India, Australia, and Japan originally initiated in 2007, (2) the AUKUS security pact with the UK and Australia founded in 2021, and (3) the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing with UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada dating back to the beginning of the first Cold War, while forging (4) a new mini NATO alliance with Japan and South Korea last August.

    Although the Chinese have no bases in North America, a Chinese “spy balloon” that strayed over “American skies” a year ago posed an “unprecedented challenge,” according to the Pentagon. A study by the semi-governmental RAND Corporation provides further insight into the official US posture. Commissioned by the US Army, the title of the study says it all: “War with China – thinking through the unthinkable.” The best minds that money can buy were paid by the US taxpayers to game Armageddon.

    Starting from the official US national security doctrine of “full spectrum dominance,” the analysts at RAND played out various US war scenarios with China. The outcome, they predicted, would be disastrous to both sides. However, based on the morality expressed on a bumper sticker I saw in my neighborhood, “he who ends up with the most toys wins,” the US would come out ahead.

    Yes, the US would prevail according to RAND. But the report also contained a caveat…if such a war is contained. That is, if other countries do not join the melee and if it does not go nuclear, the conflict might be contained.

    The military strategists warn that the chances of containment, however, become progressively fleeting as a conflict progresses. Once initiated, such a conflict is increasingly subject to unintended consequences for the protagonists. Further, they note that there is a tremendous military advantage for one side or the other to strike first.

    Contest for the future of our world

    In his official National Security Strategy, Joe Biden described “the contest for the future of our world.” According to the US president, “our world is at an inflection point.” He continued, “my administration will seize this decisive decade to…outmaneuver our geopolitical competitors,” meaning foremost China.

    Biden admonished: “We will not leave our future vulnerable to the whims of those who do not share our vision.” It’s either my way or the highway, for the imperial POTUS.

    Biden then promised to impose “American leadership” – meaning domination, because no one voted him planetary potentate – “around the world.” US world leadership is already manifest in the most mass shootings, the highest national debt, and the largest incarcerated population. The US currently leads the world in the sale of military equipment, military expenditures, and foreign military bases.

    Whistling in the dark, Biden concluded, “our economy is dynamic.” In fact, the US economy is dominated by the non-productive FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) sectors, while China has become the “workshop of the world.”  Statista estimates that China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy by 2030.

    In contrast, China’s belt and road initiative (BRI) is a global infrastructure development program which has invested in over 150 countries. No wonder Biden fears that the Chinese alternative in his own words “tilts the global playing field to its benefit.”

    The alternative posed by China

    Unlike the West, whose wealth is based on colonial relations, China elevated 800 million out of poverty without resorting to imperial wars. But is China, guided by Xi Jinping’s “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” indeed socialist? A range of opinions exist within the self-identified socialist left depending on the litmus test applied.

    For some, socialism does not exist in China or for that matter anywhere else, past or present. For them, socialism is an ideal that has yet to be realized. Others uphold China under Mao Zedong but not under the subsequent Deng Xiaoping revision. At the other end of the spectrum are proponents of China having already achieved socialism. In between, reflecting China’s mixed economy with state-owned and private enterprises, are various shades seeing China in transition between socialism and capitalism. For some, the transition is advancing; for others, it is regressing.

    The Chinese leadership’s view is that the material conditions necessary for the full realization of socialism are still in the process of being developed.

    This modest paper will not resolve the question of whether China is socialist, which ultimately will be one for history to decide. It is clear, however, that the Chinese paradigm of global cooperation is counterposed to the US’s zero-sum competition. If not precisely socialist, China at least offers a paradigm that does not preclude a socialist future. Importantly, in this contentious geopolitical climate, China and by extension the Global South pose a countervailing space from US imperial hegemony.

    The Chinese appear cognizant of the Yankee’s “make war, not peace” attitude, but the 4000-year-young civilization seems self-assured that the rationality of “win-win” peaceful development will prevail. From what I saw on my visit, they confidently exude the patience of maturity and the solid vitality of youth.

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  • How the Campaign to Free Venezuelan Political Prisoner Alex Saab Succeeded

    Alex Saab was freed from US captivity in what Venezuelan Prof. Maria Victor Paez described as “a triumph of Venezuelan diplomacy.” The diplomat had been imprisoned for trying to bring humanitarian supplies to Venezuela in legal international trade but in circumvention of Washington’s illegal economic coercive measures, also known as sanctions.

    Negotiated prisoner exchange

    In a prisoner exchange, Venezuela released ten US citizens and some other nationals to free Alex Saab after his over three years of imprisonment.

    Saab’s plane landed in Venezuela on December 20. He was tearfully greeted by his family, friends, and Venezuela’s primera combatiente Cilia Flores, wife of the president. Shortly after, President Nicolás Maduro made a triumphal public address with Alex Saab at his side at the presidential palace.

    Unlike Maduro, US President Biden made no such public address with his releasees beside him. Had he done so, he would have had to stand with “Fat Leonard” Francis, who had escaped US captivity after being convicted in a major US Navy corruption case implicating some sixty admirals. The US badly wanted him back in their custody. He knew too much about officials in high places.

    The White House has so far declined to reveal the full list of those released. John Kirby, US Security Council spokesperson, tweeted, “Sometimes tough decisions have to be made to rescue Americans overseas.” Among the others released were mercenaries Luke Deman and Airan Berry, who were captured after the “Bay of Piglets” attempt to assassinate the Venezuelan president.

    The US government would have liked nothing more than to have locked Alex Saab up and thrown away the key. And for a while, it looked like that was going to happen. Saab’s crack legal team had tried unsuccessfully to free him on the grounds that he was a diplomat who, under the Vienna Convention for Diplomatic Relations, is supposed to enjoy absolute immunity from arrest. Although the US is a signatory to the convention, Uncle Sam saw no reason to abide by international law.

    The US Department of Justice lawyers argued, in effect, that because the US does not recognize the legitimacy of the democratically elected government in Venezuela, it certainly does not have to accept its diplomats. Although appeals were made, the US government simply delayed the case.

    In short, the likelihood of achieving justice from the US justice system was slim. The last hope for freeing Alex Saab was a prisoner exchange. And that turned out to be the route to freedom.

    How the campaign succeeded

    The saga of Alex Saab and his ultimate emancipation is similar to the campaign to free the Cuban 5. The five had infiltrated terrorist groups in the Miami area, which were planning attacks on Cuba. When the Cuban authorities notified the FBI in 1998 of these illegal actions being planned on US soil, the US government instead arrested the five Cuban heroes, as they became to be known in their homeland.

    Cuban President Fidel Castro vowed that the five would be freed, and they were. Two of the five eventually completed their prison sentences. Then in 2014, the remaining three were released in a prisoner exchange after a successful international campaign.

    Like the campaign to free the Cuban 5, the FreeAlexSaab campaign rested on four legs: the remarkable resoluteness of Alex Saab himself, the mobilization of the entire Venezuelan nation on his behalf, an international movement, and the support and involvement of his family.

    Alex Saab’s resoluteness was exemplary. Unlike many prisoners, Saab had a get-out-of-jail-free card that he could have played if he had chosen to do so. He did not.

    As US officials admitted, Saab was a high value asset because he had information that the US security state wanted regarding contacts and means to circumvent the illegal coercive economic measures. All he had to do was sing and renounce Venezuelan President Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution. But he did not, even under extreme pressure. Not simply pressure, but he was tortured while imprisoned in Cabe Verde.

    In his emotional welcoming speech to Alex Saab, President Maduro remarked on Saab’s Palestinian heritage, noting that came with a capacity to resist. Venezuela has been among the Latin American nations most critical of the Israeli assault on Palestine.

    The second pillar to the successful campaign was the mobilization of the Venezuelan nation behind freeing their national hero. This mobilization extended from the grassroots to the head of state.

    Maduro noted that even while Saab was languishing in jail, the diplomat’s efforts had not been in vain. Although Saab was behind bars for 1280 days, the Venezuelan people were benefiting from the vaccines, food, and fuel that Saab had arranged to be delivered, circumventing the US blockade. Sharing the podium with them at the welcoming speech was a high-ranking Venezuelan general who, hearing this, cried.

    Efforts of friends and family

    The third element in the successful effort was launching an international campaign to #FreeAlexSaab. All over the world, friends of Venezuela’s sovereignty united to hold actions demanding his freedom.

    Out of Vancouver, Canada, Hands Off Venezuela! conducted monthly online virtual picket lines featuring guest speakers on the Saab case. British rock star Roger Waters spoke out for Alex Saab’s freedom, as did distinguished Nigerian lawyer Femi Falana, United Nations special rapporteurs Alfred-Maurice de Zayas based in Switzerland and Alena Douhan based in Belarus, international law expert Dan Kovalik at the University of Pittsburgh, and Puerto Rican national hero and former political prisoner Oscar Lopez Rivera. Also weighing in on the injustice to Alex Saab were the American Association of Jurists, the National Lawyers Guild, United Nations Human Rights Committee, and the African Bar Association, along with the Economic Community of West African States’ (ECOWAS) Court of Justice.

    Head of the North American FreeAlexSaab Campaign, Venezuelan-American William Camacaro commented that this was an important victory for President Maduro and by extension the larger Bolivarian Revolution. An already fractious opposition in Venezuela, he observed, has gotten even more divided while the Chavista movement is more unified going into the 2024 presidential election year.

    Parallel campaigns for a prisoner exchange were waged on behalf of US citizens imprisoned in Venezuela. Prominent among those drives were the friends of Eyvin Hernández. The Los Angeles public defender had been arrested in March 2022 when he illegally entered Venezuela from Colombia. The Hernández campaign waged a strong effort reaching government officials and doing effective lobbying.

    Speaking of government officials, the removal of disgraced Democrat Robert Menendez as chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Foreign Relations eliminated a significant obstacle to the prisoner exchange. Surprisingly, Maduro revealed that a deal to free Saab had previously been made with Trump, but when Biden won the election, they had to start again from scratch.

    The fourth and indispensable pillar for the successful campaign was Alex Saab’s family, who had been targeted by the US but stood firm and supportive. The day that Saab’s son turned eighteen, the US slapped him with sanctions along with his uncles and other family members. Camilla Fabri de Saab, the former prisoner’s wife, led the effort even though she was a young mother with two young children.

    As would be expected, Fabri was initially devastated by her husband’s imprisonment. She too was targeted and even her parents in Italy were hit. But out of adversity came strength. Fabri took the lead in uniting the many pieces of the campaign and the legal effort. With no exaggeration, she became a major international leader. She was appointed by Maduro to be on the sensitive negotiating team meeting with members of the Venezuelan opposition in Mexico City to retrieve some of Venezuela’s assets that had been illegally seized by the US.

    Fabri’s moving video, made just five days before her husband’s release, was about what the holidays would be like without him. As it turned out, this will be a more joyous holiday season for all the prisoners freed in this historic exchange and their families. The release of Alex Saab is a victory for Venezuelan sovereignty and shared with the third of humanity still under US sanctions.

    The post How the Campaign to Free Venezuelan Political Prisoner Alex Saab Succeeded first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.