{"id":178259,"date":"2019-01-24T19:29:00","date_gmt":"2019-01-25T00:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/24\/it-does-seem-to-be-an-american-tradition\/"},"modified":"2019-01-24T19:29:00","modified_gmt":"2019-01-25T00:29:00","slug":"it-does-seem-to-be-an-american-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2019\/01\/24\/it-does-seem-to-be-an-american-tradition\/","title":{"rendered":"It Does Seem to Be an American Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Another administration, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/news\/2019\/01\/23\/fears-us-backed-coup-motion-trump-recognizes-venezuela-opposition-lawmaker-interim\">another coup fomented in Latin America<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This is wrong, and it&#8217;s a distraction, we should be spending our energy on being outraged about Russian Facebook trolls.<\/p>\n<p>I mean that literally, there has been an overthrow of a regime promulgated by the US in every administration since (at least) the Reagan administration.&nbsp; (Honduras was Obama&#8217;s coup.) <\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">President Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela officially cut off dipomatic ties  with the U.S. government on Wednesday\u2014and gave American diplomats 72  hours to leave the country\u2014in response to President Donald Trump  declaring formal recognition of an opposition lawmaker as the &#8220;Interim  President&#8221; of Venezuela, despite not being elected by the nation&#8217;s  people for that position.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;Before the people and nations of the world, and as constitutional president,&#8221; <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/098cca00b6d44965850547e9d345d8b3\">declared<\/a>  Maduro to a crowd of red-shirted supporters gathered outside the  presidential residence in Caracas, &#8220;I&#8217;ve decided to break diplomatic and  political relations with the imperialist U.S. government.&#8221; <\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Critics of U.S. imperialism and its long history of anti-democratic manuevers in Latin American expressed immediate alarm on Wednesday after Trump&#8217;s announcement. And what Trump identified as &#8220;democracy,&#8221; critics of the move instead used Maduro&#8217;s description: &#8220;coup.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), called the latest moves by the Trump administration a &#8220;disgrace.&#8221;<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">&#8220;It&#8217;s acceleration of the Trump administration&#8217;s efforts at regime change in Venezuela,&#8221; said Weisbrot. &#8220;We all know how well that strategy has worked out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria\u2014not to mention that hundreds of thousands of people in Latin American have been killed by U.S.-sponsored regime change in Latin America since the 1970s.&#8221;<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t claim omniscience, but I will say that should this coup be successfully prosecuted, the ordinary Venezuelan is going to&nbsp; suffer, and the Venezuelan elites, along with Wall Street will loot the sh%$ out of the place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Another administration, another coup fomented in Latin America. This is wrong, and it&#8217;s a distraction, we should be spending our energy on being outraged about Russian Facebook trolls. I mean that literally, there has been an overthrow of a regime promulgated by the US in every administration since (at least) the Reagan administration.&nbsp; (Honduras was &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[368,364,394,485],"class_list":["post-178259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-corruption","tag-evil","tag-foreign-relations","tag-latin-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178259"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}