Ian Welsh

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

Month: January 2026

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 04, 2026

By

On January 4, 2026

No Comments

by Tony Wikrent

Trump DHS Post Calling for ‘100 Million Deportations’ Suggests Intent to Kick Out Nonwhite Citizens

Stephen Prager, January 02, 2026 [CommonDreams]

The Trump administration provoked horror this week with the suggestion that the United States could be turned into a paradise if over a quarter of the people in the country were deported.

On Wednesday, the official social media account for the Department of Homeland Security posted a piece of artwork depicting a pink late-1960s Cadillac Eldorado parked on a bright, idyllic beach. Over the clear blue sky are the words “America after 100 million deportations.”

Happy Race War! (Or anything but the Epstein Files) — The U.S. regime’s vision for 2026 is to deport almost a third of its own population.

Jim Stewartson, January 01, 2026 [MindWar]

To put this number in perspective:

  • The total number of undocumented immigrants in America is about 14 million.
  • The total number of foreign-born people in America—including naturalized citizens—is about 53 million.
  • The total number of Black and Hispanic people in America is about 110 million.
  • 100 million is almost a third of the total U.S. population.
  • Millions would necessarily die in any such process.
  • The economy would collapse.

The “third world” framing in the post makes the intention explicit. It’s not about crime or even immigrants; it’s about race. The only conclusion you can reach is that DHS’s goal is to forcibly transform America into a whites-only ethnostate like apartheid South Africa—by deporting every Black and brown person… somewhere….

DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm U.S. Citizenship 

[Reason, via Naked Capitalism 01-03-2025]

Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here

Radley Balko, December 24, 2025 [The New Republic]

With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse….

…Over the last year, I’ve spoken to and met with immigration attorneys and advocates all over the country. Many who openly spoke with me prior to the 2024 election are no longer willing to be quoted, fearing retaliation against their organizations or their funders, or even against them personally.

In more recent months, I’ve also interviewed former ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials, and former Immigration Court judges who served across multiple administrations of both parties. Career legal and law enforcement officials tend to be circumspect in their critiques of fellow law enforcement officers. They tend to avoid casual references to police states, or comparing U.S. police agencies to those in authoritarian countries. That’s no longer the case. These career police executives and prosecutors now use language I’ve rarely heard from current or former government officials in my career….

Read More

Maduro Kidnapped

By

On January 3, 2026

61 Comments

Didn’t expect this. Guess enough of the military wasn’t loyal or competent. Won’t work out well for the US in the longer run, but here we go again. Hell of a precedent to set. If I were Mexico’s President I’d be very worried. Hope she can trust enough of her military.

A lot will depend on if a new leader not approved by the US steps up, ideally a military man. Don’t know enough about Venezuela to have an opinion on this. Decapitation strikes don’t work on real movements (see Ansar-Allah.)

However, more likely a “unity government” will be announced, the US oil majors will be let back in and so on. It’ll be interesting to see if an insurgency springs up or not. If I were China (I’m not, and they tend to be more passive than I think is wise) I’d happily supply any insurgency that does happen.

Anyway, discuss here.

Update: US President #DonaldTrump said in a press conference that the US is going to “run #Venezuela.” Trump added that the #US will run the country until it decides a “safe, proper, and judicious” transition is in place. He said that the US does not want to be involved with “having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”

Update 2: Could be that the kidnapping did nothing but replace Maduro with someone more competent. Alternatively Delcy, whom the US has acknowledged as head of state, lead the negotiations to sell out Maduro. We’ll see.

 

Open Thread

By

On January 3, 2026

7 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Accelerating Nature Of Financialization Collapse

By

On January 1, 2026

21 Comments

There’s a lot of confusion about the end of the American empire, and the fall of neoliberalism. Many people think the US will just be in “second place” and it’ll be OK.

No.

The problem is the nature of America’s decline. Since 1980 the US economy has been progressively financialized. Profits are all that matters, not what is done to make profits. In properly functioning markets the idea is that products fill a need, on net improve human welfare and lead to more growth of real products.

If a company doesn’t make a profit, that means it isn’t growing the real economy with products which are a net positive. In such a case it goes out of business.

This is approximately how the Chinese economy works. It’s how the US economy worked for much of its history. It’s how the British economy worked up till about 1890 or so.

It’s not how the US economy works.

You could say that the US economy is currently auto-catabolic. The more money that is made, the more the real economy is damaged. You see this most purely in Private Equity. They buy up companies, loot the company, load it up with the debt (including all the debt used to buy the company), then the company goes out of business. This is what happened ToysRUs, it is also, contrary to the current storyline, what happened to Blockbuster. The company was trying to pivot to online, but all profits were drained out by PE owners.

This happened to, literally, tens of of thousands of company.

The sort of monopoly roll-ups which Matt Stoller so ably covers increase prices without increasing product quality. Health care price increases provide no utility (you can get a CT or MRI scan in China for under $100.) All of this damages the economy. Headline GDP goes up, but the actual strength of the economy decreases. I would estimate that fully half of US GDP is essentially “fake”, driven entirely by increased prices and fake profits. The US economy has been smaller than China’s, in real (not PPP adjusted, but “how much do we produce”) terms for at least ten years.

This process continues till there is no muscle left to consume.

The only possibility of the US avoiding the UK’s fate, despite being a continental power, is for the oligarchs to lose power and for there to be a huge compression of asset and service prices. This process will be extremely painful and is currently politically impossible, due to the control of the duopoly. Both parties are owned by oligarchs, the tech bros are rising and none of them have the least interest in creating a good economy when it’s so much more profitable to loot America.

Real innovation is moving to China and will increasingly do so. They are at least equal in pharma and will soon be ahead in biotech. Their markets prioritize increased production (which westerners complain about as “over-capacity.”) The Chinese government does not want high GDP numbers or high profits, they want increased human welfare and a more powerful state and country. So their markets are organized, well, as actually competitive markets, the most “free” in any major economy.

So Americans who are patting themselves on the back, figuring “well, how bad can it get? We’ll still be number 2” are underestimating how bad the economy is going to get. India is effectively a continental power too, and it punches way below its geographical weight.

This isn’t to say there is no hope for the US, but decline has a long way to go yet because reversing it requires the most powerful people in society to give up massive profits, and many of them, in the process, would lose their fortunes. Meanwhile many ordinary Americans are still doing “OK” if not great, and they don’t want radical (change from the roots) change either.

All of this is not a worse case scenario either, it’s the default—maybe even slightly optimistic. The worst case scenario involves some form of civil war, not like the War between the States, but low grade shit wafare that slowly drives a country into the dirt.

The bottom is not yet close.

This site is only viable due to reader donations. If you value it and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén