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”........

© RT.com