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, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
Alright, you guys, introducing Jose Nino.
He is a freelance writer, has some pieces at the Mises Institute site there, mises.org.
And he's the author of this new book, How Socialism Destroyed Venezuela and Why the U.S. Should Stay Out.
Welcome to the show, Jose.
How are you doing?
Thank you so much, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Alright, so, I sure like your title.
It sure confirms a couple of my biases, such as socialism doesn't work very well and the U.S. should not intervene anywhere.
So, these are good.
I guess I'll let you go ahead and state your case, beginning with, I like the way you say very clearly from the very beginning here, that socialism in Venezuela does not begin with Hugo Chavez in 1999.
So, when does it?
Yeah, this is a very interesting point because most conventional analysis points to Hugo Chavez and his regime.
I argue that it begins in 1958, whenever Venezuela returned back to democracy.
And this process really ratchets up, though, in the 1970s when the country nationalizes oil industry, contrary to the conventional neoconservative, conservative ink type of narrative that you hear all the time, that Chavez nationalized the oil industry, blah, blah, blah.
In fact, it was nationalized in 1975 by Carlos Andres Perez, and it fundamentally altered the nature of the Venezuelan state.
In fact, once Venezuela nationalizes oil industry in the 70s, the country went from a relatively hands off free market economy to a crony capitalistic petro state that used petroleum rents to subsidize industry by votes, and essentially controlled the Venezuelan populace.
This was also accompanied by the politicization of the Venezuelan Central Bank when the government bought a majority share in the bank.
And from the 1980s onward, Venezuela has never had a single year of single digit inflation.
For example, Venezuelan millennials have never seen inflation below 10%.
So Venezuela's problems have originated well before Chavez.
In fact, Chavez got elected in 1998, specifically because the average Venezuelan was poorer in 1998 than in 1958 due to these policies.
In fact, Venezuela was one of the few cases of what was called a growth disaster by Charles Jones in introduction to economic growth in this period.
It's one of the very few countries that actually got poorer from the 1950s than the 1990s.
Yeah, okay, so now here's I guess we'll go ahead and get into one thing that I thought, you know, could be a criticism of the book is that in a way you kind of don't define left and right in any kind of conventional sense.
I know Venezuelan politics are very different from American ones, but I guess technically it's socialism when the right wing government nationalizes the oil industry.
But typically when people think of the left and the socialists, they think of the money being distributed to the poor, or at least that would be the claim that the money is to be distributed to the poor.
Whereas it sounds like, as you describe it in the book, previously it was socialism, but only for the rich.
And so that's more like conservatism or even fascism rather than some sort of socialism in a sense, right?
It's socialism for the few rather than socialism for most everyone.
Well, actually, this is very interesting.
The previous governments of Venezuela, Acción Democrática, Democratic Action and COPE, which is Christian Democrats.
Acción Democrática belongs to the Socialist International.
They were technically more of a KVR left wing, limousine, leftist type of group.
They did get a pretty good deal of support from both the poor and the rich.
Christian Democrats, the other party, they were all over the spectrum.
You had like some centrists there and some quasi market types, though they were very much in favor of a very activist state.
Venezuelan politics is definitely, I would say, if you're going to use the left and right spectrum, the past 60 years has been more left wing.
I would say the difference between Chávez and the previous political order has to do more with socioeconomic divisions, more so than traditional ideological spectrums that we see in the West.
Because Hugo Chávez had a lot of support in the increasing ghettoization of the urban centers in cities like Caracas, Maracay, Valencia and Maracaibo.
And that's where he drew the base of support.
These were the people that were very much crowded out because of the previous Social Democrat policies.
So I think that's one major issue too that I do critique a lot of analysts on Venezuela, is that they try to use Western style type of political dichotomies to make sense of it.
Because what you see in Venezuela right now, it's really more of a hard socialist versus social democratic conflict.
You really don't see a right wing per se in the country.
That being said, neoconservatives will support just about anything in their interventionist schemes to topple certain regimes that don't kowtow to their financial interests or whatever they have in mind.
And I meant that not with all different things that come with right wing and left wing ideology, but more right and left just in terms of the rich versus the poor.
It was the business interests and the rich, even if they were maybe more like Hillary Clinton neoliberals or whatever, they're right wing business conservatives to a real leftist, a real poor person would see that as essentially, you know, and doesn't race have a lot to do with this too?
That this is, you know, kind of the poor in Indian versus the rich in Spanish for going way back?
Well, to some extent, the Chavez regime did bring back like more like African culture into their governing ideology and like the cultural programs that they pushed.
But Venezuela has never really had racial conflicts throughout its history, except for its wars of independence.
That when Simon Bolivar drew considerable support from mestizos and Afro Venezuelans against Canary Islanders and Spaniards.
But from the 1950s to the present, there has been a particular emphasis on assimilating Venezuelan immigrants and emphasizing a lot of like mixing as well, because Venezuela is a country of immigrants, specifically of Lebanese, Lebanese Christians, Syrians, Italians, Portuguese, Spaniards, and Colombians.
So there's always been kind of like a melting pot culture.
I think that what we do see in Venezuela, though, the past 60 years are more socioeconomic divisions of like rich, poor, lower middle class, and stuff like that.
And Chavez got a lot of the lower middle class and below.
And that's what explained like a major reason why he won the landslide in 1998.
Yeah, and it's interesting, as you say, how the inflationary policies and essentially, you know, welfarist, you know, soft socialist policies were what had destabilized society so bad in the 20 years leading up to Hugo Chavez.
That was how people came to accept him in the first place.
There's a lesson for the rest of us in that.
When your liberals are so bad, they seem worse than socialists.
You know, you have a real problem, you know, and it depends on what the issue is, of course.
But just to take this, and I really want to let you get back to your narrative here, but to go ahead and hash out the one more thing here.
So first of all, I should plead a lot of ignorance on Venezuela.
I don't know that much.
I've tried to pay somewhat of attention, but mostly I'm looking at the Middle East and I don't speak Spanish and I don't read Latin American media and whatever.
What do I know?
But one thing that certainly these statistics go around, there are CIA fact books, statistics and United Nations statistics and that kind of thing that show that after Hugo Chavez, that literacy went way up.
That, you know, death at childbirth went way down.
You know, whatever.
I'm forgetting all my terminology.
You know what I mean?
Poverty rates and homelessness and the very worst consequences of extreme poverty, you know, had really been improved upon.
Hospitals were going up.
Love them or hate them.
Government schools where there were no schools before.
And that this to me sounds a lot like it reaffirms what else I'd heard, which goes along a lot with what you say here.
That it was a socialist country, but mostly it was socialism for the people who were already rich and not so much for the people who had nothing.
And that this is why they hated Chavez and call him a communist and everything.
He didn't truly nationalize the economy very much more.
I know he did seize a few industries here and there, but essentially he didn't nationalize the economy or business interests any more than they already were.
He just shared that oil money with the people who were poor and built things that, you know, and we can get to the current hyperinflation and the destruction of the standard of living there.
I know that George Bush and the invasion of Iraq is what caused the extremely high oil prices through the early 2000s that let Hugo Chavez do so many of these things, as you talk about in there.
But is that really not the case, that there's kind of a severe race and class thing where the few whiter people were essentially receiving all those oil revenues and stashing it in bank accounts in Miami, as Greg Palast put it on the show?
Whereas when Hugo Chavez came, he said, no, we're going to give this money to the poor Indians too.
Right, not instead, but also, or no, correct me please if I'm wrong.
This is one interesting point that a lot of people tend to forget under Hugo Chavez.
In his first few years in office, he actually engaged in certain privatization schemes and opened up some markets because he...
Oh yeah, that's interesting.
I absolutely have never heard that.
So yeah, please do tell.
Yeah, I believe it was like the copper industry.
And he actually campaigned on a relatively centrist platform.
He bashed the crony capitalism of previous years.
He never really campaigned on a hardcore Marxist platform in 1998.
But what changed everything I think was the 2002 coup attempt.
The really radical advisors surrounding him were emboldened by the coup attempt, and especially when they found out about the CIA's involvement.
Because that coup attempt was mostly spurred by Hugo Chavez's reforms of the state-owned oil company PDVSA, which historically has been just a piggy bank for politicians and the corporations that are very connected to the state.
And he tried to put in some cronies.
A lot of people threw a fit.
Then they tried the failed coup.
And from that point forward, Chavez took more of, I would say, hard-like redistributionist line.
They did engage in a lot of expropriations of private property, exchange controls, and price controls.
I argue that had the US just kept a hands-off policy with Venezuela, he probably would have been ousted from office in a normal election.
And things would have maybe transitioned to more of a market-based economy in Venezuela.
But because of this and how the Bush administration essentially othered Venezuela, the Venezuelan regime just took a much more hardline approach of the economy, and they started aligning themselves with the so-called axis of evil.
It's basic geopolitics because if Venezuela doesn't align itself with other more powerful countries like Russia or China, it's very likely the US could have easily toppled it through an intervention.
It's a fallback measure in today's geopolitical arena.
I mean, there were infrastructure improvements because of the huge amount of oil money coming in.
And had Chavez maintained a much more centrist approach, I think Venezuela right now would be in better shape.
But unfortunately, US foreign policy does embolden dictators, does embolden pretty authoritarian regimes when it tries these regime change things.
And I think I've argued that sanctions and all these other types of interventions don't work.
Yeah, there is a very clear class distinction in Venezuela.
It's not as pronounced as other Latin American countries as far as race is concerned.
But there is, among the opposition, it tends to be more of European descent.
You have much more light-skinned people.
But at the same time, a lot of the candidates they run, they don't really look any more different than what the current regime runs.
I mean, it's more of an overarching culture that in Venezuela, really virulent racism has kind of gone away over the past few decades.
In that regard, it has advanced a lot.
But the main problem I argue in this book in Venezuela is that it's had a very nasty interventionist culture in economic affairs for the past few decades.
And it's not going to go away overnight.
And it definitely won't go away with a military intervention.
Yeah, well, it doesn't sound like it would go away if somehow the government and military were convinced to switch to Guaido and put him in charge.
It doesn't sound like anybody thinks that he's running on an end to corruption and real property rights and free markets and whatever.
He's just running for his faction against the other faction.
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Not that he's running.
Sorry, I didn't mean to put it in a way where his claim to power is legitimate in any way.
It's obviously not.
I mean, he is ultimately a paper candidate because in Venezuela right now, the reality is that it's going to be the person who has the military support and who has guns because there has been a social and economic breakdown and it's reverted back to its state of nature.
And the fact is he doesn't have much ground support, nor does he have the military support.
So he's a paper candidate.
The U.S. is propping up a paper candidate just for the sake of advancing a narrative and trying to do a failed regime change operation.
That's why the U.S. is really stuck between a rock and a hard place because now I think if they want to get rid of Maduro in the next few months, they have to intervene, which is a terrible idea.
But they've tried the whole CIA thing.
They've tried propping up people in the past, and it's just very clear that the Chavista Maduro type of regime and narrative that's behind it, it's just going to be really difficult to topple.
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Well, and as you say, after the coup of 2002, they were able to, I think as you put it, otherize the opposition so easily after that that, look, everyone who opposes us is an avowed CIA puppet.
You can tell just by looking at them.
And everybody knows it's true, and it is true.
And so in this case, too, you have this guy, Guaido, saying on the front page of the Washington Post that, like, yeah, I sure could use some help from the U.S. military here.
Which, you know what, I'm not Venezuelan, but I have to say that that pretty obviously from any point of view is the highest treason for him to try to get a foreign military to attack his own country in order to install him in power.
Where he, you know, there would be no escaping the characterization forever that he would be America's puppet after that.
He'd rely on American force probably to keep him in power after that anyway.
And God knows what kind of chaos.
And so what's Guaido's approval rating now that people have heard of this guy and see what he's up to?
It's got to be lower than Hillary Clinton.
And she hadn't tried this.
Imagine if Hillary Clinton tried to hire the French and the Russians and the British to come and put her or the Chinese, heaven forbid the Russians, the Chinese to come put her in power.
Because everybody knows that she really won the election and the 25th Amendment says you can do that and all of this kind of garbage and try to get foreign countries to help her do it.
I mean, boy.
Well, yeah, from the people I know on the ground, because I know some people that are more market oriented that don't like the regime, nor do they really like the current opposition.
They're a very small minority in this country, to be honest.
They even say that Guaido's approval and just overall popularity, even among the opposition, is plummeting as we speak.
We see in Venezuela in the past five years or so, you always see like a flavor of the week type of candidate, whether it be like Enrique Capriles, Leopoldo Lopez or Juan Guaido that comes into the scene.
There's like heavy euphoria for like three to five months.
And then like you see the U.S. and their think tanks try to get involved and then it just plummets and it just rinse repeat.
This is basically another iteration of the cycle.
The guy really doesn't offer much.
He actually tries to like say that Maduro is portraying the legacy of Hugo Chavez.
He tries to say like, I'm real Chavismo, I'm real socialism, blah, blah, blah.
And a lot of dissident Venezuelans that are actually free marketers, like free market intellectuals, say that, yeah, this is just more of the same.
There's really not much to offer.
And the fact that he's being propped up by the U.S. is only going to make him less popular because it's been ingrained in a lot of Venezuelan voters and the overall populace that the U.S. has been trying regime change.
And it's been insanely blatant in 2019.
So, yeah, he's going to probably become very irrelevant soon.
I don't know if you saw this, but it's worth mentioning just for fun, because I was bringing up Hillary Clinton there that, hey, she at least ran and lost.
This guy never did.
And there was a story in CNN about the plane crash.
I don't know how mysterious that was or if that's just sanctions at work or what, where some military officers were killed.
But in the CNN story on it, they said, yeah, you know, Maduro is refusing to give up power to Guaido, who beat him in an election in January.
And he's refused to give up power ever since then.
And they eventually corrected it, but they let that kind of stand all day long when there was no election in January.
Guaido never stood for election the way Hillary Clinton did.
And that is the template for the color-coded revolution is whoever loses the election just refused to accept it and stay out in the street and try to get a coup going and this kind of thing.
But in this case, Guaido was essentially unheard of in the, I forgot the exact title of the House of Parliament there.
He's kind of a backbencher until he got his rotating place as the House Speaker, essentially.
Right.
And then all of a sudden, Donald Trump and Mike Pence say he's the president and everyone is supposed to believe that.
Which is funny, you know, what did you think when you first heard of that, that the Americans were declaring this guy president?
Were you giving it even a 1% chance that the government and the military would switch sides to his view or to his power?
Yeah, we have to give this some context.
This was a ploy that's been pursued by the opposition in 2018.
There was this election that it was like a snap election that the opposition abstained from like overwhelmingly.
And it was done like I think by through advice of the State Department and several NGOs and they tried to pull some constitutional trickery where that if like a legitimate election is not called the president of the National Assembly, which was Guaido then.
Becomes like the interim president.
That's what they tried to pull.
Now, this is very much like constitutional technicality, but in a country like Venezuela, I think it's going to be mostly going to boil down to does he have the military's back?
It doesn't matter what type of constitutional procedure they try to pull if it's like legitimate or not.
The only legitimacy you'll get in Venezuela is if you have like the force of the state behind you or whatever shock troops you have and Guaido doesn't have that.
That's why whenever they declared him like the interim vice of the interim president.
I was just like thinking the only way he actually has a claim to power is if the military switches to his side, which they have not and will continue to not do so.
So, yeah, he's a paper candidate and the U.S.
Like Donald Trump is starting to figure it out that, yeah, he does not have much support.
So it's not just the military.
I mean, when they held their their protests, they got, I don't know, a good 10,000 people out or maybe even more than that.
I don't know.
But there were clearly, you know, vastly more numbers, higher numbers.
Geez, I can't talk today.
There are vastly higher numbers of people protesting essentially in favor of the government rallying at the presidential palace.
The drone footage was all over Twitter and that kind of thing.
And so the popular support may not be extremely pro Maduro, but it's certainly pro our guy versus whoever is, you know, being foisted upon them from outside of the country, you know.
The problem with the opposition as well is that you'll see them get like very quick bursts of support, but then it just dissipates really fast because of just exhaustion.
A lot of Venezuelans have left the country.
A lot of people have been disenchanted with the opposition because they don't really have much to offer ideologically or even when they govern, because most of them still control municipalities and lower forms of government.
And they're always in campaign mode.
They don't really govern their places well and they don't offer much.
So a lot of people just stay home or they just go to the rally.
And then after they see that they can't really move forward, they just quickly go back.
And as a result, candidates like Guaido lose support very fast.
It's basically the same story all over again.
It's just a different ploy that the U.S. government tried to pull.
The opposition really has not had enough support to topple the government.
So it's going to have to get some extra oomph from U.S. involvement or whatever.
And that's why I've been saying for years that I think that the path forward for Venezuela is that they have to have an opposition that actually offers like a pretty constructive and concrete market transition.
Because the current one is just basically repeating more of the same and can never really drum up a lot of support and it loses its support really fast.
So there's just a lot of factors that keep it from doing that.
And that's why now you're seeing people like Guaido call for help abroad.
Hang on just one second.
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So let's go back to the book here.
I want to ask all about the monetary policy and the destruction of the currency there, the price controls and all these things.
You really have a great write up of all of that and going back into history too.
But can you talk a little bit about the oil resource curse here?
Because I think it's really important the way you talk about how they used to have a much wider and more diversified economy in many ways.
And even though the standard of living might have gone up for the poorest people for a time based on the oil wealth, that essentially the rest of the economy was rotting out from under everyone while they're being paid not to work.
Right?
Oversimplifying my characterization there?
Most of the problems you see in Venezuela right now and the policies as well, they've already been done before from like 1970s to the 1990s.
There's nothing really new.
It's just the degree and magnitude that the Chavez regime ultimately doubled down on them.
But there's really nothing new in a qualitative sense.
The price controls have been implemented to a limited degree, even in the 80s and 90s.
And a huge problem with Venezuela is mostly the nature of the state's involvement in a lot of these industries.
And I don't think that any of the regimes of the past 50 years have really done much to address that.
And regardless, that does not justify some type of military involvement.
Reality is that I think when you look at why the U.S. is really involved in Venezuela, apart from the oil, you do see whenever Chavez did expropriate some industries, he did expropriate from politically connected Venezuelans that have a lot of deep connections in the U.S.
So that's going to obviously precipitate some type of response.
But I still think that doesn't justify some kind of intervention.
Countries have a right to pursue bad policies and good policies.
That's part of being a sovereign nation.
But I do think that at this point, the U.S. might just give Venezuela the Cuba treatment and just put full blown sanctions, travel bans, the whole nine yards and just put it in like officially put it in the axis of evil, if you will.
Because they really, the neocons now are kind of in a awkward position now that their paper candidate cannot muster up any support.
So I don't really see any constructive path going forward unless Trump just says screw it and does away with Bolton and just ignores Venezuela for the time being.
Yeah, which, you know, this is the have to have to say this is the failed promise of Trump.
If there was a promise at all of him was whatever his flaws, he wasn't a senator and he wasn't a governor.
You know, maybe a governor would have made much difference, but he wasn't a senator.
He wasn't related to Bill Clinton or George Bush.
And he could come in here and make a break with whatever policy he wanted.
He didn't have to continue with any of the wars or any of the sanctions or any of the policies against any of these countries shaking hands with Kim.
Why not shake hands with the Ayatollah?
Why not shake hands with Maduro?
Why not kill them all with kindness?
And when we have nothing to lose and everything to give and gain, you know, it's crazy.
But anyway, I guess that's because he's Donald Trump, not Ron Paul.
That's why.
OK, so but now.
So talk about the monetary policy here, because, you know, we hear such kind of solid opinions, depending on which side people are on mostly.
Right.
Where someone is a capitalist of any kind of conservative or libertarian.
They say, aha, see, socialism leads directly to hyperinflation, leads directly to you should do what I say instead.
While then anyone who is essentially on the left and defending Venezuela says, no, no, no, it's all about the sanctions.
And no one can deny that America's put pretty severe sanctions, not just on individuals, but on Venezuela's oil company, the national oil company there.
And on their participation in the international financial institutions and all these different things, the British seizing their gold and all that kind of thing.
So I wonder if you can give us a little bit of a view, your own view of all of that and how much really describing, you know, all about it, obviously, you know, how much of this really is just their plain old expansion of the monetary base.
And how much of this devaluing of their currency is due, do you think, to American Treasury Department intervention in their affairs?
Yeah, it's hard to say because expansion of the Venezuelan monetary base has been a major trend since the 1980s, if you actually think about it, because the Bolivar was the most stable currency in Latin America from 1940 to 1980.
But then once the central bank became essentially an arm of the Venezuelan government through certain reforms in the 1970s, where the government owned a majority stake, they've never been able to tame inflation.
In fact, I'll give you a personal story.
My dad's business ultimately went under in 1996, largely not just due to the tax reforms that the IMF pushed forward, but Venezuela's failure to tame inflation, which was at 100% in 1996.
100% inflation, like in any Western country, would make the population go nuts.
You would see resignations and whatnot.
So there were already pretty bad problems from beforehand.
And that's why I think that it's a tragedy that in current analysis of Venezuela, no one really talks about that, like some of the really bad trends that were going in.
Now, as far as sanctions are concerned, you saw the first really comprehensive sanctions against government officials with the Obama administration in 2014.
That was done in the context of the Venezuelan protests that took place at that time.
But really, it's like the Trump administration, in my opinion, that's had the hardest sanctions on state institutions like PDVSA and stuff like that, that's just going to make it really, really difficult for the country to do any type of market reform.
Because Venezuela will just say, the really hardliners in the Venezuelan regime will just say, look, it's the U.S. that's impoverishing us because of these sanctions, and it will give them cover, if you will.
One alternative they do have is because now that they've essentially floated into Russia and China's geopolitical orbit, they're just going to privatize and sell stuff to Russian and Chinese companies and try to get in on their anti-dollar schemes.
That's going to be their fallback measure now.
And very likely, if more rational economic approaches emerge in the current Venezuelan regime, they'll probably gravitate more towards that.
That's going to obviously tick off a lot of neocons, because they don't really like the idea of these countries being in their backyards.
But I see that as more of a geopolitical response, the U.S. being in everyone's backyard.
It's just now Venezuela's a geopolitical chess piece at this point.
But this goes to show that neocon interventions are finally getting a lot of blowback.
They're no longer the only sheriff in town.
You have countries like Russia and China that are now legitimate superpowers with both soft and hard power that they can use to exert against the U.S. and push back against the U.S.'s really misguided interventions over the past few decades.
Yeah, I mean, that's an important point.
The Russians, they're oil exporters, but the Chinese are buying Venezuelan oil despite American sanctions.
They're saying, hey, we'll still demand what you're supplying and keeping them in business there.
And so it's not the unipolar world anymore, as you say, for sure.
All right.
So now, I guess, talk about gun control here.
Chapter nine, gun control's not so subtle role in subjugating Venezuela.
I heard that Chavez was passing out rifles.
Well, it's mostly to government supporters.
Here's a bigger picture analysis.
Venezuela never really has had a Second Amendment or anything that really resembles it.
You have to keep in mind, crime rates in Venezuela have been on the uptick for decades, since the 80s.
It's part of its larger cultural decline.
And you have both the government and the opposition that are very responsible for not providing adequate security in the country.
As I mentioned before, a lot of the opposition is more concerned with campaigning against the government instead of actually providing any type of infrastructure or even considering reforms that allows its residents in the municipalities to actually protect themselves.
So both have their hands in the cookie jar in this case.
And really, right now, because of just how destabilized the country is, there's parts that are just very ungovernable.
And that's just a result of what happens when you let government control so much for decades on end.
And I think that's why in this analysis of Venezuela, you can't just talk about US sponsored regime change as a cure-all.
It's actually going to make things a lot worse.
And you have to talk about more big picture ideas of moving forward.
But you don't hear that in the US, unfortunately.
It's a very binary, like, either you support Maduro or you're against Maduro, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Well, and, you know, underlying all this is, unfortunately, it's the same thing we see everywhere is the American hypocrisy here, where democracy just means you elect a guy that America wants to win.
And installing democracy means overthrowing whoever they are, democratically elected or not, until we get our guy in there.
And this kind of thing.
And for that matter, it's all in the name, too, of free markets and capitalism, as they say.
And yet, they don't practice free market capitalism at all.
All they practice is this international gangsterism, a gun to your head.
And so, if you're on the Venezuelan side of that, you'd probably, I guess, prefer the left and independence to the right and slavery to some American multinational corporation.
Free market, libertarian, this or that is not among the choices going on here at all.
Oh, yeah, that's a great point, Scott.
And that's what I tell a lot of people, that if the opposition were somehow to win within the next six months, you're not going to see anything that even moves towards a free market.
That's just not going to happen.
It's not on the menu in Venezuela.
It ignores political trends that have been in place in Venezuela for decades.
And most of the opposition parties, they belong to Socialist International.
That's why I wrote the book.
I wrote it specifically for a lot of naive free marketers and people that think that the current opposition will somehow bring Venezuela to some type of normalcy, if you will.
It's just not going to happen.
And the U.S. getting even more hawkish on the topic, I think there's not much of an incentive to do so because, as you stated, people will prefer sovereignty over what is going to be very likely a U.S. puppet government that won't really do much in terms of reforms.
It's only just going to do enough to get U.S. interests paid.
And then they'll just let the puppets run the country to the ground in other respects.
So I personally, that's why I say like hands off.
I may disagree with certain leftist interpretations of Venezuela, but what I do agree with them, but for different reasons, is that Venezuela should be left alone.
Well, and you know, it's interesting because this is really where you start your book here, too, is distinguishing between national and individual independence here and that really all along.
They got independence from the European powers right, but they didn't go far enough with the whole individual rights of man and all of this kind of thing.
And so it's always been essentially a fight between the socialists who are already rich and the socialists who are still poor.
And so you can pick your side there if you want.
But freedom never really was part of it.
And of course, that's the whole thing about, you know, America trying to push all of this with force is that we're an extremely flawed republic as well.
So there's no real free market here either.
And that's a big part of why our government is so interested in what's going on over there.
The Coke industry's oil refinery interests and Exxon and Shell and British Petroleum and all their different interests here, all are reflected in American politics.
And, you know, we could just put the shoe on the other foot, though, and note that no matter how screwed up our government is, that if some foreign country came and intervened, say the Russians tried to meddle in our election in the name of improving our property rights and improving our freedoms here in our country at the hands of a foreign government, we would never tolerate that.
We'll go ahead and ruin our own lives.
Thank you very much.
Right.
Of course, that's the way everyone in Venezuela must feel.
What percentage of the people could possibly agree with Guaido that like, hey, U.S. Army, I could use some assistance here.
I mean, that's crazy to think.
Yeah, that's actually a really good point.
You mentioned, Scott, about U.S. domestic agenda.
I think this whole Venezuela thing, especially the conservative Inc. type of talking points on it, is really just a distraction from the fact that U.S. economy is just becoming more corporatized, more attached to the state, if you will, especially with how big the government has become.
And you see this with big tech, their collusion with the Atlantic Council, and a lot of other parts of the deep state, if you will.
And just like the U.S. has become a much less free market country over the past few decades, yet no one really talks about this, especially on the conventional right.
And Venezuela is just a good distraction and a good way to provide cover for that, to keep people from not realizing that we have a very well-entrenched managerial state, if you will, that continues to grow no matter who's in power.
And also, to another point, the military-industrial complex is one of the largest redistributionist programs on earth, because it's basically welfare for the defense industry.
Nobody talks about that.
It's a very weird distinction you see among the legacy right, that they will make a whole lot of noise about domestic issues.
Yet they don't do anything about that.
But then they're completely silent about one of the biggest welfare programs in human history, which is the military-industrial complex.
There's hypocrisy on all sides when it comes to these type of politics.
It's just foreign policy is really weird, the cognitive dissonance we see among some people.
And to your point about Guaido, even in the opposition, there's opposition as well to a military intervention, because a lot of people realize there are legitimate second-order effects and unintended consequences of an intervention that will completely destroy the country and just accelerate its complete collapse and possibly spur certain types of counterinsurgencies, insurgencies, and whatnot that will have the U.S. there for years, if not decades.
And it would be just another failed nation-building experiment that's going to cost us a ton in terms of blood and treasure, and leave plenty of Venezuelans also outhanging as well.
So it would be like a complete humanitarian disaster.
Yeah.
And you know, it's so obvious, too, is what's the opposite of that?
If our side only practiced what they preached and didn't really have this imperious hand over there intervening in Venezuela, but just wanted to maybe kind of rudely give them advice all day.
Your bill of rights isn't good enough.
Your judicial process isn't good enough.
Your monetary base expansion rate is far too high.
You're doing it wrong.
But what if they did all that, but without ever actually hurting anyone?
You know what I mean?
If they really just meant it as sound advice, and look at us, practice what we preach, too, so you can't really say anything about it, it might get a lot further.
But the point is, I guess, that they don't mean what they say.
They just say those things to cover up for what they really mean, which is, as John Bolton put it on Fox News, you can't do better than this.
Well, we want our American oil companies to take over the oil resources there.
That way we can have, this is not the exact quote I'm paraphrasing, but essentially, that way we can have the oil and the money, too.
And it'll be great for the American economy.
It's essential for the American economy that these few chosen politically connected corporations will make an extra couple of $10 billion a year, which is a joke that we should not believe in.
But that was the way they stated it clear as day.
So I guess if I was in Venezuela, I'd have to throw in with the Reds.
Because that would be the position that the USA would be putting me in.
Yeah, I mean, it's a natural nationalistic instinct that people will gravitate towards the government that represents them, no matter how flawed it is.
And I think that's been part of the human process in history overall, is national sovereignty often comes with tremendous gains in human prosperity, but it also comes with failures.
But it doesn't follow that a country is morally obligated to carry out some intervention just for the sake of humanitarian aid.
And that's really, it's really just a ruse because it's about geopolitical control and control of resources.
That's what it is.
It's just that a lot of these neocons, they get clever with the type of marketing and PR they use to justify their interventions.
But yeah, in that case, like when you paraphrase that, it's become so blatant that everybody knows it.
And I think that's why those support is completely evaporating, because they're realizing that, yeah, there's a much bigger geopolitical ulterior motive that the US has openly revealed now.
It's not even like speculation or trying to connect the dots.
It's very open now.
And yeah, I just think that this is just another disaster in the making if the US decides to pull the trigger.
And let's hope that Trump completely removes Bolton out of the equation and stuff like that, because I believe one of the biggest failures of the Trump administration was getting people like John Bolton as advisors, because they've completely derailed his supposedly America first agenda.
Yeah.
Well, and Elliott Abrams, too.
I mean, you couldn't have done worse than that guy.
Oh, terrible.
Neocon retread, yeah.
Everyone points to his role in Nicaragua in the 1980s and all of that.
And sometimes he even mentioned he got us into Iraq War II, but he also was behind the Gaza bombshell failed coup that empowered Hamas in Gaza in 06.
And he's also in the article I probably flog more than any other thing that's been written in this century, the Redirection by Seymour Hersh, where they said, ah, jeez, we just fought a whole war for Iran and Iraq.
Now we have to turn back toward our friends in Al-Qaeda and help them to fight against Shiite power in the region.
And he was the one in charge of that in the Bush years.
So, yeah, you couldn't do worse than that very man to be in charge of this thing.
Although, you know what?
So I'm sorry, and I'll let you go after this.
But and you kind of alluded to this, too, that, well, gee, they already lost, right?
They tried this coup twice.
The military and the government did not switch sides to Guaido.
And so the path that they're on is, I guess we got to kill them with a drone strike now or some kind of thing like that.
Or go ahead and back down and admit it didn't work and fire Bolton or don't.
But at some point, go ahead and call it off and say, OK, I guess, well, we're not getting this regime change.
Bolton blame it on Bolton.
He said it'd be easy.
It turned out it wasn't or they could escalate.
I'm thinking that they're going to let it go because their choices are so limited when it comes to using violence to so-called fix this thing.
But I wonder what's your take on that?
And are you fearing the worst here or you think it might sort of peter out?
Well, they're pivoting toward Iran right now, so it's like basically like I think it's good.
I think it's good.
I think that the the path they're going to go, I think they're going to, like I mentioned before, they're going to give Venezuela the official Cuba treatment and just really put hard, hard line sanctions where they just completely embargo the economy and probably have travel bans the whole nine yards.
And just say like, yeah, this country is in the bad guy axis, officially Iran, North Korea, yada, yada, yada.
And they're just going to put it on the back burner.
I do think that some moves to watch out, though, is if Brazil and Colombia join NATO, which there has been talk about that.
I'd watch out for that because that might be how there might be a U.S.-sponsored regime change there.
That could possibly happen like 2020 and beyond.
But for right now, I think Venezuela has fizzled out also just because of the whole Iran escalation at the moment.
So maybe that's the reason that they trumped this thing up against Iran for a week was sort of to cover for transitioning away from picking a fight in Venezuela.
I hate to give the guys credit, but I don't know.
I guess it's one explanation because it's certainly nothing the Iranians did.
We know that.
Well, Venezuela and Iran are also very connected, too, because of just the overall emphasis on regime change that the U.S. is doing all over the globe.
It's turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will, that this axis of evil, they're cooperating because they realize that they have mutually shared interests and enemies in the U.S.
So there's a lot of that going on as well.
But I do think that, to your point on Bolton, he grossly overestimated the kind of support Guaido was going to have.
That's been the U.S. government's position, is overestimating the opposition support since day one.
But this time, Bolton thought he could pull a fast one on Trump, and then this whole thing just completely fizzled out.
Even Trump saying, I thought that Maduro's regime was days away from falling apart when it's not the case.
Yeah, this is actually hilariously embarrassing because this type of coup was not even pulled off clandestinely like previous coups have in U.S. history.
So it's a joke, and it just shows that these neocons are very desperate.
And even among the MAGA and conservative base, there is some degree of war fatigue with all these really failed nation-building schemes.
These people are not principled anti-war people, but they're realizing, yeah, this is a joke.
This stuff is costing us too much money.
We're getting overstretched.
And yeah, it's probably best that we don't start putting more boots on the ground.
But I do think that websites like yours, Scott, and other type of organizations should always be raising awareness of this because you guys play an indispensable role in countering the conventional narratives we see coming from both the neoliberals and the conservatives.
And neocons that constantly want regime change, that constantly want us involved abroad and waste our money and wasting many American lives and putting millions of lives in those countries at risk as well.
So my hat goes off to you guys.
Cool.
Well, thanks very much for that.
Appreciate that.
And I really appreciate the work you're doing here, too.
I'm going to go check out what you wrote at Mises.org later on today when I get a chance.
But tell us, please, where can we find your new book, How Socialism Destroyed Venezuela and Why the United States Should Stay Out of the Way?
Yeah, you can find it on my website, which is JoseAlnino.com forward slash how hyphen socialism hyphen destroyed hyphen Venezuela.
You can find that there at JoseAlnino.com.
I have a newsletter and I'm also very active on Twitter at Jose Alnino.
And I also have a Facebook page as well at Jose Alnino.
So you can follow my works there.
I'm constantly posting articles and sending out emails on the latest political developments.
I'm mostly focused on domestic policies now.
I'm shifting more towards that.
But I wrote this book specifically because of the timely nature of what's been going on over the past few years.
And just to make the case against intervention and bring a unique perspective to this debate.
Well, you certainly do.
And it's great work.
And I really appreciate your time on the show as well, Jose.
Thank you so much, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Jose Nino.
And the book is called How Socialism Destroyed Venezuela.
And why the U.S. should stay out.
So you like supporting anti-war radio hosts.
That makes sense.
Here's how you can do that.
Go to scotthorton.org slash donate.
And there's all kinds of options to do so and all kinds of different kickbacks at different levels.
Of course, take PayPal, Patreon and all different kinds of digital currencies and all of those sorts of things.
And anybody who signs up by way of Patreon or PayPal to donate $5 a month to the show will automatically get keys to the Reddit room, my own private Reddit group that I have.
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And thanks.
