New Column: The REAL Reason Trump's At War With Venezuela

It's not what you think

Article and voice over by Lee Camp.

When you read a New York Times article, for the first several paragraphs you generally find yourself pondering if it was Bring Your Child To Work Day and said child somehow got loose in the NYT offices and managed to publish a column while on the lam. This feeling is thanks to the odd combination of ignorance and naïveté that drips off the average NYT page. Sometimes you think it could be masterful manipulation but usually you find yourself back at glazy-eyed ignorance.

In today’s article about Trump’s psy-op against Venezuela, David E. Sanger tries his best to figure out why Trump (or the National Security State as a whole) is doing what he’s doing. It’s kinda cute to watch the hamsters run around the wheels in Sanger’s brain. (They’re clearly sickly and overweight, not having easy access to Ozempic.)

Sanger begins,

“The president confirmed a New York Times scoop, published a few hours earlier… that he had secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action inside the country, part of a U.S. campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the authoritarian leader who clings to power there.”

I’m going to (mostly) ignore the propaganda within this sentence of pretending Maduro “clings to power” when he in fact receives far more votes than the man the US once declared president of Venezuela (Juan Guaidó), who had received a grand total of zero votes. …Let me check—Yep, still has received zero votes. Plus Venezuelan elections are far more legitimate than US elections which are mostly performed on black-box, deeply secretive voting machines that are as accountable as a back-alley blackjack dealer with one eye and six fingers on his right hand. But sure, let’s pretend “Maduro clings to power.”

Sanger then tries his damnedest (the reader can feel his synapses almost smoking from exhaustion) to figure out why Trump wants to coup (destroy) the country of Venezuela.

“Stopping the flow of cocaine?”

He rejects this idea because he rightly observes VZ is not where almost any US drugs come from and Trump doesn’t actually care about drugs anyway.

Sanger next asks,

“Reviving democracy?”

Maybe, he concludes. But usually when the US has tried to rebuild democracy in other countries, it has been a big error, he says. …Honestly it is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen for an adult man writing for the “paper of note” to still believe the US has ever given a tip of a turd about democracy, both at home and abroad. You kinda picture him typing this article while holding a teddy bear and sucking his thumb, don’t you?

He then points out that our own intelligence agencies say — No, Maduro is not sending evil men to sabotage the US. So WHAT could be the real reason for Trump’s budding war against Venezuela??

Throughout this article, Sanger (of course) cannot figure out (or reveal) the true reasons Trump (and every US president since George W. Bush) has gone after VZ harder than almost any other country in Latin America.

Here’s the real reason.

The petrodollar system. Without (at minimum) economic war on Venezuela, the US dollar would collapse. Venezuela has more oil than any country on earth. But it’s not simply that the US wants that oil. If that were the case, they would make a deal with Maduro, which he offered if the US would end the belligerence. In order for the US to print endless money (for things like our trillion-dollar-a-year death machine), the US dollar needs to remain the global reserve currency. And for that to happen, it needs the petrodollar to remain strong. And for that to happen, fossil fuels around the world must continue to be bought and sold in US dollars. If VZ were to be allowed the full output of its massive oil reserves, much (if not all) would be sold in other currencies. This would greatly harm the petrodollar. It would also make Venezuela, a socialist country, one of the richest and most powerful countries on earth.

Both of those things are horrifying to the ruling sociopaths of the US empire.

Anybody with half a brain can figure this out with a little bit of reading. The writers at the NY Times do not have half a brain… but it’s possible it’s their toddlers writing these articles. In which case, I’ll decrease my criticism by half.