Following up on my earlier essay, this argument by Chris Morlock, rewritten for clarity, offers a sharp explanation of why Venezuela was never about oil, but about maintaining financial power for a narrow elite.
This is a compelling inversion—that oil’s value lies in remaining unproduced as collateral rather than as energy. This helped me see more clearly that extraction itself isn’t the goal, control over when, where, and for whom extraction happens is. Sometimes that means pumping; sometimes it means collapse.
One thing I keep wondering, though, is how this framework accounts for moments when extraction is aggressively pursued elsewhere, or when resource flows matter geopolitically even if they don’t benefit the public? Still, this is one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen of how financial power, not material supply, structures these interventions. Thank you!
It's worth keeping in mind that the monetary system is an instrument of control that is designed to extract value through artificial scarcity and endless debt, which leads to an inevitable concentration of wealth and power.
There is a deliberate but artificial scarcity of state-sanctioned money because it is loaned into existence and has to be returned with interest, which keeps us in a collective state of perpetual debt servitude and ensures a continuous transfer of wealth to those who collect interest by allocating credit.
It's actually about defending the petrodollar. Maduro was going to start selling oil in a basket of BRICS currencies instead of us dollars. The second a leader does that, the bombs start falling. Think Gaddafi in Libya or Hussian in Iraq, and, oh yeah, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but he died before he could make it happen. Funny how that always happens.
This is a compelling inversion—that oil’s value lies in remaining unproduced as collateral rather than as energy. This helped me see more clearly that extraction itself isn’t the goal, control over when, where, and for whom extraction happens is. Sometimes that means pumping; sometimes it means collapse.
One thing I keep wondering, though, is how this framework accounts for moments when extraction is aggressively pursued elsewhere, or when resource flows matter geopolitically even if they don’t benefit the public? Still, this is one of the clearest explanations I’ve seen of how financial power, not material supply, structures these interventions. Thank you!
It's worth keeping in mind that the monetary system is an instrument of control that is designed to extract value through artificial scarcity and endless debt, which leads to an inevitable concentration of wealth and power.
There is a deliberate but artificial scarcity of state-sanctioned money because it is loaned into existence and has to be returned with interest, which keeps us in a collective state of perpetual debt servitude and ensures a continuous transfer of wealth to those who collect interest by allocating credit.
Peeled off another layer of the veils...
It's actually about defending the petrodollar. Maduro was going to start selling oil in a basket of BRICS currencies instead of us dollars. The second a leader does that, the bombs start falling. Think Gaddafi in Libya or Hussian in Iraq, and, oh yeah, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, but he died before he could make it happen. Funny how that always happens.
Oil isn't loot. It's collateral.
A working national industry produces sovereignty. A broken one produces debt, asset seizures, obedience.
Collapse isn't accident. It's design. Scarcity creates leverage.
The question isn't why production fails. It's why failure keeps paying.
Sharp piece. Made the logic visible.