By Eric Zuesse
Eric's Substack
December 4, 2025
There are many ways in which investors steal from the public, but there also are ways in which they steal from each other - and Ponzi schemes are merely one example of that, but insider trading is another, and there are others as well. However, their biggest thefts, by far, are from the public, and most such thefts are entirely legal and will be described here, by presenting examples of them.
On 4 November 2025, Semafor, a loyal propaganda-organ for the U.S. empire, headlined "Exclusive / As Trump pressures Venezuela, investors see 'major opportunities'", and reported:
As President Donald Trump takes an increasingly aggressive approach toward regime change in Venezuela, international investment giants are already eyeing potential benefits that Nicolás Maduro's ouster would create.
During last month's IMF-World Bank meetings in Washington, Barclays organized a private meeting to talk investment opportunities with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, two sources familiar with the meeting told Semafor.
The meeting was widely attended by investment firms, hedge funds, and others interested in future business in Venezuela, said Rafael de la Cruz, the director of the US office of Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia, who is recognized by the US as the winner of the last Venezuelan election. The opposition leader's team has also held "informal conversations" with the World Bank, IMF, and Inter-American Development Bank about Venezuela's future, de la Cruz said.
"We have been in touch with several companies that are showing more and more interest in the possibility of opening up Venezuela for business," he said in an interview.
In addition, UBS's chief investment office put together an eight-page memo last month that focuses on "visualizing the day after tomorrow" in Venezuela. The research document highlighted the Trump administration's "hawkish approach" towards Caracas and noted that "Venezuela's transition away from Chavismo could unlock major opportunities," in part because of its oil reserves and "severely underutilized economy."...
Hawkish Republican lawmakers are cheering on the Trump administration's efforts against Venezuela....
"The nice thing is, they've got plenty of natural resources," Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told Semafor, referring to post-Maduro investment opportunities in Venezuela. "In a democracy in Venezuela, their resources are massive, so there'll be a lot of people who want to invest."...
On 22 November 2024, I had headlined "How Corrupt America Is at the Top" and gave as an example the following from Wikipedia, about Rick Scott:
On March 19, 1997, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Health and Human Services served search warrants at Columbia/HCA facilities in El Paso and on dozens of doctors with suspected ties to the company. 41 Eight days after the initial raid, Scott signed his last SEC report as a hospital executive. Four months later, the board of directors pressured him to resign as chairman and CEO. 42 He was succeeded by Thomas F. Frist Jr. 43 Scott was paid $9.88 million in a settlement, and left owning 10 million shares of stock then worth more than $350 million. 44 45 46 The directors had been warned in the company's annual public reports to stockholders that incentives Columbia/HCA offered doctors could run afoul of a federal anti-kickback law passed in order to limit or eliminate instances of conflicts of interest in Medicare and Medicaid. 43
During Scott's 2000 deposition, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 75 times. 47 In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine in what was at the time the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history. Columbia/HCA admitted systematically overcharging the government by claiming marketing costs as reimbursable, by striking illegal deals with home care agencies, and by filing false data about use of hospital space. It also admitted to fraudulently billing Medicare and other health programs by inflating the seriousness of diagnoses and to giving doctors partnerships in company hospitals as a kickback for the doctors referring patients to HCA. It filed false cost reports, fraudulently billed Medicare for home health care workers, and paid kickbacks in the sale of home health agencies and to doctors to refer patients. In addition, it gave doctors "loans" never intending to be repaid, free rent, free office furniture, and free drugs from hospital pharmacies. 48 8
In late 2002, HCA agreed to pay the United States government $631 million, plus interest, and $17.5 million to state Medicaid agencies, in addition to $250 million paid up to that point to resolve outstanding Medicare expense claims. 49 In all, civil lawsuits cost HCA more than $2 billion to settle; at the time, this was the largest fraud settlement in U.S. history. 50 51
That was an example of a mega-thief from U.S. taxpayers; so, obviously, he never went to prison for his mega-theft from the public, and he even became elected by the ones in Florida so as to be able to advocate now prominently for another foreign invasion by the U.S. regime in order to steal for U.S.-and-allied investors the world's most petroleum-rich (and one of the world's most gold-rich) country, so that the profits from extracting those natural resources will buy better yachts for U.S.-and-allied billionaires, not better education and health care for Venezuela's people.
This is imperialistic fascism. (Political 'scientists', however, call America instead a "democracy.") U.S.-and-allied billionaires want to do the same thing, steal the lands out from underneath, such nations as Russia, China, Iran, Palestine, etc.; but not only does this rob those peoples - it robs the American public too, because these psychopathic foreign adventures are being paid-for by them.
RELATED NEWS: On November 28th, the U.S.-and-allied proxy-war to grab Russia by placing in Ukraine the nearest border only 300 miles or 5 minute of missile-flying-time away from blitz-decapitating Russia's central command in The Kremlin by an American nuclear missile, decisively failed, and so Trump ordered the current U.S. stooge leader of Ukraine, Zelensky, to accept Russia's peace terms or else become militarily conquered by Russia. The U.S. military alliance to ultimately conquer Russia - NATO - has failed, and so NATO now faces its ultimate defeat, and clearly "the end of history" (the U.S. empire's ultimately achieving control over the entire world) has now decisively turned out to have been a false expectation, and U.S.-and-allied investors are therefore now facing a future in which their net worths will be declining instead of (at everyone else's expense) rising (as has especially been the case ever since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when that "end of histoory' was supposed to have begun). Have you read or heard anything about any of this crucial history, in the U.S.-and-allied 'news'-media or 'history'-books? (Click on those last two links in order to learn more about it.)
This article was originally published on Eric's Substack.