Venezuela has oil, a lot of it. And in a collapsing global system, access to energy is power – not in the abstract, but in the most brutally material sense. When growth stalls, debt grows, and #climatechaos tightens the margins, oil stops being a commodity and becomes leverage. Control over it is no longer about markets; it’s about survival for #blinded states and profit for capital.
What the United States offers in this context is not persuasion or principle, it is a deal. Side with us, and you get a cut. Corporations get extraction contracts, infrastructure rebuilds, and long-term revenue streams. Political elitists get stability, recognition, and protection from consequences. Regional allies get leverage in their own power games. Everyone involved understands what is happening. No one at the top is confused. The humanitarian language is not meant to convince – it’s meant to lubricate the transaction.
A simple way of looking at this is as an easy to see shift from neo-imperialism back to straight forward imperialism. This is how late-stage capitalism, when the liberal democratic facing is striped bare, operates. It no longer expands by building new worlds or any possibility of shared futures. It expands by stripping assets, hollowing out states, and converting crisis into opportunity. When growth fails, extraction replaces development. When consent fails, coercion replaces politics, when legitimacy collapses, force and incentives do the work.
Trump didn’t invent this model, he just dropped the pretence. He said the quiet part out loud, tore away the diplomatic language, and treated empire like a property deal. That shocked people who still believed in the performance of norms. But the system has not changed, the Biden administration didn’t reverse this trajectory – they polished it – restoring the language of values, process, and responsibility while keeping the mess running underneath.
Different language, same mess. This is where #mainstreaming progressive critique went wrong for over a decade. It focused on hypocrisy, on broken norms, on credibility and decorum. But that’s a category error. Those critiques assume a system that actorly cares about legitimacy.
- You can’t shame a system that no longer pretends to need moral authority.
- You can’t expose corruption when corruption is the operating model.
- You can’t “hold accountable” a machine that has already priced in outrage as background noise
This isn’t about Trump, it’s not about one administration, or even one country. In the era of #climatecahos it’s about a global order that replaces politics with managed extraction and calls it stability. A system where decisions are only pantomime debated in public, but executed through sanctions, proxy conflicts, financial pressure, and media narratives to prepare the ground.
Seen this way, the war on Venezuela is not a lie to be debunked. It’s a bribe to be refused. And refusal doesn’t work as an individual moral stance. It only works collectively – outside the institutions that profit from the lie, outside the platforms that normalise it, outside the careers built on managing its mess.
That’s the hard part, the work. And that’s why projects like #OMN matter, not to perfect critique, but to build the social and media infrastructure that makes refusal possible at scale.