Venezuela’s stock of oil as collateral for USA’s crippling national debt?

Trump yesterday invaded the South American country of Venezuela, bombed its capital city and kidnapped its President, Maduro and his wife, and took them to New York City. It is pure “wild west” 19th Century colonial behavior, or in modern times, pure Mafia behavior. What the USA has done is illegal under international law. It is against the UN Charter. It is a series of war crimes, strung together. And it is totally taboo to act like this in all civilized traditions – and has been from time immemorial.

An Arranged Capitulation?

It could only have happened that way in Caracas with some sort of collusion from inside the Venezuelan military, which is a fairly strong military, and its airforce could easily have downed all those low-flying, slow-flying helicopters that accomplished the kidnapping of the President and his wife. So either the USA bought over some people to its side, or forced some other way to avoid military retaliation from Venezuela.

Anyway, Trump announced that the existing regime will remain in place, as it has been for over 20 years. The Vice President Delcy Rodrigues has been sworn in before the Venezuela Supreme Court. But, Trump says, the USA will be the one to “run Venezuela”. He says the Nobel Peace Prize winner, notorious for getting the “peace” prize for inviting an imperialist country to attack her own country militarily, Maria Corina Machado, “is not popular” in her country. So, the men standing behind him, Trump announced in his Press Conference, will run the country.

So, the new “governors” of the Venezuelan “colony”, we can only suppose, are Secretaries Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth, Joint Chief of Staff General Dan Caine, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and CIA boss John Ratcliffe. This is madness.
What is Trump talking about? Yes, we could put all this down to insanity. He does indeed act and talk mad. Falling emperors tend to.
The pretexts and the reasons

However, as you will see, behind all the pretexts and lies, there are real reasons, and they are reasons that are producing dangerously violent actions. It is like a wounded animal, a dying empire is.
We are dealing with a “desperado” US administration.

The Lies and the Ideology

Let us start with the Trump pretexts for the invasion of Venezuela and the “decapitation” of its Government, just to get these lies out of the way. Then deal with the ideology.

And then after that, we will come to the reality underlying this shocking turn of events.

The “reasons” Trump gave, i.e. the pretexts, for the invasion and kidnapping, were as vacillating as can be expected from the dictator at the helm of a fast-falling empire.

He argued, as if it made this invasion arguably “legal”, that he had been preparing this invasion because Maduro is a “terrorist”. His logic is Maduro is a “terrorist” and can thus be treated, he claims, like a “non-state enemy entity”, and thus under the US “tradition” as, for example, Osama Bin Laden of Al Qaeda was. The USA, you may remember, depending upon your age, just went into Pakistan in 2011, kidnapped Bin Laden, killed him and dumped his body in the ocean. They also killed his son, brother and sister-in-law anpasan. Trump wanted his action to be in this depraved “tradition” begun by President Obama and Secretary Hilary Clinton.
But the difference here is that Maduro, as everyone knows, is not a “terrorist”.

Maduro is the Head of State of a country recognized as a sovereign state by the UN. So, then the USA’s logic has to get more devious.
Maduro is, Trump claims in a weird line of argument, a terrorist because he is the head of a drug cartel, Cartel de los Soles, “Cartel of the Suns”, and thus a “narco-terrorist”. Trump vacillated from accusing Maduro, as “narco-terrorist”, of killing hundreds of thousands of Americans with the opiate called Fentanyl, which has nothing to do with Venezuela, but does kill people, and then changed his story to cocaine, of which very little comes to the USA from Venezuela, or even through Venezuela, and which does not typically kill people.

It is instead sniffed for fun by the upper classes of America. Anyway, as if to “prove” that there was a drug connection, over the past weeks, Trump went on a killing-in-cold-blood spree. He has had fishermen’s boats near Venezuela in the Atlantic simply vaporized by missiles, accusing those in the boats of transporting “drugs” to the USA. It would be impossible for those boats to get to the USA. Some had ten or so people on board, and the amount of fuel they would have needed would leave no place for drugs! It is a long way to the USA from Venezuela. Then the USA started to vaporize supposedly Venezuelan boats in the Pacific Ocean as well, when Venezuela does not even have a coast that gives on to the Pacific! Note that no attempt was made to arrest the people in the boats and to seize the “exhibits” necessary for a conviction for drug trafficking charge, trial, conviction and sentencing. Just kill people!

Ideology
And then there has been the two-decade long attempt to organize a series of coup d’état against first President Chavez and then President Maduro. In LALIT, we have followed the Bolivarian revolution of Hugo Chavez, and two of our members went to Venezuela as part of support visits. The USA, not just Trump, the whole USA “permanent state” opposed Chavez because assured the Venezuelan people enjoyed the fruits of the country’s oil, and mobilized the poor in order that they could put the equivalent of our “tablisman bosses” in their place while taking popular control of the country’s resources. So, this is why the USA wanted “regime change”. It was because the Venezuelan leadership under first Chavez then Maduro were not 100% pro-capitalist, and believed that the resources of the country should be shared more fairly. The Bolivarian revolutionary leadership is not much more socialist than that. But, until today, the people are organized. So the USA will not have an easy ride “running the country”.

The real panic: The USA’s looming debt crisis and also incipient de-dollarization
Just as Ramgoolam fears being downgraded by Moody’s, so does Trump. What down-grading means is simple: it means the Government owes more money to those it borrows from (including countries and companies that own Government Treasury Bonds) to be able to cover the annual budget once interest is paid. And Trump has even more reason to tremble in his boots than Ramgoolam has.

The USA owes over one trillion dollars on or about 1 January 2026 for this year’s interest payments on borrowed money – borrowed mainly from the “rest of the world” that has been tied into the system of dollar payments, in particular for petroleum products. The USA was downgraded by ratings companies in 2011 and 2023 and then in 2025. Trump is facing another downgrading, this time a drastic one. The USA will be risking junk status soon.

Collateral
Trump, the real estate man, knows that when you get over your head in debt, you need to increase your collateral if you want to borrow more money so as to pay your debts. Ki Trump ena pu met an-gaz?

Oil-rich and Rare-Earth-rich land
So, Trump and his Cabinet set out to get hold really quick of land that they “run”, which is rich in oil, or in some cases, rare-earth minerals.
So, in the month of January he bombs Venezuela, and conducts an “operasyon kokin” against the President of Venezuela and his wife, and announces that his Cabinet will now “run” Venezuela.

Why? Because Venezuela has the biggest stock of crude oil under the ground in the whole wide world. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves on earth.

So, why did Trump bomb Nigeria just before bombing Venezuela? He is preparing something else for there. Nigeria has the biggest oil reserves in Africa.

And why is Trump, along with Netanyahu, threatening to bomb Iran soon, and then “run” it? Answer: Because Iran has the 3rd biggest oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia which is number two.

Dollar used for oil payments
The USA has benefited, for the past 50 years, in all oil trade being done in dollars. This was an arrangement set up during the Oil Crisis of 1974 whereby the Arab countries agreed to sell all their oil only in US dollars. This effectively, continued the USA’s privilege to print dollar notes as much as it liked, and thus indebt itself.

Venezuela has started selling petroleum products to China. And amongst the first oil tankers the USA seized in the past weeks near Venezuela in order to keep the oil and the ships, was one such tanker on its way to China. China pays Venezuela, but not in dollars. Venezuela has applied to join BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and another ten or so countries) and is present at SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization that enables international cooperation) meetings. These two international organizations have organized payment methods not relying upon the dollar.

So, now we have the background that can enable us to follow what is happening.

Western Hemisphere
The way Trump talks, during all the desperate actions he is trying to take, shows that he aims to bring into serfdom the whole of the “Western Hemisphere” – from the tip of Greenland in the North to the southernmost Cape San Pio of Argentina – starting with Venezuela.

It is not the lashing out of a madman.

It is the concerted lashing out of desperate men at the helm of an economically sinking ship. Their strategy is clear in the National Security Strategy document they published in November.

The measures they take to “stay on top”, will tend to speed up their descent.

Surely countries will tend to sell off US Treasury Bonds when they see what has happened not only to Venezuela, but also to all the sanctioned countries and even individual people? All dollar transactions are cancelled.

Entrepreneurs will hesitate to invest in a country like the USA, when all its norms are going bonkers, as the empire falls.
Even Britain, the arch ally of Trump and Netanyahu, has begun to draw the line as the USA sinks fishermen’s boats, confiscates oil tankers and their oil, and spirits away Presidents and their wives out of their countries to put them on some kind of “show trial”.

Conclusion at a Mauritius-level
All this to say, it is more important than ever that the Republic of Mauritius refuses to rent Diego and Chagos to the USA, and also ensures its own food sovereignty at once for all the islands of our sovereign nation state. That is what self-determination means.
In the long run, the USA will burn its empire out. All empires burn their own resources and internal forces right out.

But this one might blow up the planet in a nuclear war before it burns itself out.

Which is why we need a political struggle for socialism. Now!

Join a LALIT branch now.

LALIT, 4 January 2026

Posted by Minority Voice on Jan 6 2026. Filed under Actualités, Economie, En Direct, Featured, Monde, Politique. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry