Well, the bloom is off the rose after nearly four years of blundering, but it is still surprising to hear an occasional voice raised defending the foreign policy of the president. Their argument starts with some generally legitimate observations, to include the fact that an Obama orchestrated conspiracy led by the intelligence and security agencies were out to delegitimize Trump and his team from the time he became a candidate until after he was actually inaugurated. Combine that with a hostile media and a Democratic Party that has been seeking revenge since the Clinton defeat, up to and including a phony impeachment, and it is easy to understand why Donald Trump has had to play defense since he took office.

And it is also true, and sometimes cited, that there was a significant number of hold-overs in the bureaucracy from the Obama eight years who were resistant to change and, as loyal Democrats, did what they could to sabotage proposals emanating from the White House. But even conceding all those points, that is where those who are making excuses for Trump generally drift off into space, insisting that it has taken the president nearly four years to clean house of his enemies. Given another four years and he will fulfill the promise that got him elected in 2016.

Well, that is a load of nonsense. Apart from anything else, Donald Trump’s demeanor has alienated nearly all of America’s traditional allies while most of the world regards him as a dangerous sociopath who is also something of a joke. The Trump supporters should be looking at his actual record, instances where he could have acted but didn’t and other occasions when he did things that were from the git-go clearly not in the U.S. national interest. I am thinking particularly of the ruined relations with Russia and China, the pandering to Israel and also the inexcusable attacks on Syria. But the biggest mistake of all might have been the abrupt withdrawals from international agreements and bodies, to include the disastrous departure from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). When the Washington Post’s leading Zionist Jennifer Rubin attacks you for leaving the nuclear agreement with Iran, in an op-ed which was published last week, you should know that it was the wrong move.

But Trump’s seemingly aimless foreign and national security policies are only part of the problem. More to the point, the president keeps appointing people to senior level positions where they have a hand in shaping the policies ranging from hardline on civil liberties issues to complete interventionism vis-à-vis America’s role worldwide. The list is long and includes John Bolton, Rick Grenell, Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, James Jeffrey, Robert O’Brien, John Ratcliffe and Gina Haspel. And one might suggest that the latest move might very well be the worst of all, naming Eliot Abrams as Special Envoy on Iran.

The promotion for Abrams is due to the resignation of the incumbent in the position Brian Hook. Hook’s tenure was particularly undistinguished. Daniel Larison, who describes the appointment of Abrams as “appalling,” observes how “He was responsible for lies about Yemen, cringe-inducing video messages, promoting the administration’s weird fixation with Cyrus the Great, and embarrassing historical revisionism about the 1953 coup. When he wasn’t trying to bribe ships’ captains to steal Iranian cargo, he was insulting our intelligence with phony claims of wanting to normalize relations with Tehran. Last year he came under fire from the State Department’s Inspector General for his role in the mistreatment of Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, who was the target of political retaliation at the department on account of her support for the JCPOA and at least partly because of her Iranian heritage.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed the new assignment last Thursday. Abrams, who is already the Special Envoy for Venezuela and also a noted Iran hawk, will hold both positions. Hook and Abrams had been tasked with executing the administration’s “maximum pressure” policy against the governments in Caracas and Tehran. In Venezuela, the U.S. became involved in a military coup that never got started while completely failing to advance the prospects for its “recognized” president of the country, Juan Guaido. The White House’s objective in Iran was and still continues to be squeezing the economy to bring about an uprising by the long-suffering Iranian people that would force the government to negotiate surrender terms with Washington. That has also failed to materialize.

Current U.S. policy on Iran has come down to threats to use military force if there is any evidence that the Iranians are seeking to develop a nuclear weapon. Both Hook and Abrams were disinterested in engaging in diplomacy within their respective operational areas. In spite of the lack of any results Pompeo praised the departing Hook saying that “Special Representative Hook has been my point person on Iran for over two years and he has achieved historic results countering the Iranian regime… [he has] also served with distinction as the Director of Policy Planning and set into motion a range of new strategies that advanced the national security interests of the United States and our allies.”

Abrams is best known due to having pleaded guilty in 1991 as part of the Iran-Contra affair. He was subsequently pardoned by President George H. W. Bush. While assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Abrams had testified before Congress and lied, saying that the U.S. had not been involved in arming the right-wing Contra rebel group against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. He later admitted that he had withheld information and entered into a plea agreement for a reduced sentence of two years in probation. His felony did not hurt his political career as he later served in the George W. Bush administration and currently with Trump.

The promotion of Abrams confirms that Donald Trump cares not at all for diplomacy or even for treating foreign countries with respect. This attitude has done serious damage to American interests around the world. It is past time to stop making excuses for the president and instead begin to consider what needs to be done to repair the damage.

Hawk Elliot Abrams, reborn as a U.S. envoy, is at the spear point of recent aggressive moves in Venezuela.

Barbara BOLAND

As we await answers on who funded the plot to use a handful of mercenaries and ex-Green Berets to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, it’s worth taking a closer look at the man behind regime change policy, the special envoy on Venezuela, Elliott Abrams.

Called the “neocon zombie” by officials at the State Department, Abrams is known as an operator who doesn’t let anything stand in his way. He has a long history of pursuing disastrous policies in government.

A little background on Abrams: when he served as Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights, he concealed a massacre of a thousand men, women, and children by U.S.-funded death squads in El Salvador. He was also involved in the Iran Contra scandal, helping to secure covert funding for Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of laws passed by Congress. In 1991, he pled guilty to lying to Congress about the America’s role in those two fiascos—twice.

Under President George W. Bush, Abrams promoted regime change in Iraq.

Abrams was initially blocked from joining the Trump administration on account of a Never Trump op-ed he’d penned. But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo succeeded in bringing him onboard last year, despite his history of support for disastrous regime change policies.

It’s no surprise that with Abrams at the helm, U.S. rhetoric and actions towards Venezuela are constantly “escalating,” Dr. Alejandro Velasco, associate professor of Modern Latin America at New York University, said an interview with TAC.

Meanwhile, Abrams announced the “Democratic Transition Framework for Venezuela,” which calls on Maduro’s government to embrace a power-sharing deal. The plan doesn’t explain how Venezuelan leaders with bounties on their heads are supposed to come to the table and negotiate with Juan Guaido, whom the U.S. recognizes as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. Abrams has also said that the U.S. does not support a coup.

A few days after recommending a power-sharing arrangement, and 18 years after the U.S. backed a putsch against Hugo Chavez, Abrams warned that if Maduro resisted the organization of a “transitional government,” his departure would be far more “dangerous and abrupt.” To many, Abrams’ aggressive rhetoric against Maduro made it sound like the U.S. was “effectively threatening him with another assassination attempt,” like the one Washington had “tacitly supported” in 2018.

Two weeks after Abrams’ warning, Operation Gideon began. Jordan Goudreau, an American citizen, former Green Beret, and three-time Bronze Star recipient for bravery in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with Javier Nieto, a retired Venezuelan military captain, posted a video from an undisclosed location saying they had launched an attack that was meant to begin a rebellion that would lead to Maduro’s arrest and the installation of Juan Guaido.

In a public relations coup for Maduro, the plot was quickly foiled. Given that American citizens were involved and have produced a contract allegedly signed by Guaido, the incident has severely harmed the reputations of both the U.S. and the Venezuelan opposition.

Both President Trump and Pompeo have denied that the U.S. had any “direct” involvement with Goudreau’s plot.

However, the Trump administration has given billions of dollars from USAID to Venezuela, and that money is largely untraceable due to concerns about outing supporters of Guaido.

“With all the cash and arms sloshing around in Venezuela,” it is not hard to imagine how U.S. funding could inadvertently wind up supporting something like this, said Velasco.

There are other signs that the U.S. may have been more involved in the plot than they are saying publicly.

For one, American mercenaries don’t carry passports identifying themselves as American nor do they return to the U.S. where they can be brought up on charges for their work, said Sean McFate, professor of war and strategy at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and the National Defense University.

In order to sell weapons or training to another nation, it is necessary to receive permission from the State Department. It’s unclear whether Goudreau and his band did so. But Goudreau’s social media posts look like a pretty “clear cut” violation of the International Convention Against the Recruitment, Financing and Training of Mercenaries and the U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR) said Peter Singer, a senior fellow at New America.

We know that months before the fated coup, the CIA met with Goudreau in Jamaica and allegedly warned him off the project. According to the AP, Goudreau is now under investigation for arms trafficking. Members of Congress have asked the State Department what they knew of Goudreau’s plans. Given the illegal nature of the supposedly unauthorized project, it’s very strange that the ringleader is at present in Florida, talking to the press and posting on social media.

Besides that warning, it seems no one in government tried to stop this calamitous operation.

And it’s not just regime change. Last year, Abrams advocated granting special immigration status for the 70,000 Venezuelans residing illegally in the U.S. as a way to “pressure Maduro” even though Trump ran on the promise to severely limit the number of people granted Temporary Protected Status.

It was in pursuit of special status for Venezuelans that Abrams showed himself to be “incredibly pompous, bull-headed, and willing to destroy anyone who opposes him, in a personal way, including by trashing their reputations in the media,” another senior State Department official told TAC. Abrams is not above hiding policy options he doesn’t like and offering only those he favors to Pompeo to present to Trump, sources said.

Abrams ultimately prevailed and Venezuelans received refugee status from the Trump administration, despite the fact that it betrayed Trump’s campaign promises.

According to Velasco, there are some people in the administration who believe that Venezuelans are the “new Cubans”—that they will become a solid, loyal Republican vote in the swing state of Florida if they’re granted special status. They also believe that Venezuelan expats want to see the U.S. remove Maduro. There are “many Cold Warriors” who believe all it will take is a “little push” for Venezuelans to rise up and take out Maduro, said Velasco.

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment on whether Abrams is pursuing a military confrontation in Venezuela.

“Cold Warrior” beliefs are dangerous. While “Operation Gideon” was especially clownish, had it been more sophisticated, it could have easily sparked a world war. The Russians, Iranians, and Chinese are all operating in Venezuela.

That specter is even more concerning now that Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov has said that Russian special services are on standby to help Venezuela’s investigation of the mercenaries.

theamericanconservative.com

Trump supporters suffered a collective convulsion when foreign policy hawks, like John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams, were brought screeching into his administration. How could the US president be sincere about rolling back US military activities abroad, they asked, when the neocons had a hotline to his ear?

Yet here we are, almost three years later, and we’ve yet to witness Armageddon, although we do have a spectacular trade war raging with China. Mere mortals would view the cessation of US-driven hostilities as a positive development. For the US deep state, however, which depends upon military expansion and war for its very survival, it is an unspeakable disaster. In that sense, if Trump is really serious about draining the Swamp, abstaining from global aggression would be one of the most effective ways of achieving that goal.

….I asked John for his resignation, which was given to me this morning. I thank John very much for his service. I will be naming a new National Security Advisor next week.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 10, 2019

Had Hillary Clinton squeaked out a victory in 2016, we’d all be handwringing once again, attempting to make sense of yet another killing field – this time in Syria – reminiscent of the former Secretary of State’s “We came, we saw, he died” psycho scenario that played out in both Iraq and Libya. The closest the Trump administration got to full-blown warfare came in April 2017 when it launched missiles at a Syrian air base purported to have been involved in a chemical attack on civilians. Since that moment, which made the carnivorous media cheerleaders giddy from the promise of bloodshed, it has been relatively quiet on the Western front. So quiet in fact that John Bolton is probably wondering why Trump chose him as his security advisor in the first place.

.@FareedZakaria on Syria strikes: “I think Donald Trump became President of the United States” last night https://t.co/dLipRu6SZu

— New Day (@NewDay) April 7, 2017

Indeed, not only has Washington not invaded a foreign country since Trump entered the Oval Office, it looks like Bolton may be remembered as the White House National Security Advisor who was sent home without a head of some foreign leader to place above the fireplace. And certainly not for lack of trying.

The belligerent Bush-era hawk who once spoke out in favor of preemptive strikes against both Iran and North Korea, Bolton also failed, thus far, to drive Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro out of Caracas. In fact, Maduro has claimed, without providing any evidence, that Bolton was personally responsible for organizing an attempt on his life.

The setbacks for the hawks continues in Afghanistan, where Trump has expressed a willingness to cut a deal with the Taliban that will allow him to draw down US troops and declare a foreign policy victory ahead of 2020 elections. Yet conspicuously missing from those peace talks is John Bolton, who reportedly has been blacklisted for peace talks later this month.

According to a report in the Washington Post, quoting an anonymous source, “Bolton asked for a copy of the draft agreement the United States is trying to strike with the Taliban. But the U.S. envoy leading the negotiations, Zalmay Khalilzad, denied the request, saying Bolton could read the agreement in the presence of a senior official but not leave with it in hand…”

Most shocking of all, however, as far as the deep state is concerned, is Trump’s recent suggestion that he would be willing to sit down with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani at UN headquarters later this month.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Trump made the comments after he was essentially ambushed during the G7summit in Biarritz, France last month. At the secret invitation of French President Immanuel Macron, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise visit to the meeting, to discuss possible ways of ending the standoff with Washington after the Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal last year.

According to US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, US sanctions are an effort to reduce Tehran’s oil exports—which provide some 40 percent of its revenue—to “zero.” Washington’s allies, however, fear that crushing the Iranian economy will eventually force Tehran into some sort of response, potentially a violent one, thereby giving the US a possible pretext for war.

“Iran’s strategy at this time is reducing its commitments under the nuclear deal,” Mehdi Mahmoudi, an Iranian journalist based in Tehran, told The Media Line. “Indeed, this tactic is successful because the European Union is now trying to do more and more work to appease Iran.”

Iran Gives Ultimatum, Threatens to Abandon Nuclear Deal (with AUDIO INTERVIEW) https://t.co/10TfwZwmjy via @TheMediaLine

— ايران وطن من . IRAN My Homeland (@IranHomeland) September 5, 2019

Trump’s great gambit

In an effort to understand Trump and his balancing act between a government loaded with hawks, and a geopolitical chess game rigged to dynamite, there are at least three dynamics at play – ‘3D chess’ if you like.

First, Trump the relentless businessman, whose talents are to be found in the boardroom as opposed to the battlefield, understands the need for strong-arm tactics in order to get the best possible deal. This he hopes to accomplish by putting notorious Neocons like Bolton, Pompeo and Abrams on the government payroll. Their mere presence sends an unmistakable message to Trump’s opponents: Cut a deal with me or I will remove the leash from these warmongers, who will be only too happy to do the bidding of the deep state. Thus far the nerve-rattling strategy, despite the unfathomable risks involved, has worked like magic against North Korea.

Next, by keeping snarling Neocons on the payroll, Trump gives the deep state the ‘false security,’ as it were, that another regime change operation is just one false flag attack away. Despite the string of chemical attacks in Syria, and the attack on foreign vessels blamed on Tehran, thus far Trump has managed to avoid a full-blown military scenario in places like Syria and Iran. Of course all that could change in a millisecond, but for now a very tense ‘peace regime’ is in place.

Finally, by keeping some of the most prominent members of the deep state under his wing, Trump not only works towards his own self-preservation, but facilitates his campaign pledge to drain the swamp. The importance of a ruler keeping his enemies close was laid out millennia ago by Sun Tsu, the Chinese military strategist. The question at this time is whether Trump is sincere, or still up to the task, of carrying out his incredibly ambitious plan.

Considering the untold humiliations he has suffered since entering the White House, at the hands of a media that has been completely co-opted by the deep state, it seems doubtful Trump will forego his house-cleaning campaign. In that event, the likes of Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams and other Neocon officials will be less useful against foreign adversaries than they will be against battling the D.C. swamp creatures, even if they, the neocons – Trump’s eternal enemies that he has deemed to keep close as the sage Chinese strategist advised – are wholly unaware of the contributions they will make to the main event.

The recent executive order signed by US President Donald Trump encompasses all entities that do business with Venezuela, thus creating an embargo that will further isolate the nation, even as the US moves to open a “Venezuela Affairs Unit” unit in its embassy in Bogota, Colombia. The unit would engage in diplomacy with the US-backed Juan Guaido, who is recognised by the Trump administration and its allies as the purported interim Venezuelan president. Its aim, according to US Special Representative to Venezuela Elliot Abrams, is in anticipation of “the day this regime falls”.

In a report titled “Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela”, it is estimated that 40,000 people have died as a result of the US-imposed sanctions from 2017 to 2018. According to the US, Venezuela poses “an unusual and extraordinary threat” to its national security – unfounded claims as Trump continues with overt attempts to bring down Maduro’s democratically-elected presidency.

Political pressure against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is instigated by the US, yet there is a backdrop of support from its allies in the region and, globally, from countries that spout the democracy line, even if there is nothing democratic about foreign interference.  While mostly in the background in comparison to the US, Canada has facilitated support for the Venezuelan opposition. In Europe, countries which have not explicitly backed Guaido have assumed an allegedly neutral stance which constitutes tacit agreement in terms of opposition support. The EU criticised US sanctions on Venezuela but has also threatened the country with similar punitive measures, as the European Parliament expressed its support for Guaido.

The international community is dominated by discourse that promotes foreign intervention according to the undemocratic agendas of the so-called democratic countries. Venezuela is urgently in need of a unified political strategy that stands in political solidarity against imperialist interests.

BRICS has positioned itself as one such alternative in terms of economic prospects, international security and stability. Russia and China have repeatedly affirmed their support for Maduro. South Africa and India have likewise followed suit. On the other hand, Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro is preventing BRICS from promoting a political discourse that fully repudiates US interference in Venezuela.

Contrary to the rest of the BRICS countries, Brazil recognised Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president and it has expressed support for the international community to pay heed to “Venezuela’s cries for freedom”. Brazil has also adopting measures in line with the Lima Group, as well as prohibited Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials from entering Brazil.

At the G20 summit in Japan, BRICS stated it supported dialogue between Maduro and the Venezuelan opposition to reach a solution. Yet the call is marred by the political divide between Brazil and the other BRICS members. This lack of consensus, including the divergence in terms of recognition of who is Venezuela’s legitimate leader, weakens its political diplomacy in the international arena. As Brazil aligns with the US, although reportedly holding back from endorsing military intervention in Venezuela, It is moving away from one of the organisation’s main aims, which is to establish itself in opposition to capitalist and imperialist exploitation.

In a recent interview, former Brazilian President Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva expressed his disappointment at BRICS not moving further politically. “BRICS was not created to be an instrument of defence, but to be an instrument of attack.” If this momentum is to be built, BRICS needs to find equilibrium in its politics, rather than allow itself to be swayed into a seemingly neutral position due to the US allegiances of Brazil under Bolsonaro. It is not enough to preach dialogue like the rest of the international community have done while weakening Venezuela’s autonomy. BRICS must evaluate its relevance, especially when it comes to one of its members demonstrating political opportunism that is contrary to the group’s aims.

Bolton remains National Security Advisor of the United States with his fingerprints all over the latest “incident” of limpet mine attacks on the two oil tankers in the Persian Gulf.

That is not to see that daylight has perceptibly opened up between Trump and Bolton, first on Venezuela and now on Iran. It most clearly has.

Had Trump still been fully in Bolton’s pocket, he would by now have ordered the ferocious air strikes against Iran that Bolton desperately craved. It is greatly to the president’s credit that he did not.

The failure of Bolton – eagerly supported by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Special Envoy Elliott Abrams and Vice President Mike Pence – to secure the toppling of President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela a month ago clearly cost him badly. Trump is a lifelong businessman. He would have gone for what he regarded as a good deal – the toppling of Maduro in a US–orchestrated coup but Bolton and his gang made an utter hash of it.

Bolton was therefore eager to turn the president’s attention – and that of political Washington – to Iran as soon as possible. The compliant, spineless jellyfish of the US Mainstream Media (MSM) accommodated him as always. Not a whisper of doubt about Bolton’s evident incompetence in the Venezuela Escapade has been allowed to appear in the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Instead, the MSM has settled for fluff gossip stories about how much Trump still loves or does not love his national security adviser.

Bolton retains the strategic support of his wealthy, enormously influential political sponsors: The neocon clans that ran US foreign and national security policy so catastrophically under President George W. Bush and whom President Barack Obama shamefully and complacently allowed to stay in power and perpetrate the destabilizations of Ukraine and Syria and the toppling of the government of Libya.

Bolton also continues to enjoy the total support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If Netanyahu fails to secure a governing coalition in the September elections in Israel, it is extremely possible that Bolton will lose the crucial Israeli allies he has taken for granted for so long.

Since the days of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli military has profoundly distrusted the war hungry wild delusional schemes of the neocon chicken-hawks in Washington as much as their opposite numbers in the Pentagon. Netanyahu’s most likely successor, Bluer and White coalition leader General Benny Gantz, a former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff can be a counted in their number.

Indeed, the key takeaway from the events that did – and more importantly did NOT – happen between the United States, Iran and Venezuela over the past three months is that the senior generals in the Pentagon, especially in the US Army – resisted the neocon super-hawks led by Bolton and his allies.

Senior US generals in my observations are not caricature, irresponsible militarists at all but sober professionals who recognize clearly the real rising challenges they face and the need to try and prevent having to fight several full scale wars on multiple fronts at the same time.

That is why the departure of General James Mattis as Secretary of Defense and of General John Kelly left such a worrisome gap at the apex of US strategic policymaking.

Yet the past three months have shown that the departures of Kelly and Mattis did not give Bolton and his fellow warmongers a free hand: The warmongers thought it did, but they blew it. Bolton is not gone yet by a long shot. But the myth of his supposed “genius” (which I have addressed elsewhere in these columns) has been badly damaged. Trump himself is beginning to see through it.

A man as fanatical and relentlessly energetic as Bolton – the mark of the dangerous fool in the estimation of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery – should never be dismissed from consideration until he is finally gone. As long as he still has the chance to whisper in the ear of the President of the United States – and the president lets him – he remains a danger to world peace and the survival of humanity.

The good news is that Venezuela has been granted a brief stay of execution. Iran, which Bolton has obsessed with destroying for 40 years, still remains his primary target. Yet Trump, Bolton’s own president, refused to play by Bolton’s appointed Gulf of Tonkin script on the latest manufactured Gulf crisis.

Bolton and his allies are obvious, brutal, predictable and straightforward: But they are also energetic, never-resting and relentless. They clearly have not given up in their efforts to manipulate Trump into launching a full-scale war with Iran and more provocations can be expected to follow relentlessly each piled upon another.

Bolton is down. But not out. After a strong start, he has suffered several stinging reversals. But his will power is not dented. Nor is his determination to drag his country headlong into multiple needless and avoidable conflicts whose only end can be utter destruction.

In addition to Guaidó, who is accused by the legitimate Venezuelan government of money laundering, treason, and corruption, other Popular Will leaders under investigation by both the Venezuelan Attorney General and the US Justice Department include Carlos Vecchio, Guaidó’s envoy in Washington; Rossana Barrera and Kevin Rojas, Guaidó’s emissaries in Cucuta, a Colombian-Venezuelan border town; Sergio Vargara, Barrera’s brother-in-law and a Member of the Venezuelan Congress; Guaidó’s “ambassador” to Colombia, Humberto Calderon Berti, opposition businessman Miguel Sabal; and Guaidó’s chief of staff, Roberto Marrero. Over two dozen other Popular Will leaders are also under investigation for fraud involving money earmarked by the Trump administration, particularly Iran-Contra scandal felon and current Trump special envoy for regime change in Venezuela, Elliot Abrams.

Barrera and Rojas are accused of spending money given to the Popular Will by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a longtime CIA financial pass-through, for “humanitarian relief” for alleged massive numbers of Venezuelan refugees in Colombia. The Popular Will grifters reportedly used the aid money, including that which was raised by Virgin Group’s billionaire founder and obvious CIA dupe Richard Branson, for expensive hotels, fancy restaurants, nightclubs, prostitutes, and clothing.

It comes as little surprise that Abrams, with his history of “sticky fingers” around US and foreign assistance money, has played a hand in the Venezuelan opposition fraud. As Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs during the Ronald Reagan administration Abrams was involved in the illegal raising of funds for the CIA-supported right-wing Contras fighting against the socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. In 1991, facing a felony perjury conviction for lying to Congress, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information to Congress about his fundraising activities for the Contras. In 1992, Abrams and other Iran-Contra criminals were pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, one of the unindicted Iran-Contra co-conspirators. Abrams surfaced again in 2001 in the George W. Bush administration. He was involved in the abortive 2002 CIA coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as well as in cooking US intelligence to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Abrams’s involvement in any US covert activities in always an indication of massive fraud. Abrams’s backing of Guaidó and his operatives and recent reports of fraud are not much different than the notorious Republican Party neo-con’s sordid record with such Contra leaders as Adolfo Calero, the president of the Nicaraguan Democratic Forces (FDN); Arturo Cruz; Alfonso Robelo; Edén Pastora; and Enrique Bermúdez.

CIA funds directed to the Contras for the purchase of weapons soon found their way into the hands of Colombian drug lords, including Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder of the Medellin Cartel. An elaborate scheme was worked out that saw the Contras buying, with CIA funds, weapons and cocaine, with the former ending up in the hands of the Medellin Cartel and the latter being shipped to the United States with a very handsome financial return. Everyone made out nicely, including Contra leaders who spent much of their time in Miami donating funds to Republican coffers through the offices of top Cuban-American leaders like Jorge Mas Canosa. Establishing the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) in 1981 at the urging of Reagan administration officials, including national security adviser Richard Allen and Abrams, Mas Canosa soon became a major asset for both the CIA and the Republican Party.

The CANF would also serve as a convenient CIA money laundering artifice to assist in financing right-wing terrorist groups in Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Colombia, and other Latin American nations. The CANF remains a potent political force, one that benefits right-wing politicians in Florida and Latin America, including Florida’s two Republican Senators, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, both fanatical supporters of Guaidó.

In 1992, the CIA helped launch another massive fraud when it helped form the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an Iraqi opposition group led by one of Abrams’s neo-con friends, Ahmad Chalabi. More at home in swank London clubs than in Iraqi Kurdish areas where the CIA was planning for the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Chalabi was also involved in the defrauding of Jordan’s Petra Bank, which collapsed in 1989. Chalabi eventually ensured that bogus intelligence from Iraqi-German fabulist Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a discredited one-time Western intelligence source derisively codenamed “Curveball” by the CIA for his untrustworthiness, ended up on President George W. Bush’s desk, courtesy of con-artists like Abrams, a National Security Council official. Chalabi became Iraq’s Oil Minister in the puppet US government established in Baghdad following the US invasion. Chalabi almost immediately came under investigation for counterfeiting Iraqi currency, grand theft of Iraqi national and private assets, and espionage on behalf of Iran.

Abrams and his neo-con cabal were also instrumental in launching the career of another CIA fraudster, General Khalifa Haftar, a defector from the army of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi. Safely ensconced by the CIA in northern Virginia in 1990, Haftar, who became a US citizen, was involved in several CIA-supported putsches aimed at overthrowing Qaddafi. In 2011, at the outset of the revolt against Qaddafi, the CIA inserted Haftar into eastern Libya, where he eventually became a virtual warlord, governing his army’s occupied territory from Tobruk with the assistance of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and the Abu Dhabi-based mercenaries led by Erik Prince, the founder of the CIA’s former favorite mercenary firm, Blackwater, and brother of Donald Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos. Haftar is also reportedly enriching himself and his family by pocketing revenue from Libyan oil sales in territory his forces control.

The CIA’s history of support for con-artists and grifters like Guaidó, Calero, Mas Canosa, Chalabi, and Haftar expands to a virtual “rogues’ gallery” of ne’er-do-wells, scoundrels, and other worthies. General Lon Nol was the CIA’s choice to take over Cambodia after the 1970 military coup against Prince Norodom Sihanouk. According to a May 26, 1970 TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE/EYES ONLY memorandum from US national security adviser Henry Kissinger to President Richard Nixon, Lon Nol was summed up as “emotional and not very realistic.” However, that is the sort of person the CIA has always chosen to embrace, with the neo-cons being among those who have avidly championed such political riff-raff in Congress and the mass media. Lon Nol believed himself to be an authentic Mon-Khmer “holy warrior” with mystical powers. “Black Papa,” which Lon Nol preferred his followers to call him, died in Fullerton, California in 1985, still on the dole of the CIA.

After the 1975 fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces, CIA asset and South Vietnamese prime minister and vice president Nguyen Cao Ky eventually settled in Westminster, California, not far from Lon Nol. Instead of insisting on being revered as a demi-god, Ky was more practical than Lon Nol; he ran a liquor store. The CIA’s former head of the anti-Communist Hmong Army in Laos, General Vang Pao, was arrested in California in 2007 for illegally attempting to overthrow the Pathet Lao-led government in Laos. CIA pressure eventually led the US government in 2009 to drop all the conspiracy charges against Vang Pao. Certain elements in the CIA were concerned about what Vang Pao might have said, under oath, during a full trial about his role with the CIA is smuggling opium from the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia via the auspices of CIA proprietary airlines like Air America.

Juan Guaidó and his gang are merely following in a long line of CIA crooks and criminals who conduct their illegal affairs with a wink and a nod from Langley and a sizeable financial cut for neo-cons like Abrams, Kissinger, John Bolton, and the other members of that nefarious political clique. Trump often decries the “Deep State” as covertly working to undermine him. It appears that Trump and his friends are doing quite nicely, courtesy of his feared “Deep State.”

Before we talk about the video it must be stated that this piece was paid for by the US State Department as part of the “ShareAmerica” Youtube channel. The official description of the channel is as follows.

“This channel delivers videos on American life, culture and politics. Produced by the US Department of State Bureau of International Information Programs, the videos illustrate values that underlie US policies and explore interests shared by Americans and people around the world.”

There is absolutely nothing wrong with a government using Youtube as a means of explaining its policies or doing PR for its nation. In fact the United States should make explanations as to why it has certain policies so a broad audience can understand them. That is completely reasonable, however this video about Venezuela does not explain anything about American culture, in fact it has nothing to do with America at all. It sort touches on that point about “illustrat(ing) values that underlie US policies” but in the most counterproductive means possible.

The very first words of the video, by US Special Representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams hit the viewer hard like a baseball bat to the forehead coated in pure smugness.

“The current state of affairs is not normal for Venezuela, it is not acceptable for Venezuelans. I am absolutely convinced it is not Venezuela’s destiny…”

The smugness mentioned above comes from the position from which Mr. Abrams it talking to the audience. How can any foreigner from a completely different civilization, say that they know what is “normal” for a people that is not their own and that they probably do not understand. Moreover how some suit in a biased position in a foreign government possibly know the destiny for a far-off nation with a radically different culture and history, especially since the destiny of America is a much debated topic even among Americans.

Well, if you look at the world from the perspective of a pro-Western bigot absolutely convinced of his own inherent superiority and the universalism of is beliefs then it seems perfectly reasonable to be able to tell any people in any country outside the West that they need to get with the program.

Since Abrams believes there is only one correct, moral, effective destiny for all of humanity then it makes perfect sense that he would chose to preach the one true faith to the heathen barbarians without thinking a second thought.

Looking again at these words from other angles, the question of “normalcy” in Venezuela right now is very much related to US meddling. If there was no big media pressure being put on the nation to overthrow Maduro then there would probably be a much higher level of “normalcy” in the nation. Political stability is critical to a strong economy.

Regarding whether the state of affairs in Venezuela is “acceptable” depends on your political leanings, but since Maduro continues to have very strong support from the masses the majority does apparently find things to be acceptable with the moustached one at the helm.

Just a few sentences in to the video and any viewer with even a basic knowledge of history and current affairs will be frothing at the mouth from the arrogance and irrationality of the Special Representative’s generic Beltway presentation.

As the video goes on Abrams explains his/America’s vision for Venezuela. Again, it begs the question, why should a foreigner and a foreign nation have a vision for Venezuela? But in short makes the overall argument that the video conveys is that if you back our guy Guaido then Venezuela will get nice things, like better medical care, stable electricity etc.

One of the biggest offers that the West presents to the world is simply materialism. Adopt our way, or submit to it and you will live well. This type of simple submission-for-wealth scheme worked very well in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and is surely partially responsible for the fall of Communism.

At that point in history many people behind the Iron Curtain were convinced that by submitting to the West they would get all the good things from stable dull Communism plus the fantastic cars, vacations and blue jeans they saw in movies they officially weren’t supposed to be watching. They were sure they would get “200 kinds of sausage” and all the Adidas track suits they could ever want, but the problem is that they didn’t realize that most of them would have to become migrant workers serving Brits their coffee to buy those nice things struggling far away from their homes like my cousins do.

To an extent, even today, poor people in the former Soviet Union are convinced that if they go to the West they will get instantly wealthy because those nations do things “for the people”. Talk to any Uzbek taxi driver and they will tell you it is so.

But we are not living in 1989 and we can see that the submit-for-wealth strategy has very high costs. Despite Soviet “repressions” in the Baltic states at least their populations grew, whereas with their new freedom these and other Western nations’ native populations are dying out and being replaced by migrants who despise them. Furthermore, despite completely submitting to the West nations like Slovakia are Romania are still very poor and nations like China and Singapore who reject many Western values are on the rise.

Without going into a diatribe it is now becoming obvious that the submit-for-wealth offer is far less sweet than it used to be. Maybe 30 or 40 years ago the Venezuelans en masse could have bought this, but no sane person is going to think that if they bring in Guaido, Venezuela will be as rich as 1950’s America in 5 years. This video’s Cold War tactic is no longer the home run hit that it used to be, but how could the State Department redo this video to make it much more effective while relaying the same message?

How to improve this video:

ShareAmerica’s big problem is smugness and arrogance. It is very possible to say the same thing from a position of humility and respect to the Venezuelans. A text written in this way would probably do the trick…

“The US has chosen to back President Guaido as the true leader of Venezuela because of many of the positions that Maduro holds. He pushes a sort of quasi-Communist agenda of propping up failed government policies with the riches of the nation, and this is very bad for our business, our trade and our relations with Venezuela. Of course, Venezuelans are free to choose their destiny, but Maduro is impossible to work with from an American standpoint especially since he uses our nation as some sort of boogeyman to distract the population from his own governmental failures. The United States will stand with any Venezuelan leader who does not refute our morality and is willing to work with us. Maduro has irrational beliefs that block us from working with the nation he oversees. As it stands today Guiado meets the criteria we need for productive relations and he is the man we support in Caracas, because Maduro is Anti-American and will not work with us, and we simply cannot respect a man who does not respect us.“

This approach is far less intellectually insulting and basically says in official language, that America only backs those who play ball. That is not a surprising or illogical position for a powerful civilization to have and a text like this one above would relay that to the reader’s subconscious.

If the same video were done with a drop of humility and respect to the intelligence and cultural differentness of the Venezuelans, then this video could achieve its intended results. As it stands now this video “A new Venezuela” is Youtube fuel for anti-Americanism.

The refusal of the US political establishment to abandon its petulant dream of toppling the democratically-elected government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela confirms that a thermonuclear superpower’s strategic direction has fallen into the hands a group of spoiled, immature, bullying young children or teenage thugs. F.N. Dostoyevsky would not have been surprised.

The mask has fallen off any remaining pretense of concern about the Venezuelan people and only the resort to naked brute force, incompetently applied is left.

The pace indeed has now become manic. US National Security Adviser John Bolton, who surely ought to have better things to do, flies half way round the world to threaten the government of India to scrap aid and trade deals with Caracas.

Yet more sanctions are announced on Venezuela’s oil trade with Cuba. Vice President Mike Pence flies to New York to twist the arms of senior figures at the United Nations to toe Washington’s hard line against Maduro.

Yet President Maduro has never committed any activities remotely amounting to genocide or crimes against humanity, unlike the US Reagan administration of which Bolton and current Special Envoy to Restore Democracy in Venezuela Eliot Abrams so consistently did to the ravaged Mayan peoples in Central America 36 years ago.

Venezuela has not slaughtered a million of its own people as Pakistan so eagerly did in 1971 to the peoples of East Pakistan, today Bangladesh with the full support of the US government under President Richard Nixon.

Maduro has not unleashed any wars or bombing campaigns that have killed millions of innocent civilians. He has not invaded neighboring states or used poison gas against them, as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein did with the full support of the United States when he invaded Iran in 1980.

It might well be argued that President Maduro made a mess of running his economy. But given the role two successive US administrations have played in trying to wreck Venezuela it is difficult to see how much he can even be held responsible for that.

Was Venezuela under Maduro feverishly trying to build its own Weapons of Mass Destruction? So far not even Bolton or Abrams has had the gall to suggest that.

Has the Caracas government been plotting to spread international terrorism around the world? No. Have they offered safety and sanctuary to the remnants of ISIS, now driven out of Syria by the combined military efforts of Russia and Syria? Again: No.

Yet so desperate are America’s neo-liberals, as well as neo-conservatives to topple democratically twice –elected President Maduro that they are pulling off their bright smiling wholesome masks that are the public face of globalization to reveal the snarling, cowardly, crazed little creeps behind them.

We saw this phenomenon last week when Fareed Zakaria, the Golden Pin-Up Boy of global liberalism, used his two supposedly most influential platforms – his talk show on CNN and op-ed page access in The Washington Post to call for the immediate toppling of Maduro and then for a full superpower confrontation with Russia as well.

Now recall, Zakaria is supposed to be a “nice” guy. He is supposed to stand for the “civilized” peaceful and democratic resolution of all international disputes that has already Made War Obsolete (MWO). He is supposed to be the living embodiment of a global free trade liberalism that is unfailingly peaceful, tolerant, respectful, generous, kind and good.

Yet here Zakaria is – openly calling for the abandonment of all international law, openly calling for the violent invasion of an independent, sovereign and even democratic nation.

In other words, he is openly perpetrating exactly the kinds of wicked conduct that the 1946 Nuremburg Tribunals documented, identified and convicted the most prominent Nazi war criminals for – including most emphatically conspiracy to wage aggressive war.

One has to ask the crucial obvious questions: What is it with Zakaria and those like him? Do they really want a nuclear world war to exterminate the human race? Are they really that reckless? Are they really that stupid? Are they really that mad?

The answer to all three of those questions is obviously and indisputably: Yes.

We must, therefore continue our inquiry and ask: Why? How did Zakaria and his fellow purveyors of moral outrage get to be this way?

For the answer to this – and so much else – we must go back 150 years to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s most terrifying and haunting novel, “The Possessed”.

Dostoyevsky had a vision of the achieved, perfect (in its own eyes) liberal society, determined to sneer at and tear down all the old established constraints and supposedly absurd traditions of religion, custom and caution.

Yet this enlightened and happy breed of rational “New” Men and Women were blind to the rising generation of sociopaths and psychopaths – their own children – who now flourished in the freedom provided for them: A race so arrogant and driven that they would not rest until they had torn down all of civilization in a frenzy of destruction.

In its past, Russia has known far too many such creatures.

They teem in Washington today.

Abrams escaped being charged with more serious crimes by Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh because he cut a last-minute deal with federal prosecutors. Trump, who has made no secret of his disdain for cooperating federal witnesses, would have normally called Abrams a “rat,” a gangster term meaning informant. The man who helped engineer the pardons for Abrams and his five convicted friends was none other than Bush’s Attorney General, William Barr, who has just been sworn in as Trump’s Attorney General. Trump, who is always decrying the presence of the “deep state” that thwarts his very move, has become the chief guardian of that entity.

During a recent hearing of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, newly-minted congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, reminded her colleagues and the world about the sordid background of Abrams.

Omar zeroed in on Abrams’s criminal history:

“Mr. Abrams, in 1991 you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful.”

Abrams, as is the nature of neocons, refused to respond to Omar and cited her comments as “personal attacks.”

Abrams’s and his fellow criminals’ use of mercenaries and “death squads” to conduct secret wars in Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala during the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s has made a re-entrance under Trump. Abrams was brought on board by neocons like National Security Adviser John Bolton, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to oversee a US military build-up in Colombia, said to be 5000 US troops, to support Venezuelan paramilitary and military efforts to topple President Nicolas Maduro. Abrams and Bolton are also believed to have retained the services of another unindicted conspirator in the Iran-contra affair, Michael Ledeen, a colleague of the disgraced and convicted former Trump National Security Adviser, retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. Ledeen and Flynn co-authored a book titled, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and its Allies.” The book contains nothing more than the standard neocon tripe one might expect from the likes of Ledeen.

An official investigation of the Iran-contra scandal by the late Republican Senator John Tower of Texas concluded that Abrams’s and Ledeen’s friend, Iranian-Jewish middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar, a long-time Mossad asset and well-known prevaricator, was extremely instrumental in establishing the back-channel arms deals with Iran. Ghorbanifar has long been on the CIA "burn list" as an untrustworthy charlatan, along with others in the Middle East of similar sketchy credentials, including the Iraq’s Ahmad Chalabi, Syria’s Farid “Frank” Ghadry, and Lebanon’s Samir “Sami” Geagea. These individuals, however, were warmly embraced by neocons like Abrams and his associates.

Abrams, whose links with Israeli intelligence has always been a point of consternation with US counter-intelligence officials, is part of an old cabal of right-wing anti-Soviet Democrats who coalesced around Senator Henry Jackson in the 1970s. Along with Abrams, this group of war hawks included Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Abram Shulsky, and Paul Wolfowitz. Later, this group would have its fingerprints on major US foreign policy debacles, ranging from Nicaragua and Grenada to Lebanon, Iraq, and Libya. Later, in December 2000, these neocons managed to convince president-elect George W. Bush of the need to “democratize” the Middle East. That policy would later bring not democracy but disaster to the Arab Middle East and North Africa.

Abrams and his cronies will not stop with Venezuela. They have old scores to settle with Nicaraguan President Ortega. The initiation of “regime change” operations in Nicaragua, supported by the CIA and the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) in Miami, have been ongoing for more than a year.

The Trump administration has already achieved a regime change victory of sorts in El Salvador. Nayib Bukele, the former mayor of San Salvador, who was expelled from the formerly-ruling left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) party and joined the right-wing GANA party, was recently elected president of El Salvador. Bukele has quickly re-aligned his country’s policies with those of the Trump administration. Bukele has referred to President Maduro of Venezuela as a “dictator.” He has also criticized the former FMLN government’s recognition of China and severance of diplomatic ties with Taiwan. It will be interesting to see how a sycophant like Bukele will politically survive as Trump continues to call hapless asylum-seeking migrants from his country, who seek residency in the United States, “rapists, gang monsters, murderers, and drug smugglers.”

Another country heading for a US-installed “banana republic” dictator is Haiti. President Jovenal Moise has seen rioting in the streets of Port-au-Prince as the US State Department removed all “non-essential” personnel from the country. Moise, whose country has received $2 billion in oil relief from Venezuela, to help offset rising fuel prices, has continued to support the Maduro government. However, at the US-run and neo-colonial artifice, the Organization of American States (OAS), Moise’s envoys have been under tremendous pressure to cut ties with Venezuela and recognize the US puppet Juan Guaido as Venezuelan president. Moise’s refusal to do so resulted in armed gangs hitting the streets of Port-au-Prince demanding Moise’s resignation. It is the same neocon “regime change” playbook being used in Venezuela and Nicaragua.

There will be similar attempts to replace pro-Maduro governments in his remaining allies in the region. These include Suriname, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Abrams was also brought in as an adviser on Middle East policy in the George W. Bush administration. The carnage of Iraq is a stark testament to his record. In 2005, it was reported that two key Bush White House officials – Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams – gave a “wink and a nod” for the assassinations by Israeli-paid operatives of three key Lebanese political figures seeking a rapprochement with Syria and Lebanese Hezbollah – Member of Parliament Elie Hobeika, former Lebanese Communist Party chief George Hawi, and former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

In 2008, a United Nations panel headed by former Canadian prosecutor Daniel Bellemare later concluded Hariri was assassinated by a "criminal network" and not by either Syrian and Lebanese intelligence or Lebanese Hezbollah as proffered by Abrams and his friends in Washington.

Representative Omar was spot on in questioning why Abrams, whose name is as disgraced as his two fellow conspirators – Oliver North and John Poindexter – whose criminal convictions were overturned on appeal, is working for the Trump administration on Venezuela. The answer is that the neocons, who can sense, like raptors, Trump’s political weakness, have filled the vacuum left by top-level vacancies in the administration.

In publicly recorded donations, as of 25 December 2018, Adelson and his wife donated $82,522,800 to Republican candidates in 2016, and this amount doesn’t include any of the secret money. Of that sum, it’s virtually impossible to find out how much went specifically to Trump’s campaign for President, but, as of 9 May 2017, the Adelsons were publicly recorded as having donated $20.4 million to Trump’s campaign. Their impact on the Presidential contest was actually much bigger than that, however, because even the Adelsons’ non-Trump-campaign donations went to the Republican Party, and the rest went to Republican pro-Trump candidates, and the rest went to Republican PACS — and, so, a large percentage (if not all) of that approximately $60 million non-Trump-campaign political expenditure by the Adelsons was boosting Trump’s Presidential vote.

The second-largest Republican donor in 2016 was the hedge fund manager Paul Singer, at $26,114,653. It was less than a third, 31.6%, as large as the Adelsons’ contribution. Singer is the libertarian who proudly invests in weak entities that have been sucked dry by the aristocracy and who almost always extracts thereby, in the courts, far larger returns-on-investment than do other investors, who have simply settled to take a haircut on their failing high-interest-rate loans to that given weak entity. Singer hires the rest of his family to run his asset-stripping firm, which is named after his own middle name, “Elliott Advisors,” and he despises any wealthy person who won’t (like he does) fight tooth-and-nail to extract, from any weak entity, everything that can possibly be stripped from it. His Elliott Advisors is called a “vulture fund,” but that’s an insult to vultures, who instead eat corpses. They don’t actually attack and rip apart vulnerable struggling animals, like Singer’s operation does.

So, that’s the top two, on the Republican Party side.

On the Democratic Party side, the largest 2016 donor was the largest of all political donors in 2016, the hedge fund manager Thomas Steyer, $91,069,795. The second-largest was hedge fund manager Donald S. Sussman, $41,841,000. Both of them supported Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, and then against Donald Trump.

As of 23 January 2019, the record shows that Trump received $46,873,083 in donations larger than $200, and $86,749,927 in donations smaller than $200. Plus, he got $144,764 in PAC contributions. Hillary Clinton received $300,111,643 in over-$200 donations, and $105,552,584 in under-$200 donations. Plus, she got $1,785,190 in PAC donations. She received 6.4 times as much in $200+ donations as Trump did. She received 1.2 times as much in under-$200 donations as he did. Clearly, billionaires strongly preferred Hillary. So, it’s understandable why not only America’s Democratic Party billionaires but also many of America’s Republican Party billionaires want President Trump to become replaced ASAP by his V.P., President Pence, who has a solid record of doing only whatever his big donors want him to do. For them, the wet dream would be a 2020 contest between Mike Pence or a clone, versus Hillary Clinton or a clone (such as Joe Biden or Beto O’Rourke). That would be their standard fixed game, America’s heads-I-win-tails-you-lose ‘democracy’.

On 18 January 2018 was reported that, “Trump pulled in $107 million in individual contributions, nearly doubling President Barack Obama’s 2009 record of $53 million.” However, in both of those cases, the figures which were being compared were actually donations to fund the inaugural festivities, not the actual campaigns. But Adelson led there, too: “Casino magnate Sheldon Adelson was [the] most generous [donor], giving $5 million to the inaugural committee.” The second-biggest donor to that was Hushang Ansary of Stewart & Stevenson, at $2 million. He had previously been the CEO of the National Iranian Oil Company until the CIA-appointed dictator, the brutal and widely hated Shah, was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by Iran’s now theocratically overseen limited democracy. The US aristocracy, whose CIA had overthrown Iran's popular and democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, installed the Shah to replace that elected head-of-state, and they then denationalized and privatized Iran’s oil company, so as to cut America’s aristocrats in on Iran’s oil. Basically, America’s aristocracy stole Iran in 1953, and Iranians grabbed their country back in 1979, and USbillionaires have been trying to get it back ever since. Ansary’s net worth is estimated at “over $2 billion,” and, “By the 1970s, the CIA considered Ansary to be one of seventeen members of ‘the Shah’s Inner Circle’ and he was one of the Shah’s top two choices to succeed Amir Abbas Hoveyda as Prime Minister.” But, that just happened to be the time when the Shah became replaced in an authentic revolution against America’s dictatorship. Iran’s revolution produced the country’s current partially democratic Government. So, this would-be US stooge Ansary fled to America, which had been Iran’s master during 1953-79, and he was welcomed with open arms by Amerca’s and allied aristocracies.

Other than the Adelsons, the chief proponents of regime-change in Iran since 1979 are the US-billionaires-controlled CIA, and ‘news’-media, and Government, and the Shah’s family, and the Saud family, and Israel’s apartheid regime headed by the Adelsons’ protégé in Israel, Netanyahu. America’s billionaires want Iran back, and the CIA represents them (the Deep State) — not the American public — precisely as it did in 1953, when the CIA seized Iran for America’s billionaires.

In the current election-cycle, 2018, the Adelsons have thus far invested $123,208,200, all in Republicans, and this tops the entire field. The second-largest political investor, for this cycle, is the former Republican Mayor of NYC, Michael Bloomberg, at $90,282,515, all to Democrats. Is he a Republican, or is he a Democrat? Does it actually make any difference? He is consistently a promoter of Wall Street. The third-largest donor now is Tom Steyer, at $70,743,864, all to Democrats. The fourth-largest is a Wisconsin libertarian-conservative billionaire, Richard Uihlein, at $39,756,996. Back on 19 March 2018, Politico reported that “Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth, are currently the biggest Republican donors of the 2018 midterm elections, having given $21 million to candidates for federal office and super PACs that will support them. And that doesn’t include their funding of state candidates.” On 1 October 2016, International Business Times had listed the top ten donors to each of the two Parties, and the Uihleins at that time were #4 on the Republican side, at $21.5 million.

Of course, all of the top donors are among the 585 US billionaires, and therefore they can afford to spend lots on the Republican and/or Democratic nominees. Open Secrets reported on 31 March 2017 that “Of the world’s 100 richest billionaires, 36 are US citizens and thus eligible to donate to candidates and other political committees here. OpenSecrets Blog found that 30 of those [36] [or five sixths of the total 36 wealthiest Americans] actually did so, contributing a total of $184.4 million — with 58 percent [of their money] going to Republican efforts.” Democratic Party nominees thus got 42%; and, though it’s not as much as Republican ones get, it’s usually enough so that if a Democrat becomes elected, that person too will be controlled by billionaires.

For example, in the West Virginia Democratic Presidential primary in 2016, Bernie Sanders won all 55 counties in the state but that state’s delegation to the Democratic National Convention handed 19 of the state’s 37 votes at the Convention to his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who got more money from billionaires than all other US Presidential candidates combined. The millions of Democrats who voted for Hillary Clinton were voting for the billionaires’ favorite, and she and her DNC stole the Party’s nomination from Sanders, who was the nation’s most-preferred Presidential candidate in 2016; and, yet, most of those voters still happily voted, yet again, for her, in the general election — as if she hadn’t practically destroyed the Party by prostituting it to its billionaires even more than Obama had already done. Of course, she ran against Trump, and, for once, the billionaires were shocked to find that their enormous investment in a candidate had been for naught. That’s how incompetent she was. But they still kept control over both of the political Parties, and the Sanders choice to head the DNC (the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Party itself) lost out to the Obama-Clinton choice, so that today’s Democratic Party is still the same: winning is less important to them than serving their top donors is.

This means that America’s winners of federal elections represent almost entirely America’s 585 billionaires, and not the 328,335,647Americans (as of noon on 23 January 2019). Of course, there is a slight crossover of interests between those two economic classes, since 0.000002 of those 328,335,647, or 0.0002% of them, are billionaires. However, if 0.0002% of federal office-holders represent the public, and the remaining 99.9998% represent the billionaires, then is that actually a bipartisan Government? If instead 99.9998% represented 328,335,062 Americans, and 0.0002% represented the 585 billionaires; then, that, too, wouldn’t be bipartisan, but would it be a democratic (small “d”) government? So, America is not a democracy (regardless of whether it’s bipartisan); it is instead an aristocracy, just like ancient France was, and the British empire, etc. The rest of America's population (the 328,335,062 other Americans) are mere subjects, though we are officially called ‘citizens’, of this actual aristocracy.

The same is true in Israel, the land that the Adelsons (the individuals who largely control America) are so especially devoted to. On 8 November 2016, Israel’s pro-Hillary-Clinton and anti-Netanyahu Ha’aretz newspaper headlined "The Collapsing Political Triangle Linking Adelson, Netanyahu and Trump”, and reported that Ha’aretz’s bane and top competitor was the freely distributed daily Israeli newspaper, Israel Hayom, and:

Israel Hayom was founded by Adelson nine years ago, in order to give Netanyahu – who has been rather harshly treated by the Israeli media throughout his political career – a friendly newspaper. Under Israeli law, the total sum an individual can donate to a politician or party is very limited, and corporate donations are not allowed. Israel Hayom has been a convenient loophole, allowing Adelson to invest the sort of money he normally gives American politicians on Netanyahu’s behalf. It has no business model and carries far fewer ads than most daily newspapers. While the privately owned company does not publish financial reports, industry insiders estimate that Adelson must spend around $50 million annually on the large team of journalists and the printing and distribution operations.

Distributed for free, in hundreds of thousands of copies the length and breadth of the country, Israel Hayom … clings slavishly to the line from Netanyahu’s office – praising him and his family to the heavens while smearing his political rivals, both on the left and the right.

A billionaire can afford to use his or her ‘news’-media in lieu of political campaign donations. Lots of billionaires do that. They don’t need to make direct political donations. And ‘making money’ by owning a ‘news’-medium can even be irrelevant, for them. Instead, owning an important ’news’-medium can be, for them, just another way, or sometimes their only way, to buy control over the government. It certainly works. It’s very effective in Israel.

Adelson is #14 on the 2018 Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, all having net worths of $2.1 billion or more, his being $38.4 billion, just one-third as large as that of Jeff Bezos. Bezos is the owner of around 15% of Amazon Corporation, whose profits are derived almost entirely from the Amazon Web Services that are supplied to the US Pentagon, NSA, and CIA. So, he’s basically a ‘defense’ contractor. Bezos’s directly owned Washington Post is one of America’s leading neoconservative and neoliberal, or pro-invasion and pro-Democratic Party, media; and, so, his personal ownership of that newspaper is much like his owning a one-person national political PAC to promote whatever national policies will increase his fortune. The more that goes to the military and the less that goes to everything else, the wealthier he will become. His newspaper pumps the ‘national security threats’ to America.

Adelson controls Israel’s Government. Whereas he might be a major force in America’s Government, that’s actually much more controlled by the world’s wealthiest person, the only trillionaire, the King of Saudi Arabia. He has enough wealth so that he can buy almost anybody he wants — and he does, through his numerous agents. But, of course, both Israel’s Government and Saudi Arabia’s Government hate Iran’s Government at least as much as America’s Government does. In fact, if Russia’s Government weren’t likely to defend Iran’s Government from an invasion, then probably Iran would already have been invaded. Supporters of America’s Government are supporters of a world government by America’s billionaires, because that’s what the US Government, in all of its international functions (military, diplomatic, etc.) actually represents: it’s America’s global dictatorship. They throw crumbs to America’s poor so as to make it a ‘two-party’ and not merely a ‘one-party’ government and so that one of the Parties can call itself ‘the Democratic Party’, but America’s is actually a one-party government, and it represents only the very wealthiest, in both Parties. The aristocracy’s two separate party-organizations compete against each other. But their real audience is the aristocracy’s dollars, not the public’s voters. This “two-Party” dictatorship (by the aristocracy) is a different governing model than in China and some other countries.

The great investigative journalist Wayne Madsen headlined on January 24th “Trump Recognition of Rival Venezuelan Government Will Set Off a Diplomatic Avalanche” and he reported the possibility of a war developing between the US and Russia over America’s aggression against Venezuela. US media even have pretended that the US Government isn’t the one that customarily perpetrates coups in Latin America, and pretended that Russia’s and Cuba’s Governments are simply blocking ‘democracy’ from blossoming in Venezuela. On January 24th, Middle East Eye reported that Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman had just told the World Economic Forum, in Davos, that the torture-murder of Saudi Crown Prince Salman’s critic and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was “unacceptable,” “But what do you do? What part do you play in the process of economic and social change?” and the report continued: “Gorman said he did not judge any country’s attempts to root out corruption,” and Gorman and a French tycoon joined in throwing their “weight behind Riyadh’s economic and social direction, by saying, ‘it is quite difficult and brave what the kingdom is doing’,” by its ‘reforms’. It was all being done to ‘root out corruption, and to spread democracy’. Sure. There’s “a sucker born every minute,” except now it’s every second. That seems to be the main way to win votes.

On January 26^th, Trump appointed the fascist Elliott Abrams to lead this ‘democratization of Venezuela’, by overthrowing and replacing the elected President by the second-in-line-of succession (comparable in Venezuela to removing Trump and skipping over the Vice President and appointing Nancy Pelosi as America’s President, and also violating the Venezuelan Constitution's requirement that the Supreme Judicial Trbunal must first approve before there can be ANY change of the President without an election by the voters). It’s clearly another US coup that is being attempted here. Trump, by international dictat, says that this Venezuelan traitor whom the US claims to be installing is now officially recognized by the US Government to be the President of Venezuela. Bloomberg News reported that Abrams would join Trump’s neocon Secretary of State on January 26^th at the UN to lobby there for the UN to authorize Trump’s intended Venezuelan coup. The EU seemed strongly inclined to follow America’s lead. On the decisive UN body, the Permanent Security Council, of China, France, Russia, UK, and US, the US position was backed by three: US, France, and UK. Russia and China were opposed. In the EU, only France, Germany, Spain, and UK, came out immediately backing the US position. On January 25^th, Russia’s Tass news agency was the first to report on the delicate strategic situation inside Venezuela. It sounded like the buildup to Obama’s successful coup in Ukraine in February 2014, but in Venezuela and under Trump. In fact, at least two commentaors other than I have noted the apparent similarities: Whitney Webb at “Washington Follows Ukraine, Syria Roadmap in Push for Venezuela Regime Change” and RT at “‘Venezuela gets its Maidan’: Ukrainian minister makes connection between regime change ops”.

Abrams’s career has been devoted to “regime-change,” and is as unapologetic about it as is John Bolton. Also like Bolton, he’s an impassioned supporter of Jewish apartheid. He wrote in his 1997 book Faith or Fear, that “Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart — except in Israel — from the rest of the population.” Israel is, in this and the view of many billionaires, the whole world’s ghetto, and ‘real’ Jews don’t belong anywhere else than there. And, according to that, nobody else does belong there, except people who accept being ruled by Jewish Law — the Torah. So, on 25 June 2001, George W. Bush, as the main representative of America’s billionaires, made Abrams the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations at the National Security Council. Of course, Abrams was gung-ho for Americans to conquer Iraq, because Iraqis didn’t like Israel. And the current US President hires that same agent of Israel, Abrams, now to sell internationally America’s current coup to grab Venezuela for America’s billionaires. Abrams, for years, had been courting Trump’s favor by having declined to include himself among the many Republican neoconservatives, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. He thereby has now won his new job, on the real-world sequel to The Apprentice, which is known as President Trump’s Administration. Another such winner, of course, is John Bolton, who likewise had declined to endorse Hillary.

Perhaps the US regime thinks that testing the resolve of Russia’s Government, regarding Venezuela, would be less dangerous than testing it over the issue of Iran. But Big Brother says that this imposition of America’s corruption is instead merely a part of rooting out corruption and spreading democracy and human rights, throughout the world.

The US has managed to get Venezuela in play, to control again. Some American billionaires think it’s a big prize, which must be retaken. The largest oil-and-gas producers — and with the highest reserves of oil-and-gas in the ground — right now, happen to be Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Russia, Venezuela, and US So, for example, Venezuela is a much bigger prize than Brazil.

All of those countries have an interest in denying the existence of human-produced global warming, and in selling as much of their product as quickly as possible before the world turns away from fossil fuels altogether. High-tech doesn’t drive today’s big-power competition nearly so much as does the fossil-fuels competition — to sell as much of it as they can, as fast as they can. The result of this competition could turn out to be a nuclear winter that produces a lifeless planet and thus prevents the planet from becoming lifeless more slowly from global burnout — the alternative outcome, which would be produced by the burnt fossil fuels themselves. Either way, the future looks bleak, no matter what high-tech produces (unless high-tech produces quickly a total replacement of fossil fuels, and, in the process, bankrupts many of the billionaires who are so active in the current desperate and psychopathic global competition).

This is what happens when wealth worldwide is so unequally distributed that the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”. According to economic theory (which has always been written by agents for the aristocracy), the distribution of wealth is irrelevant. This belief was formalized by a key founder of today’s mathematized economic theory, Vilfredo Pareto, who, for example, in his main work, the 1912 Trattato di Sociologia Generale, wrote (# 2135), that, though “the lover of equality will assign a high coefficient to the utility of the lower classes and get a point of equilibrium very close to the equalitarian condition, there is no criterion save sentiment for choosing between the one [such equality of wealth] and the other [a single person — whom he called “superman” — owning everything].” The article on Pareto in the CIA’s Wikipedia doesn’t even so much as mention this central feature of Pareto’s thinking, the feature that’s foundational in all of the theory of “welfare” in economics. Pareto was also the main theoretician of fascism, and the teacher of Mussolini. This belief is at the foundation of capitalism as we know it, and as it has been in economic theory ever since, actually, the 1760s. Pareto didn’t invent it; he merely mathematized it.

So, we’ve long been in 1984, or at least building toward it. But US-allied billionaires wrote this particular version of it; George Orwell didn’t. And it’s not a novel. It’s the real thing. And it is now becoming increasingly desperate.

If, in recognizing this, you feel like a hog on a factory-farm, then you’ve got the general idea of this reality. It’s the problem that the public faces. But the publics in the US and its allied regimes are far less miserable than the publics in the countries that the US and its allied regimes are trying to take over — the targeted countries (such as Syria). To describe any realistic solution to this systematic global exploitation would require an entire book, at the very least — no mere article, such as here. The aristocracy anywhere wouldn’t publish such a book. Nobody would likely derive any significant income from writing it. That’s part of the reality, which such a book would be describing.

However, a key part of this reality is that for the billionaires — the people who control international corporations or corporations that even are aspiring to grow beyond their national market — their nation’s international policies are even more important to them than its domestic affairs (such as the toxic water in Flint, Michigan; or single-payer health insurance — matters that are relatively unimportant to billionaires), and, therefore, the most-censored and least-honestly reported realities on the part of the aristocracy’s ‘news’-media are the international ones. And, so, this is the field where there is the most lying, such as about “Saddam’s WMD,” and about all foreign countries. However, when a person is in an aristocracy’s military, deception of that person is even more essential, especially in the lower ranks, the troops, because killing and dying for one’s aristocracy is far less attractive than killing or dying in order honestly to serve and protect an authentic democracy. Propagandizing for the myth that the nation is a democracy is therefore extremely important in any aristocracy. Perhaps this is the reason why, in the United States, the military is consistently the institution that leads above all others in the public’s respect. It’s especially necessary to do that, in the nation that President Barack Obama repeatedly said is “the one indispensable nation”. This, of course, means that every other nation is “dispensable.” Any imperial nation, at least since ancient Rome, claimed the same thing, and invaded more nations than any other in the world when it was the leading imperial nation, because this is what it means to be an empire, or even to aspire to being one: imposing that given nation’s will upon other nations — colonies, vassal states, or whatever they are called. When soldiers know that they are the invaders, not the actual defenders, their motivation to kill and die is enormously reduced. This is the main reason why the ‘news’-media in an imperial nation need to lie constantly to their public. If a news-reporting organization doesn’t do that, no aristocrat will even buy it. And virtually none will advertise in it or otherwise donate to it. It will be doomed to remain very small and unprofitable in every way (because the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%”). Billionaires donate to ‘news’-organizations that might report accurately about domestic US problems, but not to ones that report accurately about international affairs, especially about important international affairs. Even liberal ‘news’-media are neoconservative, or favorable toward American invasions and coups. In order to be a significant player in the ‘news’-business in the United States, one has to be.

So: this is how America’s dictatorship works. This is not America’s exceptionalism: it is America’s ordinariness. America’s Founders had wanted to produce something not just exceptional but unique in its time: a democratic republic. But what now exists here is instead a dictatorial global empire, and it constitutes the biggest threat to the very existence of the United Nations ever since that body’s founding in 1945. If that body accepts as constituting the leader of Venezuela the person that America’s President declares to be Venezuela’s leader, then the UN is effectively dead. This would be an immense breakthrough for all of the US regime’s billionaires, both domestically and throughout its allied countries (such as in France, Germany, Spain, and UK). It would be historic, if they win. It would be extremely grim, and then the UN would immediately need to be replaced. The US and its allies would refuse to join the replacement organization. That organization would then authorize economic sanctions against the US and its allies. These will be reciprocated. The world would break clearly into two trading-blocs. In a sense, the UN’s capitulation to the US on this matter would create another world war, WW III. It would be even worse than when Neville Chamberlain accepted Hitler’s offer regarding the Sudetenland. We’d be back to the start of WW II, with no lessons learned since then. And with nuclear weapons.

Photo: Flickr