Ian Welsh

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

Britain To Restrict Jury Trials, Ending Jury Nullification For Political Crimes

By

On December 2, 2025

In Britain

Without jury trials, there is no justice:

David Lammy, the justice secretary, told The Times that the scale of the backlog – which has reached nearly 80,000 cases – is failing victims as he warned that “justice delayed is justice denied”

Lammy is expected to announce that he will scrap the right to trial by jury in “either way” cases, where defendants have the choice to have their cases heard in the magistrates’ or crown court.

Last year there were an estimated 13,000 either way cases – including theft and handling stolen goods, burglary, assault causing actual bodily harm, fraud, dangerous driving and possession of drugs with intent to supply – went before juries. 

Or you could spend more money and hire more judges and judicial staff? As usual, the real reason for the backlog is that governments after government have made cuts to the justice system.

But I suggest connecting the dots. All those people being arrested for protesting Palestine, they won’t have the right to a jury trial either. Which means that juries can’t nullify the law by refusing to convict.


Oh yes, she’s a terrorist.

The war on terror, as an aside, has reached the point many of us predicted at its start: anything the government wants to say is terrorism, is terrorism. As a rule I oppose most strengtheners. A crime is not more of a crime if it is motivated by hate. We already have motivation based modifiers in law (the difference between manslaughter and murder is intent) and those are enough.

But terrorism is particularly egregious because the way we define it is completely arbitrary at this point: it’s just “whatever a government says is terrorism, is terrorism.” Even in the past it was bullshit, because “killing civilians to effect political change” is something governments do all the time, but don’t call terrorism. The biggest terrorist organization in the world right now isn’t Palestinian Action, it’s Israel. At least by any sane definition. But even there, who cares? The actual crime isn’t “terrorism”, it’s genocide and the penalty for that is either execution or life imprisonment.

The UK government is becoming one of the most authoritarian and repressive in the world. To end jury trials for a huge class of people because they can’t be bothered to tax rich people like themselves is the very definition of tyranny, especially in Britain, the very mother of the right to be tried by ones peers, not some appointed judge who will often rule exactly as those who appointed them want.

Pathetic.

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The Financialization Hoover Effect & The End Of The American Dream

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On December 1, 2025

In End of American Empire, The Twilight of Neoliberalism

The great problem with financialization is that produces higher returns than productive investments do. If you want to industrialize or stay industrialized, you will have lower profits than a financialized economy does. This leads to situations like the below:

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind. It has the largest drone market, the most robots, etc, etc… It is the world’s strongest economy.

But China is a competitive market, and in competitive markets, profits are low, because the second they start to rise, someone new jumps in. That’s how capitalism, in theory, is supposed to work. The problem is that it only works that way with aggressive government regulation and enforcement. The CPC, being Socialist, doesn’t “believe” in markets. It uses them as a tool, without an ideological commitment. There’s no nonsense about markets being self-correcting, about rich people being good, about trickle down, etc, etc… If a market isn’t working to improve mass welfare, the state intervenes, and it will let, and sometimes force, “too big to fail” companies die.

This is, ironically, “real” capitalism, something the West no longer practices.

So America in specific, and the West in general has spent about 45 years now hollowing out its real economy. In exchange a great deal of money has been created, and if you as an investor want money, then you invested in the West.

This is coming to an end. It is in its last five or so years. It relies in the destruction of the real economy by jacking up prices, loading up debt and liquidating industries, often, ironically, to send to China. Once the real economy is gone, there will not be enough financialization opportunities to allow vast inflows of foreign money. This is especially true because, increasingly, US consumers are tapped out. The decision to end large classes of Obamacare subsidies is just a nail in this coffin.

Right now the US economy is bifurcated. Most people are under huge financial stress, but about 20% of the population is doing well and spending more. They are attached to a financialization spigot of some sort. This will end, or rather contract to about 5% of the population over the next decade. As financialization opportunities go away, the number of people benefiting from remaining financialization will of necessity contract. This contraction has been going on for decades. At one point a majority of people benefited, but as time went by more and more had to be sacrificed and the losers soon outnumbered the winners. The 2008 crash was when this became impossible to deny without straight up lying.

What will be left is a sclerotic economy, with a lot of rich people (relatively, in absolute numbers, not so many), a lot of poor people and a small real middle class. (And to be in that middle class you will need to earn low six figures minimum, because financialization makes everything expensive. You’re better off living in China with half the salary of an America. Maybe a third.)

It’s weird being, well, me. Because this is the endgame. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and now I’m seeing my Cassandric prophecies all coming true. None of this was, in one sense, necessary: up till about 2010, it could have been reversed, in theory, by correct policy. In another sense it was inevitable, because the people who make all the decisions were all in, and benefiting immensely, and were unable or unwilling to understand or care about long term consequences. For many of them that made cold hard sense. They were engaged in a “death bet”, they bet they’d be dead before the game ended. Others are just fine being the richest or most powerful people in a shitty country. They don’t, yet, understand what they’ll lose when China is recognized by everyone as the most important and powerful country in the world, or what the decay of American military ability (entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead) will mean to them.

This the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was when Obama and Bernanke decided to bail everyone rich out during the financial crisis, and pass the cost to ordinary people, including by stealing their houses.

This is also epochal. For the first time in centuries, the West will no longer be the most powerful or the most technologically advanced region.

The consequences, for everyone in the world, will be vast.

 

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 30, 2025

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On November 30, 2025

In Uncategorized

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – November 30, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

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]

Legal Experts Accuse Hegseth of ‘War Crimes, Murder, or Both’ After New Reporting on Boat Strike Order

Julia Conley, Nov 30, 2025 [CommonDreams]

The Moment to Pick a Side Has Come [Civil Discourse]

Joyce Vance, Nov 30, 2025

…on Black Friday, the Washington Post ran with an exclusive story about the September 2, 2025, attack on a boat allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean, the first of a series of attacks that have involved strikes on at least 23 boats to date. The Post reported that in advance of the strike, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. ‘The order was to kill everybody.’”

That’s what the special operations commander overseeing the attack did. After the initial hit, live drone feed showed two survivors clinging to the wreckage. The commander “ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions … The two men were blown apart in the water.” The video Trump released later that day did not include the second strike.

The Post quoted Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who had advised special operations on the illegality of the order: “Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight ‘would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.’” ….

There is a price to be paid for confirming a man as the Secretary of Defense who fails to understand the role he is being called upon to serve in, instead, relishing the title “Secretary of War.” Hegseth received a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Princeton in 2003 and a Master of Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in 2013. He joined the Army National Guard as an infantry officer afterward. Nowhere along the road does he seem to have learned the fundamental lessons any Secretary of Defense should have known: The lesson of the Peleus trial.

In 1944, the captain of the U-boat U-852 sank the Greek steamer Peleus in the South Atlantic. There were 12 survivors, including an officer, who was given assurances they would be rescued the following day by Allied forces. But the U-852’s Kapitänleutnant Heinz Eck suddenly ordered his crew to fire on the 12 survivors and attack them with grenades when machine gun fire didn’t suffice to sink their life rafts.

Eck and four others were subsequently charged with war crimes. The charges were in connection with “the act of firing at the survivors and not the original sinking of the ship.” Eck argued “operational necessity,” claiming the survivors could have rallied and attacked the submarine. But all of the men were convicted.

It’s clear that even in wartime, an attack like the one on September 2 is a crime. If we are not at war—an issue the experts are now hotly debating and that we will track with Ryan Goodman in the morning—it’s quite simply murder….

A CIA trained killer who Trump granted asylum to killed a National Guard member — We need answers!

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 28, 2025

Disappeared to a Foreign Prison

Sarah Stillman, November 24, 2025 [The New Yorker]

…Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum.

All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. Nearly all had been granted forms of legal relief that bar the government from deporting them to their home countries. At the heart of the protections they’d received was one of the most basic and sacrosanct concepts in both U.S. and international law: non-refoulement. This principle means that no nation should intentionally deport or expel people to a place where they are likely to face torture, persecution, death, or other grave harms….

Mica Rosenberg, Mario Ariza, McKenzie Funk, Jeff Ernsthausen and Gabriel Sandoval, November 24, 2025 [propublica.org]

Under a zero tolerance policy, the first Trump administration separated immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border. New data suggests separations are happening all over the country, often after little more than a traffic stop.

What Pam Bondi and Lindsey Halligan did was not incompetence–It was intentional misconduct. They both must be disbarred.

Dean Obeidallah, Nov 25, 2025

The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine 

Seth Stern, November 23 2025 [The Intercept]

Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk….

U.S. Military Documents Indicate Plans to Keep Troops in Caribbean Through 2028

Sam Biddle, Nick Turse, November 25 2025 [The Intercept]

Strategic Political Economy

The UK is cursed: how finance destroyed our economy [applies to USA also]

Richard Murphy, November 28, 2025 [Funding the Future]

For more than 45 years, the UK has suffered not one, but two economic curses: the resource curse and the finance curse. Both were chosen, primarily by Margaret Thatcher, and both inflated the pound, destroyed industry, and left Britain dependent on hot money and speculation. In this video, I explain how we got here — and what we must do to rebuild a real economy based on work, fair reward and democracy.

The hypocrisy of bankers needs to come to an end

Richard Murphy, November 27, 2025 [Funding the Future]

Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City

[moneyontheleft.org, via Public Banking Institute, Nov 26, 2025]

Public Banking Institute email:

“Democratic Public Finance: A Radical Vision for Mamdani’s New York City” is a must-read for anyone who believes that our cities can—and should—be financially empowered to serve their people, not Wall Street. The essay reframes how we think about money itself, arguing that it should be treated not as a scarce private commodity but as a public tool for collective prosperity. By redefining money as “public credit,” this vision breaks from the austerity-driven mindset that has long stifled local progress and instead positions finance as a democratic force for housing, jobs, and sustainability.

At the heart of this vision is the call for public banking and civic payments infrastructure that would allow New Yorkers to access fair, transparent financial services—free from the extractive practices of private banks. A municipal public bank and “Public Venmo” system would ensure that credit flows directly into community priorities such as affordable housing, small business growth, and green energy, rather than into speculative markets. This isn’t just economic reform—it’s about returning power to the people and ensuring that city wealth circulates locally.

 

Read More

Open Thread

By

On November 29, 2025

In Uncategorized

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Killing Of Two National Guardsmen In DC

By

On November 28, 2025

In Afghanistan

is ironic in a number of ways.

As Sun Tzu pointed out about two and a half millenia ago, you should always treat traitors well. Never really trust them, but treat them well, because if people know you don’t, they won’t betray. (And be clear, this man was a traitor to his own country.)

To cap it off it turns out that he was a highly trained murderer. Highly trained murderers with shitty morals (most of them) need to be treated very carefully. Either take care of them well or kill them. At the very least, don’t bring them into your country and then abandon them to a shitty racist society without any support. (Aka. give them a job. There are tons of meaningless well paid government jobs. Give people like this one, plus a nice health care plan.)

Fortunately (or is that unfortunately?) he was in a rage and killed two national guardsmen, who while obviously willing to kill for Empire (like him, but probably less so) had no real power or responsibility for what happened to him. If he’d been thinking straight he would have gone after a politician or admin official. Even easier, a lot of the people responsible for how he was mishandled are no longer elected officials or high admin officers and thus have no real protection.

Seems a bit silly to kill a couple of peons. The people responsible won’t give a damn, they’re just talking points. But if it was one of them?

Not, of course, that I would ever condone extra-judicial murder of people who are responsible for a stupid, hopeless war and thus all the deaths, murders, rapes, torture, starvation and homelessness a stupid, hopeless war entails.

Anyway, treat traitors well, but never trust them. Sun Tzu knew. If I were a member of the elite, I’d be wondering if the next pissed off veteran, foreign born or not, will connect the dots and decide to go after actual responsible parties. Perhaps jobs should be found for them, and health care, just out of self-interest?

Oh, and do note that he did not kill civilians. That makes this act, in at least one way, morally superior to 95% of the decisions made to use violence by elected members of Congress and every administration official of my lifetime.

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Trade Is Not The Primary Driver of Currency Rates

By

On November 27, 2025

In China, Class Warfare, Development Economics, Trade

The misunderstandings packed into this little bit of writing are stupendous:

Over the past few years, China has been in deflation, while the US has been in inflation. Yet despite this stark divergence, the CNH has still depreciated more than 10% against the US dollar. This combination — falling relative prices in China and a weaker currency — has made Chinese goods and services extraordinarily cheap in global terms. A vivid example: a night at the Four Seasons Beijing costs roughly $250, compared with more than $1,160 in New York

First, a 10% drop does not make a hotel room cost one quarter as much in Beijing as in New York. That’s ridiculous on the face. Almost everything costs less in China than in America. America has an economy optimized to drive prices high to extract maximum profit. China has economy with actual competitive markets: if you raise prices someone else will come in underneath you. Almost all of America is operating in or as if it is in an oligopoly. There is little actual price competition because even when there are competitors they figure that competing on price is stupid: it hurts both of them. Why not both raise prices to usurious heights? Win/Win.

This doesn’t happen in China because it has competitive markets and it has competitive markets in large part because China will throw executives in prison or execute them if they engage in this sort of price collusion, whereas in the US, though ostensibly illegal based on the laws on the book, such collusion has been made legal by decades of court decisions and prosecutorial decisions. (Prosecutors mostly don’t, and when they do courts almost always refuse to convict.)

China also has lots and lots of firms and genuine low barriers to entry. If you try to collude, someone from outside your industry will enter and undercut you, and often this will be someone with deep enough pockets that you can’t win a price war with them.

Second, currency values outside of hyperinflation are driven primarily by demand for currency. That isn’t primarily about trade, it’s about investors and financial carry trade. China unquestionably has a more dynamic and larger economy than any Western nation, but it isn’t financialized: Chinese companies don’t produce the sort of returns that American companies have over the last 50 years. This is deliberate policy: if they did, then China’s economy would suck for ordinary people, like Western economies suck for ordinary people because prices would be much higher. (See that Hilton room, though it cascades thru the entire economy, with rent and food at the low end much cheaper in China too.)

It is also pretty hard to invest in China as a foreigner, while the US is set up for foreign investors. Even if you want “China exposure” it’s hard to get.

So the Yuan isn’t in massive demand, because there aren’t bullshit over-sized returns like the AI bubble. The central bank doesn’t run its policies based on “the stock market must always go up.” America has spent 50 years burning down its real economy to produce outsize “profits” due to asset pumping. China keeps asset prices under control, and when a bubble does occur, as it did in real-estate, they deliberately deflate it, bearing the cost.

None of this is particularly unique, by the way. It’s basically the way the US economy was mostly run from the 30s thru the mid 70s or so. The policy details, the ways things are done are different, but American policies were meant to encourage real economic growth and if you look at a stock market graph you’ll see it traded sideways. No 50 year bull market. Asset bubbles were discouraged. You can’t have a good economy with high real-estate prices, just can’t be done and the stock market is a secondary market, not a primary one. Emphasizing it is sheerest insanity.

There is very little that China has done which is genuinely unique, despite jingoistic assertions otherwise. The playbook they have run is the same one almost every successful industrializing nation after Britain used, and very similar to the Japanese model. What is different are two things. First, the scale, when 1.4 billion people industrialize and modernize, it shakes the world. Second, a genuine desire to help the poor, which is extremely rare during industrialization, though not unheard of. (The Gilded Age did not care about the poor. Britain’s industrialization period was driven by hurting the poor as much, or more, than they could bear. They were far better off as peasants than in factories.)

Anyway, countries can be real rich (lots of genuine productive capacity with low prices and dynamic markets) or they can be fake-rich, with financialized markets that squeeze the last penny out of consumers and immiserate workers, leading to non-competitive markets and oligarchy. China is rich. America is fake-rich.

 

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Are Multiple Russian Breakthroughs Imminent?

By

On November 26, 2025

In Russo-Ukraine War

In my Nov. 7 analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian War I missed two serious developments on the line of contact that I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to notice. After paying closer attention I came away with a big picture question: has Russia pierced the line of contact in three places or are my sources exaggerating? For the last two weeks there has been talk and rumors, some of which I have been guilty of passing along, that Russia achieved such a goal. But where?

Most observers are in rough agreement that the following five Kupyansk, Siversk, Lyman, Huliapole, and Constantinovka are under dire threat. Pokrovsk and Myrnograd are done. Finis.

But these three are the standouts.

The first, and most obvious, is in the immediate environs of Pokrovsk. As I noted November 7, west of Pokrovsk—is all open steppe land with little to no defensive terrain—all the way to Pavlograd. Will the Russians move forward? Doubtful. I stand by what I wrote two weeks ago: “Russia will consolidate its gains in and around Pokrovsk, after the Ukrainian soldiers in the pocket are killed or surrender. For some time after I foresee Russia utilization of tactical defense within an offensive framework.” But the Russians, when they are ready, will move across the steppe towards Pavlograd, en masse.

The second and most unlikely involves troops now taking Lyman, who afterwards will move south, in tandem with troops north of Pokrovsk, to encircle both Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, two large towns serving as the final obstacles on the road to Poltava. This encirclement, if attempted, would make the Pokrovsk-Myrnograd cauldron look likes child’s play. It is doable, however, and an encirclement of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk might be just the right bait for the last of the Ukraines reserves; with only enough reserves to fight in one place, this is where they’d stand. Russia can afford to tease the Ukraine as it retains the strategic initiative. It can feint, sucker punch and attack pretty much with impunity at this point in the war. Yes, Ukrainian forces can mount local counter-offensives, but the days of counter-offensives across the entire line of contact are long past.

The third—which is the most serious for the Ukraine—is in the south, where an imminent encirclement of Hulyiapole, will wrap up the flank of Ukrainian forces in the south elimanating all resistance to Zaporozhye. This operations seems well on its way to success. The Ukrainians have no answer to the Russians here.

As I mentioned above there are other places the Russians are pressuring: Kupyansk, Siversk and Constantinovka. In all three places Ukrainian defenses crumble, Russia hammers supply lines, drops FAB-500 on mustering points, lobs Iskanders on ammo dumps and bridges, and hurls thermobaric bombs at makeshift barracks and more. The Russians are doing this as near to the line of contact as possible. Everything to a purpose: shattering the will of the Ukrainian soldier to continue the fight.

Meanwhile, Russia’s strategic bombing and drone campaign against the whole of the nation escalates sans mercy.

Of the three points I mentioned above, I see the Russians grinding away deliberately and slowly; advancing at speeds of their choice around the Pokrovsk environs, and in and around Lyman. In other words, more attrition. Maybe a feint at encirclement will draw in the last of the Ukraine’s strategic reserves, which would then be attrited away as the Russians have been doing so since 2023.

Poor US TV generals, still have no big flashy red arrows or armored movements to get their war porn on.

Only in the south might we see a real breakout; a breakout that posisbly rolls up of the entire Ukrainian flank to Zaporozhye. The Russians might be at the gates in two weeks. Maybe less, maybe more. Maybe we’ll see an operational pause and then a deliberate resumption of the churn.

One fact is beyond obvious at this point: the Ukraine has lost. The question now is: how much more will they lose.

By The People? For the People?

By

On November 25, 2025

In Chinese Communist Party, Our Government vs the Government, The Twilight of Neoliberalism

The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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