Plunder and Predation: The US will go down as it was born and as it has lived

As deplored in the Washington Post, Washington’s recent assault on Venezuela wasn’t just your usual US war of aggression-regime change operation but also served to facilitate a particular kind of insider trading. Or rather, betting: On the so-called “prediction” platform Polymarket, a very well-informed investor wagered over 30,000 dollars that Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro would be out of office by the last day of January and – lo and behold! – “walked away with more than 400,000 dollars in profit.” That “prediction” was “timed with such pitch-perfect precision that it drew heavy media scrutiny” as it “bore the hallmarks of insider trading.”

You. Don’t. Say!

There’s cheating going on at the White House and among its hangers-on!

Now, let’s be realistic: Real-existing capitalism – not the Friedrich von Hayek-Milton Friedman fan fiction that still dulls all too many minds – has always been ruthless. Its modern history of about half a millennium includes stupendous scientific, technological, and cultural change, as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels acknowledged in their Communist Manifesto, parts of which read almost as a panegyric to the bourgeoisie and the capitalist world it made.

But that world also began with the vicious impoverishment and exploitation of – literally – the masses, the plunder and devastation of whole continents and their original inhabitants, and a brisk international slave trade, vitiating and ending millions of lives. Marxists call this “primitive accumulation”; their master also used the term “original expropriation,” sardonically comparing its role in traditional political economy to man’s fall from divine grace in Christian mythology.