AOC Dismisses Premature 2028 Polls, But Says ‘I Would Stomp’ JD Vance

A survey this week showed the congresswoman leading the vice president 51-49 in a hypothetical presidential matchup.


Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a mark up meeting with the House Committee on Energy and Commerce committee on Capitol Hill on May 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Stephen Prager
Dec 18, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a cheeky reaction after a poll suggested that she’d slightly edge out Vice President JD Vance in a hypothetical presidential election in 2028.

The survey of over 1,500 registered voters, published Wednesday by The Argument/Verasight, showed Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) leading Vance 51-49 and winning back several key voting demographics that propelled Trump’s return to the White House last year.


AOC Leads JD Vance For First Time in 2028 Election Matchup: Poll


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As she walked out of the Capitol building Wednesday evening, the Bronx congresswoman was asked about the poll by Pablo Manríquez, the editor of Migrant Insider.

She responded to the question with a laugh: “These polls three years out, they are what they are. But, let the record show I would stomp him! I would stomp him!” she said before getting into her car.

Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Vance has officially announced a presidential run. But Vance is considered by many to be a natural successor to President Donald Trump. The president and his allies have suggested he could run for an unconstitutional third term.

Ocasio-Cortez, meanwhile, is reportedly mulling either a presidential run or a bid to take down the increasingly unpopular Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

More than two years out from a Democratic primary, Ocasio-Cortez is considered a likely choice to fill the progressive lane in 2028, with support for increasingly popular, affordability-focused policies, including Medicare for All.

However, despite her strong support among young voters, early polls show her behind California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Vice President Kamala Harris for the Democratic nomination.

Wednesday’s poll showed that in a hypothetical contest against Vance, Newsom had a 53% to 47% edge, a margin only slightly larger than Ocasio-Cortez’s.

To Reach the White House, AOC Needs a Focused Class Message

Over the years, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been torn between different approaches to identity and class. She’s no stranger to a universalist approach that emphasizes economic inequality and common struggle. If she runs for president, that’s the ticket.

By Ben Burgis

December 19, 2025

Source: Jacobin

Image by Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons 2.0

In an interview with the New York Times after the 2020 election, democratic socialist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) said she was surprised by the “share of white support for Trump.” Going forward, she said, Democrats would have to learn to “actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.”

There’s a clear sense in which her premise is correct. White voters who are primarily moved by fear of immigrants, for example, are going to vote for demagogues like Donald Trump. But that leaves open the question of how to disarm the Right’s appeal.

Given that AOC has been widely discussed as a possible candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination, it’s important to see how she addresses this core issue. If she’s going to be the Left’s standard-bearer, we need to know that she’ll offer a winning message.

Back in 2016, she’d gestured at one possible answer about how to disarm xenophobic appeals in her comments on Trump’s first win. While she “did not wish (nor vote) for this outcome,” she said back then, she did “seek to understand it.” And she said that the way to understand it starts with an acknowledgment that social instability “is a direct result of wealth inequality.”

In 2016, she even argued that “racism, sexism and xenophobia did not win last night.” She wasn’t denying that racism, sexism, and xenophobia were in the mix. But she said these prejudices were “attendants” to larger problems, and that the solution was to take “poverty and economic inequality seriously.”

This aligns with the historical view of the socialist left, which is that the most important way to blunt the appeal of social prejudices among the working class is to appeal to working people of all races on the basis of their shared material interests. Everyone needs health care, housing, higher wages, and more free time to spend with their loved ones. That appeal is “intersectional” in the truest sense. It intersects distinctions of background and identity, binding together the majority of members of every group.

In the 2020 interview, though, AOC gave a far more confusing answer, saying that progressives “need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country.” That makes it sound like election canvassers can somehow hold conversations at every door so “deep” that people harboring racial animus will be convinced to start working on themselves and becoming better people.

The very different things the congresswoman has said about this subject over the years are best understood less as a matter of personal inconsistency than as a reflection of different lines of thought that have exerted influence within the Left as a whole at different times.

Many of us have been torn between different approaches at different times. In New York City, for example, many of the same grassroots progressives who have embraced identity politics in the past got excited this year by the successful mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani, who was laser-focused on bread-and-butter issues.

Indeed, the mayor-elect likes to brag about the tens of thousands of former Trump voters around the city who he managed to win over in last month’s election. In an appearance on MSBNC earlier in the race, he explained his theory of the case, saying that “if you have a relentless focus on an economic agenda and you welcome people back, and you turn the political instinct from lecturing to listening, you can still have people come home to the Democratic Party.”

Indeed, AOC, who aggressively campaigned for Mamdani, has often hit similar rhetorical notes this year. She spent much of the year co-headlining “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies around the country with Bernie Sanders. AOC and Sanders made a point of spending a lot of the tour in states that voted for Trump, and their message focused on uniting working-class people against wealthy “oligarchs” by emphasizing economic issues.

This approach doesn’t entail neglecting marginalized groups or being indifferent to prejudice or mistreatment. A universalist economic agenda disproportionately benefits the demographics that are doing the worst right now, often because of the effects of past discrimination.

It also creates conditions in which it’s easier for groups that might be victimized by prejudice or retrograde cultural practices to stand up for themselves today. In a less precarious and more economically equal society, for example, women are less likely to be economically trapped in relationships defined by sexist cultural norms about the distribution of domestic labor. Workers whose bosses make racist jokes at work are more likely to say something about it if they enjoy strong unions and better labor laws, so they’re less worried that standing up for themselves on the job will mean they’ll lose their livelihood.

And the history of the labor movement has often involved workers of different backgrounds who may have previously harbored prejudices about one another joining forces because of their shared interests and developing a greater appreciation of their shared humanity through the experience of shared struggle. That history suggests that appealing to people on the basis of shared interests is more likely to pay off as a first step than “anti-racist, deep canvassing.”

The good news is that, in 2025, there have been many signs that AOC is moving in the right direction. In a CNN Town Hall appearance with Sanders during the government shutdown, for example, she spoke about the young men who have been radicalized by the online right. She said that bigoted right-wing rhetoric of the kind that’s common on social media seeks to “divide us” so that “the same people who own those platforms — people like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg — can continue to get away with highway robbery in tax cuts, and in order to fleece all of our pockets, cut our health care, keep our wages low, so that we remain . . . fighting amongst ourselves while they make themselves richer.”

Striking a healthy universalist note, she said that the way to “fight back against that” is to “stand in solidarity with each other” across all sorts of divisions of identity and background. Even when we don’t “entirely understand each other,” she said, we need to value one another as “fellow Americans.”

That’s a message that could defeat the Right. And if AOC decides to run for president, that’s the version of her we need to see.

The Blue Road: Author Norman Solomon Warns of Democrats’ Missteps in New Book

By Nina Schmidt

December 20, 2025

Source: Pacific Sun

Norman Solomon has spent decades watching American politics unfold through the vigilant lens of a media watchdog and journalist. 

Throughout his career, the West Marin-based author has documented the ways what he terms “corporate media” have degraded the political landscape, as well as how the priorities of establishment Democrats have helped shape the country’s current political moment. In his new book, The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy, released this month, Solomon compiles nearly a decade of writings and reflections on the willful missteps of Democratic Party leadership—and is making his work available to readers completely free of charge.

Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (2005), which was adapted into a 2007 documentary narrated by actor Sean Penn. 

He has written for publications including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, and has focused throughout his career on media interests and corporate influence in politics. In The Blue Road to Trump Hell, Solomon draws on this depth of experience as a media critic and progressive to chronicle, in real time, the forces that led Democrats to consequential losses in 2016 and 2024.

The book is structured as a series of essays, capturing Solomon’s real-time reflections on the news of the day. “I just kept writing as events unfolded,” he says, “mainly to push back against a culture of political passivity…” Over time, however, he began to recognize that what he—and Democrats across the political spectrum—feared most, another Trump presidency, was becoming increasingly likely, due in large part to the Democratic Party establishment’s failure to learn from previous mistakes. 

“When 2024 turned into a kind of Groundhog Year, with Trump’s second win, and 2025 became ever more terrible,” Solomon says, “the potential value of a book about how this happened came into focus.”

In shaping his contemporaneous writings into a book, Solomon chose to preserve their integrity by presenting them as they were originally written, as individual, chronologically dated articles, rather than reworking them into a single retrospective narrative. As he explains, “In politics, we easily forget important details and subtexts. The spin cycle is nonstop—if we’re paying close attention, it can make us dizzy.” 

To avoid incorporating media spin or altering his perspectives in light of subsequent events, Solomon deliberately left the essays intact, noting in the introduction that “nothing has been revised for hindsight.” Even so, the book functions as something of an autopsy of two elections the Democratic Party fumbled. As Solomon puts it, “The Blue Road to Trump Hell exhumes history that’s been buried in avalanches of later events.”

This dysfunction is inseparable, in Solomon’s telling, from the structure of American media. Throughout the book, he critiques what he calls “corporate media,” saying “Media outlets owned by huge companies are dedicated most of all to maximizing profits,” a priority that shapes coverage in ways that undermine public understanding. In contrast, he points to smaller, often independent outlets operating outside that system as evidence that another media model remains possible.

Even within this dysfunctional media landscape however, some turning points appear with clarity. As he reflects on how certain events and perpectives—both his own and those of the figures he was chronicling—aged over time, Solomon notes, “We didn’t really need hindsight to realize that the corporatized politicians like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were giving ground to—and, in effect, often enabling—the monstrous politics of Donald Trump and his cronies.” 

On the other hand, one figure continues to stand out to him as a progressive sage: “Looking back at the history presented in this book, I’m intensely reminded of how prophetic Bernie Sanders has been and continues to be,” Solomon says.

Solomon chronicled the descent into the “real-life Shakespearean tragedy of President Biden” as he made his choice to run for reelection in 2024. He points to Democratic Party leadership as Biden’s “enablers,” arguing that they worked to suppress primary challenges while pushing the narrative that Biden—who had defeated Trump in 2020—was the strongest candidate to do so again, despite polling that suggested otherwise. 

“A gap has grown vast,” he writes in late 2023, “between current assessments from media, largely based on voter opinion data, and current public claims from congressional Democrats who keep their nose to the talking-points grindstone.”

He extends his critiques of the current political landscape to the concentration of wealth and power more broadly, frequently using the term “American oligarchs” to describe U.S. elites. Billionaires, he argues, now exert enormous influence over mass media, technology platforms and electoral politics. 

Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg wield “colossal undemocratic, actually anti-democratic, power,” Solomon says, a reality he believes the language of oligarchy captures more accurately than euphemisms about elites or donors. “The extreme concentrations of wealth and economic power are extreme concentrations of political power,” he writes.

While the subject matter of The Blue Road to Trump Hell is often weighty, the book’s tone is lightened by Solomon’s collaboration with political cartoonist Matt Wuerker, whose illustrations appear on the cover and at the beginning of each section. Solomon and Wuerker first became collaborators in the 1990s, when Wuerker illustrated the covers of several books Solomon co-wrote with media critic Jeff Cohen. 

Wuerker, a founding member of Politico, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 2012 and continues to satirize the increasingly absurd excesses of Washington’s elite as the outlet’s editorial cartoonist. “Matt is one of the great political cartoonists of our era, or any era,” Solomon says. “In vivid colors, Matt brilliantly draws the absurdity and tragedy of current events,” offering readers moments of levity and catharsis amid relentless political disappointments.

True to his critique of corporate media greed, Solomon chose to make The Blue Road to Trump Hell freely available online. “I’m excited that the book is free for everyone from the start, via BlueRoad.info, as an e-book or PDF,” he says. “The media world has far too many paywalls.” The decision was both ideological and practical. “As a practical matter,” he adds, “the book will reach far more people because anyone can read it without charge.” 

The book’s reception suggests it has found an audience among activists and progressive leaders alike. U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna praised the book on X in November, calling it “a must read” for its analysis of “the bad trade deals, financial deregulation, bad wars, & offshoring that created the anger and resentment for a populist revolt.” For Solomon, such responses affirm the book’s core goal: not merely to document political failure, but to interrupt it.

Ultimately, The Blue Road to Trump Hell is both a memorialization and a warning: a chronicle of Democratic Party leadership’s mistakes and the political and economic conditions that produced them. The book stands as an act of resistance to complacency and collective amnesia, offering a moment of accountability, while being in and of itself an artifact of cautious optimism about a party’s ability to learn from its failures. Despite setbacks, Solomon, a lifelong activist, remains hopeful and focused on what he believes truly matters, saying, “I figure that I should keep adding my voice to outcries for a much better world.”

‘The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy’ can be downloaded for free at BlueRoad.info.

Four Elderly Activists Face Charges for Antiwar Civil Disobedience in Northampton, Massachusetts

By Phil Wilson

December 20, 2025

Source: Nobody's Voice

Protesters at the rally in Northampton condemn the city for tax breaks to the weapons manufacturer, L3Harris, and are demanding a weapons ban and a transition to ethical local jobs and industry. The protest started outside the L3Harris offices on Prince Street and continued through Smith College to the Northampton City Hall, Thursday, May 1, 2025. Image credit: Douglas Hook

Courtrooms create great theater. We recognize the dramatic tension between static, formal systems of protocol that protect vested interests, and the contrary movement – the human passion to tell grim stories without flinching. We live in a country that has evolved as the world’s most rapacious empire by concealing the suffering that transpires beyond the horizon. Today (December 18) in Northampton, Massachusetts the court has been reserved for a case that – in rare fashion – features global themes. Northampton may be the venue, but the issues play out far away. Our small idyllic town can’t hide from the ferocity of a cruel country that can no longer conceal its ugliest intentions. Nothing will be resolved today, but you still feel the anxiety, the excitement. For that reason the room has been packed with spectators and members of the press. The outside hallway teems with latecomers and picketers line the sidewalk outside.

In Northampton we have the rare chance to see the irreconcilable meeting of money, murder and conscience – four elderly Massachusetts residents have their judgement day for staging an act of civil disobedience in the lobby of munitions profiteer L3Harris last March, 19th. These four tossed play money soaked in red paint (blood money) on the floor of the munition icon’s lobby and brandished an improvised arrest warrant for L3 CEO, Chris Kubasik, for war crimes in Gaza. Mind you, the defendants in this episode do not struggle for their own lives as people in court often do. They come as messengers, as entertainers perhaps (for civil disobedience has a long tradition of joyful improvisation), as proxies for the wholly absent dead and dying.

One of the defendants requires a walker, another uses a cane. Such frailty facing off against the force of the greatest military on earth, staged in a place designed to reduce emotional tension into the arcane formulae of the law, promises to be strange, compelling, unpredictable and absurd. The ages of the four, draped in Palestinian scarves, and the advanced age of many court spectators today remind us that the generation associated with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi have not all quietly acquiesced to the values of the US Empire.

If the defendants lose they will pay a small fine, but these three women and one man have come for a chance to bare their souls, to report, on the internal misery that most of us manage with basic denial. We are a perverse species blessed with the ability to manage cognitive dissonance with self-deception, but sometimes unusual individuals lose this precious ability and suffer the excruciating agonies of their own vigilance. For one reason or another, a few people experience vicarious pain from far away. Most of us distract ourselves with addictions or rationalizations, but some can’t quite escape – these people come to a crossroads where one turn leads to fatalistic resignation and the other requires confrontation. All four defendants took the latter path, and we gather in the packed courtroom to listen to their stories.

Nick Mottern, age 86, is the first to testify. For almost half a year Nick and I have been the only two people almost invariably present at 6:30 AM each Wednesday morning at L3Harris to hold up signs, wave Palestinian flags, and, in Nick’s case, hoist up an enormous cutout of Bibi Netanyahu dressed in an orange jump suit. I am, informally (as a “kid” in my waning 70’s) Nick’s apprentice in the art of civil disobedience. I am in court to support Nick, but all four defendants came to the lobby of L3Harris by means of a shared, intuitive moral roadmap. One defendant, Priscilla Lynch, had been a Massachusetts Department of Children and Families (DCF) case worker prior to retirement. She testifies that a career of protecting children had led her inevitably to the doorway of L3Harris – the perpetrator implicated in the murder of well over 20,000 Gazan children. The court learns that more than half of the childhood amputees on earth reside in Gaza. “Mandated reporters” once called Priscilla Lynch to report suspected child abuse and neglect, but how do we fathom the scale of child abuse in Gaza as being within the oversight of DCF?

Nick Mottern has placed himself in harm’s way before the power of authority as a matter of being – like breathing, like gazing curiously at clouds on the horizon at sunrise. His so called twilight years have been given to the art and science of resistance, and his mind spins ceaselessly to imagine strategies and targets to confront. Yesterday he mulled over the idea of seeking out and picketing the homes of local billionaires – “these criminals are at the root of everything,” he thinks aloud. Most people toss ideas to the wind in order to pass time – Nick plans with intent. His resolve is almost disconcerting. With countless hours of shared banter, philosophical reflection and political digression, Nick’s testimony reveals him to me in ways I have not imagined. His fearless exterior gives way to a vivid complexity – vulnerable, tortured, pursued by the images of war experienced firsthand.

Nick, a military veteran once stationed on a Navy ship out of Pearl Harbor, testifies that he had witnessed nuclear tests in the Pacific. While describing the oddly hued colors of the sky during nuclear events, he begins to sob. He recovers slowly but tears return while talking about seeing three young Vietcong soldiers killed in Saigon where he worked as a civilian correspondent for an English Language newspaper. He struggles to tell the court about seeing a shirt pulled open to expose a bullet wound to a female fighter’s chest. The grief of a half century old flashback leaps with sudden, private intimacy. Soldiers and war correspondents have the unique task of staring into the bottomless well of human cruelty, and Nick has done both jobs at a steep price.

The defense lawyer asks Nick moments later if he has ever seen starving children. Once a couple of months ago, Nick and I and another protester, Mike, blocked a food delivery truck at the L3Harris entrance while holding up a sign Nick had made reading, “L3 eats while Gaza starves.” Nick had impulsively initiated the confrontation and I had marveled at how nonchalantly he had orchestrated the whole thing. The food truck driver waved – seemingly with an air of approval – and sped on toward another entrance.

Nick tells the court that he had worked in Ethiopia in 1985 for Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers gathering information on the famine that was caused partially by a protracted civil war and indirectly by the influx of US and Soviet weapons into the horn of Africa. He could not bring himself to photograph a starving 11 year old girl, “she looked so awful,” he states with an apologetic air. One can bear witness and yet find that particular point where the witnessing becomes permanently entrenched, like a scar. I imagine that Nick has seen the gears and pulleys animating the US Empire at such an inordinately intimate proximity that only direct action offers relief. For him, I speculate, civil disobedience isn’t about guilt or even about morality in the ordinary, abstract sense – it is about making sense of gruesome realities, about preserving his own mental health. Fellow defendant, Patricia “Paki” Wieland, quoted in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, says it like this, “Once you know, then you have to take an action if you have conscience.”

I learn at our L3 protest the day prior to the trial that the group’s lawyer, Jamie Rogers, will employ the “necessity defense.” He will argue that the murderous practices of L3Harris offers no means of redress other than civil disobedience. Nick explains the necessity defense to me – breaking the law can be justifiable if the “illegal” act prevents a far greater harm, he states. He describes the hypothetical example of a person who trespasses on private property to dive into a pool to save a drowning person. The University of Chicago Law School website describes the necessity defense like this:

“If the defendant demonstrated that he perpetrated his crime in order to avert a greater evil, he would be acquitted. This defense was controversial at common law and poses a perennial challenge to the rule of law even as it introduces flexibility into the criminal justice system. Today, the question of whether the defense exists in modern federal criminal law remains an open question.”

The judge, Mary Beth Ogulewicz converted the case into a civil one. She stated that the defendants should not be tried criminally. Her decision deprived the four of a jury trial but gave them more latitude to employ the necessity defense.

Toward the end of consolidating the “necessity” strategy, attorney Rogers has impressively assembled a collection of affidavits from world class experts – these reinforce two critical prongs of the defense case: 1) that L3Harris products are being utilized to commit genocide and war-crimes, and 2) that civil disobedience has a long history of successfully addressing human rights violations that could not be mitigated in any other manner.

One of the signed affidavits comes from Joshua Paul who stated on his enclosed affidavit CV that he served as “U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Political Military Affairs Director” from 2012 -2023. Paul further stated that, “specific products manufactured by L3Harris, including parts and components in the JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions – “smart bombs”), have been used against Palestinian civilians in Gaza in violation of international humanitarian law, according to multiple press reports and nongovernmental reporting.”

Another signed affidavit by Stellan Vinthagen, makes the claim that this author is, “as far as I am aware, the only endowed chair in the world of a university-level program focused on nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience.”

Vinthagen, a professor at local Umass, Amherst states in this affidavit that:

“Through several studies utilizing all available data, it has convincingly been shown throughout at least the last 108 years of history, that the overthrow of autocracy and the creation of democracy and civil peace is linked to mass participation of ordinary people in disruptive acts of nonviolent resistance.”

The two prosecutors for “The Commonwealth of Massachusetts” appear to have not read this affidavit. These two, young, good looking, well dressed representatives of state protocol (a man and a woman) listlessly belabor the point, to no seeming purpose, that the act of tossing “blood money” on the L3Harris lobby floor, has no chance of altering company policy. In contradictory fashion they both grill the defendants about whether they had first written letters about their concerns to L3Harris brass. One prosecutor wonders aloud where futile civil disobedience might lead – the obvious implication being that eventually, frustrated resistance would morph into violence. The absurdity of this sort of reasoning, considering the age of defendants whose walkers and canes lay propped against their seats, resembles a poorly timed standup punchline. Nobody laughs although all of us might have. Attorney Rogers explains patiently that civil disobedience unfolds in its own unique rhythms, and seldom creates instantaneous change.

The prosecution seems to be content to lazily go with the argument that unsuccessful civil disobedience merits a verdict of guilty. Why disturb the routine order of things if genocide has no remedy? But this ho-hum conclusion runs straight into a powerful assertion by codefendant, Patricia Gallagher – she tells the court that she sees her actions as being akin to resisting the inhumanity of the Nazi regime. That frames the context for me – the limitless power of the military industrial complex demands resistance whether such actions succeed or not. The more entrenched that state violence becomes, the more critical it is to fight back. These four activists from Demilitarize Western Mass are all the more courageous for confronting a predicament that may have no solution. To dramatically oppose violent, criminal governmental acts becomes proportionately heroic as odds of success decrease. We know that Sophie Scholl and The White Rose have become immortal in our collective memory precisely because of Nazism’s heartless intransigence. But Judge Mary Beth Ogulewicz is no Roland Freisler. She does not make a decision today. She says that she first needs to study the affidavits. I cross my fingers.

A verdict in favor of the defendants will reverberate well beyond Northampton. We nervously await the decision.Email

Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker and union member. His writing has been published in ZNetwork.org, Current Affairs, Counterpunch, Resilience, Mother Pelican, Common Dreams, The Hampshire Gazette, The Common Ground Review, The Future Fire and other publications. Phil's writings are posted regularly at Nobody's Voice (https://philmeow.substack.com/).

USA-Venezuela

Trump reveals the real reasons behind the war on Venezuela

Sunday 21 December 2025, by Luís Bonilla-Molina

Venezuela and its people are the first direct victims of the "Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine." This war, which has already been declared, is not against drug trafficking or the Maduro regime, but rather for oil and rare earth minerals, military bases, information, and misgovernment. All democratic, progressive, popular, and leftist forces must denounce and confront the US offensive against Venezuela, which in no way means defending the Maduro government.


"America First" is the expression that sums up the neo-fascist and neo-colonial attitude of present-day US imperialism. Trump’s declaration on Tuesday, December 16, 2025, is a radical deepening of the imperialist offensive against Venezuela. It no longer wants to "go after drug cartels" or bring about a simple regime change, but demands absolute US control of Venezuelan oil, demanding the "return of territories" – which is nothing more than changing the condition of dependence to a neocolonial territorial relationship. The US is threatening to annex part or all of Venezuelan territory, something unprecedented and of dramatic significance.

In November 2025, the Trump administration published a document entitled National Security Strategy, in which it defined its priorities, emphases, purposes, and course of action. Reviving and relaunching the Monroe Doctrine, this document is a roadmap for the political moment of building a global capitalist reordering, in which the United States needs to consolidate its power.

The new world order that is struggling to emerge is incredibly capitalist and militaristic, and the United States aspires not only to be part of it, but to remain the hegemonic nation. In this realignment, control of energy and inputs for innovation (oil, uranium, lithium, rare earths) play a central role.

The Trump administration has clearly defined its territorial priorities in what it calls the Western Hemisphere, a kind of expanded border that includes all of Latin America and the Caribbean, Canada, and Greenland. In this scenario, Venezuela acquires strategic value due to its mineral wealth—the largest oil reserves, potential for rare earths in the southern/Orinoco region, biodiversity, water, and genetic reserves—as well as its privileged military location in northern South America, south of the Caribbean with a coastline on the Atlantic, and a few kilometers from the Panama Canal, which allows it access to the Pacific. The United States does not want to share these privileges with China, Russia, or any emerging nation. In other words, Venezuela is a target for the Americans, as stated in the Trump Doctrine. This is an unprecedented violation of territorial and political sovereignty.

To achieve this, since August 2025, the most impressive military and troop deployment known in the region for decades has been generated. The attack on fishing boats, accused of being drug mules, has been the tragic melody of the presentation of its offensive against Venezuela, which is intensifying every day. The intervention in Venezuelan airspace, with a NOTAM issued by the US air traffic authority and Trump’s direct presidential order to ban flights to the country, was escalated with the maritime piracy of the capture and confiscation of an oil tanker. On December 16, Donald Trump himself declared that he demands Venezuela "return oil, land, and other assets to the United States." In other words, he has publicly declared his decision to seize oil reserves and his desire to directly colonize part of Venezuelan territory.

This can only be achieved through direct military occupation of the territory, establishing military bases. But he wants to do so at the lowest possible cost in terms of the loss of American soldiers’ lives, operational expenses, and political impact. Therefore, the decision to confiscate all oil tankers not authorized by the US Treasury Department is another escalation to suffocate Maduro’s government and create the conditions for its downfall, either through internal implosion, a coup d’état from within Maduro’s own camp to initiate a transition agreed upon in the terms of the National Security Strategy. Or as a result of a "surgical operation" that would allow the Edmundo González Urrutia-María Corina Machado duo to take power. The economic suffocation of the country seems to be the ideal tool to bring any of these colonial initiatives to fruition. We would be talking about the risk of unprecedented famine for the Venezuelan population.

The establishment of US military bases on Venezuelan territory would allow the US to establish a colonial relationship close to oil reserves, ensuring exclusive access to them. In a country like Venezuela, where even its historical ally Rómulo Betancourt did not accept the establishment of US military bases on its territory due to the effects that Venezuelan nationalism would have on the electoral will of the people, this can only be achieved through a long and chaotic transition—one that prolongs and, incredible as it may seem, tes the misery and tragedy of the material living conditions experienced by the population during the Maduro period, something that is becoming increasingly clear in the US offensive.

The immediate collateral damage is being felt in Cuba, which is unable to receive Venezuelan aid in the form of fuel and oil for its economy and the maintenance of its electrical system. The United States is betting on a domino effect in the region, which will produce the "carom" of displacing the governments of Caracas, Havana, and Managua in one fell swoop. In other words, the positioning is for total control of the so-called Western Hemisphere.

Additionally, using the latest technological advances in data capture and processing, the United States is moving forward with the implementation of a predictive control regime by having extremely valuable information on the behavior of the population (of the Western Hemisphere in general and Venezuela in particular) in response to its military deployment in the southern Caribbean. That is why it generates rumors and counter-information on social media every day, to elicit responses from the population, which it can then segment and classify in order to construct its scenarios for action.

We are experiencing the first regional military offensive with technology, techniques, and purposes typical of the fourth industrial revolution, which makes it extremely difficult to interpret using the paradigmatic keys of the first three industrial revolutions.
The impossible transition

María Corina Machado has undisputed leadership among the Venezuelan population, even in sectors that historically supported Chavismo. This is largely due to Maduro, who, in his eagerness to polarize in order to prevent the consolidation of a left-wing opposition, has played the game that suits MCM best. But socially rooted leadership is not the same as the ability to govern, especially if the diagnosis of the Venezuelan crisis and the path to overcoming it is wrong.

MCM’s bet is on promoting an illiberal government that will continue and deepen the neoliberal policies applied by Maduro, especially those implemented since 2018. Its strategy of absolute liberalization of the market economy as a formula for generating employment turns its back on the central problem facing Venezuelans in the short term: wages and the return of minimally decent material living conditions. The "post-Maduro bonanza" of an economy without sanctions is seen by MCM in terms of privatization , labor flexibility, and attracting international capital, which is only possible by keeping wages low.

The United States knows this, which is why its commitment to a transition via González-Machado is to pave the way for a long and chaotic transition that will allow it to establish its openly colonial relationship with Venezuelan territory and wealth. In fact, MCM has repeatedly stated that the "recovery of Venezuela" will require deeper levels of cooperation with the United States.
The miscalculations of Madurismo

Maduroism’s anti-imperialism is limited by its survival in power. Maduroism is not leftist, much less revolutionary. Since the war in Ukraine, it has sought a strategic agreement with the United States, trading oil in exchange for remaining in power. The problem is that now the Trump administration wants to go much further.

Maduro’s government has been a disaster for the Venezuelan people and working class. Not only in terms of wages and material living conditions, but also in terms of restrictions on basic democratic freedoms, such as the right to express opinions, freedom of expression, the possibility of organizing autonomously in unions and political parties, territorial roots, and comprehensive human development. Maduro has been a terminator of the advances made during the Chavista period and a deepener of its mistakes. No Venezuelan alive has known a worse government than Maduro’s.

Amid these conditions of imperialist offensive, Maduro continues with his authoritarian line of action and the survival of the new bourgeoisie he represents. An imperialist offensive such as the one unleashed since August 2025 in the southern Caribbean can only be confronted with a large national anti-imperialist front resulting from a minimum nationalist consensus, but this requires reversing his own policies, freeing political prisoners — who include social, progressive, and leftist leaders — a general amnesty for all those prosecuted, imprisoned, and subject to restrictive measures, the return of political parties to their legitimate members, and a reorientation of dwindling national revenues toward wages and salaries.

But Maduro has done the opposite, deepening repression, increasing the number of detainees and those prosecuted, deepening the fall in wages and the concentration of wealth in a few hands. He does the opposite of what logic demands, because his commitment is not to the people but to sustaining a model of accumulation that favors the rich.

Maduro’s rhetoric does not correspond to what is happening socially. For ordinary citizens, the US attack is fundamentally against Maduro, and there is no reason to defend him. Given this situation, the desperation to survive has led large sections of the population to believe that Maduro’s departure, by any means, would be the beginning of a recovery from the oppressive situation in which they live. For the general population, the US National Security Strategy is of little importance, because Maduro has destroyed their hope for a better tomorrow.

This is a complex situation for nationalist and progressive forces and those who have not renounced their leftist identity, refusing to place themselves under the leadership of EGU-MCM. What is significant is that the country is currently experiencing, from the world of labor and the working class, initiatives for depolarization based on the construction of a minimum program for the defense of wages and basic democratic freedoms. The question is whether there will be enough time to build an autonomous pole for another possible transition.
What should be done?

Continue to bet on (and work for) the constitution of an autonomous political pole of workers, unreservedly supporting initiatives such as the formation on December 12 of the Unitary Agreement of six trade union centers, federations, guilds, and unions for the rescue of wages. An event like this, amid military tensions in the Caribbean, speaks to the instinct of the working class in the face of any scenario in the short and medium term.

In addition, the campaign for a General Amnesty must be intensified, to free all those detained, prosecuted, and subjected to restrictive measures, paving the way for multiple voices to come together to reflect on national sovereignty in times of imperialist attack. Demand the return of parties, unions, and union federations to their legitimate representations.

Any differences with Maduro, political parties, or personalities cannot serve as an excuse for not developing authentic anti-imperialism, based on the interests of the working class. All democratic, progressive, popular, and leftist forces must denounce and confront the US offensive against Venezuela, which in no way means defending the Maduro government. The departure of Madurismo must be a decision and process of the Venezuelan people, led by its working class. In this sense, these are days of promoting an anti-imperialist policy without hesitation or doubt.

Whether facing Maduro, EGU-MCM, or any other government, the working class must defend its autonomy and reaffirm that only its capacity for struggle will allow it to emerge from the current crisis. We revolutionaries must humbly and decisively contribute to this cause and direction.

16 December 2025


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Luís Bonilla-Molina is a Venezuelan university lecturer, critical pedagogue and president of the Venezuelan Society of Comparative Education.


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The Problem with Machado: Assange Sues the Nobel Foundation

by Binoy Kampmark / December 20th, 2025

The Swedish police have promised it will go nowhere, but the attempt by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to draw attention to the inappropriateness of María Corina Machado as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient raises a few salient matters. On December 17, Assange submitted a criminal complaint to the Swedish Economic Crime Authority and the Swedish Crimes Unit. The legal complaint is directed against the Nobel Foundation, arguing that the pending transfer of 11 million SEK ($US 1.18 million) and the award of the prize medal to Machado violate the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will of November 27, 1895.

The will, binding under the terms of Swedish law, stipulates that the award of the prize and monies be given to a person who, during the preceding year, “conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” in pursuing “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

Given that the peace prize laureates are selected by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, seeking to hold them accountable for their poor choice of awardee might have been a better starting point. But the complaint is alert to this, noting that the Swedish funds administrators have a fiduciary duty to disburse the funds. “The Norwegian committee’s selection does not grant them criminal immunity.” Indeed, it was up to the administrators to consider such a decision made “in flagrant conflict with the explicit purpose of the will, or where there is evidence that the awardee will use or is using the prize to promote or facilitate the crime of aggression, crimes against humanity, or war crimes”.

Whatever the administrative minutiae, Assange’s effort is worth noting. Machado has become the unsavoury alternative to the Venezuelan incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, a figure who refused to accept the electoral returns for his opposing number, Edmundo González, in July 2024. González was essentially a pick by Machado, who has emerged as the empurpled, plumed candidate seeking Maduro’s overthrow. That she was the 2025 choice of prize recipient was galling enough for 21 Norwegian peace organisations to boycott the ceremony and prompt Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel to remark that, “Giving the prize to someone who calls for foreign invasion is a mockery of Alfred Nobel’s will.”

Machado has made no secret of her approval of the buildup of US military personnel (around 15,000) off the coast of Venezuela since August, including a nuclear-powered attack submarine and the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford.  She has “incited and defended the Trump administration’s use of lethal military force and preparation for war.” The US military has already committed, charges Assange, “undeniable war crimes, including the lethal targeting of civilian boats and survivors at sea, which has killed at least 95 people.” (President Donald Trump has liberally designated such individuals as narco-terrorists.) The Central Intelligence Agency has been authorised to conduct covert actions in Venezuela. Parts of the Venezuelan military have been classified by the Trump administration as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO).

Since Assange submitted his complaint, Trump has ordered a complete blockade of sanctioned oil tankers entering or exiting Venezuela. The US has thus far seized two tankers, though the authorities have failed to distinguish which tankers are sanctioned or otherwise. The Panama-flagged Centuries, for instance, was not officially sanctioned by the US, showing that this administration is not one to be, as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth put it, legally tepid.

A list of incitements to war by Machado is enumerated. They include the dedication of the award to President Trump for having “Venezuela in where it should be, in terms of a priority for United States national security”; a heartfelt endorsement of US military escalation as maybe being “the only way” in dealing with Maduro; warm appreciation for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “decisions and resolute actions in the course of the [Gaza] war” and the endorsement of extrajudicial killing of civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea as “visionary”. Hardly the résumé for a peacemaker.

Assange argues that the failure of the funds administrators to stop pertinent disbursements to Machado, in light of the material submitted in the complaint, “indicates ongoing criminal intent”. Such funds aided “a conspiracy to murder civilians”, violated national sovereignty through using military force, and advanced resource theft (Machado’s promised reward to US firms of oil and gas resources amounting to US$1.7 trillion). In doing so, Nobel’s will and charitable purpose had been violated through “gross misappropriation, aiding international crimes […] and conspiracy.” They also breached Sweden’s obligations under the Rome Statute. By way of remedy, the “immediate freezing of all remaining funds and a full criminal investigation lest the Nobel Peace Prize be permanently converted from an instrument of peace into an instrument of war” was sought.

In an email to AFP, Swedish detective inspector Rikard Ekman showed little interest in taking up the matter. “As I have decided not to initiate a preliminary investigation, no investigation will be conducted on the basis of the complaint.”

While this complaint remains a purist’s attempt to return the peace prize to a more conventional reading (Assange thinks the UN Secretary General António Guterres and UN human rights chief Volker Turk are eminently more suitable candidates), the practice of awarding this inflated award to figures of ill repute and sullied reputation will be hard to shake. The ghost of former US security advisor and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a man lauded for bringing peace to Indochina when he covertly indulged illegal bombing campaigns, not to mention war crimes, torture, and an assortment of other blood sports, continues to loom large. It might well be time to abolish the Nobel Peace Prize altogether, and the committee responsible for it. It was never a strong indicator of merit, even if it offers the chance for some very dark humour for the reptiles to revel in.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com. Read other articles by Binoy.