Kidnap Attempt Foiled - Latin America
Like from a bad Rambo script: US mercenaries wanted to kidnap Maduro by plane to the USA
https://de.rt.com/26vd
IDs of US mercenaries who participated in the failed "Operation Gideon" in Venezuela. These were presented on May 6th on state television. by RT
[This article published on 5/7/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://deutsch.rt.com/amerika/102217-wie-aus-rambo-drehbuch-us/.]
More and more details of the failed "Operation Gideon" in Venezuela become known after two former US elite soldiers were captured and interrogated. A confidant of Juan Guaidó also confirmed that a contract with the US mercenary company had been signed.
It reads like a screenplay for a Hollywood movie, with Sylvester Stallone in the role of Rambo: a small, select group of 60 Venezuelan deserters is to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from the Miraflores Palace with the help of two former US elite soldiers. They are then to take him to the airport in Caracas, which optimistically had previously been brought under control, and then to take the President by plane to the United States of America.
In the film, Rambo would certainly have succeeded in this infernal command. President Nicolás Maduro also said after the arrest of the two US citizens that they "played Rambo".
But in reality, "Operation Gideon" failed at the very moment when the group set out from Colombia to cross the border into Venezuela. Jordan Goudreau, a former elite soldier in 1st Special Forces Command and head of the "security company" Silvercorp USA, was very sure of his case.
With this boat, part of the group led by Robert Read more:Venezuelan army prevents mercenary invasion and kills leaders - What role did USA play?
On May 3, the day of the operation, he had several videos about journalist Patricia Poleo published in Miami, where he talked about some details such as the scope and backers. RT reported on this.
Especially the role of Juan Guaidó, the self-proclaimed "interim president", who is even called "legitimate president" by some countries - including Germany - came to the fore. Goudreau presented a "service contract" for 212.9 million US dollars, which his company had concluded with Guaidó on 16 October 2019, but which the radical opposition politician supported by the West always denied.
As late as Tuesday, Guaidó declared to parliament that he had nothing to do with it, although even at that time the published evidence spoke against his account. He even declared that there was "no relationship whatsoever with any company from the security and defense sector", and that this also applied to Silvercorp USA. The very next day the tide turned when Juan Rendon, a close confidant of the "interim president", admitted in a CNN interview that there was a contract with the mercenary company after all. He had to know it eventually: After all, he had signed the contract as "High Presidential Commissioner for Strategy and Crisis Management" alongside Guaidó himself.
JJ Rendón le aseguró a Fernando del Rincón que si firmó el contrato con Goudreau, pero afirma q se trató de un documento exploratorio que no continuó También dijo que Guaidó no lo firmó pic.twitter.com/tkpUMKgSSo
- Sergio Novelli (@SergioNovelli) May 7, 2020
However, this was only an "exploratory agreement". It was to review the possibility of capturing members of Maduro's government and "delivering them to justice." But it was realized that the plan was unfeasible, and so support was withdrawn. As a result, Goudreau had sent his men on a "botched suicide mission" anyway and therefore had to bear the sole responsibility for it.
In the aftermath of the failed mercenary invasion #Venezuela with the participation of former US elite soldiers #Greenberets#USA, ����Streitkräfte @ArmadaFANB reportedly excavated several equipment hiding places. The arsenal is impressive. Something will probably follow: pic.twitter.com/gf0QBkFiAa
- Florian Warweg (@FWarweg) May 6, 2020
Whether Guaidó withdrew his support or not, Juan Rendon confirmed the testimony of Luke Denman, one of the two captured US citizens and former Green Beret soldiers. According to Denman, the aim of "Operation Gideon" was the abduction of President Maduro to the USA. Whether this was also part of the initial plan, as discussed with Guaidó, is not known.
However, it is difficult to understand why Goudreau should have acted on his own initiative. At least it is consistent with his own statement that the financing for the operation was provided by "donations" after Guaidó had not kept to the contract. As dilettantish as the group was, it is questionable whether they had active help from a foreign secret service. US President Donald Trump denied any knowledge of this operation. This alone, of course, is no proof that the US government was unaware of it.
"Nothing to do with our government"�� @realDonaldTrump is putting up a $15 million bounty on the president-Elect of #Venezuela@NicolasMaduro. According to this, ex-US Special Forces with suspected ties to Trump are planning an operation precisely to "neutralize" Maduro... https://t.co/5aUPraOX1s
- Florian Warweg (@FWarweg) May 5, 2020
After all, such mercenary companies are hired for exactly this reason. This is supposed to
give the governments the possibility of a "credible deniability", should an operation not go as planned.
However, one thing is very clear: it seems to have been a misconception that Goudreau only wanted to adorn himself with foreign feathers and brag about contacts in the White House, which he allegedly never had. There are pictures that clearly show him in close proximity to Donald Trump. These were taken at a performance on 26 October 2018 in Charlotte, North Carolina, where the US President was campaigning for the election of Republican Mark Harris to Congress. As a result, Silvercorp USA was already deployed at that time, along with the Secret Service, in the US President's security force.
The ex-elite soldier and head of the "security company" SilvercorpUSA , Jordan Goudreau, who had organized the #OperationGedeon in #Venezuela, was at least on 26.10.18 in the security team of #US President @realDonaldTrump at his appearance in Charlotte/North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/xhers3ElqU
- Zlatko Percinic (@ZlatkoPercinic) May 7, 2020In view of this, Goudreau's tweet of 4 May appears in a completely different light. It was written by him just one day after the first action of "Operation Gideon" had failed bloody and his two colleagues Airan Berry and Luke Denman were captured. In it he confirmed the operation - addressed to President Trump personally. This is not, of course, proof of anything yet, but it does raise questions. As does the fact that his Twitter account was subsequently deleted. Since the head of Silvercorp USA is the only one who could actually say more about his real employers, the Venezuelan government wants to request the extradition of Goudreau in order to bring him to trial together with the other captured US citizens.
Read more - Bay of Pigs 2.0 in Venezuela and the role of US mercenaries: "They played Rambo Almost obscene: "Learn from the experts" - the cover of Jeff Bezo's audio book. These eight U.S. billionaires are really cleaning up
by Jürg Müller-Muralt / 05 May 2020 - It is an unprecedented event in modern financial history: the corona crisis profiteers in the USA.
[This article published on 5/5/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.infosperber.ch/Artikel/Politik/Diese-acht-US-Milliardare-raumen-so-richtigab.]
In every crisis there are winners and winners and losers - a truism. However, the differences between the worldwide devastating economic and social consequences of the corona crisis for millions of people on the one hand and the profits of the narrow class at
the top on the other hand are considerable. The assets of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, for example, increased by around $25 billion between January 1, 2020 and April 15, 2020. The increase in the Amazon boss' assets alone is thus greater than Honduras' gross domestic product, which in 2018 was just under $24 billion. This is "unprecedented in modern financial history," writes the Institute for Policy Studies, one of the five major independent think tanks in Washington D.C.
Billionaire Bonanza
The Institute recently published a study entitled "Billionaire Bonanza 2020: Wealth Windfalls, Tumbling Taxes, and Pandemic Profiteers". Using the example of the USA, the study shows what redistribution from the bottom to the top means in corona times. At the same time as the massive rise in unemployment, the total assets of all US billionaires increased by 282 billion dollars between 18 March and 10 April 2020.
Rapid asset growth
It is particularly remarkable how quickly the asset growth was achieved after a stock market-related diver in mid-March. After a brief dip due to the corona pandemic, the assets of the US billionaires are now already higher than in 2019. The study names the eight billionaires, who each became at least one billion richer: Jeff Bezos (Amazon), MacKenzie Bezos (Amazon), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Steve Ballmer (Microsoft), John Albert Sobrato (Real Estate in Silicon Valley), Elon Musk (Tesla), Joshua Harris (Apollo Global Management) and Rocco Commisso (Mediacom).
"This time it took only three weeks for the rich to regain their fortunes. After the 2008 financial crisis it took another 30 months for the billionaires to be as rich as before the crisis, and quickly it [their wealth] grew even bigger. But the middle class hasn't even regained its pre-2008 status and has now entered the pandemic lockdown with this burden," writes the German online platform Telepolis.
Amazon profits massively
Hardly any company is better positioned than Jeff Bezos' Amazon to benefit from the pandemic, as documented by CNN Business. Hundreds of thousands of small businesses were forced to close, giving Amazon the opportunity to increase its market share, strengthen its place in the supply chain and gain more pricing power over consumers. At the same time, Amazon was not able to protect its employees sufficiently from the corona virus: According to the Washington Post, employees at ten different Amazon warehouses tested positive for the virus at the end of March. However, according to the abovementioned study, Jeff Bezos donated $100 million, or 0.07 percent of his assets of approximately $140 billion, to Feeding America, a nationwide network of more than 200 food banks serving more than 46 million people in the US through pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and other community facilities.
Zoom founder also frames
Eric Yuan, the founder and head of the software company Zoom, also made a big impression. He was one of the few billionaires whose net assets increased by 2.58 billion dollars at the same time as the markets collapsed at the end of February, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. This was made possible by the massive demand for video conferencing. In the first few months of this year, more people used Zoom than in the whole of 2019, with the number of Zoom users rising from 10 million in December 2019 to 200 million monthly users in March 2020 alone.
Massive reduction in the tax burden since 1980
Although the pandemic profits are an exceptional upward swing, they merely accentuate a long-term trend, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. Between 1990 and 2020, US billionaires' wealth increased by 1130 percent, an increase that is more than 200 times higher than the 5.37 percent growth in average US wealth over the same period. Between 1980 and 2018, the tax burden of U.S. billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, fell by 79 percent.
And between 2006 and 2018 alone, almost seven percent of real wealth growth went to the 400 wealthiest households in the US.
Tax increases instead of merely voluntary donations
The pandemic will drive the national debt in the USA - and not only there - to astronomical heights. "Substantial tax increases will be inevitable," writes the Institute for Policy Studies, and "our super-rich will have to bear their fair share of these increases. The Institute recommends the introduction of a 10 percent top-up tax on the income of the top 0.1 percent of households, including capital income, at an early stage. This would affect households with an annual income of over $2.4 million and assets of at least $32 million. Of course, some of the billionaires have donated large sums during the pandemic, but these sums, set at their own discretion, are no substitute for mandatory tax liabilities.
countertext: When birds fall from the sky
by Silvia Henke - The fragility that the virus brings to health and prosperity affects many things, especially firm opinions.
[This article published on 5/6/2020 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.infosperber.ch/Artikel/Gesellschaft/kontertext-Wenn-Vogel-vom-Himmelfallen.]
One could see in the reports of the eight Corona Weeks that it was always deceptive for
politicians to be guided by individual cornerstones of the crisis. The cry for help from a doctor from Bologna, for example, from a hospital where people were dying too quickly even before Corona, triggered an incredible amount of fear in our country at the beginning of March - so much so that people (including myself) felt that the shutdown was completely consistent, as if all our lives were at stake. The horrified eyes of the doctor remained with me, the video created a sensation and came back to my mind again and again. But many times I had to put it in new relations with other "sensations": with the hunger riots in the wake of the lockdown in Lebanon or with the explosive conditions of the Parisian banlieus.
But also factual knowledge had to be repeatedly revised or interpreted differently. For example, what is ignited by the conflict between the reports of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH), both of which are based on infectious diseases: The WHO report states that children are carriers of the virus, whereas the FOPH report states that children are hardly contagious or infectious. Two different scientific assessments with very far-reaching consequences for millions of families. This is just one of the many uncertainties accompanying the crisis. But how do you know what is right and who is allowed to have a monopoly on knowledge?
What knowledge?
One can hardly blame anyone for a change of opinion and perspective; they are the cause of the crisis. For as much knowledge is currently being accumulated, as much uncertainty is spreading at the same time in the respective gaps in this knowledge. Logical knowledge is per se incomplete, and epistemology and philosophy have always been concerned with this. Be it medical, virological, economic or sociological knowledge: with every forecast and every statistic, new gaps in knowledge arise between certainties and facts. Never before have politics and society listened so much to the sciences - and yet they have not come into possession of the "truth", nor have they achieved ultimate certainty of action.
The fragility that the virus brings about in terms of our health and prosperity seems to affect everyone and everything, especially fixed opinions. Only supporters of conspiracy theories are on the safe side, because they can close the gaps in knowledge with their fictitious chains of proof. For example, by drawing conclusions from the profiteers of the crisis and pointing to supposed causes, they come up with the "logic" and possible actors behind the spread of the virus: Microsoft, Amazon, and the pharmaceutical industry. Social Darwinian approaches are more succinctly formulated, but benefit from the same wisps of logic: there are too many old, overweight men suffering from multiple illnesses, the health and old-age care system is overloaded by the constant postponement of life expectancy towards 90. Consequently, the virus provides a natural balance here.
Even trenchant criticism, which is otherwise a means of exposing underlying processes and launching a different knowledge, quickly proved to be too short-winded. As in the case of Lukas Bärfuss, for example, who sent the flaming question to the Federal Council in the magazine "Der Spiegel" as to why it was not better prepared and acted more
decisively: "What may be the cause of this fatalistic blindness, the suicidal carelessness?
Bärfuss was reprimanded and shortly afterwards he was allowed to revise individual points in the "Focus" section of SRF 3. However, he retained one point, or more precisely a vocabulary: His complaint about "fatalism" in dealing with the pandemic.
That is interesting. The problem is precisely the slumbering call for rational analysis, "better" knowledge and "right" action in the fight against fatalism. Because what knowledge should be the basis for this?
Religious knowledge?
There have been calls for collective meditation against the pandemic, but - and this is hardly surprising in these times of flourishing scientific knowledge - the voice of religion has hardly been in demand and has been excluded from public discourse. Quite differently from Camus' "La Peste", where it is the Jesuit priest Paneloux who first recognizes the epidemic and uses it in his sermon: The sense of the plague was to open the eyes of the (un)believers and to force them to think about their life. Actually a meaningful message. In our country the voice of religion remained silent, silent also regarding a possible opening of churches or mosques.
In the first plans of the Federal Council they were simply forgotten, as the Bishops' Conference rightly complained in mid-April. In this context, the Facebook entry of a friend from Colombia came to my mind. The blogger and writer Nikolaus Wyss wrote on 30 March in a post that I think is interesting:
"The only fact is that we are probably a long way away from the courant normal and that we will have many victims to mourn and some winners to make. That is just the way it is. And we don't know yet whether we can count ourselves among the one or the other at the end. For God's sake let's wait and see and not think too much about it. It is better to act, whether it is by following the quarantine or by selflessly working where help is needed and can be given."
The mail was well received, but the reference to "God's will" was problematic in comments. Not only on Facebook, but also in our "knowledge management" in general, "God's will" is not in demand. We are obviously not looking for this higher whole, unknown, fateful and uncertain, to which this formula refers. We hang on the curves and statistics, we prefer to follow the experts. The "Republic" also underpinned its reliable Covid Journal with a cultivated objective and rational discourse. But, big but: is rationalism enough to explain things that ultimately elude the usual explanatory patterns? Do we not also need metaphysical, more comprehensive patterns to feel so at home in the world that we stand up for them? Doesn't climate research have exactly the same problem, that naked studies, clear figures, excellent infographics and shocking facts ultimately do not shake and move people enough?
A different knowledge
As I write these sentences, three things happen synchronously: I have finished Camus' novel "La Peste", the rats have returned to the city redeemed from the plague. I listen to "Birds Requiem" by Youssef d'Hafer and, while looking up information via an app, I get the message that more and more dead birds are falling from the sky in Basel and the surrounding area. The pigeon plague has also broken out in Basel. It is merciless and deadly. Blue tits, on the other hand, die of pneumonia.
Many of us have experienced such images, incidents and coincidences in recent weeks. Many have experienced and observed things in nature - with an alertness like the first time. In the stories they appear as incursions of another knowledge, which I would call aesthetic here. They leave room for intuition and imagination. Two fine examples of this: the Corona Glosses of the writers and columnists* Michelle Steinbeck and Martin R. Dean. While Dean points to the uncanny nature of our hygiene efforts and places them in the context of a fundamentally disturbed relationship with nature, Steinbeck observes the excessive blossoming in April, which has so sweetened the time of quarantine for all of us, as nature's anxiety blooms in the midst of climate change - while a child in the courtyard cries "ouch, ouch, ouch" in a tired moan. (Michelle Steinbeck, "Stress blooms" in the column "Awake!", WoZ from 30. 4. 2020.)
If the climate movement is now reawakening, and it will in May, it can refer to an aesthetic knowledge that the people of the Corona period have gained in terms of health and the environment. Aesthetic knowledge is sensual, instinctive and intelligent. It can never be completely classified or functionalized, it goes beyond opinions and facts into a more cognitive dimension. If we are now increasingly hearing the call that we should not return to a normality that has long since ceased to exist as a result of climate change, then this is something that must be taken seriously. As the philosopher Eva Illouz writes in a beautiful text on the pandemic in March in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: "Entrepreneurs around the world may finally understand that there must first be a world before it can be exploited.
Of course, the business community itself does not understand this. Only the individual people can decide to reduce their consumption and orient themselves differently.
Should SWISS really take off again as soon as possible when dead birds fall from the sky?
Knowledge of the world, the earth, nature, food, the wrong production methods and health has deepened. It is an aesthetic knowledge that is vital and that will strengthen the climate movement, because we know that we don't know what else is going to happen.
Silvia Henke is a literary and cultural scientist and publicist. She teaches Design & Art at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, including art and politics and visual culture. Her research focuses on art & religion, artistic thinking, transcultural art education. She is fundamentally interested in the contradictions of the present, as they also appear in the media landscape, and regularly publishes texts and columns in magazines and anthologies.