Author: Ian Welsh Page 7 of 436

The Wisdom Of Machiavellian Virtu & Why America Is Losing Its Bill of Rights & Constitutional Virtues

On January 30, 2026

If you’ve read Machiavelli, especially “Discourses on Livy”, which is actually his major work (“The Prince” is not) you know his emphasis on Virtu of the people and elites as what holds Republics together. Machiavelli thought that Republics were the best form of government and that the greatest feat was to create or maintain a Republic: he was not a fan of autocratic government.

To summarize an important part of the Discourses: good men can make bad systems work, but good systems cannot save bad men. This is the opposite of what most “leadership” and “management” thinkers say today, but they’re wrong and Machiavelli was right.

I mention this because we’re seeing it in the US today. I won’t pretend the Constitution or the Bill of Rights were perfect, or didn’t include substantial evil (aka. slavery), but the Bill of Rights in particular is genuinely good. It’s failing completely right now, the government is just ignoring rulings it doesn’t like. The first thru fifth amendments are essentially dead letters, including habeas corpus.

Likewise the Constitution did include substantial checks and balances and they aren’t working.

It’s ironic that the worshippers of the US constitution have always touted its system of “checks and balances” as part of its distinctive genius and that at present every one of those supposed checks and balances is failing.

But I think this is unfair. The checks and balances exist, the system was designed fairly well, BUT it requires virtuous people to use them. When the Supreme Court, Congress and Presidency are all filled with corrupt men and women with no virtues (virtu), of course they don’t work. The best system in the world won’t work if the people running it don’t want to follow it.

American elites don’t believe in civil liberties. (Remember how the Patriot Act passed with only Senator opposing.) They don’t believe in liberty, freedom or equality. It is asinine to pretend that they do. They believe in nothing but enriching themselves and their donors, and they seem themselves as an elite and feel no duty towards the masses well-being. This is so obvious that arguing against it is absurd.

Since they don’t want to enforce the Bill of Rights, they don’t. Since they fundamentally are OK with ICE running rampant, genocide, war and impoverishing the American people, they make it happen and certainly don’t push back against it. Why would they want people to have rights? In what way does that benefit them, as long as they have rights (which, mostly, they do. Elite impunity to law is the real Constitution right now.)

Without virtue: without wanting to do the “right” thing, no system intended to produce good results can work. America doesn’t work to produce good outcomes for most people because American elites only want it to produce good outcomes for them. It’s that simple, and no laws or constitution or rights can fix that. The only fix is to replace the entire elite, wholesale, by whatever means necessary.

But that requires a population willing to replace them at whatever price is necessary, and that means the people have to be virtuous (brave, just and desiring the welfare of their fellow citizens) and enough of them aren’t, especially since at least a plurality of regular Americans are cowardly, unjust and want to hurt their fellow citizens.

In such a situation no laws, no constitution, can work and the issue is thrown back on power, as it was during the Civil War but since, this time there is no anti-evil party (Lincoln and the Republicans) there is no clear basis for organizing or fighting. This means a long descent is far more likely than a revival of the good parts of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Good people can make bad systems work. Bad people cannot make good systems work.

China works because the Communist Party, whatever its flaws, genuinely wants its people to be prosperous, genuinely tries to reduce inequality and genuinely wants China to be strong. America doesn’t work because American elites, including both major parties genuinely wants only a small minority to be wealthy, genuinely wants to impoverish most Americans and genuinely just wants money without the work required to keep or make America strong. And they sure as hell don’t believe in civil liberties.

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The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition

By Ian Welsh

On January 29, 2026

8 Comments

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

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

Imagine that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

….

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

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

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

You have to want to do the right thing.

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

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

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

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

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

America’s Leaders In Waiting Have Identified Themselves

By Ian Welsh

On January 28, 2026

37 Comments

This was the situation when they fired:

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

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

This is the best summary I’ve read:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How To Drive Domestic Production and Reindustrialization

By Ian Welsh

On January 26, 2026

24 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Message To Commenters

By Ian Welsh

On January 25, 2026

8 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

ianatfdl-at-gmail-dot-com

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On January 24, 2026

23 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

There Is Only One Fast Route Back After Trump

By Ian Welsh

On January 24, 2026

27 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Understanding the Competent Concierge: Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney

By Ian Welsh

On January 22, 2026

47 Comments

Carney gave an important speech yesterday, which you can read here. That lead to a lot of people praising him for his honesty in noting that the rules-based order was accepted by developed nations because they benefited from it, even though everyone knew it was bullshit: if you weren’t in the club, the rules didn’t apply to you. And even if you were in the club, the rules didn’t always apply to you, but most of them did and overall the benefits outweighed the costs, at least as far as our ruling class was concerned.

Carney points out that this deal has been violated in a rupture. The old world order is dead. People who say that it died in Gaza are WRONG. Mass murder of brown people in a non-developed country is acceptable to the rules based order. (It would not be acceptable in South Korea or Japan.)

But there’s something very important in Carney’s speech: he brags about having dropped taxes and that’s a clue.

Carney is clear eyed and honest enough to recognize the hypocrisy of the old system. He was a participant, but he was one of the rare powerful participants who was able to function and realize some of the injustices of the old system. He knew it was bullshit. Most people need to entirely believe in a system, they can’t handle the moral dissonance. To Carney the trade off was worth if it you were part of the Global North, and he was willing to live with that and participate in it.

Now long before Carney was Prime Minister I had criticized him. As a central banker he blew two housing bubbles, one in Canada and one in Britain, which massively hurt ordinary people and he bailed out bankers and rich people during the financial collapse. In fact, his performance in Canada was abysmal, in that it set up a new housing bubble basically immediately.

But housing bubbles are good for rich people. They get the benefits, not the costs.

And that’s the key to understanding Carney. He’s not a left winger. He’s not a post war liberal. He’s a neoliberal technocrat, and the job of neoliberal technocrats is to keep making the rich richer. It really is almost that simple and if you use that as your guide to their actions you’ll be right most of the time.

Let’s go back to those taxes. One of Carney’s goals is to reindustrialize Canada. It’s a real goal, he’s taking action on it, spending money on it and cutting deals pursuing it. But low corporate taxes and low marginal top individual tax rates undercuts that goal. The higher corporate taxes are the more it makes sense to reinvest earnings in production. If top individual rates are low, the rich want money cashed out thru stock buybacks (which should be illegal if you want industrial growth, because they too encourage wasting money that could be reinvested in production) or dividends.

You should also have high capital gains taxes on short term gains. Ninety percent if cashed out under five years, dropping 10% a year after that is a good benchmark, with exceptions for primary residences and a few other niche cases. Again, you want people investing for the long term, and this also cuts out a lot of the bullshit that happens due to stock options.

So if Carney’s only goal was re-industrializtion, and he was method-agnostic, not an ideologue, he would raise certain taxes rather than lowering them.

But he didn’t do that, because Carney, like most politicians and senior technocrats in our system, is a concierge for the rich. His job is to make them better off. They don’t want to be annexed by the US or to have to live in fear of a fickle US changing deals at a whim. But they still want to be super rich. In the old world order that meant having access to the US, because US returns were outsized compared to non-US returns. Every elite in every other country wanted access to US financial markets. But that access is not worth the price any more.

What makes Carney different from most current elite concierges is that he is actually competent, not a worthless courtier, and that he’s able to see the hypocrisies of the system. He’s self-aware.

I supported Carney in the last election and I still support him because while he’s far from what I want, he’s at least doing some of the right things. Enough of the right things to be worth supporting. That doesn’t mean I like him, or even think he’s a good person. He isn’t. But he’s competent and has enough guts to move away from the US. While he does so he’s making a lot of compromises like joining the Board of Peace. That’s an evil act and I’m sure he knows it is, being clear eyed, but it’s a minor evil act because Canada doesn’t have a potential veto on how Palestinians are treated.

I wish he was better and my support is very conditional. Perhaps I’m not as pure as I should be. Feel free to flay me in the comments. But a man who helps break up the American Empire, and that’s what Carney is doing by being the first to make a real break with the US and with his speech calling for the middle powers to abandon America, is doing enough to make it over to the “on the balance, more good than evil” book in my mind. Now if he had a veto on Gaza the way an American President does, it’d be different.

He doesn’t and he’s helping destroy the old world order while being by far and away the best current option for Canada.

We need better if we’re ever going to move back to a truly good economy in western countries or a more good than evil world order. Carney’s still a concierge for the rich. But in helping protect Canada’s rich, he’s helping destroy the American Empire and that will be good for billions of people, including Palestinians, and he’s protecting Canada from America and some of what he’s doing will be good for ordinary people.

Even if Carney’s motives for helping destroy the old order are crass, the fact that he’s doing so is enough for me.

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