U.S. Hands Off Venezuela!
** This article was published on SocialistAction April 4, 2019 ** When you corner a rat, it lashes out. The rats in charge of the U.S. empire are cornered by the contradictions built into their own system: increasing economic inequality, regular depressions and recessions, declining profit rates, perpetual austerity, and endless wars promoted to stave off increasing global competition. The current vicious U.S. assault on Venezuela—along with the ongoing attacks on working people here at home—are what it looks like when the imperial rat lashes out. The Trump administration has openly declared the goal of regime change in Venezuela. Such an aim is illegal under international law. The mere threat of aggression is “not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” But U.S. hostility toward that sovereign, independent nation did not begin with the current