29 Apr, 2019– https://on.rt.com/9t83

Ecuador traded Julian Assange for a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which can only be handed out with the approval of Washington, John Shipton, the WikiLeaks co-founder’s father, has said.

4, 27,2019

This March marked the 16th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

In 2003, President George W. Bush and his advisers based their case for war on the idea that Saddam Hussein, then dictator of Iraq, possessed weapons of mass destruction — weapons that have never been found and never existed. Nevertheless, all these years later, Bush’s “Global War on Terror” continues — in Iraq and in many other countries.

It’s a good time to reflect on what this war — the longest in U.S. history — has cost Americans and others around the world.

First, the economic costs: According to estimates by the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, the war on terror has cost Americans a staggering $5.6 trillion since 2001, when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.

$5.6 trillion. This figure includes not just the Pentagon’s war fund, but also future obligations such as social services for an ever-growing number of post-9/11 veterans.

It’s hard for most of us to even begin to grasp such an enormous number.

It means Americans spend $32 million per hour, according to a counter by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Put another way: Since 2001, every American taxpayer has spent almost $24,000 on the wars.

As stupefying as those numbers are, the budgetary costs pale in comparison with the human toll.

As of 2015, when the Costs of War project made its latest tallies, up to 165,000 Iraqi civilians had died as a direct consequence of U.S. war, plus around 8,000 U.S. soldiers and military contractors in Iraq.

In addition to those direct deaths, at least four times as many people in Iraq have died from the side effects of war, such as malnutrition, environmental degradation, and deteriorated infrastructure.

Since the 2003 invasion, for instance, Iraqi health care has plummeted — with hospitals and clinics bombed, supplies of medicine and electricity jeopardized, and thousands of physicians and healthcare workers fleeing the country.

Meanwhile, the war continues to spread, no longer limited to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, as many Americans think. Indeed, the U.S. military is escalating a shadowy network of so-called “anti-terror operations” all across the world — in at least 76 nations, or 40 percent of countries on the planet.

We must ask: Are these astounding costs worth it? Is the U.S. accomplishing anything close to its claims?

The answer is, resoundingly, NO!

Instead the world sees the U.S. as the modern embodiment of State Terror, bullying, controlling, and punishing every nation that doesn’t kowtow to it.

U.S. activity in Iraq and the Middle East has only spurred greater political upheaval and unrest. The U.S.-led coalition is seen not as a liberating force, but as an aggressor. This has fomented insurgent recruitment, and there are now more terrorist groups in the Middle East than ever before — most of them sponsored by the U.S.

The so-called “War On Terror with its mushrooming costs — economic, human, social, and political — will just continue to grow until God ends the U.S. terrorists.

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By Tyler Durden

April 22, 2019 “Information Clearing House” –   Former CIA director and now Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long accused WikiLeaks of being a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”, usually manipulated by Russia. Since Pompeo first made this claim as CIA Director in April 2017, countless major US news sources from NPR to CNN to the Washington Post have uncritically repeated the line, smearing Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as “Russian agents,” and more broadly using the narrative to stifle independent journalism and government whistleblowers. 

But whether Pompeo or any other current or former CIA director makes such a bombastic claim without offering evidence — such as more recently asserting that China and Russia have “helped destroy” Venezuela through faltering investments, should anyone ever believe a high CIA official? Certainly the mainstream media routinely takes intelligence officials simply at their word, but Pompeo himself recently admitted the CIA is in the business of lying, cheating, and stealing.

Last week Mike Pompeo spoke at Texas A&M University, itself long known for being a favored recruiting ground of the CIA, considering too that one of the university’s last presidents, Robert Gates, was CIA chief and later served as Bush and Obama’s Secretary of Defense.

During the Q&A session, Pompeo boasted that in the CIA both the training and culture are geared toward the following:

“We lied, we cheated, we stole.”

Interestingly, a Christian religious news broadcaster was the only media that seemed to pick up on Pompeo’s words last week, and described it as follows: “that’s not the resume of the Secretary of State… that’s the resume of Satan.”

“I was the CIA Director; we lied, we cheated we stole. We had entire training courses.”

–@SecPompeo pic.twitter.com/tehirq1cyX

— Jonathan Lalonde (@JonathanLalon12) April 19, 2019

The former CIA chief and now Secretary of State said the following:

“What’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s —  it was like — we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.” — Texas A&M University (April 15, 2019)

Though some level of deception might be expected of spies placed in foreign settings to commit espionage, it’s interesting that Pompeo framed it in terms “the glory of the American experiment” — as if the CIA and government officials treat lying as a great American past time.

Certainly Pompeo’s frank admission is something to remember the next time intelligence officials weigh in on anything in front of the US domestic population.

Another interesting and worrisome remark concerned Pompeo’s vision of diplomacy as Secretary of State: “Diplomacy and military strike go hand in hand,” Pompeo said. “They are indeed intimately related; each relies on the other.”

Here are Pompeo’s full Q&A remarks at Texas A&M last week.

Pompeo’s remarks are sickening. He is proud of his lying, cheating, and stealing. He even relates it to “the glory of the American experiment.” And adding to his disgusting rhetoric is the cheering from the audience there at the University.

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Philip M. GIRALDI | 18.04.2019

It is depressing to observe how the United States of America has become the evil empire. Having served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War and in the Central Intelligence Agency for the second half of the Cold War, I had an insider’s viewpoint of how an essentially pragmatic national security policy was being transformed bit by bit into a bipartisan doctrine that featured as a sine qua non global dominance for Washington. Unfortunately, when the Soviet Union collapsed the opportunity to end once and for all the bipolar nuclear confrontation that threatened global annihilation was squandered as President Bill Clinton chose instead to humiliate and use NATO to contain an already demoralized and effectively leaderless Russia.

American Exceptionalism became the battle cry for an increasingly clueless federal government as well as for a media-deluded public. When 9/11 arrived, the country was ready to lash out at the rest of the world. President George W. Bush growled that “There’s a new sheriff in town and you are either with us or against us.” Afghanistan followed, then Iraq, and, in a spirit of bipartisanship, the Democrats came up with Libya and the first serious engagement in Syria. In its current manifestation, one finds a United States that threatens Iran on a nearly weekly basis and tears up arms control agreements with Russia while also maintaining deployments of US forces in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and places like Mali. Scattered across the globe are 800 American military bases while Washington’s principal enemies du jour Russia and China have, respectively, only one and none.

Never before in my lifetime has the United States been so belligerent, and that in spite of the fact that there is no single enemy or combination of enemies that actually threaten either the geographical United States or a vital interest. Venezuela is being threatened with invasion primarily because it is in the western hemisphere and therefore subject to Washington’s claimed proconsular authority. Last Wednesday Vice President Mike Pence told the United Nations Security Council that the White House will remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from power, preferably using diplomacy and sanctions, but “all options are on the table.” Pence warned that Russia and other friends of Maduro need to leave now or face the consequences.

The development of the United States as a hostile and somewhat unpredictable force has not gone unnoticed. Russia has accepted that war is coming no matter what it does in dealing with Trump and is upgrading its forces. By some estimates, its army is better equipped and more combat ready than is that of the United States, which spends nearly ten times as much on “defense.”

Iran is also upgrading its defensive capabilities, which are formidable. Now that Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran, has placed a series of increasingly punitive sanctions on the country, and, most recently, has declared a part of the Iranian military to be a “foreign terrorist organization” and therefore subject to attack by US forces at any time, it is clear that war will be the next step. In three weeks, the United States will seek to enforce a global ban on any purchases of Iranian oil. A number of countries, including US nominal ally Turkey, have said they will ignore the ban and it will be interesting to see what the US Navy intends to do to enforce it. Or what Iran will do to break the blockade.

But even given all of the horrific decisions being made in the White House, there is one organization that is far crazier and possibly even more dangerous. That is the United States Congress, which is, not surprisingly, a legislative body that is viewed positively by only 18 per cent of the American people.

A current bill originally entitled the “Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA) of 2019,” is numbered S-1189. It has been introduced in the Senate which will “…require the Secretary of State to determine whether the Russian Federation should be designated as a state sponsor of terrorism and whether Russian-sponsored armed entities in Ukraine should be designated as foreign terrorist organizations.” The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado and is co-sponsored by Democrat Robert Menendez of New Jersey.

The current version of the bill was introduced on April 11th and it is by no means clear what kind of support it might actually have, but the fact that it actually has surfaced at all should be disturbing to anyone who believes it is in the world’s best interest to avoid direct military confrontation between the United States and Russia.

In a a press release by Gardner, who has long been pushing to have Russia listed as a state sponsor of terrorism, a February version of the bill is described as “…comprehensive legislation [that] seeks to increase economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on the Russian Federation in response to Russia’s interference in democratic processes abroad, malign influence in Syria, and aggression against Ukraine, including in the Kerch Strait. The legislation establishes a comprehensive policy response to better position the US government to address Kremlin aggression by creating new policy offices on cyber defenses and sanctions coordination. The bill stands up for NATO and prevents the President from pulling the US out of the Alliance without a Senate vote. It also increases sanctions pressure on Moscow for its interference in democratic processes abroad and continued aggression against Ukraine.”

The February version of the bill included Menendez, Democrat Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Democrat Ben Cardin of Maryland and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina as co-sponsors, suggesting that provoking war is truly bipartisan in today’s Washington.

Each Senator co-sponsor contributed a personal comment to the press release. Gardner observed that “Putin’s Russia is an outlaw regime that is hell-bent on undermining international law and destroying the US-led liberal global order.” Menendez noted that “President Trump’s willful paralysis in the face of Kremlin aggression has reached a boiling point in Congress” while Graham added that “Our goal is to change the status quo and impose meaningful sanctions and measures against Putin’s Russia. He should cease and desist meddling in the US electoral process, halt cyberattacks on American infrastructure, remove Russia from Ukraine, and stop efforts to create chaos in Syria.” Cardin contributed “Congress continues to take the lead in defending US national security against continuing Russian aggression against democratic institutions at home and abroad” and Shaheen observed that “This legislation builds on previous efforts in Congress to hold Russia accountable for its bellicose behavior against the United States and its determination to destabilize our global world order.”

The Senatorial commentary is, of course, completely false regarding what is going on in the world, but it is revealing of how corrupt American legislators are. The Senators also ignore the fact that the designation of presumed Kremlin surrogate forces as “foreign terrorist organizations” is equivalent to a declaration of war against them by the US military, while hypocritically calling Russia a state sponsor of terrorism is bad enough, as it is demonstrably untrue. But great damage comes from the existence of the bill itself. It will solidify support for hardliners on both sides, guaranteeing that there will be no talks between Washington and Moscow for the foreseeable future, a development that is bad for everyone involved. Not just an unwise decision, it also reveals a deeply corrupted congress and administration.

[The worst terrorists, the US politicians and military, are camouflaging their own state terrorism by labeling other states as terrorists.  -ed.]

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By Paul Craig Roberts – 4 – 18-2019

April 18, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.”

Maduro was elected president of Venezuela in 2013 and again in 2018. Previously he served as vice president and foreign minister, and he was elected to the National Assembly in 2000. Despite Washington’s propaganda campaign against him and Washington’s attempt to instigate violent street protests and Maduro’s overthrow by the Venezuelan military, whose leaders have been offered large sums of money, Maduro has the overwhelming support of the people, and the military has not moved against him.

What is going on is that American oil companies want to recover their control over the revenue streams from Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Under the Bolivarian Revolution of Chavez, continued by Maduro, the oil revenues instead of departing the country have been used to reduce poverty and raise literacy inside Venezuela.

The opposition to Maduro inside Venezuela comes from the elites who have been traditionally allied with Washington in the looting of the country. These corrupt elites, with the CIA’s help, temporarily overthrew Chavez, but the people and the Venezuelan military secured his release and return to the presidency.

Washington has a long record of refusing to accept any reformist governments in Latin America. Reformers get in the way of North America’s exploitation of Latin American countries and are overthrown.

With the exceptions of Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and Nicaragua, Latin America consists of Washington’s vassal states. In recent years Washington destroyed reform governments in Honduras, Argentina and Brazil and put gangsters in charge.

According to US national security adviser John Bolton, a neoconservative war monger, the governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua will soon be overthrown. New sanctions have now been placed on the three countries. Washington in typical display of its pettiness targeted sanctions against the son of the Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. https://www.rt.com/news/456841-bolton-russia-venezuela-threat/

Ortega has been the leader of Nicaragua since for 40 years. He was president 1985-1990 and has been elected and reelected as president since 2006.

Ortega was the opponent of Somoza, Washington’s dictator in Nicaragua. Consequently he and his movement were attacked by the neoconservative operation known as Iran-Contra during the Reagan years. Ortega was a reformer. His government focused on literacy, land reform, and nationalization, which was at the expense of the wealthy ruling class. He was labeled a “Marxist-Leninist,” and Washington attempted to discredit his reforms as controversial leftist policies.

Somehow Castro and Ortega survived Washington’s plots against them. By the skin of his teeth so did Chavez unless you believe it was the CIA that gave him cancer. Castro and Chavez are dead. Ortega is 74. Maduro is in trouble, because Washington has stolen Venezuela’s bank deposits and cut Venezuela off the international financial system, and the British have stolen Venezuela’s gold. This makes it hard for Venezuela to pay its debts.

The Trump regime has branded the democratically twice-elected Maduro an “illegitimate” president. Washington has found a willing puppet, Juan Guaido, to take Maduro’s place and has announced that the puppet is now the president of Venezuela. No one among the Western presstitutes or among the vassals of Washington’s empire finds it strange that an elected president is illegitimate but one picked by Washington is not.

Russia and China have given Maduro diplomatic support. Both have substantial investments in Venezuela that would be lost if Washington seizes the country. Russia’s support for Maduro was declared by Bolton today to be a provocation that is a threat to international peace and security. Bolton said his sanctions should be seen by Russia as a warning against providing any help for the Venezuelan government.

Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?

How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”

The top officials of the US government have announced that they intend to overthrow the governments of 3 countries and this is not seen as “a threat to international peace and security?”

How much peace and security did Washington’s overthrow of governments in Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and the attempted overthrow of Syria bring?

Washington is once again openly violating international law and the rest of the world has nothing to say?

There is only one way to describe this: The Triumph of Evil.

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April 7, 2019 – Michael Snyder

We should all be deeply concerned, because we can see evidence of the cancerous moral decay that is eating away at the foundations of our society all around us.

In life, each one of us gets to make choices, and some of those choices can lead to very bad outcomes.  We all have old friends that “got on the wrong path”, and their lives ended up becoming cautionary tales.  Well, the same principle applies to nations as a whole.  America has been given very clear choices between good and evil, life and death, blessings and curses over and over again, and we have consistently made the wrong choices.  If we stay on this road, there is only one result that will be possible. (see Deuteronomy 30:15-20)

As long as we are drawing breath, there is always an opportunity to turn things around.  That is true for individuals, and it is also true for our entire nation.  But if we continue running toward evil, it is only a matter of time before exceedingly painful consequences overtake us.

The following are 40 facts that prove that America’s moral collapse is spinning wildly out of control…

#1 America has killed more than 60 million children since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973.  The federal government endorses this activity by heavily funding the country’s leading abortion provider, and after that abortion provider harvests the organs of the dead children, the federal government also heavily funds the research that is conducted on those harvested organs.

#2 According to a Quinnipiac University poll from last year, 63 percent of all Americans want to keep Roe v. Wade in place.

#3 America is a global leader in sexual depravity.  If you doubt this, just check out what is going on in Cleveland at the end of this month.

#4 Americans are now more likely to die from an opioid overdose than they are from a car accident.

#5 In the city of Baltimore, approximately one out of every four babies is born as an opioid addict.

#6 Overdosing on drugs has now become the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50.

#7 McDonalds feeds approximately 70 million people a day globally. Pornhub gets more than 78 million visits a day.

#8 The teen birth rate in the United States is higher “than in any other industrialized country in the world”.

#9 According to the CDC, approximately 110 million Americans have a sexually-transmitted disease right now.

#10 The CDC also tells us that there are approximately 20 million new sexually transmitted disease cases in the U.S. every single year.

#11 The number of married couples with children in the U.S. just reached a 56 year low.

#12 According to the United Nations Population Fund, 40 percent of all births in the U.S. now happen outside of marriage. But if you go back to 1970, that figure was sitting at just 10 percent.

#13 At this point, approximately one out of every three children in the United States lives in a home without a father.

#14 Approximately one-fourth of the entire global prison population is in the United States.

#15 By the time an American child reaches the age of 18, that child will have seen approximately 40,000 murders on television.

#16 According to a study conducted by the Mayo Clinic, nearly 70 percent of all Americans are on at least one prescription drug.  An astounding 20 percent of all Americans are on at least five prescription drugs.

#17 According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, doctors in the United States write more than 250 million prescriptions for antidepressants each year.

#18 Over half a million people are homeless in the United States right now, but more cities than ever are passing laws making it illegal to feed them.

#19 One recent study found that the average American spends 86 hours a month on a cell phone.

#20 A different study found that one-third of all American teenagers haven’t read a single book in the past year.

#21 Americans are obsessed with material things and are willing to go deep into debt to get what they want.  At this point, 480 million credit cards are in circulation in this country. That number has risen by nearly 13 percent since 2015.

#22 37 million credit card accounts in the U.S. are “seriously delinquent” at this moment.

#23 According to a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately two-thirds of all Americans in the 15 to 24-year-old age bracket have engaged in oral sex.

#24 It has been reported that one out of every four teen girls in the U.S. has at least one sexually transmitted disease.

#25 It has been estimated that 30 percent of all Internet traffic now goes to adult websites.

#26 According to the Pentagon, 71 percent of our young adults are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military because they are either too dumb, too fat or have a criminal background.

#27 The city of San Francisco handed out a total of 5.8 million free syringes to drug addicts in 2018.

#28 During one seven day stretch last summer, a total of 16,000 official complaints were submitted to the city of San Francisco about piles of human feces littering the streets.

#29 When you include unfunded liabilities, the true size of our national debt is 222 trillion dollars.  What we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

#30 The suicide rate in the United States is up 34 percent since the year 2000.

https://www.sgtreport.com/2019/04/40-facts-that-prove-that-americas-moral-collapse-is-spinning-wildly-out-of-control/

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This is an excerpt from a much longer article by Ron Unz originally entitled Oddities of the Jewish Religion, which we highly recommend. We reproduce it here because there is so very little written about this important book, which debunks much of what was taught in the West in the 20th century about Russia.

” … given the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the top leadership during much of (the revolutionary) period, it is hardly surprising that “anti-Semitism” was deemed a capital offense (in Russia).”

Throughout most of my life, Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn was generally regarded as the greatest Russian literary figure of our modern era, and after reading all of his works, including The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and The Gulag Archipelago, I certainly concurred with this assertion, and eagerly absorbed Michael Scammel’s brilliant thousand page biography.

During the 1980s and 1990s whispers of his supposed anti-Semitism began floating around, probably because he had sometimes hinted at the very prominent role of Jews in both financing and leading the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as afterward staffing the NKVD and administering the Gulag labor camps.

It is unlikely that this ‘quote’ is authentic, rather it reflect the opinion of the memer  who created it, a view which has merit:

“You must understand, the leading Bolsheviks who took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse.

“It cannot be overstated. Bolshevism committed the greatest human slaughter of all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant and uncaring about this enormous crime is proof that the global media is in the hands of the perpetrators.”

Late in his life, he wrote a massive two-volume history of the tangled relationship between Jews and Russians under the title Two Hundred Years Together, and although that work soon appeared in Russian, French, and German, nearly two decades later, no English translation has ever been authorized. His literary star seems also to greatly waned in America since that time, and I only very rarely see his name mentioned these days in any of my regular newspapers.

Perhaps the documentation of very heavy Jewish role in Communism was considered inappropriate for American audiences, as was the discussion of the extremely exploitative relationship between Jews and Slavic peasants in pre-revolutionary times, based on liquor-dealing and money-lending, which the Czars had often sought to mitigate.

When a ruling elite has little or no affinity to the population it controls, benevolent behavior is not likely, and those problems are magnified when that elite has a long tradition of ruthless behavior. Enormous numbers of Russians suffered and died in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, and given the overwhelmingly Jewish composition of the top leadership during that period, it is hardly surprising that “anti-Semitism” was declared a capital offense. It is unfortunate indeed when a country comes under such control.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, reborn Russia soon fell under the overwhelming domination of a small group of Oligarchs, almost entirely of Jewish background, and a decade of total misery and impoverishment for the general Russian population soon followed. But once an actual Russian named Vladimir Putin regained control, these trends reversed and the lives of Russians have enormously improved since that time.

America’s media organs were overwhelmingly friendly toward Russia when it was under Jewish Oligarchic rule. But Putin has been demonized in the press more ferociously than any world leader since Hitler.

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Robert BRIDGE | 01.04.2019

[The Ukranian Maidan refers to the overthrow of the lawful Ukranian government in 2014 by actions fomented by the US Government. Maidan is a Ukrainian word for “square, open space.” The coup was started in the Ukraine’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti square. The US Government pulled a similar overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 when they overthrew the lawful government of Mohammad Mosadech and replaced him with the Shah of Iran. Now they are attempting to do the same thing to Venezuela.  -ed]

Venezuela is home to the largest oil deposits in the world, which makes the political stakes involved much higher than they would be otherwise. Enter Juan Guaidó, Washington’s puppet leader in Caracas, who will be attempting to rally the country against legitimate (i.e., democratically elected by the people) President Nicolas Maduro next month.

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó has announced that April 6 will kick off a nationwide “tactical actions” as part of the so-called Operation Freedom protests, which are designed to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

“On April 6 will be the first tactical actions of the # Operation Freedom across the country,” Guaidó declared over Twitter this week. “That day we must be ready, prepared and organized, with the Aid and Freedom Committees already formed. The rescue of Venezuela is in our hands!”

Is this the start of Maidan 2.0?

But first, who is Juan Guaidó? That’s a questioning worth pondering momentarily because just a few months ago, the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans – 81 percent of the population – had never heard of the young man before. That all changed when Guaidó, 35, was awakened by a phone call from none other than US Vice President Mike Pence. Literally overnight he had become the poster boy of the political opposition in Venezuela and leader of the National Assembly. “Juan Guaidó is a character that has been created for this circumstance,” Marco Teruggi, a sociologist and leading observer of Venezuelan politics, told the Grayzone. “It’s the logic of a laboratory – Guaidó is like a mixture of several elements that create a character who, in all honesty, oscillates between laughable and worrying.”

In fact, Washington recognized Guaidó more than just an opposition leader; it recognized him, without a drop of legality, as the de-jure president of the Latin American country (Just this week, Guaidó’s wife Fabiana Rosales was the guest of honor at the White House, as the media referred to her as “first lady” and “first-lady-in-waiting”).

Meanwhile, the US media has wasted no time placing the laurels on Guaidó’s young, inexperienced head, declaring the quiet coup d’ etat the “restoration of democracy” in a land where the election process, which provides its voters with a digital receipt, is considered to be the most transparent and reliable in the world. In other words, if Maduro is in office, which he is, it is due to the will of the people, not the will of Mike Pence.

So what should Venezuela expect on April 6 with the commencement of Guaidó’s organized protest? Anything is possible, but the likelihood of some sort of event or incident that will heighten the tensions in the country cannot be discounted. It certainly does not help that Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton warned in the past of “serious consequences” if any harm comes to Guaidó.

“Let me reiterate – there will be serious consequences for those who attempt to subvert democracy and harm Guaidó,” Bolton tweeted back in January. Those sorts of threats must be treated with extreme caution and due consideration. Suffice it to recall what followed like clockwork in Syria after such red-line threats were delivered about what would happen in the event of a chemical attack. Unsurprisingly, a chemical attack would eventually occur, whereupon the United States would immediately blame the event on the government, as opposed to the ragtag terrorist rebels who had infinitely more reason for resorting to such methods, and more so following such declarations from the US. In other words, should anything untoward happen to Guaidó, the West would have its perfect pretext for whatever follows next, which are better left to the imagination.

Although it appears as though Juan Guaidó’s popularity is on the wane – his motorcade was attacked by a pro-Maduro crowd just this week, while turnout for his anti-government marches has been reportedly dwindling – Caracas took the step of barring him from holding public office for 15 years due to irregularities in his financial records. According to the State Comptroller, Juan Guaidó has taken 90 international trips without indicating who provided the estimated $94,000 in expenses.

“We’re going to continue in the streets,” Guaidó responded.

Meanwhile, back in the United States, a number of government officials are taking a very unhealthy interest, if not suspicious interest, in what is happening in Caracas. Senator Marco Rubio, for example, sounds worse than any opposition figure in Venezuela, and tweets about practically nothing else than what is happening south of the border. On one particularly lamentable occasion, Rubio was delusional enough to actually post before-and-after images of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. The first showed him in power, the second just moments before being brutally murdered by a street mob. It boggles the mind to think that this man, who has a strange penchant for quoting Bible verse while fomenting for violent upheaval, stood on a platform as a Republican presidential hopeful.

In any case, there have been several events that strongly suggest that the United States has some sort of plan to bring about the crisis that could lift Guaidó into power, as well as open up the Latin American oil industry to foreign private interests, as he has already promised to do.

First, there is the well-documented incident from last month in which a ‘humanitarian supply’ truck, attempting to cross into Venezuela from Colombia, was torched. The US quickly blamed the incident on Maduro, however, video footage seems to indicate that it was actually anti-government protesters who carried out the attack with the use of Molotov cocktails.

Meanwhile, the beleaguered Latin American country has suffered a spate of electricity blackouts this month, which Maduro has been quick to blame on the United States. Guaidó, of course, blamed the outages on the “incompetence” of the Maduro government. However, Maduro may be forgiven for seeing the hand of the United States every time the lights go out. In fact, such things were discussed years ago, as revealed in a Wikileaks email dump that show even during the reign of Hugo Chavez, the problem of energy supplies was considered as a crowbar to break down the government. The following email was from Stratfor, which provides intelligence analysis.

“A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector. There is the grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010… This could be the watershed event, as there is little that Chavez can do to protect the poor from the failure of that system. This would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

Now, to what degree, if any, the United States may be tempted to hack/attack the Venezuelan power grid is anybody’s guess, but it certainly does not seem to be beyond the realm of possibility. And this could explain why the United States is so rattled by the presence of some 100 Russian cyber specialists in Venezuela, which arrived last week.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said Russia’s relations with Venezuela are conducted “in strict accordance with the Constitution of this country and in full respect of its legislation.”

Understandably, the last thing that Moscow would like to see is yet another regime change fiasco, this time in Caracas, similar to the one that occurred on its border in Ukraine with the Maidan uprising, which continues to wreak havoc on global relations. In that sense, the global community can only hope that common sense and scruples wins out over opportunism and rogue politics, all in the name of oil profits.

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RT – 3 Apr, 2019

Venezuela’s National Constituent Assembly has backed a Supreme Court request to strip Juan Guaido of his immunity, paving the way for possible legal proceedings against the US-backed opposition leader calling for regime change.

The unanimous decision now paves the way for legal proceedings against the 35-year-old politician. “Sometimes the law takes time, but let’s not despair,” Cabello said, referring to the criminal investigations against Guaido currently being conducted by the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Supreme Court of Justice.

Meanwhile, Guaido used his questionable powers to push through a ‘law’ to protect public employees, basically awarding himself immunity from prosecution. “This law will protect public employees. We’d like to tell public employees, ‘Think freely, make your own decisions,’” he told his supporters.

Furthermore, the opposition body declared the Maduro government as a “state promoting terrorism” and urged the Organization of American States and the United Nations to follow suit – and then to act against it accordingly.

The National Assembly has no real power in Venezuela since the Constituent Assembly was established after the 2017 elections. While the opposition-controlled unicameral body is still, on paper, functional, other government branches and institutions have refused to recognize its authority.

Guaido’s appointment to head the National Assembly was immediately annulled by the Venezuelan Supreme Court in January. That, however, did not stop the opposition leader from proclaiming himself the ‘interim president’ and seeking regime change with the help of the US and its allies. Despite the unprecedented level of western support, Guaido has failed to convince the military to switch sides and rebel against the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

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Aaron Kesel – April 1, 2019

U.S. and Russian tensions are picking up, and several geopolitical moves have been made in the past week with much of the press mum on what’s happening between the U.S. and Russia over Venezuela and Ukraine.

Last week, the Russians sent troops into Venezuela with the speculatory number being a total of 100 soldiers deployed. Auspiciously, immediately after this, the U.S. Air Force deployed six nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to Europe to send a “message to Russia,” Real Clear Defense reported.

The U.S. Air Force is carrying out “theater integration and flight training” out of London’s RAF Fairford station, which will help prepare airmen to use the base as their forward operating location for bombers in Europe, the Air Force said last week.

“Training with joint partners, allied nations and other U.S. Air Force units contributes to our ready and postured forces and enables us to build enduring and strategic relationships necessary to confront a broad range of global challenges,” the Air Force said.

Meanwhile, simultaneously the U.S. Air Forces Pacific also launched B-52 bombers from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, Air Force Times reported.

The Kremlin accused the U.S. of escalating tensions by flying its B-52 bombers near its border. Russia’s Defense Ministry further claimed it prepared two Sukhoi SU-27 fighter jets to intercept a U.S. aircraft before it changed its direction, Reuters reported.

Trump administration national security adviser John Neocon Bolton threatened Russia for sending in troops into Venezuela, stating that any move to expand operations there would be considered a “direct threat” to international peace, Reuters reported.

“We strongly caution actors external to the Western Hemisphere against deploying military assets to Venezuela, or elsewhere in the Hemisphere, with the intent of establishing or expanding military operations,” White House national security adviser John Bolton said in a statement.

“We will consider such provocative actions as a direct threat to international peace and security in the region,” Bolton added.

Almost immediately after this, Russia flew its own Tu-154M aircraft over several military installations in California and Nevada such as Edwards Air Force Base and Fort Irwin National Training Center, including Area 51, as part of the Treaty on Open Skies agreement, The Drive reported.

This also came after U.S. President Donald Trump’s loose-lipped statement that “Russia has to get out” of Venezuela and “all options are open” in ensuring that Russia withdraws from the socialist nation. It also followed comments just one day after Elliot Abrams, Washington’s envoy to Venezuela, threatened that “the Russians will pay a price” for allegedly helping prepare the country with S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems for combat.

The Russian government response is that U.S. plans for regime change; Moscow has been thwarted since it has sent in its military, and the U.S. is nervous, MSN reported.

Other things to note: both Russia and the U.S. have pulled out of the INF Treaty which governs the two nations not using nuclear weaponry. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, banned land-based nuclear missiles in Europe during the Cold War. This followed a month after with Russia running a drill flying two of its nuclear-capable strategic Tu-160 bombers over the Caribbean Sea and Venezuela during a 10-hour training mission, presumably in response to U.S. threats to withdraw from the treaty with Russia, WSBTV reported. The U.S. claimed that Russia’s 9M729 cruise missile breaches the INF treaty, Activist Post reported.

Russia also tested its “Avangard” hypersonic weapons and an underwater nuclear-capable drone that Activist Post reported Putin had teased.

Russia further plans to build a base and a military presence in La Orchila, Venezuela, also presumably in response to the U.S. suggesting it will pull out of the INF treaty,  according to TASS.

According to military envoys, Russian authorities have made a decision (and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro did not object) to deploy strategic aircraft to one of Venezuela’s islands in the Caribbean Sea, which has a naval base and a military airfield. Ten years ago, Russian experts and Armed Forces commanders had already visited the island of La Orchila, located 200 kilometers northeast of Caracas. Venezuelan laws prohibit the setup of military bases in the country, but a temporary deployment of warplanes is possible.

“We’ll finish building infrastructure in 2019 to accommodate air defense radar units and aviation guidance points on the Sredny and Wrangel Islands, and on Cape Schmidt” in the Russian Arctic, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said according to France 24.

Activist Post previously reported that U.S. and Ukraine were in “close discussion” with Washington to supply another cache of lethal weapons for Kiev’s fight in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin told reporters Nov. 18, a day after a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Washington. This came after Moscow rammed and shot at Ukrainian Navy ships allegedly for invading its territorial waters in the Kerch Strait near Crimea, hitting two vessels and injuring six crew members.

In October, President Trump cited China’s potential expansion as a reason the United States should consider quitting the INF treaty.

“If Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it, and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable,” Trump said after a rally in Nevada.

China has called for a calm between Russia and the U.S. taking a role of easing relations urging the two nations for constructive dialogue.

“[T]his treaty plays a significant role in easing major-country relations, promoting international and regional peace, and safeguarding global strategic balance and stability,” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement on the ministry’s website.

China is opposed to the U.S. withdrawal and urges the U.S. and Russia to properly resolve differences through constructive dialogue … China opposes the multilateralization of this treaty. What is imperative at the moment is to uphold and implement the existing treaty instead of creating a new one.

Those war drums keep beating louder and louder with no signs of slowing down that growing rhythm, which if we aren’t careful could lead to a “global catastrophe.” As for Venezuela, it’s up to the will of the people; hate or love Maduro it’s not my fight or yours, it’s theirs. But one thing is for sure: a person who proclaims himself to be president (Juan Guaidó) without a single vote from the people and has an extensive history of involvement with regime change trainers shouldn’t be president — that’s certainly not a healthy way to view democracy. All three superpowers — Russia, China and the U.S. have financial and military interests in Venezuela.

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