Welcome to Axis ProRata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Sponsored by TSX Broadway.

I'm Dan Premack.

On today's show, Facebook steps in it again and the latest on the so-called trillion-dollar infrastructure plan.

But first, the growing crisis in Venezuela.

So the South American nation is at this point on the verge of being a failed state.

Inflation might as well be infinite. People are literally starving. Around 10% of the population is

estimated to have left. And there's now a constitutional crisis over whose it's a legitimate

leader. So there's obviously lots of finger pointing as to how things got so bad, but most of it

can be traced back to former Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, not only tying the entire country's

economy to oil and socializing the industry, but to his idea that oil prices would never really

fall too much. There are other petro states, but they usually give themselves some cushion,

whereas Venezuela

basically kept borrowing and borrowing against the oil at high prices, but those prices eventually

fell. And if that wasn't bad enough, Chauvin's successor, Nicholas Maduro, put a bunch of

inexperienced and, to be honest, corrupt people in charge of much of that same oil industry.

And then, yes, there were recent U.S.

sanctions that exacerbated the suffering without a corresponding amount of humanitarian aid.

So that's kind of the history in the background up until recently, when Maduro was re-elected

in an election that he and some other international observers called Fair, but which the opposition

and others called an autocratic sham.

The opposition, backed by the U.S. and a growing Western coalition, instead is recognizing

...