Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 6 of 436

America Psychopathy Continues To Stun (Cuba Edition)

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On February 9, 2026

33 Comments

So, as you probably know America is stopping all fuel from reaching Cuba. They’ll be out in days. Tomorrow the jet fuel runs out, so no more international flights.

But the real issue is that no fuel means no diesel tractors, no distribution of food, not enough refridgeration: in a word, famine.

This is deliberate US policy. Mexico has a sent a couple of ships full of food with a military escort, but that’s irrelevant: without fuel the food will not get where it needs to go and cannot be preserved. She doesn’t have the guts to send oil, which is understandable.

This is the problem with the fall of the USSR. No one these days has the balls, desire and ability to stand up to the US when it pulls shit like this. Russia’s busy and a lot weaker than it used to be, plus they’re basically just off-brand capitalists now, China doesn’t care and doesn’t have a navy with enough projection power yet, and the EU are spineless (that may be changing somewhat, but not fast enough.) Everyone else is too weak and too scared.

An international convoy system, with each convoy guarded by military ships from multiple countries might work, but I see no sign anyone is even talking about it, let alone organizing.

So Cubans will starve if Trump keeps this up and Cuba doesn’t capitulate and let America choose its government.

This is a direct result of Trump getting away with his naval blockade on Venezuela: in that case not letting them send oil out. No one did anything to stop America or to even impose a cost, so on to Cuba.

China could simply cut off all access to some key manufactured goods like magnets or any of hundreds of other goods where they’re the only supplier, including goods that the US has to have to make weapons. But this doesn’t really matter to them, so they aren’t. Or a coalition of other countries could all sanction the US at the same time, but again, no.

Perhaps your question is “why should they?”

I’m glad you asked, imaginary but helpful reader.

Because Trump started with Venezuela, then went to Cuba. Who will he go to next? There are four strategies for dealing with bullies:

  1. Join them and beat up their victims. (We’ll call this the NATO strategy.) If you help them, and kiss their ass enough, maybe they won’t attack you. Works surprisingly well, until it doesn’t. Ask Denmark about that. Or Canada. Or, well, the EU as a whole.
  2. Fight back. If you’re too weak, get together with your friends. Even if you lose, make them hurt. And you might win (Vietnam says “Hi! America still cringes every time they hear our name!”)
  3. Scurry like rats into corners and hope they don’t pick you as their next victim.
  4. Ignore them if you’re as strong or stronger than them. Bullies only attack those weaker than them. You aren’t. Who cares who they beat up as long as it isn’t you?

Most of the world is picking : “scurry like rats!” China isn’t, they’re picking “Who cares if they beat someone else up, they can’t do it to us!”

There’s a lot to be said for , as long as you’re sure you’ll never be weaker than the bully (a safe bet for China right now) and don’t give a damn about anybody but yourself.

But , “scurry like rats, hoping you aren’t the next victim” is stupid. Each successful victimization just whets the bully’s appetite and the more cowardice he sees, the more he pushes people around. Victims multiply.

Don’t want America, under Trump or another President to revisit the Greenland situation with an amphibious assault one fine morning?

Send those convoys to Cuba or find some other way to hurt America in general and Trump in specific. Not because you care about Cubans or, heck, human welfare. Gaza has revealed you don’t give a shit. But because you’re protecting yourself by protecting others, setting the precedent that the powerful can’t just pick you off one by one.

But that would require statesmen with guts, wouldn’t it?

Ain’t none of them in the EU with any power.

So I guess the Cubans will starve, just like the Palestinians, in a 100% manmade famine which the US either caused (Cuba) or which couldn’t have happened without American assistance (Palestine.)

Remember, the Athenians in the Melian dialogue were right “The powerful do what they will, the weak suffer what they must” but so were the Melians when they pointed out that with every atrocity the Athenians were alienating others, and that they, too, would suffer.

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Open Thread

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On February 7, 2026

16 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Are The Boomers To Blame For America’s Decline?

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On February 6, 2026

30 Comments

It’s common to slap all the blame on Boomers, but it’s not really fair, though they certainly did plenty of harm. (Yes, some Boomers, elites are more to blame, yadda, yadda.)

But it wasn’t just the boomers. The so-called Reagan Republicans included a ton of GI Generation and Silents. The issue is that the people who created the FDR system weren’t GI Gen, they were Lost and Missionary generation. GI Gen and later lived in the economy created by those generations, but they didn’t really understand how and why it worked because they weren’t adults during the 1920s, so they didn’t get what it was reacting against or what it was trying to fix and avoid a recurrence of.

GI Gen and Silent leaders looked at all the rules FDR and co had put in place and they didn’t really understand why they existed: the rules looked stupid, there seemed to be tons of them,  and they figured “we’re smarter than they were, we won’t do stupid things and life will be a lot easier with less regulation.”

Well that was the rationalization: the other issue was simple enough. Getting rid of the rules let a lot of people become rich and even the middle class thought they’d benefit (and many did, with rising housing and stock prices and lower taxes.) The rules had, quite explicitly, been intended to make sure there couldn’t be another Gilded Age nor another roaring twenties — no stock bubbles, no super rich.

But, of course, a lot of people, especially with power, wanted to become super-rich, or at least richer and getting rid of the rules that were meant to stop that was a no-brainer. Enough middle class people were convinced to go along, and enough racists also joined in (Reagan and Nixon ran heavily on racism.) So a coalition was created which destroyed what had come before.

This started before Reagan, as someone will chime in to tell us, but Reagan was the formalization, the big break.

It happened because people wanted unearned wealth, and because the old system had broken (oil spikes, end of Bretton Woods, end of gold money, staglfation, and no one knew how to fix it (or no one anyone was willing to listen to) because the architects were all old or dead.)

So when offered “you can get rich or at least affluent without work and stick it to the niggers too” a lot of people took that deal. It wasn’t just the Boomers—Silents and GI were key to it, more key than the Boomers in the early years. It’s just that they’re all dead now so we blame the Boomers. Gen-X was complicit, but were still children when the key changes were made.

Boomers get all the blame, but they didn’t start the fire that burned down the old order, they simply threw fuel on it (Clinton, especially) when they could.

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How Boeing Made Record Profits And Burned Down The Company

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On February 5, 2026

19 Comments

One of the most important things to understand about companies and countries both is the difference between sustainable prosperity and burning down the house.

You’re probably aware that Boeing has serious problems. Those problems have been obviously “on the way” for a long time. When Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle (where it makes most of its planes) to Chicago, the writing was on the wall.

BUT it was also a good time to buy Boeing stock:

The move to Chicago meant that Boeing’s executives had moved away from the manufacturing floor. It was the sign that Boeing’s culture was no longer “Engineering from top to bottom” but finance driven. And that emphasis on finance, on juicing profits, increasing executive salaries and driving up stock prices (those stock options don’t pay otherwise) had an effect. You can see it in the chart above.

Here’s a more recent chart:

Ouch.

What had happened is that Boeing was forced by the Clinton administration to merge with its competitor McDonnell Douglas in 1997. McDonnell Douglas was an “MBA” firm. Boeing was an engineering firm. The takeover changed Boeing’s culture and leadership, engineering became secondary and for over 20 years, it was good to be a stockholder.

But Boeing’s ability to make and design planes took a huge hit, there were massive quality problems and employees below the executive rank were angry and demoralized. Boeing planes started falling out of the sky. They were unable to make reliable rockets any more and eventually spending all their time on juicing profits blew up in the face.

This is a general law. The same thing happened at General Electric. If you’re old enough you remember GE as an American industrial giant, making everything from turbines to washing machines. It was a technological pioneer. Then Jack Welch took over, started firing 10% of employees every year (the “lowest performers”, supposedly) and turned GE into a finance company. After all, profits from finance are much higher than profits from manufacturing.

Unfortunately, as with American car companies, GE wasn’t really a bank. Its financial profits were still dependent on being a major industrial company, but Welch didn’t believe in manufacturing. And now GE is a shadow of itself. Jack Welch? Well he got rich, he was lionized as one of the great CEOs of the era, and he retired before GE went completely to hell.

GE will never recover, and with it went a big chunk of America’s industrial and technological might.

And it’s unlikely Boeing will really recover. If it wasn’t for China, it would be possible. But China’s building its own civilian airliners now. They’re not caught up yet: they can’t make the jet engines, but they will be able to soon. (They make excellent jet fighters, probably better than the equivalent American planes, as performance in the recent India/Pakistan border incident showed.)

So China’s likely five years out from producing cheaper more reliable planes than Boeing, which is to say, cheaper and more reliable than American jets. The European market is going to turn hard away from Boeing due to Trump’s games and their having Airbus jets as an alternative. So what’s left for Boeing? Geopolitical risk is too high for anyone but Americans to buy their planes, and Chinese jets will cost less. If you don’t want Chinese, buy European.

They screwed up the rocket they were building for NASA, giving the market to SpaceX by default (and perhaps soon other new companies.) American fighter jets are worse than Chinese jets, and even if they’re better than some other alternatives, the market is crashing on them, because with modern software, you can’t use them if the US decides to stop you. They effectively have a kill switch. Given the US has recently threatened both Europe (Greenland) and Canada, who the Hell wants to buy an American jet, when America is the danger?

Buy Russian. Buy Chinese. Buy European. But American? You’d have to be a moron.

Now let’s look at the US economy overall:

The entire US economy is being burned down. Those high profits aren’t a sign of health, they are a sign that excess profits are being taken at the expense of reinvestment in production and tech; of too high cost structures that make producing in America too expensive (because those profits indicate higher prices); of non-competitive markets, and, generally speaking, of burning down companies or the economy, or both, to make unsustainable profits.

The problem is simple enough. China’s now ahead in 89% of techs. Prices for its goods are much lower. Who the Hell is going to buy American goods? Two years ago there was an answer. American allies would, even at higher costs, because they were scared of China and wanted to stay on America’s good side. But now? After America has proved more dangerous than China to Europe and Canada and after Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs and other insane trade moves?

China’s looking mighty good, and America is the threat.

Oh people will still “invest” in the US, if you want to call it that. If America’s in its final stages of burning down the house to generate high profits, why not? But I suspect that even that is going to drop significantly because the geopolitical and exchange rate risk is just too high. As America declines, the US dollar will as well, and when you adjust for drops in the dollar, those returns aren’t going to look so great to non Americans.

The “Burning Down the House To Generate Heat” metaphor is one for our age. Not just for Boeing or America and its economy, but for humanity and ecosphere.

Welcome to the end of American Empire.

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The Amount Of Contempt Elites Have For Public Intelligence Is Breathtaking

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On February 4, 2026

33 Comments

The latest episode is an attempt to suggest Epstein was working for Russia:

This is ridiculous. Epstein was close friends with the Israeli Prime Ministers. Ghislaine Maxwell’s father Robert Maxwell might have been Israel’s most important spy. Israel’s fingerprints are all over the Epstein files, and there are almost no significant ties to Russia. There’s one email where Epstein tries to coach Trump on how to deal with Putin, and some trafficking ties, though more to Ukraine than to Russia, but they are dwarfed by Israeli ties.

Source

Elites think we’re morons. But hey, why not? I mean the “Trump is a Russian asset” lie worked (he massively increased sanctions on Russia). They lied over 80% of the time about Corbyn, including ridiculous anti-semitism smears, and it worked. They lied about WMD in Iraq, and Iraq ties to 9/11 and it worked. They lied about mass baby murders by Hamas and it worked. They lied about Gazan hospitals being Hamas bases and it worked.

They’re completely used to a plurality to a majority of the population believing their lies, so why not this time?

Are they right? Can they tell us the moon is made of blue cheese and get us to believe it? Perhaps so.

This is one of the reasons why, when I talk about war crimes tribunals I always include the media, who lied and lied and lied to enable genocide, child killing, rape and war. The media is almost entirely captured, certainly every corporate media outlet is little more than a source of propaganda. Truth only peaks out when one part of the elite disagrees with another part of the elite, but if the elites are united, as they were against Corbyn and are for mass murder of mostly children in Gaza, well, the media salutes and falls in line.

As I have said many times, the only way to fix the West and especially America is wholesale replacements of the elites and all their courtiers. No one with a conscience works at the top levels, because if someone has a conscience they can’t do the job.

They all have to go, and to ensure there’s no repeat, most of them need to be tried for their crimes, have everything they have beyond basic subsistence taken from them (they’re why so many people are homeless) and be thrown into prison.

This is is also a matter of simple self-respect from the rest of us. Enough pretending these people aren’t psychopaths who would kill or impoverish anyone if it would earn them a single bent nickel or, in many cases, even if it wouldn’t, because it’s how they get their rocks off.

It’s them or us, and so far it’s mostly been us.

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American and Chinese Elites Both Achieved Their Goals

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On February 3, 2026

15 Comments

Chinese and American flags

The period around 1980 was pivotal to the fate of nations. In the West Thatcher and Reagan came to power and finished the destruction of the post-world War II order, setting the West on a new path. This process had been ongoing since 1968, but the form of the new consensus was not clear until Reagan’s victory: financialization, crushing workers, destroying the middle class, asset bubbles and so on.

In 1978 Deng came to power in China and instituted reforms, especially market ones. This coincided with the West, and especially America, wanting to offshore and outsource their industry. This increased profits and impoverished the working and middle class. It financialized the economy: you could have the profits without the production and without dealing with uppity and powerful workers.

Reagan went after unions hard, Thatcher broke the miner’s union, the most powerful in Britain. The Federal Reserve started a long term policy of raising interest rates every time wages rose faster than inflation, meaning that over a period of decades wages rose less than inflation, and thus were reduced in real terms. The BLS moved towards understating inflation systematically, to undercut things like pensions with cost of live adjustments and to help “boil the frog”. Every change in how inflation was measured, for decades, which I am aware of, reduced the measured inflation rate. That doesn’t happen randomly or if your goal is the accurate measure of inflation.

Deng lucked into a geopolitical moment, and knew exactly how to take advantage of it. “Tired of dealing with uppity workers? Hate environmental regulations? Want more profits without the work of production? Move your production to China and we’ll make you rich!”

Deng exactly spotted the West’s weakness and knew how to take advantage of it. He also delivered: offshoring and outsourcing did make the West’s elites, and especially US and British elites filthy rich.

In exchange China got the industry and with the industry came the know-how and the technology. The technological lead always (always) moves to the country with the factory floor, and so it did in this case. It took quite a while for this to become obvious, so people could fool themselves, but the movement was inexorable. The same thing had happened when the industrial base moved from Britain to America (with tons of British financing). It took about 30 years for the tech lead to follow the industrial base. In this case it seems to have been about 20 years from China taking the industrial lead to tech supremacy, but the movement was the same.

American elites, wanting to be rich without real work and to destroy their internal enemies, those pesky workers who wanted a cut, got what they wanted. In exchange they destroyed their empire, because the real basis of the American empire was industry and technology.

The Chinese got what they wanted: China became the world’s leading industrial and technological power and a billion people were lifted out poverty.

The Gods often grant want we desire, if we’re willing to work for it. American elites got their wish. So did the Chinese.

Welcome to the Chinese century.

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Epstein Occupied A Structural Position, So Who Has Replaced Him?

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On February 2, 2026

22 Comments

As sometime contributor DanfromTo points out, Epstein performed “necessary” tasks for the elite: control thru blackmail and the provision of experiences many of them genuinely want to have. Power is allowed to people who can be trusted with it by other members of the elite, who will do what the elites want: whether that be bailing out rich people or committing genocide.

Some people, like Biden, will do these things because they are true believers, but it’s always best to have them collared, in case they have an attack of conscience or just decide that the bread is better butter on another side.

Epstein wasn’t the first pimp to rich people and he won’t be the last. Almost no one who fucked under-age women (or performed worse acts, there are indications of murder and cannibalism in the files) has actually suffered any consequences. There’s no real reason for American elites to stop and Israel, certainly, needs collars on new members of the elite.

So who replaced him?

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A Word On Elite Pedophilia

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On January 31, 2026

22 Comments

More Epstein documents have been dumped, and they’re atrocious. It seems like most of the US elite was involved.

There are two reasons for this. One is that people who are super-powerful and super-rich feel like ordinary morality and laws don’t apply to them, and rape and torture and pedophilia are, to them, an ultimate rush, a proof of their power.

The other is similar to some gang initiations where if you want to be a member you have to kill someone. (Making your bones.) Once you’ve done that, you’re in, because they have you by the balls. You can’t betray them because they know who you murdered.

If you want to be in the top echelon of American (or Israeli, and possibly UK) elites they need to know you can be trusted. They need blackmail. You have to make your bones. Once you’ve committed an unspeakable crime, and they have pictures and video (remember, Epstein had cameras everywhere), well you can be allowed in, because you’re not going to use any power you have in any way the betrays elite interests, because they can destroy you any time they want.

(This is also how the Yale fraternity “Skull and Bones” is alleged to operate. You tell them your secrets to get in. They push your career. You’re one of them, and you can be trusted by other members, because you all have dirt on each other.)

Elite pedophilia isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, at least to other members of the elite classes.

 

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