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The (Over)Reach Of Gangster Imperium, from Venezuela to Gaza

15 1
06.01.2026

Image by Mohammed Ibrahim.

The Trump administration’s military aggression against the people of Venezuela proves the dictum: US/Western imperialism is gangsterism on an international level. The World has witnessed an attempted smash and grab/shakedown operation, and extortion racket perpetrated by a gangster state.

Of course, Trump is going to strut and preen and sputter braggadocio about his exercise in plundering Venezuela’s oil assets. Trump’s personality evinces the traits of a gangster given to ostentatious displays of his criminality, not the smart type who schemes from the shadows.

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The history of the Mob proves the latter’s reign is given to greater longevity. After his moment of (fantasized) glory (early signs point to egomaniacal overreach) the tanking US economy and the shadow of Epstein will continue the (dismal and deranged) undoing of the Bitcon Don.

Trump’s increasing cusp-of-Alzheimer’s impulsiveness, his angry outbursts and non-sequitur-laced diatribes mirror Al Capone’s unseemly and pathetic end, undone, as syphilis ravaged the body and brain of the once king of the Chicago underworld.

Gangster power is a throne made of shit-dust.

Regarding Trump’s lies about Venezuela being a narco-state

The Hugo Chavez government halted CIA drug smuggling operations in the nation, decades back. Venezuela presents nada threat to the US on a military nor any other basis. And no, a contrived court case, sans a UN mandate and congressional resolution regarding war powers, does not constitute a legal justification for military action.

Trump is simply a congenital criminal, a sociopath born into a rigged system that protects the worst people US empire spawns within its swamp of mendacity. Of course, you recall said swamp…that Trump pledged to drain. Of course, you also remember he was “the peace candidate.”

Trump’s word is as real as the lie that is America. As real as the US is “a shining city on the hill.” The nation is a blood-sustained empire built on a mountain of corpses, from genocide-dispatched Indians, worked-to-their-grave African slaves, crushed beneath US empire Latin America and Caribbean peasants, and........

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