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Venezuela Officials Claim They Captured CIA-Linked Mercenaries in False Flag Plot

Venezuelan authorities claim to have captured a group of mercenaries allegedly linked to the CIA.

In a statement on Sunday, Venezuela Vice President Delcy Rodriguez shared that the alleged mercenaries were apprehended with “direct information” from the CIA.

Delcy’s statement comes as joint military exercises between the United States and Trinidad and Tobago are currently underway in the Caribbean Sea.

Per Newsweek:

Venezuela said it has captured mercenaries “with direct information” relating to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as Caracas accused neighboring Trinidad and Tobago of a “military provocation” by carrying out joint drills with the U.S.

The Trump administration has launched multiple lethal strikes on alleged drug boats close to Venezuela and Colombia as part of what officials paint as a crackdown on narcotics trafficking into the U.S. that has strained American relations with Colombia, a longtime ally, and worsened tensions with Venezuela. The U.S. moved significant military assets to the southern Caribbean, bolstered by the announcement last week that the U.S. Navy’s newest and largest aircraft carrier would join fighter jets, a submarine and multiple warships already in the region.

The White House has little love for Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, and has doubled the reward for information leading to his arrest on drug-related and corruption charges to $50 million. Venezuela said it is ready to respond and released an appeal in English from Maduro, calling for peace.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez did not give further details about the “mercenary group” she said was linked to the CIA in a statement published on Sunday but said it intended to carry out what she termed a “false flag” operation. The term refers to a plan that makes another party look responsible for an operation or action. Rodríguez said the operation was setting the stage for a “full military confrontation with our country.”

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The Hidden Architecture Of Debt: How Private Banks Captured The Global Economy

Introduction: Why Money Power Matters

Most people graduate school knowing trigonometry but not how money is created. We learn to vote for parties but rarely examine who shapes the economic terrain those parties must walk on. Yet for more than a century, the power to create money as interest-bearing debt has quietly concentrated economic and political control in private hands. The result is a world where nations strain under compounding obligations, public debate revolves around the margins of policy, and whole societies become dependent on a credit system they neither designed nor fully understand.

This essay distills key arguments and quotations (historical and contemporary) about how modern banking actually works, why debt has become the engine of governance, and what that means for sovereignty, prosperity, and even our moral compass. The aim is not to recycle slogans but to clarify mechanisms: how money enters circulation, who benefits first, who bears the risks, and why the system almost always demands more growth, more extraction, and more debt.

1) The Core Mechanism: Money as Debt, Not as Value

A century of central banking and commercial credit has normalized a simple but profound fact: most new money is created when banks make loans. As former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert B. Anderson put it in 1959, when a bank issues a loan, it credits a deposit that did not exist the moment before; the new deposit is “new money.” In practice, this means the money supply expands primarily through private lending, not public issuance.

That mechanism is turbocharged by fractional-reserve banking and today by capital-based banking rules: banks do not lend out pre-existing savings one-for-one; they expand deposits by creating credit. Interest is attached to that credit, meaning the system requires continual new borrowing to service past borrowing. If credit creation slows materially, defaults rise, asset prices wobble, and political pressure mounts to “stimulate” again. In short, we live inside a treadmill that is far more credit-driven than most civics textbooks admit.

Critics from Henry Ford to John Scales Avery have argued that this arrangement is structurally unjust because it privatizes the seigniorage (the profit of creating money) and socializes the fallout (inflation, asset bubbles, austerity). Whether or not one accepts every claim these critics make, the underlying math is hard to ignore: when money arrives as interest-bearing debt, the system has a built-in bias toward ever-expanding leverage.

2) From Private Credit to Public Power: How We Got Here

Modern banking’s political leverage grew alongside institutions like the Bank of England and, later, the U.S. Federal Reserve (established in 1913). Whatever the intention of their founders, central banks now sit at the junction of state and finance: they are publicly mandated yet operationally insulated (and privately owned), coordinating liquidity to stabilize the system while commercial banks originate most money-like claims.

This hybrid design has real consequences. It allows a small circle of decision-makers to set the price of money (interest rates), backstop private balance sheets in crises, and influence fiscal choices by making some policies financially easy and others expensive. Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan once emphasized the institution’s independence; the flip side of that independence is low democratic visibility over choices that shape every mortgage, job market, and public budget.

Beyond national central banks lies the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — often called the “central bank of central banks.” Through standards (Basel accords) and coordination, it helps align global banking rules. Critics argue this produces a technocratic layer of control over national economies with little public oversight. Whether one views that as prudent stewardship or as democratic deficit, it underscores a theme: the architecture of money governance is largely opaque to the public it governs.

3) Debt as an Organizing Principle: Nations on the Hook

If money is introduced mainly through borrowing, then borrowers become the gearwheels of the system. This is true of households, firms, and crucially governments. National debts have exploded over decades. Interest on those debts is neither a schoolbook abstraction nor a harmless line item: it diverts tax revenue from public goods to creditor claims year after year.

Concrete examples illustrate the point. Countries such as Ireland have paid billions annually in debt interest, amounts that can reach a significant share of national profits in strong years. Canada has spent tens of billions per year on interest at various points. The United States services hundreds of billions annually. The deeper the debt stock and the higher the rates, the more fiscal space narrows — and the easier it is for outside creditors and institutions to demand policy concessions as the price of liquidity.

International lending reinforces the pattern. When a country is pulled into a crisis, the usual medicine involves austerity and privatization in exchange for financing — effectively transferring public assets and future cash flows into private hands. Even when such programs stabilize a currency, they often leave a legacy of reduced sovereignty and social strain. Either way, the organizing principle remains: service the debt first.

4) Why Perpetual Growth Feels Non-Negotiable

Once you grasp that interest-bearing credit is the dominant source of new money, the politics of “growth at any cost” make more sense. If economies must expand to service past obligations, then policymakers are incentivized to chase GDP even when the ecological or social returns are negative. This is why governments of every stripe tend to converge on similar policies when growth stalls: tax incentives to borrow and invest, financial repression to keep rates low, deficit spending to plug holes, and pressure on central banks to ease again.

Critics like Roy Madron, John Jopling, and John Scales Avery have argued that this growth-dependency crowds out other goals: equitable distribution, environmental stewardship, and cultural stability. It also explains why mainstream debates often avoid the root structure and instead focus on the speed of the treadmill. We argue about 2% vs. 3% inflation rather than who issues money, who captures seigniorage, and who eats the losses when cycles turn.

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California Political Adviser Pleads Guilty to Being Foreign Agent of China

The former campaign adviser of a Southern California city council member pleaded guilty on Oct. 27 to acting as an illegal Chinese agent.

Sun Yaoning, also known as Mike Sun, worked as a campaign adviser in the 2022 city council race in Arcadia, a Los Angeles suburb.

He also operated a news website targeting the local Chinese American community, posting content supporting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

If the judge accepts the sentencing recommendation, Sun, 64, could face up to 10 years in prison.

In the plea agreement, Sun agreed that he was a foreign agent for China from 2022 to 2024, promoting pro-CCP propaganda in the United States without alerting the U.S. Attorney General.

Campaign filings from the November 2022 election show that Sun worked as treasurer for the campaign of Eileen Wang, an Arcadia city council member.

At the time of the arrest in December 2024, Arcadia City Manager Dominic Lazzaretto said in a letter to the community that Sun had no affiliation with the City of Arcadia and that Wang had spoken with the FBI and was cooperating with investigators.

According to the plea agreement, Sun admitted to writing a report about his activities in support of the CCP.

“Overseas anti-China forces have been ceaseless, Taiwan independence, Tibet independence, Xinjiang independence, and Falungong have been active for a long time,” he wrote.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. As with the other areas mentioned above, the faith group has been a major target of the Chinese regime.

Sun proposed organizing counteractivities and requested $80,000 to fund a demonstration at a Fourth of July parade in Washington, according to the criminal complaint filed on Dec. 17, 2024, by the Justice Department in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Sun also admitted to providing information to a Chinese official at the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles about activities in the area related to Taiwan. In April 2023, during a visit by then-Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, Sun took photos of protesters and sent them to the Chinese official.

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Zelensky Declares Expansion Of Long-Range Attacks On Russian Oil Refineries 

Days after urging European allies in Britain that Ukraine urgently needs sufficient long-range weapons to change the course of the war, President Zelensky has declared Monday that he intends to expand strikes against Russian refineries.

After a meeting with his staff Zelensky indicated, “We reviewed the effectiveness of our long-range strikes over a defined period and the results achieved. Russian oil refining is already paying a tangible price for the war—and will pay even more. We set tasks to expand the geography for the use of our long-range capabilities.”

This makes clear it’s no secret how Kiev would use Tomahawks missiles if it received Washington’s approval to get them; however, President Trump has appeared to resist so far.

The past couple of months have seen Ukrainian long-range drone strikes on Russian energy sites and oil depots become an almost nightly phenomenon. Drones are very hard to defend against, given their small size, so the UAVs often hit their targets as they are often sent in large waves.

Recently, media sources have said the Trump White House has been actively giving intelligence assistance to Ukraine related to these long-range attacks on Russian energy. Still, there’s as yet no indication Trump has approved Tomahawks.

The Ukrainians of lately been striking defense sector and manufacturing sites as well, sometimes with devastating and deadly effect. One recent ‘mystery’ blast more than a dozen people:

The death toll from an explosion at a Russian plastics manufacturing plant has increased to 13 people, the Chelyabinsk regional administration said Monday.

The blast occurred last Wednesday night at the Plastmass plant in the town of Kopeysk. The facility, known for producing artillery ammunition for the Russian military, is subject to Western sanctions.

It is unclear whether sabotage or other deliberate action caused the explosion.

But Russia has been hitting back hard, with a Monday an aerial attack on an important energy facility in Chernihiv region, resulting in a number of towns and settlements in the border area being without electricity.

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Black Principal’s Race-Only Assembly Sparks Outrage at Dallas High School. Claims Black Students Must be the “Priority” Over Everyone Else

A Dallas, Texas, Principal has been removed from her position after Grant Stinchfield obtained an email that exposed the principal at Woodrow Wilson High School in Dallas for engaging in what can only be described as discriminatory behavior towards White and Hispanic students.

The black Principal is accused of holding a “Black-only” assembly, where she allegedly told students she was “valuing the well-being of African American students over the others at this moment.”

That’s, according to one outraged Black student who wrote an email to the school administration calling out the discriminatory meeting.

Today on “Stinchfield,” Grant reads the email where the student whistleblower claims his black Principal even boasted about “only hiring Black staff.” That declaration appears to be a proud admission of the discrimination.

It is the latest example of the disgusting use of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) that only leads to poor outcomes and lots of controversy.

Grant Stinchfield calls this what it is — a blatant act of woke victimhood ideology gone too far. It’s the twisted belief that you can fix racism with more racism. By prioritizing one group over another, this principal didn’t lift anyone up. Instead, she sent a dangerous message that minority students are victims and that everyone else doesn’t matter.

It’s a moral and educational failure at every level.

In a letter to parents on Monday morning, the DISD confirmed the Principal has been replaced, telling parents the principal’s actions “do not reflect the values or expectations of our school community.”  And late Monday Morning the Principal issued an apology, insisting in a letter to parents, that she takes, “full ownership and responsibility for what occurred.”  and it was never her “intent to single out or cause harm to any group of students.”

It is unclear if the Principal will return or not.

Statements and suspensions are not enough. Grant demands immediate accountability from the Dallas Independent School District, insisting that school leaders make it clear this kind of divisive, race-based policy will never happen again.

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We Have Not Properly Reckoned with the Economic Insanity of 2020

It’s been nearly six years since the SARS-CoV-2 virus spread into the United States, ushering in the pandemic that would come to define the first quarter of this decade.

Considering how recently it occurred and how much it affected every facet of American life, it is somewhat remarkable how absent the pandemic and the government’s response are from today’s news cycle, the daily political fights online and in the media, or in popular culture and fiction.

Even when the pandemic is brought up and re-examined, the focus is usually on the necessity and nature of the government measures put in place to control the spread of the virus or the public’s level of compliance.

That is, to be sure, a worthwhile debate. But the government’s economic response is often left out, which can give the impression that—as controversial as the lockdowns or vaccine mandates might have been—the quick and extensive mobilization of the government’s considerable fiscal and monetary powers was one uncontroversial success story of the covid years.

It wasn’t, and the lack of controversy surrounding it is disturbing.

For most of American history, there had been a fairly consistent understanding that it’s wrong for the government to step in and help a company when it was suffering economic losses or facing bankruptcy.

Beyond that being an avenue for cronyism and corruption, economic theory has also made it very clear for hundreds of years that economic losses are a necessary element for economic growth.

The economy is, after all, a process. And specifically, it’s a process for producing goods and services that people want to consume. In a market unhampered by government, every part of every line of production is geared towards eventually making something that people value enough to pay for. That’s the whole point.

For an economy to grow and everyone to become wealthier, some people need to take on the role of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs reallocate resources to new lines of production or refine existing lines to account for factors that are constantly changing—things like technology, capital availability, and consumer preferences.

In our role as consumers in a truly free market, we can opt out of any exchange for any reason. So entrepreneurs can only make profits if they offer a good or service consumers’ value enough to pay more for than the business had to pay to produce it. When they don’t, they are stuck with the losses. Economic losses are a very motivating signal that the resources used in a line of production would be better used elsewhere. They are crucial for reorganizing the economy to better meet the needs and wants of the end consumer—which, remember, is the entire purpose of the economy in the first place.

To be clear, the federal government has been intervening in the economy since it was founded. And especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, government officials have been using state power to warp the economy in ways that benefit themselves and their well-connected friends in various industries.

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US Officials Disagree With Trump on Venezuela

In the waters of the Caribbean, a surprisingly large U.S. fleet sits with Venezuela in its sights. It includes over 10,000 troops, Aegis guided-missile destroyers, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, F-35B jet fighters, MQ-9 Reaper drones, P-8 Poseidon spy planes, assault ships and a secretive special-operations ship.

The fleet is built for war on Venezuela or its drug cartels, but it is engineered to put enough pressure on Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to push him from power. The justification for the war is stopping the flow of drugs into the U.S. by Venezuelan drug cartels; the justification for the coup is that Maduro is the head of those cartels.

But U.S. officials – often those in the best place to know – have disagreed with all three aspects of the military action: the significance of Venezuela’s drug cartels in the flow of drugs, and especially fentanyl, into United States; the role of Maduro in those cartels; and the use of the military to fight them. For their disagreement, many of those officials have left or been forced from their jobs.

U.S. President Donald Trump has insisted that military force is necessary to stop “narco-terrorists” who are smuggling a “deadly weapon poisoning Americans. He has claimed that “every boat,” the U.S. military strikes off the coast of Venezuela is “stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl” and “kills 25,000 on average – some people say more.”

But current and former U.S. officials disagree. While most of the boats the U.S. military has sunk have been in the passageway between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago, U.S. officials say that that passage is neither used to transport fentanyl nor is it used to transport drugs to the United States. 80% of the drugs that flow through that passage is marijuana, and most of the rest is cocaine. And those drugs are headed, not to the U.S., but to West Africa and Europe. Most of the fentanyl that finds its way into the U.S. comes from Mexico.

The military strikes on Venezuelan boats cannot be justified by the war on drugs and “are unlikely… to cut overdose deaths in the United States,” according to officials. “When I saw [an internal document on the strikes],” a senior U.S. national security official said, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change’.”

According to U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, 90% of the cocaine that transits into the U.S. enters through Mexico, not Venezuela. And Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl. The dissenting American officials are in agreement with international bodies. The  2025 UNODC World Drug Report assesses that Venezuela “has consolidated its status as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaves, cannabis and similar crops.” The report says that “[o]nly 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela.” The EU’s European Drug Report 2025 corroborates the UN report: it “does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for the international drug trade.”

U.S. intelligence also disagrees on the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is at the head of the Venezuelan drug cartels. The Trump administration has insisted that “Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de Los Soles.”

Again, though, U.S. officials disagree. A “sense of the community” memorandum dated April 7, 2025 that puts together the findings of the 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence directly contradicts the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is the leader of Tren de Aragua (TDA) drug cartel.

The memorandum clearly states that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” It states that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA.”

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Graham Platner’s Campaign in Freefall: Manager QUITS Amid Explosive Nazi Tattoo Scandal

Democrat Senate candidate Graham Platner’s campaign is spiraling out of control after his newly appointed campaign manager abruptly resigned just four days into the job.

According to Axios, Kevin Brown stepped down on Monday, citing personal reasons.

“Graham is a dear friend. I started this campaign Tuesday but found out Friday we have a baby on the way,” Brown told Axios.

“Graham deserves someone who is 100% in on his race and we want to lean into this new experience as a family, so it was best we step back sooner than later so Graham can get the manager he deserves.”

But the timing couldn’t be worse.

Platner has been in damage-control mode since acknowledging on Pod Save America that a skull-and-crossbones tattoo he got nearly two decades ago “while drunk” bore a disturbing resemblance to the Nazi SS Totenkopf, the skull emblem worn by Hitler’s elite death squads.

But CNN’s KFile dug up deleted Reddit posts from 2019 where Platner discussed the very same symbol and its Nazi ties.

CNN reported:

A KFile investigation has uncovered mounting evidence that Platner — a Marine veteran— was aware of and defended the use of Nazi symbolism that had come to be embraced by some members of the military.

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FDA’s War on Commonsense Nicotine Regulation

Nicotine pouches—small, smokeless packets tucked under the lip—deliver nicotine without burning tobacco. They eliminate the tar, carbon monoxide, and carcinogens that make cigarettes so deadly. The logic of harm reduction couldn’t be clearer: if smokers can get nicotine without smoke, millions of lives could be saved.

Sweden has already proven the point. Through widespread use of snus and nicotine pouches, the country has cut daily smoking to about 5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe. Lung-cancer deaths are less than half the continental average. This “Swedish Experience” shows that when adults are given safer options, they switch voluntarily—no prohibition required.

In the United States, however, the FDA’s tobacco division has turned this logic on its head. Since Congress gave it sweeping authority in 2009, the agency has demanded that every new product undergo a Premarket Tobacco Product Application, or PMTA, proving it is “appropriate for the protection of public health.” That sounds reasonable until you see how the process works.

Manufacturers must spend millions on speculative modeling about how their products might affect every segment of society—smokers, nonsmokers, youth, and future generations—before they can even reach the market. Unsurprisingly, almost all PMTAs have been denied or shelved. Reduced-risk products sit in limbo while Marlboros and Newports remain untouched.

Only this January did the agency relent slightly, authorizing 20 ZYN nicotine-pouch products made by Swedish Match, now owned by Philip Morris. The FDA admitted the obvious: “The data show that these specific products are appropriate for the protection of public health.” The toxic-chemical levels were far lower than in cigarettes, and adult smokers were more likely to switch than teens were to start.

The decision should have been a turning point. Instead, it exposed the double standard. Other pouch makers—especially smaller firms from Sweden and the US, such as NOAT—remain locked out of the legal market even when their products meet the same technical standards. 

The FDA’s inaction has created a black market dominated by unregulated imports, many from China. According to my own research, roughly 85 percent of pouches now sold in convenience stores are technically illegal.

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The World Confronts the Genocide Washington Is Trying To Bury

On October 4th, 2025, in an interview with Axios, President Trump stressed that one of the main goals behind his Gaza plan was to restore Israel’s international standing. “Bibi took it very far and Israel lost a lot of support in the world,” Trump said. “Now I am gonna get all that support back.”

Under Trump’s plan, a supposed ceasefire took effect on October 10th. But Israel only withdrew from less than half of the Gaza strip, and killed at least 93 people in the next two weeks, after killing at least that many per day for the previous two years. Israel has only allowed 15% of the humanitarian aid called for in the plan to enter Gaza, and has kept the critical Rafah crossing from Egypt into Gaza closed. The daily life-and-death struggle to find food, water and shelter carries on unabated for two million people in Gaza.

While the reduction in the daily scale of Israel’s mass murder is obviously welcome, this is not a real ceasefire. Like previous Israeli ceasefires in Gaza, as in Lebanon, this is a one-sided ceasefire that Israel violates at will, on a daily basis, with no accountability.

This is only the first part of Trump’s plan for Gaza, and there is still no agreement on the other parts, such as the disarmament of Hamas, who provide the only government and police force in Gaza. They now have the added job of protecting their people from Israel-backed criminal gangs and death squads, some with links to ISIS, who prey on them from the Israeli-occupied areas, stealing aid supplies, assassinating local leaders and terrorizing the population.

Hamas is obviously not going to disarm under these conditions, and previously said it would only surrender its weapons once Palestine has an internationally recognized government with its own armed forces. On the other side, Israel has not agreed to other parts of Trump’s plan, such as its withdrawal from the rest of Gaza, nor to any plan for the future of Palestine.

In the United States, where corrupt politicians and corporate media take U.S. and Israeli lies at face value or even repeat them as statements of fact, some may believe that Trump’s plan has resolved the crisis in Palestine. The rest of the world is not so naive or easy to manipulate, but many other governments are also beholden to oligarchies that profit from trade, investment and arms deals with Israel, even as the public in those same countries reels in shock at Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians and U.S.-backed impunity for its crimes.

Trump’s Gaza plan, like much of his foreign policy, cynically exploits the greed and fear of political leaders and their oligarch patrons. Admitting that Israel has “lost a lot of support in the world,” he offers a shortcut back to “business as usual” for governments eager to protect – and even expand – profitable ties despite Israel’s ongoing atrocities and open contempt for international law.

In his first term, Trump brokered the “Abraham Accords,” normalization deals between Israel and Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan that included mutual recognition and expanded trade. He now has his eye on the big prize: Saudi Arabia.

But Arab-Israeli relations have long been contested. In the 1949 UN General Assembly vote on Israel’s admission, all Arab and Muslim countries except Turkiye (which abstained) voted against recognizing the state of Israel. Thirty-two mostly Arab and Muslim countries, including some of its closest neighbors, still either don’t recognize Israel or have no diplomatic relations with it.

Despite decades of hostility, Trump persuaded Israel and some of these countries to support his Gaza plan with the promise of future benefits from normalization and trade. But there is still a gaping chasm between Israel and these Arab and Muslim countries over Palestine. They say they will not recognize Israel unless Israel recognizes Palestine, with full sovereignty over East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

But the foundational basis of Netanyahu’s Likud Party is its plan for a Greater Israel, to be formed by annexing all of occupied Palestine “between the sea and the Jordan.” And on October 22, during Vice President Vance’s visit to Israel, the Knesset voted in favor of annexing the West Bank.

Trump unveiled his Gaza plan at the very end of the UN General Assembly’s annual high-level meeting in New York, where many world leaders spoke out for much stronger international action against Israel. The New York Declaration, which 142 countries voted for, was the result of a conference in July led by France and Saudi Arabia that promised “concrete, timebound, coordinated action” to enforce a ruling by the international Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2024 that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is illegal and must be ended “as quickly as possible.”

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