Declaring war on common sense, Venezuela bans its own money

The scale of the conspiracy is staggering: More than 300 million of Venezuela’s highest-denomination bank notes have been ferried out of the country in recent months. Huge stacks of 100-bolivar bills now sit in warehouses throughout Central and Eastern Europe — Poland, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Macedonia — all part of a devious plot hatched by the U.S. Treasury Department. Working through local nongovernmental organizations and local mafia syndicates, the plotters have spirited the actual physical banknotes first by land to neighboring Colombia and later by air to Europe in an ambitious bid to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist government by choking off the supply of paper money, setting off chaos and destabilizing the economy. The notes can’t be destroyed because the Americans have offered to pay dollars for them to their proxies, but only once the government has actually been overthrown. If this story sounds outlandish to you, spare a thought for the people of Venezuela, who sat stunned on Tuesday as the powerful interior minister, Nestor Reverol, announced this bizarre, baseless conspiracy theory as settled fact. More…