The top five special interests groups and institutions that seek to benefit from a coup in Venezuela
As the
US continues to attack the Maduro government, keep these special
interests in mind. Think about who gets rich off of the regime-change
agenda. It’s the same people that said we had to invade Iraq in
order to prevent nuclear apocalypse. It’s the same people who said
the world would stop turning on its axis if we didn’t carpet bomb
Libya and Syria.
Now
they’re trying to get us to support war in Venezuela. You won’t
be any freer or more prosperous after the Maduro government is
toppled. It’s just war propaganda.
Saddle
the Venezuelan people with enormous debt to the IMF
The
trojan horse for the return of neoliberalism in Venezuela, Juan
Guaido, stated that he’s going to borrow money from the IMF to fund
his government, which would make all Venezuelans indebted to this
predatory institution. Guaido spends the money and the poor and
working people work to pay taxes that pay off the principal and the
interest.
The IMF
was created in New Hampshire in 1945 to internationalize and
standardize capitalism and its rules in an increasingly globalized
and US-dominated world.
Its
primary function is acting as an international lender-of-last-resort
to indebted countries. IMF member states decide which countries will
receive loans, but the member states with the largest say are the
ones with the largest share of the IMF’s funds, which have always
been the United States and its allies.
This is
why the IMF’s standard “structural adjustment program” is based
on the so-called Washington Consensus. A set of 10 economic policies
entirely concocted by US think tanks, the IMF, the World Bank and the
Treasury Department.
The
Washington Consensus is as follows:
In
exchange for a loan, often with a high-interest rate that many would
call predatory, the IMF overhauls the protective and redistributive
policies of a country for neoliberal policies, making the target
country ripe for finance capital investment and profit-making.
Control
the oil reserves
There’s
little doubt that the oil industry is pushing the US to overthrow the
Maduro government, especially when John Bolton openly states this on
national television.
Bolton
was himself once part of the oil industry, serving as the director of
Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. in 2007. So, he is no stranger to
advocating for the interests of the fossil-fuel industry.
Venezuela
has the largest oil reserves in the world by far and Washington won’t
let that wealth go unexploited, or worse, be shared among its enemies
like the Maduro government, Russia, China, or Iran.
And with
so many politicians, Republican and Democratic, bought off by
industry players — companies like ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and
Chevron — it’s impossible to imagine anyone in Washington
advocating for Venezuela maintaining ownership over its own sovereign
natural resources.
Establish
military dominance and arm your puppet
One of
the most bizarre things about America is that it created one of the
world’s largest private industries around arms dealing. And like
any industry, whether it be JDAM bombs or beef, private businesses
often resort to lobbying Congress to squeeze political favors out of
the government in the form of subsidies. Or, in the case of the
military industrial complex, a foreign policy of endless war, one
based on elusive ideas like combating terrorism or defending
democracy.
You can
see that wherever the US goes, expensive construction projects
follow. Behind every multi-billion dollar base construction, some
private contractor is there reaping the profits.
Once the
US military presence is firmly established, the weapons sales begin.
And we all know no US ally, or puppet state, is complete without a
full fleet of Lockheed Martin F-16s. Then they’ll be able to fend
off all of those pesky leftist rebels with freedom missiles.
With
Venezuela’s neighbors, Colombia and Brazil, growing closer to NATO
and accepting US military presence in their countries, we can only
assume Venezuela is Washington’s next target.
As the
strategic approach of regime change evolves, new industries arise to
meet these needs.
After
the massive anti-war protests following the invasion of Iraq,
outright invasion and occupation were no longer viable strategies due
to negative public opinion. Washington sought to disguise war
propaganda using humanitarian rhetoric.
Create
the humanitarian alibi
Privately
owned NGOs dedicated to human rights and promoting “American style”
democracy have played a much larger role in regime-change operations
in recent years. They serve as soft-power institutions, which attempt
to subtly sway a population against its own government through
propaganda laced with words like ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and
‘human rights’.
These
NGOs are given the full blessing of the US government and the two
often work in tandem.
The US
Agency for International Development’s regime-change arm, the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED), funded opposition groups in
Nicaragua, Venezuela (during the 2002 coup), Haiti, Ukraine, and most
recently China and North Korea. And whenever US foreign policy sets
its sights on a certain target, private industries usually develop to
help meet that goal as well as make a quick buck along the way.
For
example, Thor Halvorssen — the first cousin of Leopoldo Lopez, the
founder of Juan Guaido’s party, Popular Will — calls himself a
human-rights activist. He founded the notorious Human Rights
Foundation (HRF) and makes a living giving speeches and TV
appearances, talking about why the governments of Venezuela or North
Korea are not legitimate and need to be overthrown.
Unsurprisingly,
the HRF is funded by the conservative Sarah Scaife Foundation, which
is itself funded by think tanks like the top neoconservative think
tank, the American Enterprise Institute, as well as the Heritage
Foundation. HRF is also funded by the Donors Capital Fund and the
Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, which are also funded by the American
Enterprise Institute. It’s one big web of moving money that all
leads back to the same cast of characters.
The
crisis in Venezuela has been a huge gift for people like Halvorssen,
who use the US’s war on Venezuela to promote themselves and their
organizations.
Buy
the facts from the think tanks funded by the Military Industrial
Complex
Like
NGOs, think tanks also play an important role in giving regime change
a sense of legitimacy — in their case, intellectual legitimacy.
Think tanks rely on donations to operate and many find willing donors
among the capitalist class. These fat cats pay for fancy looking
reports meant to justify their desired goal: the delegitimization of
socialist governments and the legitimization of coup governments that
uphold the Washington Consensus.
The Cato
Institute has been deeply involved in the attempted overthrow of the
Venezuelan government. In 2008, Cato awarded Venezuelan opposition
leader, Yon Goicoechea, the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing
Liberty and $500,000 for his role in disrupting a constitutional
referendum in Venezuela. That money was used to finance the political
rise of Juan Guaido, and his clique known as Generation 2007.
These
seemingly independent research groups have intimate networks that
they leverage to amplify the message their donors have given them.
Whether
it was the bank bailouts following the 2008 crisis, or the lack of
action on climate disaster, in America it seems the government always
puts the interests of the rich ahead of the poor and working class,
and the situation in Venezuela is no different.
More:
Comments
Post a Comment