Signatories here: pic.twitter.com/JbmSWU1fBk

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) January 7, 2021

TYT devoted most of its show tonight to the domestic terrorism that occurred yesterday. at the Capitol. As individual segments on YT become available, I will be posting them. Here’s one of those segments, about Biden’s chamomile tea.

Biden Must Now Determine His Policy Towards Venezuela

The concept of “Free” trade while the smell of death, blood, and powder still hung in the air, clashed with the proposal. And so, the dictators were brought down by people and corporations interested more in continental trade than in dictators on the way down. The new century, beginning in 2000, was to be one of no more coups or governments overthrown, and with free elections. But that expectation was promptly dashed in 2002. The first continental leader voted-in as president was Hugo Chávez, who took on with success the difficulties of the working class. The regular people, the majority, loved him. But he was not allowed to change Venezuela and thus set a bad example for other countries. He had to go, and the ancien regime was to be restored even if it entailed a new dictatorship. The upper class and the military, with the approval and support of the US, planned and executed a coup and Chávez was arrested. The coup lasted only two days, because the people came down from the hills and demanded from the armed soldiers, face to face, that they return their president; and the soldiers yielded.

Chávez remained popular, but his time was cut short by a disease and he died while still young (59 years old.) New elections were held, and Nicolás Maduro became president. The US did not recognize either president. No matter how clean and open were elections and referendums, the US never accepted the votes of the people. Maduro morphed in the media from president to dictator: He had to go (and he still has to go).

It is hard to find any current international treaty that allows the US or any other country to simply declare that it is taking over another –and smaller– country. Imagine that Canada declared that it was taking over, say, Colombia. There would be an outcry throughout the world. Without international treaties to cite, and without approval of the UN’s Security Council, the US rested on the approval of allies in Western Europe, countries short of oil and gas and interested in access to immense deposits of hydrocarbons. (As an aside: Canada would not be allowed to grab Colombia in any case, because the latter is now a member of NATO, although the country is neither North nor Atlantic.)

The US scraped up what Venezuelan assets and millions of dollars it could find and turned them over to Guaidó –now a clownish meme– claiming that he would administer better the country. But he could not. His actions sounded like collusion with treason, including by allowing the US to send mercenaries to generate social disorder and, ultimately, assassinate Maduro. The plots have failed. They were to have been successful once Trump sent in Elliott Abrams, a neocon expert in undoing governments in Central America who was sanctioned by the District of Columbia Bar for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair. Whatever Abrams prescribed has made no difference, and Maduro is still president of Venezuela.

President-elect Biden would not want to begin his term saddled with the mess that his predecessors left behind: two predecessors, as Barak Obama went as far as declaring in 2015 that Venezuela represented an imminent danger to the US, without the facts to support such an assertion.

Had Trump’s plan worked, Biden might have pressed on, but the reality is that what the US has done to Venezuela remains an embarrassment for the US. In recent days, various sources have floated the idea that Biden would take back some of the sanctions now in place, but only if Maduro ignores the past and ensures “free and fair” elections. That is not simple. For the US, the only acceptable elections are those that result in what the US decides, as history shows; from Brazil 1964 to, more recently, Bolivia. The OAS (Organization of American States) is but an extension of the State Department, and the CIA is expert in organizing the desired results.

Further, there are still powerful interests who want to take Venezuela as it was done to Puerto Rico in 1898, but now with far many more natural resources at stake. And others who pushed the plan enthusiastically don’t want to end up with eggs on their faces.

The President should consider, aside of domestic politics in Miami, that Latin America is looking much as it was in 2002: Argentina is now run by the left wing of the Peronists; the MAS has returned to power in Bolivia; Brazil’s people are unhappy with their president while Lula regains political ground; the Chileans are demanding a new Constitution and their current president is facing low levels of support; Ecuador, which made friends with the US under the current presidency, may change direction in the coming elections with a new candidate supported by Rafael Correa, one of the Left presidents who emerged in 2006. Even the islands of the Caribbean are showing independence through CARICOM and other associations.

Biden has said that he wants to mend countries affected by Trump’s actions. That refers mainly to Europe, but, if he wants to do the same with Latin America –our neighbors–, he should consider the changes taking place in the Southern Hemisphere.

At a prior Summit of the Americas of 2015, when Obama was President and Biden his Vice, and Hugo Chávez handed to the president a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Obama said:

When I came to my first Summit of the Americas six years ago, I promised to begin a new chapter of engagement in this region. I believed that our nations had to break free from the old arguments, the old grievances that had too often trapped us in the past; that we had a shared responsibility to look to the future and to think and act in fresh ways. I pledged to build a new era of cooperation between our countries, as equal partners, based on mutual interest and mutual respect. And I said that this new approach would be sustained throughout my presidency; it has, including during this past year. I’ve met that commitment.

Yet, four years later, on June 28, 2019, Hillary Clinton, then in charge of the State Department, guided successfully a coup d’état in Honduras. President-elect Biden, the Vice-president at the time, surely knew of the coup.

For decades, the US has maintained toward Latin American neocolonial policies of dictatorships, coups d’état, and, more recently, regime change. Will Biden maintain the current plan of the US to overthrow the president of Venezuela?

Reminder: The United States will host the Ninth Summit of the Americas in 2021. The Summit takes place once every three years and is the only meeting of all leaders from the countries of North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean.

This was posted before Trump’s attempted coup yesterday.

"Get outta here!"

A confrontation breaks out after GOP Rep. Morgan Griffith asks to strike out comments from Rep. Conor Lamb saying Republicans lied about the election.

Lamb replies, "The truth hurts" https://t.co/wTKxzqAo9U pic.twitter.com/XDA9ArvRrG

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 7, 2021