Submitted by Pachamama
For decades we in the Caribbean, misguidedly so, have been living under a false presumption that our here and dear homeland was ‘a zone of peace’. We well remember those homilies as oft repeated by generations of the political elites, as if mantra, but not at all well-based in truism. These thinly-veiled falsities have been laid bare by the existential realities of our time. Enter, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela!
As Wilpert has argued, the Pink-Tide governments currently facing serial reversals in the wider region always had Venezuela as their epicenter. Thus, the internal logic employed by Washington was not to be limited to the rollbacks in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Guatemala for Venezuela was always the main target. Of course, Cuba and Nicaragua remain firmly within the bullseye of empire as well. Mexico under its new left-leaning president will soon, more openly, also attract empire’s ire. Under this global financial hegemony no deviations to the established orthodoxy shall be permitted, they posture.
Imperialism has gone through at least three (3) distinct phases. Classical imperialism meant you outright stole other peoples’ things at the point of a sword. Colonial imperialism has meant that one was committed to bearing the costs of administrative control, or management on the ground directing the theft of resources, thereby reducing the net margin of surpluses extracted. The colonial extraction of surpluses by financial imperialism is the purest and most efficient formation thus removing up to 95% of surplus production from the ‘host’ directly to the German bankers or ‘parasites’, as in the recent case of Greece.
In the case of the militarized financial colonialism, which seeks to re-impose itself on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the adversary is seeking to create conditions on the ground aimed at the renewal of historical patterns of extraction by pressuring the country with a contrived humanitarian crisis. By paying off its national debt and kicking out the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Hugo Chavez denied the money-changers the rentier economy most efficient in extracting surpluses. This is a long-planned artificial crisis to which they are presenting the faux but ready-made solution, of course!
The United States has, for many years now, deployed dollar supremacy to create artificial scarcities in Venezuela, primarily through financial manipulation and employing other petroleum producers to sink the price of crude. Such a scenario unduly pressurizes the population; suggest that the military should be disloyal and commit treason; aims to set up a rival government in Venezuela; is portentous for a civil war; locates the Caribbean well within a final war scenarios. But America should try to avoid a hot war for it has lost every conflict, except Grenada, in more than one hundred (100) years. However, civil confusion, fictitious claims to governmental authority and disaster capitalism are also in America’s immediate interests, like in Syria and contrary to popular claims. Claims just as propagandistic as those about ‘zones of peace’ anywhere.
The USA has set up financial companies in Colombia to invite holders of US dollars to remove them from the country (Venezuela), mainly the wealthy Venezuelans left behind. They have set up financial services companies in Miami whose sole role are to act to drive down the parity for the bolivar, creating inflation of more than a million percent in a year. Then they blame Chavez and Maduro for ‘mismanagement’ and they own the media to often repeat their memes, lies. They have insisted, for years, that Venezuela was not to borrow in US dollars from anywhere. They have demanded that American companies operating in Venezuela were to repatriate their reserves of US dollars. And more!
More recently we have seen the weaponization of international finance taken to a new and worrying level. It’s worrying for Russia, China, Turkey and others. The United States has contravened the well-established understanding of international law what sovereign statism means when removing the legal protections the government of Venezuela has had viz a viz its US dollar reserve holdings in American banks and its holdings of bullion in London institutions. We are witnessing a global colonial conspiracy with obvious extraterritorial implications. It is or should be intolerable to all world nations. The grapes of globalization, you say!
What connects the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to the dirty looks of American empire is the three (3) letter word which has been, since its discovery, been the bane of all countries of the South. What’s worse, is that imperial (American) control of oil, we say control not necessarily ownership, not that Trump and those currently in the White House care much about the differentiation any more, for they are gangsters. But crude oil is the single strategic mineral, which has, since 1971, could have acted to impose a perceived value on a fiat American ‘currency’ through ‘forced-demand’ market conditions as imposed by empire. Without which, the paper-tiger of an American empire falls, tomorrow morning!
These are the orders of magnitude the present illegal and aggressive ‘humanitarian’ war against the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela represents for the Caribbean, the wider region and the very existence of live on our Mother, Earth. These scenarios make nonsense of quaint notions about ‘zones of peace’ anywhere. For Russia, China, Iran and others will not be forever dominated by American fiat currency control mechanisms, for resistance must come, sooner or later. And if Venezuela is to be the battle ground no pretenses about the Caribbean as a ‘zone of peace’ can contain these configurations of forces.
We are endeavouring to ignore the bellicose mouthings of Trump and company. Beyond that, all the other international indicators suggest the end of imperium. All the forces within the United States of America, itself, also point to an unescapable collapse, and very soon too. War with Venezuela, as urged by the Deep State or permanent American government and particularly the bankers running the Federal Reserve, remains the last flicker of hope for maintaining or extending American global hegemony. For they have failed to control Russian oil, Iranian crude, Central Asian resources, so Venezuela seems a necessary but insufficient target. They should expect millions of freedom fighters from Venezuela and elsewhere to deliver a righteous resistance, in several neighbouring countries as well. Venezuela represent another miscalculation for the internal and external constellations are working against the continuation of American hegemony and are well-disposed to denying empire any lifeline.
The very existence of America has always been about global hegemony. We simply have to look to see where its nearly 1000 military bases are located. We’ll discover that they are primarily situated near oil fields, to protect oil shipping lanes and other strategic minerals. The oil majors have always acted as instruments for imperial power starting with Iran (1953) as British Petroleum, as successor, acted with the CIA and British Intelligence (MI6) to remove Mohammad Mosadegh, a duly elected leader, who nationalized Iranian oil. By these, the oil majors, on whose behalf the United States military has always been praetorian guard. Of course, they enlist their partners in crime to assist in the policing of the world’s resources. France’s hegemonic relationships with its former colonies still represent the most perverse contradiction from the country which continues to claim to have given us ‘liberty’.
Why the increased recklessness at this time? Well, major countries are coming to realize that the fiat dollar has been used to threaten them, wage wars against them, impose sanctions against them, subjected them to intractable poverty, been extractive of real wealth owned by them, subjected them to more and more irrational American demands, the rising list of demands never seems ends. Strengths also present weaknesses and the growing weakness of empire also presents the Achilles Heel as a point of attack. So we have a number of countries establishing systems which seek to bypass the US dollar as global reserve currency and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIF) system used for its transfer.
Venezuela, just last years and in its own defense, decided to price its oil in the yuan, or petro-yuan, the currency of China. This military response by Trump and his gang in the White House is not dissimilar to what happened to Maumar Khadafy when he decided to sell Iraqi oil solely in the gold dinar. Meaning, buyers had to hold gold to buy Libyan crude oil. No such competition is ever to be given to the Devil’s dollar. The same fate met Saddam Hussien of Iraq, who deciding to price Iraqi crude similarly. They are many other countries facing this colonial reprisal. We will do well to remember that our region has never been a stranger to American backed wars, subversions and intrigues.
Contrary to the predictions of Trump we expect the American empire to collapse long before his wish for ‘socialism’, as an organizing principle, to have a chance in the heart of imperium. The truth is that America has many aspects of what he calls, derisively, as ‘socialism’. Indeed, Trump himself is a product of statist or corporate socialism through the privatization of surpluses and the socialization of debt, his many unpaid debt from several bankruptcies.
As we approach the weekend we now see the British billionaire, Richard Branson, bringing a threatening humanitarian live aide type concerts to Venezuela’s borders. This is the threatening behavior of the humanitarian war hawks and Venezuela should have a prepared counter-measure for any kinds of forces threatening it. Branson, an acolyte of Obama must also be an agent for empire. Venezuela, a country is not starving as they would wish us to believe. Why can’t this man Branson, who got his billions through the thief of public assets, not encourage the aggressive countries for which he acts as agent, to deliver the resources of the Bolivarian Republic, instead?
Everything here proves that it was a ‘mistake’ for Hugo Chavez to expect to launch a real structural revolution to liberate the masses of the Venezuelan peoples while at the same time leaving the capitalist structures in place. These capitalists have always been the agent of slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and now financial imperialism. They are the ones who, like the Americans, always believed that all the resources of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela were theirs and theirs alone, even as they served their White masters from abroad.
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