Telesur — US Labels Venezuela a Threat While Backing Human Rights Abusers

Barack Obama has upped the ante in his aggressions against Venezuela. The U.S. president claimed Monday that the democratically-elected Venezuelan government poses a “threat to national security,” due to a full compliment of alleged human-rights abuses..

Yet this preoccupation with human rights becomes perplexing when one considers that many of the chief recipients of U.S. aid — a combination of military and economic assistance — or support employ highly-questionable practices to prop up their regimes. 

Israel and Egypt, who receive some of the highest military financing from the US, have both been in the spotlight for a whole host of human-rights abuses in the past months, while Saudi Arabia, who Obama sycophantly labelled as the U.S.'s “greatest ally,” has a long history of violent state repression. Colombia, the tenth overall highest recipient, and the highest in Latin America, has jails crammed with political prisoners.... 

In spite of all these blatant and well-publicized human rights abuses, these countries continue to receive large sums and support from the U.S. Venezuela, on the other hand, which in 2012 was elected the United Nations Human Rights Council for the first time with 154 votes, is deemed a threat. 

The hypocrisy of the U.S. in funding actions abroad, while having the highest prison population in the world at 2,228,424, and whose police force is continually criticized for murdering innocent black and Latino people, appears to know no bounds.

Ouch.

Telesur
US Labels Venezuela a Threat While Backing Human Rights Abusers

Follow the money

The United States government has a long history of declaring certain countries to be a “national security threat.” The policy of declaring a particular country, no matter how small, a threat to the U.S. — the economically-and-militarily-largest country in the world — has its roots in the “Trading with the Enemy Act” of 1917. 

Since then, the legal framework for declaring another country to be a national security threat has changed several times. The current legal framework is governed by International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) of 1977. 

Once a U.S. president has declared a country to represent a national security threat, under the provisions of the IEEPA, the president is authorized to block transactions and freeze assets of any government entity or government official of that country. 

If there is an actual armed conflict, then the president has the authority to confiscate the property of any government official or entity of that country. In the case of Venezuela, which owns the major multi-billion dollar oil company CITGO in the U.S., this would be a significant blow to the country....

Currently the following governments have been declared to be national security threats under the IEEPA:

Cuba (since 1977)

Iran (since 1979)

Myanmar (1997)

Sudan (1997)

Zimbabwe (2003)

Syria (2004)

Belarus (2006)

North Korea (2008)

Russia (2014) 

The U.S. government has consistently worsened relations with Venezuela ever since Obama became president. As early as 2010, the newly-appointed U.S. ambassador to Venezuela, Larry Palmer, issued uncharacteristically-undiplomatic declarations against the government against Venezuela during his appointment hearing in the U.S. Senate.
When his remarks became public then-President Hugo Chavez rejected Palmer's nomination, at which point the Obama administration expelled Venezuela's ambassador to the U.S..... 

Declaring a Country a 'National Security Threat'

Also

The BRICS Post
US-Venezuela ties worsen amid new sanctions

Zaid Jilani — The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State

The shameful complicity of Democratic leaders in creating our out-of-control, militarized police forces.

Remember when Democrats were accused of being "soft on crime"? Remember "law and order Democrats" as part of triangulation?

This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.

The war on drugs morphed into a race war on non-whites, chiefly Blacks and Hispanics.

Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party. 

Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.…

AlterNet

The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
Zaid Jilani