VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes:  North Americans are beginning to notice the implosion of their economy, and thus of their privileges. They complain on liberal blogs that their credit cards now charge 19% interest where just last year the rate was only 9%. Wow, gee whiz, what suffering!

The US people are not worse than any other ... were the Venezuelan upper-classes still in charge of their country the same complaints would be the be the main feature of Venezuela's media. Yet who can say no to the proposition that the situation of those millions in the world who cannot borrow, whose next meal is utterly dependent on how much cash, not credit, they have is ever so much more dire?

• Do not, I pray, waste your pity on those who until just a few short months ago were lamenting the term limitations mandated in our own US federal constitution which prevented George W. Bush from seeking a third term.

One of the most laughable slanders against us progressives, a proud and permanent minority, here in the USA is to impeach our assertion that President Franklin Roosevelt managed with his New Deal to staunch the crisis of 1929 by saying that it was really the the economic stimulus of World War Two which ended the Great Depression. Or perhaps we should now say Great Depression, version 1.0.  By implication, if not outright and overtly those who make such assertions are really saying that our US economic system must ever be based upon war and the looting of target countries. And thank you very much for your conservative support of my own political and economic analysis

It has been in the past, is now, and forever will be the view of most of my fellow countrymen that war is indeed the key to US national prosperity.But among many others a major problem is the work of Mikhail Sergeivich Kalashnikov, Hero of the Soviet Union.  More than any other this skillful engineer has given to the citizens of countries thousands of kilometers removed from his own, those targeted for conquest and exploitation, a means of national defense.  His rifle can be produced by any competent machine shop. Anywhere in the world. It fires automatically a more powerful and accurate bullet than that used by the US imperial forces.

• It is this means more than any other which has crippled the efforts of our Washington empire to expand into Central Asia. To capture in Iraq the world's second largest oil reserve.

Never again will this liberal, this radical, bad-mouth the personal possession of firearms. It was an armed local population in Iraq, best exemplified by the farmer who with a single bullet from his World War I Turkish Mauser shot down a US Blackhawk helicopter, followed by thousands of his fellow countrymen who with the most basic of weapons scotched Wall Street's attempt at an American global empire. And I must say across an ocean of hostility that the armed people of Afghanistan, whatever we may think of their reactionary and cruel views of Islam, have prevented the crooks-in-chief of my country from their fondest dream of taking over the natural resources of the Central Asian regions of their once-mighty Soviet adversary

Venezuela and all other countries are going to face an uncertain and painful future