Capitalist vultures aren't just circling, they are pouncing - drawn to the smell of decay evident in Washington's militant tactics

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 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 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 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.

After the establishment of first a traditional European great power empire under a radically new management dedicated to Communism in 1917 and then, one World War later, a whole Communist "second world" - centered in but not restricted to Eurasia - the capitalist regimes of the West slowly learned to tread a little more carefully, at least at home.

Treating their populations to some reformist rhetoric, very moderate redistribution and unusually rational public spending, for a short moment in history the ruling - and owning - elites of countries such a West Germany and France almost looked as if in search of capitalism-with-a-human face. Even some American presidents weren't ashamed to promise "progressive" things such as a "new deal" (Roosevelt) and a "great society" (Johnson).

After the global neoliberal and right-libertarian surge and the end of most of that rival "second world" several decades ago, capitalism has become more brutally straightforward again everywhere. And not only in terms of the frank contempt its current elites - such as the real-estate billionaire who also runs the US and the BlackRock and Rothschild careerists who are in charge of Germany and France respectively - display for everyone not part of their exclusive, disdainful club.

Plunder plain and simple was never gone from the repertory of capitalism, obviously. Just ask the Syrians what has happened to their oil, for instance. More than half a decade ago, in his first term, American buccaneer-in-chief Donald Trump, already had a moment of refreshing candor, openly acknowledging that the US military was in Syria (perfectly illegally under international law, of course) "to take the oil. I took the oil. The only troops I have [in Syria] are taking the oil."

Still, what Washington's beasts of prey are doing to Venezuela now is an especially glaring example of shamelessness, a fresh peak performance (for now) of American chutzpah. The Trumpists and their media are positively reveling in their own iniquity. The robbing of Venezuela's resources - what is already taking place and the much bigger plunder gleefully expected for the future - is celebrated in public. And if there is dissent, then only about the profits to be had, their prospective scale and whether they are quite as certain as Trump. (Spoiler alert: not, obviously.)

Take the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), for instance, one of the top party organs of the international predator class (next to the likes of The Economist, Financial Times, and Bloomberg). Between the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro - with the killing of over a hundred Venezuelans and Cubans, at least - and the escalating media campaign to prepare for another war of aggression against Iran, the newspaper was busy with assessing the economic impact of future US exploitation of Venezuela's oil: in essence, will it lower the global oil price? And if so, what does that mean for other oil producers, those in OPEC, but also, crucially, in the US (complicated, actually, with many domestic American oil producers dreading a price drop), for Trump, his Republicans and their domestic standing (the midterms are threatening and affordability remains an issue), and last and probably least, for ordinary Americans?

Thankfully, the WSJ has also artlessly drawn attention to a particularly cynical aspect of the Great Venezuelan Oil (and gold, and lithium, and more) Robbery. No, not the insider betting at Polymarket but what it called the "Donroe Trade," with investors "racing to capitalize on President Trump's ambitions to dominate the Western Hemisphere," that is, in less ideological language, on the windfalls from imperialism. There has been a "sharp rally" in Venezuelan debt - a regime change bet already noticed last December - boosting "hedge funds and other investment firms." And, as good investors are supposed to do, they are also already "eyeing debt in Colombia and Cuba" and preparing for opportunities in Mexico and Greenland, too.

Regarding Venezuela again, one firm at least is planning exploratory trips to inspect the loot and is "keeping in touch" with the White House. Venezuelans may have mixed feelings about the same firm having a history of organizing such trips to Ukraine and Syria. And if nothing else makes money, there still is the potentially very lucrative niche of doing business with arbitration claims.

In short, the vultures aren't just circling, they are pouncing. And the good old Wall Street Journal, unsurprisingly, finds all of that quite normal and as it should be. Yet, read another flagship publication of real-existing capitalism, Bloomberg, and you'll find news that should give Washington's triumphant pirates of the Caribbean food for thought.

Just as enough investors were swarming into the 'Donroe Trade' of booty, pillage, and big boisterous promises to merit a lengthy WSJ article, a different kind of boom was taking place centered on a different region of the world: Asia, including China. There, Bloomberg reported, tech and AI stocks were "on a tear." And this was not just any surge for stocks from Asia. Rather, investors - very much including those from the US - were "betting their momentum and outperformance against US peers will last through" all of 2026.

The simple fact that these hopes shape the market mood is more important than the details. Investors are optimistic about Asian semiconductor supply chains, earnings potentials, and cutting-edge technological progress, while feeling worried about American tech and AI stocks' ability to sustain their "rally after years of outsized gains," in short, a typical US bubble. In particular, Bloomberg notes, "enthusiasm over [China's] tech prowess has only grown in the new year." China - that is, the geopolitical competitor that Washington is most obsessed with, next to Russia.

This is a snapshot of a telling moment in history-on-the-move, no more. But take a step back and consider this picture in the round: In Venezuela, the US has - once again - proven its supreme legal and moral nihilism, as well as its ability to brutally beat up much weaker countries. It has also made a special point of letting the world know that the scourging of Caracas is meant as a lesson to frighten Latin America in particular and all of us in general. That on its own may look like a sort of success, or as they say in Washington, "a win." But in reality, as the American historian Alfred McCoy - certainly no friend of either Russia or China - has observed, America "is an empire in decline." Its lashing-out and crudely undisguised, even proud pillaging fundamentally reflects weakness, not strength.

In the words of Emmanuel Todd, the brilliant French intellectual who correctly predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, and more recently, the "defeat of the West," America is no longer capable of re-industrializing. It has become too incompetent in actually producing things or training the engineers and workers that can produce those things, even if Trump's policy of tariffs and protectionism looks as if it is about bringing manufacturing home. What this late-state US is good at is extremely uninhibited violence and "predation," that is, plain robbery.

Ironically, capitalists sense this long-term change with the same acuity they display for the fleeting opportunities to profit from the ransacking of Venezuela. Yet none of this makes a difference to the fact that Washington is losing its grip. It can still inflict great pain and cause terrible destruction, but it cannot offer a vision of international - or, for that matter, domestic - order that attracts anyone who isn't corrupt, submissive by nature, or witless.