Portside

Despite the hype and brinkmanship, Germany doesn’t want to Greece to leave the Eurozone. The true objective is to undermine popular support for the Syriza government to get a new more compliant regime, a “slow-motion coup d’etat.” Germany, the other EU countries, and the U.S., will try to give Greece enough oxygen to avoid default and exit, which they really don’t want, but not enough for an economic recovery, which they also don’t want.

Are European leaders making impossible demands of the current Greek government as part of a strategy to get rid of it? The European Central Bank not only trained its guns on the new government but started firing on Feb. 4, just nine days after the election, when they cut off the main line of credit to the Greek government.

What the sanctions made clear is that President Obama’s opening to Cuba represented exactly zero change in Washington’s overall strategy toward the region: The intention of expanding commercial and diplomatic relations with Cuba was mainly to pursue a more effective strategy of undermining the Cuban government--and all of the left governments in the region.

The latest sanctions, like the ones approved in December . . . represent a victory for a political faction that wants to prevent the normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It was not a result of pressure from the right in Congress, but came from deep within the Obama administration.

On Monday, the White House took the absurd step of declaring Venezuela an “unusual and extraordinary threat.” Obama is channeling Ronald Reagan, adopting practices similar to those used against the Nicaraguan Sandinista government. But, the world has moved forward, even if Washington has not. Venezuela today has very strong backing from its neighbors against what almost every government in the region sees as an illegal attempt to destabilize the country.

Even though the country’s black market for U.S. dollars has stabilized, the government will need to bring inflation down in order to maintain a stable exchange rate.

As China looks set to overtake the US as the world's largest economy, a multipolar world can only be good for democracy.

John Kerry’s rhetoric is divorced from the reality on the ground, where life goes on – even at the barricades

Venezuela's struggle is widely misrepresented in western media. This is a classic conflict between right and left, rich and poor. Although there are abuses of power and problems with the rule of law in Venezuela – as there are throughout the hemisphere – it is far from the authoritarian state that most consumers of western media are led to believe.