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January
26
2019

The Exceptional Nation Asserts Its Exceptionalism
Paul Craig Roberts

Washington has chosen a president for Venezuela. I wonder if Trump saw the black humor in doing to Maduro what the Democrats and presstitutes are doing to him.

Few Latin American governments have ever had a government that represents the majority indigenous people or a president who was not of Spanish descent. Chavez in Venezuela perhaps was the longest lasting indigenous leader. His successor Maduro is also indigenous.

Indigenous Latin American leaders are unacceptable to Washington, because they tend to be reformers who represent their country’s people instead of American business and financial interests. Consequently, when a Latin electorate elects a leader who will put them first, Washington overthrows the leader. This is the history of US/Latin American relations.

In the 21st century alone Washington has overthrown the elected presidents of Honduras, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela and overturned the independence of Ecuador that had provided asylum protection for Julian Assange. Washington’s coup with the Spanish elite against Chavez in Venezuela initially succeeded. Chavez was in captivity, but before he could be murdered the Venezuelan people and military forced his release.

Chavez, either because he lacked the power to move against the traitorous Spanish elite or because he chose to display magnanimity, did not hold those responsible who participated in the coup against his life and Venezuelan sovereignty. Washington’s agents, the Spanish elite, were not arrested and retained their control over the media and the economy. Venezuela has substantial oil revenues, but they do not reach the government’s budget or protect the value of the currency. I do not know who controls the Venezuelan oil, but it appears the revenues are being stolen. As it seems unlikely the Spanish elites would permit the indigenous people to control the oil business, possibly the oil revenues are what funds, along with Washington, the anti-Maduro opposition. If the Maduro government is stealing the revenues, then the government is committing suicide.

Consequently, Washington and its Venezuelan vassals have had a free hand against Maduro. The whores who comprise the Western media have served Washington’s demonization of Maduro, an elected president that Washington calls a dictator. In the election that re-elected Maduro, Washington instructed the traditional Venezuelan oligarchy to boycott the election. That allowed Washington to claim that Maduro was not legitimately elected.

Of course, if there had been any chance of Washington and its Spanish vassals winning the election, they most certainly would not have boycotted it. But the whores who constitute the American media have no integrity and thereby no problem in overlooking the fact that Venezuelans prefer Maduro to Washington’s Spanish vassals.

Washington using sanctions and economic punishments has been trying for years to destabilize Venezuela in order to bring down the government and install Washington’s agent as president. This policy has cruelly punished the Venezuelan people, but nevertheless they have clung to their indigenous leadership. The other day Washington organized a military coup, but few participated and it was easily put down.

Defeated on these fronts, Washington had Trump and Pence declare that Maduro was not the president of Venezuela and that Washington recognized its agent in the legislature as president. Pence called for the newly annointed president to overthrow the Maduro government and threatened Maduro with invasion if he acted against Washington’s designated president.

Maduro’s response, a numbrer of years late, was to order all US diplomats out of Venezuela. Washington replied that as Washington does not recognize Maduro’s government as legitimate, Maduro lacks the authority to throw them out. The US diplomats will remain and continue the conspiracy against Maduro.

Here we have a situation in which Washington, not the Venezuelan people, has chosen the president of Venezuela and refuses to accept the Venezuelan government’s break of diplomatic relations.

As I write, indications are that Washington’s vassals in Canada and Europe are also withdrawing recognition from the legally elected government of Venezuela, conferring recognition instead on the unelected agent of American business and financial interests selected by Washington.

What does this say about the West? The West regards itself as the home of integrity, human rights, democracy, truth, and goodness. But in fact the West is committed to supporting Washington’s suppression of Venezuelan self-determination.

What Washington is doing to Venezuela is a good lesson for the gullible Russian Atlanticist Integrationists and the gullible pro-western Chinese youth. As China’s Global Times put it: “For a long time, the US has been eager to replace international law with its geopolitical interests and values so as to legalize its interference” and hegemony over the world. https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-01-24/china-joins-russia-slamming-us-interference-venezuela

Putin expressed his support for the legitimacy of Maduro’s government and said that the Venezuelan internal political crisis was “provoked from outside the country.”http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1136984.shtml

Will Washington announce tomorrow that the US has decided that Alexei Navalny, not Vladimir Putin, is president of Russia? Will Washington announce that the US no longer considers Xi Jinping to be China’s president, as his one party regime makes him illegitimate, and has replaced him with Tsai Lng-Wen?

How long will other powers tolerate Washington’s illegality and aggression?

How long will Americans tolerate the shame that Washington heaps upon their shoulders?

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

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