The Venezuelan Government’s Answers to Trump’s Accusations

7 November 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

The following news-report by Telesur, which is the Venezuelan Government’s TV network headquartered in Caracas, is entirely current and accurate today though Juan Gaido has been replaced by Corina Machado as being the U.S. Government’s selected stooge-leader of Venezuela if-and-when Nicolo Maduro becomes successfully installed by the U.S. Government to lead Venezuela (but, anyway, even if you don’t believe that the U.S. Government is so evil as to regime-change other nations’ Governments, this news-report from Venezuela does accurately describe the situation in Venezuela today, though it was reported nearly six years ago):

https://web.archive.org/web/20190719145152/

“An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela: Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose Coup”

22 February 2019

0:05

INTERVIEWER ABBY MARTIN: For the last few weeks the world’s focus has been on Venezuela as Trump pushes for regime change, almost

0:11

every media outlet paints the same picture that Venezuela is a brutal dictatorship in a starving nation,

0:17

one that demands intervention and that they finally have a solution to the crisis,

0:23

a legitimate claim to power by an opposition politician Juan Gaido: [U.S.-and-allied media reports] “As civil society collapses,

0:29

America confronts the socialist dictatorship, Maduro stole the previous election, he

0:35

locked up and he tortured anyone trying to unseat him, there’s no toilet paper some days in Caracas, they’re eating zoo

0:40

animals. What happened? Well you know what happened: they implemented socialism. The eyes of the revolution are

0:46

everywhere. President Maduro’s militia still trying to keep the people in line.

0:51

Gaido is investing in the people whereas Nicolas Maduro is investing in the army. So, this is a neighborhood uh

0:57

Juan Gaido feels safe in, this is one of the wealthier neighborhoods of Caracas” Despite the faux dissent against Trump’s

1:04

domestic policies, the corporate media have lined up to support his coup in Venezuela.

1:09

Tech giants like facebook and twitter are doing their part to shape the narrative, too, recently removing 2 000 accounts for

1:16

spreading pro-Maduro messaging to, quote, influence people. [U.S.-and-allied media reports] “Would you personally negotiate with Nicolas

1:22

Maduro to convince him to exit? [Trump:] Well, he has requested a meeting and I’ve

1:27

turned it down because we’re very far along in the process.” Trump has said a military option is on the table

1:33

with coup leader Juan while oh suggesting he will request it. [Mike Pompeo:] “People don’t recognize that Hezbollah

1:38

has active cells, the Iranians are impacting the people of Venezuela, we have an obligation to take down that

1:44

risk for America.” [John Bolton] “All options are on the table.” [Mike Pence] “All options are on the table.” [Trump:] “All options are on the table.” [Bolton:] “The United States

1:51

now looks forward to watching each corner of the triangle fall in Havana in Caracas in Managua.” [Tump:] “The

1:58

days of socialism and communism are numbered.” [Bolton:] “Llibertad libertad libertad!” Their latest cynical stunt is

2:06

weaponizing aid to hold Maduro’s government hostage in the latest war escalation. [U.S. propaganda-media interview supporters:] “The U.S.

2:11

announced the delivery of so-called aid via military aircraft the border. [U.S. State Department official Junie Chung: “The only thing that’s stopping us is the Maduro regime. We’ve seen them block the bridges, block the roads. And it’s an abomination to humanity to stop basic necessities and goods from entering your country to help your own people.”] “It’s an

2:17

abomination to humanity to stop basic necessities and goods from entering your country to help your own people.” [Her CNN interviewer:] “Is there

2:23

any concern that something like this would provoke him from doing something even more drastic?” [Different CNN interviewer:]

2:29

“What happens if he doesn’t let that aid through?” [Marco Rubio:] “Well, look, the aid is going to get through and I think ultimately the

2:35

question is whether it gets through in a way that he’s cooperative with, or in a way that he’s not.”

2:40

From Iraq to Libya to Venezuela what usually preempts U.S. military intervention is the pretext of a

2:46

humanitarian crisis, and right now pretty much everyone speaks with authority about the fact

2:52

that there is a human rights crisis caused by the Maduro government. What is surprisingly absent from the

2:59

discourse is testimony from the human rights investigator designated by the U.N. to assess said

3:04

crisis, Alfred de Zayas was the first U.N. investigator to go to Venezuela in 21

3:10

years. He has written 13 reports for the U.N. Human Rights Council but his report on Venezuela was largely

3:17

ignored. I spoke with Alfred to find out why. [ALFRED DE ZAYAS:] “If you know

3:22

a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and in Yemen and in Syria and in Sudan

3:29

and in Somalia, you wouldn’t say there is a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela, and at no point when i was

3:36

walking the streets in Venezuela did I feel uh threatened or did i see

3:42

violence or did i consider that this country was undergoing a

3:48

humanitarian crisis, but I see human rights more and more being instrumentalized

3:56

to destroy human rights. There is a weaponization of human rights.

4:03

I see the rule of law being instrumentalized to destroy the rule of law and unfortunately

4:10

the complicity of the mainstream media. What i’m saying to you

4:18

I think it would have been sensible to say it to the BBC it would have been

4:25

sensible to say it to the New York Times and to the Washington Post

4:30

and to the Economist and to the Financial Times, but at no time

4:37

since I returned from Venezuela and since my report was officially presented

4:44

to the Human Rights Council, have I been approached by any of these

4:49

organs who actually have a responsibility vis-a-vis you and vis-a-vis me and vis-a-vis the

4:56

people of the United States, to inform.” [INTERVIEWER CONTINUES:] You know, many people will say the crisis

5:01

cannot be blamed on the sanctions, of course that sanctions are being used as a scapegoat for Maduro’s economic failures. Alfred,

5:09

talk about the impacts of the sanctions thus far and the new sanctions that were just

5:15

implemented on the state oil company. [ZAYAS:] What is particularly Machiavellian what

5:21

is particularly cynical is to cause an economic crisis that threatens to

5:28

become a humanitarian crisis. That’s what the United States has done through the financial blockade, through

5:35

the uh sanctions, and then to say oh we’re going to offer you uh humanitarian help we’re sending

5:43

so many tons of humanitarian assistance through USAID.

5:48

We’re sending it to Colombia and we’re going to deliver it now. I think that here Juan Gaido is

5:56

being the shall we say the jockey, he is riding on the Trojan horse of

6:03

the United States but the solution of the problem is much easier than the band-aid

6:11

of sending some packages of food or of medicine. The solution

6:19

is in my report, what iItold the Human Rights Council

6:27

is that the financial blockade, has had

6:33

extremely adverse human rights impacts obviously the origin of the

6:39

current economic crisis is in the fall the dramatic fall in the price of oil

6:47

but normally you would be able to fix that a country as wealthy as Venezuela should

6:54

have been able to borrow money on its enormous natural resources and

7:02

then would have been able to buy and sell like anybody else. But no, the United States has made sure that

7:09

because of the threat of enormous penalties to the U.S. Treasury the banks have been

7:17

closing the accounts of the Venezuelan Government and of the Petroleus of

7:24

venezuela already in july 2017, uh Citibank unexpectedly decided without

7:33

prior notice and arbitrarily to close the bank accounts of the central bank of

7:38

Venezuela and the bank of Venezuela in November 2017

7:44

again Citibank blocked the transfer uh for a shipment

7:52

of more than 300,000 doses of insulin in November 2017,

7:58

the company Euroclear retained 1.65

8:04

billion dollars that the Venezuelan Government had paid for the purpose for the purchase of food

8:10

and medicine. Citgo the uh Venezuelan state

8:16

oil company based in the U.S. has not been able to transfer its profits

8:21

outside the United States of America. It needs that money to buy food and medicine and it is in

8:28

the neighborhood I think by now of nine or uh 10 billion uh dollars that have been

8:34

withheld there again. Wells Fargo Bank uh withheld and cancelled payment of seven

8:43

million five hundred thousand made by Brazil to Venezuela uh for the sale of

8:49

electricity in May 2018. The Venezuelan minister of people’s power informed that a

8:57

financial transaction amounting to 7 million dollars for the purchase of dialysis

9:04

supplies for patients including children and adolescents requiring such treatment had been

9:11

blocked so uh you see here uh the immorality of it but not only the

9:18

immorality of it, there is personal

9:24

criminal liability uh for the impact of these sanctions I mean I

9:30

am certain that the increase in child mortality the increase

9:37

in maternal mortality the increased deaths for uh lack of

9:44

insulin or lack of anti-retroviral drugs is a direct result

9:52

of this blockage so that venezuela has not been

9:58

able to purchase what its people deserve. It’s not like the government

10:06

doesn’t want to distribute, is that the government is being through an external economic

10:12

war is being asphyxiated and that was the name of the game what the United

10:20

States intended to do, was to create a situation whereby the people or the military

10:28

uh would topple the government and then uh the one percent uh

10:35

could again come in and could again control the wealth of Venezuela. Venezuela had

10:42

succeeded in uh bringing millions and millions of Venezuelans out of

10:49

extreme poverty nobody cared in the 1980s and 90s that there were millions of Venezuelans

10:56

dying of hunger and malnutrition, no one cared it’s

11:02

it it was a government that was palatable to Washington and a

11:08

government that was a right-wing government. The moment that a left-wing government came in power uh

11:14

priority number one in Washington was to topple it and now you have the Bank of England

11:19

seizing the gold right from Maduro over a billion dollars worth and threatening to give it to Juan Gaido

11:25

that’s yet another violation of international law but try to bring the United States

11:30

before the International Criminal Court or before the International Court of Justice.

11:37

…

27:14

INTERVIEWER: Why do you think the corporate media are so unified in lockstep behind this regime-change narrative

27:20

yet bemoan entities like Russia Today and Telesur as state propaganda organs?

27:26

DE ZAYAS: Well, as i said, what drives the world is the economy, what

27:33

drives the world is money and the

27:39

corporate moguls uh who control and own the press, have an interest in

27:48

having a world composed of the [richest] one percent that will

27:55

uh rule everything and administer everything for our own good or so they claim,

28:03

and it is, as I say, scandalous, that

28:10

they do not give the coverage the attention to things

28:18

uh published by academics. Now, we’ve been talking about fake news,

28:25

about the ocean of lies that we read in the papers every day, but

28:32

it’s not just the lies that create the problem, it is the absence of information

28:39

when a whole dimension is suppressed, and you do not

28:45

hear anything about other points of view [facts that contradict the propaganda’s narrativee]. Sooner or later, you

28:52

accept the narrative that, yes, there is a humanitarian crisis, ergo you need a humanitarian

28:59

intervention, and if Maduro doesn’t leave by his own free will,

29:05

it will be necessary to topple him, and then you find someone like one Juan

29:10

Gaido, who’s going to play the game. I mean, every country has opportunists

29:17

and who will be the agent

29:23

for the United States and for United States transnationals and for the United

29:31

States oil industry. There are billions of dollars in profits

29:36

to be made in Venezuela and thus-far the profits have been used uh to

29:44

satisfy the social needs of the Venezuelan people; uh, that of course is likely to end

29:51

if uh this uh coup is uh successful. I mean, if you want

29:57

to have a coup d’etat in Venezuela say so,

30:04

you want a coup d’etat because you want American business to move in and to take the profits. That’s where

30:10

it’s at, but it’s not a question that you sympathize

30:16

with the poor suffering Venezuelan people when it is the United States that is

30:21

causing that suffering well at least John Bolton is speaking.

30:26

…

——

MY COMMENTS: The reason why this isn’t propaganda but authentic news-reporting is that this contains no lies and no implicit falsehoods; it is entirely truthful. Is the only solution to this problem, the problem that it reports — the voracious U.S. imperialism (“neoconservatism”) — an overthrow of the American Government, a Second American Revolution? If not, then should one accept a government such as this one is? It certainly isn’t any authentic democracy.

“Richard Wolff: Economic Decline Fuels U.S. Political Meltdown”

7 November 2025

1:17

Probably the biggest issue you’ve

1:23

touched on yourself, which is that the dynamic center of capitalism

1:30

has moved from the west to the east. It it seems to me the evidence now is is

1:37

literally overwhelming. Uh I I know there are plenty of people who don’t

1:42

want to see it, but I really do now write that off to what is typical of

1:48

declining empires that the people who run them don’t want to see them

1:55

decline which I understand are frightened by the prospect of

2:01

decline which I understand and so do something which I understand

2:08

which is to pretend it isn’t happening. It reminds me of a time when my my

2:15

little daughter when we were taking her for a walk and a dog came by and started

2:21

barking and the barking dog frightened her. Um so she did what seemed to her to

2:28

be the logical thing to do. She put her little hands in front of her eyes.

2:34

No one told her to do this. She just did that because then she couldn’t see the dog

2:41

and he was much less frightening because she couldn’t see him, you know. And we

2:46

It was a moment when you realize how a human being learns after a while that

2:52

the barking dog is still there even when you can’t see him. And you know that’s a

2:58

learning process. I think the United States, where I live, I’m speaking to you from New York City.

3:06

The United States, where I live and work and have all my life, is in a state that psychologists call

3:14

denial, in which large numbers of its people,

3:19

most of its leadership, certainly the leaders of the Republican and Democratic

3:25

parties are busily engaged not only in

3:30

the rather passive activity of denial, but in the more active

3:37

of asserting the contrary, as if trying very hard to persuade

3:45

themselves that the denial is not inappropriate

3:51

that that they really don’t have to worry for and I would say this as follows

4:00

the the center of gravity of capitalism — The

4:05

capitalism is still here in the United States. We are a capitalist society. It’s true. This week we elected for the

4:12

first time a socialist as mayor of this city, which is an enormously important

4:18

step and also a step in this decline. We we are still certainly a capitalist

4:26

country. Um but it isn’t the dynamic center. It isn’t where the the

4:32

technological breakthroughs are stunning and build on each other. It isn’t a

4:38

growth area. It isn’t the market expansion. It’s basically none of those

4:44

things. It has a few remaining dynamic sectors. High-tech in California is one

4:52

of them and so on. But the bulk of of the dynamic of capitalist growth,

4:59

technical growth of output, growth of trade, that’s moved east. That’s now

5:05

somewhere else. And it is the gap as you know, you you and I have discussed it.

5:12

The uh if you add up the GDPs of the G7, they were roughly equal to the GDP of

5:19

China and the bricks in the year 2020. And here we are almost six years later

5:25

and the gap gets wider each year in the favor of the east not the west. So

5:34

capitalism is in a declining situation in the west.

5:40

I would argue worse in Europe than in the United States. But wherever

5:46

whichever one of those the dynamic the growth the expansion that has gone to

5:52

the east and and you see the symptoms in our culture here literally every day.

6:02

…

MY COMMENTS: If you want to see the statistical documentation of the truthfulness of what Dr. Wolff says there, click here. And here. And to see my historical analysis of how we got to this stage, click here. This is what is leading the U.S. empire to the brink of WW3, which, if the U.S. empire’s controlling owners want to go all the way to nuclear war in order to destroy its economic competitors, will instead destroy the entire world. Consequently, a Second American Revolution might be the only way to prevent that outcome from happening. If that is to be a well-informed Revolution, then it should be aiming to achieve the type of post-WW2 world that FDR had been planning but that Truman blocked from happening. If FDR’s goal won’t be the goal of the Revolutionists — those modifications of the U.N.’s Charter and organization — then we’ll still be heading toward a WW3. Either the reformed U.N. as a democratic federal Government of the world will be leading the world, or else the fascist-supremacist U.S. Government will continue to lead the world to oblivion. The choice between those options will be made soon. Because those are the options, and we’ve now reached the critical stage.

There are many within the empire who back this unlimited empire, support it, and don’t think it to be evil. For example, on November 7th was headlined at Yahoo News, “Here’s what Elon Musk needs to do to earn his Tesla trillion”, reporting that Tesla stockholders had just agreed to his demand that they approve his proposed milestone-based bonus-payment deal; and almost all of the reader-comments were rooting for him to win all of that trillion-dollar bonus; the view of one commenter, that such limitless greed is vile, was a small minority of the commenters’ views:

Hawk

No one earns a billion/trillion dollars.

You extract it- from workers, from the planet,

from communities, from our government.

There is no ethical billionaire/trillionaire.

Most Americans (especially Republican ones) admire unlimited greed. It has become virtually the national ideology — especially now that Trump is in power. With such an ideology, Musk’s own famous remark in response to a commenter who opposed his having been behind the then-recent coup in Bolivia, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”, reflects the views of all post-WW2 U.S. Presidents except JFK — and THAT’S the problem, which needs to be changed. It’s called imperialistic fascism, and Hitler too was like that. (I just now have discovered that that URL,

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1286866843307737088, is now showing blanks at all three Web archives; Musk got it removed from all three. I didn’t know that that could even be done, but now I know that it can and was. However, I’ve also now found that that tweet-exchange had fortunately been screenshot and posted to the Web by someone, and I have now archived that. And I was able to archive it here too. So, you can see it at either site. Musk is an exceedingly dangerous person. Should such individuals be in prison? Would it ever happen? If not, why not? Does this show the need for a Second American Revolution?)

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.