Tag Archives: Venezuela

Consistently Spending More Than a Nation Can Afford Causes Its Fall, by Bill Bonner

Posted on November 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

It demonstrates rampant intellectual depravity that the above title is widely considered controversial, if not outright wrong. From Bill Bonner at bonnerandpartners.com:

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”

– James Madison

PARIS, FRANCE – And now, we come to the end… and the beginning.

We end our series on the Persecution and (political) Assassination of Donald J. Trump, as performed by the morons, flimflammers, and bunglers of the Deep State.

But also, through the open door in front of us, we see what might be the future…

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The 2 Most Important Things I Learned When the SHTF in Venezuela, by J.G. Martinez D.

Posted on October 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

Some things just cannot be taken for granted. From J.G. Martinez D. at theorganicprepper.com:

Hello again fellows.

It’s has been a while since our last interaction.

Some health issues have knocked me down on my back, literally, this last week, but here I am again. Stress seems to be charging a toll on me.

Let’s go straight to the topic now. I know this is not something I usually do, you’re right.

If there is something that looks like SHTF, it is the extreme change of the situation we faced. I will elaborate a small prelude for those readers unaware of our story. I had a good life back there in Venezuela, until 3 or 4 years ago. Living in an already paid for house, in a good subdivision, a city the exact size not too big not too small..good medical care, good salary, a great job. In less than one year (a few months, indeed) all of that is gone. Couple relationship, everything. A total extension, all of a sudden, life reset. And a bugout getting through two foreign countries, now becoming increasingly violent against us migrants.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Economy, Government

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Falling From Grace, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on September 2, 2019 | 2 comments

How empires fail, from Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, “Empires fall from grace with alarming speed.”

Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it’s one that I’ve kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.

I’m from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to the “New World” to seek promise for the future.

As I’ve spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I’ve had the opportunity to observe many British contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on board when Britain “came back.”

This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world’s foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn’t returned to its former glory.

And it never will.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Military, War

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Punishing the World With Sanctions, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on August 17, 2019 | Leave a comment

Without much success, the US government keeps ramping up sanctions to bend other nations to its bidding. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

Sanctions are economic warfare, pure and simple. As an alternative to a direct military attack on a country that is deemed to be misbehaving they are certainly preferable, but no one should be under any illusions regarding what they actually represent. They are war by other means and they are also illegal unless authorized by a supra-national authority like the United Nations Security Council, which was set up after World War II to create a framework that inter alia would enable putting pressure on a rogue regime without going to war. At least that was the idea, but the sanctions regimes recently put in place unilaterally and without any international authority by the United States have had a remarkable tendency to escalate several conflicts rather than providing the type of pressure that would lead to some kind of agreement.

The most dangerous bit of theater involving sanctions initiated by the Trump administration continues to focus on Iran. Last week, the White House elevated its extreme pressure on the Iranians by engaging in a completely irrational sanctioning of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. The sanctions will have no effect whatsoever and they completely contradict Donald Trump’s repeated assertion that he is seeking diplomacy to resolving the conflict with Iran. One doesn’t accomplish that by sanctioning the opposition’s Foreign Minister. Also, the Iranians have received the message loud and clear that the threats coming from Washington have nothing to do with nuclear programs. The White House began its sanctions regime over a year ago when it withdrew from the JCPOA and they have been steadily increasing since that time even though Iran has continued to be fully compliant with the agreement. Recently, the US took the unprecedented step of sanctioning the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is part of the nation’s military.

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Posted in Banking, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Imperialism, Trade

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Washington’s Mighty Warriors: Draft Dodgers and Scoundrels, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on May 31, 2019 | Leave a comment

The people pushing hardest for war within the Trump administration have never been in one. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

Remember Shakespeare’s line “he jests at scars that never felt a wound?” That epithet could have been written with National Security Advisor John Bolton in mind. Bolton was notoriously a draft dodger during the Vietnam War, like his current boss, not due to any scruples regarding what was occurring, but out of concern for his own sorry ass. He is now credibly believed to be the driving force behind the punishment being meted out to Venezuela and, far more dangerously, of the creeping escalation that is taking place in the Middle East that is seeking to draw Iran into a misstep that would lead to war. Bolton, who has received the “Defender of Israel” award, has long been an outspoken advocate for attacking Iran and now he has the power to do just that.

The psychopaths in the White House have been pretending that the United States “and its allies” are being threatened by Iran, a ridiculous conceit in and of itself as the Persians are hugely outgunned by the local U.S. presence as well as by the weapons in place in the region in the hands of the Saudis and Israelis. Israel is, one might recall, armed to the teeth through the beneficence of the United States and is also the region’s only nuclear armed power by virtue of the theft of U.S. technology and enriched uranium. The Saudis, meanwhile, are about to receive another $8 billion American made weapons due to the “Iranian threat.” That Trump has arranged the arms sale on his own questionable authority as an “emergency response” seems to bother some in Washington and the media, but no one will ultimately do anything about it as everyone inside the Beltway hates Iran due to the assiduous work of the Israel Lobby.

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Sanctions Are a Bitch – U.S. Refiners Importing Russian Oil Like Mad, by Tom Luongo

Posted on May 23, 2019 | Leave a comment

The law of unintended consequences catches up to Trumps trade and sanctions policies. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

It’s a headline so funny I literally ruined a keyboard spitting out my coffee yesterday.

Working off a stub from Bloomberg, Sputnik took a lot of joy in amping up the irony.

The market needs to be fed. And refiners will buy whoever has the best cargo at the best price. It is only politicians who don’t understand that you can’t dictate to the markets.

Now refiners in the U.S. have been under pressure with rising oil prices but Russian oil isn’t brought in to supply the tight gasoline market. Russian Urals grade is considered heavy-sour which is better for refining into diesel and other heavier grades.

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Posted in Business, Energy, Geopolitics, Governments, Trade

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Silicon Valley Giants Collaborate With The US Government On Venezuela, by Caitlin Johnstone

Posted on May 13, 2019 | Leave a comment

The tech giants have become just another arm of the Deep State. From Caitlin Johnstone at medium.com:

Whenever you speak out on a public forum against internet censorship, like the recent Instagram/Facebook banning of Louis Farrakhan, Infowars, and several right-wing pundits, you always offend two major political groups. The first group are the power-serving authoritarians who identify with the left side of the political spectrum; they argue that it’s good and right to trust Silicon Valley plutocrats to regulate political speech on giant monopolistic platforms. The second group are the capitalism cheerleaders who believe there’s a free market solution to every problem; they argue that these Silicon Valley giants are private companies which are completely separate from the government, so it’s not accurate to refer to what they do with their own property as censorship.

Is that really true, though? Is it really accurate to claim that these sprawling corporations that nobody’s been able to compete with are simply private companies, separate and distinct from the government of the nation they’re based in? If you look at their behavior, it certainly doesn’t seem like it.

The US government is working to topple the government of Venezuela and replace it with a puppet regime. On the off chance that you were still in denial of this self-evident fact, check out this April 24th fact sheet on the website for the US embassy in Brazil which openly boasts about the way economic and diplomatic pressures are being deliberately placed on the Venezuelan government to install Washington puppet Juan Guaido to the nation’s leadership. Trump’s National Security Advisor has blatantly threatened that the US will starve the families of Venezuelan military officers if they don’t overthrow their government, right there on Twitter.

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Posted in Business, Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Government, Horseshit, Media, Technology

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Are All the World’s Problems Ours? by Patrick J. Buchanan

Posted on May 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

Here’s a radical new idea: maybe the US government could leave one or more tiny corners of the world alone for a while. From Patrick J. Buchanan at buchanan.org:

In 2003, George W. Bush took us to war to liberate Iraq from the despotism of Saddam Hussein and convert that nation into a beacon of freedom and prosperity in the Middle East.

Tuesday, Mike Pompeo flew clandestinely into Baghdad, met with the prime minister and flew out in four hours. The visit was kept secret, to prevent an attack on the Americans or the secretary of state.

Query: How successful was Operation Iraqi Freedom, which cost 4,500 U.S. lives, 40,000 wounded and $1 trillion, if, 15 years after our victory, our secretary of state must, for his own security, sneak into the Iraqi capital?

Topic of discussion between Pompeo and the prime minister:

In the event of a U.S. war with Iran, Iraqis would ensure the protection of the 5,000 U.S. troops in country, from the scores of thousands of Iranian-trained and Iranian-armed Shiite militia.

That prospect, of war between the U.S. and Iran, had been raised by Pompeo and John Bolton on Sunday, when the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier task force and a squadron of U.S. bombers were ordered into the Middle East after we received reports Iran was about to attack U.S. forces.

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Russiagate Zealotry Continues to Endanger American National Security, by Stephen F. Cohen

Posted on May 10, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Russiagate myth has exploded, but that doesn’t mean Trump will no longer be boxed in on policy towards Russia. From Stephen F. Cohen at lewrockwell.com:

Now in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent political scandal in modern American history. It rests on two related core allegations: that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an “attack on American democracy” during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and that Trump and his associates willfully colluded, or conspired, in this Kremlin “attack.” As I have argued from the outset—see my regular commentaries posted at TheNation.com and my recent book War With Russia?—and as recently confirmed, explicitly and tacitly, by special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report, there is no factual evidence for either allegation.

Nonetheless, these Russiagate allegations, not “Putin’s Russia,” continue to inflict grave damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the integrity of the presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many Democratic members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the Democratic Party and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst episodes of journalistic malpractice in modern times.

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CIA Intervention in Venezuela, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on May 9, 2019 | Leave a comment

It used to be years, even decades, after CIA interventions and regime changes before we found out about them. Now we know about them in real time. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

As far as I know, no evidence has yet surfaced that definitively establishes direct CIA involvement in the U.S. regime-change operation in Venezuela. But it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is directly embroiled in the operation.

How do we know that? Because that’s what the CIA does. It’s what it has always done. Regime-change has always been one of the core missions of the CIA. If there is a U.S. regime-change operation, you can bet your bottom dollar that the CIA is at the center of it.

You can also be certain of something else: secrecy. The long-established modus of the CIA is to keep its role in regime-change operations secret, even if it has to lie or commit perjury to maintain that secrecy.

For example, think back to the Chilean coup in the 1970s.

When the Chilean people elected Salvador Allende president, the CIA immediately went into action. It began offering bribes to Chilean congressmen to get them to vote against Allende’s confirmation. (Allende had received only a plurality of the votes and, therefore, under the Chilean constitution the Chilean congress determined who was going to be president.)

It also orchestrated the kidnapping and assassination of Gen. Rene Schneider, who was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was standing in the way of a CIA-inspired military coup, which the CIA was secretly inciting within the Chilean national-security establishment.

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