Abby Martin Goes In Depth on Venezuela | Joe Rogan

That's too big to fail. The banks fail, then the people fail. That's unbelievable, man. And all this shit that we're spending, I mean the Venezuela shit, all these sanctions, it is, the Venezuela coup, I mean were you following that? That was insane. Well, I was following it as much as you were sort of putting out as much, you were putting a very alternative view as opposed to like what we're seeing in either left or right wing publications. And you faced a lot of resistance because of that, right? Right. But you were there. Yes, yes. I was there and that's why I knew with my own, I mean I saw with my own eyes the reality on the ground. And what do you think is happening over there? So what is happening over there? I mean if you poll Venezuelans themselves, they will say that their quality of life has lessened because of US sanctions. So back in 2015, Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat, very random. There was no threat obviously opposed to the US, but it was just to kind of start the sanctions on them. What was the justification? Who knows? Who knows pressure? I mean there's always been pressure because of course the US has always hated Maduro and hated Hugo Chavez and the US empire doesn't forget and it doesn't forgive. And going back to 2002, Bush tried to engineer a coup against Hugo Chavez. That didn't work. And so what we've done with these civil society organizations is try to foment radical discontent on the ground in Venezuela to try to get some sort of uprising. The guy Juan Guaido was just some guy plucked from obscurity who was just well known in Georgetown and Washington DC, much more well known there than he was even in Venezuela. So this was completely engineered. It was totally concocted. No Venezuelans really knew who he was. I think like 80% of Venezuelans had no idea who Juan Guaido was. But the economy went into a spiral because oil prices dropped and they would have been able to pick back up their economy. But unfortunately the sanctions were so debilitating that it went into complete freefall. Venezuela is not a socialist country. That's actually the vast majority is private industry and a lot of those private CEOs are very anti-government. Long story short is that the coup was initiated during the Trump administration after he slapped like 70 sanctions on Venezuela. And we're talking about medicine, food, all the things that they're saying that they need, right? That they're trying to stage these fake aid caravan deliveries. That was all bullshit. What they're doing is actually preventing the delivery from food and medicine from getting to Venezuelans. And this coup was a failure because the resilience of the Venezuelan people, they believe that they have a democracy. They do have a democracy. It's actually more free than our democracy. There's not a dictatorship there. Maduro won a presidential election last year. He won a presidential election. The US lobbied the opposition candidates to not run against him so then they can say it was illegitimate, that it was a dictatorship. And so he won. He won the popular vote and they tried to implement all these things and they've been blocked. And the opposition keeps crying to the US that they need help, that they need to be invaded. It's pretty disturbing when you have opposition candidates saying slap sanctions on us, invade our country, help us Trump, help us. I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous. But when I was on the ground, I saw flourishing democracy. I saw dozens of people, hundreds of people who said that they love the process there, that they believe in the Bolivarian movement and that they're Chavismo till death. And we don't understand because those people's voices are totally censored from corporate media. The only Venezuelans that we hear from in corporate media are rich opposition, either expats or people who just have fled. And what do we hear from corporate media? What is the corporate take? So this is even Elizabeth Warren, even Bernie Sanders has been terrible on this. I mean, it's really bad. I mean, their take on corporate media, if you're looking at Fox News, they'll say we need to overthrow Maduro and everyone's starving and it's a failed state. They know they never mentioned the sanctions. They never mentioned the fact that US sanctions just from 2017 alone has killed 40,000 Venezuelans. This was just a study out by Seeper. 40,000 Venezuelans have died from Trump's sanctions, from insulin shipments not getting there, primarily. A lot of other things, medicine wise, that people have not been getting in, they are dying. So that is absurd. We like to think of sanctions as kind of like the soft power that just targets elites of the country. No, it's an act of war and that's exactly what's happening to Iran and Trump's implemented sanctions all over the world in a really devastating way. But the corporate media will say we need to overthrow them. They're a failed state. They're a dictatorship. In reality, no, they're not. They're a democracy and we don't like their politics. That's really what it is. We don't like the fact that their politics, their politics are that they nationalize the oil. And that's really where it comes from, this fake ambassador that was trying to get into the embassy here, Carlos Vecchio. He's an ex-exon lawyer. And you see all of these people who were involved in exon mobile and all of the oil industries that were flourishing in Venezuela before Chavez got elected. And they just want their profits back. They want their money back. They don't like the fact that Chavez took the profits from the oil companies. That's what the crux of the problem is, Joe. And it's amazing. It's amazing how transparent it is. So ever since these failed coup attempts over the last decade, the US has been fomenting regime change through the civil society organizations, USAID offshoots in the country and basically trying to foment violent unrest. Violent unrest to the extent that they burn down streets. There's lynch mobs. I mean, when I was there during the height of the violence in 2017, like 200 people died. And the news just kept saying, like insinuating that Maduro was going out there with police forces and actually gunning down people in the streets. It couldn't be farther from the truth. We looked at all the deaths. We broke them all down. We looked at death records and we found out that the opposition lynch mobs were actually responsible for the overwhelming majority of deaths in the streets. So that's happening. People get lynched for being black. They get lynched for being Chavez mode. These people are targeting maternity clinics, hospitals, basically any enclave of government services, because that's what this is really about. It's about a kind of a fascistic bent of the opposition wanting to take back the power from the poor. The poor people got power and they didn't like it. And that's what the crux of the problem is. But when you're looking at the corporate media, it's an absurdly cartoonish brush that's being painted. And then if you look at the liberal media with Maddow and all these other people, they either don't talk about it or they say, Maduro needs to let the aid in. You even saw Bernie and Elizabeth Warren saying Maduro needs to let the aid in, let the aid in Maduro. The aid was the coup. The aid was a trick. They're getting aid every day from countries that are not trying to actively overthrow them. But we staged this big stunt on the border of Colombia. And by the way, Colombia is actually suffering more than Venezuela. Colombia is in dire poverty. There's people getting assassinated every week who are labor leaders and teachers. I went there and I talked to a teacher who's living in exile because he's scared for his fucking life. But we don't hear about that, right? Because they're allies with the US. So it's a cynical stunt to try to get this humanitarian international outcry to say, oh my God, people are dying. People are hungry. It's not a matter of that there's no food. It's that food is very expensive because there's an actual economic war being waged by massive corporations in the country and just external entities, whether it be the Trump administration or US multinationals that are asphyxiating, preventing aid and food from coming in. And the aid that they're claiming that they need to accept is basically a hoax. It's a stunt to try to get regime change to happen. We just saw Richard Branson stage some ridiculous big concert on the border of Colombia, and they had what they said were aid trucks on this big bridge. And you had CNN on the ground being like, all right, they need to let the aid in. Why don't they let the aid in? And the aid was fake. It was just a truck full of, I don't know, very minuscule things. But they wanted to try to ram these trucks through just to get the soldiers up in arms and to try to get them to defect. It hasn't worked. They've been trying over and over, going to try to get something going. And basically, at the end of the day, what happened was just a giant money grab. It was basically a money laundering scheme. You look at these people who are the opposition leaders now, Juan Guaido, Carlos Veccio, they've just stolen all the money back. Maybe they realized the coup wasn't going to go forward, but they basically ended up stealing at least $70 million and just putting it right in these people's bank accounts. It's pretty shocking. I mean, you have international, it's an international conspiracy to try to take the money back from the people whose money was basically administered by Maduro for social services. And the root of it all is nationalizing the oil. Nationalizing the oil is the root of it all. And also just uplifting the poor. I mean, poor people got a voice and they never had a voice in that country their entire lives. And that country was, it was a colonial holdover. And so the Bolivarian movement started this pink tide all across Latin America. And it was scary. It was a giant threat to the US establishment. And actually, that's why Telosor was founded. Telosor, the organization that I used to sell the show to, it was started as kind of a counter to this global hegemony in this corporate narrative, trying to overthrow these democratically elected leaders. But it's shocking when you see like the Bank of England seized all of this gold that was rightfully Maduro's, they seized it illegally. All of these banks and international bodies just stole all this money and they just gave it to these opposition leaders. So even though the opposition leaders weren't able to take the power back in the country, they still have taken all the money. And no one's talking about that. And everyone's just acting like this is some crazy dictatorship that needs our saving. How dare you? Who the fuck do we think we are? We're uninformed, right? Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah, you should check out, everyone should check out our Empire Files YouTube channel because we've done extensive coverage on the ground really going into the nuts and bolts of what the economic crisis really is. And my partner Mike Preisner did this epic takedown of John Oliver. The liberal media is just as bad. John Oliver did some fucking absurdly false kind of like analysis of the whole Venezuela situation. And we just went through and debunked every single line of it. I mean, it was extremely disingenuous. I bet he had someone who wrote all of it, right? So I bet he probably has no real knowledge of it, nor could you really, unless you extensively studied it the way you have, and especially if you have feet on the ground. I think that most people just, in order to understand a complex nuanced problem, like some sort of an international conflict that we're involved in that has to do with nationalizing oil, like, God damn, you got to do a lot of work. You do, you do. And if you run a show like last week tonight or whatever the fuck the show is called. You have producers doing everything for you. Someone else is doing that. I mean, you find that with a lot of these so-called online experts. When you talk to them one on one and you get them off the record without notes, like they're just people. Well, there's this guy, this UN human rights investigator named Alfred de Zias that I did this big interview with, and he said, he tried to propose this to the UN saying there is no humanitarian crisis there. This is all fake. Yes, people are suffering and dying, but it's not because of Maduro's policies and corruption. This is because of US sanctions that have asphyxiated the economy and prevented any sort of recovery from taking place. And the economy is still in freefall. They can't work with international bodies. Again, we have the threats of sanctions with institutions that now work with Venezuela. So they've been isolated. They've been isolated from the world. So it was the idea that they just put these sanctions in place, allow this political unrest to take place, support the opposition, and then just have a slow burn until it all collapses. Yes. And they'll come in and swoop in and fix everything and make it a part of the United States government. And then these people will not have a voice any longer. And another thing that they hate is that Maduro's given 2 million free homes to people. That's something that's completely unheard of to maybe Americans. But that's one thing that Juan Guaido said that he would do. He immediately implemented a new hydrocarbons law, or he was proposing to implement a new hydrocarbons law, which is again, reprivitizing the oil, and also just immediately privatizing all of the social services that Maduro and Chavez did. So it's pretty shocking what would happen and pretty devastating what would happen if Guaido's coup did succeed. And the whole Trump administration, I mean, it's not just Venezuela. It's Nicaragua and Cuba too. I mean, we can't go to Cuba anymore. Yeah, that's a new one, right? Yeah. When did that happen? Yeah. Just a couple weeks ago, right? Yeah. What was the purpose? I mean, what was the rationalization? Because socialism is terrifying, and we can't just let this small island nation just live its life. We have to create some genocidal blockade that prevents food and medicine from getting in there too. But what was the... Was there a justification? Did they say why they were doing this, why they're imposing these new laws? No. It's just John Bolton's bizarre speech about the Troika of tyranny. Remember the axis of evil? Remember that? Yeah. That's the Troika of tyranny. Yeah, that's the Troika of tyranny. Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. It's like, wait, I thought that we were fighting a war on terrorism. We're going up to Nicaragua too? Yeah. Because of Ortega. Yeah, they hate anyone who leans left. They want to crush. Crush. It's pretty fucking nuts. What's happened? The Cuba one is a weird one, right? The Cuba ones... Because what has happened over there? Nothing. There's... Yeah, they're not... Yeah. They haven't done anything to us. The only thing they just did was actually give out free HIV prevention pills and they... Well, that's where they fucked up. Which... Big pharma. Yeah. That's where they fucked up. We're not into that. Yeah. No, the Venezuela thing's a mess. It's so difficult because it's so nuanced, but that's... I encourage everyone to maybe check out Venezuela Analysis and Empire Files and tell us more if they want to learn more about that situation. Thanks for watching.