Ian Welsh

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

Month: May 2025 Page 2 of 5

What Do You Call Two Dead Nazis?

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On May 22, 2025

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A good start.

So, someone killed two Israeli diplomats in D.C., and everyone is crying crocodile tears and screaming about anti-semitism. (One of them was a Christian fundamentalist, as an aside.)

These two diplomats are agents of a genocidal state. Their job is to keep the weapons and ammunition flowing to Israel so that Israel can kill more Palestinians, wipe out the last remaining hospital, torture Palestinians, rape Palestinians (including, it appears, with dogs), deliberately snipe children in the head, cause a huge famine, and turn every building in Gaza into dust.

And I’ve left a number of sickening crimes out.

So, am I sad they are dead? No. Am I going to pretend I give a shit when someone who supports genocide winds up dead? No. Every single pious well-wishing for Biden is the equivalent of wishing Petain, the leader of Vichy France, who helped the Holocaust along, a good life.

All of these people are knowingly involved in genocide. They have had many opportunities to stop supporting mass murder, and they have refused every single one of them.

They are all, forgive me for using the word, evil. The bad guys. Torture. Rape. Mass murder. Deliberate killing of children.

It is my dream that every single one of them will eventually hang from the neck for their crimes. No exceptions. I think it would be wise to add the corporate leadership of companies like Palantir and Microsoft, both of which are helping the genocide along.

This is a moral stance, but it is also a pragmatic stance. People who have gotten away with genocide once are not the sort of people anyone wise wants in their society, or in a position of power anywhere. Once could easily become twice.

You don’t even have to give a damn about Palestinians. You just have to have good judgment, and a concern for your own neck and the lives, rectums, and limbs of people you care about.

From the neck. Unil dead. For everyone who knowingly aided or committed genocide.

(Addendum): If this is someone lashing out in rage at any Jew and just happening to kill two Israeli diplomats I can only say, “Thank God he killed evil people,” and note that the reason that people are conflating “Jewish” with “Zionist,” as I have written repeatedly, is that Israel constantly says they’re the same thing, and then goes on to mass murder children, rape, torture, and so on. Some people are going to believe them, “Oh, Israel is Jewish, not Zionist. The Israelis say they’re the same thing, and so do many non-Israeli Jews. I guess they know what they’re talking about.” Nobody and nothing causes more anti-semitism in the world than Israel itself. For them to cry crocodile tears about anti-Jewish racism after plastering themselves with the Torah then covering themselves in the blood of children is nauseating.

And, for a little leavening of the anger and rage, a classic:

Treasury Bond Auction Is Extremely Weak

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On May 21, 2025

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Whoa, Nelly!

•U.S. 20Y Yield: Spiked to 5.097%, up +10.7 bps intraday. •10Y Yield: Rose +11.1 bps to 4.592% •30Y Yield: Jumped +10 bps to 5.067%

This caused stocks to trend down and even the dollar. Simply put, the US is adding a lot of debt, reducing revenue by cutting taxes, and there’s wild amounts of uncertainties due to Trump’s tariff and trade policies. Bond traders are worried, Japan is reducing its Treasuries’ holdings, and everyone is looking imploringly at the Federal Reserve.

As a friend quipped, “the economy is perfectly healthy, as long as we keep it on life support.”

Which is to say the likely result is that the Federal Reserve will have to step up and start buying Treasuries again. The last time it did that was during Covid.

“Print more money to bail out elites.”

But here’s the problem. The US really is trouble. Yes, in principle the US can print as much money as it wants, like any sovereign that issues its own currency. But that’s not the issue. The question is, “What does the money being printed produce?”

QE has essentially produced richer elites, more monopolization, a poorer general population (a recent study found 60 percent of Americans cannot afford a “decent” lifestyle), and higher prices. You could also say it has funded a less competitive US that is falling further and further behind in technology.

It’s what you spend money on that matters. All QE has EVER done is make it so that current elites stay in power, keep getting richer, and are rewarded for driving Americans into the ground at very accelerating speeds.

The Fed can’t rescue the US from spending its money to do all the wrong things. That requires legislative and executive action. Those parts of the government, however, are even more fickle and stupid than the Fed, which is like saying that Mount Everest is taller than K2. Technically true, but both are so tall (stupid) that it beggars belief.

If there’s something the US can do wrong right now, it’s doing it wrong, and it if it isn’t, it’s a legacy policy they haven’t gotten around to fucking up yet.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Attempt to Find a Democratic Joe Rogan or Beat the Right Online Will Fail

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On May 20, 2025

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Open your wallets, donors:

At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.”

Here’s the thing, Rogan could lean left (not centrist, left). Remember this?

Here’s the deal: There will never been a popular, centrist online presence which is stronger than the right-wing populist one. Centrists don’t do popular. They don’t have the instincts. It’s all about pandering to elite and PMC ideology — think Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and their ilk. They can run numbers, sure, but no one gets super worked up. No one who wasn’t going to vote Democratic no matter what loves them.

Rogan is a populist. He was willing to go left, he’s willing to go right. He’s not going to go Centrist. There will never be a centrist Joe Rogan.

This is a symptom of a larger problem.

Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.

If by “left-leaning” they meant left, this would be theoretically possible, but what they mean is centrist:

Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media-like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.

It’s been memory-holed, but there was a time when the left was stronger than the right online — vastly stronger. In the 2000’s, the days of the so-called Netroots or blogosphere, it wasn’t even close. The big names were left-wing, and the biggest right-wingers did numbers that were one-tenth of theirs.

This was widely acknowledged. There were mainstream press articles about the right-wing’s online problems.

Then Obama took power, and the word went out: If you’re a Democratic operative or donor, you should stop funding Netroots, and if you don’t, well, you will be frozen out of work as an operative, and if you’re donor, your interests will not be prioritized.

It was there, I was an insider, and I know. The combination of Google and Facebook systematically driving advertising revenues into the dirt, along with some other issues (basically related to Democratic core voters lack of any actual principles other than, “Our party is always right, the Republicans are always wrong, and the left owes us their votes and has nowhere to go”), Netroots died. It took a few years, but the job was done.

The Netroots’ mantra was, “more and better Democrats.” We fundraised for Democrats, but we also primaried Democrats we considered bad. This was unconscionsable to Democratic power brokers. We were supposed to be entirely an adjunct and not interfere in internal Democratic politics at all. So, they put Netroots down like a diseased dog.

Democrats want a cheering section. They don’t want anyone who will do anything but promote the candidates chosen by insiders.

That’s NOT how a popular online movement works. It isn’t how any of the movements which have been successful on the right worked. They all primaried Republicans they didn’t like and pushed policies they believed in — even if the party didn’t agree.

So donors can throw as much money as they like at the problem, but unless they’re willing to fund the actual left, and to understand that funding doesn’t mean they get complete control, they will fail.

It would be better to encourage already existing, left-wing populist figures and give them some funding, as opposed to trying to astroturf a new online movement.

But then, an already-existing figure might say, “Free Palestine” or “Biden is senile,” and they can’t have that.

No one will really trust an astroturfed “left-wing” figure, and they won’t grow to huge stars.

You can have effective, powerful left-wing online populists, or you can have court eunuchs who always back the party line.

Choose one.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

America’s Military Power Is a Legacy Asset

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On May 19, 2025

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Since the industrial revolution, military power has been largely a function of three factors:

  1. Technology
  2. Industrial Capacity
  3. Population

As time goes by, population becomes less important (see, rise of drones), but it still matters. Think of it as something like Tech x IndCap x (Pop x .5).

The US has a powerful military, though most of the technology is one or two generations old. The general consensus is that Pakistan’s Chinese jets (themselves last-gen tech) out-performed India’s Western jets.

At this point, China is ahead in about 80 percent of tech fields. China has 31 percent of world industrial capacity, and the US about 16 percent, meaning that China has about twice as much. Further, China owns the entire supply chain for many of its technologies, whereas the US’s supply chain is reliant on China.

Finally, of course, China’s share of world industrial capacity is increasing.

A lot of civilian industry can easily be turned into military tech. This is what made the US “the arsenal of democracy” in World War II.

China has about 230x the shipbuilding capacity of the US.

China produces about 20K civilian drones a day. The US produces about 20K civilian drones a year.

The US and Canada combined produce about 12 million cars a year. China produces about 30 million cars a year.

So in a real war, where civilian industry is retooled for military production, well, China is well ahead. In the case of drones and ships, ludicrously ahead.

The US finds itself in a similar position to Japan on the eve of the Pacific War. Japan had a powerful fleet and air force, but it couldn’t replace equipment losses to match the rate of the US, let alone expand its arsenal. If it isn’t a “short victorious war,” the US loses, unless it goes nuclear, in which case everyone loses.

This imbalance is only going to get worse. China has a ridiculously small army of about two million, with a million paramilitary. When you consider its population of 1.4 billion, well, again, China is similar to the US before WW2; an industrial behemoth with an undersize military, but which can be expected to ramp up — fast.

(These numbers are better if one includes South Korea and Japan, or even the EU, but then one has to add Russia to the Chinese side. And the way the US is acting, it’s less and less clear its allies will support it in a shooting war, especially if it starts the war. Never thought I’d say that about Japan, but Trump has really shit the bed with his insane trade war.)

All of this is going to get worse and worse for the US. China is increasing its tech and industrial lead, while the US is systematically de-funding its research sector even as erratic economic policy makes long-term investment in new industrial capacity difficult. China’s civilian airline industry is taking off, its car industry is expanding as the West’s collapse, and it’s the only real player in the drone space.

China doesn’t want a war for the simple reason that the longer they put one off, the easier it will be if it happens — and the less likely it will be to happen, because Americans will be unable to sustain the delusion that they have any chance of winning said war.

The American era is over. It’s even likely that the US will lose control of South America, which it has had since the late 19th century. (Yes, there were theoretically independent nations in South America. Theoretically.) It will be pushed back to its North American stronghold, where it even seems to be attempting to lose effective control of Mexico and Canada, which is an entirely self-inflicted wound, as both nations wanted to stay under the US wing.

Just as the sun set on the British Empire, today it is at the horizon for America, and the long European supremacy is nearly over. The world returns to its normal state, where the Middle Kingdom is the most important and prosperous country in the world.

 

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 18, 2025

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On May 18, 2025

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by Tony Wikrent

 

The (anti)Federalist Society assault on the Constitution

Trump in TROUBLE as Amy Coney Barrett SNAPS at Supreme Court (YouTube video)

[Legal AF, May 16, 2025]

[TW: Leah Litman, Michael Popok and Alex Aronson discuss the Supreme Court hearings on Friday 5-16-2025. This is ostensibly about birthright citizenship, but perhaps the more important issue is  whether US District courts can impose injunctions nationwide. I do not recall ever before having linked to a discussion of Supreme Court hearings, but these were extraordinary in showing how (anti)Republicans and conservative are attempting to obliterate two and a half centuries of legal development and reasoning in the USA republic’s experiment in self government. Recall that the (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians repeatedly sought and obtained injunctions to stop implementation of Biden policies they disliked. But now that Democrats and liberals are stopping Trump policies with court injunctions, (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are arguing that only the Supreme Court can impose nationwide injunctions.

[But it’s even worse: Trump’s former personal attorney, now serving as U.S. Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, actually argued that a court injunction can apply only to the particular case and the particular litigant. (This was the point in the hearings that Justice Amy Coney Barrett sputtered “Really?” with some incredulity.) In other words, according to Sauer, if you want to prevent Trump / Musk / DOGE from disposing of 12,351 workers from an agency, you would need 12,351 injunctions for each of the 12,351 agency workers to protect all of them. As Justice Sonya Sotomayor, pointedly asked Sauer, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Litman, Popok and Aronson also discuss how (anti)Republicans and conservatives / libertarians are pushing for laws and legal decisions that would almost totally restrict the path for class action lawsuits, the only alternative to using court injunctions to legally protect large groups of people. With this, you see the outlines of the legal assault on American law and jurisprudence that has been developed during the past half century in the seminars and conferences by the Heritage Foundation, Federalist Society, Mercatus Center, and the rest of the apparatus of plutocrat-funded conservatives and libertarian entities.

[As I have argued before, the “left’s” response to this assault on American law and jurisprudence has been crippled by the “left” rejecting the legitimacy of American history and institutions for being based on racism and misogyny. I firmly believe this is the primary reason the doctrines and ideas being developed by conservatives and libertarians were largely ignored for the past half century. The “left” has yet to deal with the question of why the plutocrats are expending so much to reinterpret and change American law and jurisprudence. What was there in place before the plutocratic assault that plutocrats want to obliterate, and the “left” has been ignoring?

[Especially frightening is that “Justices” Thomas and Alito appear to have accepted Sauer’s arguments.]

In Birthright Citizenship Case, Trump DOJ Asks Supreme Court Justices to Make Themselves Irrelevant

Garrett Epps, May 16, 2025 [Washington Monthly]

… Thursday’s argument had two aspects, which appeared and disappeared like the Katzenjammer Kids playing peekaboo throughout the nearly three hours of oral argument. The Court had formally assembled to hear the first: When is it okay for one federal district judge to block a government policy nationwide?

The second was: Has every Congress, every Court, and every administration for the past century and a half read the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause wrong, leaving Donald Trump, on his sole authority, to upend the rule that all babies born in the U.S., except the children of diplomatic families, are citizens at birth?

Though Sauer began his argument by boldly proclaiming the administration’s novel interpretation of the Amendment (it applied, he said, only to the children of free slaves in 1868 and has no effect on the children of immigrants today), he quickly moved to the administration’s real aim in bringing this “emergency docket” application before the Court.

In Sauer’s view, the case was about a broader issue than the permissibility of “universal injunctions” (federal district court orders that block new executive policies nationwide). Article III of the Constitution, which created the federal judiciary and gives it its powers, he argued, does not permit any federal court, at any level, to issue such injunctions.

This raises the question: What if the government loses in the district court—and then loses again in the Court of Appeals? What if it loses in the Supreme Court? What court can order it to stop engaging in behavior that Article III courts have found to violate the Constitution?

Without quite saying so, Sauer let it be known that the answer is: None.

If plaintiffs won in the Supreme Court, he graciously conceded, they could take the judgment to the bank—for themselves, that is. But Sotomayor asked him, once the Court decided the constitutional issue, would its order bind the government to stop the unconstitutional action against anyone?

Well . . . said Sauer . . . Not so much.

The result of such a case, Sauer said, would not be a Supreme Court order binding everyone else, but instead a Supreme Court precedent. And of course, plaintiffs still being injured by a government policy (for example, by being rendered stateless by an executive order) could cite that precedent in their cases. “If there was a decision that violated the precedent of the Court, then the affected plaintiffs could get a separate judgment,” he said.

Responded Sotomayor, “You’re talking about the hundreds and thousands of people who weren’t part of the judgment of the court. They would all have to file individual actions?”

Maybe not, said Sauer—if the case could satisfy “the rigorous criteria of Rule 23,” to be certified as a class action.

But if not, said Sotomayor, “you are claiming that not just the Supreme Court—that both the Supreme Court—and no lower court can stop an executive from universally, from violating those holdings by this Court.”….

If a president can simply wave away that much adverse authority—and then only grudgingly apply his losses in court—then the role of the federal courts will be, from now on, quite different from the one they have played for the past 100 years. American-style judicial review would become something like the Mexican writ of amparo, by which parties can get a judgment blocking an unconstitutional law only as to their individual cases; others in the same situation must go to court to get their own amparo. In the atomized world envisioned by the administration, judicial review might be called the Writ of Sisyphus. No matter how often a court pushes the rock up the hill, it will face the same task over and over if the government so chooses.

 

The Visionary of Trump 2.0: Russell Vought is advancing a radical ideological project decades in the making.

McKay Coppins, May 16, 2025 [The Atlantic, via ownwithtyranny.com]

…Vought’s critics have warned that elements of his agenda— for example, unilaterally cutting off funding for congressionally established agencies such as USAID— are eroding checks and balances and pushing the country toward a constitutional crisis. But in interviews over the past several weeks, some of his allies told me that’s the whole point. The kind of revolutionary upending of the constitutional order that Vought envisions won’t happen without deliberate fights with Congress and the judiciary, they told me. If a crisis is coming, it’s because Vought is courting one.
Bannon told me that mainstream Republicans have long complained about runaway federal bureaucracy but have never had the stomach to take on the problem directly. Vought, by contrast, is strategically forcing confrontations with the other branches of government. “What Russ represents, and what the Romneys and McConnells don’t understand, is that the old politics is over,” he said. “There’s no compromise here. One side is going to win, one side is going to lose, so let’s get it on.”
… Vought himself has written that we are living in a “post-Constitutional time.” Progressives, he argues, have so thoroughly “perverted” the Founders’ vision by filling the ranks of government with unaccountable technocrats that undoing the damage will require a “radical” plan of attack. “The Right needs to throw off the precedents and legal paradigms that have wrongly developed over the last two hundred years,” he wrote in an essay for The American Mind, a journal published by the Claremont Institute.
What exactly would such an approach look like in practice? Mike Davis, a Republican lawyer and a friend of Vought’s who helped steer judicial nominations in Trump’s first term, told me that he expects an escalating series of standoffs between the Trump administration and the judicial branch. He went so far as to say that if the Supreme Court issues a decision that constrains Trump’s executive power in a way the administration sees as unconstitutional, the president will have to defy it. “The reptiles will never drain the swamp,” Davis told me. “It’s going to take bold actions.”

The End of Rule of Law in America

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Amidst Everything Else, the Palestinian Genocide Is Picking Up Steam

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On May 16, 2025

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A healthy person can survive forty to sixty days without food, depending on how fat they were to begin with. Women last longer than men (women are better at all extreme endurance feats I am aware of).

It’s been about two months since Israel cut off all food and water to Gaza. There were storehouses and some food, and it took about 30-40 days to exhaust the stores, but even before that, there wasn’t enough.

And even before this cut-off there wasn’t enough. There was a brief period after Trump took power with supplies moving in large amounts, but since the start of the crisis, Israel has been choking off food, medicine, and everything else, and Israeli citizens have stopped and hijacked aid trucks.

So, there aren’t any fat people in Gaza, except for some Zionist genociders who cosplay as soldiers. Most people in Gaza haven’t had enough food for well over a year.

Palestinians are going to start dying in massive numbers right about now, and the deaths will accelerate.

This is the first live-streamed genocide. Everyone knows it’s happening, and no one except the Ansar-Allah is doing shit, though credit to Hezbollah for trying until Mossad ripped them apart. (I do maintain Hezbollah’s strategy was awful, but that’s water under the bridge. At least they tried.)

I include Iran in this general indictment. It has enough missiles to really hurt Israel and proved that it could get thru the “Iron” Dome.

But, again, they’ve done more than pretty much every other country in the world.

I will note, for the record, though that it’s unlikely to matter much, that for the rest of my life I will judge people based on whether they were against the Palestinian genocide at the time. In a few years almost everyone will pretend they were against it, but we have receipts. And even if you are good to puppies and children, give lots of money to charities and are perfectly aligned with my politics on everything else, I will regard you as evil and a piece of human garbage, who could only improve the world by committing suicide, if you were OK with this.

This genocide could be stopped tomorrow by the US simply halting all shipments and aid to Israel. Even Europe, were it to act similarly, might be able to stop it.

But no one with the power to do anything decisive, is. Which means they’re all monsters.

And if you are depraved enough to think “who cares, it doesn’t affect me?”, let me assure you that on top of being human filth, you are also stupid and a fool. If they’ll do it to Palestinians, they’d do it to you and yours if they thought it was in their interest and they could get away with it.

Which, so far, they have every reason to believe they could.

Certain actions, like genocide, rape, torture and deliberate child murder have to be off the table entirely for the protection of everyone. You never want to normalize them, even if you are an evil piece of shit, because once something becomes routine, who knows who is next on the table?

Welcome to Hell.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

The Unifying Goal of Right & Center Elites

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On May 15, 2025

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Getting elites attention

What the right wants from its followers is for them to be riven by hatred of any difference, thus making them easy to manipulate and willing to sell out their economic values in exchange for seeing brown people beaten, and women and trans people losing control over their own bodies.

What neoliberals want is for their followers to be convinced that each group, even each micro group, is on its own, unable to understand each other and thus that solidarity is impossible and all one can hope for is that some member of the identity group is allowed to join the elite, while most of all groups remain in poverty.

They’re very similar, really. In both cases hatred of other groups is inculcated as the core value, as a way of making manipulation easy and avoiding having to actually deal with broad issues of well being.

Both of these are variations on “divide and conquer”. It costs a lot less to give a few people something than to give many people something. “Want some women and minorities in power? Sure. Costs us almost nothing.”

“Want women to be forced to bear rape children and die in pregnancy due to lack of necessary abortions? Sure, costs us nothing. Our women can still get abortions.

“Want trans people excluded and denied health care? Sure, they’re a tiny part of the population and rich trans people will be fine.”

On the other hand giving everyone healthcare would cut a lot of profits. Giving everyone a liveable wage or assistance to those who can’t work or find jobs: that would cost a lot of profits.

“You can have anything you want, as long as it doesn’t make elites poorer.”

On that the right and center are unified.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

 

Capitalists Only Respond to Threats

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On May 14, 2025

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Stumbled on this chart recently:

It kind of tells its own story.

It’s worth reading The Communist Manifesto. People have weird ideas about it, but a lot of it is really unexceptionable. For example, Marx and Engels demanded pensions for old folks.

Capitalists looked at this, and said, “Oh, we can do this if the alternative is worse,” and introduced them. Someone as hard-headed as Bismarck responded this way.

The threat of a credible enemy ideology which treats ordinary people better than capitalists do forces capitalists to change. For a long time, we haven’t had that, but the single party “Marxist-but-with-capitalism” CCP offers another. And yes, they do (overall), treat their workers better, as well as being better at capitalism than capitalists. No one is as obsessed with how markets actually work as Marxist economists.

Let’s look at another of my favorite charts:

Oh hey! Having powerful organizations taking the part of workers matters.

Something happened right after Reagan took power:

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Strikes involving more than 1,000 workers

Then there’s this:

(The numbers have gone down since then, but they’re still vastly high, and far, far higher than China.

Break the unions and lock up the people who won’t obey bullshit (a.k.a. drug) laws.

Class war is real, and constantly ongoing, and elites have won that war.

Power and fear is all that capitalists ever respond to.

Always remember that.

This blog has always been free to read, but it isn’t free to produce. If you’d like to support my writing, I’d appreciate it. You can donate or subscribe by clicking on this link.

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