Yesterday, on the eve of what promises to be an historic election in Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro of the United Socialist Party delivered his final speech before election day.
I was in attendance, and delivered a report from Caracas. The full video of my report appears below, at the end of this post.
President Maduro’s speech was televised nationally, but those who personally attended the event were election observers from around the world.
In my time Caracas, I’ve met observers from central Africa, West Asia, numerous European countries, Canada and the United States, Southeast Asia and, of course, many Latin American countries.
One of the dignitaries in attendance was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela. In my report, I managed to capture the moment when President Maduro warmly welcomed Mandela.
The President’s speech offered a vigorous defence of the Bolivarian revolution and a stinging denunciation of U.S. imperialism.
In a few moments, I will be heading to a local polling station to observe the vote.
Bravo and thanks .
You made some interesting arguments in your rant, Dimitri. But I did find your critique of Kamala Harris’ communications skills to be weird, along with your omission of the fact that she is a trained lawyer like yourself. Any sound analysis of the state of the Democratic Party shows that there is renewed grassroots excitement in the past week, something that simply would not be happening if Harris was flunking the speedy launch of her presidential campaign. At any rate, any weaknesses in the internal democracy of the Democratic Party itself are not necessarily indicative of the commitment to democracy or lack thereof of the U.S. state apparatus itself.
The available evidence suggests that the Saddam Hussein regime was planning to build biological and chemical weapons and restart the nuclear program once the sanctions regime ended: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/434506.The_Bomb_in_My_Garden To that extent, the sanctions regime against Iraq was successful in thwarting an international threat until the Hussein regime was forcibly removed.
There were 230 million reasons why Kamala Harris had to remain on the ticket, despite never having earned a delegate in the 2020 primary and not really doing much as VP.
Since 2016, the DCCC, the Donor class, and establishment Democrats have worked to ensure that a Bernie Sanders-type grassroots insurgency would never happen again. And to that end, they have succeeded – with Vice-President Harris as the immediate beneficiary of a bloodless coup against an incumbent POTUS who just a few weeks earlier told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that only God Almighty himself could talk him out of running for a second term.
Please don’t attempt to justify the WMD fiasco that killed over a million Iraqis and helped spawn ISIS and endless conflict in the Middle East. Unless you favour permanent instability in that part of the world…