Weekly Roundup: Venezuela
Weekly Roundup is a collection of posts from across my social media platforms in an attempt to consolidate the content into one place, and bypass any lingering shadow bans that certain platforms are notorious for.
When I went to write up my Weekly Roundup posts, Substack said I hit the maximum length limit. So, I broke it into two parts. Here is everything pertaining specifically to Venezuela. Everything else will come out tomorrow. Apparently, a lot happened this week.
Venezuela:
Two things can be true at once.
AND both things can be bad.
This situation in Venezuela is not a matter of who is good and who is bad. This is two bads colliding in a superconductor.
Maduro was a terrible dictator who stole an election and persecuted his people to such an extent that there is a very large diaspora of Venezuelans who fled the country. He was a bad person.
However, invading a sovereign nation under such flimsy pretense (because we all know it’s about oil), means people are missing the bigger picture. That bigger picture is the collapse of the post-WWII global order.
You know that conspiracy theory about the “New World Order”? Well, when you actually dig into the conspiracy theory, the NWO was democracy upending the traditional European aristocracies after the world wars.
After WWII, we intentionally set up an international, rules based system that protected the sovereignty of individual nations in order to create an interconnected global, economic system, and prevent another world war.
I have been warning for years that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a deliberate attempt to undo that global order. If they were not fully and completely pushed out of Ukraine, we risked losing the international legal protections for national sovereignty.
Trump just did that.
Putin doesn’t like a global order that prevents him from attacking and invading his neighbors on a whim. He wants a global system that revolves around spheres of influence.
Basically, various regions around the world would have one dominating entity that maintains power and control over the region. Russia, China, and the US would all control their respective regions.
This power isn’t maintained through diplomacy and democracy, but by force. It would turn sovereign nations into vassal states.
The US attack on Venezuela risks setting a precedence that any country can be invaded at any moment simply because they aren’t strong enough to defend themselves against the regional superpower.
THAT is recipe for WW3.
One year ago, the US was the leader of the free world. This year, we have been downgraded to the alpha bully of the hemisphere.
Back in 2014, Princeton did a study that compared the legislative output of Congress with the overall desires of the American people. They studied almost 1,800 policy issues over a 30 year period to see how the voting preferences of average Americans influenced policy outcomes.
The results shouldn’t surprise anyone today.
They didn’t match at all.
Average Americans have almost zero input in the direction of legislative action. The republic is a farce. We have democratic rituals that make us feel like we have power within our own nation, but we don’t.
Legislative output, however, DID match the desires of corporate America and the richest among us. Ergo, America is not a republic. It’s a corporate oligarchy. And no, party lines don’t matter.
Republican vs democrat is irrelevant. Both parties are controlled and operated by the wealthy elites. The billionaire class. We elect representatives that do nothing to represent us.
Recently, I was talking to someone close to me who put it this way:
There is no such thing as politics. There’s only the rich vs the poor
But also, on Wednesday, Trump came out publicly and said that not only would the US be taking all of the money earned from Venezuelan oil money, but also that he, himself, would be personally responsible for it, while maintaining it outside of the treasury, in offshore accounts.
That means we’ve moved out of the corporate oligarchy and into a straight up kleptocracy. That’s when a country’s leadership uses the channels of governance to steal the nations resources for their own pockets.
Additionally, Trump wants to raise the military budget to $1.5 trillion. That’s a raise of about 60%, since the budget currently sits at just under $1 trillion.
At the same time, he threatened Raytheon, one of the largest defense contractors in the US. If Raytheon doesn’t start financing Research and Development upfront, they will no longer be allowed to do business with the Department of Defense.
Which is wild.
Trump is trying to raise military spending to an absurd amount while ALSO cutting back the R&D funding. 1) It won’t happen because the next budget debate will be in fall, and 2) that money would definitely go to lining someone’s pocket. The question is who?
Welcome to the kleptocracy.
You can read more in Heather Cox Richardson’s posting here:
And this type of government system has some historical precedence behind it.
Historically speaking, the system collapses.
There’s an old proverb that says no one is free from domination if some men are free to accumulate enough wealth to dominate.
Egalitarian societies are highly resilient against dictatorships. When everyone has a say in the political system, dictators can’t gain any traction. However, when a society starts managing resources that can be hoarded, the scales of power begin to grow lopsided because wealth translates to power. (See also: the weaponization of hunger)
When the top becomes too heavy, the system collapses in on itself.
Usually, it manifests in one of two ways.
1) Everyone leaves. Dictators have no control over a population that has the ability to leave the domain of the dictator. In the past, this usually manifested as geographical land traps. If you are wedged between the mountains and the sea, you have a higher risk of a dictator taking over. If you live in easy to navigate grasslands, you have a lower chance because you can get up and leave at any moment.
Thriving economic sectors turn into ghost towns.
Today, we have a globalized system of extremely tight immigration monitoring via passports and electronic tracking. Having such tight immigration systems is a really bad thing for multiple reasons, but this is among the biggest.
If you don’t let people flee a dictator, the dictator gains more power. A rising dictator in one area threatens the stability of other areas. But it also creates a situation where you have more difficulty fleeing a dictator in the event they rise to power in your area.
“It can’t happen here” is a bold faced lie.
2) It ends in fire.
The Russian tsars, the Cahokia in indigenous Mississippi, the French Revolution, China, Egypt, Rome... the list goes on and on and on. The people revolt and the wealthy elites either flee or die.
Social inequality, political injustice and corruption, nationalism and/or religious dominance, climate instability, and wealth hoarding. When these collide, the civilization collapses.
The only difference between the historical collapses and what we have today is that we have never had a globalized economic system prop up the empire. We have no idea what kind of ripples the collapse of a global economic system will have.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
We aren’t prepared for the incoming collapse.
Also, this seems relevant again.
