President Obama just declared Venezuela a threat to US national security, which is code word for any smaller, less powerful nation possessing balls enough to thumb its nose at the Empire bully America. The lie of accusing another sovereign nation as a threat to US national security like clockwork is the first step toward levying economic sanctions. Cuba, Iran, Syria and Russia come readily to mind. This petty, tit for tat politics game comes only a week after Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro announced a drastic downsizing of US Embassy employees and that tourist visas for any Americans traveling to his country would be required, not exactly actions posing much of a “threat” to America. In fact Maduro is exercising remarkable restraint considering that Canada and the US attempted to overthrow the Venezuelan president on Valentine’s Day last month. But with rejuvenated resolve and concerted focus the United States is once again intent on bringing Maduro down.
Obama has been hypocritically playing the ethics card again, accusing the Maduro government of being corrupt and guilty of egregious human rights violations, everything that the US is guilty of in spades. Again Obama can hardly take any higher moral ground on human rights issues when he leads the nation that imprisons one quarter of the world’s prison population despite comprising only 5% of the total global population. Civil liberties are fast disappearing in the prison-industrial complex of America amidst an increasing hostile police state where US law enforcement’s been steadily arming and militarizing to make war against its own citizens who risk death from police bullets at a rate 55 times greater than from any so called terrorist and 100 times more likely to be killed by police than citizens from any other industrialized nation. Where half the current prison population is of the same race he is, Obama should be the last one to criticize any nation for its human rights record when a stronger case can be argued that it’s the United States that is the worst human rights violator on the planet. No other nation on earth has violated and destroyed more human lives and nations than US Empire’s killing machine. According to a study nearly a decade ago, the USA has accounted for an estimated 30 million deathsaround the globe just since World War II. With thousands more US inflicted casualties since that statistic was released, the murder capital of the world with all its exceptionalism just keeps on killing. And no other nation on earth even remotely comes close to the dubious distinction of being at war 93% of its time in existence.