Here’s Peter Zeihan to state what conservatives knew a decade ago: Venezuela is headed for collapse.
It’s just over 6 minutes long, so even though I’ve excerpted it, you might want to watch all of it to listen for the one word Zeihan doesn’t say.
“Under 20 years of ridiculous mismanagement and theft by the governments of Hugo Chavez and now Nicholas Maduro, the state’s broken.”
“Basically we’ve had two decades of the governing authorities literally stealing everything that wasn’t stripped down, and then getting a wrench and getting a lot of the stuff that was stripped down [I think he means “strapped down”], to the point that they simply didn’t just confiscate materials they stripped it of equipment and melted it down or sold it for parts and there’s really nothing left.”
“So the country that used to have the highest educational levels in Latin America, the country that used to have the highest standard of living and the most cultural achievement, is now teetering on the verge of being a broken state, a failed state.”
“Roughly 1/3rd of the population that has out migrated since uh the last 6-7 years.”
“In calendar year 2022 and calendar year 2023, the Biden Administration did a partial lifting of sanctions on the regime, basically saying that if you start working in the direction of free and fair elections, we will allow investment to come in to stabilize the energy sector and get some more oil out of the ground. Uh, we’re going to trust your word for it, and then we will reassess when we get closer to elections in 2024.”
I bet everyone reading this can figure out exactly how well that worked out. “We’ll just take your word that your three card monte game is on the level.”
Chevron came in and got oil output up to a million barrels a day.
“But in the last several weeks it’s been clear that the government of Maduro has no intention of having real elections.” You don’t say. What you mean is “It’s been clear for decades that Venezuela’s socialist thugs have never had any intentions of holding free elections.” Only and idiot would think otherwise.
But the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to increase oil production in the rest of the world to help Biden’s reelection chances, while supressing oil production at home. “There’s a lot of things about that that are inconsistent.” You don’t say.
Oil production is now under three-quarters of a million barrels and falling.
“The really high-end stuff, the stuff that was part of the outcome of Venezuela being such a successful state, left a long time ago, and in bits and pieces ever since the the middle management and the secondary skill set and now there’s really nothing left.”
“People like to talk about the Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians coming, in but they don’t have any experience in this sort of oil patch, so we are probably going to see a collapse of what’s left of the output this year and early in the next year.”
“One of the many, many, many, many, many mistakes that Chavez and Maduro made is they hated the United States so much, and their spending was so crazy, that they started pre-selling their oil specifically to China and to a lesser degree to Russia. ‘We’ll take X number of billions of dollars from you now and we will pay you back with raw crude in the years to come.’ Well, what that means is that the Venezuelans are already not getting money from the oil that they produce.”
“So we are going to see this collapse, and as that happens, the ability of getting even a modicum of foreign currency to pay for the 80% of their food that they now import because they destroyed their agricultural sector is on deck.”
“So the famines of the past, the dislocations of the past, the migrations of the past these have all just been the appetizer course, and over the next very few years we’re going to see the full collapse of Venezuelan society.”
Leave it to the Biden Administration to enable foreign leftist enemies for temporary political gain.
Did you notice the word missing from Zeihan’s analysis?
Anyone who reads the histories should know that “socialism” always turns into “Trade our scoundrels for yours, and we loot it all down to the bedrock…”
Envy and theft; those are the roots of socialist belief. They envy the successful, the majority of the movers and shakers behind the socialist campaigns to take power, and the first thing they do is slaughter the people that built it all, take their wealth, and set up shop in their looted palaces.
You say you’re a socialist, it’s tantamount to saying “I’m a big believer in theft and looting…” as well as “You’re who I mean to steal from and loot…”
[…] Increase in state violence & torture, and a total of 1,113 political prisoners BattleSwarm: The Coming Collapse Of Venezuela Behind The Black: NASA accidently airs simulated medical emergency on ISS, panicking the public, […]
Back before the WSJ became utterly useless due to its collectivist/statist/authoritarian slant on news (as opposed to its opinion page) I used to clip interesting articles on Venezuela. I scanned some of them as “.pdf” files; send me an e-mail and I can forward a few to you. One of them was from 2005 on how they had simply confiscated the oil fields from companies like Exxon and Repsol in order to create “joint ventures” with the state-“run” oil company PdVSA. I kept tracking the output of oil from there, watching it drop like a rock.
One of their major problems is that the oil fields there are very old and not producing much any more; its also very heavy crude and hard to extract. Exxon and others developed secondary- and tertiary-recovery systems that brought production back…but when they were forced out by Chavez those systems lost production almost immediately. One of the major reasons, as documented by the WSJ, was that the oil field workers with extensive experience in heavy-oil production were fleeing the country…Canada and its tar-sands projects was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this flood of talented refugees.
No one with two spare brain cells to click together is even slightly surprised by the logical outcome of “nationalizing” (i.e., stealing for the government lackeys) an industry in the name of “el socialismo”, particularly one as technically demanding as oil production.
That GW quote is probably a misattribution. It certainly doesn’t sound very Washingtonian. It appears to be from Glenn Beck, who grew up in Mt. Vernon, Washington, so maybe a bonehead AI search result gave us that.
The emigration of Venezuelans is a powerful counterpoise to its economic collapse. Over 25% of its population – something over 8 million people – have left the country, reducing the strain on its ever diminishing resources. Fewer mouths to feed with oil revenues.
At some point Venezuela will collapse, but the Biden Administration’s border policies, and those of neighboring countries, keep Maduro in power. Close our southern border and Venezuela collapses within 12 months.
Peter Zeihan is quite good at providing concise and interesting talks on various subjects.
I enjoy his videos, and for the most part he does a good job of avoiding the injection of his own political views into his videos with rare exceptions.
If you’ve watched him for any length of time you’ll grow to learn that he is part of “social intelligencia” that is infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. He is incapable of giving Trump any credit for things that occurred during his Presidency, like his fellow jet-setters.
Like most things in life, he’s generally interesting when he’s not bat-shit crazy, i.e. the total collapse of China in the next 10 years.
“[T]ake their wealth, and set up shop in their looted palaces.”
A long time ago, during the Reagan years, I chanced to meet a Venezuelan national during a college chess club event. When he learned that I was an unapologetic conservative and saw that I was also a strong chess player, he invited me to his home for coffee (espresso).
He lived by himself in a McMansion that was situated in an upscale suburb. When I asked how it happened that a “poor” college student could afford such opulent surroundings, he confided that the home was owned by his absentee parents.
Back home, they owned a prosperous auto repair business and sent all their profits from the operation to a US bank account. Their son Ricardo had been sent on ahead to earn a college degree and manage their property.
Forty years ago, this Venezuelan middle-class family had a strong premonition that their country was trending socialist and took precautions to avoid having their wealth confiscated. By now, the mortgage is fully paid and their assets are secure.
Those who waited until the socialists consolidated power before taking defensive measures undoubtedly wish they had acted much sooner.
“The last official act of any government is to loot the treasury.”
– George Washington
Anyone who reads the histories should know that “socialism” always turns into “Trade our scoundrels for yours, and we loot it all down to the bedrock…”
Envy and theft; those are the roots of socialist belief. They envy the successful, the majority of the movers and shakers behind the socialist campaigns to take power, and the first thing they do is slaughter the people that built it all, take their wealth, and set up shop in their looted palaces.
You say you’re a socialist, it’s tantamount to saying “I’m a big believer in theft and looting…” as well as “You’re who I mean to steal from and loot…”
[…] Increase in state violence & torture, and a total of 1,113 political prisoners BattleSwarm: The Coming Collapse Of Venezuela Behind The Black: NASA accidently airs simulated medical emergency on ISS, panicking the public, […]
Back before the WSJ became utterly useless due to its collectivist/statist/authoritarian slant on news (as opposed to its opinion page) I used to clip interesting articles on Venezuela. I scanned some of them as “.pdf” files; send me an e-mail and I can forward a few to you. One of them was from 2005 on how they had simply confiscated the oil fields from companies like Exxon and Repsol in order to create “joint ventures” with the state-“run” oil company PdVSA. I kept tracking the output of oil from there, watching it drop like a rock.
One of their major problems is that the oil fields there are very old and not producing much any more; its also very heavy crude and hard to extract. Exxon and others developed secondary- and tertiary-recovery systems that brought production back…but when they were forced out by Chavez those systems lost production almost immediately. One of the major reasons, as documented by the WSJ, was that the oil field workers with extensive experience in heavy-oil production were fleeing the country…Canada and its tar-sands projects was one of the biggest beneficiaries of this flood of talented refugees.
No one with two spare brain cells to click together is even slightly surprised by the logical outcome of “nationalizing” (i.e., stealing for the government lackeys) an industry in the name of “el socialismo”, particularly one as technically demanding as oil production.
That GW quote is probably a misattribution. It certainly doesn’t sound very Washingtonian. It appears to be from Glenn Beck, who grew up in Mt. Vernon, Washington, so maybe a bonehead AI search result gave us that.
The emigration of Venezuelans is a powerful counterpoise to its economic collapse. Over 25% of its population – something over 8 million people – have left the country, reducing the strain on its ever diminishing resources. Fewer mouths to feed with oil revenues.
At some point Venezuela will collapse, but the Biden Administration’s border policies, and those of neighboring countries, keep Maduro in power. Close our southern border and Venezuela collapses within 12 months.
Peter Zeihan is quite good at providing concise and interesting talks on various subjects.
I enjoy his videos, and for the most part he does a good job of avoiding the injection of his own political views into his videos with rare exceptions.
If you’ve watched him for any length of time you’ll grow to learn that he is part of “social intelligencia” that is infected with Trump Derangement Syndrome. He is incapable of giving Trump any credit for things that occurred during his Presidency, like his fellow jet-setters.
Like most things in life, he’s generally interesting when he’s not bat-shit crazy, i.e. the total collapse of China in the next 10 years.
“[T]ake their wealth, and set up shop in their looted palaces.”
A long time ago, during the Reagan years, I chanced to meet a Venezuelan national during a college chess club event. When he learned that I was an unapologetic conservative and saw that I was also a strong chess player, he invited me to his home for coffee (espresso).
He lived by himself in a McMansion that was situated in an upscale suburb. When I asked how it happened that a “poor” college student could afford such opulent surroundings, he confided that the home was owned by his absentee parents.
Back home, they owned a prosperous auto repair business and sent all their profits from the operation to a US bank account. Their son Ricardo had been sent on ahead to earn a college degree and manage their property.
Forty years ago, this Venezuelan middle-class family had a strong premonition that their country was trending socialist and took precautions to avoid having their wealth confiscated. By now, the mortgage is fully paid and their assets are secure.
Those who waited until the socialists consolidated power before taking defensive measures undoubtedly wish they had acted much sooner.