Venezuela: The Real Fucking Reason We Are There - PetroDollars

The classroom chalk dust settles like fallout. White powder coats everything—the eraser, the teacher's hands, the timeline of American imperial fuckery stretching across a blackboard like a coroner's report. This is what teaching looks like when you're charting the autopsy of a nation's sovereignty: tactile, gritty, leaving residue on everything it touches. The squeak of chalk on slate mirrors the screech of diplomatic machinery grinding a country into profitable dust.

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Here's the scene: A history teacher traces Venezuela's timeline from 1998 to 2025, each date a fresh wound in the body politic. Pre-1998, Exxon controls the world's largest oil supply sitting under Venezuelan soil. The profits flow north while Venezuelan citizens get table scraps from their own natural resources. Economy fails. Enter Hugo Chavez in 1998, democratically elected, who then—surprise fucking surprise—starts dismantling democratic checks and balances. By 2007, he nationalizes the oil, kicks Exxon out of the profit column, and Venezuela's production drops from three million barrels daily to 700,000. Corruption? Absolutely. But also informal U.S. sanctions because how dare a sovereign nation control its own resources.

But what happens when "liberation" becomes the linguistic camouflage for extraction? When democracy means installing whoever signs the oil contracts?

Let me paint you a picture of American foreign policy as a master class in selective memory. The teacher's board shows 2002: Maria Machado creates Sumate, an organization to overthrow Chavez. Funding source? George W. Bush through the National Endowment for Democracy—because nothing says "endowment for democracy" quite like bankrolling a fucking coup attempt. When it fails, Bush plays dumb, Machado gets politically eliminated, and the U.S. pretends this little fascist hiccup never happened.

Flash forward to 2025. Machado wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Dedicates it to Donald Dumpstump. And suddenly—suddenly—Venezuela is a threat to democracy, a drug cartel haven, a national security emergency requiring American intervention. The pattern reveals itself like mold on bread:

THE VENEZUELA PLAYBOOK:

Translation: We break your economy, call you broken, then offer to fix you—for a price measured in drilling rights and petrodollars.

Here's where my stomach turns itself inside-fucking-out: Machado was politically excommunicated in 2002 for attempting a U.S.-backed coup. Twenty-three years later, she's a Nobel laureate being groomed to give 80% of Venezuela's oil to Exxon while Venezuelans get to keep 20% of their own resources. This isn't democracy restoration. This is a leveraged buyout wearing freedom's face.

The chalk dust smells like the residue left after burning constitutional sovereignty. It coats your throat, makes you cough up the lies we tell ourselves about American exceptionalism.

How the Shakedown Actually Works

The real mindfuck isn't just about oil—though controlling the world's largest supply is obviously part of the wet dream. The actual mechanism is more insidious, more systemic, more comprehensively fucked than simple resource theft.

Oil trades globally in U.S. dollars. This arrangement—called the petrodollar system—means every nation buying oil must first acquire American currency. This creates artificial demand for dollars, inflating their value and stabilizing the U.S. economy regardless of domestic fiscal policy. Venezuela sitting on massive reserves while trading outside this system represents an existential threat not to American security but to American economic hegemony.

Enter the BRICS nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and expanding membership of countries trading in their own currencies, bypassing the dollar entirely. If major oil producers start accepting yuan or rubles or any fucking thing besides dollars, the entire house of cards wobbles. The U.S. economy—propped up by artificially inflated currency demand—faces reckoning.

THE ACTUAL STAKES:

Not "might be about democracy." Not "includes humanitarian concerns." This is a protection racket dressed up as liberation theology.

The spectrum of acceptable opinion allows us to debate whether intervention is humanitarian or aggressive. It doesn't allow us to question whether the entire fucking premise—that America has any right to determine Venezuela's government or resource allocation—is imperial violence wearing a democracy mask.

The Claim: Donald ShitEater wants to "restore democracy" to Venezuela, liberate them from authoritarian rule, protect American national security from drug cartels.

The Reality: Except—and I cannot stress this clusterfuck enough—the U.S. literally funded a coup attempt in 2002, imposed crushing sanctions that devastated the Venezuelan economy, and is now installing the same coup-attempting shitstain we funded twenty-three years ago to give our oil companies the rights to Venezuelan resources.

THE RECEIPTS:

Chavez was democratically elected in 1998. The U.S. response to his nationalization of oil? Fund Machado's Sumate organization through the National Endowment for Democracy—a CIA cutout that does regime change with better branding. When Hugo Chavez reduced oil production through corruption and informal sanctions, we blamed Venezuelan governance while strangling their economy. Obama labeled them a threat in 2013. Trumpty MouthAnus imposed formal sanctions in 2017. Now Fartin' Donald claims he's saving them from authoritarianism by installing someone who attempted authoritarian overthrow with American money.

This isn't "complicated geopolitics with difficult trade-offs requiring nuanced understanding of competing interests." This is textbook imperialism: destabilize, demonize, invade, extract. The four horsemen of American foreign policy have been running this play since we invented bananas as a republican cause.

But we're not talking about liberty. We're talking about the price tag on sovereignty when a superpower decides your resources are too important to leave in your hands.

The synthesis is fuck-all clear: We have constructed a global economic system where American prosperity requires other nations' subordination, then labeled any resistance to that subordination as authoritarianism requiring correction.

Not "promoting democracy." Not "protecting human rights." Economic imperialism with a freedom flag draped over the fucking profit motive.

These same dickwads who scream about Venezuelan authoritarianism funded a coup against a democratically elected president, supported the excommunicated coup leader with a Nobel Prize, and are now preparing to install her as president to sign away 80% of Venezuela's oil to Exxon. The projection is Olympic-level:

The hypocrisy isn't a bug—it's load-bearing infrastructure.

What does it say that we want Venezuelan oil without the inconvenience of Venezuelan democracy? That we demand they follow international law while we violate it to install corporate-friendly regimes? That "liberation" consistently looks like American companies controlling other countries' natural resources?

The chalk dust settles. The timeline complete. Pre-1998 through 2025: a masterclass in how empires dress up theft as salvation. The white powder still coats everything, residue of a lesson taught in the language of maps and dates and regime changes that somehow never feels like history when you're living through the next iteration.

Tomorrow, Donald Dumpstump will send troops or sanctions or both toward Venezuela. Mike BibleFucker will pray over legislation funding "democracy promotion." Elon PocketPecker will tweet some libertarian horseshit about free markets while supporting government intervention to secure oil rights. And the same goddamn masses will scroll past the invasion, arguing about whether this is really about democracy or just about oil, as if the question itself isn't designed to obscure the much simpler truth: this is about control.

But that's not how it has to be. That's just how it is when we accept the premise that some nations have the right to determine other nations' governments, that corporations can sue for lost profits on resources they never owned, that "national security" means securing advantageous trade terms at gunpoint.

The question isn't whether Venezuela is perfectly democratic or corruptly authoritarian. That question serves empire by suggesting that imperfect governance justifies foreign intervention.

The question is what we're willing to accept as the price of prosperity: someone else's sovereignty, burned like chalk dust, coating everything we touch with the residue of empires built on the fiction that freedom and extraction can coexist when one country holds the gun and the other holds the oil.