PACIFICA RADIO LIVE NATIONAL COVERAGE
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After months of destroying civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela that killed scores of civilians, which the Trump administration charged were involved in the illicit drug trade, the US military staged a violent incursion into that country and abducted its controversial leader President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.
Yet, once Maduro and Flores were in US military custody and being transported to New York City, in a press conference from Mara-a-Lago President Trump declared that the United States was now going to "run the country" until he determined there could be "a safe, proper and judicious transition" of power. Trump referenced a potential "second wave" of military force he had held in reserve but was willing to deploy if the Venezuelan officials now in control on the ground failed to run the oil rich nation "properly."
"We're not afraid of boots on the ground," Trump said. He claimed that the 1970s legal nationalization by Venezuela of it's oil industry amounted to the theft of what he asserted were U.S. oil fields. The President said his actions had "superseded" the Monroe Doctrine by what he described as the "Donroe Doctrine."
"We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition," Trump said. "So we don't want to be involved with, uh, having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition."
Trump asserted the American intervention was not going to cost US taxpayers anything because U.S. oil companies would be given carte blanche in Venezuela to take "a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground."
"As everyone knows. the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time. They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could've taken place," Trump said. "We're going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money for the country."
On Saturday, Jan. 3, WBAI-Pacifica broadcast the President's first press conference since the invasion of Venezuela live, followed by over three hours of expert analysis hosted by WBAI Evening News anchor Paul DiRienzo. Contributors included Gabriel Aguirre, Latin American organizer for World Beyond War (calling in from Caracas, Venezuela); Laura Jedeed, writer at FirewalledMedia.com and an Army veteran who served two tours in the War in Afghanistan; Egberto Willes, host of KPFT's Politics Done Right; James Henry, a fellow of Yale University’s Global Justice program; Joe Wilson, union consultant and labor historian; Nolan Higdon, host of The Disinfo Detox Podcast and lecturer at UC Santa Cruz; and Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a civil rights attorney, professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), and author of the new book, A Protest History of the United States.
We also opened the phones for listener calls on the invasion and what it means for the US, Venezuela, and the rest of the world.
