I'm going to begin today just giving a kind of general overview of how the character of U.S.

imperialism has shifted, or at least the strategies of the U.S. Empire, have shifted over the years.

Of course, I'm not in any way denying that the tactics and really forms of warfare that Washington

waged around the world during the first Cold War, roughly from the end of World War II until

1991. Those tactics are absolutely still in use. Of course, the infamous CIA operations,

coups around the world, all of that, that many of you probably

know, the infamous coup against Mossadegh by the CIA in 1953 in Iran, the coup against Arvance,

the president of Guatemala in 1954, the famous coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973.

I mean, we could talk about that all day long.

But I do think that there is a political shift that we see in the 1980s,

and I think we have to understand that political shift in tactics of imperialism

to understand where we are today, to understand

the, what you could call kind of regime change industry, to understand the tactics of what

El Comandante Chavez in Venezuela referred to as the Golpe Suave.

And I think that for people who don't speak Spanish the

goalpe suave means soft coup and I think that there's actually a significant difference

between the hard coups that we still sometimes see as we saw the the US government back

in Bolivia against Evo Morales in November 2019. That was absolutely a hard

coup with the military. But these days, many of the coups, especially in Latin America, are much more

what are referred to as gulp as soft coups that involve lawfare, legal warfare, that involve

economic warfare through so-called sanctions, that involve

information warfare through lies and fake news, and that involve increasingly cyber warfare.

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