Sheer jingoism at its worst.. and exactly “How” does Holstein propose to carry this out? I presume he will volunteer to be in the “first wave” of invaders or the usual mercenary fascist brigades our neocon State and misnamed “Defense Department” hacks love to bankroll to do our dirty work! And of course we are just innocent Little Red Riding Hood in Ukraine…supporting “democracy” as usual by sacrificing others in the name of “US Foreign Policy” and supporting despots who make lucrative deals with the IMF and the Mobsters at the World Bank by selling their country out….to us!
Wow, I could not disagree with this more. Venezuela has internationally monitored elections--every time. Venezuela has a free press, including American tv and press, a freer press than we do. VZ has many political parties, including a party of hyper-capitalist oligarchs. VZ has built 3 million new subsidized apartments in Caracas. Everyone has free internet. VZ has free food and toiletries for the poorest people every two weeks. They have no homeless. But more than all of that, VZ is a SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. The US only seems to care about that when OTHER countries violate sovereignty. The US declared the VZ democratically elected government invalid and selected our own handpicked president, someone who has never run for office and has no governing experience whatsoever. He is a clown--Guaido. The Venezuelans hate him, and they hate us. Our interest in VZ is their huge oil reserves. We don't like their government because they won't allow us to take it over and rob them of their sovereign resource. Maduro is no more corrupt than any other president--certainly no more corrupt than our own. We have overthrown the governments of most of the South American countries repeatedly, some multiple times. Every time we have installed a miserable dictator. Presidents on both sides of the aisle have done this. We've overthrown VZ THREE TIMES, and your friend thinks we should do it again?
you must either be a bot of the regime or a Communist sympathizer to even state that VZ elections were legitimate! This all sounds VERY familiar Commie talking points
LOL. They are INTERNATIONALLY MONITORED. That means election monitors from around the world oversee EVERY election. Jimmy Carter pronounced VZ elections the fairest in the world, and he worked as an election monitor there. All votes are counted in public in full view of monitors and representatives of all 20 of their parties. Compare that to what happened here in 2020. If you look up the ratings for free and fair elections around the world, you will see that the US ranks about 47th in the world. VZ is at or near the top. Furthermore, VZ is a capitalist country, or they wouldn't have wealthy enclaves, oligarchs, and giant shopping malls and supermarkets. There is nothing "communist" about them. They just have a larger safety net than we do, akin to the nordic countries. You have been the victim of US propaganda. If you recognize that the US media is fake and continually lies, what makes you think they are telling you the truth about Venezuela?
LOL indeed. The oligarchs are NOT government cronies. They are the owners of corporations who are constantly price gouging to, for example, make food and clothing too expensive to buy for poor people. What you are talking about are just government cronies, like the nepotism that occurs here as well, such as the families of Kerry, Pelosi, Biden, Clinton etc. Yes, VZ has that kind of corruption, as does virtually every country. Opinion polls taken by outside companies consistently show that Maduro is popular with a majority of the voters of a majority of the parties. When interviewed, Venezuelans inevitably say, "We have our problems here, just like anywhere, but we DON'T need the US to come in here and "fix" things for us. We are perfectly capable of handling our own problems." The US needs to address its own problems and quit interfering in other countries.
After the last two years and seeing all the reports of voter fraud, I'm suspicious of any country being able to hold uncorrupted elections. And in the case of South America, I immediately think of Kissinger: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the [Chilean] voters to be left to decide for themselves.
It seems there are too many vested interests to leave elections alone.
This is why countries are ranked for how well they have managed to do this. The US is not highly ranked, because our elections are neither free nor fair. Furthermore, we interfere with ALL elections abroad. Venezuela IS highly ranked.
sure...... who does the ranking?? remember is not who votes but who counts the votes, right! Agree there is corruption on all sides, but to even consider VZ a fair election is REALLY off! We saw the burning of ballots! we saw the intimidation and the cheating! we know where the developers of Dominion came from (its on record by witnesses)..... I was there!
I could not believe what I was reading above. Venezuela used to be a free, wealthy nation, but no more. I hope we don't go the same way, but can stop it before we get there.
Venezuela is still a free nation, but it is not a wealthy nation because the US has had crippling sanctions on the country, which is against international law, since they elected Chavez. The US can't tolerate any country electing a leftist, so they have been doing everything in the book to topple the government since then, including having the CIA found and fund opposition parties, interfere with elections, fund terrorist attacks, and steal their money. The US has forbidden the IMF, which we control, to allow anyone to loan them any money, and it has frozen their accounts at banks all over the world. In the UK alone, they have 2 billion in gold that they have not been able to withdraw because the US says they can't. All of these facts are in the public domain--no conspiracy theories--you can look them up. Who is the bad guy here?
That is completely false. It is no more socialist than Norway or Denmark. If it were socialist, there would be no private property and no extremely rich. There would be no corporations, and no enclaves of rich company owners. There would be no superstores and huge shopping malls. There are all of those things. There is complete freedom of speech. In fact, there is more freedom of speech there than here, since the government does not police the internet, and most people watch American news and American tv, which is not censored. American and worldwide newspapers can be bought on every street corner, or read online. Guaido, the US puppet who has been declared by us to be their "president" even though he has never even held an elected position even within his own party, waltzed around VZ trying to drum up business for his ridiculous cause for several years without being arrested and imprisoned. Do you think someone who, say, Russia had announced was the "real" president of the US even though he was someone Russia had just appointed to the position, would be allowed to walk around the US trying to get people to revolt against the elected government would be free today? He would be dead. Does Venezuela have anyone like Julian Assange who they have imprisoned without trial just for telling the truth about their war crimes? No, they do not. Because VZ has not committed any war crimes. They don't overturn governments all over the world and interfere with every election in sovereign countries as we do. Learn who the enemy is. Learn who the liars are.
I'd rather speak to those who stayed. Those who have left are for the most part wealthier people who don't like the social safety net. Same with the people who left Cuba.
P.S. The way other countries vote to govern themselves is not our business. If we want to discourage leftism, we could try being a good neighbor instead of constantly invading other countries and overturning their governments, sometimes multiple times. We have even overturned the governments of our allies on occasion. You win more flies with honey than with vinegar. This is why the US is hated around the world.
I deeply appreciate all the information you share in your substack, Dr. Alexander, but Mr. Holstein is wrong on this. Guaido is decidedly *not* who he makes him out to be—that has been obvious for many years now. Advocating regime change is extremely dangerous and reckless; one would have thought we should have learned this lesson by now. Sovereignty matters—for our own bodies as much as for individual nations. Respectfully, I would urge far more caution and consideration, and not taking Mr. Holstein’s words here as anything approaching ‘instructive’.
What?! Regime change wars should not be USA business. Cruel, fatalities?! Stop on war drum beat. Wasn’t the US involvement in Ukraine coup bad enough in 2014? Wasn’t our stolen election an example of our votes robbed?! With illegal activity out of Ukraine? We need peace and take care of our homeland and clean up our own vast govt corruption.
Toppling a regime? Unless it’s the Biden crime family regime count me out. The CIA has orchestrated an insane number of covert coups and the US military has overtly destroyed too many countries in the name of democracy. It’s time to stop that. I’m shocked you’re on board with this, Dr. Alexander.
We all know or at least should know why American Oligarchs and Corporations want their Grubby hands on Venezuela? It has less to do with oil and more to do with water. They want make water if the have not already, the next big commodity along with the very air we breathe. Venezuela has one of the most pristine and unpolluted water sources in the world. Have anybody investigate if Venezuela have a legitimate claim to that part of Guyana? If you so much as start a Tribe or group in the USA and try to proclaim some kind of autonomy or Sovereignty you are squashed like a fly, If you live in another country and your government does the same, the same fate is an assurance. These Corporations and Oligarchs do not care about Venezuela or Guyana and they are going to decimate, steal and pillage like they always do, to get the resources of both countries, the people's suffering and death is irrelevant to them. We can't be in a freedom movement and still advocate for these types of policies. There is constant meddling and destabilization of Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela, we have to start asking, " WHY?".
The government that should be removed, for the good of humanity, is the deep state that controls insane puppets like Joe Biden in the United States. The ongoing genocide through injections of lethal spike protein has been fueled by hyper-corrupt US agencies like the FDA and CDC throughout the world. Juan Guaidó is an even more ridiculous caricature than Joe Biden... the difference is that he could be imposed as president in the United States.
I’m sick of our mismanaged military putting our sons and daughters in harms way, and wasting billions and trillions of tax dollars meddling in affairs beyond our borders.
We can fix a huge number of our national security exposures by:
* Sealing our borders, admitting only those who have been properly vetted,
* Ejecting illegal immigrants,
* Turning our military back into a military and not some giant, sick, social and medical experiment so they can credibly defend our borders.
The last thing we need is more military adventures abroad.
I’m waiting for the midterm elections to be canceled due to some “emergency” or another.
The military-intelligence /tech/arms/media complex that actually runs things, and for which elected officials and courts are just a now-ragged veneer of legitimacy, needs to be removed, but they’re not going to make it easy.
The problem I see is that what do we replace it with? There is a vicious and venal class that is always eager to rush in and commandeer the levers of power. Extreme decentralization seems to make the most sense.
I agree. Centralized systems are too fragile due to the nature of psychopaths. Decentralization seems to be the only effective way to guard against them.
I analyse this as a problem with the size of errors.
My body has many defective and potentially cancerous cells (shocking, I know, I really wanted to be perfect) which are spotted and removed by my immune system. Once one of them gets big enough I will be subject to the horrors of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
In your appreciation of the problem of large centralized systems you see the same result, that is that the errors are so huge that they cannot be mitigated without systemic damage or destruction.
The Soviet Union may have continued for centuries had it not been exposed to a more effective competing system.
The sociopaths and psychopaths are a feature of most societies, and graduate from nasty hallway monitors in school to their "deserved" and desired positions above us in real life.
I totally disagree with Alex Holstein. As far as I am concerned the United States should stop interfering in the affairs of other countries. And as for Cuba it was a playground for wealthy Americans before Castro finally booted them out.
"Removing Maduro would not only clear the way for Juan Guaidó, the country’s legitimately recognized president"
Wow that's about as big a heap of propaganda as vaccines are safe and effective.. Never ceases to amaze me that folks see the lies in their area of research and expects truth elsewhere. Guaidó, is the CIA's man this was yet another coup attempt.. try some better sources.
Sheer jingoism at its worst.. and exactly “How” does Holstein propose to carry this out? I presume he will volunteer to be in the “first wave” of invaders or the usual mercenary fascist brigades our neocon State and misnamed “Defense Department” hacks love to bankroll to do our dirty work! And of course we are just innocent Little Red Riding Hood in Ukraine…supporting “democracy” as usual by sacrificing others in the name of “US Foreign Policy” and supporting despots who make lucrative deals with the IMF and the Mobsters at the World Bank by selling their country out….to us!
Wow, I could not disagree with this more. Venezuela has internationally monitored elections--every time. Venezuela has a free press, including American tv and press, a freer press than we do. VZ has many political parties, including a party of hyper-capitalist oligarchs. VZ has built 3 million new subsidized apartments in Caracas. Everyone has free internet. VZ has free food and toiletries for the poorest people every two weeks. They have no homeless. But more than all of that, VZ is a SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. The US only seems to care about that when OTHER countries violate sovereignty. The US declared the VZ democratically elected government invalid and selected our own handpicked president, someone who has never run for office and has no governing experience whatsoever. He is a clown--Guaido. The Venezuelans hate him, and they hate us. Our interest in VZ is their huge oil reserves. We don't like their government because they won't allow us to take it over and rob them of their sovereign resource. Maduro is no more corrupt than any other president--certainly no more corrupt than our own. We have overthrown the governments of most of the South American countries repeatedly, some multiple times. Every time we have installed a miserable dictator. Presidents on both sides of the aisle have done this. We've overthrown VZ THREE TIMES, and your friend thinks we should do it again?
you must either be a bot of the regime or a Communist sympathizer to even state that VZ elections were legitimate! This all sounds VERY familiar Commie talking points
LOL. They are INTERNATIONALLY MONITORED. That means election monitors from around the world oversee EVERY election. Jimmy Carter pronounced VZ elections the fairest in the world, and he worked as an election monitor there. All votes are counted in public in full view of monitors and representatives of all 20 of their parties. Compare that to what happened here in 2020. If you look up the ratings for free and fair elections around the world, you will see that the US ranks about 47th in the world. VZ is at or near the top. Furthermore, VZ is a capitalist country, or they wouldn't have wealthy enclaves, oligarchs, and giant shopping malls and supermarkets. There is nothing "communist" about them. They just have a larger safety net than we do, akin to the nordic countries. You have been the victim of US propaganda. If you recognize that the US media is fake and continually lies, what makes you think they are telling you the truth about Venezuela?
I lived in VZ! I know first hand. The only oligarchs are corrupt government cronies! what safety net?? LOL! what cave are you in?
LOL indeed. The oligarchs are NOT government cronies. They are the owners of corporations who are constantly price gouging to, for example, make food and clothing too expensive to buy for poor people. What you are talking about are just government cronies, like the nepotism that occurs here as well, such as the families of Kerry, Pelosi, Biden, Clinton etc. Yes, VZ has that kind of corruption, as does virtually every country. Opinion polls taken by outside companies consistently show that Maduro is popular with a majority of the voters of a majority of the parties. When interviewed, Venezuelans inevitably say, "We have our problems here, just like anywhere, but we DON'T need the US to come in here and "fix" things for us. We are perfectly capable of handling our own problems." The US needs to address its own problems and quit interfering in other countries.
After the last two years and seeing all the reports of voter fraud, I'm suspicious of any country being able to hold uncorrupted elections. And in the case of South America, I immediately think of Kissinger: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the [Chilean] voters to be left to decide for themselves.
It seems there are too many vested interests to leave elections alone.
The problem with the far left is, it’s a one way ticket to hell. You vote them in once- they take care of the rest.
A simple look at US history will tell you that both sides are equally corrupt and likely to cheat.
This is why countries are ranked for how well they have managed to do this. The US is not highly ranked, because our elections are neither free nor fair. Furthermore, we interfere with ALL elections abroad. Venezuela IS highly ranked.
sure...... who does the ranking?? remember is not who votes but who counts the votes, right! Agree there is corruption on all sides, but to even consider VZ a fair election is REALLY off! We saw the burning of ballots! we saw the intimidation and the cheating! we know where the developers of Dominion came from (its on record by witnesses)..... I was there!
Harvard does the ranking every year. The vote count is PUBLIC. All parties watch.
Here are the world election integrity rankings. https://peopledemandingaction.org/component/k2/item/275-u-s-electoral-integrity-ranked-45th-among-107-nations-worst-of-established-democracies
Was it the last time or the time before when we stole their gold. I get it mixed up 🤷🏻♂️
Yeah, they still haven't gotten that back. Done in collusion with the UK.
I could not believe what I was reading above. Venezuela used to be a free, wealthy nation, but no more. I hope we don't go the same way, but can stop it before we get there.
Venezuela is still a free nation, but it is not a wealthy nation because the US has had crippling sanctions on the country, which is against international law, since they elected Chavez. The US can't tolerate any country electing a leftist, so they have been doing everything in the book to topple the government since then, including having the CIA found and fund opposition parties, interfere with elections, fund terrorist attacks, and steal their money. The US has forbidden the IMF, which we control, to allow anyone to loan them any money, and it has frozen their accounts at banks all over the world. In the UK alone, they have 2 billion in gold that they have not been able to withdraw because the US says they can't. All of these facts are in the public domain--no conspiracy theories--you can look them up. Who is the bad guy here?
We should stay of of other countries. The other issue is you cannot trust what the gov or MSM say either.
PPS. I'd love it if you would tell us in what way Venezuela is not free.
It is a socialist country. No freedom of speech.
That is completely false. It is no more socialist than Norway or Denmark. If it were socialist, there would be no private property and no extremely rich. There would be no corporations, and no enclaves of rich company owners. There would be no superstores and huge shopping malls. There are all of those things. There is complete freedom of speech. In fact, there is more freedom of speech there than here, since the government does not police the internet, and most people watch American news and American tv, which is not censored. American and worldwide newspapers can be bought on every street corner, or read online. Guaido, the US puppet who has been declared by us to be their "president" even though he has never even held an elected position even within his own party, waltzed around VZ trying to drum up business for his ridiculous cause for several years without being arrested and imprisoned. Do you think someone who, say, Russia had announced was the "real" president of the US even though he was someone Russia had just appointed to the position, would be allowed to walk around the US trying to get people to revolt against the elected government would be free today? He would be dead. Does Venezuela have anyone like Julian Assange who they have imprisoned without trial just for telling the truth about their war crimes? No, they do not. Because VZ has not committed any war crimes. They don't overturn governments all over the world and interfere with every election in sovereign countries as we do. Learn who the enemy is. Learn who the liars are.
Speak to those who have escaped VZ.
I'd rather speak to those who stayed. Those who have left are for the most part wealthier people who don't like the social safety net. Same with the people who left Cuba.
P.S. The way other countries vote to govern themselves is not our business. If we want to discourage leftism, we could try being a good neighbor instead of constantly invading other countries and overturning their governments, sometimes multiple times. We have even overturned the governments of our allies on occasion. You win more flies with honey than with vinegar. This is why the US is hated around the world.
I very much agree with your statements above.
I deeply appreciate all the information you share in your substack, Dr. Alexander, but Mr. Holstein is wrong on this. Guaido is decidedly *not* who he makes him out to be—that has been obvious for many years now. Advocating regime change is extremely dangerous and reckless; one would have thought we should have learned this lesson by now. Sovereignty matters—for our own bodies as much as for individual nations. Respectfully, I would urge far more caution and consideration, and not taking Mr. Holstein’s words here as anything approaching ‘instructive’.
What?! Regime change wars should not be USA business. Cruel, fatalities?! Stop on war drum beat. Wasn’t the US involvement in Ukraine coup bad enough in 2014? Wasn’t our stolen election an example of our votes robbed?! With illegal activity out of Ukraine? We need peace and take care of our homeland and clean up our own vast govt corruption.
Misfired on this one Paul.
Toppling a regime? Unless it’s the Biden crime family regime count me out. The CIA has orchestrated an insane number of covert coups and the US military has overtly destroyed too many countries in the name of democracy. It’s time to stop that. I’m shocked you’re on board with this, Dr. Alexander.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is our ally. FFS.
We all know or at least should know why American Oligarchs and Corporations want their Grubby hands on Venezuela? It has less to do with oil and more to do with water. They want make water if the have not already, the next big commodity along with the very air we breathe. Venezuela has one of the most pristine and unpolluted water sources in the world. Have anybody investigate if Venezuela have a legitimate claim to that part of Guyana? If you so much as start a Tribe or group in the USA and try to proclaim some kind of autonomy or Sovereignty you are squashed like a fly, If you live in another country and your government does the same, the same fate is an assurance. These Corporations and Oligarchs do not care about Venezuela or Guyana and they are going to decimate, steal and pillage like they always do, to get the resources of both countries, the people's suffering and death is irrelevant to them. We can't be in a freedom movement and still advocate for these types of policies. There is constant meddling and destabilization of Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela, we have to start asking, " WHY?".
The government that should be removed, for the good of humanity, is the deep state that controls insane puppets like Joe Biden in the United States. The ongoing genocide through injections of lethal spike protein has been fueled by hyper-corrupt US agencies like the FDA and CDC throughout the world. Juan Guaidó is an even more ridiculous caricature than Joe Biden... the difference is that he could be imposed as president in the United States.
I’m sick of our mismanaged military putting our sons and daughters in harms way, and wasting billions and trillions of tax dollars meddling in affairs beyond our borders.
We can fix a huge number of our national security exposures by:
* Sealing our borders, admitting only those who have been properly vetted,
* Ejecting illegal immigrants,
* Turning our military back into a military and not some giant, sick, social and medical experiment so they can credibly defend our borders.
The last thing we need is more military adventures abroad.
Enough is enough.
Well, first you'd have to address the fact the government does not see US borders and is lining up for a New World Order and the Great Reset.
That, of course, is a huge problem.
I’m waiting for the midterm elections to be canceled due to some “emergency” or another.
The military-intelligence /tech/arms/media complex that actually runs things, and for which elected officials and courts are just a now-ragged veneer of legitimacy, needs to be removed, but they’re not going to make it easy.
The problem I see is that what do we replace it with? There is a vicious and venal class that is always eager to rush in and commandeer the levers of power. Extreme decentralization seems to make the most sense.
I agree. Centralized systems are too fragile due to the nature of psychopaths. Decentralization seems to be the only effective way to guard against them.
I analyse this as a problem with the size of errors.
My body has many defective and potentially cancerous cells (shocking, I know, I really wanted to be perfect) which are spotted and removed by my immune system. Once one of them gets big enough I will be subject to the horrors of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
In your appreciation of the problem of large centralized systems you see the same result, that is that the errors are so huge that they cannot be mitigated without systemic damage or destruction.
The Soviet Union may have continued for centuries had it not been exposed to a more effective competing system.
The sociopaths and psychopaths are a feature of most societies, and graduate from nasty hallway monitors in school to their "deserved" and desired positions above us in real life.
Juan Guaidó legitimately recognized president? What?
I totally disagree with Alex Holstein. As far as I am concerned the United States should stop interfering in the affairs of other countries. And as for Cuba it was a playground for wealthy Americans before Castro finally booted them out.
I respectfully disagree. As the following article details, US meddling in other governments has been far from harmless:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-million-people-in-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
"Removing Maduro would not only clear the way for Juan Guaidó, the country’s legitimately recognized president"
Wow that's about as big a heap of propaganda as vaccines are safe and effective.. Never ceases to amaze me that folks see the lies in their area of research and expects truth elsewhere. Guaidó, is the CIA's man this was yet another coup attempt.. try some better sources.
https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/
Didn't the US get their fingers burned enough times yet?
Lunatics among us. Juan Guaido is a legitimate president of Venezuela? Who drank the cool aid?