Oil is the only thing that keeps Venezuela's economy afloat, and guess who's gotten their hands on it?

Yup, the Russians. And alongside them, the Chinese, who are taking the earnings.

Here's an excellent report from the Washington Post on the extent of the problem:

In exchange for modest loans and bailouts over the past decade, Russia now owns significant parts of at least five oil fields in Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest reserves, along with 30 years’ worth of future output from two Caribbean natural-gas fields.

Venezuela also has signed over 49.9 percent of Citgo, its wholly owned company in the United States – including three Gulf Coast refineries and a countrywide web of pipelines – as collateral to Russia’s state-owned Rosneft oil behemoth for a reported $1.5 billion in desperately needed cash.

Russian advisers are inside the Venezuelan government, helping direct the course of President Nicolás Maduro’s attempts to bring his failing government back from bankruptcy. They helped orchestrate this year’s introduction of a new digital currency, the “Petro,” to keep oil payments flowing while avoiding U.S. sanctions on the country’s dollar transactions.

Venezuela’s still-formidable defense force, once an exclusively U.S. client, is now equipped with Russian guns, tanks and planes, financed with prepaid oil deliveries to Russian clients. 

So in exchange for a lot of Russian guns, Venezuela has turned over a lot of its oilfields and their earnings. In exchange for loans, Venezuela is turning over even more oil earnings to China.

It's not as bad a problem for us as Hot Air's Jazz Shaw argues, given that the U.S. fracking revolution has made America the world's largest oil producer, self-sufficient in energy production, and a net energy exporter.

But it's plenty bad for Venezuela, a socialist hellhole that not too long ago loudly touted its "resource nationalism," self-sufficiency, and energy "independence" from the yanqui gringo neo-colonialist embrace. 

Yeah, sure. These days they don't have any of that. Their future is now mortgaged to Russia's will.

And what isn't Russia's, is pretty much China's. Here's China's dibs from the Post story:

A major Venezuelan creditor, China has shown little interest in accumulating Venezuelan assets or strengthening political ties with Maduro’s failing regime. For the most part, it has concentrated on trying to get its loans repaid.

Russia, in contrast, has repeatedly restructured, refinanced or taken in-kind payments from Venezuela.

What does this mean? It means the nation has probably lost its independence as well as its future economic development based on its penurious situation and sellout to bigger and less friendly powers. Most everything they earn is headed for the coffers of the Russian empire, and the Chinese empire, ironically the home of much-complained-about "unequal treaties."

Like Ecuador, described here, they are going to get a whiff, or rather, deep gulp, of "unequal treaties" up close. And they can kiss any possibility of rebuilding themselves and crawling out of poverty, even with a regime change to end socialism, goodbye.

Seriously, they won't crawl out of this hole even if they hang Venezuela's dictator, Nicolas Maduro, up from a dictator's meat hook. They've been sold out to Russia and China, and their only hope for getting out of it now is maybe regime change in those countries.

The Russian bear doesn't play around. If shaking off Uncle Sam's "yoke" was tough in the minds of these socialist idiots, wait till they try to shake off the Russian bear's yoke. It's not going to happen. What they have now is self-colonization - to two of the world's most oppressive states. Who would have thought ten years ago as Hugo Chavez danced around and touted his oil card at summits that it would now come to this? Once again, America stands as a shining city on the hill, rejected by Venezuela as the hellbound reject God, and now the consequences are to be paid.