I wrote this photo essay from here in Venezuela, where hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Caracas to condemn the suffocating US embargo of their country, using the slogans #NoMoreTrump and #TrumpUnblockVenezuela
These photos are just from the rally at the end, after 5 hours of marching
@GrayzoneProject These Venezuelans are entirely ignored by the corporate media, which has repeatedly helped to sell the right-wing US coup attempts
The Trump administration is collectively suffocating the entire Venezuelan population with a criminal embargo that is devastating the economy and trying to starve them. And people know who their enemy is
"Trump sanciona a tu madre" = Trump sanction your mom!
Ex-CIA agent explains US regime-change strategy:
"The point is to put pressure on the targeted gov by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country… That means making the people suffer as much as you can until the country plunges into chaos" thegrayzone.com/2019/08/12/tru…
At the huge march against the US embargo here in Venezuela, protesters handed out this flyer:
“How terrorist attacks by Guaidó and US imperialism affect you:
1. They try to paralyze the strategic economic-productive apparatus of the country.
Samir Amin wrote in 2006: "I do want to see the construction of a multipolar world, and that obviously means the defeat of Washington’s hegemonist project for military control of the planet. In my eyes it is an overweening project, criminal by its very nature, which is drawing the world into wars without end and stifling all hope of social and democratic advance, not only in the countries of the South but also, to a seemingly lesser degree, in those of the North. In this connection, I wrote as long ago as 1991 of the emergence of an ‘empire of chaos’".
"... my idea of the multipolarity that is necessary today entails a radical revision of ‘North–South relations’, in all their dimensions. This revision must create a framework that makes it possible to reduce the power of forces within the system (the capitalist system, to call it by its name) that operate in such a way as to exacerbate the polarization of wealth and power. By calling into question the ‘imperialist’ tradition, or whatever one likes to call it, which governs core–periphery relations in the actually existing capitalist system (something quite different from the general market system dreamed up by mainstream economists), such a revision would automatically pose a challenge to the most fundamental aspects of capitalism".
Samir Amin: "The analyses in [my] work are ‘geopolitical’, but I should stress that they are in no way inspired by the methods of conventional geopolitics. That discipline, which originated in the nationalist ruling-class thought of the imperialist countries, treats nation-states as homogeneous invariables, with ‘interests’ dictated by their geographical location and economic ambitions usually identified with those of the dominant sections of capital".
Samir Amin: The aim of the US ruling class "was not only to encircle the USSR (and China) but also to make Washington the worldwide master of last resort: in other words, to extend to the whole planet the Monroe doctrine that had already staked its claim to run the New World in accordance with its own ‘national interests’".
To understand the genocide in Gaza, it's important to recognize Zionism's roots in European colonialism.
Israel was not created due to the Nazi Holocaust. The British empire endorsed creating Israel in the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when Europe was colonizing the Middle East🧵
It's not a coincidence that the Balfour Declaration came immediately after the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement, in which the British and French empires carved up the Ottoman empire's territory and established their own colonies in the Middle East (West Asia).
Zionism was directly modeled after 19th-century European colonialist movements.
Zionist "founding father" Theodor Herzl wrote a letter to Cecil Rhodes, the genocidal colonizer of Africa, asking for help to colonize Palestine.
Herzl boasted that Zionism was "something colonial".
The neo-feudal corporate landlords at Apple are charging creators on Patreon a 30% fee for all new memberships registered using the iOS app.
It's the perfect symbol of the future of the economy -- neo-feudal rent extraction by corporate monopolies.
🧵This is how the scam works:
It all started with Big Tech corporations first offering supposedly "free" services (which were paid for by selling users' information).
Those "free" platforms soon became monopolies, and were so deeply embedded into the economy that they are now (privatized) digital utilities.
A 20th-century economy needed utilities like an electrical grid, water plants, sewage system, highways, etc.
These natural monopolies should be publicly owned, provided as public goods to prevent rent-seeking by corporate landlords (although neoliberals want them privatized too)
Russia was banned from the Olympics in 2019 due to doping. Now we know that the US has allowed athletes to use steroids (ie cheat) since at least 2011, with no punishment
Also, Russia was banned this year due to the war in Ukraine, but the US invaded Iraq and faced no punishment
What the US government calls the "Rules-Based International Order" is a global imperialist dictatorship, in which the US makes up "rules", and violates them whenever it's in its interests.
But then the US invades or sanctions foreign countries it accuses of breaking the "rules".
Before WWII even ended, the US government recruited genocidal Nazi monsters to launch its cold war on the Soviet Union.
Later, the CIA recruited Nazi spies like infamous criminal Reinhard Gehlen, Third Reich's spy chief on the Eastern Front, to continue Hitler's war on the USSR.
Many US corporations profited from investments in Nazi Germany, such as Chase Bank, Standard Oil, IBM, Ford, GM, Coca-Cola, and Kodak.
Hitler also got help from US Senator Prescott Bush, father of President George H W Bush, grandfather of George W Bush. theguardian.com/world/2004/sep…