On December 31st, a brand-new account on Polymarket placed a bet: Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, would be out of office by the end of January. It was the first in a series of increasing bets. On January 3rd, the US bombed the Venezuelan capital, kidnapped Maduro and his wife, and killed at least 80 people along the way. The account cashed out with almost half a million dollars.
It would be a misread to describe the surprise invasion of Venezuela as imperial expansion driven by the dictates of capitalism; it is, somehow, worse. Normal capitalism requires a working relationship with reality. Normal capitalism thrives on predictability. The Trump administration is behaving like gambling addicts chasing clout in an attention economy. Venezuela is a fucking meme stock.
America produces the most ghoulish capitalists in the world, and not even they want this
Then there’s Donald Trump saying he consulted oil companies on the invasion — but the same execs are denying that they knew. In Trump’s defense, a Politico report quotes an anonymous petroleum “industry official” saying that there had been an “offer” from the administration on the table for 10 days prior to the attack on Caracas. “They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed.’” But the oil companies, according to the insider, are awfully ambivalent about an entire sovereign nation being annexed to their supposed benefit — “the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.” Another source said that overtures from the Trump administration had been “relatively flatly received” by the industry.
America produces the most ghoulish capitalists in the world, and not even they want this. The oil companies are leery about Venezuela because they are aware that the oil there is sour crude, which “requires significant refining” — in other words, complex and expensive infrastructure rather than the decades-old shambles that’s there.
Hence the incredible suggestion from Trump on Monday that the US government might subsidize the restoration of oil infrastructure. The whole affair reeks of desperation, like Elon Musk haggling with Stephen King over the price of X Premium. Capital is being lured into justifying the propaganda, rather than the other way around.
We have now arrived at the logical end state of financial nihilism. Meme stocks are sentiment only; whatever happens to the underlying company is irrelevant at best to what happens with the stock price. And despite the death toll, this administration is treating the war on Venezuela as all sentiment, in-jokes, and degen memes. That’s why the war room (war nook?) is just a big TV screen of X.com and war profiteering now consists of Polymarket bets.
This is Wag the Dog staged by idiots who have themselves gotten confused about the difference between image and reality. Real people are dead because a number of powerful people in the US live in a sadistic fantasy, chasing a gambler’s high.
Perhaps you are thinking, “Surely it cannot be legal to suddenly bomb a country, kidnap its head of state, and annex it? All in the dead of night? Surely not?” If such doubts are running through your mind, you’re in good company — in its judgment in the Nuremberg trials, the tribunal declared that a war of aggression “is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
As with all meme stocks, enthusiasm for the Venezuela operation exists in an echo chamber. YouGov polling in the wake of the bombing says that more Americans disapprove than approve of Trump’s handling of Venezuela; in the lead-up, support for military action was “scant.” But a lot of very powerful people have had their brains completely cooked by the rogue internet forum known as X, and can’t even tell how out of touch they are.
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