Venezuela must secure the ability and the will to defend her territory and her resources against any attack upon her sovereignty!

VHeadline's Washington D.C. based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Were anyone still in doubt that the Empire is in disintegration this week's news is conclusive in forcing us to that conclusion.

The travesty of a televised debate between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barak Obama, the two remaining Democratic contenders for their party's nomination for the United States presidency was so awful, so shamefully ridiculous that even corporate media outlets have offered devastating criticism.

What is meaningful is that silly questions, say, one about why one candidate does not wear a flag-pin in his lapel, are all that can be asked in such a forum.

No establishment journalist dares to get into substantive issues such as the Iraq fiasco, and the consequent bankruptcy of our public finances. The candidates could only speak to these problems in the vaguest of generalities. And they would reveal that they have neither the ability nor the interest to go beyond the boundaries set for them by Wall Street.

With no substantive differences all that can be offered the public is blather and bumf about flag pins, the statements of ten years back of one's pastor, possible personal acquaintance with former radicals, etc. Watch and see -- following the general "elections" in November it is more than likely that whoever is the winner a "bi-partisan" arrangement will be made in which aggressive corporatist government will be the only winner. Our people and yours the losers.

The US establishment does show in this exercise that they are still somewhat nervous about Obama because he has not been around national politics so long as Clinton and might not yet be so perfectly corrupted. But that is a question of degree, not one of substance.

No one can work within the system here without being tainted by its lack of democratic legitimacy and its total subservience to big money.

The real measure of imperial success is that in less than a week the rise in the price of oil by 2% and the fact that the USD now stands at 1.598 Euros, the grant of billions in welfare to private financial interests and the guerrilla conflict in Iraq rages unabated.

It is not yet time for Venezuela to relax her pressure on the Empire but it is perhaps time to wonder what a post-imperial United States would look like. Perhaps to wonder whether this crippled entity can maintain over the long term enough economic power to be an offset to Chinese and/or European ambitions.

The Chinese troops in Haiti -- always the bellwether state in our hemisphere, the one which has always shown us how empires, left to follow their real inclinations, would like to behave -- are very interesting.

The corporate corruption of the United Nations Organization, comparable to that of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund has led to its becoming the military defender of an extremely corrupt, extremely useless local elite in that country. One totally uninterested in even finding their people enough to eat. No country in the Western Hemisphere has more rich per capita, nor more poor.

Active in this suppression are units of the Chinese Army experimenting with the techniques needful for operations at a great distance from their homeland. Seconded to this enterprise are some of their best and brightest officers.

With Chinese business now active throughout all of Ibero-America the question must sooner or later arise for the newly independent countries of the region how much sovereignty must be yielded to the new capitalist master which has appeared in the place of the old.

Then too the European Union has now surpassed the United States in the volume and value of its economy. And it is participatory in the Haitian experiment. One must weigh the problem of all these massive corporatist states acting in combination to conquer and loot the resource-producer countries of the whole world, not just in our America.

The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 is the perfect example of the sort of cynical deals that can be arranged by such elitist great powers in their ceaseless maneuvers for global dominion. But where that was a deadly threat only to the countries of the Baltic and Eastern European regions, what is now possible is truly a similar world-wide problem for all the smaller countries.

Emma Goldman once said that if elections could change anything they would be illegal. And certainly now in the USA this is the case.

• Venezuela must secure somehow alike the ability and the will to defend her territory and her resources -- to at least make any attack upon her sovereignty or her resources prohibitive in cost to any assailant.

Perhaps what may be necessary is a world wide alliance by smaller countries to expropriate all foreign properties in the event of any more of these imperial aggressions. Certainly the efforts of the Bolivarian government to secure its frontiers and to build up its people and to make them full participants in the national defense are laudatory. But we may have to go beyond that now.

From the imperial capital,

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com