Oil, Agriculture and Imperialism: Averting the Fast-Track to Armageddon?
Rule by force is the disease, dear reader.
As long as our 'utopia' continues to be dominated by violent thugs look what gets done in our name.
The long history of empire is coming to an end.
US National Security Advisor John Bolton has more or less admitted that the ongoing destabilisation of Venezuela is about grabbing its oil. He recently stated:
“We’re looking at the oil assets… We’re in conversation with major American companies now… It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
The US’s hand-picked supposed leader-in-waiting, Juan Guaido, aims to facilitate the process and usher in a programme of ‘mass privatisation’ and ‘hyper-capitalism’ at the behest of his coup-instigating masters in Washington, thereby destroying the socialist revolution spearheaded by the late Hugo Chavez and returning to a capitalist oligarch-controlled economic system.
One might wonder who is Bolton, or anyone in the US, to dictate and engineer what the future of another sovereign state should be.
But this is what the US has been doing across the globe for decades. Its bloody imperialism, destabilisations, coups, assassinations, invasions and military interventions have been extensively documented by William Blum.
Of course, although oil is key to the current analysis of events in Venezuela, there is also the geopolitical subtext of debt, loans and Russian investment and leverage within the country.
At the same time, it must be understood that US-led capitalism is experiencing a crisis of over-production: when this occurs capital needs to expand into or create new markets and this entails making countries like Venezuela bow to US hegemony and open up its economy.
For US capitalism, however, oil is certainly king.
Its prosperity is maintained by oil with the dollar serving as the world reserve currency.
Demand for the greenback is guaranteed as most international trade (especially and significantly oil) is carried out using the dollar.
And those who move off it are usually targeted by the US (Venezuela being a case in point).
US global hegemony depends on Washington maintaining the dollar’s leading role.
Engaging in petrodollar recycling and treasury-bond ‘super-imperialism’ are joined at the hip and have enabled the US to run up a huge balance of payments deficit (a free ride courtesy of the rest of the world) by using the (oil-backed) paper dollar as security in itself.
More generally, with its control and manipulation of the World Bank, IMF and WTO, the US has been able to lever international trade and financial systems to its advantage by various means (for example, see this analysis of Saudi Arabia’s oil money in relation to African debt).
US capitalism will not allow its global dominance and the role of the dollar to be challenged.
Unfortunately for humanity and all life on the planet, the US deems it necessary to attempt to prolong its (declining) hegemony and the age of oil.
No longer will the world stand silent while 'murican war power rules the planet.
Why would we want to violently dominate the planet anyway?
Who does that make us?
Why do you continue to let them get away with it?
Rise up, while you still can.