Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani
24-08 32nd Street
Suite 1002A
Astoria, NY 11102
Dear Mayor-elect Mamdani,
It should not
come as a surprise to alert citizens that your decisive victory in the
Mayoral race has prompted your opponents – the privileged super-rich and
their indentured servants in City Hall – to label you as an
“extremist,” “radical,” or, in Trump’s view, a “communist.” How
ludicrous! Your affordability agenda is hardly immoderate. Many
Democratic politicians have taken these positions over time.
Free
bus fares exist in some municipalities in the U.S., including Kansas
City, Missouri, Tucson, Arizona, and Alexandria, Virginia. Proposing
half a dozen city-run grocery stores in New York City’s “food deserts”
(meaning a geographic area with limited access to affordable, healthy
food options) is hardly radical. You could even have them structure
these stores as consumer cooperatives (owned by consumers). Food co-ops
have existed in numerous communities in the U.S. for years. Your rent
stabilization proposal is not uncommon – many large cities have rent
controls to protect powerless tenants from avaricious landlords,
especially from today’s very large corporate landlords with their
fine-print contract peonage. Also, there are cities in the U.S. offering
partially publicly subsidized child care. New Mexico just launched a
statewide universal child?care program.
The social democratic
countries in Europe and other countries, including Canada, have long had
much broader social safety nets that go far beyond what you have
proposed.
What the oligarchy and large corporations really do not
like about you is that you are projecting a consistent and wide-ranging
voice for the people, the workers, the poor, and the powerless in the
corridors of political power of City Hall. They have had long-game
statism, or a corporate state, at the local, state, and federal levels,
with little opposition by the two-party duopoly.
Regarding your
self-description as a democratic socialist, that doesn’t pass the laugh
test. You are not arguing for nationalization of banks and insurance
companies, utilities, not even, to our knowledge have you called for a
“public bank,” which has existed so effectively in North Dakota (now a
Republican stronghold) founded in 1919.
You call for increasing
taxes on the undertaxed super wealthy and large corporations. So do over
80% of the American people. Pretty normal.
Indeed, President Donald Trump has become a corporate socialist par excellence. As The New York Times reported
on November 25, 2025, (“$10 Billion and Counting: Trump Administration
Snaps Up Stakes in Private Firms”) the Trump administration has de facto
partly nationalized an array of private companies for ulterior
political motives under the contrived banner of national security. The
companies include Intel, U.S. Steel, Westinghouse, MP Materials, Vulcan
Elements, and MP Materials. This invites bribery by other means, i.e., a
Trump donation in exchange for an administration sweetheart investment.
The fabled Central Intelligence Agency now features a venture capital
firm, In-Q-Tel, ostensibly to fund commercial technologies to fortify
the U.S. intelligence community and the Department of Defense. But under
Trump, partisan political motives likely will inform the CIA’s
investment portfolio.
As for taking a stand on pending legislation ending the unconscionable daily
electronic rebate of tens of millions of dollars in stock transaction
taxes (a progressive tiny sales tax of one tenth of one percent on stock
sales), you have been AWOL despite urgings by your numerous colleagues
in the state legislature to sign on to a bill that would end the rebate
and specifically allocate the many billions of dollars annually to mass
transit, education, health care and environmental protection.
So far, your silence has put you to the RIGHT of former Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG. During his presidential run in 2020, he said:
“Harness
the power of the financial system to address America’s most pressing
challenges. Introduce a tax of 0.1% on all financial transactions to
raise revenue needed to address wealth inequality, and support other
measures – such as speed limits on trading – to curb predatory behavior
and reduce the risk of destabilizing “flash crashes.”
At the beginning of the year, Norway looked set to elect the most
right-wing government in its history. The right-populist Progress Party
was surging in the polls while the centre-left government was in
disarray, with the Centre Party withdrawing from the Labour-led
coalition after a row over further integration into European energy
markets. Yet in the parliamentary elections of 8 September, the
incumbent Labour Party staged a recovery – clinging onto power with a
slightly increased vote share of 28 per cent. Jonas Gahr Støre now leads
a second government, this time principally supported by the Red Party,
Socialist Left and Greens, which won a combined 16 per cent, rather than
its erstwhile coalition partner, which collapsed to 6 per cent. On the
right, power shifted to the more radical Progress Party, led by Sylvi
Listhaug, nearly doubled its share to 24 per cent, overtaking Erna
Solberg’s Conservatives, which dropped to 15 per cent. According to its
own post-election evaluation, the Conservatives – who ruled from 2013 to
2021 – were punished in part for not having a sufficiently distinct
platform to the Progress Party, with whom they faced the widely
unpopular prospect of governing in coalition.
Both Labour and Conservatives ran on the same set of issues: welfare,
the cost of living, national security. In the televised debates, the
urban-rural divide was high on the agenda – a perennial subject in a
country with the lowest population density in mainland Europe. The
Conservatives campaigned for increased privatisation of healthcare to
cut waiting lists, and tax cuts, even for the rich; Labour’s headline
pledges were a hospital waiting list cap, cutting the cost of nursery
fees and a fixed-price electricity scheme. On national security,
meanwhile, the parties were united in preaching loyalty to NATO,
full-throated support for Ukraine and a large-scale increase in military
spending. Indeed, Labour – whose finance minister is former NATO chief
Jens Stoltenberg – has made NATO membership a red line for any coalition
with the left parties, and Støre’s government last year pledged to
double the defence budget, touting the proposal as a ‘historic boost’.
Militarism was the ‘cause above all causes’ in the election according to Aftenposten,
Norway’s paper of record. Bordering Russia in the Arctic, the spectre
of the Cold War looms large in a country that once refused permanent
foreign bases or the stationing of nuclear weapons on its soil to avoid
antagonising the USSR. Tensions with Russia rose after a significant
increase in American troops from 2018 and bomber planes were stationed
in 2021. Norway is now set to be a maritime stronghold for NATO in the
strategically vital gap between Greenland, Iceland and the UK, as well
as the broader North, Norwegian and Barents Sea area.
US President Donald Trump (left) and Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro IMAGE/Al Jazeera
Perpetually at war
Every time the US empire, or “the imperialists of the planet,” as Nicaragua’s co-President Rosario Murillo put it, is on a war-mission to spread “democracy” or to fight “communism” or “terrorism” or “Islamic terrorism” or “narcoterrorism” or whatever label it decides to put on its enemy, the question raised by many critics is:
when will the US learn a lesson that wars are not achieving anything but are instead harmful to the US itself?
The critics may be right but the problem is that the US leaders don’t want to learn any lesson.
Why?
Because none of the wars have been detrimental to their person or their well-being because almost all wars are fought hundreds or thousands of miles away on “enemy” land. There have been a few incidents where the US has been counter-attacked as the burning of White House and other buildings by the British troops in 1814, the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Taliban attack on World Trade Centers in 2001.
Just comparatively, minor incidents.
Imagine if the US was attacked the way Vietnam, Guatemala, Haiti, Chile, Afghanistan, Philippines, Cuba, Cambodia, Iraq, and so many other countries have been attacked by the US. The US leaders thinking on starting wars would have been completely different, But that is not the case, and so the constant wars by the US, continue.
Of course, US suffers financial losses in these wars, and also incurs some loss of lives. The financial losses are covered through borrowing which its leaders don’t worry about because they’ll be gone after 4-8 years. (The total US debt January 8, 2026 stands at 38.6 trillion dollars, highly doubtful will ever be paid.) US didn’t care about loss of life of its soldiers either until, the Vietnam War, where 58,220 US citizens lost their lives. Over three million Vietnamese were killed. The US government kept lying:
Anti-war protests and media coverage in second half of 1960s and first half of 1970s of planes arriving in US carrying coffins of US soldiers forced the ruling elite to take care of the problem, by asking TV channels not to show the coffins.
Today, advanced warring technology has solved the high casualty problem, thus allowing the war-show to continue uninterrupted and filling the coffers of the death merchants.
Empire’s Juggernaut <1> out of control
On January 3, 2026, US forces bombed Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, and kidnapped President Nicolas Maduro and wife Cilia Flores. An absolutely criminal and illegitimate act. (Several articles on Maduro’s abduction here.)
Anita Naidu reminds us not to forget the white supremacy involved in these warring acts:
Here, white supremacy is the global system that ranks nations, people and sovereignties according to proximity to Western power and allocates legitimacy accordingly.
In 2002, Maduro’s predecessor President Hugo Chavez was kidnapped by the US government of George W. Bush who supported right-wing elites in Venezuela. It was a short-lived 47-hour coup because Chavez supporters and his military succeeded in crushing the coup d’etat.
“Years ago, someone told me: ‘They’re going to end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker – you personally – you, Chávez. Not just that the government supports it, or permits it – no, no, no. They’re going to try to apply the Noriega [2] formula to you.’ They’re looking for a way to associate Chávez directly with drug trafficking. And then, anything goes against a ‘drug trafficker president’, right?”
Trump has also threatened Columbia, Cuba, Greenland, Iran, and Mexico with establishing its dominance over them.
“Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document.”
Trump’s predecessors who came to the Americas in what is now the US did the same thing with the Native Americans — ordered them to sign papers and hand over the territory or get killed so they would get the territory, anyway.
On January 5, 2026, White House advisor Stephen Miller clearly laid out Trump & CO’s philosophy on how they would rule Latin America:
“The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We’re a superpower and under President Trump we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower. It is absurd that we would allow a nation in our backyard [the Latin America] to become the supplier of resources to our adversaries [China and others] but not to us.”
In 1993, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeline Albright yelled at Colin Powell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:
“What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
The US did go to war against Yugoslavia in 1999 when Albright was Secretary of State. That war came to be known as “Madeleine’s War” and “Albright at War.”
In an interview to the New York Times on January 8, 2026, Trump answered a question on whether there were any restrains on his “global powers”:
“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”
About morality and mind: Trump suffers from WMD — not weapons of mass destruction but Whopping Morality Deficiency. Trump’s mind is constantly thinking how to increase his, family’s, and cronies’ wealth through stealing or forcefully acquiring goods, services, and resources of other countries. He wants to exert his power over the entire globe and acts like previous US leaders, as the Global Emperor. Only such a leader could dismiss “international law” so casually, and could let Israel ignore UN resolutions regarding genocide of Palestinians.
Not looking to hurt people? Really? The cities in US are experiencing ICE atrocities. People getting killed, deported, or sent to El Salvador’s notorious prison.
Nigeria was bombed on false pretext. US attacks on Venezuelan boats as a prelude to force Maduro to go into exile, killed 123 people. During Maduro’s abduction 80 people were killed. One could go on but suffice to say that Trump’s actions are tremendously hurting and uprooting lives every second.
Historically, US leaders have ignored international laws when it has suited them. As did German Chancellor Adolf Hitler on September 1, 1939, when he attacked Poland. Hitler’s justification:
“The Polish state has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and appealed to arms… In order to put an end to this lunacy I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on… Destroying Poland is our priority… The winner is never asked if what he said was the truth or a lie. As far as starting and fighting a war is concerned, there is no law – victory is the decisive factor. Be brutal and be without mercy.”
In above words, one can easily identify similar excuses given by US presidents for their deadly illegal wars.
When will China wake up?
With full financial and military support, US let Israel commit genocide in Palestinian territory of Gaza ignoring United Nations Resolutions, the World Court, and hundreds of protests by millions of people world wide. China remained quiet, except for polite diplomatic condemnation and call for ceasefire.
Israel bombed Iran several times killing many people, including several scientists. Later Israel joined the US in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities. but China reacted mildly.
The US kidnapped Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. Ditto.
The question is when will China wake up and realize that every US military action, is making it bold and enhancing its power. And, every Chinese inaction is making it weaker. If the Trump juggernaut keeps on like this, who knows where it will end.
As one of the most economically and technologically powerful country, people around the globe expect China to form some kind of security coalition with countries threatened by the US. One wonders will China only wake up when the US shows up at Taiwan’s doorstep.
Trump’s thundering doesn’t raise as much fear, world wide, as Xi Jinping’s silence does.
Will the US empire’s juggernaut stop?
It depends on our Dear Leader’s mood. If he restricts himself to the Western Hemisphere, that is North and South Americas, without any challenge from Russia or China, Trump could maintain the US hegemony for a long time till guerilla movements with some leader like Che Guevara or Fidel Castro seriously challenge it. But if Trump overstretches himself like Adolf Hitler did, by attacking the Soviet Union, than the end may not be very pleasing. And there are strong chances that Trump will cross the red line due to his arrogance and over confidence.
What then will happen to our Dear Leader? Well, Elon Musk, his buddy, will fly him to Mars before people chase after him.
Is peace possible?
Global peace is somewhat possible if a Warsaw Pact kind of alliance is formed that could deter US and NATO from roguish overt and covert wars. Post 1991, after dismantling of USSR and Warsaw Pact, NATO not only stayed intact but increased membership, including some Warsaw Pact countries and former Soviet Republics, and now reaches almost the border of Russia. (See the maps here.) In 1991, US became the only superpower, because the other superpower, Soviet Union, was dismantled. With more than 750 bases encircling the world in 81 countries, including the Middle East, US doesn’t have to go to war all the time; it just threatens small countries and gets what it wants.
Notes:
<1> English word Juggernaut (meaning: overwhelming or unstoppable force) comes from the name of a Hindu Lord of the Universe Jagannath. (One of Indian Prime Minister Modi’s BJP party members got carried away declaring: Lord Jagannath is a devotee of Modi!)
<2> In 1989, US government of George H. W. Bush Sr. invaded Panama and captured it’s leader Manual Noriega on drug charges. The actual reason was his refusal to support US war against the small Central American country of Nicaragua. Noriega had been involved in drug business for a very long time but was on good terms with the US, so was safe from them. In an Orwellian manner, the US news media, almost always supports the US government lies.
B. R. Gowani an be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com
Artist Misha Japanwala preserves what we are told to be ashamed of
IMAGES STAFF
She calls her work a love letter to Karachi and the people who have given her the courage to be as shameless as she can be.
Pakistani artist and designer Misha Japanwala described herself not as a sculptor, but as a documentor — creating an archive of both life and loss — in a recent interview with CBS News.
“My practice is documenting people and their bodies,” she said, as she walked CBS News’ Elaine Quijano through her exhibited works at the Hannah Traore Gallery in New York City.
Born and raised in Karachi, Japanwala made it to the Forbes
30 Under 30 Asia list in 2021. Her signature breastplates and
human-form sculptures draw from Pakistan’s social issues, serving as
social commentary as much as they reflect her own evolving aesthetic.
Her moulds have been worn by a number of artists, including Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o, and rapper Cardi B, both in her music video for ‘Rumours’ and photographs that announced her pregnancy in June. She was also featured in a special issue of V Magazine guest-edited by model Gigi Hadid.
She moved to the United States to pursue fashion, but found herself
captivated “not with clothes, but the bodies that wear them”. Today, she
works from her home studio in New Jersey, inviting subjects to have
their bodies moulded.
Reflecting on her journey, she told the channel with a sparkle in her
eyes, “Instead of feeling like I had to conform my body to fit a
certain garment, I was creating a garment out of my body itself.”
In early 2025, Taylor Swift released The Life of a Showgirl,
a glittering chronicle of fame and reclamation. But just months before
that, another headline clung stubbornly to her name: her private jet had
emitted over 8,000 tons of CO? in a single year
– more than a thousand times the average person’s footprint. When
called out, her team replied that she “purchases carbon offsets,”
effectively buying permission to pollute.
The irony was almost cinematic. A woman who had become the world’s most celebrated feminist icon was now the poster child for luxury’s ecological excess. It captured our cultural moment perfectly, resistance that sparkles, guilt that is offset, and feminism that is beautiful but bloodless. Swift performs empowerment that feels lyrical but rarely radical. Her carbon trail, much like her feminism, remains insulated by devotion and devoid of consequence.
Her storytelling has always revolved
around heartbreak and girlhood nostalgia, a loop of emotional survival
that feels empowering but ultimately keeps her politics sentimental, not
structural. Her insistence on eternal adolescence makes her feminism
comforting rather than challenging. Power, here, is a feeling and not a
demand.
The Eras Tour
took this logic global. Resilience became spectacle, and fandom became
moral validation. Any critique of her wealth or silence on politics was
reframed as misogyny, sanctifying her brand as untouchable. Swift has
turned feminism into a luxury good, that’s comforting, and perfectly
owned.
India’s own ‘branded rebellion’
India mirrors this pattern with remarkable precision. Influencers like Apoorva Mukhija, alias Rebel Kid, and self-help icons like Wizard Liz
preach confidence, self-love and detachment from the male gaze, all in
neatly packaged reels. Their rebellion is algorithm-approved: it
unsettles no one and sells effortlessly, and also ends where corporate
sponsorship begins.
Two decades before US forces kidnapped Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro this weekend, Hugo Chávez had already predicted the approach:
Years ago, someone told me: ‘They’re
going to end up accusing you of being a drug trafficker – you personally
– you, Chávez. Not just that the government supports it, or permits it –
no, no, no. They’re going to try to apply the Noriega formula to you.’
They’re looking for a way to associate Chávez directly with drug
trafficking. And then, anything goes against a ‘drug trafficker
president’, right?
On the morning of 3 January, Trump tweeted
a Happy New Year message. The US had carried out ‘a large scale strike
on Venezuela and its leader’. President Maduro and his wife Cilia had
been ‘captured and flown out of the Country’. Trump said more details
would follow in a few hours’ time. The details, however, were confused.
Later that day, an old friend from Caracas rang to say that secret
negotiations had been taking place for some time between the regime and
the Americans. The Americans wanted Maduro’s head, which he refused to
supply – according to the New York Times, he was offered
transport to a well-cushioned retirement in Turkey, which he scorned,
to his great credit. And though repeatedly offering to negotiate with
Washington on questions of oil and US drug imports, he was also rallying Venezuelans against Trump’s military build-up in the Caribbean.
The Trump administration evidently preferred negotiating with Delcy
Rodríguez, the vice-president, and others in Venezuela, where the two
key ministers are Diosdado Cabello at the Interior Ministry and Vladimir
Padrino at Defence. Both have support in the Army, some 100,000 strong,
and Cabello also commands the popular militia forces, which are said to
be larger still. As Trump reinforced his threatening armada over the
past few months, the Maduro government responded by arming sections of
the population.
The question of who now governs Venezuela has therefore become
crucial. The first answer came from Trump: ‘We are going to run the
country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious
transition.’ But the Trump Administration is caught in a cleft stick.
Trump’s MAGA base is not in favour of sending American troops to be
killed in foreign countries – this was a central part of the campaign
they waged against the Democrats and the old GOP establishment over
Afghanistan and Iraq. They do not want US troops on the ground in
Venezuela. At the same time, the hard-right Latino émigré ultras represented by Rubio are unhappy that Bolivarians are still in office in Caracas.
There was talk at one point that Marco Rubio might be appointed de
facto governor or consul, to give orders to the Venezuelan government.
Meanwhile, messages from Caracas have been mixed. The day after the
capture of Maduro, Cabello declared:
This is an attack against Venezuela. We are in position. We call on
our people to remain calm and to trust the leadership. Do not allow
anyone to become discouraged or make the situation easier for the
aggressive enemy.
US Starts 2026 by Bombing Venezuela and Kidnapping Its President
With its violent military intervention into Venezuela—a country I
used to live in—the US has begun this year with entitled and undisguised
imperialism. The unapologetic kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro and of Celia
Flores (not just a wife as the media refers to her, but also former
head of the National Assembly) and killing of at least 40 Venezuelans
aims to cement and normalize the US’s standard operating procedure for
international relations as violence and control. It will take
Venezuela’s oil and the DRC’s tech minerals, and to hell with Global
South self-determination, agency, and ownership.
I remember when I
lived in Venezuela and we talked about what we would do if the US
attacked. We were already facing other kinds of attacks, including basic
food shortages orchestrated by private companies, destabilization
attempts, right-wing violence, and English-language mainstream media
lies. The conversation particularly came up around elections, when the
shortages and destabilization typically increased, and US attacks felt
less hypothetical.
Even then, though, we would balance the very
real and long history of violent US interventions in Latin America with
skepticism. How could they kill innocent people and bomb what felt like
to me the closest thing to paradise? Venezuela was never a utopia—there
were mistakes and much work to do, but the Andean mountains were
intensely green, the coastal waters a peaceful turquoise, the nights
full of fairy fog that you could see drifting down the streets. The days
were full of the laughter of the tiny children I taught as part of our
participatory education project. We solved our own local problems as an
organized community, turned empty lots into community gardens, and there
was always, always, political debate and high political literacy.
People knew their constitution, often by heart, knew the laws, and the
news. Venezuelans had and have this infinite urge to dance, even on
moving buses or after two-day long meetings. How could anyone consider
destroying that world? It felt inconceivable. It didn’t make sense, and
it still doesn’t.
Yet we all know that beautiful Gaza, with
its beaches, shops, delicious zaatar bread, hospitals, books, and
resilient people, has been turned into rubble and whole families wiped
out. The US-led destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq ruined people,
communities and saw key cultural and archaeological sites irreparably
damaged, and artifacts looted. I live in Mexico now, and here alone, the
US has used NAFTA and the so-called “War on Drugs” to militarize this
beautiful country and systematically turn it into a vast grave (with 131,000
forced disappearances) and into an obedient neoliberal production line
for nearshoring US companies. So, in Venezuela, I guess we should have
been less skeptical. Friends there messaged me on Saturday in shock,
their ears ringing from the sounds of bombs. New year weekend wasn’t
meant to be this.
However, throughout 2025, the US
had asserted itself more openly as global police chief at the service of
big business. It “negotiated” (pressured) a “ceasefire”
in the DRC which would give it access to the country’s highly
sought-after tech minerals and metals and to security control, and it
has supported Israel, bombed Nigeria, and killed Venezuelans with
complete impunity. It closed its borders to refugees in violation of
international law, and breached migrant and human rights within its own
borders. It also bombed
Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and Somalia. It carried out or was partner to
622 overseas bombings in total, and also intervened in manipulative
ways, such as Trump’s comments days before the Honduran election in
November that led to the victory of the right-wing candidate he backed,
or the US’s role in the international “Gang Suppression Force” in Haiti.
While
global institutions like the International Criminal Court and the UN
have demonstrated their ineffectiveness at doing anything at all about
the US’s illegal sanctions against Cuba, the genocide in Gaza, or
climate destruction, Trump has been able to fortify the US as a force
that actually decides international affairs.
In his press
conference Saturday, Trump said the US would be selling Venezuelan oil.
Though he laid the groundwork for the military intervention into
Venezuela with evidence-free talk of drug cartels, bombing what were
likely fishing boats in the second half of 2025, most people knew this
was always about regaining control over the country with the largest
known oil reserves. However, Venezuela also represents defiance. The US
has sanctioned the country for such behavior for over a decade, killing
or contributing to the deaths of over 40,000 people in 2017–18 alone.
The US doesn’t just treat the Global South as a resource buffet. In order to secure its access to the goods, it wants the countries’ governments at its beck and call. Venezuela, especially during the 2010s and through initiatives like CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States), was playing a role of uniting Latin America against such dominance and towards independence and social and economic alternatives.
‘We did this incredible thing’: Trump’s capture of Maduro and the ‘complexities’ of international law
by AYESHA MALIK
America’s actions are a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter and a clear act of aggression.
It shouldn’t be shocking and yet it still is. Images of the leader of
a sovereign, oil-rich nation humiliated and handcuffed by the world’s
superpower using tactics as crude as the resource it seeks to control.
We have seen this before, after all.
Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Congo’s Patrick
Lumumba, Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh, Chile’s Salvador Allende and
Panama’s Manuel Noriega all met the same fate (a full list would take up
the entire article). Regime change, rinse, repeat.
‘He effed around and he found out’
By most accounts, Maduro seems to have gotten off lightly. In 2019, US Senator Marco Rubio threatened that the Venezuelan leader would meet the same fate as Qaddafi, tweeting a photo of the bloodied Libyan general before he was reportedly sodomised and killed by US supported rebels. The CIA has long preferred assassination as the policy option
for stubborn leaders using underhanded tactics like poisoned cigars,
turning lovers into honeypots, planting a Brutus within a Caesar’s inner
circle. That is until Trump decided the US no longer needed to operate
from the shadows.
In 2017, Trump considered the assassination of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, reportedly saying
“let’s f***ing kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the f***ing lot of
them.” And it seems with Maduro, someone did try. A few months after
Rubio’s threat, there was an attack against Maduro’s life,
which was “the world’s first known attempt to kill a head of state with
a retail drone, purchased online and armed by hand with military grade
explosives”.
After spending many years trying to illegitimise the Venezuelan
leader in order to pave the way for the invasion, US Secretary of War
Pete Hegseth, who has the verbal range of a legacy-admitted frat bro at
an American university, said
that Maduro had his chance but had “effed around and he found out”. He
also said, in an effort to appease the Republican MAGA base, that this
regime change operation was “America First” and he was right in a way;
the biggest winners of the night were Texan oil barons.
What happened in the early hours of January 3 in Caracas left the world stunned. But the strongest reason for astonishment is the fact that the world was stunned. What happened had been widely predicted. Since when? The less informed would say since Donald Trump came to power. But it is mainly since the publication of the National Security Strategy in November 2025, which states that the US reserves the right to intervene in any country whenever its interests are at stake.
Let’s go back in history and analyze the three main components of
what happened: the surprise, the illegal capture of a political leader,
and the reasons given for the act.
As for the surprise and the reasons, we need only go back to
September 1939. In 1939, the world (the world that mattered then was
Europe and the US) was stunned by Hitler’s surprise attack on Poland.
The justification of the Nazi leader: “The Polish state has refused the
peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and appealed to arms…
In order to put an end to this lunacy I have no other choice than to
meet force with force from now on… Destroying Poland is our priority…
The winner is never asked if what he said was the truth or a lie. As far
as starting and fighting a war is concerned, there is no law – victory
is the decisive factor. Be brutal and be without mercy.”
Anyone who closely followed Hitler’s behavior could predict what was
going to happen. Hitler publicly invented Polish aggression while
secretly ordering surprise attacks, telling his generals to act
ruthlessly to achieve victory, illustrating the deceptive nature of the
invasion. Polish aggression was invented, the invention was turned into
reality through propaganda, and the invasion was invoked as an act of
self-defense. Germany’s security was at stake. It so happened that
European diplomats looked but did not see, listened but did not hear,
read but did not understand. Denial was a cover for the impotence and
poor political quality of the political leaders of the time.
As for the illegal capture of leaders, it is easy to recall the case
of Panamanian President Daniel Noriega on January 3, 1990. However, we
need to go back much further to see how a similar tactic was used in the
past during the period of historical colonialism. King Ngungunyane was
the king of the Gaza Empire between 1884 and 1895, a territory that
today corresponds largely to Mozambique. Because of his resistance to
Portuguese colonialism, he was known as the “Lion of Gaza.” He was
defeated by colonialist troops in 1895 in Chaimite. Not satisfied with
their victory and fearing that the king would continue to fuel
anti-colonial resistance, the colonialists captured him and brought him
to Portugal as a trophy of war. They paraded him along the main avenue
of Lisbon. He was then deported to one of the Azores Islands, where he
died in 1906.
In August 1897, French colonialists imposed colonial control over the
Menabé kingdom of the Sakalava people in western Madagascar, massacring
the local army. King Toera was killed and beheaded; his head was sent
to Paris, where it was placed in the archives of the Natural History
Museum. Almost 130 years later, pressure from the king’s descendants, as
well as from the government of the Indian Ocean nation, paved the way
for the return of the skull.
In other words, displaying symbols of resistance (sometimes the
leaders themselves, their skulls, or their art objects) as trophies in
the metropolis is a consistent practice of colonial rule. Whether the
“deposit” is on an island, in a museum, or in a center in New York is a
minor issue, a matter of convenience for the victor.
Has colonialism returned?
This is perhaps the most naive question that can be asked at this
point. It is based on the idea that colonialism is a thing of the past,
having ended with the independence of the European colonies. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Colonialism is the treatment of a
people or social group considered subhuman and, as such, unworthy of
being defended by international or national law, human rights, or
international treaties. The justification is perfectly rational: since
they are subhuman, it would be absurd to treat them as human. That would
jeopardize the defense of beings considered fully human. Colonialism is
racism, slavery, plundering of natural and human resources, occupation
by a foreign power, expulsion of peasants or indigenous peoples from
their ancestral territories to make way for “development projects,”
illegal deforestation, ethnic profiling, and racial discrimination.
Colonialism is a permanent and essential component of capitalism.
Writing in England and bearing in mind above all the English case, Karl
Marx was mistaken when he wrote that colonial violence was an initial
phase of capitalism (primitive or original accumulation) that would
later give way to the “monotony of economic relations based on the
exploitation of free wage labor.” Colonial violence is permanent, and
without it, capitalism would not exist. It is not present in the same
way everywhere in the world precisely because colonialism-capitalism is
an unequal and combined global project. From Rosa Luxemburg to Walter
Rodney and David Harvey, this fact is now almost universally accepted.
More recently, what was the creation of the State of Israel if not an act of colonial occupation, a loathsome way for Europeans to unload onto the Palestinian people the atonement for the heinous crimes that they, Europeans, had committed against the Jews? Is the transformation of Gaza into the Riviera of the eastern Mediterranean anything more than an act of recolonization?
Venezuela: American regime change with a Trumpian twist
by BELEN FERNANDEZ
A fire burns at Fuerte Tiuna, Venezuela’s largest military complex, after a series of explosions in Caracas on January 3, 2026 IMAGE/Luis Jaimes/AFP
Trump has added a particular layer of dementedness to the latest unprovoked US aggression.
United States President Donald Trump has kicked off the new year with a typically deranged bang by conducting
massive air strikes on Venezuela and reportedly capturing the country’s
president, Nicolas Maduro, who has apparently been spirited off to an
undisclosed location.
The attack does not come entirely as a surprise, given Trump’s track record of doing whatever the hell he wants with no regard for the law – or for his own promise to, you know, stop waging war abroad.
Indeed, Trump has been chattering for months about the possibility of
enhanced US military action against Venezuela, as the US has gone
about bombing boats willy-nilly off the country’s coast, supposedly in the name of combatting drug trafficking.
This has entailed numerous extrajudicial killings and rampant accusations
of war crimes. But, hey, it’s all in a day’s work for an administration
that couldn’t care less about legal justification for its behaviour,
much less human rights and other such silly concepts.
The US has also hijacked various oil tankers, with Trump unleashing blissfully ludicrous allegations that Venezuela is guilty of stealing US oil, land and assets.
This latest bout of US aggression comes on the heels of decades of US sanctions, which have crippled the Venezuelan economy and which have constituted a form of warfare unto themselves. As of 2020, former UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas calculated that 100,000 Venezuelans had already perished as a direct result of coercive economic measures.
The World Socialist Web Site, the Socialist Equality Party
in the US and the International Committee of the Fourth International
unequivocally denounce the invasion of Venezuela and the criminal
abduction of President Nicolás Maduro in the early hours of Saturday
morning. We demand the immediate release of Maduro and his wife, Cilia
Flores, and the full withdrawal of all US troops and military forces
from the region.
The invasion, which included the killing of at
least 40 people, is a total repudiation by the Trump regime of any
semblance of legality. It is an unprovoked war of aggression launched in
flagrant violation of international law and carried out to reimpose
colonial control over Venezuela and all of Latin America. This
imperialist assault must be opposed by the working class in the United
States and throughout the world.
Speaking at Saturday’s press
conference, Trump’s “Secretary of War,” Pete Hegseth, declared, “Welcome
to 2026.” Only three days into the New Year, the assault on Venezuela
is an unmistakable signal that the imperialist violence that marked
2025—in the Gaza genocide and the bombings of Lebanon, Syria and
Iran—will escalate in 2026.
There is no concrete wall between foreign and domestic policy. Imperialist gangsterism beyond the borders of the United States will be accompanied by the acceleration of the conspiracy to impose a fascistic presidential dictatorship within the United States.
Roaming Charges: Preliminary Notes on a Kidnapping
by JEFFREY ST CLAIR
The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The
Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will
all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue
to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield.
– Eduardo Galeano
+ You’ve come a long way, MAGA babies…
+ There’s no plausible interpretation of
the US Constitution or federal and international law that would
legitimize Trump’s lethal attacks on Venezuela and the kidnapping of its
president. Trump acted without a UN Resolution. He acted without
Congressional authorization. Venezuela didn’t pose a military threat to
the US or the US forces that had mobilized against Venezuela in the
Caribbean. An indictment in a US court is not a legal basis for a
military invasion. This was an unprovoked aggression that resulted in
civilian deaths. Multiple murders, in other words.
+ Trump on Venezuela: “We’re there now, but we’re going to stay until
such time as the pop — proper transition can take place. So we’re gonna
stay until such time as — we’re gonna run it essentially.” Apparently,
Marco Rubio will be the new Juan Guaidó of Venezuela, which must come as
a shock to Nobel Prize winner, María Corina Machado, who thought she
was in line to become the new Juan Gauidó of Venezuela. After all, she
gave her rather dubious Nobel Prize to Trump, only to have him say she
“didn’t have the respect” to govern. Ah, how sharper than a serpent’s
tooth it is to have a thankless despot…
+ Fox News: “What do you think is next for the Venezuelan people now that you have removed Maduro?”
Trump: “We can’t take a chance of letting someone
run it and just take over where he left off. So we’re making that
decision now. We’ll be involved in it very much.”
+ The cocksure boast that the US will “run” Venezuela appears to be
another Trumpian fantasy. It’s impossible to “run a country,” if you
don’t have control of it, which the US doesn’t by any measure. The
Maduro government remains in place and defiant, even with Maduro
renditioned to New York City. Indeed, the attack appears to have only
strengthened the resolve of the Venezuelan people, instead of inspiring
the chimerical uprising Rubio led Trump to expect, much as Rumsfeld and
Cheney deceived Bush into believing about Iraq.
+ Despite Trump’s claim that Delcy
Rodríguez was “cooperative,” Venezuela’s vice-president, who was sworn
in as the nation’s leader after Maduro was renditioned to the US,
vigorously denied that she planned to help the U.S. government run the
country. Instead, she asserted her own power as acting president and
defiantly demonstrated the continuity of the Bolivaran Revolutionary
government in the wake of the US attacks.
+ Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello: “Here, the unity of
the revolutionary force is more than guaranteed, and here there is only
one president, whose name is Nicolas Maduro Moros. Let no one fall for
the enemy’s provocations. We are outraged because in the end everything
was revealed — it was revealed that they only want our oil.”
+ Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López forcefully
rejected Trump and Rubio’s claim that Venezuela will be run by the US
and demanded the return of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
“Our sovereignty has been violated and breached. The [Venezuelan
military] will guarantee the governability of the country … [and will]
continue to employ all its available capabilities for military defense,
the maintenance of internal order, and the preservation of peace.”
+ Trump responded to Rodríguez’s defiant stance with his usual
boorish bombast when being confronted by a woman by threatening her with
a fate worse than Maduro’s: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she’s
going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
+ According to Semafor, plans for the secret U.S. raid to bomb Caracas and kidnap Maduro and his wife were leaked to the Washington Post and New York Times before it happened, but both papers decided not to publish to protect U.S. troops. Thus, in true Hegsethian style, the elite press knew about the operation before Congress was briefed.
Following his attack on Venezuela and the abduction
of Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump has escalated his threats
against Colombia and claimed without evidence that President Gustavo
Petro is involved in cocaine trafficking. Trump and others in his
administration have also threatened military action against Cuba,
Greenland, Iran and Mexico in recent days.
Manuel Rozental, a Colombian physician and activist with more than 40 years of involvement in grassroots political organizing, tells Democracy Now! that Trump’s attacks on Petro are lies. The former guerrilla “has seized more cocaine than any other government in the past,” says Rozental. “President Petro is not a drug trafficker. President Petro has been a victim of drug mafias and their allies.”
AMY GOODMAN:
We begin today’s show looking at the U.S. attack on Venezuela and the
abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. On
Tuesday, President Trump announced on Truth Social the interim leaders
of Venezuela had agreed to turn over between 30 and 50 million barrels
of oil to the United States. In his message, Trump wrote, quote, “This
Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled
by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is
used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” unquote.
This follows earlier remarks by Trump that he plans to, quote, “take
back” Venezuela’s oil.
In recent days, Trump has also threatened other Latin American nations, including Colombia, Mexico and Cuba. Speaking to reporters Sunday aboard Air Force One, Trump specifically targeted Colombian President Gustavo Petro and claimed, without evidence, that Petro is trafficking cocaine into the U.S.
Meet Paul Singer, the Billionaire Trump Megadonor Set to Make a Killing on Venezuela Oil
by STEPHEN PRAGER
Paul Singer, the founder of Elliott Management, is seen during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2013. IMAGE/Remy Steinegger/World Economic Forum via Wikimedia Commons
“Paul Singer’s shady purchase of Citgo has everything to do with this coup.”
One of President Donald Trump’s top billionaire donors, who has spent
the past several months backing a push for regime change in Venezuela, is about to cash in after the president’s kidnapping of the nation’s president, Nicolas Maduro, this weekend.
While he declined to tell members of Congress, Trump has said he tipped offoil executives before the illegal attack. At a press conference following the attack, he said the US would have “our very large United States oil companies” go into Venezuela, which he said the US will “run” indefinitely, and “start making money” for the United States.
As Judd Legum reported on Monday for Popular Information, among the biggest beneficiaries will be the billionaire investor Paul Singer:
In
2024, Singer, an 81-year-old with a net worth of $6.7 billion, donated
$5 million to Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s Super PAC. Singer donated tens of millions more in the 2024 cycle to support Trump’s allies, including $37 million to support the election of Republicans to Congress. He also donated an undisclosed amount to fund Trump’s second transition.
Singer is also a major pro-Israel donor, with his foundation having donated
more than $3.3 million to groups like the Birthright Israel Foundation,
the Israel America Academic Exchange, Boundless Israel, and others in
2021, according to tax filings.
In November 2025, less than two
months before Trump’s operation to take over Venezuela, Singer’s
investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, inked a highly
fortuitous deal.
It purchased Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of
Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, for $5.9 billion—a sale that was
forced by a Delaware court after Venezuela defaulted on its bond
payments.
The court-appointed special master who forced the sale, Robert Pincus, is a member of the board of directors for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Elliott Management hailed the court order requiring the sale in a press release, saying it was “backed by a group of strategic US energy investors.”
Singer
acquired the Citgo’s three massive coastal refineries, 43 oil
terminals, and more than 4,000 gas stations at a “major discount”
because of its distressed status. Advisers to the court overseeing the
sale estimated its value at $11-13 billion, while the Venezuelan
government estimated it at $18 billion.
As Legum explained, the
Trump administration’s embargo on Venezuelan oil imports to the United
States bore the primary responsibility for the company’s plummeting
value:
Citgo’s refiners are purpose-built to process heavy-grade Venezuelan “sour” crude.
As a result, Citgo was forced to source oil from more expensive sources
in Canada and Colombia. (Oil produced in the United States is generally
light-grade.) This made Citgo’s operations far less profitable.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro; US President Donald Trump IMAGE/Shutterstock
The U.S. attack in Nigeria did indeed point to the operation to kidnap Venezuela’s head of state.
Trump’s kidnapping of Maduro has taught me a lesson: that if you
think you have a scoop, you file it immediately, not only to get the
story out first but to warn the world if it’s about something bad that
might be coming.
Shortly after Trump bombed Nigeria on Christmas day, I wrote a
piece that said his real aim was to send a message to Maduro and that
among the options he was entertaining was a SEAL-type operation to
capture or kill Maduro. How did I come to this conclusion? I have no
assets in the U.S. intelligence community. I was completely running on
instinct, and my instincts told me that the egomaniac Trump wanted to
eclipse Obama’s feat in sending in the SEALS to kill Osama bin Laden in
Abbotabad, just as he wanted badly to get the Nobel Peace Prize that
Obama got.
But it was the holidays and, out of consideration for the folks
that run my stories, who deserved a New Year’s break to be with their
families, I sat on it after I finished it on December 27 and only sent
it to Foreign Policy in Focus on January 2, eight hours before the
Caracas operation that kidnapped Maduro, in violation of all the norms
of civilized conduct among states.
But though out-scooped by Trump, I still think that there are
elements in the unfiled article that could be useful in helping us
anticipate what could unfold in the days and weeks ahead. So here’s the
scoop that wasn’t.
Trump Strikes Nigeria But Real Target Is Venezuela
The Trump regime’s air strikes on Islamic State targets in Nigeria on
Christmas Day may have had symbolic significance but no strategic
value. There will likely be no impact on the efforts of the militant
group called Lakurawa, allied to ISIS, to establish a base in Sokoto
state.
Many have been puzzled by the attacks that involved the use of
Tomahawk missiles, especially given the relatively minuscule space given
to Africa in the recently released National Security Strategy (NSS)
2025. That brief section focuses on transforming the U.S. relationship
with Africa from one based on aid to trade, though it does say, “we must
remain wary of resurgent Islamist terrorist activity in parts of Africa
while avoiding any long-term American presence or commitments.”
It is likely that the attacks were carried out for reasons unrelated
to Africa. One is to appease Trump’s Christian evangelical base. As
Joshua Keating, an expert in crisis areas, has noted,
“Trump’s sudden interest in Africa’s most populous country was likely
motivated less by any particular event there — these are all
longstanding issues — than by developments in Washington. Though it
doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media attention, the plight of
Christians in Nigeria has been a galvanizing issue for evangelical
Christians in the US in recent years.” On his internet platform Truth
Social, Trump has cited figures from the international Christian rights
NGO Open Doors, claiming that of the 4,476 Christians killed for their
faith globally in 2024, 3,100 were in Nigeria.
In her recent book on the key groups that make up the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Furious Minds,
Laura Field says that non-establishment Christian groups have an
outsized influence in the Trump administration. With the Republicans
struggling in the lead-up to the mid-term elections in 2026, these
groups’ muscle on the ground can determine whether the Republicans will
continue to control the House of Representatives.
Black
Agenda Report contributors have focused analysis, reporting and
interviews on Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution for many years. We hope
that this list, which is not exhaustive of BAR’s coverage, will assist
our readers in understanding why Venezuela was and is seen as a threat
to the U.S. state and why independent anti-imperialist journalism is so
important.
I have met Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez too. And before them Chavez. I
have walked around the streets of Caracas. Through other locales in
Venezuela as well. And some Communes too. All that was some time back.
It is all totally irrelevant. What matters, then? That I am a citizen of
the United States. And so I should work to stop my country’s latest
infamy. And about the only means I have available is to write.
U.S. malevolence is now directed at Venezuela. On the one hand, we
steadily escalated violence in surrounding waters with extra judicial
murders. It didn’t work. Then we imposed economic war in the form of a
full blockade. Doing so targeted the population. It said to Venezuelans,
overthrow your government to stop the punishment we impose. It didn’t
work. So now we bombed Caracas and some other “targets.” Trump says, we
will run the country. We will get back the oil under their ground that
they stole. Our imperial violence will win. So why war? Why now? Put
differently, war, what is it good for? Who is it good for?
These assaults have nothing to do with drugs. Trump doesn’t kidnap
real drug runners. He pardons them. But if it’s not drugs, what is the
motivation?
To try to explain Trump’s behavior is fraught with difficulty even
after the fact. Kurt Vonnegut might have said it is like trying to tell
time using a cuckoo clock from hell. Nonetheless, I think the three best
candidate explanations are grabbing oil power and wealth, exacting
vengeance writ large, and perpetual distraction.
Oil, because Trump doesn’t care a whit about the planet and its
inhabitants. Instead, like others before him, he likes the idea of
controlling as much of that productive but supremely deadly substance as
possible. It is because oil conveys power. Because oil impacts prices.
Because oil can enrich those who hold it. Trump doesn’t hide this
motive. He flaunts it. And Venezuela has by far the largest oil reserves
in the world. What a prize. Trump’s true base, his billionaire base,
will benefit big from taking over Venezuela’s oil while they still can,
before Trump is defanged and removed.
Vengeance, because Trump thinks, like most American President’s have thought, that the U.S. owns the world. We don’t invade anywhere because everywhere is ours. We can’t invade what we own. We don’t attack anyone because anything we do is by definition defense. More, when Venezuela nationalized its oil industry (in 1976 and later intensified under Chavez), Trump believes it stole our oil. After all, we own the world. Everything is ours and everything includes oil sitting under Venezuela. So sure, let’s punish the Venezuelan thieves. Let’s grab back what’s ours. Vengeance is obviously warranted. More, when Cubans overthrew Batista, Castro stole the country he resided in. Fancy that. It’s just imperial calculus. Controlling Venezuela will hurt Cuba.
Behind the DOJ’s politicized indictment of Maduro: a CIA-created ‘network’ and coerced star witness
by MAX BLUMENTHAL
The US Department of Justice indictment of Venezuela’s kidnapped leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a political rant that relies heavily on coerced testimony from an unreliable witness. Despite DOJ edits, it could expose more Americans to the CIA’s own history of drug trafficking.
The January 3 US military raid on Venezuela to kidnap President
Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores was followed by the
Department of Justice’s release of its superseding indictment
of the two abductees as well as their son, Nicolasito Maduro, and two
close political allies: former Minister of Justice Ramon Chacin and
ex-Minister of Interior, Justice and Peace Diosdado Cabello. The DOJ has
also thrown Tren De Aragua (TDA) cartel leader Hector “Niño” Guerrero
into the mix of defendants, situating him at the heart of its narrative.
The indictment amounts to a 25 page rant accusing Maduro and Flores
of a conspiracy to traffic “thousands of tons of cocaine to the United
States,” relying heavily on testimony from coerced witnesses about
alleged shipments that largely took place outside US jurisdiction. It
accuses Maduro of “having partnered with narco-terrorists” like TDA,
ignoring a recent US intelligence assessment that concluded he had no
control over the Venezuelan gang. Finally, the prosecutors stacked the
indictment by charging Maduro with “possession of machine guns,” a
laughable offense which could easily be applied to hundreds of thousands
of gun-loving Americans under an antiquated 1934 law.
DOJ prosecutors carefully avoid precise data on Venezuelan cocaine
exports to the US. At one point, they describe “tons” of cocaine; at
another, they refer to the shipment of “thousands of tons,” an
astronomical figure that could hypothetically generate hundreds of
billions in revenue. At no point did they mention fentanyl, the drug
responsible for the overdose deaths of close to 50,000 Americans in
2024. In fact, the DEA National Drug Threat Assessment issued under
Trump’s watch this year scarcely mentioned Venezuela.
By resorting to vague, deliberately expansive language larded with
subjective terms like “corrupt” and “terrorism,” the DOJ has constructed
a political narrative against Maduro in place of a concrete legal case.
While repeatedly referring to Maduro as the “de facto… illegitimate
ruler of the country,” the DOJ fails to demonstrate that he is de jure illegitimate under Venezuelan law, and will therefore be unable to bypass established international legal precedent granting immunity to heads of state.
Further, the indictment relies on transparently unreliable, coerced witnesses like Hugo “Pollo” Carvajal, a former Venezuelan general who has cut a secret plea deal to reduce his sentence for drug trafficking by supplying dirt on Maduro. Carvajal was said to be a key figure in the so-called “Cartel of the Suns” drug network which the DOJ claims was run by Maduro. If and when he appears to testify against the abducted Venezuelan leader, the American public could learn that the “cartel” was founded not by the deposed Venezuelan president or one of his allies, but by the CIA to traffic drugs into US cities.
Zeteo‘s Mehdi Hasan outlines Donald Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine,” a throwback foreign policy exemplified by the Trump administration’s shocking intervention in Venezuela. With his claims of U.S. sovereignty over nations in the Western Hemisphere, “Trump’s basically saying, ‘Well, this is ours, and China, Russia can have their spheres of influence.’ And it is very 19th-century-esque. ’Let’s divide up the world between the powers.’” This orientation is a major shift from U.S. foreign policy of recent decades, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when interventionist actions were framed around ideological motivations, explains Hasan. “They said it was WMDs. They said it was democracy. They said it was al-Qaeda. They at least pretended that it wasn’t about the oil.” Meanwhile, Trump is brazen about his aims to seize control of Venezuela’s resources and demonstrate that “might is right.”
Editorial Boards Cheer Trump Doctrine in Venezuela
by ARI PAUL
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain allegedly quipped. On January 3, 1990, Panamanian Commander Manuel Noriega surrendered to US forces, who carried him off to face drug charges. Thirty-six years to the day later, US forces swooped into Venezuela, abducting President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following decades of hostility
between the oil-rich socialist country and the United States. The
pretext offered: Maduro had to be taken to the US to face drug charges.
The coincidence is a reminder that the US has a long history
of both covert and military intervention in Latin America: President
Donald Trump, as extreme as he might be, isn’t an outlier among American
presidents in this regard. And despite the right’s attempt to paint
Trump as some sort of peacenik (Compact, 4/7/23; X, 10/14/25), he is no less an imperialist than his predecessors.
And that’s precisely why many of the nation’s leading editorial pages are hailing Maduro’s capture.
‘Hemispheric hygiene’
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/3/26)
called the abductions “an act of hemispheric hygiene,” a dehumanizing
comparison of Venezuela’s leaders to germs needing to be cleansed.
For the Journal,
the abductions were justified because they weren’t just a blow to
Venezuela, but to the rest of America’s official enemies. “The dictator
was also part of the axis of US adversaries that includes Russia, China,
Cuba and Iran,” it said. It called Maduro’s “capture…a demonstration of
Mr. Trump’s declaration to keep America’s enemies from spreading chaos
in the Western Hemisphere.” It amplified Trump’s own rhetoric
of adding on to the Roosevelt Corollary, saying “It’s the ‘Trump
Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine”—a nod to the long-standing imperial
notion that the US more or less owns the Western Hemisphere.
The next day, the Journal editorial board (1/4/26)
even seemed upset that the Trump administration didn’t go far enough in
Venezuela, worrying that it left the socialist regime in place, whose
“new leaders rely so much on aid from Cuba, Russia, China and Iran.”
“Despite Mr. Trump’s vow that the US will ‘run the country,’ there is no
one on the ground to do so,” the paper complained, thus reducing “the
US ability to persuade the regime.”
The Washington Post board (1/3/26) took a similar view to the Journal. “This is a major victory for American interests,” it wrote. “Just hours before, supportive Chinese officials held a chummy meeting with Maduro, who had also been propped up by Russia, Cuba and Iran.”
The Post, which has moved steadily to the right
since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, seemed to endorse extreme “might
makes right” militarism. “Maduro’s removal sends an important message
to tin-pot dictators in Latin America and the world: Trump follows
through,” the board wrote. (Really? Did we miss when Trump “followed
through” on his promise to end the Ukraine War within 24 hours? Or to take back the Panama Canal? Or make Canada the 51st state?)
It belittled Democratic President Joe Biden, who “offered sanctions
relief to Venezuela, and Maduro responded to that show of weakness by
stealing an election.”
Like the Journal, the Post board (1/4/26)
followed up a day later to push Trump to take a more active role in
Venezuela’s future. It worried about his decision to leave in place
“dyed-in-the-wool Chavista” Delcy Rodriguez and other “hard-liners” in
Maduro’s administration.
The Post chided Trump for
dismissing the idea of installing opposition leader María Corina
Machado, who it deemed a worthy partner in imperial prospects: “She has a
strong record of standing for democracy and free markets, and she’s
committed to doing lucrative business with the US.” As with the Journal, the assumption that it’s up to the US to choose Venezuela’s leadership went unquestioned.
‘Fueled economic and political disruption’
The New York Times editorial board (1/3/26),
on the other hand, condemned the abductions, saying Trump’s attack
“represents a dangerous and illegal approach to America’s place in the
world.”
But the board only did so after the requisite vilifying,
asserting that “few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is
undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere
in recent years.”
You’re writing from the country that has spent the past four months blowing up small craft in the Caribbean, and you think it’s Maduro who has “destabilized the Western Hemisphere”?
Even as CBS News content czar Bari Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes piece about the plight of Venezuelan migrants under the administration’s brutal round-ups, the Times
editorial blamed Maduro alone for the humanitarian crisis at hand. “He
has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by
instigating an exodus of nearly 8 million migrants,” the editorial said.
As is typical in US commentary on Venezuela (FAIR.org, 2/6/19), the word “sanctions” does not appear in the editorial, though US strictures have fueled an economic collapse three times worse than the Great Depression.
And it comes after the Times opinion page gave space calling for regime change in Venezuela. “Washington should approach dismantling the Maduro regime as we would any criminal enterprise,” wrote Jimmy Story (New YorkTimes, 12/26/25), a former US ambassador to Venezuela. Right-wing Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece simply headlined “The Case for Overthrowing Maduro” (11/17/25).
And now that it’s all over, the White House is getting a lot more
honest about the real motives behind its actions. After all those months
of babbling about fentanyl and “narcoterrorism” and freedom and
democracy, the Trump administration has come right out and admitted that
its regime change interventionism in Venezuela has always been a good
old-fashioned oil grab.
“We’re gonna take back the oil that frankly we should have taken back a long time ago,” Trump told the press following Maduro’s abduction, saying “We’re
going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,
and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela, and people from
outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela, and it goes also to
the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the
damages caused us by that country.”
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the
biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the
badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making
money for the country, and we are ready to stage a second and much
larger attack if we need to do so,” Trump said.
“We have tremendous energy in that country. It’s very important that
we protect it. We need that for ourselves, we need that for the world,”
the president added.
Trump made it explicitly clear that this is going to be some sort of
long-term US occupation project, contradicting early claims of his
supporters who had defended the president’s actions in Venezuela as a
brief in-and-out, one-and-done special ops intervention.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said.
“So we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in. And
we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of
years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a
safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” the president said. “And
we have to have, we had boots on the ground last night at a very high
level. Actually, we’re not afraid of it, we’re we don’t mind saying it,
but we’re going to make sure that that country is run properly. We’re
not doing this in vain.”
You would think, after all these incredibly honest admissions, that this was a regime change operation aimed at controlling the resources of the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, people would get real and accept that they were lied to about the Trump administration’s real reasons for targeting Venezuela. But I am still getting Trump supporters prattling on about drugs, terrorism, and democracy in my social media replies defending my criticisms of his monstrous act of war.
Venezuela’s Revolution Still Stands, Debunking Trump’s Psyop
by MANOLO DE LOS SANTOS
In the aftermath of the illegal US operation against Venezuela, a deliberate misinformation campaign has been waged to sow doubt about the survival of the country’s revolution.
The events of the past 72 hours represent a qualitative escalation in
the 25 years of regime change operations by the US government against
the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. The United States’ execution of “Operation Absolute Resolve”, a targeted bombing raid and the illegal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro,
has created a moment of profound crisis but also profound clarity. For
revolutionary forces globally, a concrete analysis is required to cut
through the disinformation, understand the objective balance of forces,
and chart a path forward.
The objective conditions of the US military intervention
In the wake of the operation, there has been great talk of the
unmatched military capabilities of the US Empire. But Marxists should
begin with an understanding of the political relationship of
forces. Under closer examination, that the Trump administration had to
carry out an operation in this fashion is also proof of imperialism’s
political weaknesses – in Venezuela, internationally, and at home.
The decision by the Trump regime to undertake this operation, rather
than a full-scale invasion, is a testament to the power of organized
popular resistance. Two primary factors constrained US options:
Mass mobilization in Venezuela: President Maduro’s call to massively expand the Bolivarian Militias saw
over eight million citizens arm themselves. Combined with Venezuela’s
professional military, which has not fractured, this created a scenario
where any ground invasion would degenerate into a protracted people’s
war, with unacceptable political and material costs for the United
States. There remains a strong base of support for Chavismo and
the Bolivarian Revolution, which the Trump administration tacitly
admitted when it said there must be “realism.” They admitted that the
Venezuelan right wing lacks the support to lead the country.
Faced with these deterrents, the White House pivoted to a
strategy of decapitation: using its overwhelming technological and
military superiority to sever the head of the revolutionary state while
avoiding a quagmire. In deciding to utilize a “surgical” strike,
involving over 150 aircraft and elite Delta Force units, rather than a
war to destroy the Venezuelan state, they are tacitly recognizing that
it is here to stay. The US has, in the aftermath of two failed and
costly military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, sought the path
of least resistance, preferring bombing campaigns and abductions that
can serve as political “trophies.” But underneath the hyper-emotional
style of Trump and the hyper-aggressive military tactics – recalling
prior eras of “gunboat diplomacy” in Latin America – there is also a
reluctance to go all the way to a regime change war. It is a return to a
19th-century gangster imperialism, forcing concessions at gunpoint;
this is what Trump really means by “running” Venezuela.
The asymmetry of power and the question of “betrayal”
Although the Venezuelan masses, party, and state were prepared to counter a full-scale US invasion in a decentralized people’s war of resistance, no country on the planet has the preparation or the capacity at present to prevent the overwhelming and brutal force of a US special operation such as the one conducted. No nation, no matter how morally justified, popularly mobilized, or militarily capable, can presently match the concentrated, high-tech lethal force of the US war machine in this respect. The coordinated mass bombing, disabling of communications, electricity, and anti-air defenses, followed by the raid on President Maduro’s secure residence, was an application of this asymmetrical power. The heroic resistance of the security detail, comprising Venezuelan forces and Cuban internationalists, resulting in 50 combat deaths, confirms this was an act of war, not a “surrender” – despite all earlier claims.
The mass media’s blind spot on Trump’s Venezuela escalation
by SOPHIA TESFAYE
Iraq-era mistakes of blind deference by the mainstream press are back
The story the American media is missing about Venezuela right now is not really about Venezuela. It is not about the country’s strongman president Nicolás Maduro, electoral legitimacy, corruption or even oil — at least not in the way Donald Trump
pretends it to be. It is about something far more unsettling. The
world’s most powerful country is openly asserting the right to invade,
occupy and “run” any nation it chooses, and by failing to connect the
dots for the American people, the media is helping to normalize Trump’s
expansionist project.
What we are watching is not simply
another foreign policy crisis; it is the construction of a permission
structure for imperialism, built by stenography and deference.
Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s attack on Venezuela and capture
of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, has not merely failed to
interrogate the Pentagon’s actions, it has actively laundered them,
presenting an act of war as a technocratic maneuver, a coup as a
“capture” and an invasion as an “operation.” Americans have seen this
pattern before, and the consequences were catastrophic.
Like George W. Bush’s regime change operation in Iraq, Trump’s removal of Maduro is premised on a transparent lie. Instead of Bush and Dick Cheney’s weapons of mass destruction, Trump has made a jumble of claims about electoral illegitimacy, corruption and “hemispheric defense” that sound like post-hoc rationalization — and that the administration didn’t care enough to conjure a logical or legal justification for an outcome decided in advance.
The sense of déjà vu is undeniable.
In 2003, the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein, triggering a nearly two decade
debacle that killed almost 5,000 American troops, cost more than a
trillion dollars, destabilized an entire region and helped incubate
movements far more violent than the regime it replaced. At the time, the
American press largely went along with the Bush administration,
amplifying official claims while marginalizing opposition voices.
This time, as Semafor reported, the New York Times and the Washington Post knew in advance about Trump’s unprovoked attack and chose to sit on the story, ostensibly to “avoid endangering U.S. troops.” Yet the administration gave no advance notice to Congress.
The United States attacks Venezuela and kidnaps its President in an illegal operation
by VIJAY PRASHAD & TAROA ZUNIGA SILVA
A little after 2 am Venezuela time on January 3, 2026, in violation
of Article 2 of the United Nations Charter, the United States began an
attack on several sites in the country, including Caracas, the capital.
Residents awoke to loud noises and flashes, as well as large helicopters
in the sky. Videos began to appear on social media, but without much
context. Confusion and rumor flooded social media.
Within an hour, the sky was quiet. U.S. President Donald Trump
announced at 4:21 am that his forces had conducted attacks on Venezuela
and had seized President Nicolás Maduro Moro and his wife Cilia Flores. A
short while later, Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriquez confirmed
that the whereabouts of Maduro and Flores are unknown. The U.S.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi confirmed that Maduro and Flores were in the United States and had been charged with “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy.”
The outcome of this attack on Venezuela is unclear. The government remains in control, even with the President having been kidnapped. The people of Venezuela are in shock but defiant. It is unclear if the United States will strike again, or if the U.S. government has a clear political plan for the aftermath of this strike.
The war against Venezuela
The attack on January 3 is not the first against Venezuela. In fact,
the pressure campaign began in 2001 when the government of Hugo Chávez
enacted a Hydrocarbons Law in accordance with the sovereignty provisions
in the Bolivarian Constitution of 1999. That campaign had the following
aspects (this is an illustrative and not a comprehensive list):
(2001) U.S. funding of anti-Bolivarian social and political groups through the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID.
(2002) U.S. role in the attempted coup d’état.
(2002) Creation by USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives of a Venezuela program.
(2003—04) Funding and political direction for the work of Súmate (led by Maria Corina Machado) to recall Chávez by referendum.
(2004) Development of a 5-Point Strategy to
“penetrate” Chávez’s base, “divide” Chavismo, “isolate” Chávez, build up
groups such as Súmate, and “protect vital U.S. business interests”.
(2015) U.S. President Barack Obama signs an executive
order that declares Venezuela to be an “extraordinary threat,” which is
the legal basis for the sanctions that followed.
(2017) Venezuela banned from access to U.S. financial markets.
(2018) International banks and shipping companies
pressured to over-comply with illegal U.S. sanctions, while the Bank of
England seized the Venezuelan Central Bank gold reserves.
(2019) Creation of an “interim” government by
“appointing” Juan Guaidó as the U.S. authorized president and organizing
a (failed) uprising, and freezing Venezuela’s ability to sell oil as
well as seize its oil assets overseas.
(2020) Attempt to kidnap Maduro through Operation
Gideon (and by placing a bounty for his capture), while the United
States put a “maximum pressure” campaign on Venezuela during the
pandemic (including International Monetary Fund denial of Venezuela’s
own reserves).
(2025) Gift of the Nobel Peace Prize to Maria Corina Machado with the Nobel Committee saying that Maduro should leave office.
(2025—26) The attacks on small boats off the coast of
Venezuela, the positioning of an armada to form an embargo of
Venezuela, and the seizure of oil tankers from Venezuela.
The attack on January 3 is part of this war that began in 2001 and
will continue long after the engines of the Chinook helicopters cool
down.
The eagle is angry
When the United States government decides to act unilaterally,
whether against Iraq in 2003 or Venezuela between 2001 and 2026, no
other force has been able to stop it yet. In 2003, millions of
people—including in the United States—marched in the streets to demand
no war, and most governments in the world cautioned against the war, but
the governments of George W. Bush and Tony Blair (of the United
Kingdom, acting as his no. 2) went ahead with their illegal war. This
time, major powers informed the United States that a war in South
America and the Caribbean would be immensely destabilizing: this was the
view of leaders who govern countries that neighbor Venezuela (Brazil
and Colombia) and major powers such as China (whose special envoy, Qiu
Xiaoqi, met with Maduro only hours before the U.S. attack). Not only
could the world not stop the United States in 2003, but it has also been
unable to stop the United States between 2001 and now in its obsessive
war for oil against Venezuela.
The attack on Venezuela was timed so that Trump could stand before the U.S. houses of Congress on January 4, when he will give his annual address, and claim that he has scored a major victory. This is not a victory. It is just another example of unilateralism that will not improve the situation in the world. The U.S. illegal war on Iraq ended with the U.S. forced to withdraw after a million civilians had been killed in a ruthless decade; the same transpired in Afghanistan and Libya—two countries ruined by the American Eagle.
Venezuela is Merely the Front Line in America’s China War
by MANOJ JOSHI
The US is likely to press on in its aggressive phase and push for the divestment of the Chinese port companies in Panama. They will, no doubt, use the instability created by their actions to push against other Chinese projects and investments in Latin America.
There is a subtext in the American action in Venezuela which is all-too-visible – the United States’s rivalry with China.
The American rationale for the invasion of Venezuela and the kidnapping of its president and his wife has been shifting rapidly. From illegal immigration and drug smuggling, it now seems to be centered around Venezuelan oil. But behind that is a larger theme which was spelt out in the National Security Strategy document released recently.
This is what was termed as the “ ’Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe
Doctrine.” The US may want stability in Latin America to prevent mass
migration to the US, or governments who will crack down on
narco-terrorism but what it also wants is a hemisphere free from
“hostile foreign incursion or ownership of key assets.” As Trump noted
in his January 3 press conference:
“Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the
Western hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won’t happen.”
If you read carefully, it’s clear that the target is China. And this is emphasised in the NSS observation that as part of this policy, the US “will deny non-Hemispheric competitors” military facilities in the region “or to own or control strategically vital assets in our Hemisphere.”
Speaking to NBC on Sunday, US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who is
supposed to be running Venezuela as the US proconsul, declared, “This
is the Western Hemisphere. This is where we live – and we’re not going
to allow the Western Hemisphere to be a base of operation for
adversaries, competitors, and rivals of the United States.”
Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves, some 303 billion
barrels. Its current production is roughly 1 million barrels per day,
down from 3 million bpd on account of poor management and US sanctions.
But China is the destination of 80% of this oil. It has also invested in
the Venezuelan oil industry, as has the US (through Chevron, that still
operates there) and some European companies.
Trump has now expansively suggested that the US will take over the
country and revitalise its oil industry, of course, at a cost to the
Venezuelans. But, his intentions are clear. As he noted in his January 3
press conference, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American
talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us
during those previous administrations, and they stole it through force.”
In essence he wants reimbursement for the nationalisation, as well as
the alleged damage done to the US through the drug smuggling.
China in Latin America
China has developed substantial interests in Latin America,
underscored now by the fact that some 24 countries in Latin America have
signed up to the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI). In practical terms,
Chinese interests involve copper in Peru, lithium in Argentina and Chile
as well as iron ore. It owns extensive hydropower facilities in Brazil,
is involved in electricity distribution in Chile, as well as oil
extraction in Venezuela and Ecuador. There is growing Chinese investment
in renewables in Latin America.
Among infrastructure developments, what stands out is the Chancay port in Peru and development of railroads in Colombia and power grids in several countries, including Argentina. Huawei operates in several countries of the region and has data centres and cloud computing assets there. As for space, China’s largest non-domestic space facility is in Argentina.
Donald Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and abduction of President Maduro is part of a larger imperialist plan to impose US hegemony in Latin America, control the region’s natural resources (oil, gas, critical minerals, rare earths), and create a new supply chain that cuts out China.
The United States has launched a full-frontal attack not only against
Venezuela, but against all of Latin America — and even against the
basic concept of sovereignty.
Donald Trump ordered the US military on January 3 to bomb Venezuela,
to kidnap its constitutional President Nicolás Maduro, and to send him
to New York to be subjected to a show trial on politically motivated
charges.
Analysts Warn Venezuela Invasion Could Empower Trump to Take Actions Elsewhere
by MICHAEL FOX
The US’s first unilateral invasion in South America is Trump’s testing ground for military supremacy in the region.
The bombs fell in the early hours of January 3. They cascaded over the city, one and then another. The bright orange explosions rocked Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, shaking people awake.
“The bombs lasted a while,” Caracas resident and community organizer Yanahir Reyes told Truthout. “And you could hear the helicopters, the planes. It was terrifying.”
The U.S. forces rained down fire — focused on the military barracks in the capital and nearby states, but also hitting surrounding neighborhoods.
Videos of the invading forces spiraled quickly onto social media.
Countless videos of the bombs falling, people screaming, trying to make
sense of it all, while the explosions shook buildings and destroyed homes. And the sound of the arrival of the U.S. forces echoed across the city.
Shock. Fear. Confusion.
“The scariest part was videos of helicopters — helicopters flying in
Caracas and bombing targets on the ground around Fuerte Tiuna
[Venezuela’s largest military barracks],” Caracas-based journalist
Ricardo Vaz told Truthout. “What are they here for? Are there troops on the ground?”
U.S. forces would kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his
wife, Cilia Flores, under charges of drug trafficking. Maduro is now in
New York, awaiting trial at the Southern District Court. According to the BBC, a Venezuelan official says at least 80 people were killed in the U.S. invasion.
This was the invasion that Donald Trump had vowed for months. An
invasion that U.S. administrations had threatened for years and decades,
going all the way back to President George W. Bush.
And it marked the U.S. once again deploying direct military action in
other countries in the region. A return to President Theodore
Roosevelt’s gunboat diplomacy, where the United States pushes its agenda
and its interests by force. The Monroe Doctrine on steroids, or what Trump has called it his own “Donroe Doctrine” — Donald plus Monroe.
It is a terrifying precedent. It is the first time the United States
has taken unilateral military action against a nation in Latin America
in more than 35 years. Many analysts and Latin Americans had hoped this
bellicose foreign policy and direct U.S. aggression had been relegated
to the history books.
But those playbooks have been dusted off and are being used again, echoing the December 20, 1989, U.S. invasion of Panama. And it was a copy and paste job — give or take some minor alterations.
Trump and Miller’s “iron law” of imperialist barbarism
ANDRE DAMON
In the aftermath of Saturday’s US attack on Venezuela and the
kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has
unleashed a torrent of threats against countries around the world,
targeting Cuba, Colombia, Iran, China, Russia and even the European
Union.
Following Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, the Trump
administration presented a series of demands to Venezuela’s interim
president, Delcy Rodríguez, aimed at subordinating the country’s foreign
and economic policy to US geopolitical and corporate interests. US
officials told Rodríguez that Caracas must first “kick out China,
Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” according to ABC News,
and then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and
favor America when selling heavy crude.”
This is, in essence, the
transformation of Venezuela into a colonial protectorate of the US.
American imperialism intends to steal Venezuela’s oil and reverse the
nationalization of the oil companies, which is directed not only against
Venezuela itself but also Russia and China. Trump issued a direct
threat to Rodríguez, stating that if she “doesn’t do what’s right, she
is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Over
the weekend, Trump also renewed his declared intent to annex Greenland,
an overseas territory of EU and NATO member Denmark, through military
force.
In a CNN interview Monday, White House Deputy Chief of
Staff Stephen Miller laid out the criminal character of the assault on
Venezuela and American imperialism as a whole. When asked what Trump
meant when he said the US would “run” Venezuela, Miller declared, “We
live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force,
that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that
have existed since the beginning of time.”
Miller dismissed
international law as “international niceties” and declared flatly: “The
United States of America is running Venezuela … we are in charge,
because we have the United States military stationed outside the
country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on
all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”
Miller made
clear that this “iron law” applies not just to the former colonies but
the territories of the European powers themselves. When asked about
Greenland, Miller declared that “Greenland should be part of the United
States” and refused to rule out the use of military force. “Nobody’s
going to fight the United States militarily over the future of
Greenland,” he sneered.
This is the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of “iron laws of Nature” in relation to races and racial-state conflict.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s US attack on Venezuela and the
kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration has
unleashed a torrent of threats against countries around the world,
targeting Cuba, Colombia, Iran, China, Russia and even the European
Union.
Following Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, the Trump
administration presented a series of demands to Venezuela’s interim
president, Delcy Rodríguez, aimed at subordinating the country’s foreign
and economic policy to US geopolitical and corporate interests. US
officials told Rodríguez that Caracas must first “kick out China,
Russia, Iran and Cuba and sever economic ties,” according to ABC News,
and then “agree to partner exclusively with the US on oil production and
favor America when selling heavy crude.”
This is, in essence, the
transformation of Venezuela into a colonial protectorate of the US.
American imperialism intends to steal Venezuela’s oil and reverse the
nationalization of the oil companies, which is directed not only against
Venezuela itself but also Russia and China. Trump issued a direct
threat to Rodríguez, stating that if she “doesn’t do what’s right, she
is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
Over
the weekend, Trump also renewed his declared intent to annex Greenland,
an overseas territory of EU and NATO member Denmark, through military
force.
In a CNN interview Monday, White House Deputy Chief of
Staff Stephen Miller laid out the criminal character of the assault on
Venezuela and American imperialism as a whole. When asked what Trump
meant when he said the US would “run” Venezuela, Miller declared, “We
live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force,
that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that
have existed since the beginning of time.”
Miller dismissed
international law as “international niceties” and declared flatly: “The
United States of America is running Venezuela … we are in charge,
because we have the United States military stationed outside the
country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on
all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.”
Miller made
clear that this “iron law” applies not just to the former colonies but
the territories of the European powers themselves. When asked about
Greenland, Miller declared that “Greenland should be part of the United
States” and refused to rule out the use of military force. “Nobody’s
going to fight the United States militarily over the future of
Greenland,” he sneered.
This is the language of the Nazis, drawn from Hitler’s Mein Kampf and its talk of “iron laws of Nature” in relation to races and racial-state conflict.
Beyond the specific ideological influences of Miller’s statements,
however, he is expressing what is in fact the essential character of
imperialist policy. Lenin, in his 1916 work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
in analyzing the competition between different banks and corporate
conglomerates, explained that influence and power are divided “‘in
proportion to capital,’ ‘in proportion to strength,’ because there
cannot be any other method of division under commodity production and
capitalism.”
Polemicizing against those, including Karl Kautsky, who claimed that capitalism was capable of peaceful development, he wrote:
Monopolies,
oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the
exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a
handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given
birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel
us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism.
In the aftermath of World War II, under conditions of immense social upheaval and enormous popular outrage over the crimes of the Nazi regime, the capitalist powers outlined and expanded certain principles of international law that were supposed to regulate the relations among states. A limited number of the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime were tried for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In its ruling, the International Tribunal declared a “war of aggression” to be the “supreme international crime.”
Former PDVSA President Rafael Ramírez with former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez (in red shirt). IMAGE/Wikimedia Commons
The current US attacks against Venezuela are part of a two-decade process led by the US and the Venezuelan right wing to undermine the Bolivarian project and its bold decision to use the country’s oil wealth for the betterment of its people.
The United States had no problem with Venezuela per se, not with the
country nor with its former oligarchy. The problem that the United
States government and its corporate class have is with the process set
in motion by the first government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
In 2001, Chávez’s Bolivarian process passed a law called the Organic
Hydrocarbons Law, which asserted state ownership over all oil and gas
reserves, held upstream activities of exploration and extraction for the
state-controlled companies, but allowed private firms – including
foreign firms – to participate in downstream activities (such as
refining and sale). Venezuela, which has the world’s largest petroleum
reserves, had already nationalized its oil through laws in 1943 and then
repeated in 1975. However, in the 1990s as part of the neoliberal
reforms pushed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and by the large
US-owned oil companies, the oil industry was substantially privatized.
When Chávez enacted the new law, it brought the state back into
control of the oil industry (whose foreign oil sales were responsible
for 80% of the country’s external revenues). This deeply angered the
US-owned oil companies – particularly ExxonMobil and Chevron – which put
pressure on the government of US President George W. Bush to act
against Chávez. The US tried to engineer a coup to unseat Chávez in
2002, which lasted for a few days, and then pushed the corrupt
Venezuelan oil company management to initiate a strike to damage the
Venezuelan economy (it was eventually the workers who defended the
company and took it back from the management). Chávez withstood both the
coup attempt and the strike because he had the vast support of the
population. Maria Corina Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
in 2025, started a group called Sumaté (“Join Up”), which placed a
recall referendum on the ballot. About 70% of the registered voters
came to the polls in 2004, and a large majority (59%) voted to retain
Chávez as the president.
But neither Machado nor her US backers (including the oil companies)
rested easy. From 2001 till today, they have tried to overthrow the
Bolivarian process – to effectively return the US-owned oil companies to
power. The question of Venezuela, then, is not so much about
“democracy” (an overused word, which is being stripped of meaning) but
about the international class struggle between the right of the
Venezuelan people to freely control their oil and gas and that of the
US-owned oil companies to dominate Venezuelan natural resources.
The Bolivarian process
When Hugo Chávez appeared on the political scene in the 1990s, he
captured the imagination of most of the Venezuelan people – particularly
the working-class and the peasantry. The decade was marked by the
dramatic betrayals by presidents who promised to secure the oil-rich
country from IMF-imposed austerity and then adopted those same IMF
proposals. It did not matter if they were social democrats (such as
Carlos Andrés Pérez of Democratic Action, president from 1989 to 1993)
or conservatives (such as Rafael Caldera of the Christian Democrats,
president from 1994 to 1999). Hypocrisy and betrayal defined the
political world, while high levels of inequality (with the Gini index at
a staggering 48.0) gripped the society. The mandate for Chávez (who won
the election with 56% against 39% for the candidate of the old parties)
was against this hypocrisy and betrayal.
It helped Chávez and the Bolivarian process that oil prices stayed high from 1999 (when he took office) till 2013 (when he died at 58, very young). Having taken hold of the oil revenues, Chávez turned them over to make phenomenal social gains. First, he developed a set of mass social programs (misiones) that redirected oil revenues to meet basic human needs such as primary healthcare (Misión Barrio Adentro), literacy and secondary education for the working-class and peasantry (Misión Robinson, Misión Ribas, and Misión Sucre), food sovereignty (Misión Mercal and then PDVAL), and housing (Gran Misión Vivienda).
People’s Archive of Rural India. IMAGE/ Parth M.N., Used under Creative Commons license.
PepsiCo refused to allow a shareholder resolution requesting the
company look into allegations that it is buying sugar from female farm
workers in Maharashtra, India, who are coerced into undergoing
hysterectomies. The resolution was filed following an exposé by the Fuller Project and the New York Times.
BNP Paribas Asset Management and Mercy Investment Services, among others, filed the shareholder resolution
in November 2024, asking PepsiCo to detail the “effectiveness of
PepsiCo’s efforts to uphold its human rights standards throughout its
sugar supply chain in India.” Had the company accepted the resolution,
it would have been discussed at its annual general meeting on May 7th,
2025.
However, in February 2025, the company asked
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to allow it to reject
the resolution on the grounds that the request related to operations
valued at under five percent of its assets, net earnings, and gross
sales under a 2025 rule change that allows companies to request
permission from the SEC to take “no action” on resolutions that are not
“significantly related” to the company’s business.
Despite the
rejection of the shareholder resolution, the company has not denied
multiple in-depth reports from Indian newspapers and reputable
non-profit organizations like Oxfam that
sugar produced by workers in Maharashtra is indeed used to sweeten
beverages made by international food conglomerates like PepsiCo as well
as products made by Coca-Cola, Mondel?z, Nestlé and Unilever.
Pepsi
products in India are made exclusively by Varun Beverages, based in
Haryana, which operates bottling plants across India, including in Maharashtra—one of the largest producers of sugar in the country.
The core of the human rights abuses borne by the workers (who are mostly migrants from middle, lower and lowest castes) in Maharashtra lies in the district of Beed, a poor rural region.
Every autumn before the harvest begins, sugar mill owners pay private local contractors known as mukadam
(the word means labor foreman) to Beed to recruit workers. Over 1.5
million migrants—men, women and children—travel from one field to the
next during the cutting season that spans October to March in search of
job opportunities.
These workers often have to live in tents by
the fields and the sugar mills because the cane has to be transported to
the mill as soon as it is cut, otherwise it loses value. The women wake
up as early as four in the morning every day to draw and carry water,
build a fire, boil tea, cook lentils and vegetables for their meals and
wash clothes in a basin, before beginning work shifts that sometimes
last until midnight. Once the sugar has been harvested from a field, the
workers move to the next location, hauling their belongings with them.
To cut costs, mill contractors take advantage of an informal system of married couples working together called koyta that is unique to the region. (The word koyta
is derived from the Marathi word for a sickle used to cut sugarcane.)
The couples are given an advance for the season—sometimes as much as
150,000 rupees (US$1,800) per couple—instead of proper wages, in
exchange for delivering a set weight of cane for the season. (This works
out to approximately US$5 a day per worker per day, but often less.)
The cash-up-front is a huge incentive for parents to press girls as young as 12 to enter into illegal child marriages
(the legal age of marriage is 18 for women). Weddings are sometimes
conducted at the sugar mill gates so that children can be put to work
immediately.
by GEORGIA GEE, MEHEDI MAROF, & TANBIRUL MIRAJ RIPON
IMAGE/ Joan Wong for Rest of World
Newly revealed contract between Starlink and Bangladesh shows how these deals are made.
In early April, U.S. President
Donald Trump launched a salvo of international tariffs that rocked the
global economy. Targeting countries from Mexico to Fiji, the announced
tariffs led to a market crash while governments around the world jumped
into action in attempts to forestall them.
Bangladesh, which sells vast amounts of garments and textiles to the
U.S., was particularly threatened. It suddenly faced a 37% rate — one of
the highest on the list.
On April 7, Muhammad Yunus, chief adviser of Bangladesh, sent Trump
an urgent letter. He listed all the ways that his country was trying to
comply with Trump’s agenda and asked him to delay tariffs. The note
included a curious addition: “We have executed the necessary steps to
launch Starlink in Bangladesh.”
Since Starlink launched its first satellites in 2019, the internet
provider owned by billionaire Elon Musk has attempted to expand into
markets around the world, often facing regulatory red tape in doing so.
But with Musk playing a high-profile role in Trump’s White House from
January through May, Yunus and other leaders seemed to recognize that
accommodating Starlink could be one means of appeasing the new
administration.
The same day Yunus sent his letter, Starlink applied for a license
with the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. Three weeks
after Yunus’ letter to Trump, the BTRC approved Starlink’s application.
The service launched in Bangladesh the following month.
Bangladesh became the latest country around the world to expedite its
regulatory approval process for satellite internet providers while Musk
took part in Trump’s second administration. During the first five
months of the year — as Musk assumed his lead role in the Department of
Government Efficiency — Starlink announced it had become available in at
least 13 countries, while its applications were approved in two more.
In the six months since Musk broke ties with the administration,
Starlink announced its entry into an additional 13 countries, totalling
at least 26 countries in 2025.
In some cases, Starlink found quick success in countries it sought to enter for the first time. In others, Starlink’s applications had stalled for years until they were suddenly greenlit.
“With Starlink, none of [the] regular procedures have been followed,”
said Mohammad Aminul Hakim, president of the Internet Service Providers
Association of Bangladesh, which represents over 900 companies in
Bangladesh’s internet sector. He told Rest of World that he had never seen any internet service provider being granted the right to operate in Bangladesh so quickly.
Reporting by outlets including ProPublica and The Washington Post
suggests that the support and influence of the White House may have
made the difference. Several countries that ushered in Starlink this
year appeared to be trying to stave off Trump’s tariffs and were pressured by the U.S. State Department to expedite deployment, prompting calls from Democratic senators for an investigation into the company’s foreign deals.
In a new investigation of Starlink’s dealmaking across the globe, Rest of World
obtained Bangladesh’s license agreement, which our research suggests
has yet to be publicized. The document is embedded, in full, at the
bottom of this article.
Rest of World also reviewed records and official statements
in the public domain and interviewed industry stakeholders, satellite
experts, and government officials across 10 countries, including some
that welcomed Starlink this year and others that continue to elude the
satellite internet provider.
Nickson Zhuwayo, a Grade 7 learner at Manyoshwa Primary School in Seke, Zimbabwe, uses this lantern to read and do his homework at home. IMAGE/Farai Shawn Matiashe/IPS
SEKE, Zimbabwe, Dec 5 2025 (IPS) –
When going home after school, Monica Ben not only takes with her a pen
and exercise books but also a lantern to light the dark room and
completes her daily homework in Mashonaland East province.
Known as the Chigubhu lantern, a Shona name for a bottle, this
portable light was made using recycled materials by a 12-year-old
learner, Ben, at Manyoshwa Primary School in Seke, a rural area 54
kilometers from Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare.
“Candles are expensive,” Ben tells IPS on a warm day at her school.
“Before this Chigubhu lantern, it was either I came early to do homework or I did not submit anything to the teacher.”
The lantern is charged at school during the day using renewable
energy and Ben takes it home daily after school, giving her about four
hours of portable lighting.
Making Lanterns From Electrical Waste
The school compound’s air was filled with palpable excitement from the learners who had just returned after a holiday.
Ben lives with her peasant farmers in a remote farming area that is hard to access even with an off-road car.
Most houses, including Ben’s, are not connected to the main grid,
making it difficult for school children to read and do their homework at
night.
A local innovator, Aluwaine Tanaka Manyonga from the capital, Harare,
invented the Chigubhu lantern, a portable circular lighting product
made from light-emitting diode (LED) lighting electronic waste.
It is housed in waste plastic bottles and tins and the lantern is rechargeable with solar energy.
Ben is one of the more than 100 schoolchildren at Manyoshwa Primary
School who were taught how to make these lanterns using readily
available electrical waste.
“I take an empty bottle and cut it in half. I then take a piece of
cardboard and mark it with a pencil before cutting it. I install switch
cables and close the light with a bottle top,” she says, smiling.
“I put a handle on it. Thereafter, I test the voltage in the battery before putting it inside.”
Godwin Kadiramwando, a headteacher at Manyoshwa Primary School since
2021, says it all started four years ago with a solar system
installation at the learning facility.
“Manyonga did it for free. The solar system supplies power to one of
the classrooms for lighting as well as charging smartphones and
laptops,” he tells IPS.
The following year, Manyonga gave a class of Grade 7 learners, about
30, some Chigubhu lanterns so they could read and do their homework at
night.”
Kadiramwando says in 2023, instead of giving them already-made
lanterns, Manyonga decided to teach them to make the lanterns and fix
any technical issues.
