Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition

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On January 29, 2026

8 Comments

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live.  The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect:

Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street.

Imagine that.

This is a reprint from 2015, but I think it makes an important point worth repeating, especially for all the new readers since then.

The right thing to do is almost always cheaper and gives better results, at least if the welfare of people is your concern.

If people are poor, give them money.  If people don’t have a house, get them a house.  If people are sick, get them health care.

The fact is, though, that you have to want to do the right thing. People tend to get down on the Church of Latter Day Saints, but for all their issues, I’ve always had a soft spot for them because I’ve heard many stories like this:

The church donated all of this,” Bate says. “Before we opened up, volunteers from the local Mormon ward came over and assembled all the furniture. It was overwhelming. For the first several years we were open, the LDS church made weekly food deliveries—everything from meat to butter and cheese. It wasn’t just dried beans—it was good stuff.” (The Utah Food Bank now makes weekly deliveries.)

I ask him if this is why the programs work so well in Utah—because of church donations.

“If the LDS church was not into it, the money would be missed, for sure,” he says, “but it’s church leadership that’s immensely important. If the word gets out that the church is behind something, it removes a lot of barriers.”…

….

“Why do you think they do it?” I ask(my emphasis)

“Oh,” he says, “I think they believe all that stuff in the New Testament about helping the poor. That’s kind of crazy for a religion, I know, but I think they take it quite seriously.”

A major driver of the social welfare movement in the United States was the social gospel.  The ending of sweatshops, the huge work programs of the 30s, the provision of Medicare and Social Security was driven in large part by Christian crusaders who believed that what they did to the poor, they did to Jesus.

You have to want to do the right thing.

This is just as true when dealing with matters like inequality.  FDR and the politicians of the 50s ran marginal tax rates for high earners at 90% or so because they, and the American people, genuinely believed that no one should have that much money.  They believed that it was earned by the efforts of other people: a rich person is someone who gets rich on other people’s work, with very rare exceptions, and even they get rich because of the society they are in.  (For a complete explanation of that, something most people refuse to understand, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)

Ethics and mores; belief, is why people do things.  It doesn’t exactly come before material circumstances (the two influence each other, with material circumstances, including technology, determining a range of possibilities), but within what is possible, belief in what we should do determines what we actually do.

In the world today we have the resources not just to feed everyone, but to give them a decent life, with education, entertainment, and housing that is warm in the winter and at least not unbearable in the summer.  We can cloth everyone well.  We have had the ability to do this for at least a hundred years or so, in theory, we’ve had it in practice since the recovery from World War II.

To do so, however, we must believe that we should, and we must be willing to act on that belief.  There will be sacrifices (a lot fewer billionaires, a lot less McMansions), but in the end even most of those who complain would be objectively better off, because inequality is robustly associated with worse health and less happiness, even for those who are the richest.  The top .01%, if they were still the top .01% but had far less money and power, would be happier and healthier in such a world.

As such, the battleground of belief; of ideology, is as important as that of technology. It is belief, mediated by power and turned into behaviour, which determines what actually happens in this world.

America’s Leaders In Waiting Have Identified Themselves

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On January 28, 2026

37 Comments

This was the situation when they fired:

Right hand holding his phone. Left hand on the ground. Zero threat to anyone. His gun, holstered, which he never went for, had been removed by an agent.

This is an execution. The Agent has not been positively identified (though there’s a possible ID floating around), and was immediately removed from Minneapolis. The ICE agents attempted to keep local police from the scene.

This is the best summary I’ve read:

an ICE agent physically assaults an annoying woman who is whistling at him to antagonize him, Pretti steps between the officer and the woman to protect her, Pretti is the restrained by 5 officers on his hands and knees, one of the officers notices he is armed and yells “gun,” an ICE officer disarms Pretti and while running away accidentally discharges the weapon, then another ICE agent reacts to the negligent discharge by shooting Pretti in the back multiple times while he is on his hands and knees.

No one has been charged, I can’t tell if there’s any investigation into the shooting: there certainly isn’t a federal one, and the local governor and mayor appear to be wimping out: going thru the motions without any attention of charging anyone.

This isn’t the first ICE execution, and who knows how many have occurred that weren’t filmed. Then there are all the people dying in detention, where they routinely keep 80 people in a cell, lights on all the time and beat people who ask for medical aid.

One of the ICE agents applauded when Pretti was killed. When Renee Good was killed the agent who shot her called her a “fucking bitch” and refused to let a doctor help her.

Police in the US are almost always bad. The job attracts authoritarians who like the idea of being able to push people around, but even the minimal safeguards were let loose on ICE and the Border Patrol—they took the job because they like being able to hurt people without even the remotest possibility they might be held accountable.

This is part of a larger pattern. The Trump administration ignores about a third of all court orders against it. Just ignores them. The rule of law has completely broken down in America at the elite and enforcer levels. It was already mostly broken, but there was a final red line: elites smarter than Trump weren’t willing to obviously ignore courts. Perhaps important people might ignore Congressional subpoenas, but Congress wouldn’t actually institute contempt against them, so the facade remained.

Now law is gone entirely. The first, second and fourth amendments are in tatters. Habeas Corpus is dead, ICE and the BP just routinely ignore it. This a common law protection, centuries old. (In the UK they’re making it illegal for jurors to not convict people if the judge disagrees, ending jury nullification.)

Civil liberties seem like “nice to have”, and so does the rule of law, but they aren’t. Without them a society can’t function. That whole “high trust” thing goes away, and no one trusts anyone else. The economy grinds to a halt and civil society collapses.

The silver lining here, the hope, is that Minnessotans have come together to resist this. Thousands of people, not just protesting, but feeding those who can’t leave their houses, helping legally, and putting their bodies on the line. There are good people left in the US, but what they need to recognize is that fixing this requires replacing almost every member of the current elite: Walz has failed, Congress has failed, business has mostly been supine to trump as have universities. Everyone who’s in a position of power, whose duty and responsibility it is to resist has either failed or not even tried.

What needs to be done is to note the ones who tried or resigned rather than engage in illegality and immorality. Go after everyone else, replace them and if they actively engaged in evil, convict them and send them to prison. Put the people who did resist back in, not just politicians but prosecutors and judges and city councillors and so on, and then fill the rest of the ranks with people who went out on the streets in Minnesota and elsewhere and put their bodies in the way of evil, or who otherwise meaningfully resisted.

These are the people who proved themselves. When the brownshirts came,  they are the ones who stood up. We now know who is actually moral, who is actually brave and who can actually be trusted when the chips down. This is the new leadership cadre, if Americans are wise.

Not saying this will be done, but these are the slivers of hope. The Brownshirts came.They were resisted. Those who actually resisted proved themselves.

Those should be your leaders. Anyone who failed should be out or in prison.

 

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Just How High Can Silver Really Go?

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On January 27, 2026

23 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Everyone is talking about gold topping $5k an ounce. The yellow metal is captivating and big moves by it tend to suck all the oxygen out of the media space regarding other metals. In 2025 gold rose a whopping 64% against all comers, i.e the dollar, the S&P 500, oil, Bitcoin and on and on.

Gold’s meteoric rise last year is a fucking piker compared to what silver did. Silver was the best performing asset of 2025 rising an astonishing 147%. Yeah you read that right. 147% from January 1, 2025 to December 31, 2025. This raises some important questions, such as why did silver, after decades of disappointing performance, blow past every asset this planet has to offer and consequently how high can it go? Does silver have a ceiling?

So, questions asked, let’s now examine the known and/or knowable variables affecting silver prices at present.

First, what’s silver’s all time inflation adjusted high? This depends on who you ask and how you measure inflation. By our current CPI measurement silver’s all time, inflation adjusted high was roughly $150 an ounce. This was in February 1980 when the Hunt Brother’s tried to corner the silver market. Now, as most of you know, Ian and I both distrust current inflation measures, like the CPI, because it overweights consumer goods with stable or falling prices, using accounting legerdemain like hedonic pricing which equates increasing computer chip power and/or efficiency as disinflationary. At the same time the CPI underweights prices of goods that are rising, like food and other non-durables.

Seriously, I defy anyone to tell me food prices are stable or falling: you can’t do it. The CPI does this primarily to avoid COLA adjustments on entitlements, cheating retirees.

Other measures of inflation, indices, weighting using purchasing power parity or other yardsticks, delivers an all time silver high closer to $190. So, I’m going to channel King Solomon and split the baby in half and call the all time high at $170. But however you measure inflation it’s clear silver isn’t even close to its 1980 Hunt Brother’s high.

Second, price moves in gold and silver are not coupled and have not been for at least 150 years. They don’t correlate. Gold is considered a safe-haven against fiat currency hyper-inflation or economic collapse. Silver, on the other hand, is essential to modern electronic manufacturing. So gold had a nice run last year, but silver was number one by a very, very wide margin, outperforming gold, the way Shohei Ohtani outclasses everyone else on a baseball diamond. Even as silver and gold have been decoupled since the late 19th century evidence is mounting that last year’s silver move might have been the opening act of their long awaited re-coupling.

Perhaps a précis on how and why they decoupled and what a re-coupling would look like is in order.

The first question is to ask, “how long were gold and silver coupled?” Well, from ancient times—yes, fucking Greeks and Romans ancient times—until the 19th century silver and gold traded at a 15:1 ratio.

Don’t believe me?

Consider then how the 1792 US Coinage Act established a 15:1 ratio between the two in our newly constituted republic. That said, during the next century—the 19th—a handful of rare developments coalesced to break the two thousand year old linkage between the two royal metals, thereby widening the ratio nearly exponentially.

First, the gold standard for measuring currency values between nations was established. It soon became the, well, gold standard for all international trade.

Second, the conventional wisdom prophesied the end of America’s silver boom—never mind that the aggregate value of silver mined in Arizona and Nevada had a notional dollar value greater than the California, Yukon, Deadwood, Montana and Alaska gold rushes combined. Gold’s price during the 19th century, due in large part by its merciless acquisition by European banks, blew out the ratio, decoupling the two metals for a century and a half. The ratio between the newly decoupled metals had widened from 15:1 to 50:1 by the turn of the 20th century. By the turn of the 21st the gap was nearly 100:1, in large part due to US government manipulation of silver prices. The US government sheltered a rentiers market in silver bullion for decades. Wholesalers got silver at spot prices. They then charged retail buyers high premiums and pocketed the sizable difference. This cozy arrangement, due to silver’s recent price moves is breaking down, and fast. Good I say.

That said, I argue, based on a reasonable man’s assumption, that the spread, now roughly 50:1, will continue narrowing and sometime in the next few years complete a reversion to its 2,000 year historical mean. That puts a potential price of an ounce of silver at $320 an ounce and might even overshoot a little bit, as reversions are wont to do at times. Overcorrections are a real thing. Hitting the Hunt Brother’s high of $170 an ounce is just a mental milestone, nothing more. The silver bugs are getting their revenge and how.

Now, my assumption is based on a single premise, a reversion to the mean/norm. Not a bad premise to base an assumption on, but not enough for intellectual coherence and honesty. So, let’s explore another variable: silver’s supply versus demand forecast.

What is the global supply versus demand picture like? In short, extremely unbalanced. The numbers are staggering. Aggregate global demand per year is 1.3 billion ounces. Annual global mining supply maxes out at roughly 850 million ounces. Let’s be generous and toss in recycling raising global supply to 1 billion ounces of silver a year available for industrial purposes.

The maths paints a grim supply picture: a whopping 23% gap between supply and demand. Because silver is the single most important industrial metal—it is in every electronic we own— demand is not going down any time soon. A single tomahawk missile requires 500 ounces of .999 grade silver. Yes, 500 ounces. See where I’m headed with this demand equation?

Why is it in everything? It’s the goldilocks of metals. Silver might not be as conductive as some but it’s less resistant than most. It doesn’t overheat like some and burn through plastic coating, but its best left exposed and uninsulated. It’s place in the bell curve of the electrical performance of all metals is right before the big bulge grows. Most of the time we want things good and fast. In reality, however, we must choose between good or fast, but silver? Well, silver gives you good and fast together. Goldilocks!

One big variable exists concerning global silver supply that has no easy short or even medium term fix. It’s physically impossible for global mining companies to ramp up mining production enough to even begin closing a 23% gap between supply and demand in any time frame less than 2-3 years. And this assumes no economic growth leading to increased global demand. That is some wicked nasty inelastic demand for silver and it has zero supply side answers, except very high prices that lead to retail silver owners cashing out. Central banks would have to print precisely three metric shit-tons of fiat currency to induce silver bugs to sell. I know some of them—they make rabid dogs seem like puppies—and they are adamant: no selling until the ratio reverts to 15:1. Until they get their ring there will be no huggy or kissy.

Another fundamental we ought mention are draconian export controls on bullion instituted by the Chinese central government. Note: China is the world’s leading consumer of industrial silver. It also has an extremely long and complex history using silver as its monetary base. Much, much less so with gold. If you want a book recommendation on the subject just ask.

Then there is our southern neighbor, Mexico, our number one supplier of silver to this day, is considering retaliatory tariffs on silver for United States because of Trumpian fuckery. Much fuckery there and I applaud Mexico’s president for sticking to her guns.

Consider as well dollar weakness and potential QE. Both point directly towards higher silver prices. Add to all this a wildcard fundamental hiding in plain sight: the magic price point that compels the addition of physical silver to the portfolios of Central, Commercial and Investment Banks around the globe. It’s a simple equation: storage costs fall as prices rise. At $40 an ounce there is no reason to hold silver in a vault. At $170? We’re getting close. At $300? Bingo! You’re goddamned right there is a reason. Such a development would spike demand by an order of magnitude as it would reinforce the powerful upward trend already in place. This is the dynamic that could at long last force the reversion of the gold to silver ratio back towards 15:1. Gold’s present price of $5000 an ounce implies a target of $333 per ounce of silver. In my opinion, and this is not investment advice, this is where we are heading. Right now. It may take 18-24 months, but it’s going to happen.

These are just some of the fundamentals. I can’t cover them all. If you think I missed an important one, add it in the comments, please.

Let’s talk about some technicals followed by sentiment.

Late in 2025 silver achieved a triple top breakout. Triple top breakouts are very rare in any asset. But when they occur they are an extremely bullish signal, conveying that there is no predictable upper limit to the assets potential advance. This is silver today. Silver hit $50 in October, backed down to the low $40s, made another run in November to try and overcome $50 and didn’t make it. But then in late November and all of December during the Santa Claus Rally silver blew through $50 and ended the year at $72.05. Market observers I respect, all unsure but all equally intuitive, explained the triple top breakout as the result of a handful of factors coalescing in the short term, such as Chinese export control tightening, high retail demand, Mexico threatening tariffs on silver, and a short squeeze on the Comex. This confluence makes sense to me.

The underlying technicals that lead to triple top breakouts are usually either a short squeeze or a gamma squeeze. In late 2025 silver underwent a short squeeze. But in early 2026 led by a bank frenzy to cover what were in essence some very large naked shorts in the SLV and PSLV ETFs, coupled by a bizarre change in margin requirements—from a straight percentage to one based on the notional value of the contracts (I mean, WTF?)—backfired spectacularly, leading to the rarest of rare technical developments, one I’ve only seen once in my life as an investor—the mythical unicorn, the gamma squeeze.

In short, a gamma squeeze “is a rapid [asset] price surge from [futures] trading, where heavy retail (read: investment banks, spk) call buying forces market makers to buy shares to hedge risk, creating a feedback loop that pushes the price even higher.” A gamma squeeze can be viewed as one powerful force intent on creating and sustaining an upwardly positive feedback loop “[where the] cycle escalates because as the [asset] price rises, market makers must buy more [futures or the hard asset] to cover their increasing delta risk, driving prices up further and attracting more call buying, often in low-float, i.e. low-volume [assets].” Silver is now, for all intents and purposes, in a virtuous rising feedback loop, leading to higher prices which force more buying to cover expected demand thus leading to higher prices. When it comes to shorting a gamma squeeze FAFO. You will lose your ass.

These developments all serve to reinforce my call late last year that silver is not on a cyclical bull run. It is engaged in a secular bull stampede.

Cyclical trends last between 3-5 years, represent basic price discovery and a market composed of two healthy opposing forces: supply and demand. Cyclical bull or bear runs tend to predict the business cycle as well, serving as a leading economic indicator.

Secular trends, however, are a different animal altogether. Like Earl Campbell, that human rhinoceros, running over middle linebackers like they were children, a secular bull or bear is powerful, based on large scale structural economic rearrangements, demographic realignments, and/or crushing but ‘unforeseeable’ externalities—like the Arab Oil Embargo of the 1970s or losing wars like Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan——that leave robust long-term consequences, like inflation, busted supply chains, broken armies, revanchist politicians, rising internal violence and other variables, in their wake. Secular bulls or bears last decades, some as long as 40 years.

Now a word on sentiment. Sentiment is a fickle bitch, much like the muse. Nothing can bankrupt an investor with more rapidity and totality than a sudden turn in sentiment. Two forces, ultimately rule investing: fear and greed. Beware the latter and respect the former, said my mentor at Morgan Stanley.

Right now silver is flying under the radar. Everyone is talking about gold. It’s gold, why the hell not? Gold makes people febrile. I’ve literally seen it with my own eyes. I’ve felt my forehead warm up and my fingers get a sudden subtle itch when I’ve held certain gold coins in my life. I had a Julius Caesar gold aureus in the palm of my hand once. Wow! So I get why silver remains the red headed step-child of the metals market. And the lack of commentary on silver reinforces my conviction of silver’s inevitable rise to $250-$300. As I used to say when I worked on Wall Street, “buy the rumor, sell the news.”

It worked every time. And right now silver is hardly a whisper much less a rumor.

So, realistically at what price would I begin selling my silver?

$275-$300 an ounce.

I’m patient.

And certain.

How To Drive Domestic Production and Reindustrialization

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On January 26, 2026

24 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion over this topic, so let’s break down some of the factors.

The principle is that you need someone to buy whatever it is you want to produce. That means it has to be priced reasonably, and that you either have to have foreign or domestic consumers.

It’s often noted that before the British conquest of India, India had more textile factories than Britain. Britain destroyed them. Why? Because they wanted them to buy textiles made in Britain. Before that, the most important government action to create industry in Britain is that they forbid the export of wool to the Low Countries. Why? Because Flemish weavers were way better than British ones. But it doesn’t matter how good your weavers are if they don’t have wool. So the Brits kept the wool at home and pretty soon they had a textile industry. When cotton and mechanized looms came along they wound up selling the world. After all, there wasn’t any competition from India!

Imperialism, trade policy and technological advances for the Industrial Revolution win.

So if you’re a country which wants domestic production you need customers. Demand. It can be domestic or international. Now in traditional industrialization you need foreign customers usually, because your country is poor before industrializing. Almost everyone did it this way except Russia. America was a partial exception, having strong domestic markets and legacy tech inherited from British North America, but only a partial one: they sold a lot to Britain and Europe in the early years.

You also need the technology, and you get a lot of that from overseas unless you were Britain. This is true of pretty much everyone, including the US (which got huge investments from Britain), Japan (Britain first time, US for reindustrialization after WWII), South Korea (US), Taiwan (US), and China (US). Germany might be considered a partial exception in the 19th century, their industrialization story is startling and impressive (See “Cities and Civilization” by Peter Hall.)

But let’s say you’ve already industrialized once, and then partially re-industrialized. You have the remnants of a skilled workforce and you have good universities and technical institutes and a literate workforce. (Pushing it here, half of Americans are essentially illiterate.)

You’ve also got a fairly rich population and decent domestic demand, in global terms. In other words, there’s domestic demand sufficient to support more production than you’re doing. (How do you know? Well, all those imports indicate demand, don’t they?)

The problem is that foreign production is cheaper and quite likely better. (Remember those Flemish weavers.)

Now the first way to do it takes its cue from the Brits and wool. If you produce a lot of resources suitable for production, why are you selling them in the raw state?

There’s a few stages of this. If you’ve got oil, say, you could refine it in country before sending it overseas. In Canada it used to be illegal to ship raw fish overseas, but after NAFTA it got sent to the US to be stuck in tins or smoked or whatever. You shouldn’t be sending raw logs. You should refine bauxite into aluminum yourself. Copper into wires. Etc…

This only works if the current producers can’t just buy from someone else, but there are certainly still cases where this is true. (We’re about to experience very severe copper shortages, silver is already in shortage, and China has been using its control over rare earths like this.)

Tariffs come in when you want to make domestic production cheaper than overseas. If you’re just starting in an industry, it’s going to be. You can use tariffs (the US strategy during the 19th cnetury), you can force your currency lower than its market value (this is what China did) or you can use subsidies. Tariffs are under international agreement, essentially illegal, but Trump has made that a dead letter, so they’re possible again.

Tariffs are only useful, however, if you’re actually going to be increasing production. They do nothing if you aren’t. (Trump, pay attention.)

Now let’s talk about demand. If you need more demand for goods you need to increase the amount of money people can spend on whatever it is. There’s a number of ways to do that.

First is tax policy: tax poor and middle class people less and rich people more. Give them money, taken from the rich. Poor and middle class people spend most of their money on goods and services. Rich people, given more money, drive up asset prices. Note that this means income taxes. Get rid of general VAT taxes, you don’t want to tax consumption or in anything you want more demand create an exemption. You can also remove taxes on whatever it is you want people to buy.

Change other types of taxes to discourage short term trading, buying in secondary markets and future markets and encourage people with more money than they need to invest in production. High capital gains taxes on short term investments, for example. Tax rich people’s income highly, and send that to poor people or use it directly for investment thru the government. Tax corporation highly so they are encouraged to retain earnings and invest them. Get rid of stock buybacks, just make them illegal, like they were for much of the 20th century.

Second are any policies which drive up wages for the bottom 80% of the population generally.

Third are subsidies. Subsidize the cost of buying or manufacturing whatever it is. Europe, China and the US have all used this with electric vehicles.

Fourth are general market policies: you need competitive markets with few barriers to entry. You must make oligopolies and monopolies illegal and easy to break up or you must tightly regulate prices in monopolies. In general you don’t want any business to have pricing power, because if you give regular people money and business just jack up prices, demand doesn’t increase.

Fifth is breaking supply side bottlenecks. After the oil crises central bankers spent a lot of time deliberately putting downward pressure on wages because wage increases led to using more oil, all marginal oil increases had to come from OPEC and that meant inflation. So instead they pumped up asset prices like houses and stocks. If there’s something needed for production, you need to find a way to get enough for reasonable prices. Copper, coal, oil, silicon, rate earths, uranium… whatever. This may mean domestic production, it may mean trade deals, though domestic is better if feasible.

Sixth is that you have to reduce cost structures. Real estate, rent, interest rates, medical prices, and so on.These are costs: they make production more expensive and they soak up demand from regular people. If landlords can increase prices freely then, again, they’ll just take up any extra money that regular people get which would otherwise go to buying all those new products.

Seventh is making currency levels dependent on trade and not on financial flows. You want your currency low if you’re importing more than exporting, and high if you’re exporting more than importing BUT if you export a lot of resources, you need to find a way to reduce currency rates below what they’d normally be if you want manufacturing to increase. Doing all this means taming financial markets and making the central bank do what is necessary, which it often doesn’t want to, since it’s usually run by ex-bankers and traders.

Eighth is managing trade deals. It’s a lot easier to get a big enough market if you make a deal with another county or countries. “You produce X and we won’t. We’ll produce Y and you won’t, thus X and Y both have much larger markets. And we freeze other countries out of our market for these goods.” General free trade is usually stupid, managed free trade like this is smart.

Ninth is making your banks lend to producers at reasonable rates rather than lending to people whose actions will drive up asset prices instead.

This is a high level overview. Each point could support it’s own article, heck, it’s own book and I haven’t even hit all the high points.

But the point is that there’s a lot involved. Real policy is when a government tries to do something from all angles, not just one. You don’t just put on subsidies and hope for the best. You don’t just slap on tariffs and think “surely someone will start producing”. You have to actually use as many levers as possible to make it possible to produce: demand, supply, credit, market structure, smashing barriers to entry, avoiding pricing power and so on.

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, that’s means you have to make it your main priority, the way it was for China for decades or for Japan for decades or for South Korea for decades. It doesn’t happen by accident, or if you only half-ass it. In fact half-assing it is likely to produce no noticeable results at all.

If Western countries want to reindustrialize, they can. But only if they decide they’ll do whatever it takes. Decline is baked in, resurgence takes effort.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 25, 2026

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On January 25, 2026

16 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 25, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

Dingbat imperialism and its malcontents

Hoodwinks and Hijinks: Trump ‘Nabs’ Greenland at Davos 

Simplicius [via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

…In this case, Trump did major damage to alliances and economic ties, causing Europe and Canada—by way of Mark Carney and Macron—to announce reorientations toward China. That said, it’s still possible for the whole megillah to turn out favorably in the long term, particularly because it helps rupture NATO and the EU, which ultimately works in everyone’s favor, including the US’s. The more the transatlantic mafia and ‘deep state’ can be hobbled and undermined, the weaker the American deep state becomes, which sources much of its power, funding, and influence from the European arm of the cabal…

[TW: Besides providing this badly needed perspective on Trump versus the “Trilateral Commission” transatlantic mafia, Simplicius also provides in the article a very useful collection of Trump’s craziness this past week.]

The Strong Will Suffer What They Must — Vaclav’s Grocer and American Hubris

Seva Gunitsky, Jan 21, 2026

…The Melian Dialogue is not endorsing a timeless law of global politics. It’s showing us Athens at the precise peak of its imperial hubris: the moment when a great power becomes so convinced of its own invincibility that it can no longer perceive its limits….

Carney seems to be betting, I think correctly, that America under Trump has reached its Melian moment: maximum confidence, minimum self-knowledge….

Watching A Superpower Die By Suicide 

Garrett Graff, January 22, 2026 [Doomsday Scenario, via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

The Great Greenland War — Three Possible Histories

Big Serge [via Naked Capitalism 01-22-2025]

The Bridge at the Center of the Pentagon 

Michael McNair [via Naked Capitalism 01-19-2025]

The Architect of U.S. Defense Strategy

The man setting U.S. defense strategy has already told you exactly how he thinks. He published the playbook years before taking office. And surprisingly few analysts have actually read it.

Elbridge Colby, or “Bridge” to those who know him, now serves as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the senior official responsible for running U.S. defense strategy.

Captain John Konrad, after spending a week inside the Pentagon, put it bluntly in his 13,000-word field report for gCaptain: “aside from Hegseth, the most powerful gravitational body in the building is Elbridge Colby.” He added that Colby’s “grand strategy remains exactly what he published in his books and interviews long before taking office. He is executing it now.”

 

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

The University of Pennsylvania Ran a Simulation to Predict an American Civil War. It Gave the EXACT MOMENT WE ARE IN RIGHT NOW.

Shaun King, Jan 22, 2026

A Penn law center war-gamed a federal operation spiraling into state vs. federal force. Their scenario is now playing out

Expert Who Ran Simulations on ‘How Civil Wars Start’ Warns Minnesota Is Exactly What It Looks Like

Brad Reed, January 21, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Claire Finkelstein, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, wrote in a Wednesday column published by the Guardian that she and her colleagues at the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law (CERL) conducted a tabletop exercise in October 2024 that simulated potential outcomes if a US president were to carry out law enforcement operations similar to the ones being conducted by the Trump administration with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minnesota.

‘Absolutely Vile’: ICE Snatches Young Kids From Minnesota Schools, Sends Them to Texas

Jake Johnson, January 22, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Federal immigration agents have detained at least four children from Minnesota public schools over the past two weeks, including a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl who were both sent to Texas detention centers that have come under fire for grotesque conditions.

Trump orders active duty troops to prepare for Minnesota deployment 

[Politico, via Naked Capitalism 01-19-2025]

Why are federal agents gunning down Americans in the streets?

Noah Smith, Jan 10, 2026 [Noahpinion]

Here’s an assessment by a 25-year ICE veteran whose job was to evaluate shootings by the agency….

Here’s a video of ICE agents in Arkansas beating up an unarmed U.S. citizen. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting two U.S. citizens in a Target. Here’s a story about a similar arrest. Here’s a video of an ICE agent brandishing a gun in the face of a protester. Here’s the story of ICE agents arresting a pastor who complained about an arrest he saw. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting an American citizen and punching him repeatedly. Here’s a video of ICE agents threatening a bystander who complained about their reckless driving. Here’s a video of ICE agents arresting a man for yelling at them from his own front porch. Here’s a video of ICE agents making a particularly brutal arrest while pointing their weapons at unarmed civilians nearby. Here’s a story about another ICE killing, this one in Maryland, under dubious circumstances. Here’s a video of ICE agents savagely beating and arresting a legal immigrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents storming a private home without a warrant. Here’s a video of ICE agents pulling a disabled woman out of a car when she’s just trying to get to the doctor.

These are all things I noticed on X within just the last two days. There has been a pretty constant stream of these for months. Here’s a roundup of some others, by Jeremiah Johnson….

Vance Endorsed Slashing Civil Liberties Protections During Minneapolis Visit — The VP said that the executive branch should be able to issue its own warrants to enter homes.

Josh Kovensky, January 23, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

…But Vance made another remark while in Minneapolis that has largely escaped attention.

He threw his support behind the idea that the executive branch can enter private homes as part of immigration enforcement without a warrant. It’s an argument that would transform the Fourth Amendment, which mandates that independent judges can issue warrants on the request of law enforcement.

Vance’s remarks came in response to a question about a whistleblower disclosure to the Senate, first reported by the AP. Per the disclosure, ICE issued a memo in May arguing that immigration authorities could enter private residences absent a judicial warrant if they believe that someone with a final deportation order is inside….

Breaking the Fourth Amendment
Joyce Vance, Jan 23, 2026 [Civil Discourse]

[TW: Using a screen shot of a court warrant, and an administrative warrant, Vance explains the differences and legal implications.]

‘Dark, Bizarre Stuff’: White House Posts Deepfake Image of Arrested ICE Protester Crying

Stephen Prager, January 22, 2026 [CommonDreams]

“All of us are on full notice that this White House feels no compunction about concocting obvious lies, concedes nothing when its lies are exposed, and should be presumptively disbelieved in all matters.”

12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 01-18-2025]

The Congresswoman Criminalized for Visiting ICE Detainees

Jonathan Blitzer, January 19, 2026 [The New Yorker]

LaMonica McIver went to tour an immigration jail in her New Jersey district. Now she faces seventeen years in prison.

Senate Republicans Steamroll Democrats on Another ICE Funding Increase

[Migrant Insider, via Naked Capitalism 01-21-2025]

Documents reviewed by Migrant Insider reveal a stark disconnect between Democratic talking points and the actual appropriations tables in the bill negotiated by the Senate Appropriations Committee. While Democrats publicly touted restrictions on ICE and reduced detention capacity, the legislation actually pumps $3.84 billion into ICE custody operations — up from $3.43 billion — and boosts Enforcement and Removal Operations funding from $5.08 billion to $5.45 billion.

The $403 million mandatory funding increase for ICE jail beds represents a Republican victory that comes at a critical juncture: just days after the administration made expanding detention capacity its top immigration priority, and on the heels of widely documented enforcement operations that have terrorized immigrant communities nationwide….

Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, January 23, 2026 [The New Republic]

Is ICE Running a Black Site in Minnesota?

Thomas Neuburger, Jan 20, 2026 [God’s Spies]

Black Sites and Black Days

Thomas Neuburger, Jan 23, 2026 [God’s Spies]

Is it really fair to call the ICE prison at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building a “black site”? Let’s take a look.

FBI Agent Resigns in Protest as Trump DOJ Investigates Renee Good—Not the ICE Agent Who Killed Her

Julia Conley, January 24, 2026 [CommonDreams]

ICE Prosecutor in Dallas Runs White Supremacist X Account

[Texas Observer, via The Big Picture, January 19, 2026]

The Observer has identified the operator of “GlomarResponder,” an overtly racist social media account, as ICE Assistant Chief Counsel James Rodden, based on an overwhelming number of biographical details matched through publicly available documents, other social media activity, and courtroom observation.

Trump DOJ Uses Anti-KKK Law to Charge ICE Protesters With Felony

Schuyler Mitchell, January 23, 2026 [Mother Jones]

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating against ICE at a St. Paul church. On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had arrested Chauntyll Allen, Nekima Levy Armstrong, and William Kelly for their alleged involvement in a January 18 anti-ICE demonstration. The three protesters were charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence.

Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers. Levy Armstrong leads the grassroots civil rights nonprofit Racial Justice Network and once served as the president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. Allen is a member of the St. Paul School Board and a founder of Black Lives Matter Twin Cities….

You’ve Heard About Who ICE Is Recruiting. The Truth Is Far Worse

[Slate, via The Big Picture, January 19, 2026]

I’m the Proof. What happens when you do minimal screening before hiring agents, arming them, and sending them into the streets? We’re all finding out.

How Donald Trump Has Transformed ICE

[The New Yorker, via The Big Picture, January 19, 2026]

A former D.H.S. oversight official on what, legally, the agency can and can’t do—and the accountability mechanisms that have been “gutted beyond recognition.”

‘Confirming Everything We Knew Already’: Docs Show Trump Admin Targeted Gaza Activists for Their Opinions

Brett Wilkins, January 23, 2026 [CommonDreams]

Trump sues JPMorgan for $5 billion, alleges the bank closed his accounts for political reasons 

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 01-23-2025]

The Last Election

Chris Hedges, Jan 19, 2026

The presidential election in 2024 may be the last free vote taken in the United States. Dictatorships only hold elections with predetermined outcomes or do not hold them at all. Trump is no exception.

The Evil Man and the Empty Congress — A psalm for the republic in extremis

Mike Brock, Jan 20, 2026 [Notes From The Circus]

…Let me be precise about what I mean. Evil, as I use the term here, is the systematic use of power to dissolve the constraints that protect human dignity and law, while demanding deference to the very crimes being committed. It is not merely selfishness, incompetence, or even cruelty. It is the deliberate subordination of other human beings to one’s own will, coupled with the insistence that this subordination is right and proper, that resistance to it is illegitimate, that the victims deserve what they receive.

By this definition, observe: A president who pardons those who attacked the Capitol on his behalf, while prosecuting those who investigated him. A president who defies court orders and dares the judiciary to stop him. A president who treats foreign policy as a vehicle for personal enrichment and grudge-settling—threatening war over Greenland, blockading Venezuela, inviting Vladimir Putin to advise on Middle East peace. A president who is 30 days late on releasing court-ordered documents and responds to the deadline by releasing one percent of the files. This is not a policy disagreement. This is the methodical dissolution of the constraints that make lawful government possible, conducted by a man who believes he is owed obedience….

First, let us address those who made this moment possible.

The anti-anti-Trump intellectuals. The contrarians and self-appointed heterodox thinkers who could not bring themselves to support Trump, but who found the alarm of his critics unseemly. The real threat, they insisted, was the overreaction itself. They positioned themselves as the adults in the room while the rest of us succumbed to panic…

Here is what I maintained for years, and what I will now state plainly: the obsessive fixation on leftist excess functioned as a form of cognitive capture. It rendered an entire class of otherwise intelligent people incapable of perceiving threats originating in their own ideological vicinity. They became so convinced that the republic faced imminent danger from campus speech codes and diversity initiatives that they looked upon an actual authoritarian—a man who had already attempted to overturn an election—and concluded he represented the lesser evil.

This is the precise error made by German conservatives in the early 1930s, who persuaded themselves that the Austrian corporal was a manageable risk compared to the Bolshevik menace. I do not make this comparison for rhetorical effect. I make it because the structural logic is identical….

The financial class, which assured us that Trump represented the superior outcome for capitalism and markets. They were explicitly and repeatedly warned that this man was unstable, authoritarian, and constitutionally incapable of the restraint that global economic leadership requires. And they made their calculation: yes, but the regulatory burden. Yes, but the tax implications….

The technocratic establishment—the consultant class, the pollsters, the professional Democrats who have made careers of cautious positioning. They have no theory of the moment. They have tactics designed for a political context that no longer exists. They are preparing for an election in 2026 as though elections, conducted fairly and counted honestly, remain a reliable mechanism for the transfer of power….

To the Citizen—and I use that word with the weight it deserves—I hope you understand that this falls to you now.

The institutions have failed. I have just spent considerable effort documenting the various ways in which people who should have known better did not act as though they knew better. The cavalry is not coming. There is no adult in the room who will fix this while you go about your life. The room is full of adults, and they have failed.

Which means the republic is counting on you to keep her….

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A Message To Commenters

By

On January 25, 2026

8 Comments

I’d like to apologize. I’ve been lax about letting thru comments with ad-homs. Please attack people’s arguments and not them. I will be more strict about this, starting immediately.

I value my regular commenters. Most of you say smart and interesting things. Please do me the favor of avoiding ad-homs. I don’t want to not approve comments which are otherwise good because they have a sentence or two attacking another commenter.

If you’re a regular commenter, feel free to email with your preference of:

1) just not letting your posts with ad-homs thru; or,

2) deleting the ad-hom parts and letting the rest thru.

Make sure to include the name you comment under if it’s not the same as the name on your email.

ianatfdl-at-gmail-dot-com

Open Thread

By

On January 24, 2026

23 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

There Is Only One Fast Route Back After Trump

By

On January 24, 2026

27 Comments

Trump’s administration is routinely ignoring court orders. It’s often refusing to let attorney’s see clients. It’s not respecting Miranda rights. It claims the right to enter homes without warrants and routinely searches without cause. It’s violating habeas corpus every day. ICE and the border patrol (the border patrol is often lumped in with ICE, but many of the worst abuses have been theirs) are brownshirts or Gestapo, whichever analogy you prefer.

The Supreme Court has let most of Trump’s crimes thru, and Trump has massively increased in his wealth in just one year of the Presidency. Trump routinely blackmails Americans, forcing them to do what he wants or he’ll use the power of the Presidency against them

The rule of law is broken in the US. Law is not just about following the letter, though that level is broken, it’s about intent. The fourth amendment is a dead letter in America. Let’s be clear, it’s been in danger for a long time. The exception to the 4th amendment allowing warrentless searches within 100 miles of the border, which pre-dates Trump, was obviously bullshit and meant that two-thirds of the American population is subject to warrantless searches.

The rule of law’s obvious break-down began with pardoning Nixon. When Iran-Contra happened, the people involved had mostly worked for Nixon. They were not indicted. When Bush lied the country into war with Iraq his administration was full of men who had been with Nixon and involved in Iran Contra.

Biden pardoned his own son, an act of sickening nepotism which in a functioning country would lead to him being removed from office before his term end.

On the non-governmental side the crimes of the rich are almost never prosecuted. There was vast fraud leading up to the financial crisis, and no one was indicted for it. After the financial crisis banks systematically used fake signatures on documents containing fake information to foreclose on homes they had not right to. This was not just allowed, but encouraged by government.

The rich and powerful are almost immune to the force of law, but all along the effective rights of ordinary citizens have been under assault. Most people accused of a crime don’t get a trial and they are told that if they insist on one, rather than taking a plea bargain, they will spend much more time in prison. Mandatory sentencing laws have removed most of judge’s discretion and power has moved towards prosecutors. Step by step Mirana rights have been weakened by the Supreme Court. Warrants are often served without knocking, in violent fashion, and we all know that cops lie routinely on the stand and under oath.

Many of the worst abuses started overseas. Detainees were tortured, they couldn’t see lawyers, they have no rights. Thomas Neuburger makes the case that there is now a black site in Minnesota. What starts overseas eventually comes home.

The US is an oligarchy. An oligarchy where there is no rule of law if someone powerful enough wants to break the law.

There is only one road back from this.Mass prosecutions, starting at the top, with Trump and Vance and the cabinet members and family members who engaged in corruption like Jared Kushner and going right down to every ICE brownshirt who violated citizens rights and every prosecutor who went along. Every violation of rights, every major corrupt action.

Of course this means first that the Supreme Court and other parts of the judiciary which aided and abetted by ignoring clear constitutional directives need to be impeached and removed and if possible then themselves tried for crimes. Clearly draconian laws like the one allowing warrantless searches within 100 miles of the border must be repealed.

I don’t pretend that this suggestion is easy or likely. I think the odds of it happening are tiny. But it’s what’s necessary if the Bill of Rights, the Constitution and common law protections for for ordinary people are to mean anything. And it MUST include the powerful. If it’s just a few ex ICE agents getting their knuckles rapped it will mean nothing.

Precedents have been set for over 50 years now that the powerful can get away with doing almost anything awful to ordinary people.

End those precedents with a new one that they can’t, or lose all of your actual rights.

All rights come only from power. If you cannot enforce your rights you have them only if those with more power than you want you to. Every right that you allow someone else to lose, because you aren’t in the group losing rights, you will eventually lose.

More than anything else except stopping American participation in genocide, if I were American this would be my priority. Not even the economy is as is important, because without functioning and fair rule of law nothing else can or will work. If America, internally, is 100% “the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer as they must” everyone in the US who isn’t an oligarch is cooked and even if the rich don’t realize it, so is America as a nation.

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