The greatest collection of status quo enthusiasts can be found at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. As nations around the world attempt to distance themselves from Washington’s financial, military, and political grip, the CIA is reaching into its past playbook to deal with wayward governments.

After helping to foment a political rebellion in Ukraine against the democratically-elected government of President Viktor Yanukovych, Washington’s propaganda apparatus, which is centered on the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute (OSI), has focused on Venezuela.

Venezuela identified three U.S. embassy officials in Caracas meeting with opposition protesters and helping to plan anti-government riots throughout the country. The three U.S. «consular officers» — Breann Marie McCusker, Jeffrey Gordon Elsen and Kristopher Lee Clark – were ordered expelled by the Venezuelan government. Last October, Venezuela expelled another three U.S. diplomats – chargé d’affaires Kelly Keiderling, David Moo, and Elizabeth Hoffman — for involvement in fomenting domestic unrest. The six so-called diplomats were involved in activities often associated with «official cover» CIA agents.

Just as was the case with U.S. ambassador to Kyiv Geoffrey Pyatt and the visiting foul-mouthed Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland meeting with Ukrainian opposition leaders to help plan anti-government protests, the American diplomats in Caracas were charged with meeting opposition forces loyal to Leopoldo Lopez, the Harvard-trained agent for U.S. corporate interests. The Venezuelan government charged that Lopez, like the other Venezuelan opposition leader, Henrique Capriles Radonski, received covert financial support from the CIA via such organizations as the NED and USAID to plan protests and launch economic sabotage against Venezuela.

Links have been established between Lopez’s Voluntad Popular political party and front organizations associated with the right-wing and pro-Israeli narco-terrorist, former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. Money, with obvious CIA and narco-terrorist fingerprints, has been funneled to Lopez’s party by such Soros-sounding Uribe fronts as the Center for Thought Foundation of Colombia First and Democratic Internationalism Foundation. In the months preceding the latest outbreak of violence in Venezuela, the

The U.S. embassy in Caracas, as is the case with its counterparts in Kyiv and Moscow, has served as a virtual protest planning hall for Venezuela’s U.S.-financed opposition. The one thing that Ukrainian opposition leaders Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Vitali Klitschko, and Oleh Tyahnybok; Russian opposition figures Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov; and Venezuelan opposition leaders Lopez, Capriles, and Maria Corina Machado have in common is a free pass to enter the respective U.S. embassies in their capital cities any time they please and leave with as much money as they can carry.

What unites CIA destabilization campaigns in Ukraine and Venezuela is the use of local fascists to bolster anti-government forces… In Venezuela, reactionary supporters of past fascist oligarchic regimes are willing allies of the United States while in Ukraine, such fascists as Tyahnybok represent a continued U.S. and Israeli connection to Ukraine’s opposition. A declassified CIA report, dated April 4, `1973, states that even during the time of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Communist Party leaders called for «vigilance against Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism», seen as twin threats to Ukraine at the time. Today, not much has changed with the orientation and nature of Ukraine’s opposition.

While propping up Venezuela’s opposition leaders with U.S. dollars, the United States and its bankers have mercilessly attacked the Venezuelan currency and economy by using the corporate media to spread false stories about basic commodities shortages in Venezuela, including toilet paper, salt, and sugar. This is an old CIA trick that was long used against the government of Cuba and other nations opposed to U.S. imperialism.

The same scare tactic of rampant scarcity of goods is being used by the CIA to undermine the government of Red Shirt-supported Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra with U.S.-fed rumors of rice shortages in the country due to a scheme to sell Thai rice to China. The CIA-led campaign against Yingluck has resulted in charges being filed against the Prime Minister by a typical Soros «civil society» contrivance – the National Counter-Corruption Commission — the brainchild of Yellow Shirt royalists and phony constitutional «reformers» like octogenarian Amorn Chantarasomboon.

Just as with the abortive CIA coup against President Hugo Chavez in April 2002, the CIA and its local worthies have launched propaganda attacks against PDVSA, the state-owned Venezuelan oil company, which owns CITGO in the United States. The CIA’s propaganda organs are pushing the meme that PDVSA is so corrupt and moribund that Venezuela is being forced to import gasoline from the United States. The story is patently false but corporate media operations, including those operated or influenced by the Soros network of global propagandists, are gladly reporting the falsehood as fact.

The corporate media, especially The Miami Herald, which caters to the whims and fantasies of Venezuela’s exiled oligarchs in southern Florida as much as it does to right-wing Cubans and nationalistic Zionists in its gated-community readership area, has also falsely claimed that Venezuela is experiencing a massive crime wave because the government of President Nicolas Maduro is unable to provide security for the population. This, too, is an old CIA trick that has been used to undermine the political stability of governments around the world, including Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, by assisting home grown terrorists and criminal syndicates in carrying out attacks on the civilian population.

The CIA used the same game plan of fomenting economic sabotage against the government of Chilean Socialist President Salvador Allende. In Venezuela, the CIA attacks the oil industry. In Chile, the CIA used the copper industry to stage sabotage attacks against the Chilean economy prior to launching the bloody September 11, 1973 coup that saw the assassination of Allende and the subsequent slaughter by U.S.-trained death squads of his political supporters.

Other Latin American nations are taking note of America’s covert aggression against Venezuela. The United States formally suspended economic aid to Bolivia after its government expelled USAID for fomenting rebellion in that country. Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa formally announced his nation was withdrawing from the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance, a Pentagon contrivance which has permitted the United States to base its military forces in Latin American nations.

But the CIA sees the situation in which the United States finds itself in Latin America reversible. An overthrow of the government of Venezuela by a rightist clique is hoped to reverse leftward trends in other countries. A December 29, 1975 CIA Intelligence Memorandum, titled «Latin America’s Changing Foreign Relations», saw hope that the bloody coup against Allende in 1973 would have beneficial pay-offs for America. The CIA saw Allende’s demise as stymying the «Third Worldism» and «demagoguery» of Mexican President Luis Echeverria and the petroleum policies of Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) Latin American cheerleaders Ecuador and Venezuela. The CIA was wrong, as usual, in its assessments of Latin America. Not only did Mexico, Ecuador, and Venezuela resist American pressure (the latter two punished by being excluded from reduced tariffs under the 1974 U.S. Trade Reform Act) but fascist-ruled Chile defied America by voting in the UN General Assembly for a resolution equating Zionism with racism.

With subtle pressure by the CIA unsuccessful against Latin America in the mid-1970s being a non-starter, the CIA resorted to tried and true methods to silence its Latin American opponents. The aerial assassinations of Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos and Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos, both known for their anti-American policies, showed the world that America would gladly resort to murder when it could not get its way.

In the present day, President Obama has shown that he is no different from past American presidents in authorizing deadly covert operations to eliminate the leadership of nations that oppose U.S, hegemony.