Post B8vUSR6iz4t2Ttsgwi by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
(DIR) More posts by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #B8vUSFF95wUbgXjFPE by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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It’s easy to forget, but back in January, the US invaded Venezuela, murdered some people, kidnapped the Venezuelan president, and declared that it was now “running” the country.Although the US has never clarified what that means, it apparently includes collecting all the revenues from the sale of Venezuelan oil. For a while, that money was being directed to an account in Qatar, of all shady places, but is now collected in an account at the US Treasury. Some of this money has allegedly been dispersed to the Venezuelan government, but no one will publicly say how much. It doesn’t seem like anyone except Donald Trump and his Secretary of State / consiglieri, Marco Rubio, has any oversight of this money.https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-u-s-took-over-venezuelas-oil-industry-where-has-all-the-money-gone
(DIR) Post #B8vUSR6iz4t2Ttsgwi by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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The Financial Times attempted to estimate the dollar value of those oil sales, since there is no public accounting by the US, and came up with a figure of $13 billion. Given how poorly the Venezuelan economy was performing even before the devastating earthquakes, it’s likely that the US has dispersed only a fraction of the money it has collected back to the Venezuelan regime. https://archive.is/0BUoO
(DIR) Post #B8vUSh1Hp42lpfSZgu by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Trump has publicly claimed that the US has seized even more than that from Venezuela, and that the US is simply “taking” money from another country, and that this money has financed the invasion in January with much more left over.This might, of course, simply be Trump’s normal bullshitting and confabulation, made worse by his advancing dementia. But I’ve found that he’s rarely only ever truthful when he’s admitting having done something awful about which he’s proud.https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/07/27/trump-says-us-has-sold-more-than-13-billion-of-venezuela-oil-.html
(DIR) Post #B8vUaYMjsjZRJEF5F2 by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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So, without much fanfare, the US appears to have resumed a practice that went out of favor among most states more than a century ago, and globally since the defeat of Nazi Germany: naked aggression to seize resources for the benefit of the aggressor and direct personal enrichment of the aggressor’s ruler.The US has spent the decades since 1945 enjoying immense benefits from a global system it established that transfers wealth and resources, but usually through indirect, institutional means.From Bretton Woods to the WTO and IMF to the dollar’s global reserve currency status to intellectual property regimes, US elites have redirected global wealth to themselves, but they have done so through formal institutions, processes, and international agreements.
(DIR) Post #B8vUahRK93aNS3SN8a by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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These systems are *complex*. They feature many interconnected nodes: state bureaucrats, quasi-independent organizations, formal bilateral and international agreements, highly educated experts and lawyers, and so forth. And all that complexity requires resources: the people who professionally do the work of maintaining these systems require resources while they perform this work, from the lawyers who draft the agreements to the customs officials who monitor the flow of goods across state borders to the accountants and auditors who manage the flow of currency.If our hegemonic system of global capital and capitalist states really has hit the point of diminishing marginal returns on additional complexity, I suspect we should start to see societies like the US start to shed complexity.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
(DIR) Post #B8vUam80iI6jzbSWEC by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Isn’t that exactly what we’re seeing? The US has been abrogating international agreements, separating itself from its allies, shedding bureaucrats, voiding laws, shuttering institutions, and losing key capabilities.The result is a US that is getting simpler, with less capability to collect rents overall, and more reliant on direct brute force, but at a lower overall cost to sustain previous complexity.So there are fewer overall resources available to the US and US elites, but the resources that are still available are more directly under the control at the elites at the center of this project, the Trump crime family and its various courtiers.
(DIR) Post #B8vUaudr3mKkOgQ3yS by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Trump has explicitly talked about doing to Iran what the US did to Venezuela: attack, subordinate, and steal. This is very much in keeping with a style of predatory warfare that was popular for millennia and probably perfected by the British:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benin_Expedition_of_1897But that was long before these states had developed the institutions and regulations that allowed them to transfer wealth from the global poor through non-violent, or at least indirectly coercive, means.Of course, Trump’s attack on Iran has failed spectacularly, in large part because he has eschewed the complex systems and institutions that would have advised him not to attack Iran. He, and the US, are vastly less capable as a consequence, but he and his cronies are much richer, having stolen (among many other things) billions of dollars from the Venezuelan state.
(DIR) Post #B8vUb1BOjyjKgS9w5g by HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social
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Joseph Tainter proposed that societal collapse was an economizing effort. That is, when the benefits of complexity are outweighed by their cost, a society will shed complexity to converse resources: interconnections are severed, specializations are abandoned, and elites are overthrown.Here, we see an utterly unsustainable cost—the immense burden placed late capitalist elites on society—and a last-ditch effort by some of those elites to economize in a manner that frees up more of society’s remaining and dwindling resources for their own exclusive use, rather than being directed to support societal complexity. If I’m correct, we should expect to see more of this style of naked, rapacious, archaic-feeling aggression by states (such as what we’ve seen with Trump and Venezuela and Iran or Russia in Ukraine) as they encounter similar limits.