Four observations on the Trump administration’s flagrant lawbreaking in abducting Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, from Caracas and bringing him to New York to “stand trial” on “narco-terrorism” and firearms charges:
1. It is a sign of quite how much of a rogue state the US has become that Washington isn’t even trying to come up with a plausible reason for kidnapping the Venezuelan president.
In invading Afghanistan, the US said it had to “smoke out” al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from his mountain lair after the 9/11 attacks. In invading Iraq, the US said it was going to destroy Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened Europe. In bombing Libya, the US claimed it was preventing Muammar Gaddafi’s troops from going on a Viagra-fuelled campaign of rape.
Each of these justifications was a transparent falsehood. The Taliban had offered to hand over bin Laden for trial. There were no WMD in Iraq. And the Viagra story was a work of unadulterated fiction.
But earlier US administrations at least had to pretend their actions were driven by humanitarian considerations and the need to maintain international order.
The charges against Maduro are so patently ridiculous you need to be a Trump fanboy, an old-school imperialist or deeply misinformed to buy any of them. No serious monitoring organisation thinks Venezuela is a major trafficker of drugs into the US, or that Maduro is personally responsible for drug-trafficking. Meanwhile, the firearm charges are so preposterous it’s difficult to understand what they even mean. Jonathan Cook 3d
Note well the pattern:
Israel and the US commit genocide in Gaza – the media tell us it's law enforcement to defeat Hamas.
The US abducts Venezuela's president – the media tell us it's law enforcement against drugs and firearms violations.
It's not surprising they do it. But it's shocking we keep falling for it. 831 48 230
2. Unlike his predecessors, President Trump has been honest about what the US really wants: control of oil. This is an old-fashioned, colonial resource grab. So why are the media even pretending that there is some kind of “law enforcement” process going on in New York? A head of state has been abducted – that’s the story. Nothing else.
Instead we’re being subjected to ridiculous debates about whether Maduro is “a bad man”, or whether he mismanaged the Venzuelan economy. Sky News used an interview with Britain’s former Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to harangue him, demanding he condemn Maduro. Why? Precisely to deflect viewers from the actual story: that in invading Venezuela, the US committed what the Nuremberg trials after the Second Word War judged to be the supreme international crime of aggression against another state. Where have you seen any establishment media outlet highlight this point in its coverage? Jonathan Cook 3h
Sky News journalist: "Only when you accept my premise that Trump had grounds to abduct Maduro, will I move on..."
This is how the media launders the supreme crime of aggression when our side does it. 131 18 34
If Sky and other media are so worried about “bad men” running countries – so concerned that they think international law can be flouted – why are they not haranguing Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper over Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity? Doesn’t that make him a very “bad man”, far worse than anything Maduro is accused of? Why are they not demanding that Starmer and Cooper condemn him before they are allowed to talk about the Middle East?
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the western media did not weigh the justifications for Moscow’s invasion, or offer context, as they are now doing over the lawless attack on Venezuela. They responded with shock and outrage. They were not calm, judicious and analytical. They were indignant. They warned of “Russian expansionism”. They warned of Putin’s “megalomania”. They warned of the threat to international law. They emphasised the right of Ukraine to resist Russia. In many cases, they led the politicians in demanding a stronger response. None of that is visible in the coverage of Maduro’s abduction, or Trump’s lawbreaking.
3. The left is often censured for being slow to denounce non-western powers like China or Russia, or being too wary of military action against them. This is to misunderstand the left’s position. It opposes a unipolar world precisely because that inevitably leads to the kind of destabilising gangsterism just demonstrated by Trump’s attack on Venezuela. It creates a feudal system of one lord, many serfs – but on the global stage.
That is exactly what we see happening now as Trump and Marco Rubio, his secretary of state, mouth off about which country – Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Mexico – is going to be attacked next. It is exactly why every European leader, from Keir Starmer to EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, sucks up to Trump, however monstrous his latest act. It is exactly why the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, speaks so limply about the general importance of “the rule of law” rather than articulating a clear denunciation of the crimes the US has just committed. Jonathan Cook 4d
Starmer: "We regarded Maduro as an illegitimate President and we shed no tears about the end of his regime."
Pretty sure Putin regarded Zelenskiy as an "illegitimate president" too.
So presumably invading Ukraine was okay, then? 330 49 97
Hard as it is for westerners to acknowledge, we don’t need a stronger West, we need a weaker one.
But harder still, westerners need to understand that the very concept of “the West” is an illusion. For decades, Europe has been simply hanging on to the coat-tails of a US military behemoth, in the hope that it would protect us. But in a world of diminishing resources, the US is showing quite how ready it is to turn on anyone, including its supposed allies, for a bigger share of global wealth. Just ask Greenland and Denmark.
European states’ true interests lie, not in prostrating themselves before a global overlord, but in a multipolar world, where coalitions of interests need to be forged, where compromises must be reached, not diktats imposed. That requires a foreign policy of transparency and compassion, not conceit and arrogance. Without such a change, in an era of burgeoning nuclear tripwires and growing climate chaos, we are all finished.
4. Washington’s goal is to make Venezuela once again a haven for private US capital. If the new acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, refuses, then Trump has made it clear Venezuela will be kept as an economic basket-case, through continuing sanctions and a US naval blockade, until someone else can be installed who will do US bidding.
Venezuela’s crime – one for which it has been punished for decades – is trying to offer a different economic and social model to America’s rampant, planet-destroying, neoliberal capitalism. The deepest fear of the West’s political and media class is that western publics, subjected to permanent austerity as billionaires grow ever richer off the back of ordinary people’s immiseration, may rise up if they see a different system that looks after its citizens rather than its wealth elite.
Venezuela, with its huge oil reserves, could be precisely such a model – had it not been long strangled by US-imposed sanctions. A quarter of a century ago, Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, launched a socialist-style “Bolivarian revolution” of popular democracy, economic independence, equitable distribution of revenues, and an end to political corruption. It reduced extreme poverty by more than 70 per cent, halved unemployment, duadrupled the number of people receiving a state pension and schooled the population to reach literacy rates of 100 per cent. Venezuela became the most equal society in Latin America – one reason why millions still turn out to defend Maduro.
Chavez did so by taking the country’s natural resources – its oil and metal ores – out of the hands of a tiny domestic elite that had ruined the country by extracting the national wealth and mostly hoarding or investing it abroad, often in the US. He nationalised major industries, from oil and steel to electricity. Those are the very industries that Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader feted by the West, wants returned to the parasitic families, like her own, that once ran them privately.
Seeing the way Venezuela has been treated for the past two decades or more should make it clear why European leaders – obedient at all costs to Washington and the corporate elites that rule the West – are so reluctant to even consider nationalising their own public industries, however popular such policies are with electorates.
Britain’s Keir Starmer, who only won the Labour leadership election by promising to nationalise major utilities, ditched his pledge the moment he was elected. None of the traditional main UK parties is offering to renationalise water, rail, energy and mail services, even though surveys regularly show at least three-quarters of the British public support such a move.
The fact is that a unipolar world leaves all of us prey to a rapacious, destructive, US corporate capitalism, which, bit by bit, is destroying our world. The issue isn’t whether Maduro was a good or bad leader of Venezuela – the matter the western establishment media wants us concentrating on. It is how do we put the US back in the box before it is too late for humanity. The last working-class hero in England. Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ??? - 4 November 2021 Georgina the cat ???-4 December 2025
Jonathon Cook has been writing stunning piece after stunning piece lately
such a needed corrective to the permanent bullshit blizzard. None of this truthful analysis to be found anywhere near the corporate media. The corporate media are complicit in the Gaza genocide. Never forget what they did. Never forgive them for it.
The threat of a better example - Venezuela even looks after the citizens of the US
For the eighth straight year, Venezuela's state oil company is donating free heating oil to hundreds of thousands of needy Americans.
The CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program has helped more than 1.7 million Americans in 25 states and the District of Columbia keep warm since it was launched back in 2005. The program is a partnership between the Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), its subsidiary CITGO and Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit organization founded by former US Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II.
It provides discounted and free home heating services and supplies to needy households in the United States and abroad. It has been supported from the beginning by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
In 2005, a pair of devastating hurricanes, Katrina and Rita, led to dwindling oil supplies and skyrocketing fuel costs. Some of the poorest and most vulnerable Americans, including many elderly people on fixed incomes, found themselves having to choose between heating their homes or providing food, clothing or medicine for themselves and their families.
Since that first winter, CITGO has provided 227 million gallons of free heating oil worth an estimated $465 million to an average of 153,000 US households each year. Some 252 Native American communities and 245 homeless shelters have also benefited from the program.
This winter, more than 100,000 American families will receive Venezuelan aid. With the US government estimating that households heating primarily with oil will pay $407 (19 percent) more this year than last, the program remains an invaluable helping hand to many needy Americans.
"The CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program has been one of the most important energy assistance efforts in the United States," CITGO CEO Alejandro Granado said at the Night of Peace Family Shelter in Baltimore, Maryland, where he and Citizens Energy Corporation Chairman Kennedy launched the 2013 program. "This year, as families across the Eastern Seaboard struggle to recover from the losses caused by Hurricane Sandy, this donation becomes even more significant."
Last year, President Barack Obama and Congress reduced Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) funding by 25 percent, cutting off an estimated one million US households from desperately needed assistance just as winter's worst chill, accompanied by record heating oil prices, set in. Fortunately, the CITGO-Venezuela Heating Oil Program was able to assist an estimated 400,000 Americans last year.
"The federal fuel assistance program reaches only one-fifth of all the eligible households in the US," Kennedy said in Baltimore. "Millions of families just go cold at night in their own homes."
on January 7, 2026, 3:46 pm