Venezuela on the edge of civil war

Venezuela has been caught up in violent rioting backed by the right-wing wealthy class, and they have been responsible for most of the murdered and wounded, which the corporate Fake News ignore..

VENEZUELA is a step closer to civil war after July 20th‘s “fake referendum” held by the government opposition. Corporate Fake News (i.e. mainstream corporate media) hailed the fake referendum as a vote of “no confidence” for President Nicolas Maduro.

The vote count of the fake referendum has not been released and likely never will be. Only the number of the turnout was reported as being over seven million, but who needs to count votes when the referendum was only a symbolic protest?

Symbolic or not, the US empire propaganda mill is already churning out that President Nicolas Maduro is no longer the legitimate president of Venezuela.

As in Syria, when the empire labels a president illegitimate, it uses it as a fig leaf for illegal aggression against a sovereign country.

The fake referendum now opens the door for more US meddling, both covert and overt.

The empire has had its foot firmly inside the door for 17 years. Reports going back to 2007 document hundreds of millions of dollars funded by the US State Department to instigate an insurgency in Venezuela.

A few hundred million dollars to overthrow President Nicolas Maduro is peanuts for the US, compared to the $5 billion that was “invested” in Ukraine’s colour revolution.

The US started gunning for Hugo Chavez and his Bolivarian Revolution from the moment that he was democratically elected in 1998, according to award winning journalist Eva Golinger (Mike Whitney interview, Counter Punch).

Chavez’s election and his Bolivarian Revolution challenged the ideology of neoliberalism pushed by the empire to exploit developing countries and their resources.

Zealots of neo-liberalism, led by the high priests of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, preach that privatization of state owned enterprises, devaluation of the currency, cutting social services for the poor, exploitation of natural resources by international corporations, consolidation of agricultural land into large private holdings, importing cheap subsidized US agriculture, forcing small farmers into city sweatshops, and opening markets to foreign imports will create economic prosperity. It does not. It is voodoo economics and the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund know it.

What neo-liberalism does is guarantee that international bankers will be repaid their crippling loans.

The Bolivarian Revolution rejected neo-liberalism and enacted a new socialist constitution in 1999, which led the way for President Hugo Chavez to nationalize Venezuela’s oil wealth, so its revenues could be used to provide essential services and anti-poverty programmes.

Chavez used Venezuela’s natural resources for Venezuelans, which is heresy to neo-liberals. Chavez’s charismatic personality, commitment to the poor and concern for social justice made him a hero loved by the people.

His legacy and “Chavismo” revolutionary socialism lives on.

Chavismo that denies international corporations profits are fighting words to the US empire.

In 2002 President George W. Bush was caught red handed as the instigator of a plot that kidnapped Chavez and tried to overthrow him in a coup d’etat.

The coup failed because the people turned out in the streets demanding Chavez’s return and reinstatement.

Bush was left with egg on his face, the blood of dozens murdered in the coup attempt and a smoking gun in his hand (The Guardian).

In 2009 there was initially hope that the newly elected President Barack Obama might change the empire’s aggressive foreign policy to one of accommodation.

But while presidents come and go, the US foreign policy objectives do not change.

Obama turned out to be a willing neocon and neo-liberal, and he went along with the deep state of the military-industrial complex, Wall Street bankers, big oil, big pharma, mainstream corporate media, oligarchs, spy agencies, political hacks, bureaucrats, and the 1 percent that really run the empire.

In 2015 President Obama turned up the heat on Venezuela by imposing economic sanctions. To make the sanctions legal Obama had to declare that Venezuela is a national security threat to the US.