It is a real question as to who's under greater threat from Washington...

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: Those who think this depression has hit the bottom are like those on the Titanic who decided that their ship was unsinkable.  663,000 jobs were shed from the US economy last month to bring the unemployment rate to 8.5%.  That is if you believe the sexed-up statistics which are produce in Washington.

• If we were to calculate unemployment using the same statistical methodologies as were originally deployed we would see unemployment in the range of 16 to 19%.

But no matter.  It really serves the interests of Bolivarian Venezuela better if the USA continues to ignore the problem posed by her own bankruptcy as long as possible. 

After all, the longer the North Americans live with their heads in the clouds the less likely anything can be salvaged for them.  And after, at the G20 conference in London, they led the major corporate powers into augmenting the resources available to the International Monetary Fund, so as further to plunder the global south, this is the best we can hope for. 

The message to the various resource-producing countries like Venezuela is that we will continue to arrange the global corporate system with currency manipulations to transfer your natural wealth northwards.  We will do this by corruption and any other means expedient. 

It is a real question as to who is under greater threat from Washington:  Its friends or its enemies. 

We here at VHeadline.com have long been warning our readers that the empire is dangerously unstable financially, thus politically.  The Stanford affair should show even to the South American elites that they can no longer rely upon any personal financial security by hitching their fortunes to those of the northern colossus.  It is clear that Colombia has understood this problem.  Her narco-government chose years ago to firmly marry itself to the corpse of Yankee imperialism.  But like all other drug lords these are financially sophisticated people, they know how to use a hedge-fund:  They chose not to make any final break with their Bolivarian neighbor.  Just on the off-chance that North American guns, North American soldiers and North American business would not be sufficient to rescue this government from the just wrath of their own people ... this may yet turn out a very prudent move.

Trinidad & Tobago remains purely out of habit rather subservient to the Empire:  Her government would continue a domestic policy of privatization of public resources long after the failure of this policy has become globally apparent.  There are still those in Port-of-Spain who cannot bring themselves to believe the awful wreck that is occurring on the north side of the Gulf of Mexico.  Yet even Premier Manning, that unworthy successor to Eric Williams, finds it now prudent to make polite gestures to Cuba, to Nicaragua, to Guatemala, to El Salvador.  Even to Venezuela ... just in case. 

And yes, alas for Mexico.  So far from God, so near the United States.  The great gifts of the Yankees, the Drug War and the North American Free Trade Association have not turned out quite the blessings they were advertised to be.  These people too, painfully learn that full spectrum disorder is all the empire has to offer to even its most loyal provinces.

Then Brazil.  Always the most cautious of the American republics ... is this part of her dour Portuguese heritage?  Her supposedly socialist leader, Lula da Silva, immediately upon his election sends his army to participate in the latest episode in the eternal martyrdom of poor Haiti (although some say, cynically this is to keep them busy hundreds of kilometers from home).  Yet da Silva's government performs nobly in backing the independence of Ecuador and Bolivia.  Even Paraguay.  It would seem that Brasilia too, cannot yet quite believe how completely the Yankees have wrecked their own empire.

There was a time, only a few years ago when their own armies would have disciplined Correa in Ecuador or Morales in Bolivia, but the disgusting imprisonment for their dissent against the torture and warfare state of a few beautiful Christians and idealistic students at Fort Benning, in our US state of Georgia, where Latin armies were supposed to learn their true allegiances ... to Wall Street, rather than to their own ... may have aided civil society in these countries to overcome decades of military rule. 

I certainly hope so, for this is the best and only way open for us here in the belly of the beast to aid you. Only Canada, sold to us by Britain in 1940, remains loyal to our empire ... and how much longer, with real money to be made in trade with Europe or the far East can that continue?

Tomorrow the pitiful profits of once-great US corporations will become public ... and the USA will endure another spasm of economic contraction.