Here’s a short insightful clip of an article that truly tells it like it is. So much in our world today feels senseless and deeply misaligned with humanity’s best interests. Until we collectively wake up and choose what is right over what is convenient, the noise and confusion will only intensify, driving us toward the same tragic patterns we claim to abhor—the endless cycle of war. This journalist’s take on current events is both thought‑provoking and unflinchingly honest, offering a realistic and penetrating look at the recklessness and greed that continue to shape decisions at the highest levels of power.
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“Washington’s goal is to make Venezuela once again a haven for private US capital. If the new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, refuses, then Trump has made it clear Venezuela will be kept as an economic basket-case, through continuing sanctions and a US naval blockade, until someone else can be installed who will do US bidding.
Venezuela’s crime – one for which it has been punished for decades – is trying to offer a different economic and social model to America’s rampant, planet-destroying, neoliberal capitalism.
The deepest fear of the West’s political and media class is that western publics, subjected to permanent austerity as billionaires grow ever richer off the back of ordinary people’s immiseration, may rise up if they see a different system that looks after its citizens rather than its wealth elite.
Venezuela, with its huge oil reserves, could be precisely such a model – had it not been long strangled by US-imposed sanctions.
A quarter of a century ago, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, launched a socialist-style “Bolivarian revolution” of popular democracy, economic independence, equitable distribution of revenues, and an end to political corruption. It reduced extreme poverty by more than 70 per cent, halved unemployment, duadrupled the number of people receiving a state pension and schooled the population to reach literacy rates of 100 per cent.
Venezuela became the most equal society in Latin America – one reason why millions still turn out to defend Maduro.
Chavez did so by taking the country’s natural resources – its oil and metal ores – out of the hands of a tiny domestic elite that had ruined the country by extracting the national wealth and mostly hoarding or investing it abroad, often in the US.
He nationalised major industries, from oil and steel to electricity. Those are the very industries that Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader feted by the West, wants returned to the parasitic families, like her own, that once ran them privately.
Seeing the way Venezuela has been treated for the past two decades or more should make it clear why European leaders – obedient at all costs to Washington and the corporate elites that rule the West – are so reluctant to even consider nationalising their own public industries, however popular such policies are with electorates.
Britain’s Keir Starmer, who only won the Labour leadership election by promising to nationalise major utilities, ditched his pledge the moment he was elected. None of the traditional main UK parties is offering to renationalise water, rail, energy and mail services, even though surveys regularly show at least three-quarters of the British public support such a move.
The fact is that a unipolar world leaves all of us prey to a rapacious, destructive, US corporate capitalism, which, bit by bit, is destroying our world. The issue isn’t whether Maduro was a good or bad leader of Venezuela – the matter the western establishment media wants us concentrating on. It is how do we put the US back in the box before it is too late for humanity.
This is one of my “Four observations on the US kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro”.
Read the rest here if interested: https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/four-observations-about-the-us-kidnapping
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