Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing Max Blumenthal from the Gray Zone Project.
And this one is also reprinted at ConsortiumNews.com.
The making of Juan Guaido, U.S. regime change laboratory created Venezuela's coup leader.
And it's with Dan Cohen, which reminds me, the two of them made this documentary called Killing Gaza.
Man, it'll blow your mind.
Seriously, please watch it.
Do it as a favor to me.
OK, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
Good to be on.
Good to have you here.
Now, first of all, before we talk about the coup in Venezuela, I just want to tell you, I saw this video.
Well, it is about the coup in Venezuela, but this is you on Capitol Hill asking these congressmen about, is it meddling when America does it in Venezuela?
And you got some great reactions.
You want to talk about that for a second?
Yeah, it was pretty sad.
I mean, it really shows how easy it is for characters like, you know, John Bolton or Marco Rubio or, you know, the neoconservative movement to get their agenda across on Capitol Hill because nobody knows anything about foreign policy and nobody cares.
And now you have the U.S. attempting to topple the elected government of a country of 30 million people, possibly through some kind of Syria-style proxy war in which hundreds of thousands could be killed, could destabilize a large sector of the Western Hemisphere.
And I go around asking a good amount of legislators.
I mean, they were just, they're all rushing into a financial services committee hearing.
And I just asked them if they had any thoughts about Venezuela.
And they either rattled off this kind of drone-like rhetoric about how we're spreading freedom and it's our right to do it as a superpower, or they were pulled away by their staff, or they basically didn't know anything about it.
The most telling, I guess, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was supposed to be this bold, progressive new voice.
And she really didn't want to answer, didn't want to offer a single comment, probably because she's scared she'll be identified with Maduro by the Republicans.
But that was just, it was just sad and really revealing and dismaying.
Well, so tell me, who's the guy who had the most to say there?
The black guy who, you know, he talks about the history of what we've done in Haiti and some of these things, and then at the end he completely cops out and says, well, I got a different, I'm on the financial affairs committee, I don't do Latin America.
Yeah, yeah, that was Lacey Clay, and he, I mean, he was pretty woke.
He knew what time it was.
He basically said the U.S. has this long history of toppling governments and it's been really destructive and we shouldn't be embargoing Venezuela just because it's going to hurt ordinary people.
And I said, are you going to say anything about it?
Because there was a progressive caucus letter that went out on opposing intervention, and it got like four signatures.
And he said, I don't do that, man, I do financial services.
And then he just kind of walked off.
It's like, why not?
You're supposed to represent this country.
You're elected to do, not just to like represent one committee.
It was just really dismaying.
Well, I haven't been watching TV, but I talked with Jonathan Schwartz earlier from The Intercept who wrote this thing about Elliott Abrams.
And he was saying on TV, everybody's celebrating the intervention.
It's just like when Trump bombs Syria, that finally he does something presidential.
And they're all rallying around it.
Yeah.
I mean, I guess, you know, elite interests transcend party lines and even, you know, now they suddenly support someone who they've been calling a Russian asset controlled by Putin.
What's amazing is that the consequences are never discussed.
And it's always talked about in terms of like Trump sending a message or Trump doing something.
But there's no understanding of what it would actually do.
You know, when I talked to Rosa DeLauro, who's supposed to be this legendary progressive who's dyed her hair pink and everybody loves her in the kind of, you know, anti-Trump, pro-impeachment circles.
She was fully on board with sanctioning Venezuela.
She was, you know, just reflexively pro-intervention.
I like the way she answered you.
I'm not going to fall into the trap.
I'm not going to have, hey, it was a simple question.
Yes or no?
You support sanctions or you don't?
What trap?
Yeah.
You're putting words in my mouth.
And so I just kept pressing her and I said, do you support sanctions or not?
She said, yes, I do.
Right.
You know?
Yeah.
Well, she, I mean, it's just impossible to find any Democrat, anyone on Capitol Hill who's willing to speak up against that, against this intervention, except for maybe five legislators.
And you would think this would be a lot easier than Syria.
I mean, you know, you do have an elected figure.
You do have like a strong popular socialist base that he represents.
His popularity level is about as high as Emmanuel Macron's.
There aren't massive street protests going on.
The opposition, you know, as we outlined in our piece on Juan Guaido, is extremely unpopular and fanatical.
And, you know, you have this tradition on the left in the U.S. of supporting these kind of movements and at least defending these governments against intervention.
You know, Hugo Chavez would get a hero's welcome when he came to D.C. and New York, when he came to New York and specifically would go to church in Harlem.
And Maduro as well got that kind of welcome when he came last year.
But it's there's just been like silence on Capitol Hill and not, you know, not the kind of fervent response that you would see in general from left wing activist circles.
Although, you know, I feel like with my own work on this, there has been less of a challenge to get it out there than it has been had been on Syria.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the thing is people on the left in America are pretty used to defending the Chavez government that this is sort of a legacy of with Maduro, his handpicked guy there.
So it should come somewhat easy to them to at least be skeptical of stuff like this.
Yeah.
To just condemn intervention.
But as I said, you know, the Progressive Caucus is 80 strong within the Democratic Party and they only got four signatures on a letter that criticized Maduro and just simply stated opposition to intervention.
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All right.
Now, so in this article, you say that just like me, most Venezuelans had never heard of this guy.
And I'm not a Venezuelan.
But most of them have never heard of their new so-called president, according to the United States of America.
Yeah.
Until when?
Until January 22nd, last week?
Yeah.
Data analysis poll, which is like the Pew polling company in Venezuela, it's like their version of Pew, found that 81% of Venezuelans had not heard of Juan Guaido before January 22nd.
He represents the third least populous state in Venezuela.
And until 2015, was only a deputy.
He wasn't even a member of the National Assembly.
He was a deputy assembly member.
He was not actually elected president of the National Assembly.
He became president because of kind of a rotating power sharing agreement.
And his party, Popular Will, just came up for that agreement.
And they passed over a more popular or more well-known figure for him, because Guaido is kind of like the Venezuelan Obama.
The more popular figure, Jose Andres Mejia, is basically white.
He is extremely wealthy, and not the kind of image that the opposition wants to put before the international community of this white oligarch just taking over.
Although that's what the party is and represents.
So Guaido, who is kind of mestizo, looks more like common Venezuelans, comes from a more middle class background, is just basically appointed.
And then he's recognized by the troika of terror, John Bolton, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump.
Yeah.
That's a good way to put it.
All right.
Now, so by the way, so this National Assembly, it's equivalent to the U.S. House or some kind of parliament?
Or what exactly role does it play there?
Yeah, it has played that role.
It was dominated by the opposition.
A lot of the districts were kind of like opposition strongholds.
And they had a strong showing, I think, in 2013.
And they basically, the opposition started using the National Assembly as a means for obstructing the agenda of the executive, of the president, Maduro, but actually putting forward plans to topple the government and to privatize state assets through the transition law they put forward in 2017.
So the National Assembly was held in contempt in 2017.
And it was also led by the Popular Will Party, which has been intimately connected to street violence.
I mean, heinous acts of street violence.
And the founder of the Popular Will Party, Leopoldo Lopez, who is just the portrait of aristocracy, descended from Venezuela's first president, white as snow, extremely wealthy.
His family looted the national oil company PDVSA and plowed that money into establishing the basis for this party and another party that's basically that the U.S. is leaning on called Justice First or Primera Justicia.
And so he basically created these networks through U.S. supposed democracy promotion organizations that you talk about on your show all the time, the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, the Einstein Institute of Gene Sharp, to train Venezuelan students.
I mean, thousands of students were trained through these.
And then he would activate them at times of national controversy and create these conflicts in the streets, which would sometimes put Caracas and other cities under siege.
They were called garimbas.
And basically in opposition neighborhoods, which were middle class and upper class neighborhoods, there'd be these barricades set up and then there'd be violent confrontations with police.
And chavistas would often be killed, sometimes burned alive.
One of the tactics they used was called the guaya, where they would stretch barbed wire across highways to kind of shut down the highways.
But it would often lead to people, unsuspecting motorists, being killed.
One was actually decapitated because he drove through the barbed wire.
And Juan Guaido was asked about that tactic in an interview on air.
And he said, you know, it's a myth.
We don't do this.
But what's more revealing is that Juan Guaido had posted video of himself actually participating in these garimbas and actually participating in what, you know, in the U.S. we would kind of call black bloc activity.
And then this is the guy being sold as the Democratic leader who is going to stir the military and the security forces to revolt, someone who is involved in activities where members of the security forces were killed.
Yeah.
Which, OK, so let's focus on that for a second, because I want to go back to some of the history of a little bit deeper history of him in these groups.
But just when it comes to the news in the past week or so here, there's no move whatsoever by the military to fall into this guy's camp and under his authority.
In fact, they told him not just no, but laughingly, hell no.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's really we link to a video that Guaido's wife made addressing the military.
And it's really worth watching it, even if you can't speak Spanish, just to see how uncharismatic and wooden and pathetic the whole thing is.
I mean, her appeal is just not going to get them out of the barracks.
And the military is completely on the side of the government.
It's comprised of the kind of people who had been ignored for 100 years by a neocolonial government and who followed Hugo Chavez, who came out of their ranks.
These are the young men who come from the slums and the popular neighborhoods outside of the cities who have just been ignored, who comprise the majority, who really represent the majority of the population.
And the army is an institution that's been completely transformed.
It was completely transformed under Hugo Chavez and now under Maduro into a much more professional institution.
It has extremely strong anti-aircraft defenses on par with Syria's, maybe better.
And it's well prepared for hybrid warfare and an invasion.
Prior to Chavez's election, the military was just a completely different institution.
And now, so talk a little bit, you mentioned this a couple of times, but it really is, it's not that it's a hobby horse of yours.
It really is central to all of this, is the issue of race and this very white, small minority versus the majority, essentially Indian population of the country.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's apparent when you look at who's behind Guaido, it was apparent to me when I was in Nicaragua last year and I would go to an opposition rally and they were always held in the more affluent areas of Managua versus going to a pro-government rally.
And the opposition rallies would be, you know, people would be wearing brand name clothes.
Not all of them were white, but there was a disproportionate number of whiter looking people.
You know, their music was different.
They were chanting.
There were many Catholic chants.
It just had a kind of conservative undertone.
And that contrasted really strongly with the Sandinista rallies.
And it's the same dynamic as at play in Venezuela and has been at play in Latin America for generations.
Venezuela, unlike Nicaragua, has also, you know, an Afro-Venezuelan, a black population who had been ignored and discriminated against until Chavez came to power.
And so you have that dynamic and something that's ignored in the U.S. when we talk about Russia backing Venezuela, that this is just, you know, that the evil autocracies of the world are standing behind a fellow autocracy, Russia and China.
The entire Caribbean bloc, the entire CARICOM bloc is standing behind Venezuela's government right now.
And this has a lot to do with the history of colonialism and the relationship that they've had with the U.S., especially the relationship of Haiti and the U.S., where we overthrew their government.
And a figure who is very close to Hugo Chavez, Jean Bertrand d'Aristide, twice, not once, but twice.
Well, you know, the thing of it is, too, I was talking with Greg Palast earlier, and he's certainly a man of the left.
And he, I guess, quote unquote, concedes.
He doesn't necessarily have a dog in the fight, really.
But he says that, you know, Maduro has not handled things well there at all, especially the economy.
He printed way too much money and then put on price controls, which caused major problems.
And you could be even much further right than Greg Palast, who, as I said, is a leftist.
And you could just hate this guy Maduro's economics if you want.
But that sure doesn't give America, USA, the government the right to intervene over there one little bit and just look at the consequences of our last, say, I don't know, eight or ten interventions in Latin America and or in the Middle East.
I mean, why should this be different if this goes further?
Why should we expect different or better results than we've seen in Syria or Libya or Iraq or Afghanistan or Yemen or Somalia or Honduras or any of the places in Latin America where we've been in the past either?
Yeah, I mean, you know, Trump was freaking out about a caravan.
I mean, get ready for like a hundred thousand Grateful Dead concert style caravans of war refugees, because that's what would happen here.
But, you know, as we talked about, the military has already said no.
So that means this thing either fizzles out or America really escalates at this point.
So what do you know about that?
Yeah.
And the UN has said no.
The UN has said that Maduro is the legitimate leader of Venezuela.
And this is the situation as I see it, but also as a friend in Caracas who we interviewed for our podcast yesterday on our podcast, Moderate Rebels.
Her name is Alina Epiva, and she's one of the sharper analysts on the situation.
And she was just talking about everyday life.
And she said that, you know, life is normal right now.
The opposition doesn't have people in the street.
Not many people are in the street.
People in the country are not excited about what the U.S. is doing.
In fact, they strongly oppose it.
Even people who are opposed to Maduro, because they don't want war.
They don't want their country to be transformed into Libya.
And so she described the moment as a tense calm, where people are wondering what's going to happen next.
Very different from 2016, when the opposition put Caracas under siege with the violent Gorimbas.
There aren't blockades.
They're having very small marches.
And so what people are worried about is some kind of invasion, some kind of provocation, where the U.S. creates a pretext to do another Libya-style operation.
And it will be like Libya, but it'll be so much more intimate.
The effects will be so much more intimate for the U.S., as Libya was for Europe, because the U.S. will start to have to absorb the cost of the refugees, along with Colombia, which has had a long-running civil war that the U.S. armed and fueled.
And that could be exacerbated.
Colombia could be destabilized.
So the effects will be wide-ranging.
And then you have in the background $70 billion of Chinese investments in Venezuelan gold and oil.
You have $17 billion of Russian investments.
You also have the perspective of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin on toppling sovereign governments, because their governments are the ultimate prize for the U.S., and they favor kind of a multipolar world.
They're going to stand on principle and on their own economic interests behind the Venezuelan government.
And it's unclear to me how strongly they'll be able to reinforce the state of Venezuela.
I don't think we'll see direct Russian intervention, as with Syria, where you had a country that actually posed a direct national security threat to Russia, because the Syrian border is not that far from Russia's periphery, and you can have ISIS outflow into places like Dagestan.
But I think they're going to stand up strongly.
And the U.S. faces a risk, a major risk, if it escalates on many levels.
If you look at John Bolton's map at his press conference I think four days ago, he had a map of the world, and the countries that supported the U.S., that were basically playing U.S. puppets in this assault on Venezuela, were blue, and the countries that rejected what the U.S. was doing were red, communist red.
It's like blue freedom versus communist red.
And he really is putting forward a kind of us versus them, a Cold War dynamic that I think is extremely dangerous.
The contradictions and the divisions are really coming out around Venezuela.
Well, and it's funny, as they're doing this right in the midst of making peace with North Korea, which ought to go to show that if America wants to, America can make peace with Iran, make peace with everybody.
There's no reason to have any rogue states.
A rogue state just means one we don't have a deal with.
So let's make a deal.
Right.
I mean, for crying out loud.
I mean, literally, North Korea is the most totalitarian state on the planet Earth today.
Two-thirds of the population in the military.
Severe penalties for the slightest political disruption or disorder or any kind of thing.
I mean, it is really a tyranny.
And good.
All the more reason to talk to them.
All the more reason to work things out with them and see if we can crack that egg open.
Although they have nukes and the ability, therefore, to defend themselves.
So that's why we've got to negotiate with them, I guess.
But they have deterrent capacity that Venezuela does not have.
But it's a lesson for North Korea that the U.S., while demanding that they, you know, it's the same lesson as Libya, is that even if you agree to the U.S.'s terms, or if you do not have deterrent capacity but you have a government that the U.S. does not like, in the case of Venezuela, the U.S. doesn't like the government because they control the world's largest oil assets and are using them for public programs and have basically detached the longstanding pro-U.S. oligarchy from being able to plunder those assets.
That's just one reason.
But, you know, it's a lesson to North Korea that even if you get rid of your nukes, the U.S. can move in at any time and still demand regime change and still try to mobilize its neighbors to attack you.
So I actually think this will complicate negotiations with North Korea.
And it might, you know, and it's disturbing that the Democrats have sort of backed themselves into a situation where because they oppose Trump so much, they have to oppose the negotiations with North Korea.
It doesn't bode well if Trump isn't elected, isn't re-elected.
Yeah, sure, would hate to see that deal fall apart for as much progress has been made.
And luckily the South Koreans are really driving this thing.
Trump's major accomplishment is allowing them to do it over Bush and Obama's dead bodies.
But so be it.
We'll see what happens in Hanoi.
It's pretty exciting because I think there will be some concrete, not just negotiations, but some concrete agreements there.
Yeah, I'm really optimistic about it, too.
Now, so we've got to talk about Canvas and the Kochs.
So first, Canvas is really tied up with the color-coded revolutions going back to the very turn of the century here, right?
Yeah, basically Canvas grew out of Otpor.
Otpor is the fake democracy, kind of astroturf democracy group that grew up, that was kind of, I would say, seeded in Serbia by the National Endowment for Democracy and the usual groups.
They based themselves off of Gene Sharp's nonviolence theories, which were actually, nonviolence is a form of hybrid warfare.
Gene Sharp worked alongside a military intelligence colonel named Robert Helvey to develop these theories, and Serbia became a testing ground after the NATO assault that split up Yugoslavia.
Milosevic had held on to power, and NATO and the U.S. moved in by training this cadre of students who used really unorthodox tactics to mobilize a popular revolt against Milosevic, who people had real grievances against.
He was running this really ossified, state-centered structure, and people wanted to be part of the West and wanted to be part of what they thought was going to bring them freedom.
There are some really good films about Otpor and the consequences for the people of Serbia called The Weight of Chains and how it actually didn't work out as everyone expected.
But nevertheless, Otpor was really successful.
They would do concerts, spontaneous concerts.
Their protests would take advantage of new technology to kind of outflank local security forces.
They succeeded in driving out Milosevic, and then, according to Stratfor, which is kind of the private CIA, they all put on suits and formed an organization called Canvas, which was funded by the same usual suspects, National Endowment for Democracy, USAID.
And according to one former Otpor member, the CIA directly funded it.
What they proceeded to do was to train student activists in countries around the world.
According to Otpor, only autocracies that the U.S. opposes.
So Zimbabwe would be one.
They tried to get into China.
And Venezuela came on the target board.
And starting in 2005, Gene Sharp's Einstein Institute was sending the Canvas trainers to Venezuela and sending Venezuelan students to Belgrade for training sessions.
Juan Guaido was part of that original cadre, alongside Leopoldo Lopez, who I talked about before, and the founders of the Popular Will Party, the most extreme militant opposition party in Venezuela.
They called themselves Generation 2007.
And if you actually read Juan Guaido's ghost-written editorial in The New York Times, I think that appeared yesterday, and unlike every other New York Times article, is not behind a subscription wall because they want you to be propagandized, he talks about being a student leader starting in 2007.
But he doesn't mention that his student leadership was bestowed on him by the fake democracy astroturfing groups that the U.S. government funds.
Good times.
And then, so what all was he up to then after?
You're saying he was in Serbia for the...
I'm not sure if he was in Serbia, but the trainings of these Venezuelan students that worked alongside him, this small cadre, first went to Serbia in 2005.
I got you.
And then, yeah.
Now we know that USAID and the National Republican and National Democratic Institutes and all that, that they've been involved in all of these color-coded revolutions, but is that true for Canvas too?
I mean, you know, Canvas is basically the group that oversees the training sessions, and then those they train will often become trainers.
And I interviewed a student who was in one of these sessions in Nicaragua, and one of his trainers is someone who said that Gene Sharp is his guru.
And he's actually, his name is Felix Maradiaga.
He's actually going to be at one of the Koch Brothers LibertyCon summits in Latin America this month.
So, yeah, I was just talking with Greg Palast earlier about, as I mentioned there, about the Kochs and their role in this.
And according to Greg, they run this refinery in Corpus Christi that is essentially geared only to handle this very heavy, very polluted Venezuelan crude oil.
And so they've always kind of been a captive market for Hugo Chavez and now Maduro.
They hate that because Chavez and Maduro sort of took advantage of that captive market and stuck it to them.
And so it's interesting to me that they have come out really very publicly against Trump.
And I think I read the other day they were even saying outright that they were going to refuse to help finance the Republicans in the upcoming election season because of how dissatisfied they are with all of this.
And yet apparently they have a major interest in seeing the regime change here.
And so I guess no wonder that even the Cato Institute, which employs so many great foreign policy peaceniks there, is actually on the other side up to their eyeballs in this regime change, it looks like.
Yeah.
I'd have to listen to your interview with Greg, and he definitely knows more about the Koch brothers than I do.
But I also understand they have a lot of business in Venezuela in fertilizer and a lot of agricultural products, and they simply don't like the way that the economy is structured.
They want the free market.
So they host every year, I think, at the Cato Institute, a Milton Friedman Prize for some figure, usually often in the global south, who is, in their view, spreading freedom, actually taking on a government that they, in the U.S., just don't happen to like.
One of the figures that they honored, I think it was in 2013 or 2010, was Jan Gojkocea, who is a major figure in the Justice First Party, which works alongside Juan Guaido's Popular Will Party.
And they gave him half a million dollars, and he proceeded to plow that money into his student networks in Venezuela just to ramp up regime change activities.
And, of course, we know Milton Friedman as the ultimate Chicago boy, the neoliberal economist who went down to Chile and helped Augusto Pinochet reform the economy in so many ways.
Fun footnote there, Greg Pallast actually studied under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago as an undercover red union labor organizer type, but went and studied under him anyway, because he is a brilliant guy like that.
And that's certainly part of it, no doubt about that.
So, I mean, it's very clear what the agenda is.
Dan Cohen and I wrote about a meeting called Fiesta Mexicana, where Otpor apparently oversaw this meeting.
It was at a hotel, I think, in Cancun in Mexico.
Many of the Generation 2007 student activists, along with newer figures, were there for training, but also to basically plan a series of destabilizing activities that would bring down the government.
And the bill was footed by the former head of PDVSA in the 1990s, before PDVSA was sort of nationalized and used to fund the social programs.
His name was Pedro Borelli.
He's now at Georgetown University's Latin American program.
And we noticed that he had recently tweeted a call for the murder of Nicolas Maduro, along with a picture of Muammar Gaddafi as he was being dragged to the streets and about to be sodomized with a bayonet.
And so Borelli reacted really angrily to the publication of our article and contacted Dan Cohen and started basically telling him, you know, you got some things wrong.
The hotel wasn't called Fiesta Mexicana.
It was actually another hotel, and it was a legitimate activity.
And Gene Sharps at Einstein Institute has trained thousands of students.
I like what they do, but I don't fund them.
But I support this.
And he basically said, yes, this all took place.
So, you know, I don't know how the U.S. would react if a foreign power, along with some local oligarchs, were training students to carry out destabilization activities in the country.
But it probably would react pretty harshly and jail them.
And yet it took years, years before the Venezuelan government started putting these figures in jail.
Many of them were openly involved in violence.
I mean, Leopoldo Lopez has boasted about kidnapping government officials.
He led a rally on February 14, 2014, alongside Juan Guaido, where he called for a march on the attorney general's office, and the attorney general's office was then torched by the marchers.
I mean, just imagine if that happened in the U.S., if the Department of Justice was torched by a group openly supported by Russia of American students.
It wouldn't be pretty.
But this is what's been going on in Venezuela for over a decade, probably two decades, and what we're seeing now is really just the culmination, as the opposition itself is weaker than it's ever been.
Yeah.
And now, you know, I don't know.
I talked with Greg about this a little bit, and I'm going to have David Stockman on, who is much more of a capitalist economist, but he actually wrote in a recent piece there at his website that regardless of the monetary inflation due to the falling oil prices and the socialist economy there and the overspending by the government and monetization of their debt and all that kind of thing, that the sanctions have had a lot to do with the hyperinflation there as well, and that it's not just their expansion of the money supply as much as it is the U.S. Treasury Department taking steps to devalue their money from the outside that they can't really do anything about in order to destabilize the country.
It just seems like their best plan to push it over now that it's really weak just wasn't a good enough one.
I don't know what they're going to do now, but I don't know if they know either.
Yeah, absolutely.
It makes it impossible for them to restructure their debt.
It lowers their international credit rating, so it makes it impossible to find investors.
And it's doing the same thing in Nicaragua, by the way, since the passage of the NICA Act, where the economy was actually doing very well because the credit rating has been lowered.
And the bond rating.
So basically, I'm not an economist, but I was speaking, as I told you, to Alina Pive in Caracas, and she said that actually the inflation rate was going down, the lines at supermarkets had ended, there was food on the shelves, things were beginning to improve dramatically heading into this year.
But then as soon as Maduro was inaugurated and the U.S. initiated this plan and started intensifying sanctions, that all was reversed.
So you can really, when you're inside the country, you can actually really feel the effect of the sanctions on an immediate level.
Right.
Well, yeah, it's just a means to an end to save the people, like the great liberal congressman you talked to there.
By the way, I thought it was funny that I think a lot of them didn't even get it, that when you were asking them if it was meddling, that was kind of a playoff of all the accusations against Russia.
They're not even that together to even figure out the joke that you were kind of making.
I think some of them got it, but not all.
Maybe some of the Republicans got it, but when I asked Deloro about the Mueller investigation and then I bridged it into meddling in Venezuela, she didn't really see the connection.
It's just this exceptionalist mentality that I was playing off of.
Right.
And I guess one of them even said that, right?
Like, hey, we're the greatest.
USA is superpower number one or something.
Yeah.
He's like, well, we're just a superpower, so f**k it.
That's funny.
Honesty.
Yeah.
Well, I guess it would be interesting to see how this plays out.
It could get a lot worse, but I sort of think it's going to blow over.
It doesn't seem like they even have a couple of Army divisions willing to make a break here.
So what do they got?
I don't want to jinx it, but I think Syria was a real turning point where the U.S. just realized it can't just go in and smash countries up and that the post-Cold War order, the unipolar order is over and we may see a similar result.
However, we're seeing an unprecedented attack on a country's economy and an overall program that's actually aimed at toppling the Cuban government as well.
Right.
I was going to say, there's that Wall Street Journal article that mentions Cuba and Nicaragua.
They're next for sure.
They're going right back to full-scale economic war against Cuba.
Yeah.
I mean, it spelled out the obvious, but put a few pieces together.
And one thing we don't talk about a lot, we talk about the neocons, we talk about these regime change democracy promotion groups, but we don't talk about the Cuban-American lobby.
Yeah, the right wing Cubans in Miami.
What an insidious factor they are and how they basically set the policies that, they basically play the same role that the neocons have played in the Middle East, in the Western Hemisphere, and they're the ones who've been driving this policy and conceiving this for a long time.
And John Bolton was always their guy.
Once he got in the National Security Council, it was pretty clear something like this was going to happen.
And they've already seized something like $17 billion of assets that belong to the Venezuelan government.
Then you have $1.3 billion in gold assets that the Bank of England has just simply stolen under U.S. pressure.
That means that no government should trust the Bank of England with its assets.
The U.S. can just come in and take them.
So it's just international piracy, and common people in Venezuela are going to suffer enormously.
You have 3 million people who have already left, and the U.S. just – I mean, the Trump administration isn't going to relent its economic attack, even if it can't achieve its political goals.
They may not have a solution, but that doesn't mean they're going to stop.
Same as the war in Yemen.
Exactly, exactly.
You're seeing unprecedented resistance on Capitol Hill to that.
But I really think it will take another president to break free of the relationship with MBS.
Not break free, but to at least wriggle out of this war, start initiating some kind of peace talks.
Well, I mean, I guess we're going to see, because the Senate is virtually guaranteed, I think – I don't want to jinx that – to re-pass the resolution that they pushed through last November, and Ro Khanna in the House is – and the Democrats have a majority now, and the leadership has said that they will support the War Powers Resolution in order to try to force a stop to the war in Yemen.
Something really could come of that, but I don't know.
The same exact Congress just voted – or maybe that was the Senate, but anyway – the Congress voted to prevent leaving NATO ever, and then I guess it was the Republicans in the Senate voted to condemn leaving Syria and Afghanistan.
A lot of Democrats voted for it, too.
Yeah, and the Washington Post headline today on the front page is, GOP votes to condemn Trump.
It doesn't say what it was about.
It just makes it look like, oh, well, there's some more friction.
We should celebrate that as the resistance.
And then you read, oh, it's over keeping our troops forever in the Middle East.
My favorite was, in move sure to please the Kremlin, Trump cancels CIA program supporting al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria.
Wow, that's a way to phrase it.
Yeah, and I don't know if you saw Rachel Maddow's Russian weather machine report, Russia can destroy our electric grids and make us all freeze to death.
She's doubling down today by simply noting that RT and Sputnik reported on her insane commentary.
So it's like a way of dismissing it.
If RT reports on something accurately, well, then maybe you didn't say that.
Maybe you aren't insane.
Wait, I missed this, so I'm so glad I quit Twitter.
So the thing is, she's saying that, you know how it's cold outside right now?
Well, someday if they wanted to, they could turn off your heater.
Yes, she said that unclassified ODNI report says that Russia and China can tank our electricity grid and make us all freeze to death in the polar vortex.
And that she got mocked relentlessly on Twitter and is blaming the whole thing on Russia.
This Russian disinformation fooled her into being a fool.
Yeah, yeah.
Poor girl.
I think it's actually the, you know, ODNI disinformation fooled her.
But in any case, this is- Well, ODNI works for Trump and Trump works for Putin, so.
Right, and Putin clearly is working with Trump on Venezuela, right?
And on getting out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.
Of course, that's the brilliance of it, man.
It's the dialectic.
He's got to control both sides of the fight.
He backs Maduro and Trump and controls them both in order to, I don't know, I guess Russia's going to get all the oil.
That's my conspiracy and I'm sticking with it.
Yeah, yeah.
And if anyone says otherwise, then they work for Russia.
Of course.
I got to get out of here, but- Thank you, Max.
Thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Thanks a lot.
Yeah, anytime.
All right, you guys, that's Max Blumenthal.
This is at the making of- No, it's at Consortium News.
It's called The Making of Juan Guaido.
U.S. Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader.
All right, y'all, thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
