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By Jonathan Cook

The path to Caracas – and potentially next to Colombia, Cuba and Greenland, other targets of Donald Trump’s colonial greed – was paved in Gaza.

6 Jan 2026 – For decades, the United States and Israel have stuck closely to their respective, scripted roles in the Middle East: the job of good cop and bad cop.

The charade has continued despite Washington’s active participation in Israel’s 25-month slaughter of Gaza’s people – and a dawning realisation among ever-larger sections of western publics that they have been duped.

Here is my first prediction of 2026: this law enforcement role-playing is going to continue even after the Trump administration’s outrageously illegal abduction of Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, at the weekend, and Trump’s admission that the US attack was about grabbing the country’s oil.

The path to Caracas – and potentially next to Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland and Canada, other targets of Donald Trump’s greed – was paved in Gaza.

It is worth standing back, as one year ends and another begins, to consider how we got here, and what lies ahead.

The central conceit of the good cop, bad cop narrative is that both the US and Israel are the ones upholding the law and fighting the criminals.

Unlike the Hollywood version, neither of these real-world cops is in any way good. But there is a further difference: the spectacle is not intended for those the pair confront. After all, the Palestinians know only too well that they have been suffering for decades under the boot of a lawless, joint US-Israeli criminal enterprise.

No, the intended audience are the onlookers: western publics.

Ban on aid groups

The US “honest broker” myth should have perished long ago. But somehow it persists, despite the evidence endlessly discrediting it. And that is because western capitals and western media keep propping the myth up, treating it as a plausible description of events it simply cannot explain.

Nothing has disrupted the official “policing” storyline in Gaza, supposedly against Hamas “law-breaking”.

It is now echoed in Trump’s outlandish claim that his self-declared oil grab in Venezuela is really about bringing Maduro to justice for supposed drug trafficking – or “narco-terrorism” as the administration prefers to call it.

Why has Gaza dropped off the front pages? Only because the “good cop” declares it has brought hostilities from the “bad cop” to an end.

Last week, Trump publicly applauded Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence, for sticking to the president’s so-called “peace plan”. “Israel has lived up to the plan, 100 percent,” Trump declared.

The reality, however, is that Israel violated the “ceasefire” nearly 1,000 times in the first two months after it was supposed to go into effect, in mid-October. Israel continues to kill and starve the people of Gaza, if at a slower rate.

Last week Israel announced it was banning 37 humanitarian organisations from Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders, which supports one in five emergency hospitals beds in the strip. The group noted that Israel was “cutting off life-saving medical assistance for hundreds of thousands of people”.

The ceasefire is just the latest storyline in a two-year piece of theatre.

Horrifying dream

While western capitals and the media stubbornly adhere to the good cop, bad cop narrative, western publics have started waking from it, as if from a bad dream.

The mass demonstrations of two years ago may have gradually shrunk in numbers, but only after western politicians and media waged an aggressive war of attrition and campaign of vilification against them. Public exhaustion has set in.

The cause of the disbelief and anger that spurred millions to take to the streets, and to campuses, remains unaddressed. Western powers are still colluding deeply in Israel’s crimes. The public’s initial outrage has slowly hardened into a burning resentment and disdain towards their own political and media establishments.

That mood intensifies each time western officials, unable to win the argument, resort to force.

Britain illustrates especially starkly the authoritarian, repressive trends visible across the West.

There, protests against genocide have been designated “hate marches”. Slogans in solidarity with the Palestinians are now grounds for arrest for antisemitism. Journalists critical of the government have been arrested or their homes raided.

Support for practical action to stop the genocide, by targeting the weapons factories supplying Israel with killer drones, is now classed as terrorism.

The government is flaunting its indifference – again backed by the media – as anti-genocide activists risk death to protest the outlawing of Palestine Action and their abusive treatment by prison authorities, in the biggest UK hunger strike since the IRA’s nearly half a century ago.

To no effect, a group of United Nations legal experts – called special rapporteurs –expressed grave concern last month at the UK’s flouting of international law in its treatment of the hunger-strikers, who face prolonged detention on remand in violation of British law.

Just before Christmas, the world’s most famous environmental campaigner, Greta Thunberg, was arrested in London by the Metropolitan Police for holding a sign drawing attention to the plight of those prisoners.

This has been a process of escalation, of upping the stakes. First, opposition to Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians was conflated with antisemitism. Now opposition to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians is conflated with terrorism.

Scrapping jury trials

The task of western establishments – and their media – has been to shore up a patently duplicitous narrative to excuse their complicity in the Gaza genocide: that the more vocal the criticism of Israel, the more evident the antisemitism.

The implication is clear. The correct response to that genocide is silence.

Ultimately, domestic courts in the UK – led by a judiciary highly unrepresentative of wider British society – are unlikely to hold the line against this all-out assault on law, morality and basic logic.

The test will be a ruling by the High Court, expected soon, on the legality of the British government’s decision to outlaw Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation – the first time a direct-action group has been proscribed in British history.

Worryingly, the judge hearing the case – who, in approving the judicial review, had indicated a degree of scepticism about proscription – was removed from the hearing at the last minute and without explanation. He was replaced by a new panel of three judges who have a track record of demonstrating more deference to the British state.

[https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1993632270658285827]

The lacuna in this growing domestic architecture of authoritarianism is the right to trial by jury. Unsurprisingly, juries have a tendency to take a far more critical view of the British establishment’s behaviour than the establishment does itself.

For centuries, juries have been a central component of fair trials, and viewed as a fundamental to a justice system capable of limiting state power and governmental overreach.

Now the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced plans to scrap many jury trials – citing the need to address a record backlog of cases, a backlog it is failing to address by properly funding the court system.

Once the principle is conceded, it is surely only a matter of time before all jury trials are eradicated.

Bank accounts frozen

Already, under government direction, judges in political trials – notably in climate protest cases – have been denying defendants the chance to explain their motivations and reasoning to juries.

That is because too often, when presented with information the media has withheld from them, those juries acquit.

Starmer’s government understands that efforts to crush the Palestinian solidarity movement, and chill speech critical of UK complicity in genocide, depend on securing convictions. Juries are an obstacle.

Even so, the government has up its sleeve other punishments – outside the scope of judicial scrutiny – that can be used to penalise pro-Palestinian activism, whether it be efforts to stop Israel’s genocide or to simply ameliorate the suffering of its victims.

Last month it emerged that the National Crime Agency, a body answerable to government ministers, was likely behind efforts to economically intimidate and vilify the wider Palestinian solidarity movement.

The bank accounts of solidarity groups in Manchester and Scotland have been frozen, as part of investigations into Palestine Action, despite neither having an affiliation with the direct-action group.

These underhand, extrajudicial moves by the government hamper efforts to raise or donate money to charities that help feed Palestinians in Gaza, treat the wounded and house those without shelter in the winter.

It is hard to get one’s head round the depravity of these decisions.

Declared non-person

This is far from just a British problem. Other western states are following suit in a bid not only to rehabilitate the genocidal state of Israel but to erase any perception of their own participation in its crimes.

And the template is being rolled out not just domestically but at the international level too.

While western states bully their publics into silence on Gaza, international humanitarian institutions have done their best to hold their nerve.

United Nations special rapporteurs – independent legal experts – have issued a series of damning reports on Israel’s genocide and western complicity.

The US responded last week by slashing $15bn from its funding of UN humanitarian agencies.

Most visible among the rapporteurs has been the UN’s expert on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. Washington’s response to her has been illuminating.

In July she was placed on a US Treasury sanctions list normally reserved for those accused of terrorism, drug trafficking or money laundering. Her listing came a few days after she published her report on the collusion of western corporations in Israel’s genocide.

The US sanctions violate the diplomatic immunity she enjoys as a UN official and make it impossible for her to attend meetings at UN headquarters in New York.

With the US effectively exercising a stranglehold on the international financial system, the sanctions also mean no banks or credit cards will allow her to use their services. She cannot be paid by employers. She cannot book a flight or hotel.

Universities, human rights institutions and charities have cut her adrift for fear of facing reprisals themselves if they continue to have dealings with her.

Her assets in the US have been frozen, including her bank account and an apartment. It is unlikely her new book on Palestine can be distributed in the US.

Effectively, Albanese has been turned into a non-person, with the silent consent of western politicians and media.

ICC sanctioned

The State Department justified the sanctions on the grounds Albanese had recommended that the International Criminal Court issue arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

In fact, ICC judges approved the arrest warrants in November 2024 after the court’s prosecutors amassed evidence of crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu and Gallant, chiefly over their imposition of an aid blockade to starve Gaza’s population.

It was no surprise, therefore, that the Trump administration has issued similar sanctions against eight judges at the Hague war crimes court, either for approving those arrest warrants or for authorising an investigation into crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan.

In an executive order announcing the sanctions in February, Trump declared a “national emergency”, saying the court represented an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States”.

You might imagine that this lawless move against some of the most renowned jurists in the world would have provoked considerable pushback in Europe. You would be wrong. The all-out assault on one of the main pillars of international law has been barely mentioned.

Le Monde broke ranks in November to interview French judge Nicolas Guillou. He detailed the impact since he was sanctioned in August: “All my accounts with American companies, such as Amazon, Airbnb, PayPal and others, have been closed… Being under sanctions is like being sent back to the 1990s.”

European banks, fearful of the US Treasury, also closed his accounts, and European companies refuse to provide him with services.

He concluded: “Putting someone under sanctions creates a state of permanent anxiety and powerlessness, with the intent of discouragement.”

Washington has sanctioned too the ICC’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, and two of his deputies.

In fact, Khan, a British lawyer, has found himself embroiled in a protracted legal and reputational struggle ever since he submitted the applications in May 2024.

That included threats, reported by Middle East Eye, from the then UK foreign secretary David Cameron that Britain would defund the court and withdraw from the Rome Statute that founded the ICC if Khan did not back down.

‘Might is right’ politics

Clearly, Israel and the US are eager to intimidate the court, and ready to destroy it rather than be judged by international law standards and held accountable for their crimes.

But the sanctions have an additional audience: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), sometimes referred to as the World Court.

Its panel of 15 judges have issued a series of rulings over the past two years against Israel.

Most explosively, the ICJ ruled in January 2024 that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. As a result, the ICJ is currently investigating Israel for this, the ultimate crime.

The wheels of justice turn slowly at the World Court. But its judges are undoubtedly watching the treatment of Albanese and the ICC with alarm.

Like gangsters, Israel and the US are sending a very direct message to each of the ICJ judges: you will be punished too, if you dare to find us guilty.

ICC judge Nicholas Gillou notes that Europe could show solidarity with the victims of these sanctions by invoking what is known as “a blocking statute” – a mechanism that protects EU citizens and companies from the effects of sanctions imposed by third countries.

But any hope that Europe will break ranks with the US and Israel over this naked attack on the two main courts upholding international law – bulwarks against a return to “might is right” global politics – is almost certainly forlorn.

Last month, drawing on the Trump playbook, the European Union imposed economic sanctions on a dozen of its own critics.

Notable was the inclusion of Jacques Baud, a former colonel in the Swiss army. His distinguished military career includes leading peacekeeping missions for the UN, including in Rwanda and Sudan, and serving as a Nato senior strategic analyst.

Reputational assassination

Baud was accused of no crime. His offence is being deeply critical of European officials and the strategic coherence of their support for war in Ukraine. Given his military expertise, his analyses are embarrassing European establishments.

The draconian sanctions mean he is effectively imprisoned in Belgium, where he lives. He cannot leave to return to Switzerland. His assets are frozen. He cannot use a bank account and cannot have any kind of economic relations with other citizens of the EU.

Baud cannot appeal the decision or subject it to judicial review. Like Albanese he has been turned into a non-person.

A precedent has thereby been set that means anyone who challenges western leaders – whether judges, journalists, lawyers, or human rights groups – could similarly end up destitute.

What the US and the EU are rolling out are extrajudicial reputational assassinations and economic incarcerations, as a way to silence critics and watchdogs, that cannot be appealed.

This is a model Israel and its lobbyists in the West have been trialling for years.

The US doxing website Canary Mission, for example, seeks to destroy the careers and livelihoods of students and academics critical of Israel.

Meanwhile, the lawfare group UK Lawyers for Israel is currently under investigation for threatening individuals and groups with vexatious legal actions to pressure them into retracting their solidarity with Palestinians.

Criminals in charge

Washington – the gangster-in-chief posing as global policeman – refuses to accept any limitations on its actions. If legal authorities, whether domestic or international, try to stand in its way, they are either punished or pushed aside.

In this topsy-turvy world, Trump’s naked exercise of colonial violence is feted as peace-making. As he was massing troops off Venezuela’s coast last month, Fifa, the international football federation, awarded him its inaugural peace prize – an honour created specifically to stroke his ego.

Though the Nobel Committee could not bring itself to hand the peace prize directly to Trump, its judges did the next best thing. They awarded it to Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuela opposition leader who has publicly called on the US to invade her country and seize its resources.

The complete abandonment of long-standing international legal safeguards puts everyone in jeopardy – all the more so when technological developments mean states have near-absolute control over their citizens’ lives, and super-powers can use ever more sophisticated weapons to wreck countries at little cost to themselves in blood or treasure.

But paradoxically, the very act of dismantling the global system of international law is still being dressed up in the garb of law enforcement.

Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza is supposedly needed to defeat Hamas’ “illegitimate” rule. The abduction of Maduro from Caracas is sold as the enforcement of drug-trafficking laws.

European leaders’ response to Trump’s crime of aggression against Venezuela signals where things head next.

Britain’s Starmer effectively welcomed Washington’s criminal regime-change operation and threat to occupy Venezuela to control its oil. He said he “shed no tears” for Maduro.

Similarly, Kaja Kallas, Europe’s foreign policy chief, emphasised Maduro’s supposed lack of “legitimacy”.

Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Denmark, Greenland, Canada – all in Washington’s sights – should fear that similar “legal” pretexts will be found to justify attacks on their own sovereignty.

Trump’s favourite new catchphrase is that he can do global business “the easy way or the hard way”.

Now, having shredded international law, the “good cop” looks ready to discard an outdated disguise and reveal the serial villain underneath.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.

19 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Michael J. Talmo

16 Jan 2026 – In 1992, a simple slogan helped Bill Clinton get elected President of the United States: “It’s the economy, stupid!” The phrase was coined by political consultant James Carville, and it worked like a charm. Clinton defeated sitting President George Bush, Sr. (1924-2018) in a landslide victory. Clinton captured 368 electoral votes to Bush’s 168. It’s time for a liberal/progressive presidential candidate to adopt an updated version of that slogan. Hence, the title of this article.

But it won’t be quite that simple. Decades of unfettered right-wing propaganda have brainwashed the public into blaming minorities for our economic and social problems. We have legions of uninformed, ignorant voters who don’t know up from down. The poor and middle class have become a divided people, while the billionaire class has remained united. To change this, Americans, along with people in other countries, because billionaire wealth is a global problem, must first understand what’s really going on. Otherwise, they will remain mere pawns on the chessboard of life.

The situation we’re in

In 2017, Forbes Magazine reported that the three richest men in America, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates, “collectively hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the domestic population, ‘a total of 160 million people or 63 million American households,” with an estimated “combined fortune” of “$263 billion.” But that’s nothing compared to how billionaire wealth has skyrocketed since then.

In April 2025, Fortune Magazine reported that “the world’s billionaires now hold more wealth than every country in the world except the U.S. and China.” Take a minute to let that sink in, folks. We now have a global population of around 8.3 billion people within 195 countries. The combined population of the U.S. and China is around 1.8 billion. Meaning, the 3,028 billionaires occupying our planet with a combined net worth of $16.1 trillion dollars have more wealth than 6.5 billion people. With 808 million of those people living in extreme poverty, another 3.5 billion who are “poor by a standard that is more relevant for upper middle-income countries,” and 67% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, how can hoarding all of that wealth possibly be moral or economically justified?

As Business Insider reported, we are living in a second Gilded Age, which began with the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) in 1981. Like the first Gilded Age of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, our country is now ruled by oligarchs, which the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines as “government by the few” or “a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes.” Some synonyms for “oligarchy” are “despotism,” “tyranny,” “totalitarianism,” “repression,” “dominance,” and “subjugation.” And as explained, after that list of synonyms, oligarchs are usually the rich and privileged.

Nevertheless, there are millions of poor and middle-class people who have been duped into thinking that there’s nothing wrong with a few people having so much money and power. They think that billionaires are self-made and that anyone can be rich if they work hard enough. They believe that billionaires create jobs and are innovative geniuses that tirelessly work to improve our standard of living. They believe that the best way to help them accomplish this is via tax cuts and deregulation of their mega business empires, which is often referred to as “trickle-down” economics. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Burying the myths

As explained here and here, billionaires started out with parents who were either rich or upper middle class and who, in some cases, had connections to the wealthy. For example, Bill Gates came from a well-to-do family to begin with. But as CNBC reported, his mother knew the chairman/president of IBM, which helped Gates’ company, Microsoft, land the contract that in one year would make him a billionaire at age 31. Jeff Bezos got $250,000 from his parents to launch his business. In the case of billionaires like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they were born on home plate. Musk’s family owned an emerald mine, and Fred Trump (1905-1999) had a net worth of 200 million. Of course, there are poor and low-income highly talented entertainers like Elvis Presley (1935-1977) and gifted athletes like Muhammad Ali (1942-2016) who became wealthy. But they’re the exception and not the rule.

As for wealth trickling down, it doesn’t. Business Insider reported on a 2022 study that “demolishes the myth that tax cuts for the rich will trickle down.” The London School of Economics and Political Science reported on a comprehensive 2020 study that analyzed “data from 18 OECD countries over the last five decades” and found (see Abstract) “that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality” and that “such reforms do not have any significant effects on economic growth and unemployment.” The London School emphatically stated that history has shown us “that policies relying on ‘trickle-down economics’ are destined to fail.”

Nevertheless, as Investopedia reported, it was President Ronald Reagan in the U.S. and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013) in the U.K. who brought trickle-down economics into mainstream politics, where it still remains entrenched to this day. Reagan even gave it a cutesy name that was coined by political strategist, Jude Wanniski (1936-2005), “supply-side economics.” But no matter what you call it, making the rich a whole lot richer benefits no one but the very rich and does immense harm to the rest of us.

Facing reality

Economics 101: What drives an economy? Demand! People having money in their pockets to buy things. Put adequate amounts of money into the pockets of poor and middle-class people, and they put it right back into the economy, which allows it to grow and provide more jobs. This, in turn, adequately funds the government via taxation, which then gives that revenue back to the people via maintaining the infrastructure and by providing and funding needed public services like fire departments, protection from criminals, mail delivery, public libraries, education, and a strong social safety net that includes healthcare and providing help in times of adversity. This creates a virtuous cycle.

Obscenely rich billionaires interfere with the aforementioned virtuous cycle by sucking most of the wealth out of the economy. They have so much money that they can’t possibly spend it (there aren’t enough of them to buy enough stuff to keep an economy going anyway), so they either hoard it, which is a big problem by itself, or they use it to cause even worse problems.

Pollution

Last November, Yahoo News reported that “fifty of the world’s richest billionaires emit more carbon through their investments, private jets, and yachts in just 90 minutes than the average person does in their entire lifetime.” It would take the average person “860 years” to emit the same amount of carbon.

For example, Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon: His “private jets alone have emitted as much carbon as an average US Amazon employee would over 207 years.” That same month, UPI News reported that “Billionaires create over a million times more greenhouse gas emissions than average person.” Back in 2022, Euronews reported that “125 ultra-wealthy individuals emit the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions of 85 million cars in a year.”

For those among you who either don’t think global warming is real or who think it isn’t caused by humans, keep in mind that this is irrelevant to the fact that air and water pollution from fossil fuels kills millions of people every year and causes illness in many more. In 2022, the peer-reviewed journal The Lancet reported that “pollution remains responsible for approximately 9 million deaths per year,” which makes it “an existential threat to human health and planetary health, and jeopardises the sustainability of modern societies.” Pollution includes “contamination of the ocean by mercury, nitrogen, phosphorous, plastic, and petroleum waste; and poisoning of the land by lead, mercury, pesticides, industrial chemicals, electronic waste, and radioactive waste.”

Healthcare

America is the only wealthy industrialized country that doesn’t guarantee healthcare to all of its citizens nor even recognize it as a human right. Instead, healthcare is viewed as a commodity rather than as a vital public service. But as bad as for-profit health insurance companies and hospitals are, even worse are billionaires’ private equity firms, which buy up private medical practices, hospitals, nursing homes, you name it.

Missouri Medicine, the peer-reviewed journal of the Missouri State Medical Association, explained in this 2024 report that “private equity typically acquires healthcare entities to load them with debt, while distributing the funds received from the loans back to investors as dividends,” which results in “lower quality or an outright denial of medical care, a shortage of equipment, a firing of employees, and an increase in prices. Patients and physicians lose, at the expense of short-term private equity profits. In many cases, the ultimate outcome is closure or bankruptcy, leaving patients and employees stranded.” Hospital closures especially apply to rural hospitals, where traveling to a hospital emergency room much farther away could cost too many people their lives. But “private equity firms are not motivated by providing quality medical care to a community but rather are squeezing their targets for profits.”

Housing

An October 2025 Common Dreams article reported that in the U.S., “Billionaire demand for luxury housing is driving up the cost of land and housing construction, supercharging the already existing housing crisis” and that “Billionaire speculators are buying up rental housing, single family homes, and mobile home parks to squeeze more money out of the existing housing shortage,” which has been going on for decades and may take another decade to correct, as reported by J.P. Morgan. The NHC further reported that unaffordable housing has become “a nationwide affordability crisis that now impacts workers across nearly all income levels,” which has also been caused by “rising interest rates,” along with “wage stagnation,” which has also been going on for decades.

The NHC reported here and here that in Asheville, civil engineers cannot afford to buy a home despite a salary of nearly $100,000. Construction laborers and electricians cannot even afford to rent one-bedroom apartments. In Seattle, a dentist earning over $200,000 a year cannot afford a typically priced home with 10% down,” which is “eroding stability for workers, employers, and communities…the American dream of home ownership is slipping away.” In fact, Yahoo Finance reported in a 2025 article that middle-class people won’t be able to afford a home within ten years, along with nine other things.

Food

A report by Farm Aid explained that “A handful of corporations control our food from farm to fork. Their unbridled power grants them increasing political influence over the rules that govern our food system and allows them to manipulate the marketplace.” The result is a corporate system that drives family farmers out of business by lowering the prices paid to them while raising prices that consumers pay for groceries, along with giving them fewer choices. In other words, as reported in this 2024 article in The Atlantic, “Mergers and acquisitions have created food oligopolies that are inefficient, barely regulated, unfair, and even dangerous,” which, as explained in this 2024 article in The Conversation, is “damaging our health, our communities, and the planet.”

And who owns/controls the aforementioned food oligopolies? As reported in Euronews. Billionaires! Forbes Magazine and ABC News list who those billionaires are here and here. Naturally, the goal of this kind of corporate monopoly is to maximize profits, not provide healthy food, which is why singer Willie Nelson, founder and president of Farm Aid, emphatically stated that “Our food system belongs in the hands of many family farmers, not under the control of a handful of corporations.”

Jobs

Last year, Elon Musk declared that “AI and robots will replace all jobs” and that “working will be optional,” more like a hobby. Also last year, Common Dreams reported that “AI could kill nearly 100 million US jobs.” Within the next 10 years alone, AI and robots could replace “40% of registered nurses,” “64% of accountants,” “65% of teaching assistants,” and “89% of fast food workers, among many other occupations.” It’s happening already. There are self-driving trucking companies that brag about eliminating the need to pay high wages to human drivers. Predatory capitalism has always been about cheap labor. “UnitedHealth Group, JPMorgan Chase, and other companies are openly telling investors that AI will allow them to slash payrolls—even as they post tens of billions in profits and reward CEOs with pay packages of $25 million, $35 million, or more.”

And let’s not overlook the danger AI and robotics pose to our freedom and to our very existence. In this 2023 analysis, the BMJ warned that “seeking to create machines that are vastly more intelligent and powerful than ourselves” opens the door to “the potential for such machines to apply this intelligence and power—whether deliberately or not—in ways that could harm or subjugate humans.” This possibility “is real and has to be considered,” as reported here and here. Of course, while Elon Musk gets all gushy and squishy about AI and robots taking our jobs, he muses that this “will make everyone rich” via a “universal high income.” Don’t fall for it, folks. If AI and robots wind up in the hands of a few greedy billionaires, I strongly doubt if things will bode well for the rest of us.

The media

The mainstream news media used to be governed by an FCC policy called the fairness doctrine. Since 1949, it required TV and radio news broadcasters to present both sides of controversial issues “in a manner that fairly reflected differing viewpoints.” Instead of expanding the fairness doctrine to cover cable networks, it was abolished under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. This, as reported by the Poynter Institute, “accelerated the polarization of US media,” which, along with corporate deregulation, led to a few billionaires controlling just about all of the media not only here but globally, which is crushing democracy and human rights, as reported here and here. Among the top media billionaires is Rupert Murdoch, who owns dozens of outlets that include Fox News, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Times in the U.K. Elon Musk owns Twitter, now X, Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook; and Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

As explained in this 2025 Yahoo News report, none of these billionaires are trained journalists. Instead, they rely on a sea of trolls, grifters, and pseudo-journalists who will spew their right-wing propaganda. Just about all of them are multimillionaires. Some examples: Fox’s Laura Ingraham, net worth: $40 million; Sean Hannity, also Fox News, net worth: $250 million; Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire, net worth: $50 million; Candice Owens, net worth: $5 million. But her husband, George Farmer, has a net worth of $10 million. Yes, there are centrist journalists and even some fairly liberal ones in the media. But they’re vastly outnumbered by the conservative right-wing ones. So, when you hear news commentators on Fox, Newsmax, etc., denouncing universal healthcare, keep in mind that all of them are so rich that they don’t need health insurance, so they don’t care. Their job is to put a happy face on economic and social policies that make the rich richer and the rest of us a whole lot poorer.

Government

The ultimate achievement of the enormous wealth of this planet’s billionaires is the capture of the U.S. government, along with the governments of other rich countries. Last year, Harvard University reported on a 2014 study conducted by Princeton and Northwestern Universities, which “concluded that the U.S. government represents not the interests of the majority of citizens but those of the rich and powerful,” which makes America “not a democracy at all, but a functional oligarchy.” And as explained in this 2023 study published by Cambridge University Press, “billionaires formally enter the political sphere at a much higher rate in autocracies than in democracies” and “have a strong track record of winning elections.” And in this 2025 article, CEO Today reported that Elon Musk is among the “billionaire puppeteers” who are “gaining control over global politics,” which “raises serious concerns about the concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals.”

In my country, the U.S., the corruption is too vast for words. Most of our U.S. congressmen and presidents, along with many state legislators and governors, must rely on wealthy campaign donors to get elected. Most of them like this rotten system because they can get a whole lot richer after they leave office by becoming corporate lobbyists, by getting a cushy corporate job, or by getting huge fees for speaking engagements even if they say complete gibberish. In exchange, the billionaires get to enjoy the tax breaks and tax loopholes that they lobby for, which allows them and the huge corporations they either own or control as major shareholders to pay little or no taxes, including inheritance taxes, so they can build their family dynasties. And they usually get away with crimes that would send the rest of us to prison, while they get governments to pretty much cater to their every whim.

Example: In this 2025 article, Yahoo Finance reported that the world’s two richest men, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, “didn’t pay a dime in federal income tax” in some years, along with Michael Bloomberg, Carl Icahn, and George Soros, just to name some. This, as reported in ProPublica, “demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share.” In other years, “IRS records show that the wealthiest can—perfectly legally—pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.” As for Donald Trump, a New York Times report revealed that he “paid just $750 in federal income tax upon entering the White House” in 2017 and “no income tax at all in 11 of the 18 years that the Times reviewed.” Investopedia and ITEP further reported that “it’s not unusual for large U.S. corporations to pay no U.S. income taxes despite making billions of dollars in profits.”

Example: Common Dreams and Democracy Now explained why Trump blatantly violated U.S. and international law by attacking Venezuela and abducting President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, who are now on trial in New York City for a litany of drug charges. But if Trump was really concerned about illegal drugs killing Americans, he wouldn’t have pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence for helping to drug-traffic “more than 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.” Turns out that the real reason is with Maduro gone, “Paul Singer, a billionaire who is a top donor to President Trump, is set to profit immensely since his investment firm purchased Citgo, the U.S.- based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company.” Right-wing organizations funded by Singer had been pushing for the ouster of Maduro, and Trump delivered. It’s that simple.

Example: In this 2022 article, City Journal reported that the COVID-19 lockdowns “brought little benefit and much harm.” They “hurt the economy, impeded education, and harmed the development of children.” In this 2021 article, Business Insider reported that “200 million to 500 million people” fell into poverty in 2020. But not to worry because Business Insider also reported that the world’s billionaires didn’t suffer any economic hardship at all. They “added 4 trillion to their wealth.” The World Economic Forum explained that “much of the financial gain for billionaires resulted from approaching the initial impact of the pandemic on asset prices.” In other words, “as assets like stocks suddenly got much cheaper, the wealthy were able to accumulate significantly more of them before they regained value. Most people don’t have the same type of access to equity markets as the wealthy.” And let’s also not forget that since Trump took office in 2025, the “10 richest Americans have gained 700 billion in wealth.”

Bottom line: nobody can work hard enough or long enough to earn a billion dollars, much less multiple billions of dollars. “Rent extraction, financial speculation, resource monopolization, and exploiting working people does,” as reported in Jacobin. And if the very wealthy do occasionally wind up in an American prison, many of which are torture chambers as reported here and here, not to worry. They have special luxury prisons prisons for millionaires and billionaires. That’s the way the mop flops in America. Country club prisons for the rich and brutal torture chambers for us peasants. Isn’t oligarchy just grand?

Divide and conquer

Since the billionaires who currently run things don’t want to share their wealth, which results in a much lower standard of living for just about all the rest of us, they manipulate the public into thinking that various minority groups are responsible for their problems. This creates an underclass of scapegoats to bully, persecute, and inflict unimaginable acts of cruelty on. Who that underclass is changes over time. For now, it’s immigrants, transgender people, and drag queens. It’s the oldest trick in the book: “Look at those people over there so you won’t pay attention to what we’re doing over here.”

To accomplish this cultural charade, they rely on their massive right-wing media echo chamber, which includes a whole army of YouTubers and podcasters who got rich spewing hate, lies, and propaganda. It is in this culture war arena that ignorance resonates, stupidity reverberates, and bigotry radiates. These usually multimillionaire grifters are a bunch of useless little parasites feeding off the bigger, even more useless billionaire parasites. In politics, a grifter is a con artist who uses the political process to enrich themselves. The Republican Party wallows in this grift like pigs wallow in mud because they have nothing to offer except tax cuts for the wealthy. So, they focus on made-up culture wars where they can assume a fake moral high ground and pretend that they are righteous and good.

The most effective way to make people fall for the scapegoating minorities con is by claiming that children need to be protected—especially when it comes to sex. This is the moral high ground of right-wing conservatism, its ivory tower of virtue. This kind of propaganda shuts down all logic and critical thinking because of our Christian culture’s discomfort with sex, as explained here and here. In the study of argumentation, this is known as the “think of the children” fallacy, which is an aspect of the “appeal to emotion” fallacy. Logical fallacies are errors in reasoning that lead to wrong conclusions. Since the sex is dirty and sinful paradigm is so ingrained in Western society, even non-religious people hold these core views, which makes the protecting kids fallacy so difficult to overcome. It shuts down rational discussion and prevents people from looking at the consequences of what’s being proposed.

Obviously, and of course, children need to be protected from sexual predators. But censoring the internet, watching porn, books in school, and being exposed to other lifestyles isn’t about protecting kids—it’s an excuse to take everyone’s rights away. It’s about control. This is more easily accomplished in a society of wealth inequality and economic hardship. When people are in survival mode, they are less concerned about protecting the rights of others and become more tribal. They are easier to manipulate. Billionaire oligarchs thrive on division and conflict. They don’t want the public to realize that culture wars are manufactured moral panics designed to distract them. Class warfare is what’s very real and what we need to unite against.

Last year, Erika Kirk, the late Charlie Kirk’s widow, made the ultimate Freudian slip. As reported here and in this video, she was “presenting the inaugural Charlie Kirk Courage Award to Utah University student Caleb Chilcutt,” when she said, “Despite the devastating loss of Charlie Kirk, my incredible husband at UVU, Caleb has persisted with the same grift.”

Naturally, Erika flubbed around trying to correct herself, uttering the word “gift” and then “grit,” and finally saying, “It has been a long day!” She then turned to Chilcutt and said, “Trust me, you’re not a grifter, honey. It’s all good.”

Sorry to tell you this, dear boy: in my humble opinion, Erika Kirk was totally correct when she called you a grifter.

So, to all of you xenophobes, racists, religious fanatics, and nice folks who don’t feel comfortable with those who are different, I implore you: Wake up. Instead of worrying about who’s picking your strawberries, worry about who’s picking your pocket; instead of worrying about who’s washing your car, worry about who’s taking you to the cleaners; instead of worrying about who’s working at Home Depot, worry about the fact that future generations won’t be able to afford a home. Instead of worrying about who’s in the bathroom, worry about your life being flushed down the toilet, because while you get to feel morally superior and think you’re defending civilization from the forces of evil and fruitcakery, your billionaire overlords are tearing civilization out from under you while laughing all the way to their offshore bank accounts.

What the future holds

Last year, the London School of Economics (LSE) reported “that the world is now on course for no less than five trillionaires within a decade.” Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison will most likely be among them. The first Gilded Age was bad enough. But with AI, Robots, and other kinds of futuristic technology, this second Gilded age could soon be much worse and won’t just affect our jobs as I mentioned previously.

Yuval Noah Harari, PhD, is a bestselling author, historian, and professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. At this 2020 Davos meeting, Dr. Harari laid out the potentially diabolical future that soon-to- be trillionaire elites have in store for us:

“In the coming decades, AI and biotechnology will give us god-like abilities to re-engineer life and even to create completely new life forms. After 4 billion years of organic life shaped by natural selection, we are about to enter a new era of inorganic life shaped by intelligent design. Our intelligent design is going to be the new driving force of the evolution of life. And in using these powers of creation, we might make mistakes on a cosmic scale.”

In this 2021 60 Minutes interview, Dr. Harari warned that if these “new technologies are available only to the rich,” it could lead to “a process of greater inequality than in any previous time in history because for the first time, it will be real biological inequality…Homo sapiens will split into different biological castes” with “different bodies and different abilities.” In other words, we might see a whole race of humanoids that are much stronger, faster, and far more intelligent than the rest of us. Beings that might have a much greater life span and who are almost impossible to kill. Beings that will see themselves as gods among insects.

Another technology wealthy elites might use against us is optogenetics, which has the potential to restore brain function and cure diseases by genetically modifying targeted cells in our gray matter with light. But in this video on the World Economic Forum’s website, Nobel Prize winning Japanese scientist Susumu Tonegawa, PhD explained that with optogenetics, “our memory, our emotions, and even thoughts can be manipulated. This is the idea that has existed only in the realm of science fiction until recently.”

Please understand that I’m not anti-progress and technology. I recognize all of the benefits AI and robotics can give us. But it’s foolhardy not to recognize the enormous danger they pose in the wrong hands. And I have no doubt that in the hands of power-obsessed trillionaire elites, they will be used not only to control our lives but also our minds, our memories, our emotions, and reality itself. They will become too powerful for any of us to stop them. Of course, their plans could backfire, and these technologies might wind up controlling or destroying them along with the rest of us.

What must be done

In 1887, historian and politician Lord Acton (1834-1902) famously wrote that “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Wealth is power, and giving the ultra-wealthy the power they wield is the equivalent of giving sadistic despots like Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) or Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) the abilities of Superman. Power is a drug. It’s a narcotic, a hallucinogenic drug that warps the mind and mangles the soul. And it’s addictive. The more you get, the more you want. As explained here and here, wealth/power retards one’s humanity and the ability to tell right from wrong.

Power over others is the reason why the police sadistically abuse and kill citizens; it’s the reason why prison guards abuse and kill prisoners; it’s the reason why politicians like Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu can callously give orders that mass murder Palestinian men, women, and children. It’s the reason why state and federal legislators can pass laws denying people vital medical care to serve a religious or political agenda. It’s the reason why employers and the managers under them, even in small businesses, abuse their employees.

Of course, not everyone who’s a billionaire or in positions of power will do terrible things. But many will because violent, angry, sadistic, manipulative, greedy types are the kinds of people who usually crave wealth and power and who far too often succeed in getting them. Therefore, we must, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) declared in this 1936 speech about the danger of wealth inequality, “take away their power.” Here is how.

Get rid of all billionaires. I don’t mean kill them. I mean confiscate their wealth, which they didn’t earn, break up the corporate monopolies they control, and give those trillions back to the rest of us where it rightfully belongs. This would eliminate all poverty and economic hardship in developed and developing nations. Forget about a small billionaire wealth tax of 5%, like the one proposed in California. That’s kid stuff. It’s like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. I’m for free enterprise and for talented and innovative people acquiring some wealth. But there has to be a limit. In my opinion, no individual or household should be allowed to have a net worth of more than $15 million. That’s more than enough to live a luxurious lifestyle. With the ultra-rich gone, we can then correct so much that is wrong in governments and create more just and peaceful societies and make sure that they stay that way.

It’s up to us, folks. The billionaires have the wealth, but we have the numbers. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. We must unite and put an end to this enormous wealth gap. We did it before, and we must do it again. If we don’t, we will lose our freedom, our identities, and even what it means to be human.

Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties.

19 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Vijay Prashad

The US bombing of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and first lady showcased the current hyper-imperialist stage of the world order. Although a new mood has emerged in the Global South, it is not yet a developed challenge to the collective West.

15 Jan 2026 – In 2024, our institute published two important texts – the study Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage and dossier no. 72, The Churning of the World Order. Taken together, they offer five key observations:

US-led imperialism has entered a new, more aggressive stage, which we call hyper-imperialism. Since the Second World War, the global order has been marked by US dominance, visible in its network of more than 900 foreign military bases; in the concept of ‘Global NATO’ and the use of US-NATO military strikes to solve political disputes outside the North Atlantic; and in hybrid forms of power projection, including unilateral coercive measures, information warfare, new forms of surveillance, and the use of lawfare to delegitimise dissent. This hyper-imperialism is driven, we argue, by the relative economic and political decline of the Global North.

1. US-led imperialism has entered a new, more aggressive stage, which we call hyper-imperialism. Since the Second World War, the global order has been marked by US dominance, visible in its network of more than 900 foreign military bases; in the concept of ‘Global NATO’ and the use of US-NATO military strikes to solve political disputes outside the North Atlantic; and in hybrid forms of power projection, including unilateral coercive measures, information warfare, new forms of surveillance, and the use of lawfare to delegitimise dissent. This hyper-imperialism is driven, we argue, by the relative economic and political decline of the Global North.

2. The United States remains the central hegemonic power within a unified imperial bloc that we describe as the Global North. Rather than a multipolar, inter-imperialist rivalry between Western powers, we argue that the US dominates a militarily, politically, and economically integrated NATO+ bloc that has subordinated other Western powers. This US-led bloc seeks to contain what it sees as challenges – such as the rise of China – to its control over the Global South.
3. The hyper-imperialist bloc aims to maintain its neocolonial control over the Global South and secure strategic dominance over the rising powers in Eurasia (China and Russia). Through the NATO+ bloc and its control over major financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States seeks to repress national sovereignty and resist any challenge to its interests – as seen in the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza. We also see this in the US’s withdrawal from any multilateral agreements that constrain its power, including key arms-control treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (2002) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (2019), as well as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (2026).
4. For the US-led NATO+ bloc, the rise of China and the shift of the centre of the world’s economy from the North Atlantic to Asia must be reversed. Our research highlights how the Global South – led by China and other emerging economies – has overtaken the Global North in gross domestic product (GDP) in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms and therefore represents a credible threat to Western economic hegemony. We show that control over raw materials, science, technology, and finance is being contested by these rising powers. This has provoked a strategic response from the NATO+ bloc. While the Global South wants to privilege peace and development, the Global North wants to impose war on the world.
5. This current phase of imperialism intensifies the possibility of conflict and poses a danger to global stability. With the erosion of US economic and political power, military force and hybrid methods have become central for Washington to try and maintain its global influence. This increases the risk of widespread violence and confrontation that imperil the possibility of global peace, accelerate the climate catastrophe, and threaten the sovereignty of the peoples of the Global South.

The concept of hyper-imperialism is central for our work. What we are seeing now is hyper-imperialism on hyper-drive.

The US attack on Venezuela on 3 January 2026 came on the same day as French and UK jets bombed an underground facility in the mountains near Palmyra (Syria) and just a few weeks after the US bombed villages in the Nigerian state of Sokoto. None of these attacks – all carried out under the pretence of fighting some form of ‘terrorism’ – had authorisation from the United Nations Security Council, making them violations of international law. These are all illustrations of the danger and decadence of this sulphurous hyper-imperialism. These are nothing more than instances of the NATO+ bloc demonstrating its power over the Global South through lethal military actions for which there is no defence.

Annual global military spending reached $2.7 trillion in 2024, with projections that it could reach between $4.7 trillion and $6.6 trillion by 2035 – the higher number nearly five times the level at the end of the Cold War and two and a half times the level spent in 2024. The same report estimates that it would take between $2.3 trillion and $2.8 trillion over ten years to eliminate extreme poverty globally. Over 80% of this military spending is done by NATO+ countries, with the United States far and away the largest military spender in the world. You do not spend so much on weapons of destruction without being able to destroy the world. No other country comes close to the ability of countries in the NATO+ bloc to intimidate by armed force.

The second key concept that our institute has developed over the past few years is the new mood in the Global South. We have argued that due to the economic rebalancing of the last period, space has opened for countries in Africa and Asia – in particular – to assert their sovereignty after several decades of suffocation. We saw this, for example, in the Sahel region with the creation of the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) by Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger; in the reaction of several countries to the South African case in the International Court of Justice against Israel’s genocide; and in the attempt by countries from Indonesia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to add value to their raw materials rather than exporting them unprocessed. These instances show how the countries of the Global South, led by China, have begun to test their ability to assert themselves against NATO+ authority across various institutions. But the key word here for us is ‘mood’: a new sensibility that is being tested but is not yet a developed challenge to the collective West.

A few hours before the attack on Venezuela, President Maduro met with Qiu Xiaoqi, China’s special envoy for Latin America, in Caracas. They discussed China’s third Policy Paper on Latin America (released 10 December 2025), in which the Chinese government affirmed: ‘As a developing country and a member of the Global South, China has always stood in solidarity through thick and thin with the Global South, including Latin America and the Caribbean’. They reviewed the 600 joint development projects between China and Venezuela and the roughly $70 billion in Chinese investment in Venezuela. Maduro and Qiu chatted and then took photographs which were posted widely on social media and broadcast on Venezuelan television. Qiu then left the meeting with the Chinese ambassador to Venezuela, Lan Hu, and the directors of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Latin America and the Caribbean Department, Liu Bo and Wang Hao. Within hours, Caracas was bombed.

Shortly after the attack, the spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said, ‘Such hegemonic acts of the US seriously violate international law and Venezuelan sovereignty and threaten peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean region. China firmly opposes it’. Beyond that, little could be done. China does not have the capacity to roll back the savagery of US hyper-imperialism through military force. China and Russia have considerable military capacity, including nuclear weapons, but they do not have the global military footprint of the United States – whose military spending is more than double that of these two nations combined – and are therefore mainly defensive powers (that is to say, they are mainly able to defend their borders).

These recent events are a sign of the weakness of the new mood in the Global South at present, but not the vanquishing of that mood. Across the Global South, condemnations of the US violation of the UN Charter came thick and fast. The new mood remains, but it has its limitations.

The third key concept that our institute has developed is the far right of a special type. This far right has made a swift entrance into the halls of government in most continents, but it has done so with even greater speed in Latin America and the Caribbean. We argue that it has emerged for several reasons, including:

The failure of social democrats to solve deep crises of unemployment, social anomie, and crime due to their commitment to IMF-imposed fiscal prudence and cruel austerity.

1. The failure of social democrats to solve deep crises of unemployment, social anomie, and crime due to their commitment to IMF-imposed fiscal prudence and cruel austerity.

2. The collapse of commodity prices that had allowed the social democratic forces to ride a ‘pink tide’ based on redistribution of increased national incomes and on modest social welfare policies that tackled the most urgent problems facing the population, including hunger and poverty. Part of the far right’s animosity has been directed at such income-redistribution schemes, which it claims are unfair to the middle class.
3. The failure of social democrats – or even of the left when they have come to local power – to address the rise of criminality, partly associated with the drug trade, that has gripped working-class neighbourhoods across the Western hemisphere.
4. The weaponisation of the discourse of corruption by the far right of a special type to systematically delegitimise centre-left and social democratic political figures. This system of lawfare has created a highly moralised anti-politics that elevates an authoritarian desire for order and punitive justice without any structural reform.
5. The emergence of a politics of fear in response to a manufactured civilisational crisis that is exemplified by the spectre of ‘gender ideology’, the racialised portrayal of Black youth in urban centres as a threat (so that police violence against them came to be treated as normal and expected), the land claims of Indigenous peoples, and environmentalist demands. The far right of a special type captured the imagination of enough of the population around the defence of their traditions and the need to restore their way of life, as if it was the feminists and the communists who had eroded society and not the fires of neoliberal destruction.
6. The injection of massive amounts of money from the Global North into the Global South through transnational right-wing platforms (such as Spain’s Foro Madrid) to fuel evangelical networks and new digital disinformation ecosystems.
7. The direct interference of the United States in the Global South through its dominance over financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, through global financial systems like SWIFT, and through direct military force and intimidation.

The far right of a special type in Latin America and the Caribbean was the imperial antidote to the return of the ideas of sovereignty articulated by Simón Bolívar and taken up by Hugo Chávez, which found expression in the pink tide. As the pink tide receded, an angry tide surged: we moved from leaders such as Chávez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), and Néstor Kirchner (Argentina) to Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil), Javier Milei (Argentina), Daniel Noboa (Ecuador), José Antonio Kast (Chile), and Nayib Bukele (El Salvador).

The fourth key concept that our institute has developed, which helps us shape our thinking, is the future – not only as socialism, the objective, but as hope, the sensibility for such a future: the idea that we must not allow our thinking to be constrained by an eternal, ugly present, but instead orient it toward the possibilities that are inherent in our history and our struggles for a better world. The far right of a special type pretends, through the theology of prosperity, that it represents the future, when in reality it offers only a permanent present of austerity and war and portrays the left as the past. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our 100th dossier (May 2026) will explore this concept. We look forward to sharing it with you.

As Kwame Nkrumah used to say, ‘forward ever, backward never’.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter.

19 January 2026

Source: transcend.org

By Vikas Parashram Meshram

While people across the world were celebrating the New Year, U.S. President Trump launched air strikes last Friday on four Venezuelan cities and several military bases. On Saturday, news emerged that following the attack, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife had been taken hostage and transported to the United States. President Trump’s initial allegation was that President Maduro was involved in a “drug war” against the United States. He accused him of narco terrorism.

However, it was during a Saturday night press conference, when Trump made several significant claims about Venezuela’s oil reserves, that his real intentions became apparent. While congratulating himself on the alleged success of the entire operation, he announced that Venezuela would now be placed under American supervision. He further stated that the responsibility of rebuilding Venezuela would be handed over to top American oil companies using the country’s oil reserves. These declarations made it clear that the primary objective of the United States was to seize Venezuela’s oil wealth. The earlier accusations against President Maduro were merely a pretext for the attack.

Independent American analysts have also established that the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro who had long been a target of Donald Trump constitutes a grave violation of international law. Invading a sovereign nation, arresting its president, and transporting him to the United States is a rare example of outright international thuggery. Even more disturbing is Trump’s declaration that Washington will govern this Latin American country until a “transition of power” takes place. This sets a dangerous precedent that could be repeated beyond the American continent.

There is no doubt that Maduro’s downfall will evoke mixed reactions within Venezuela. A global network had long been engaged in an international conspiracy to demonize him. Maduro has been accused of ruining the country’s economy, suppressing dissent, and forcing millions into exile. He has also been accused of election rigging and involvement in drug trafficking. However, experts in global diplomacy believe that Trump’s move is driven not by a desire to deliver justice to victims of authoritarianism or to protect national sovereignty, but by the objective of gaining control over Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. Launching a military operation to arrest a head of government abroad and then ruling the country from Washington is, without doubt, an expression of imperialist ideology.

Undoubtedly, this display of American authoritarianism will have far-reaching geopolitical consequences. Even U.S. allies who opposed Maduro are now issuing warnings. Russia and China have described America’s actions as a threat to the rules-based international order. Meanwhile, developments in Venezuela have given China an opportunity to blunt U.S. criticism of its own regional ambitions, potentially heightening concerns over Taiwan.

America’s actions also revive memories of the invasions and military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan wars launched due to American complacency and overconfidence, which ultimately ended in humiliating withdrawals. Yet those countries never returned to normalcy. Trump’s assertion that the mission to capture Maduro will be funded through Venezuela’s oil revenues reveals America’s intent to control natural resources. The U.S. has not clarified who will be entrusted with leadership to fulfill the Venezuelan people’s aspirations for good governance and security. India is among the countries that have expressed concern over these developments, aligning with broader global anxieties about the future. Sooner or later, however, Trump will realize that removing an authoritarian ruler is easy, but ensuring long-term peace and stability requires sustained and serious effort.

The arrest and forced deportation of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is a blatant violation of international law and also breaches Article 2 of the United Nations Charter. By intercepting oil tankers in the Caribbean and illegally killing civilians aboard ships without any credible anti-drug justification, the United States has bypassed the UN Security Council and appointed itself judge and executioner. This intervention follows a familiar calculation.

First, it seeks to revive the Monroe Doctrine to re-establish American dominance in the Americas a system that governments like Venezuela, in alliance with Cuba, had attempted to overturn. Second, it aims to sever Latin America’s ties with China, as the Maduro government has looked eastward for investment and oil trade. Third, it represents a selfish attempt to seize Venezuela’s enormous crude oil reserves resources that are viewed as a “prize” for American businesses.

In any case, America’s claims of victory may prove hollow. Although Maduro’s rule was authoritarian, Venezuela’s United Socialist Party still enjoys substantial support. The Bolivarian movement was launched to counter the extreme inequalities created by previous U.S.-backed elite governments. By forcibly imposing a new order, the United States is not “liberating” people, but rather reinforcing fears of colonial plunder. The hypocrisy is evident.

While the Trump administration, without presenting any public evidence, declared Maduro the head of a drug cartel to justify his removal, it ordered the release of former Honduran leader Juan Orlando Hernández

convicted on drug trafficking charges and helped Washington-backed Nasry Asfura rise to power. In the post-Cold War, globalized, and interdependent world, hopes for a stable and liberal order have repeatedly been dashed by the actions of both the United States and Russia. By withdrawing from climate agreements and escalating tariff wars, the U.S. has shown contempt for international norms something arguably more dangerous than any single atrocity. The attack on Venezuela is a natural and violent outcome of this isolationist-imperialist blend of Trumpism. If the international community remains silent, it will effectively endorse a world order in which sovereignty depends on Washington’s will.

The claims that President Maduro had links with Venezuelan drug cartels were baseless. Trump’s attack on Caracas and the subsequent capture of President Maduro and his wife inevitably recall memories of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. At that time, U.S. President George W. Bush accused Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction. The entire American media legitimized Bush’s lies. Today, almost the whole world agrees that the invasion of Iraq was based on false and unfounded claims. Bush’s real objective was to remove Saddam Hussein from power and seize control of Iraq’s oil fields. Saddam Hussein was eventually executed after arbitrary legal proceedings. Later, under President Obama, U.S. forces withdrew from Iraq but by then, the country had been devastated.

Venezuela holds about 17% of the world’s oil reserves. When hardline socialist President Hugo Chávez, an outspoken critic of U.S. expansionist foreign policy passed away, Nicolás Maduro came to power. In terms of ideological commitment, Maduro emerged as Chávez’s most fitting successor in Venezuela’s political landscape. He implemented measures that improved the living standards of the majority and translated socialist aspirations into reality developments that deeply unsettled capitalist America.

However, Maduro was also accused of suppressing opposition voices and manipulating elections, allegations that sparked widespread global debate, especially after Venezuelan opposition leader María Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2025. Yet the reality is that such accusations and counter-accusations are common in the domestic politics of almost every country. This does not grant the United States any moral authority to interfere in another nation’s sovereignty.

During Trump’s first term, seizing Venezuela’s oil reserves was on his agenda, but he failed. At the beginning of his second term, Trump made his intentions clear. He is interested in capturing Venezuela’s oil reserves, even if it means removing Maduro from power. Preparations for Venezuela had been underway for months: attacks on oil vessels, their seizure, and the creation of a political climate through media statements. Finally, the attack occurred, and President Maduro and his wife were taken hostage and brought to the United States. Trump’s post-attack statements to the press made it evident that the world is, in reality, governed not by politics, but by economics.

Vikas Parashram Meshram is a journalist

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Nilofar Suhrawardy

United States’ attack on Venezuela, overthrow and capture of its President Nicolas Maduro along with his wife, is another stark indicator of the limited credibility United Nations has today. Divisions among its member-countries, marked by increase in wars, naturally raises questions on how “united” it really is. Added to it this is the hard reality about the limited respect this organization has from its most powerful members. And this is primarily marked by the veto-power they have in the UN Security Council. Their respect for United Nations’ “unity” seems to be limited to the veto-power they can exercise to only display their stand against what other members may support.

President Donald Trump seems to be giving importance to nothing else, but to what he believes should be pursued. There is nothing surprising about this. Perhaps, his priority is to let his own voice boom louder than all others around him and also elsewhere. Little significance is apparently given by him to his words contradicting his own voiced earlier. Trump’s move against Venezuela from no angle justify/legitimize the claim made earlier by him for the Nobel Peace Prize and he declaring himself to be a “peacemaker,” responsible for bringing several wars to an end.

Little importance has been given to ethics at practically all levels, diplomatic, political, legal, humanitarian and even economic. As expressed by Trump at the press conference (Jan. 3) that US is going to run the country, that is Venezuela, it is clear, he has given priority to probably only his approval for the purpose. And none practically to Venezuela and its citizens. Strangely, the President appears to be moving on a track with little consideration for law- national as well as international law and that of Venezuela. No consideration has been displayed for members of the US Congress. Certainly, as head of the only superpower, a country that is viewed globally as the most powerful, the US President has the right and unwritten authority to decide his priorities and thus take action against other powers. But this definitely does not justify the manner in which he has and is deciding his moves for Venezuela. In fact, if he did this for any state within his own country, this would most probably agitate his own citizens against him. It would perhaps even provoke a few to take legal action against him.

Quite a few facts cannot be disputed. One is sovereignty of Venezuela as a nation. United States has taken military action against a country which did not provoke it militarily. United States’ war-exercises have been conducted as if the superpower had all the authority to do so and that they are justified. Venezuela is not a disputed piece of property to which claim can be laid simply on the basis of military prowess and/or its wealth. But this is what has been done. The impact is simply not limited to the country’s President and his spouse being captured. It extends beyond that. In addition to taking control of its oil reserves and keeping its reins of powers in US hands, it literally amounts to reducing Venezuelans to the stage of being no longer free in their own country, the freedom of which has been snatched in a matter of few hours. And they have been reduced to the stage similar to slavery.

Trump aims at United States’ domination of Western Hemisphere. This doesn’t spare other countries in the region. His strike may not be confined to Venezuela. It isn’t without reason that other Latin American countries are wondering whether their turn could be next. Columbia, Cuba and Mexico have already been given “threats” by Trump. Besides, it may be recalled, less than a year ago, Trump described Canada as 51st state of United States. He also wants Greenland to become a part of US. So, there is no knowing as to when in which direction he may decide to abuse his own power, legally, diplomatically, politically, economically, unilaterally, regionally, globally and at various other levels. He has abused these by not exercising them as he is bound to. His prowess as President of a Superpower doesn’t entitle him to treat other leaders and countries as if they were his pawns, with their moves decided by him – as and how he desires.

When Trump had chosen to give some diplomatic importance to Russian President Vladimir Putin to discuss Ukraine-crisis and other issues at Alaska, his European allies were alarmed. Soon after the Alaska Summit, they rushed to Washington to present their views to him. They have probably been shocked by Trump’s stand against Venezuela, but they have not yet come out with strong criticism or a stand even remotely similar to that they have regarding Ukraine. Meanwhile, Israel’s violations of Gaza-ceasefire continue, with no criticism from Trump, the one who played a key role in this being reached. He had also begun talking about steps towards next phase of ceasefire. But Trump’s war-moves against Venezuela and their impact leave no room for explaining his silence on violations of Gaza-ceasefire or abuse of peace as well as peace-talks, which also amount to abuse of Palestinians’ rights. In the same vein, there is nothing surprising about the so-called phase of “democracy” – labeled as Arab Spring – referred to now as Arab Winter, was nothing but abuse of democracy. Democracy cannot be imposed by use of weapons, be imported and/or be forced upon any community.

Trump cannot be accused of imposing “democracy” upon Venezuelans as he has brazenly referred to Venezuela being run by United States and if his voice is not heard, a second phase of attack on their country will be considered. And even if he had, he would not have been most probably believed. What an irony- US has been considered as a major democratic power, a nation that is looked up to. But Trump’s Venezuelan-strike has certainly burst this belief- like a bubble. Irrespective of what US gains/loses by this move of Trump, the hard reality that the superpower has risked more than it can afford to, diplomatically, cannot be missed!

Nilofar Suhrawardy is a senior journalist and writer with specialization in communication studies and nuclear diplomacy.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dimitris Eleas

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been abducted by Delta Force and is already on U.S. soil. Many commentators have rushed to publish articles explaining what happened, or more accurately, how they interpret the latest developments.

What has taken place constitutes a major challenge to the BRICS countries, and above all to China, which unsettled the West –and especially the United States– with the military parade it staged last year. What has unfolded in Venezuela also represents a complete collapse of any notion of law and morality. Even for the United States itself, these actions were carried out without congressional approval –as required by the U.S. Constitution– according to an article published by The New York Times, and they violate U.S. law in relation to what was done, and ‘continues to be done’, in Venezuela.

In a way, it all began with the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and later Libya—developments that opened the door not only for Putin, but also for Trump. For long time, Trump has accused Maduro of leading a drug-trafficking network, an allegation Maduro himself has vehemently denied. And yet, Trump recently granted a pardon to Juan Hernández, president of Honduras from 2014 to 2022 – despite the fact that Hernández was running a drug operation while he was in office.

Delta Force pulled him out of bed, blindfolded him, and shackled his hands. He then spent the following night in prison in Brooklyn, New York. Yes, of course, Maduro, who began his life as a bus driver, is an unrestrained strongman and a tyrant. But what also took place is unacceptable. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of a “significant development.” The prime minister of Greece said much the same, even adding that this was not the appropriate moment to comment on the legality of the intervention. One is left to wonder: do these two truly grasp what is unfolding?

All of this also reveals Trump’s deeper intentions: he does not want China to emerge as the dominant power in Panama, Venezuela, or the broader region. Trump is an unusual president, one who can now claim, “I removed him from power, and he’s still alive, and he didn’t meet the fate of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi.”

China, however, is the clear loser. It has taken a significant hit. Beijing relied on Venezuelan crude oil, extended massive loans, and carried out major infrastructure projects there, only to be confronted with the reality that American power remains unshakable, whether exercised through diplomacy or through the use of force. The United States, of course, also wants to reclaim the assets of major American corporations that were seized by Caracas in the past, and, quite plainly, to turn a profit as well.

America needs Venezuela’s largest proven reserves of oil, as well as its gold and lithium. The United States needs that wealth, right in its own neighborhood, to “flow onto” the New York Stock Exchange, and indirectly, to help reduce the fiscal deficit (when spending exceeds federal revenues, and the national debt continues to grow).

For many Americans, Trump is a great leader; for others, he is not. Perhaps, with Trump in the White House, the world is returning to something like the era of the Roman Empire, with a dash of Cold War. The Monroe Doctrine is in the air as the U.S. returns to Latin America to restore its prestige, the MAGA movement, and the president himself with his enormous ego—“Dr. Ego.” At the same time, international law cannot be overridden in this manner, because doing so harms weaker countries and vulnerable citizens. The next stop for Delta Force and the CIA will be Greenland –again under cover of night– to keep China away from America’s backyard. The United States has no intention of handing the scepter to China for the next hundred years.

China’s power –already dealt a severe blow by what has happened and what is to come in Venezuela– and the effectiveness of Delta Force, the CIA, the NSA, and the U.S. Armed Forces in an operation involving a fleet of ships and 150 aircraft that left the world in awe, is a sharp jab straight at Beijing’s elite. Why? Because China is the target of “Trumpian nationalism,” and the real boss controlling 25% of the global economy is using Nicolás Maduro as the medium, the geopolitical stakes could not be higher.

Dimitris Eleas is a political scientist, writer and independent researcher living in New York. His e-mail is: dimitris.eleas@gmail.com.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Rima Najjar

I. The Persistence of Surprise

The ritualistic shock that greets each new American military intervention in the 21st century has become almost comical. It is perfectly understandable to be stunned by the scale and brazenness of the U.S. operation in Venezuela — the deployment of over 150 aircraft culminating in the seizure of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife on January 3, 2026. It is reasonable to marvel at how swiftly it succeeded and how little resistance it met, revealing the brittleness of regimes sustained more by bravado than genuine institutional support. Nor is it odd to still wonder how Hugo Chávez, with his charisma and media mastery, managed for so long to obscure the accumulating institutional decay — the hollowed-out state, the collapsing oil-dependent apparatus, and the drift toward militarized governance — a fragility the Bolivarian system never corrected into durable institutions.

What strains credulity is the impulse to label this intervention “tragic, complex, extraordinary, and controversial,” rather than recognizing it as yet another familiar chapter in the U.S. playbook. Such a reaction betrays deliberate historical amnesia. It refuses to confront the enduring American doctrine of hemispheric dominance: a century-long pattern of unilateral action that runs unbroken from the 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary, through Cold War regime change in Guatemala, Chile, Grenada, and Panama, to the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya.

II. Continuity Without Uniformity

U.S. foreign policy has undergone major reorientations, codified in successive National Security Strategies — from the Obama administration’s emphasis on multilateralism and “strategic patience” to Trump’s explicit “America First” unilateralism. Those shifts produced real bureaucratic conflict and recalibrated the thresholds for intervention. What persists across them, however, is a durable claim of prerogative: the claimed right to dictate political outcomes in its self-proclaimed sphere of influence, by force whenever the political and strategic arithmetic allows. What should astonish us is not the intervention itself, but the endurance of our surprise, given the United States’ long record of a recurring sequence: intervention, regime removal, and predictable instability.

III. Manufacturing Exceptionality: Media, Memory, and Moral Fables

Beneath the public astonishment lies a more elemental force: humanity’s almost touching optimism bias — the quietly desperate conviction that this time, surely, the pattern might finally fracture, even as every precedent insists otherwise. That psychological need for hope weakens historical judgment, creating fertile ground for the deliberate erasure of memory.

Twenty-four-hour news cycles present each crisis as immaculately new, stripped of historical context, allowing the hard-won lessons of Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Libya to slip quietly into obsolescence. In the hours and days following January 3, U.S. cable networks and major dailies exemplified this erasure. Fox News and allied outlets celebrated the operation as a triumphant strike against the “kingpin of a vast criminal network responsible for trafficking colossal amounts of deadly illicit drugs into the United States,” framing it as pure counter-narcotics enforcement rather than hemispheric power play. CNN and MSNBC, while more measured, still centered the narrative on unsealed indictments for narco-terrorism, cocaine conspiracy, and weapons charges — language that evokes domestic organized crime rather than sovereign-state confrontation — rendering the military dimension almost incidental. The spectacle of a blindfolded, handcuffed Maduro paraded aboard the USS Iwo Jima was replayed endlessly, yet rarely situated within the long U.S. history of extracting foreign leaders for trial.

This managed forgetting then receives its final reinforcement through moral simplification. Western audiences are offered neat binaries that erase the blend of social gains and authoritarian excesses in the records of figures like Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, reducing them to stock villainy and making the intervention appear self-evidently just. The indictment’s language — “partnering with some of the most violent and prolific drug traffickers and narco-terrorists in the world” — performs this work, recasting a polarized national leader as a cartoonish cartel boss whose removal needs no further justification.

Beneath that framing sits a deeper cultural faith: the belief in linear progress — the assumption that each new intervention must represent deviation rather than continuity, that the arc of history still bends toward restraint. Even critical outlets such as The New York Times or The Guardian, while acknowledging illegality or “dangerous precedent,” typically begin by conceding Maduro’s authoritarianism, softening the radicalism of unilateral force by anchoring it in the villain’s undeniable flaws. The effect is to treat the operation as a tragic exception in an otherwise improving order, rather than as the latest expression of a durable imperial doctrine. Through this sequence — hope, forgetting, simplification — the illusion is sustained: empire appears to act not from prerogative, but in reluctant defense of universal values.

IV. Shock as Moral Resistance

And yet, even this managed forgetting does not fully succeed. The recurring shock that follows each intervention is far more than naïveté. It carries a stubborn, deeply human strength — an act of resistance, a deliberate refusal to release the world we were once promised. Reality keeps returning, merciless and unchanged, yet the refusal endures.

The same quiet defiance appears when Palestinians meet each new Israeli atrocity with fresh disbelief and renewed shock. They hold fast to hope for justice and intervention, knowing that to accept brutality as permanent would close the door on any different future.

In a parallel way, people across the Global South — and even some disillusioned voices in the West — still feel astonishment at the image of a sitting president pulled from his home at gunpoint, flown to Manhattan, and placed on trial for charges that seek to criminalize his entire rule. Despite the long-established pattern, this astonishment persists as an act of defiance. It refuses to accept the normalization of conditional sovereignty, where the final judgment of legitimacy is made not in Caracas, but in Washington. To stop feeling shocked would mean surrendering the moral conviction that another world remains possible — one where hemispheric dominance finally yields to genuine self-determination.

V. Selective Astonishment: Venezuela’s Social Fracture

Shock follows lines of history and experience.
Beyond the Western world — and among those long accustomed to the United States’ recurring hand in Latin America, from Grenada in 1983 to Haiti in 1994 — the reaction was markedly restrained. The most intense astonishment remained concentrated among Western publics still invested in the post–Cold War fiction of a rules-based international order. Across regions shaped for generations by intervention, the prevailing tone was quieter: a weary resignation threaded with enduring currents of resistance, expressed through grassroots organizing, insurgencies, solidarity networks, and popular defiance that have repeatedly confronted occupation and imposed rule.

Inside Venezuela, that uneven distribution of shock traced fault lines carved by decades of political polarization. Among pro-regime supporters — the chavistas duros, communal council loyalists, colectivo networks, and security cadres whose identities and livelihoods were bound to the Bolivarian state — the morning after carried the weight of existential rupture. Their grief and fury reopened older wounds: the trauma of the 1989 Caracazo, the memory of the 2002 coup attempt, and the long narrative of foreign siege. For these communities, January 3 registered as more than the removal of a president. It marked the collapse of a political project that had promised dignity, sovereignty, and protection from precisely the kind of intervention now unfolding.

The opposition moved through a different historical register. Veterans of the pre-Chávez order read the moment as the long-delayed implosion of Bolivarian rule. Younger activists shaped by the crushed protest cycles of 2014 and 2017 sensed the fragile opening of political space. Even here, however, reactions fractured. Business elites calculated opportunity. Grassroots organizers braced for another false dawn. Ordinary Venezuelans, hardened by years of crisis, met the moment with wary pragmatism, having learned that every proclaimed “transition” carries its own forms of violence, dispossession, and disappointment.

By January 5, the vacuum had consolidated around Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s longtime vice president and oil minister. Within hours of the capture, Venezuela’s Supreme Court — long aligned with Chavismo — transferred presidential authority to Rodríguez under Article 233 of the constitution, citing Maduro’s “forced absence” due to foreign aggression. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and the high command quickly endorsed the move, while figures such as Diosdado Cabello, the powerful vice president of the ruling party and longtime Chavista enforcer, rallied the party base around continuity of the Bolivarian project. In her first address, Rodríguez denounced the U.S. operation as a “barbaric kidnapping,” affirmed Maduro’s legitimacy, and called for resistance and national unity against imperialism.

Within days, the posture shifted. Trump’s public vow that the United States would “run” Venezuela “very judiciously,” coupled with explicit threats that Rodríguez would “pay a very big price — probably bigger than Maduro” without cooperation, reshaped the terrain. Rodríguez formed dialogue commissions, invoked “peaceful coexistence,” and signaled conditional engagement with Washington. At the same time, Secretary of State Marco Rubio clarified that U.S. leverage would operate through offshore military pressure — including roughly 15,000 troops positioned in the Caribbean — and the looming prospect of further strikes, rather than through direct administration. Rodríguez now advances along a narrow corridor: accommodating U.S. demands over oil access and infrastructure while restraining hardline loyalists who interpret any concession as betrayal.

This interim Chavista arrangement collided head-on with the opposition’s narrative. María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning leader of the anti-Maduro coalition, immediately called for Edmundo González Urrutia — widely regarded by the opposition as the legitimate winner of the contested July 2024 election — to assume the presidency and command of the armed forces. Opposition figures urged military defection and framed the moment as the long-awaited end of Bolivarian rule. Trump, however, dismissed Machado’s political leverage and chose instead to engage Rodríguez as a more manageable interlocutor, drawn by her ties to the oil sector and the promise of rapid stabilization without dismantling entrenched Chavista power networks.

What emerged was neither collapse nor renewal, but recalibration. Elite structures persisted under new constraints. U.S. prerogative set the outer boundaries of acceptable outcomes. Popular sovereignty remained visible yet increasingly conditional — contingent on external approval and on the willingness of domestic power elites (the military command, party leadership, courts, and economic interests) to comply with U.S. demands over oil access, security cooperation, political alignment, and the terms of Venezuela’s post-intervention order.

This recalibration exposes the mechanics of power under intervention. Political life reorganizes around an external center of gravity. Competing forces adjust their positions in relation to it. The range of possible choices contracts.

In this environment, the post–January 3 “transition” moves out of Venezuelan hands and into negotiations between domestic elites and external authority. Popular forces are left to absorb the consequences rather than shape the terms. Sovereignty remains, but only within new limits. Governance and legitimacy drift away from ballots and mass movements toward leverage, access, and compliance.

VI. Power Recalibrated: January 5 and the World Beyond

By January 5, 2026 — with Maduro and Cilia Flores escorted under guard to Manhattan federal court — the global response had settled into a familiar tableau: outrage from adversaries, hedged pragmatism from allies, and quiet accommodation to U.S. primacy. That accommodation hardened as Trump vowed to “run” Venezuela, coupled with open threats toward Colombia and Mexico and growing speculation about Cuba’s impending collapse.

Adversaries moved quickly from denunciation to strategic recalibration. North Korea responded by accelerating missile launches and military drills, presenting them as preparation for “actual war” in a deteriorating “geopolitical crisis” — a blunt signal that the fate of a non-nuclear regime like Maduro’s only reinforces the centrality of deterrence. China condemned the operation as “hegemonic” and in violation of international law, demanding Maduro’s immediate release and warning of regional instability. Russia’s Foreign Ministry labeled the raid an “act of armed aggression” and an “unacceptable assault on sovereignty,” pressing for an emergency UN Security Council session — convened on January 5 but rendered inert by U.S. veto power. Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced the operation as “state terrorism,” warning that the loss of Venezuelan oil subsidies placed his country’s economy in acute danger — a vulnerability Trump openly mocked, remarking that “Cuba looks ready to fall” without them.

Trump’s rhetoric extended the message well beyond Venezuela. He floated the prospect of “Operation Colombia” against President Gustavo Petro, accused Mexico of failing to control drugs and migration, and revived talk of acquiring Greenland for Arctic security. These pronouncements deepened the sense of conditional sovereignty across the hemisphere, compelling neighboring states into defensive postures: Colombia deployed forces along its border, while Mexico and Brazil issued sharp rebukes.

Regional reactions manifested along ideological lines. Left-leaning governments responded with alarm: Brazil’s Lula da Silva called the intervention a “very serious affront” and a “dangerous precedent,” invoking the darkest history of foreign interference; Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum declared it an “unacceptable line” had been crossed; Chile’s Gabriel Boric urged dialogue over force. Joint statements from Colombia, Spain, and Uruguay reinforced opposition to unilateral action.

By contrast, Trump’s allies celebrated. Argentina’s Javier Milei hailed the operation as a “victory for freedom,” El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele signaled approval online, and Ecuador’s Daniel Noboa framed it as a decisive blow against “narco-Chavista” structures.

European governments maintained their characteristic ambivalence. France’s Emmanuel Macron suggested Venezuelans might “only rejoice” at Maduro’s removal while criticizing the method as violating principles of non-use of force. Germany’s Friedrich Merz described the legal terrain as “complex.” Spain’s Pedro Sánchez rejected both Maduro’s rule and any intervention that breached international law. Meanwhile, the UN Security Council deadlock laid bare the paralysis of global institutions whenever U.S. strategic priorities collide with the Charter’s constraints.

The resulting pattern was unmistakable: disbelief and outrage where faith in post–Cold War norms still lingers; strategic hedging where U.S. power has long shaped outcomes. For non-nuclear states living under the Monroe Doctrine’s shadow, the recalibration is stark — alignment, vulnerability, or defiance under threat of extension. Nuclear powers such as Russia and China respond by hardening deterrence doctrine. Across the hemisphere, the message is absorbed: sovereignty remains provisional, now enforced through precision force and amplified by presidential spectacle.

VII. After the Illusion

The deeper legacy of January 3 lies in the lesson already absorbed worldwide. Nuclear-armed states now see deterrence as existential. Non-nuclear states confront a harsher calculus of alignment or vulnerability. And those living under the Monroe Doctrine’s shadow — in Latin America, and in places like Palestine where sovereignty has long been treated as provisional — recognize in the January 3 operation the same enduring pattern of U.S. power they have confronted for decades.

The operation also imposed a form of political humiliation whose impact reaches far beyond Venezuela. As with the televised capture of Saddam Hussein, the spectacle addressed an entire region as much as an individual regime.

That spectacle reached its zenith hours after the extraction, when President Trump personally posted a photograph on Truth Social showing Nicolás Maduro — dressed in a gray Nike Tech sweatshirt and sweatpants, blindfolded with what appeared to be blackout goggles or a dark band over his eyes, handcuffed, and clutching a plastic water bottle — aboard the USS Iwo Jima in the Caribbean. The caption read simply: “Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima.” Shared minutes before Trump’s Mar-a-Lago address announcing that the U.S. would “run” Venezuela pending a “safe, proper and judicious transition,” the image spread instantly across global networks. Its visual language unmistakably echoed the degrading photographs of Saddam Hussein’s 2003 capture and Manuel Noriega’s 1989 surrender. Even many opponents of Maduro recoiled at the optics: a sitting head of state extracted in his sleep, stripped of agency, and displayed like a trophy before due process.

The staging deepened the psychological wound. For Chavistas and many ordinary Venezuelans, the image condensed decades of perceived siege — the 2002 coup attempt, economic warfare, sanctions — into a single, visceral symbol of subjugation. Protests erupted in Caracas, U.S. flags burned, and chants demanding Maduro’s release filled the streets. Loyalists gathered outside Miraflores Palace, their grief laced with fury at the public stripping of national dignity. In the opposition and the diaspora — especially in South Florida’s “Doralzuela” — celebrations mixed with unease: relief at the fall of authoritarian rule tempered by the recognition that sovereignty had been conditional all along, now rendered in viral form.

The photograph functioned as theater of power — low on visible violence, high on symbolic domination. The blindfold and restraints, unnecessary after capture, maximized humiliation. As with Saddam’s emergence from the spider hole or Gaddafi’s bloodied final moments, the image spoke not only to Maduro but to every leader in the region tempted to challenge U.S. prerogative. The message was unmistakable: resistance invites not only removal but public diminishment. Even those who welcomed the fall could not escape the corrosive broadcast — that sovereignty in the Americas remains, in practice, a revocable grant.

Alongside the strategic lesson came an emotional one. For many across the region, the image carried a weight of collective shame — not necessarily because they supported the fallen leader, but because it struck at something shared: dignity, historical standing, how one’s people are seen and situated in the world. The same reaction was widely documented in the Arab world after Saddam’s capture: even fierce opponents of his rule described a sense of exposure, of being diminished before the world. Alongside fear and the strategic recalculations of governments and political elites — over alliances, deterrence, policy direction, and survival itself — the politics of humiliation operate through the quieter, more corrosive injury of wounded collective identity.

The pattern has not been broken; it has evolved. What once required coups or invasions can now be achieved through precision strikes and criminal indictments. Empire no longer needs moral disguise.

The operational anatomy of January 3, 2026 — codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve — exemplifies this refined imperial template. Months of CIA and Joint Special Operations Command preparation produced a granular portrait of Maduro’s existence: his movements, meals, clothing, and even pets. A covert CIA team had operated inside Caracas since at least August 2025, aided by a human source close to the president. U.S. forces rehearsed the extraction on a full-scale replica of Maduro’s compound — a “very highly guarded fortress,” officials said — echoing the Abbottabad mock-ups used before the bin Laden raid.

When the moment came, more than 150 aircraft launched from twenty bases. Strikes neutralized Venezuelan air defenses and blacked out parts of Caracas. Delta Force operators breached the compound, engaged in brief firefights, and extracted Maduro and Cilia Flores within minutes. By 3:29 a.m. Eastern time, they were aboard the USS Iwo Jima. Zero American deaths. Limited collateral. Maximum message.

This clinical minimalism lowers the domestic political cost of intervention while amplifying global spectacle. Empire now delivers precision violence that appears restrained even as it broadcasts conditional sovereignty to the hemisphere.

Inside the United States, the operation ignited familiar polarization. Republicans celebrated law-and-order triumph; Democrats condemned unconstitutional adventurism. South Florida’s Venezuelan diaspora filled the streets with flags and chants. Anti-war protests surged across major cities. Yet across that divide ran the same selective astonishment — the belief that U.S. power can still be exceptional when convenient, rather than the durable doctrine of hemispheric dominance it has always been.

We are entering a world in which the pretense of universal surprise at U.S. intervention is wearing thin, even as selective shock endures. The question is no longer whether the pattern will continue, but how long the rest of the globe can afford to accept it.

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Chris Hedges

The evisceration of the rule of law at home and abroad solidifies America as a rogue state.

The ruling class of the United States, severed from a fact-based universe and blinded by idiocy, greed and hubris, has immolated the internal mechanisms that prevent dictatorship, and the external mechanisms designed to protect against a lawless world of colonialism and gunboat diplomacy.

Our democratic institutions are moribund. They are unable or unwilling to restrain our ruling gangster class. The lobby-infested Congress is a useless appendage. It surrendered its Constitutional authority, including the right to declare war and pass legislation, long ago. It sent a paltry 38 bills to Donald Trump’s desk to be signed into law last year. Most were “disapproval” resolutions rolling back regulations enacted during the Biden administration. Trump governs by imperial decree through Executive Orders. The media, owned by corporations and oligarchs, from Jeff Bezos to Larry Ellison, is an echo chamber for the crimes of state, including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, attacks on Iran, Yemen and Venezuela, and the pillage by the billionaire class. Our money-saturated elections are a burlesque. The diplomatic corps, tasked with negotiating treaties and agreements, preventing war and building alliances, has been dismantled. The courts, despite some rulings by courageous judges, including blocking National Guard deployments to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago, are lackeys to corporate power and overseen by a Department of Justice whose primary function is silencing Trump’s political enemies.

The corporate-indentured Democratic Party, our purported opposition, blocks the only mechanism that can save us — popular mass movements and strikes — knowing its corrupt and despised party leadership will be swept aside. Democratic Party leaders treat New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — a flicker of light in the darkness — as if he has leprosy. Better to let the whole ship go down than surrender their status and privilege.

Dictatorships are one-dimensional. They reduce politics to its simplest form: Do what I say or I will destroy you.

Nuance, complexity, compromise, and of course empathy and understanding, are beyond the tiny emotional bandwidth of gangsters, including the Gangster-in-Chief.

Dictatorships are a thug’s paradise. Gangsters, whether on Wall Street, Silicon Valley or in the White House, cannibalize their own country and pillage the natural resources of other countries.

Dictatorships invert the social order. Honesty, hard work, compassion, solidarity, self-sacrifice are negative qualities. Those who embody these qualities are marginalized and persecuted. The heartless, corrupt, mendacious, cruel and mediocre thrive.

Dictatorships empower goons to keep their victims — at home and abroad — immobilized. Goons from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Goons from Delta Force, Navy Seals and Black Ops CIA teams, which as any Iraqi or Afghan can tell you are the most lethal death squads on the planet. Goons from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) — seen escorting a hand-cuffed President Nicolás Maduro in New York — the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and police departments.

Can anyone seriously make the argument that the U.S. is a democracy? Are there any democratic institutions that function? Is there any check on state power? Is there any mechanism that can enforce the rule of law at home, where legal residents are snatched by masked thugs from our streets, where a phantom “radical left” is an excuse to criminalize dissent, where the highest court in the land bestows king-like power and immunity on Trump? Can anyone pretend that with the demolition of environmental agencies and laws — which should help us confront the looming ecocide, the gravest threat to human existence — there is any concern for the common good? Can anyone make the argument that the U.S. is the defender of human rights, democracy, a rule based order and the “virtues” of Western civilization?

Our reigning gangsters will accelerate the decline. They will steal as much as they can, as fast as they can, on the way down. The Trump family has pocketed more than $1.8 billion in cash and gifts since the 2024 re-election. They do so as they mock the rule of law and tighten their vice-like grip. The walls are closing in. Free speech is abolished on college campuses and the airwaves. Those who decry the genocide lose their jobs or are deported. Journalists are slandered and censored. ICE, powered by Palantir — with a budget of $170 billion over four years — is laying the foundations for a police state. It has expanded the number of its agents by 120 percent. It is building a nationwide complex of detention centers. Not solely for the undocumented. But for us. Those outside the gates of the empire will fare no better with a $1 trillion budget for the war machine.

And this brings me to Venezuela where a head of state and his wife, Cilia Flores, were kidnapped and spirited to New York in open violation of international law and the U.N. Charter.

We have not declared war on Venezuela, but then there was no declared war when we bombed Iran and Yemen. Congress did not approve the kidnapping and bombing of military facilities in Caracas because Congress was not informed.

The Trump administration dressed up the crime — which took the lives of 80 people — as a drug raid and, most bizarrely, as a violation of U.S. firearms statutes: “possession of machine guns and destructive devices; and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”

These charges are as absurd as attempting to legitimize the genocide in Gaza as Israel’s “right to defend itself.”

If this was about drugs, former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández would not have been pardoned by Trump last month, after he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for conspiring to distribute over 400 tons of cocaine in the U.S., a conviction that was justified with far greater evidence than that which supports the charges levied against Maduro.

But drugs are the pretext.

Flush with success, there is already talk by Trump and his officials about Iran, Cuba, Greenland and perhaps Colombia, Mexico and Canada.

Absolute power at home and absolute power abroad expands. It feeds off of each lawless act. It snowballs into totalitarianism and disastrous military adventurism. By the time people realize what has happened, it is too late.

Who will rule Venezuela? Who will rule Gaza? Does it matter?

If nations and people do not bow before the great Moloch in Washington, they are bombed. This is not about establishing legitimate rule. It is not about fair elections. It is about using the threat of death and destruction to procure total subservience.

Trump made this clear when he warned interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Maduro’s kidnapping was not carried out because of drug trafficking or possession of machine guns. This is about oil. It is, as Trump said, so the U.S. can “run” Venezuela.

“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,” Trump said during a press conference Saturday.

Iraqis, a million of whom were killed during the U.S. war and occupation, know what comes next. The infrastructure, modern and efficient under Saddam Hussein — I reported from Iraq under Hussein so can attest to this truth — was destroyed. The Iraqi puppets installed by the U.S. had no interest in governance and reportedly stole some $150 billion in oil revenues.

The U.S., in the end, was booted out of Iraq, although controls Iraqi oil revenues which are funnelled to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The government in Baghdad is allied with Iran. Its military includes Iran-backed militias in Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces. Iraq’s largest trading partners are China, the UAE, India and Turkey.

The debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq, which cost the American public anywhere from $4 to $6 trillion, were the most expensive in U.S. history. None of the architects of these fiascos have been held to account.

Countries singled out for “regime change” implode, as in Haiti, where the U.S., Canada and France overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991 and 2004. The overthrow ushered in societal and government collapse, gang warfare and exacerbated poverty. The same happened in Honduras when a 2009 U.S-backed coup removed Manuel Zelaya. The recently pardoned Hernández became president in 2014 and transformed Honduras into a narco-state, as did U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, who oversaw the production of 90 percent of the world’s heroin. And then there is Libya, another country with vast oil reserves. When Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO during the Obama administration in 2011, Libya splintered into enclaves led by rival warlords and militias.

The list of disastrous attempts by the U.S. at “regime change” is exhaustive, including in Kosovo, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen. All are examples of the folly of imperial overreach. All predict where we are headed.

The U.S. has targeted Venezuela since the 1998 election of Hugo Chavez. It was behind a failed coup in 2002. It imposed punishing sanctions over two decades. It tried to anoint opposition politician Juan Guaidó, as “interim president” although he was never elected to the presidency. When this did not work, Guaidó was dumped as callously as Trump abandoned opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. In 2020, we staged a Keystone Cops attempt by ill-trained mercenaries to trigger a popular uprising. None of it worked.

The kidnapping of Maduro begins another debacle. Trump and his minions are no more competent, and probably less so than officials from previous administrations, who tried to bend the world to their will.

Our decaying empire stumbles forward like a wounded beast, unable to learn from its disasters, crippled by arrogance and incompetence, torching the rule of law and fantasizing that indiscriminate industrial violence will regain a lost hegemony. Able to project devastating military force, its initial success leads inevitably to self-defeating and costly quagmires.

The tragedy is not that the American empire is dying, it is that it is taking down so many innocents with it.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, worked for nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, National Public Radio and other news organizations in Latin America, the Middle East and the Balkans.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Feroze Mithiborwala

Delcy Rodriguez, daughter of Jorge Rodríguez a leading Ideologue and Martyr. She comes from a rich heritage rooted in Bolivarian Socialism, Anti-Imperialism, and Popular Sovereignty.

When the United States carried out what the Venezuelan government has described as the illegal abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores, Caracas entered one of the most dangerous moments in its modern history. In the midst of shock, military threat, and diplomatic siege, Delcy Eloína Rodríguez Gómez—long a central figure of the Bolivarian state—assumed the role of caretaker president, vowing continuity, resistance, and national sovereignty.¹ To understand Delcy Rodríguez is to understand inheritance—of struggle, ideology, and sacrifice.

A Revolutionary Lineage

Delcy Rodríguez was born in Caracas on May 18, 1969, into a family deeply rooted in Venezuela’s revolutionary left. Her father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, was a founding leader of the Liga Socialista, a Marxist organization that emerged from the remnants of the 1960s guerrilla movement and sought to challenge the political and economic order of Venezuela’s Fourth Republic.²

In 1976, Jorge Rodríguez was arrested by Venezuela’s political police, the Dirección de los Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención (DISIP), under the government of President Carlos Andrés Pérez. He died shortly thereafter in custody. Although authorities claimed suicide, contemporaneous reporting, testimony from fellow detainees, and later historical investigations have documented strong evidence of torture during interrogation.³ His death has been widely recognized by scholars as emblematic of Cold War repression in Venezuela under U.S.-CIA-backed regimes that combined state power with systematic political repression, torture and violence.⁴

Thus for Delcy Rodríguez, this legacy is ideologically deeply rooted in struggle and sacrifice — it is personal, political and formative.

Her brother, Jorge Rodríguez Gómez, today serves as President of Venezuela’s National Assembly and has been a central political strategist within the Bolivarian movement, further situating the Rodríguez family within the revolutionary project.⁵

From Chávez to Maduro

A lawyer trained at the Central University of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez entered public life during the ascent of Hugo Chávez, whose Bolivarian project sought to dismantle Venezuela’s entrenched elite pact and reclaim state sovereignty over oil revenues.⁶

Rodríguez later served as Foreign Minister from 2014 to 2017, becoming internationally visible for denouncing sanctions, U.S. interventionism, and violations of international law at forums including the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement.⁷

In 2018, Rodríguez was appointed Executive Vice President and later assumed a central role in economic coordination during the escalation of U.S. sanctions, which economists and human rights bodies have linked to sharp declines in living standards and excess civilian mortality.⁸

Her ideological orientation has remained consistent: Bolivarian socialism, anti-imperialism, and popular sovereignty.

The Abduction and the Constitutional Response

Following the January 2026 U.S. operation—described by Washington as a “law-enforcement action” and by Caracas as an “act of international piracy” —multiple international legal scholars and Global South governments questioned its legality under international law, citing violations of state sovereignty and due process.¹

Rodríguez’s designation as caretaker president followed constitutional succession norms previously analyzed by comparative constitutional scholars studying Venezuela’s crisis governance framework.⁹

In her first public address, she stated: “There is only one president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro Moros. What has occurred is an abduction, not a transition.”¹⁰

She accused the Trump administration of acting as an imperial enforcer for transnational capital, citing oil interests, sanctions profiteering, and Venezuela’s steadfast support for Palestine.

US Gangster Capitalism, Zionism, and the Architecture of Aggression

Rodríguez has framed the operation as an expression of “gangster capitalism”—a term used by critical political economists to describe the fusion of coercive force, sanctions regimes, and corporate extraction in contemporary imperial strategy.¹¹ UN special rapporteurs have previously characterized U.S. sanctions on Venezuela as causing “devastating humanitarian consequences” that may amount to violations of international law.¹²

Crucially, Rodríguez has been explicit that the assault on Venezuela cannot be separated from the strategic U.S.–Israeli alliance and the political project of Zionism, which she has consistently described as a colonial ideology rather than a religious identity.

In public statements before and after the abduction of Maduro, Rodríguez argued that Venezuela was targeted not only for its oil reserves but for its uncompromising alignment with Palestine, its condemnation of apartheid Israel’s on-going genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, and thus its refusal to submit to U.S.–Israeli geopolitical diktats and threats.¹³

She further identified Zionist political networks as operating in convergence with sanctions enforcement, regime-change policy, and militarized coercion against governments in the Global South that reject Western hegemony.¹⁴

This framing is consistent with Venezuela’s long-standing foreign policy since the Chávez era, including the severing of diplomatic relations with Israel following the 2008–09 genocidal war on Gaza and repeated denunciations of Israeli apartheid at the United Nations.¹⁵

Rodríguez’s intervention thus situates Venezuela’s crisis within a broader global confrontation between an imperial order anchored in Washington and Tel Aviv, and a Global South asserting sovereignty, multi-polarity, and resistance to colonial violence.

The Social Missions: Why the People Still Defend the Revolution

At the core of Rodríguez’s political legitimacy lie the Bolivarian social missions initiated under Chávez. These programs have been extensively studied by international institutions, development economists, and UN agencies.

Mission Barrio Adentro expanded primary healthcare access with Cuban medical cooperation; Mission Robinson led UNESCO to declare Venezuela free of illiteracy in 2005; Mission Ribas and Mission Sucre dramatically increased secondary and university enrollment among working-class Venezuelans.¹⁶ Food distribution systems such as Mercal and later CLAP, alongside the Gran Misión Vivienda Venezuela, were designed to buffer the population against market volatility and sanctions-induced shortages.¹⁷

Peer-reviewed economic studies demonstrate that between 2003 and 2012 Venezuela achieved one of the sharpest reductions in poverty and income inequality in Latin America.¹⁸ While sanctions and macroeconomic collapse later reversed many gains, scholars widely agree that the missions permanently altered social access and political consciousness.¹⁹

Rodríguez has consistently defended this redistributive model, arguing that oil revenues must serve social development rather than foreign capital accumulation.²⁰

Popular Support and Political Reality

Multiple independent surveys and regional analysts note that a significant segment of Venezuela’s population—particularly among the poor—continues to reject U.S. intervention regardless of dissatisfaction with economic conditions.²¹ Rodríguez’s authority rests less on personal charisma than on social welfare, empowerment of the poor, institutional continuity and anti-imperialist legitimacy.

Conclusion

Delcy Rodríguez stands today as a political embodiment of resistance—shaped by the torture-death of her father, forged in Chávez’s revolution, tested under Maduro’s siege, and now confronting direct U.S. military coercion. History’s verdict remains unwritten. What is already clear is this: Venezuela did not submit—and Delcy Rodríguez did not bow.

Footnotes

1. Alfred de Zayas, statements on extraterritorial coercion and sovereignty, UN Independent Expert archives; International Association of Democratic Lawyers, legal brief, January 2026.
2. Steve Ellner, Rethinking Venezuelan Politics (Lynne Rienner, 2008), 42–45.
3. Greg Wilpert, Changing Venezuela by Taking Power (Verso, 2007), 29–31.
4. Eva Golinger, The Chávez Code (Pluto Press, 2006), 18–22.
5. Steve Ellner and Miguel Tinker Salas, eds., Venezuela: Hugo Chávez and the Decline of an Exceptional Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
6. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State (University of Chicago Press, 1997).
7. United Nations General Assembly, Sixth Committee debates, 2015–2017.
8. Francisco Rodríguez, “Sanctions and the Venezuelan Economy,” Peterson Institute Working Paper, 2019.
9. Javier Couso, “Constitutional Crisis and Executive Power in Venezuela,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 17, no. 2 (2019).
10. Associated Press and Reuters, reports quoting televised address, January 2026.
11. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford University Press, 2003).
12. UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, A/HRC/39/47/Add.1 (2018).
13. Delcy Rodríguez, statements on Gaza and Palestine, cited in Telesur English, November 2024.
14. Delcy Rodríguez, address to the Non-Aligned Movement ministerial meeting, reported in Al Mayadeen English, January 2026.
15. United Nations General Assembly, Venezuelan statements on Palestine and Gaza, 2009–2024.
16. UNESCO, Venezuela Declared Free of Illiteracy, 2005.
17. FAO, Food Security Policies in Bolivarian Venezuela, regional report, 2013.
18. Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval, The Venezuelan Economy in the Chávez Years (CEPR, 2008).
19. Julia Buxton, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela (Ashgate, 2018).
20. Delcy Rodríguez, remarks cited in Telesur English, 2024.
21. Latinobarómetro, regional opinion surveys, 2018–2024.

Feroze Mithiborwala is an expert on West Asian & International Geostrategic issues. He is the Founder-Gen. Sec. of the India Palestine Solidarity Forum.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org

By Andre Damon

In a degrading pseudo-legal farce, the Trump administration dragged kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores before a federal court in Manhattan on Monday.

When Maduro was asked to confirm his identity, he declared: “My name is President Nicolás Maduro Moros. I am president of the Republic of Venezuela. I am here kidnapped since January 3rd—”

He was allowed to get only a few words out before 92-year-old Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein cut him off. “There will be a time and a place to go into all of this,” he snapped.

As deputy US marshals led him from the courtroom, Maduro declared in Spanish: “I am a kidnapped president. I am a prisoner of war.”

The hearing lasted just over 35 minutes. Both pleaded not guilty. Defense attorney Barry Pollack, who previously represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, announced he would challenge the legality of his client’s “military abduction.” Maduro, he said, “is head of a sovereign state and entitled to the privileges that go with that.”

Flores bore the marks of the violence inflicted upon her during the abduction. The Telegraph reported that Flores “had visible bruises to her face—one the size of a golf ball on her forehead—red cheeks and what appeared to be a welt over her right eye.” Her attorney, Mark Donnelly, told the court she had sustained “significant injuries during her abduction” and asked the judge to authorize an X-ray to determine whether her ribs were fractured.

The day before, Maduro had been paraded through New York in a van with open doors. This is itself a war crime under international law, as it falls under the prohibition of “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.”

The Manhattan federal courthouse where Maduro appeared is the same courthouse where Jeffrey Epstein, a close associate of Trump, stood for his arraignment in 2019. Epstein was murdered in prison on August 10, 2019, in what the Trump regime calls a suicide.

Maduro and his wife are being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—the same facility that once held former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, whom Trump pardoned just weeks ago despite his conviction for trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.

The accusations against Maduro are not meant to be believed by anyone. Maduro was not kidnapped because he trafficked drugs. He was kidnapped because his country sits atop the largest proven oil reserves in the world—303 billion barrels—and the gangster Trump wants them. Trump said so himself at Saturday’s press conference: “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars … and start making money for the country.”

The Hill reported on Monday that Trump told oil companies about the assault on Venezuela before it happened, while not notifying Congress, let alone the American people. “Reporters on Air Force One asked the president if he spoke to American oil companies to tip them off before” the attack, The Hill wrote.

“Trump nodded and said he spoke to the companies ‘before and after’ the operation. ‘And they want to go in, and they’re going to do a great job for the people of Venezuela, and they’re going to represent us well,’ Trump continued.”

The Trump administration has issued a list of demands to Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in Monday after Maduro’s abduction. According to Politico, US officials demanded that Rodríguez stop “the sale of oil to U.S. adversaries, according to a U.S. official familiar with the situation and a person familiar with the administration’s internal discussions.” Trump threatened Rodríguez in an interview with The Atlantic: “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

Rodríguez initially responded to the seizure of Maduro defiantly, declaring on Saturday that “there is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro” and denouncing the US operation as “barbaric.” But by Sunday she had struck a more conciliatory tone, posting on Instagram that Venezuela sought “peaceful coexistence” and inviting the US government “to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation.”

The State Department posted an image of Trump declaring: “This is OUR hemisphere.” US imperialism is claiming the whole of Latin America (along with Canada) as its property, making clear that it will kidnap or murder anyone who resists, in a return to naked colonialism.

While Maduro declared his innocence in a Manhattan courtroom, the United Nations Security Council convened an emergency session a few miles to the north, where the magnitude of what the Trump administration had unleashed became clear. This was not simply a travesty of US criminal law and international law. This was an act of war targeting the entire world.

The atmosphere at the UN was one of crisis. Which country would be next? The European Union? Russia? Canada? Colombia? Cuba? China? In the past month alone, Trump has issued direct threats against at least six UN member states.

Venezuela’s UN Ambassador Samuel Moncada accused the United States of attacking Venezuela in a bid to seize control of its oil resources—“a move that harks back to the worst practices of colonialism and neocolonialism.”

Colombia’s representative stated, “There is no justification whatsoever, under any circumstances, for the unilateral use of force to commit an act of aggression. Such actions constitute a serious violation of international law and the United Nations Charter…”

China’s representative added: “China is deeply shocked by and strongly condemns the unilateral, illegal and bullying acts of the US.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs, invited to brief the Security Council, placed the assault in context. “In the past year, the United States has carried out bombing operations in seven countries, none of which were authorized by the Security Council and none of which were undertaken in lawful self-defense under the Charter,” he said. “The targeted countries include Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and now Venezuela.”

Sachs traced the history of US regime-change operations against Venezuela: the US-backed coup attempt in 2002, the funding of anti-government protests in 2014, the crippling sanctions that collapsed oil production by 75 percent and real GDP per capita by 62 percent, the unilateral recognition of Juan Guaidó as “interim president” in 2019 and the seizure of $7 billion in Venezuelan sovereign assets.

“Members of the Council are called upon to defend international law, and specifically the United Nations Charter,” Sachs declared. “Members of the Council are not called upon to judge Nicolás Maduro.”

Yet even as condemnation poured in from around the world, the American press celebrated the act of imperialist banditry. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board railed against “The ‘International Law’ Illusion in Venezuela,” declaring that “Rogue regimes now use it [international law] as a shield to protect their own lawbreaking.” The Journal concluded: “The demonstration of U.S. nerve and military prowess will do more than a thousand U.N. resolutions to protect the free world.”

The Washington Post editorial board was equally brazen. Its headline declared: “Maduro’s arrest exposes legal fictions,” with a subtitle adding, “The administration concocts a legal rationale for a foreign policy objective. That’s OK.” The Post openly declared that international law is a “legal fiction.”

These editorials constitute open admissions that what the United States carried out was a crime, coupled with the declaration that American military power places it above the law.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated he was “deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected.” But such statements will not stop Trump’s global military rampage.

The capitalist powers that built the post-World War II legal order are now tearing it apart in their drive toward a new colonial carve-up of the world. Opposition must come from below—from the independent mobilisation of workers in the United States, Venezuela and internationally against imperialist war and the capitalist system that produces it.

6 January 2026

Source: countercurrents.org