The Dollar Vigilante’s Jeff Berwick and WeAreChange’s Luke Rudkowski from a location in a barrio of Caracas, Venezuela, which is in total collapse and chaos.
They chronicle their observations and experiences in Venezuela, which was not too long ago, a fantastically rich “Petro State”. The country is undergoing what Berwick describes as “The final end product of Socialism.”
The hyperinflation is such, that dinner costs a whole backpack loaded with devalued currency. Criminals rule the streets, while guns are officially illegal and seemingly every aspect of society is regulated. The average restaurant needs to comply with over 100 regulations in order to operate. The police are more concerned with enforcing such regulations and no-smoking areas than in tackling the gangs of criminals who’ve taken control of the streets and completely run amok.
Berwick opines that what’s happening in Venezuela might be a test run for what financial elites want to see achieved throughout the entire world by October of 2016, starting with a complete global financial meltdown, then the establishment of a world totalitarian state and then that of a global currency.
Let’s hope he wrong!
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PS: I apparently need to clarify that the opinions in this video piece are those of Luke Rudkowski and Jeff Berwick.
In my opinion, to boil down what’s happening in Venezuela to “Socialism” is absurd and typical of the telegraphic, shallow, pat mentality of North American pop culture, even if there was evident jocularity in Berwick’s pronouncement that a Bernie Sanders Presidency would result in the US transforming itself into Venezuela.
I thought I’d made it sufficiently clear that they were expressing their points of view and I was allowing it, without endorsing it – but apparently, I wasn’t clear enough.
I used to have a notice printed on my old site that said, “A post on this site does not equate to an endorsement.” I allow differing points of view from my own on the site to trigger debate and dialogue, such is happening, below.
Being half-Brazilian, I’ve long known about the ongoing destabilization of the nations of South America by the CIA and by transnational corporations.
For example, Zika is a case of economic warfare against Brazil. It’s a psyop, which is being propped up by the CDC to protect the Japanese petrochemical behemoth, Sumitomo Chemical.
The dangerous effects being reported about “Zika” are caused by petrochemical toxicity, such as that used in the larvacide, which was placed in the public drinking water supplies in some poor communities of Brazil’s Northeast, where cases of microcephaly have become near-epidemic.
The very, very low-grade Dengue-type illness caused by the Zika virus on the other hand produces symptoms in only 15-20% of those infected.
I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil for 5 years during the waning days of the CIA-installed military dictatorship. I can assure everyone reading this that they don’t want to live in a military dictatorship. Yet, it appears that this is fast what the US is becoming. Because of my direct experience, I became aware of similar covert operations all over the “developing world” during the latter half of the 20th century.
After 9/11, the USG’s geopolitical actions became totally overt and the covert stuff all became corporate.
I do think it’s fair to criticize the crappy leadership of Venzuela’s Maduro and Brazil’s Rousseff – but it’s important to acknowledge also the relentless and ongoing clandestine actions to destabilize the governments and economies of South America and to understand that the modern-day predicaments of these countries are very much an outgrowth of some 150 years of US meddling, mostly through the bribery of the controlling classes, going as far back as Jacksonian times.
I’ve also observed 12 years of Socialism in Brazil, which has been disastrous for small business owners and for the Middle Class, overall but which has had some positive outcomes, such as the eradication of hunger and the raising of 40M people out of poverty. This was only possible with the first-time discovery of crude oil reserves in the 1990s and by high oil prices. I think Brazil’s economy is diversified enough and has a large enough manufacturing base that it will not collapse into a state such as that of Venezuela (few people know that Brazil was the China of the world before China did, in the late 1990s!)
Brazil might actually be in better shape to weather the collapse of the Petro-dollar than the US, because it did not offshore its manufacturing base. Venezuela, as noted below bet the farm on petroleum extraction and it will take a lot of work to put Venezuela together again…
Time will tell…
