A Daily Reid: Imperialism, Inc.
The U.S. has always been an imperialist bastard, pretending to fight a "war on drugs," crime or communism. Trump is just following tradition.
You used to get called crazy and paranoid if you accused the CIA of being responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. It was that cranky unc in the barbershop who would insist that crack didn’t exist in our communities until CIA agents flew the drugs in and started distributing them to the Crips and Bloods and other gangs, so they could sell it on our corners. But like so many conspiracy theories, this one … initially discovered by a muckraking, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist named Gary Webb, who died in disgrace of alleged suicide (from two gunshots to the head, no less) after being ridiculed as a crank and a liar … turned out to be true. One of the mainstream outlets that picked up the baton was CBS News, whose once-legendary show, 60 Minutes, scored a Peabody Award for their version of the story back in 1993:
So, given that the U.S. had no problem allowing cocaine from or that passed through Venezuela to be sold U.S. streets, it’s hard to take entirely seriously the sudden moralizing about Nicolås Maduro. Especially since Trump just recently pardoned a convicted president / drug kingpin — the former president of Honduras: Juan Orlando Hernandez:
Ah ok … you pardoned him because he’s a criminal like you, not a criminal like Maduro. Got it, Donald…
And while it’s infuriating watching Trump toss his “America first” shtick in the shitter to pursue what’s looking like metastatic imperialism (spanning from Greeland to Canada to Panama to Colombia, Cuba and hell at this point maybe more) it’s not like he’s creating a new tradition … or a new doctrine…
Damn, that man is stupid…
But the truth of the matter is, previous presidents, including Eisenhower, Reagan and Bushes 1 and 2 walked so Trump could shamble.
And it wasn’t just flying cocaine into the U.S. for street dealers to cook into crack in the hood, to fund regime change in Nicaragua during the Reagan years, when George H.W. Bush was vice president. Our CIA ran and then discarded quirky dictator / drug lord Manuel Noriega in Panama when Bush The Elder was in his previous job as CIA director — having taken over for the guy who looked the other way and ignored the My Lai massacre (which then Major Colin Powell helped cover up. He was later made not just a general, but Bush’s son George W’s Secretary of State.) And despite having Noriega on the payroll in his old job, Bush I had no problem declaring his own war on drugs (and on Noriega) during his presidency.
Try not to get too distracted by the hairstyles in this vintage CBS Evening News clip…
The man who declared the very much illegal invasion of Panama to arrest Noriega to be quite legal indeed? The coverup general himself: William “Bill” (I may or may not have murked Jeffrey Epstein” Barr (of course. And he’s still Henry Kissingering, even having refused to endorse the supposedly dangerous Donald Trump:
In ordering Noriega’s removal, the White House relied on a 1989 legal opinion by then-Assistant Attorney General Bill Barr, issued six months before the invasion. That opinion said the U.N. Charter’s prohibition on the use of force in international relations does not bar the U.S. from carrying out “forcible abductions” abroad to enforce domestic laws.
Supreme Court decisions dating to the 1800s also have upheld America’s jurisdiction to prosecute foreigners regardless of whether their presence in the United States was lawfully secured.
Barr’s opinion is likely to feature in Maduro’s prosecution as well, experts said.
Drawing parallels to the Noriega case, Barr on Sunday pushed aside criticisms that the U.S. was pursuing a change of government in Venezuela instead of enforcing domestic laws. As attorney general during the first Trump administration, Barr oversaw Maduro’s indictment.
“Going after them and dismantling them inherently involves regime change,” Barr said in a “Fox News Sunday” interview. “The object here is not just to get Maduro. We indicted a whole slew of his lieutenants. It’s to clean that place out of this criminal organization.”
And that’s just some of the dirt the U.S. has done in our backyard. Destabilizing and overthrowing elected governments, and both using and then pretending to want to suppress the drug trade to solidify our control is how this country has always done business with our corner of the Global South:
If a country has oil, they get subjugated to U.S. oil companies and to the petrodollar. If not? Anything goes. The U.S. has run this game in Central America, South America, the Middle East, Asia and Africa. The stated causes change, from “fighting communism” to “liberating the people,” but the endgame is always the same: U.S. companies wind up with control over the natural resources of the country, and those resources get traded in dollars. And when countries’ leaders try to resist, or nationalize their resources, or trade in Euros or anything other than dollars? They wind up like
Mossedegh in Iran
Saddam Hussein in Iraq
or Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.
Here’s a good, comprehensive look at the U.S. history of coups….
So it should not surprise you that Donald Trump is following in this long, ugly, American imperialist tradition. Despite his having said stuff like this in the past:
He is president again. And so he is responsible for continuing to support The Project: defending the U.S. economy against threats from abroad, including, very specifically BRICS and other international alliances that threaten to take countries — particularly oil producing countries — off the dollar crack pipe…
Trump clearly believes in the concept of American empire. He’s quite excited by it, actually — and yearns to add his own ugly surname to the long list of presidents who expanded America’s ill gotten gains.
And So Maduro and his wife will pay the price for his playing footsie with China and Russia (and running crossways of Israel…) with his freedom traded for the return of U.S. oil companies to the world’s largest oil reserves to trade their crude in our dollars. It’s a strategic initiative triggered by the expiration of the U.S.-Saudi petrodollar deal made by Richard Nixon.
That deal expired last June, leaving the U.S. vulnerable to a global fiscal free-for-all.
I explained it on The Joy Reid Show Monday night:
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This is why right-wingers want to keep Americans ignorant about their history. It undermines their claims to moral superiority.
Our government loves to smash on Central and South America. They have been doing this for over a century. Leave them the fuck alone! We went in to Guatemala removed a democratic government and replaced it with a greedy corrupt dictator. Just for freaking bananas! Panama...well we know about the rape and pillage there just because we needed to ship crap to California. I could go on and on and on. USA colonialism. It's really a ploy to steal from beautiful brown people with different customs from the white man. Racism undermines it all. Sickening.