This is Not About Protecting Americans

It’s about repeating the mistakes of the past 120 or more years

In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century (see www.randomlengthsnews.com for the timeline).

Direct intervention occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. These incidents involved the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents, or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government played an indirect role. That is, local actors played the principal roles, but either would not have acted or would not have succeeded without encouragement from the U.S. government. Source: ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America

Since before the Spanish-American War to the invasion of Panama under the first Bush administration, and now today, the US policy has not been one of defending and supporting democracies in this hemisphere, nor anywhere else. It has been about protecting US corporate investments, controlling the natural resources of other countries, for American profits, and enforcing it all with clandestine CIA actions like Chile in 1973, the Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua 1981-90, or in Guatemala (1954), the CIA-organized force ousted the democratically elected President, Jacobo Arbenz.

These are just a few of the many incidents done in the name of the United States when popularly elected leaders are overthrown by our country to keep them from protecting their nation’s interests and natural assets. Think of Chevron Oil, the United Fruit Company, or any number of mining corporations. As Gen. Smedley Butler put it in 1937, “War is a racket.” Butler (1881-1940) was a senior Marine Corps officer who fought in both the Mexican Revolution and World War I. At the time of his death, he was the most decorated Marine in U.S. history. During his 34-year career as a Marine, he participated in military actions in the Philippines, China, Central America, the Caribbean, and France. In his later years, Butler became an outspoken critic of American wars and their consequences. In 1933, he also exposed a since-ignored plot to overthrow FDR and the United States government.

Corporate capitalism doesn’t respect or trust real democracies or what benefits the citizens of any country. It’s all about greed and profits before people. The corrupt band of billionaires that surrounds the twice-impeached Orange Felon, DJ Trump, is the best example of the worst villains that America has ever produced.

The invasion of Venezuela and the arrest of their president, Nicolás Maduro, no matter what you think of him, is by any assessment a violation of international law and of the U.S. Constitution. There are now more front-page headlines than the revelations in the Epstein files that will expose just how corrupt and perverse this circle of predators actually has been. When this inner circle is finally exposed, they will not be looked upon as patriots but as traitors and criminals!

The Orange Felon’s pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize is quickly vanishing into the world war prize of fascism and greed, and yet the majority of the Republican Party simply looks the other way.

They need to be reminded of the words by Gen. Butler, “War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war, a few people make huge fortunes.”

And so, we might be urged to ask if you haven’t swallowed the current BS coming from the Oval Office, “Just who is going to profit from this assault on Venezuela?” It certainly isn’t about the drug war, and it’s definitely not about regime change. He actually said it out loud, it’s about “the oil companies” (though American taxpayers will have to chip in to make the whole venture profitable this time). And the damnable thing is, few in the corporate-owned media are willing to call the Trump administration exactly what it seems to be: “a racket!”

The common denominator in all of these invasions for the past century is the self-serving interests of American capitalism over the social and political control over other nations. And then he complains about “all these illegal aliens” coming to this country. If we as a nation were not impoverishing these countries, people wouldn’t be trying to come here to make a living.

Trump is just too stupid to see how this all is related to our own country’s misadventures in protecting corporate capitalism.

U.S. Direct Interventions –Military/CIA Activity That Changed Governments

Over the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century (see table).

Direct intervention occurred in 17 of the 41 cases. These incidents involved the use of U.S. military forces, intelligence agents, or local citizens employed by U.S. government agencies. In another 24 cases, the U.S. government played an indirect role. That is, local actors played the principal roles, but they would not have acted or succeeded without encouragement from the U.S. government.

U.S. INDIRECT INTERVENTION

Government/Regime Changes In Which The U.S. Is Decisive