The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Marc Steiner: Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. As we begin this conversation, Trump is meeting with all executives from 17 companies. Secretary of State Rubio, Energy Secretary Wright, and Interior Secretary Bergen are looking at a hundred billion dollar investment as US and private corporations are about to seize the oil and the wealth of Venezuela. And as we air, we all know that the Venezuela president, Nicholas Madoro and First 80 Flores have been kidnapped and imprisoned by the United States. So to parse us out today, we’re talking with Geo Maher, who’s an abolitionist, educator, organizer, and writer based in Philadelphia. He’s taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Vassar, Drexel, San Quentin State Prison, and the Venezueela School of Planning in Karacas. He spent a lot of time in Venezuela, he’s taught there and in Mexico.

He’s the author of five books, Recreated Chavez: Building the Commune: Decolonizing Dialectics: A World Without Police and Anti-Colonial Abruptions. Well, welcome. It’s good to have you with us. I’m glad we’re having this conversation. I’m glad you’re the one we’re having it with. Watching this, as a kid, I was a young fan of Teddy Roosevelt. And when I’m watching what’s going on now with Trump, this government in the United States and Venezuela, it’s almost like we’re going back in time to an era when the United States ran roughshod over all of Latin America.

Geo Maher: Yes.

Marc Steiner: I’d really like to hear, start with just your thoughts and analysis about what we’re really facing at this moment, what this means, the lies, the coverups about Venezuela smuggling drugs in the United States and the rest. And talk a bit about that dynamic and where your analysis takes you about what’s going on.

Geo Maher: Absolutely. I think it’s a good question. That’s clearly the reference point that Trump himself is putting forward. So if we’re talking about lies, they’re incredibly thin lies and they’re being put forth hand in hand with very straightforward comments about this reality, which is to say we’ve been told on a couple of occasions this is about democracy or about drug trafficking. We know that those aren’t true. These are very transparent pretexts, but Trump is also being very open that it’s about natural resources and about US interests. And he’s invoking the Monroe doctrine. He’s trying to update with his sort of Trump corollary, the Monroe doctrine. I think we should take seriously the historical frame, but also the updating. As in so many parts of his political mythos, he’s trying to bring Americans back to some kind of lost settler glory days. And at the same time, he’s doing so in a context of the open decline of US hegemony and empire.

So he’s projecting power. And I think we should take seriously the language he uses and that Marco Rubio is using about projection to understand that what this means is a performance. It’s a performance of a power that he knows is waning. It’s a performance of something that is in decline and that he’s trying to prop up in a kind of desperate way by performing a kind of power on the global stage.

Marc Steiner: Let me ask you quickly. What do you mean when you talk about power waning?

Geo Maher: I mean, the open decline in US to Gemini, the fact that we no longer live in a unipolar world, the fact that the challenges particularly from China are straightforward and serious. And I think Trump and elements of the Republican Party are more honest and open about this than most of the Democratic Party. And so they see this situation. They feel as if something like the existing Democratic norms are no longer enough to play the role that the US wants to play on a world stage. They’re also, of course, and this is an important piece, hamstrung by the fact that half of his base does not want to play a significant role on the world stage. So they’re trying to thread a very specific kind of needle by saying the wars way over there are bad wars we should not have been involved in, but what we need to do is to retreat into our hemisphere, not into the boundaries of our sort of country, but into our hemisphere and prop up power here as a basis for reasserting a kind of US global hegemony without the sprawl.

Marc Steiner: So let me jump into the reasoning that Trump Hughes and Rubio and this right-wing government in America used to attack Venezuela. You know Venezuela intimately.

Geo Maher: Yes. Yes.

Marc Steiner: So I want you to describe for people listening to us the Venezuuela you know what that government was really doing, what it was like on the ground and what the reality is as opposed to what the lies of were being fed by our media and by the Trump administration.

Geo Maher: Yeah. No, first and foremost, it’s important to understand the fact that what’s often referred to as the Bolovarian Revolution in Venezuela is one of the most important experiments in building a truly alternative form of directly democratic socialist participatory democracy. This is what it was oriented toward. This was the goal of that project is and remains the goal of that project. It’s a project that came long before Chavez that will continue long after Maduro. This is a project to rebuild the kind of society that Venezuelans want and need. And also as a model for a broader understanding across the world of what national sovereignty and natural resources should be doing in the service of the people. Now that project has been in crisis for quite some time as a result of a series of forces, some of which are internal to the government. Of course, there was some mismanagement of the exchange rate system in particular, but there’s really no way to understand or gauge what’s happening in Venezuela today without taking incredibly seriously the system of US sanctions.
Now these began under Obama. That’s also important to understand. They were more targeted, but they still began to sort of impact the economic structure of Venezuela under Obama. Oil prices had collapsed soon after Chavez’s death. The political leadership of Nicolas Maduro was always in question even internally. So he’s sort of struggling to get his feet under him and he was subject to immediate violent aggression by the opposition and by US imperialism. So he is struggling to get his feet under at the same time that the economic rug is being pulled out from under the Venezuelan society. And this led to an incredibly devastating spiral on the economic level. You hear, for example, the US government talking about the oil production system of oil production being in decay in Venezuela, and that’s true, but it’s largely a result of the sanctions. It was declining because of the collapse in oil prices.
Oil as an industry is incredibly expensive to maintain and upkeep. It requires a great deal of actually imported both material items and chemical inputs. And so the more the economic crisis moves forward, the less the Venezuelan government is able to even import what they need to get the oil out of the ground. Then when the Trump blockade in particular kicks in, we’re talking about, again, people do not understand this. We’re talking about a system of sanctions that seeks to explicitly strangulate the economy and make it impossible for Venezuelans to eat. Almost all food is imported into Venezuela as a result of the money that is earned from the oil sale. So when you tell Venezuela, when you block the ability of Venezuela to even sell oil by excluding them from financial networks to transfer money, by preventing them from being able to ship oil to anywhere even nearby, by forcing them to ship and discount oil halfway across the globe, you’re talking about actually a process of starvation that Mark Wise brought and Jeffrey Sachs.

And yes, the Jeffrey Sachs did a study in 2018 showing that already in 2018, 40,000 people had been killed by these sanctions. That is what has devastated this economy, and it has not been good. So the gains that were accomplished, particularly under Chavez, were rolled back by this economic crisis. There’s absolutely no way around that. The political support for the government, of course, declined as it declines in any economic crisis, and that is the explicit goal of the sanctions. So the situation today and for the past 10 years has been an incredibly tense and fraught one

Marc Steiner: So there are two things here that are connected I wanted to ask you that as you mentioned, this began way before Trump. It started with Obama and the American government’s hostility for a long time to Venezuela and the government of Venezuela. I want to unpack that and why that is. And what will be the consequence of the Unitited States on the ground in Venezuela taking over the government, putting their puppet in power? I’m curious why it’s there and where you think it takes us. What do you think is going to happen next?

Geo Maher: Absolutely. And I think it’s important to understand that as you already suggested, when Democrats today are acting scandalized by references to the Monroe doctrine, but they themselves act on that basis all the time. It wasn’t just Obama, it was George W. Bush before him. It was Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. It was the role that they all played in the region, which was different-

Marc Steiner: Because we own Latin America. We think we own.

Geo Maher: Yeah, of course. Yeah. And they all sought in different ways to overthrow the Venezuelan government. There was a coup in 2002 that Bush didn’t plan. The US didn’t plan, but supported, and it failed. Chavez was overthrown for two days, and then the masses of people took to the streets and reversed the coup, which tells you something about how popular that process was. Not long after that, when Obama is in power, the strategy shifts from coups to the massive financing of the Venezuelan opposition, particularly through USAID. And I know people are again up in arms at the dismantling of USAID. USAID was a counterinsurgent institution that was used to funnel resources to the Venezuelan opposition to try to get them elected. And with all of the millions of dollars sent to them, they still couldn’t win an election. And everyone knows that they lost those elections.

There’s no question about those elections. And so that was Obama’s strategy. Simultaneously at the same time, you’ve got Hillary Clinton referring to Chavez as a dictator back then, even when he’s winning 60% of the vote in open and fair elections. You’ve got the Obama administration, particularly again with Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, facilitating a coup in Unduras that leads to the reinstitution of right-wing desquads in the country and generates part of the migration crisis that then comes toward US borders. So this is the way that the bipartisan system has operated from day one when it comes to the Venezuelan revolution. And honestly, the attempts to crush any alternative in the region. Now, what that means looking forward is that the situation is very complicated. And it’s one of those very interesting moments where it seems as if the US is holding all the cards, but it actually has very few cards to play.

Trump has spoken of a second wave of attacks. Now, of course, thankfully you have some movement within the US government to head that off and to prevent any kind of funding for a second wave of attacks. But even that second wave of attacks would have been very, very perilous for the US government, not because it wouldn’t have overwhelming military force, which it would, but because it would certainly take casualties, which is something that the government is not willing to do. And when it comes to this question of putting in a puppet government, people were shocked when Trump very quickly dismissed the possibility of installing Maria Corina Machado, this so- called peace prize when an incredibly violent opposition leader who is somehow winning the peace prize. But I guess that’s part of the course when it comes to the peace prize. But what Trump knew when was very honest about it was the fact that she could not govern the country.

No puppet could govern the country. And this is why Trump was actually forced to make and engage in some kind of concession with the existing Venezuelan government because no opposition leader, no imposed puppet could govern the country, no US occupation could have boots on the ground without taking casualties. And so the hands of the Trump administration are actually very tied when it comes to certainly carrying out the kind of occupation of the oil structure that he has claimed to be seeking. It’s not going to happen that way. So the question is what will happen. And in a lot of ways, despite the perilous situation for Venezuelans and for the remaining governmental structure in Venezuela is they’re actually holding a lot of cards when it comes to actually managing the economy and managing the oil industry.

Marc Steiner: So a couple of things here, but I want to talk about oil for a moment. And really what’s pushing this is the administration, but also it’s the oil companies nationally and internationally who want their quote unquote property back and their profits back.

Geo Maher: That’s-

Marc Steiner: A factor that much in the mainstream depress doesn’t push enough, talk about enough the role that plays in why this invasion and illegal imprisoning of the president of that country took place. So talk a bit about that.

Geo Maher: Yes. And it’s not just oil, right? It’s all of the natural resources. All

Marc Steiner: The natural resources, right?

Geo Maher: We’re talking about gold, we’re talking about rare earth minerals, but of course, very much about oil. And again, Trump’s talking points are both very honest and also misleading, honest in the straightforwardness of saying this is about oil. Misleading in the sense that there was no … I mean, Venezuelan oil was nationalized in the 70s. It was not a particularly harsh nationalization. Everything was compensated. The oil companies were allowed to remain and to function on a property.

Marc Steiner: The point you just now made is incredibly important because the way it’s presented is that they seized it. All the companies lost what they had, but that’s not the case. That’s a really important point.

Geo Maher: The case. No, it’s not the case at all. And even when Chavez did exactly what should have been done, which is to put increasing pressure on the oil industry to pay higher royalties to the Venezuelan people, which is what happened in more recent years, it was the oil companies themselves that voluntarily left. They said, “Listen, this is not going to work for us. We’re going to leave.” Now, of course, they have huge interests in re-imposing themselves in returning to the traditional royalty split, which is exactly the kind of deal that’s being worked out right now under huge duress for the oil companies to come back in. But here again, it’s very interesting because Trump simply can’t do what he’s claiming and what he’s promising because the amount of money that would need to be invested in the billions and billions of dollars, this is not something these oil companies are going to offer unless they’re promised something significant, unless they’re promised the long-term Iraq solution where the Venezuelan people get nothing and the oil companies get all of the profits until they’ve recouped their investments.

Of course, that creates a contradiction that cannot be accepted by the Venezuelan government, by the Venezuelan people. And so one of the question marks is going to be, how does Trump walk away from this with a win that doesn’t just look like the resumption of the oil trade with Venezuela under existing conditions Because the more Trump tries to push up the sort of royalty rate paid to oil corporations, the less of that money is going to go to the Venezuelan people. And this is a government whose legitimacy in Venezuela relies on its dedication to redistribute oil wealth to the everyday people, to uphold social programs, to uphold the development of the country. This is a population that is incredibly conscious, that is highly politically organized, that has developed in leaps and bounds over recent decades. And so there’s this question mark as to whether or not the organized people in Venezuela will ever take a step back from demanding what’s truly theirs in terms of what lay under the subsoil.

Marc Steiner: Given that and given the popularity of the Venezuelan government, Maduro and the rest from the people of Venezuela, what do you think happens next inside Venezuela? I mean, clearly they’re going to have to occupy Venezuela with American troops or with troops that be loyal to the American way for their own reasons in Venezuela. So where do you think this goes?

Geo Maher: It’s incredibly difficult to say, and it’s also daunting from the perspective of what we care about most in Venezuela, which is these sort of grassroots revolutionary project that has been built. So the government is under heavy pressure to come to concessions with the US government. Again, what that looks like and what it will look like possibly is a betrayal of the Bolivarian project, a betrayal of the revolution. And so there’s a very much a zero-sum game here. Again, Trump can’t get what he needs without the Venezzuelan government. The Venezuelan government cannot give Trump what he needs without betraying the political process and making themselves susceptible to resistance from within, resistance from the grassroots coups against them for having sold out that project. So it’s a very complex and fraught situation. Again, that is precisely why Trump needs this Venezuelan government to be in place, why he can’t simply replace it.

And so the question is going to be how can they carefully move back to a kind of normalcy that would allow for imports to resume, which is already, it seems already beginning, that exports are going to the US, food will be imported, people’s lives will begin to gradually get better. The real push though needs to be for the lifting immediately of the sanctions regime. And that’s the strategic orientation of the Venezuelan government, of course, today, is how can we, and on what level can we play along with this Trump narrative in a way that will benefit the people by getting rid of these absolutely brutal and crippling sanctions, by creating a situation in which we can go back to selling oil and using those resources to fund the everyday social welfare of the Venezuelan people.

Marc Steiner: So what we’re witnessing now in Venezuela seems to me is the tip of the spear to take down popular governments in Latin America and across the planet and bring in international corporations to reinvest and take over the land they think is theirs, the property, the mines, the oil fields. And I think that the question I really like to talk to you about is given that reality, this particular move of Venezuela has huge implications across the planet and for the United States and this Trump administration. And I think that we could be seeing, as I said a moment ago, the tip of the iceberg in many ways of what could follow because of this.

Geo Maher: I think that’s certainly true. In some ways, I’d actually say it’s almost the inverse, it’s almost a consummation because Trump has been working to pull apart the sort of pink tide in Latin America for many years. We’re talking about open support for, and even a stubborn support for the former president of Brazil, Bolsonaro, the fascist who was briefly in power. We’re talking about open support and threats being leveraged in order to encourage the election of Miley in Argentina. We now have a neofascist elected in Chile, coups and Bolivia and elsewhere tightening the sort of screws on Central America. In some ways, all of this was to break up the sort of regional cohesion that the Ballavarian project had been able to build. And then the prize at the end of that in some ways is this sort of final attack on Venezuela. But yeah, you’re absolutely right that the goal is to not only access those resources, but resources to access and claim resources is always requires breaking up those political structures that exist to defend those resources.

And that’s national in Venezuela, but it’s also regional. For the US to reclaim this region, it has to break down the political unity of that region and it has to break down those sort of political organizations that are capable of defending it. So that is precisely what’s happening in Venezuela and across the region. And again, the goal is to do this slightly bizarre mode of foreign intervention, but not global intervention. We’re not globalists, we’re regionalists. We are working in our own backyard as the Trump administration is repeating over and over this week, and the more they repeat things, you realize the more they have to. They’re trying to make something a reality by saying it. But what they’re saying is, this is not for an intervention, these are our interests. That’s the sort of rhetorical game that they’re trying to play. And again, the goal is to not just to claim those resources for the US, which is obviously a prize in and of itself, but it’s to exclude global competitors from this region and from this hemisphere.

Marc Steiner: What do you think, as someone who has both studied and been to Venezuela a lot, what do you think’s going to happen now inside Venezuela? I mean, obviously, at least from our perspective looking in, Maduro Chavez were very popular with most of the people in Venezuela, lives changed, but things can get really warped very quickly when these kind of events happen when countries are taken over like this. So what do you think is going to happen inside internally and what do you think the people’s response will be?

Geo Maher: Yeah. And again, the broad trajectory is that Chavez was massively popular. Maduro was elected democratically multiple times and then suffered a crisis, of course, of popularity because of the economic catastrophe. And so his level of popularity was very low at a certain point as it would be for anyone whose economy is sort of on the rocks. The reality is that this moment creates a whole range of complicated variables. One is that, again, if we’re talking about the opposition popularity, when voters move away from, say, someone like Maduro, they don’t necessarily support the opposition and they certainly don’t support opposition policies. This has become absolutely clear when it comes to the far right opposition that supports military intervention. No one, very few Venezuelans support active military intervention into their country, much less oil occupation, occupation of the natural resources. That is not something Venezuelans will support.

So what you’ve actually seen is a mobilization of some of the center back toward the government at the very least in defense of national sovereignty. And so what’s very, very complicated is that we don’t know exactly where the existing Venezuelan government will land. One of the major elements of the work that I’ve done on Venezuela is to emphasize and underline the fact that there always exist in these revolutionary processes, a complicated tension between what’s happening on the grassroots level and what’s happening in the state. And the state is not necessarily the friend of the revolutionary movements on the grassroots level. That’s always been an open conflict in Venezuela. And there’s the risk certainly that we’ll see that conflict and that breach widen. If the Venezuelan government is seen as too conciliatory toward Trump or is seen as too repressive toward grassroots movements, the grassroots movements may decide to take a very different path and we may see that gap widening because people, again, organized Venezuelans do not want to move back.

They do not want to move away from the gangs that they have made in terms of building local communal structures of directly democratic self-government and production. They don’t want that taken away from them, and they don’t want their oil handed way to foreign governments, particularly to US imperialists. So that is going to be a tightrope that the Venezuelan government is going to need to walk. These are governmental leaders that people support certainly as the representatives of their national government at this point, but that they don’t necessarily trust as representing their best interests in the long run.

Marc Steiner: I mean, it seems to me also that we’re facing here is this is about control of the entire basin of the Caribbean of that part of Latin America and control of all of its resources, as you mentioned earlier, the rare earth minerals as well as the oil. And it takes me back to my early studies of what happened in the 1920s in the United States. It’s like a hundred years later, we’re doing the exact same thing again to Latin America.

Geo Maher: Yes, absolutely. In the 1920s were characterized by Marine landings across the region by an open imposition of imperial power. And this was the height of that sort of period of imperial warfare. Again, we’re seeing a return to it under very, very different circumstances. Yes. The struggle is going to be very much over. And the question’s going to be to what degree Trump can leverage this threat because again, his projection of power is all about threats when it comes to the tariffs, it’s like slap tariffs on a bunch of countries and then use those as a negotiating process. They’re not a fixed objective. They’re a negotiating tool. This invasion is a negotiating tool, both with the Venezuelan government and with the governments of Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, and elsewhere. This is exactly the kind of power projecting that Trump’s going to leverage and push. And it’s going to be a question of what kind of resistance can be developed within the US, what kind of limits can be placed on presidential power by the Democrats in Congress, and on what level that will create more room for maneuver for the Venezuelan government and for the Venezuelan people.

Marc Steiner: Well, as this unfolds, we really want to have you back and talk a great deal more about this. I mean, because this is just beginning and we have to see where this could lead. There’s so many roads it could take. And I really do appreciate you taking the time with us today, and I appreciate the work. We’re going to be linking to your work so people can see just what you’re doing and we’ll stay in touch. And thank you so much for being with us today.

Geo Maher: No, thank you so much for having me. It’s been a great conversation.

Marc Steiner: Once again, thank you to Geo Maher for joining us today. We’ll stay in touch with him as the story unfolds, we talk together more. And I want to thank Cameron Granadino for running the program today, audio editor, Stephen Frank, for working his magic, producer, Rosette Sewali, for making it all work behind the scenes, and everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com, and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to Geo Maher for joining us today and all the work that he does. So for the crew here at the Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.