Ian Welsh

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

Category: End of American Empire Page 1 of 6

American Billionaires Are Competing To Be King Shit of Turd Island

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On September 17, 2025

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You may have heard that Tesla’s board has proposed giving Elon Musk a one trillion dollar payday. Tesla is falling apart, and the ostensible theory is that only Musk can save it, as if he’s not the guy who ran it into the ground with his bad decision making.

Elon, of course, is currently “the world’s richest man” but his fortune is probably under 500 billion. So he wants to triple it.

This, as you may have figured out already, is not about saving Tesla, but looting it before it crashes out completely, which is what’s going to happen. Only 100% anti-china EV tariffs are keeping Tesla alive right now, but the problem is that non-Chinese companies are now producing cheaper, better cars and no, Tesla isn’t going to regain its lead.

Elon is just a rat trying to leave a sinking ship with a huge wheel of gold embossed brie, and the board (his cronies) are helping him.

Meanwhile:

(Every person who told you that the end of dollar hegemony was impossible was either an idiot or lying to you.)

Oh, and meanwhile China is banned all its tech companies from buying NVidia AI chips. Seems they figure their homegrown chips are now as good as the lobotomized versions NVidia is allowed to sell to Chinese companies.

In about three years, China’s chips will be as good as NVidia’s. In about six years they’ll be as good and a lot cheaper. Then every country outside the West will switch.

Meanwhile, as I’ve discussed before, every non-Western country will use Chinese Open Source AI, because using American or European AI is way too risky (if you don’t understand why, you’ve been a coma for the past 40 years.)

NVida is driving something like 40% of American stock valuations and AI is the huge bet America is making. America can’t even make magnets.

So what happens when China can produce essentially everything the West can, at equal or better quality, and it costs less? Passenger jets, military tech, chips, AI, robots, drones, cars, consumer goods. Everything. (or a reasonable facsimile, well north of 9% within five to ten years, and it’s already north of 80%.)

Well, the oligarchs who have been competing to be the richest guy in America are going to find they have a whole bunch of US dollars that the most important economy in the world, China, won’t accept for anything meaningful. You won’t be able to buy Chinese companies with it. You won’t be able to buy Chinese tech secrets with it. Chinese scientists won’t want to work in the shithole that the US is turning into, especially given all the racism against Chinese.

American oligarchs will, as my father put it, find out that they were competing to be “King Shit of Turd Island.” Like being the world’s richest Indian in 1950. You’ll live a nice life, but you don’t matter.

Serious elites have three jobs, in order of importance.

  1. Keep their country powerful and advanced and important;
  2. Keep control of their country
  3. Compete among themselves.

American elites reversed the order of these tasks for generations. They’ll be lucky to avoid a civil war, is how badly they’ve fucked up. And the tech-bro “masters of the universe” are about to watch China roar past them and gain the tech lead in everything that matters. They can own America’s Tik-tok, but who cares, because America is a has-been nation, coasting on legacy fumes, and it’s only going to fall further and further behind.

Thiel and Musk and so on are just crabs in a bucket, competing for power in country going to Hell. May the best most ruthless crab be crowed King Shit of Turd Island.

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Follow Up and And Reply On My “How to Lose Allies” Post

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On September 10, 2025

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First, I want to follow up on this: “I am due to have a conversation with a friend that lives in Denmark tomorrow and I’m going to ask him about energy prices.”

His reply, and I paraphrase as I did not record it or take notes: “if we still had to make our house payment, we would be totally screwed. The amount of money that we pay for energy now is about equal to what our house payment used to be. It’s about five times higher than it normally is, but what’s even worse is the high cost of energy filters out into everything in the Danish economy. A simple item like bread is three times higher than it used to be. Specialty items are three or four times higher than they used to be. Fish from fisherman that we go to the docks to buy from because we live on an island is four times more expensive because they’re paying four times more for the energy they’re using to go out and fish. It’s brutal and it’s all because the United States or somebody allied with it blew up the Nord stream pipeline. I try to keep my mouth shut about this because most people have drank the Kool-Aid, but I really hope Russia wins because I’m sick of all this global elite bullshit.”

These words were spoken by a well educated American married to a Dane with two teen-aged Danish children. If the Danish economy is suffering like this Germany must be fucked.

Where does Europe get its energy now? From the US, now exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) to Europe for 4x the price of Russian and Turkmen natural gas. Here is my question as a Texan: why haven’t natural gas prices risen in tandem with the export of the commodity? People I have asked who recieve natural gas royalties are pissed because there is no price increase pass through. So, owners of the wells are getting screwed and so are the buyers of the product. Welcome to Oligarchical America.

Next I want to address a handful of commenters in my post, best reprersented by Mark Level. He writes, in a very gracious and polite comment that he takes issue with my outline of American Grand Strategy. He notes, “This insane hobby-horse (or idee fixe, choose your metaphor) dates back far more than 120 years, probably 3x that long, and originates in British Colonial phobias about Russia and “the East” generally. Halford John Mackinder developed this lunacy & published it almost exactly 120 years ago, but it had a long pre-natal development among arrogant Imperial gits in Asia. (Gits and twits, upper-class British twits, like the Monty Python sketch.) See here, and the delightful childish fantasy of being Alexander Magnus from this Mackinder thought bubble . . . .”

Please note, first and foremost, I used the word hostile power or hostile coalition. Hostile being the primary variable.

I’ve read Mackinder’s works. Anyone who has traveled across the Silk Road pretty much has to read them. His idea is not necessarily original. It’s more a fusion of ideas that came out of the late 18th century and 19th century Western European dominance of the world that began, as I previously mentioned, with the defeat of Venice in 1509,  Portugal’s conquest of a Spice Empire, and its desrtuction of the Ottoman Navy in the Indian Ocean, thus having no rivals, and of course Spain’s rapacious theft of New World gold and silver.

During the 17th and 18th century, a new idea developed with the growth of the British Navy, who outstripped the Dutch and pretty much took over their empire. New York City was, after all, New Amsterdam. What these developments presaged was an idea that centered around the ascendancy of the Littoral powers over the Continental Empires that had ruled Eurasia for millenia. Gunpowder, boats, better firearms, better steel and in the New World, devastating disease leading to genocide in many cases up and down North and South America. The Littoral is defined by strategists “as those land areas (and their adjacent areas and associated air space) that are susceptible to engagement and influence from the sea.” Thus the emphasis on a strong navy by Alfred Thayer Mahan who proved just how dominant Littoral Powers could be. For a time, that is, only for a time, as I see it.

Add to this ascendancy the wars of the Western European powers of the United Kingdom, Spain, France, and the Holy Roman Empire primarily fought during the 18th century for two strategic reasons, primarily by two very different nations with very different vital national interests at stake.

One, was the United Kingdom’s insistence that no power could dominate the Low Lands of the Netherlands and later Belgium because if they could, it would threaten an invasion of the British Isles, plus their massive exports of wool textiles, fueling the nascent industrial revolution. Smart, if ruthless policy.

Second, we must understand France‘s main goal during the wars of this time (and for several centruies prior) was to ensure a divided Germany. So long as the German states were littered into 100 different little principalities France had nothing to worry about. Thus France could go on dominating the continent. The first seismic change to this was the War of the Sixth Coalition which saw for the first time Russia flex its true potential when Russian troops occupied Paris. France’s cataclysm occured not in 1941 but in 1870 with her defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. The result of which was Prussia unifying all of Germany into one empire, adding insult to injury by having the Kaiser crowned in Versailles and taking Alsace Lorraine away as its prize.

Fuse those two strategies together and it is not too far an intellectual leap, considering the Great Game going on at the time between the UK and the Russian Empire, for Mackinder to conjure up his ideas. Were his ideas taken up by the United Kingdom? You bet, but by 1917 when it was clear that the United Kingdom could no longer maintain the balance of power in Europe and the United States had to intervene, (everyone should read AJP Taylor’s magnum opus, The Struggle For Mastery in Europe, to understand the balance of power and its collapse in 1917) US foreign policy intellectuals adopted it. And rightly so.

I think it’s the correct idea. But my reasons for thinking it’s the correct idea are not gonna make many of you happy. You might have to face some hard truths. Oh yeah, I did tell you I was a Realist in the old school manner of the word? In fact there have been a few times when Ian has chastened me pretty seriously for my realism. With that admisssion I will make another one: I don’t mind the criticism from Ian or from others. Ian is probably the smartest person I’ve ever met in my life and I listen to what he has to say. And when I say listen to him, I mean, I consider his words deeply. A man who cannot change his mind will never change anything. Nevertheless, I digress.

Here are my reasons for why I believe the prevention of a single hostile power or coalition of hostile powers from dominating the Eurasian landmass is smart policy. Please, if you take anything away from this sentence, take the meaning hostile. 

Number one: the Monroe Doctrine. Oh, I hear you screaming already. But the fact is that if this were not “our” hemisphere, not a one of us would have the standard of living we do today. Our hegemony of the Western Hemisphere is the primary foundation of our wealth and our power. You might not like it. I grimace frequently at the crimes we comitt to protect it. But, the Westphalian System is not built on justice. It is built on the acceptance of international anarchy. Each nation to its own. There is no single sovereign power governing planet Earth. Thus, violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived. Is this a grim Hobbesian outlook? Yes. I don’t like it and I’m pretty sure you don’t either. But as a realist, I take the world as it is, not as I desire it to be. A hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take that hegemony away. You might not like it but trust me when I say you don’t want that to happen.

Second, a hostile power or coalition of hostile powers that dominate Eurasia can take more than our hegemony away, it/they can invade us. We don’t want that either. Thus we have a powerful navy that projects power to keep Eurasia divided–for the time being, because I think if we get into a war with China, their indirect way of war–read your Sun Tzu–will probably outwit us on the high seas. I’ve spent a great deal of time in China and have a healthy fear of their capabilities. However, my greatest fear is that in our arrogance we will engender the very hostility we must prevent and by our own devices bring about the doom we should seek to avoid. We have lost our edge, our generosity of spirit and our understanding of power. We have become a mean spirited, two-bit, cheap and vulgar people. And sadly, because so many of us are beaten down economically by rich elites who are delusional, we’re going to lose a big war in a painful way. A war that could be avoided, but probably won’t be. I hope I’m wrong, but don’t think I am.

That said, these very wise words, written by Robert D. Kaplan recently, convey the gravity of our present predicament, “There is no prediction. It is only through coming to terms with the past and vividly, realizing the present that we can have premonitions about the future.” Moreover, as a wise woman wrote about history, “the more I study history, the more I learn the art of prophecy.” Deeply contradictory statements, yet both true in their essence.

Are we any more perceptive now about what awaits our planet than were the Russians of 1917, or all of Europe in 1914, and, for that matter, the Germans of the 1920s and the early 30s?

Do we honestly think we know better than they did? With all of our gadgets and our technological triumphalism I bet you there are a handful of you out there that think we do know better than they did. I hate to disappoint you, but we don’t. History is the story of contingency and human agency, not inevtiablity.

So, there it is. Rip me to shreds if you wish. I’ve suffered enough Shakespearean arrows of outrageous fortune in my 54 years to handle it. In fact, I welcome your ideas and if you got this far I’m grateful for your time.

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If You Understand Only One Thing About Chinese Government

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On September 2, 2025

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It should be that almost always they do what they promise, and they meet their goals. An American-Chinese silicon valley type spent some time in China recently (I don’t agree wit the whole article, but you should read it), and among the bits that stood out to me was this:

In the US, when politicians make campaign promises, I never actually expect them to follow through. But Chinese leaders do—for better and for worse. The 2025 plans to build 1,350 Shenzhen parks or reduce China’s energy dependence aren’t mere propaganda. (Neither, tragically, was the one-child policy.) Accountability is built into China’s bureaucratic system through KPIs, and you can see the results firsthand.

This echoes what Naomi Wu noted: that the Communist party attains their goals, and that many of them are the smartest most capable people she knows. (I think the one child policy wasn’t a mistake, as it happens, though it probably continued too long.)

This chart is of average rent as a percentage of income.

As a westerner this is mind boggling. My entire life rent prices have just increased and increased and increased. So have housing prices. One of my big criticisms of China for years was that they had overly-relied on housing bubbles to fund their growth and that it was causing significant discontent. Every young Chinese person mentioned it as a problem.

So then they just… went and fixed it? And yes, it’s been painful, and led to some softness in the economy, but when it’s done, the economy will be much stronger. (See, “China is Transitioning, and So far successfully“).

China faced a challenge during Trump’s first term: he slapped export controls on chips. They didn’t have a significant domestic industry. So they built one. They knew that if America had done this with one industry, they could do it with all, so they set a national goal to become self sufficient industrially: to be able to make everything they needed. As this was happening, they realized housing was too expensive, so they made that part of the solution, they rotated investment out of real estate into industry.

To a Westerner who has lived their entire adult life under neo-liberalism, this is mind-boggling. Wait, the government can “just do things?” And when it decides to do things, it succeeds? It isn’t just bullshit?

I mean do things other than de-regulate and say “well there isn’t anything we can really do, this is just how the world is.” Do things other than just make the rich even richer? Do things other than constantly de-funding science and engineering and the humanities? Do things other than making medicine fantastically expensive? Do something other than blowing another asset bubble?

I’m 57, and I remember the world before neoliberalism, but I remember it as a child. In my entire adult life I have not seen a Western government capable of doing what China does: set an important goal which benefits the population as a whole and crush it.

China is winning because China deserves to win, because it is better run. I’m not going to whitewash it: there are a lot of things I don’t like about how China is run. But bottom line, it’s run more for the benefit of ordinary citizens than most Western countries, and those countries which seem to be run for the benefit of the population as a whole are running on legacy systems: the entire EU it seems, is considering gutting their social welfare systems to spend more money on American weapons. For my entire life things have been getting slowly worse in France and Germany, and quickly worse in the UK. In China, on the other hand, life keeps getting better for the majority of the population.

Are you worried about Democracy? You should be. But one simple threat is this: China isn’t a democracy and its actions clearly benefit the majority of its people more than the actions of American or British or EU governments benefit their people.

Democracy isn’t just a something word you wave around. If it doesn’t produce better results, people will stop believing in it.

China’s winning because the CCP gets results and the results it chooses to get are, much more often than in the West, good for the majority of its people. That means it deserves to win, and we deserve to lose.

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Trump Is Running the Standard Purge and Control Playbook To Install Decline

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On August 27, 2025

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Some years ago I wrote an article about how to run a real left wing government.

Seven Rules for running a real left-wing government

Of course, it was really a guide for how to change the ruling ideology of a society. Because, yes, elites, apparatchniks and what as might be called a deep state state exist. These aren’t all the same thing. There is plenty of private support for whatever the status quo is, especially at the highest levels, since whatever the ideology is, it put them in charge and benefited them. There are also a lot of mid level enforcers, bureaucrats (both private and public) and professionals who benefit from the status quo.

Anyway, two of the seven rules were specific to the problem of running a left wing government in a neoliberal world (it was 2016.) But here are the other five

  • Your First Act Must Be a Media Law
  • Take Control of the Banking Sector
  • Who Is Your Administrative Class?
  • Take Control of Distribution and Utilities
  • Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System

Control the Media: Now the wording isn’t always the best, but Trump has been on a constant attack against the media. He’s changed who is allowed to be part of the White House press pool and he’s made the media pay blackmail money. He’s now talking about removing NBC and ABC’s licenses. He may, he may not, but the threat makes them change.

Take Control of the Banking Sector: for the first time in its history, a Federal Reserve governor has been fired the President has always had this authority in theory (except over the Chair), but has never used it in practice. Ironically I once advised Obama to use this power to stop the Fed bailouts in 2009. Control over the banking sector is really control over the permission system: whoever is given money or the ability to create money can do things. Once you have your hands on the money-artery, nothing significant can happen without your permission.

Who is Your Administrative class: All systems have a class of people which run the bureaucracies. We have come to know ours as the PMC. Trump is replacing them, firing them in huge piles, and replacing them with right wing, often religious, fanatics. These are people who will give him his military parade (denied in his first term), who will extradite his enemies, who will break laws for him knowing that the Supreme Court (carefully packed during decades of preparation for this moment) will make what they do legal, and that in any case, the enforcer class is under Trump’s control.

Indeed, Trump has been purging the enforcer class and replacing them with people who would not have been considered qualified by the previous system. This is true of the military, the FBI and indeed of all the three letter agencies. Since ICE are his loyal brownshirts, needing no purging, they are being massively enlarged and given far greater powers.

Reduce vulnerability to the World Trade System: Let’s state this simply: the US had been losing the trade game badly for about fifteen years. China was coming on hard, Africa is lost, South America is almost lost, Russia is no longer complacent and America has lost the lead in over 80% of technologies. It can’t build ships, its planes fall out of the sky, most electronics are made elsewhere, it can’t even make magnets. It’s a joke.

So Trump is creating a two bloc system, there’s the US and its vassals (calling them allies amounts to lying) Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Korea. On the other side China, Russia, Iran, and their friends, which includes most of Africa and Asia and a good chunk of South America.

The US has slapped 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, and tariffs on almost everyone else. Why? Well, simply enough, the US can’t compete. If there is free trade, or anything approximating it, the US’s economy will be further cannibalized. Since they can’t sell overseas, except for chips, food and a few other goods, it’s time to stop competing. The US can’t win, so it’s not going to play.

The problem, of course, is that unless the US takes this time behind trade barriers to become competitive, it’ll just keep falling behind, and there’s only so much it can cannibalize its vassals. Given the massive slashing of research and universities, with no sign of a new system to replace them, it’s clear that the US has chosen semi-permanent decline.

Trump is Changing the US ruling ideology to Controlled un-development

It’s still about making the rich richer, but Trump’s choice is controlled decline. The US and the West will fall further and further behind, living conditions will get worse and worse, but the rich will become relatively richer in relation to everyone else in society. Think India in the post-war period. Fantastically wealthy elites, everyone else is a peon. Oh, there’s lots of ruin in countries, but this is the direction of the arrow and it only changes if a different ideology takes over.

Competition in the US between all groups will become far more savage, because there is no net. You get you hands on a position which commands resources or you become homeless or techno-peasant.

The vassals, who mostly have social welfare systems, will be forced to liquidate them, buy US military goods (which are useless against the US, given the software driven nature of them) and sell off all their public goods to continue the enrichment of elites. Any who try to avoid this fate will be coerced as necessary, first by their own internal elites.

This is the future in America and its allies. The only way to avoid it is to figure out how to defect.

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Trump Takes Share Of US Company Profits & Pentagon Guarantees Rare Earth Prices

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On August 25, 2025

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The US government is to take a 15% cut of Nvidia and AMD chip sale profits to China. There are also discussion of taking a 10% stock share in Intel.

Meanwhile the Pentagon has taken a hundred million dollar stake in a rare earth miner, and guaranteed minimum prices.

As Albert Pinto notes, this isn’t neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is dying, if not dead, in the US, though the Euros are clinging to it. Everyone’s noticed that China’s hybrid model absolutely trounced the West, and, hey, it’s a chance to get even richer. Pinto thinks that Trump is trying to change the nature of the oligarchy:

8/ Winters’ model of oligarchy:

1 Warring: armed oligarchs defend property claims separately

2 Ruling: oligarchs institutionalise defence

3 Sultanistic: 1 oligarch monopolises armed wealth and defence

4 Civil: state defends property regime Trump: US from 4->3?

Now I don’t think America’s oligarchy going to go Sultanistic, in the sense of one ruling oligarch. The only way that happens is if Trump manages to turn the Presidency into a Trump family matter, and that seems unlikely. But a rotating sultantic Presidency until, perhaps, someone manages to make it permanent: that’s possible.

But the days of laissez-faire are clearly over. Now this isn’t entirely stupid, I’ve been calling for what Trump did for rare earths for twenty years. It’s the obvious thing to do. Likewise, ensuring stable domestic production of necessary resources is sane and necessary and if one has to pay a little bit more, so be it.

Owning shares in US companies isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The truth is that every fundamental innovation which made the internet and smart phones possible was government funded. Tesla doesn’t exist without a massive government loan back when it was nothing. But the government doesn’t share in the upside nearly as much as it should, because large corporations pay almost no taxes. The government takes the risks (Solyndra was given about the same amount of money as Tesla at the same time, and went bankrupt) but doesn’t share in the upside. Tesla just paid back the loan, but if the US had an equity share, it’d have made out very well.

Golden shares, a 10% ownership in large or important firms used to be quite common. It’s not a new policy, but it used to be associated with the left wing. What’s going on now is a right wing version of the same thing.

The President is the strong man who runs the government. Everything private companies do they do because he allows it, therefore government has a right to a share of the profits and to exercise control when it chooses to. The President picks winners and losers, determines the effect of court decisions, and so on.

It’s the logical extension of the tendency to Imperial Presidency. Every other power in society is weakened, the President is above all. An elected dictator, as it were. (Similar to parliamentary democracies in that sense, but very un-American and without the protections of Westminister government, where new parties are possible and governments can fall easily.)

Right now the scramble is to see which faction will control the Presidency after Trump. The best bet is probably the tech-bro faction, since Vance is Peter Thiel, the Palantir surveillance state magnate’s creature. (Though puppets have a tendency to cut their strings when they attain supreme power.)

All of this entails a vast misunderstanding of how the Chinese public/private system works, by the way. For one, China probably has the most competitive (free) markets in the world in those sectors which are private. For another, the system is not run to maximize profit, but to produce certain social and policy outcomes, including a good life for the majority of the population. China has both deliberately reduced housing and rent prices, crashing the housing market and costing owners a huge amount of money, and it has been deliberately reducing the number of billionaires.

These aren’t incidental matters, and just saying “well, we’ll move to a mixed model” misses what makes China’s economy work so well.

But no society run by a financial oligarchy is capable of understanding that “more profit” isn’t the way to win economically, so America will continue to learn the wrong lessons from China. As for Europe, they aren’t even learning the wrong lessons, they’re just doubling down on austerity and increasing military spending in a way which will make some Americans rich and hardly help them at all. Not even in the game.

More on all this later.

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China is a Rich Society. No Western Country Is.

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On August 20, 2025

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Chinese and American flags flying together

Saw this recently, from the University of Chicago:


The commentary is a bit of an exaggeration. But not too much.

Now if this was just one data point, it wouldn’t matter, but the bottom line is that funding for universities, including university research, in being massively cut in America and the UK, with issues in most Western countries. It’s not just about the humanities, science is getting hit hard, as is engineering.

As best I can tell, China has opened about 1,700 new universities and colleges in the past 25 years. Those that existed have expanded enrollment. It’s very reminiscent of the post war period in America. And the best of universities are excellent.

Americans are ostensibly rich, yes, but the society is not. A lot of the apparent wealth is false: if it costs one fifth as much to get dental or health care or one tenth as much to buy a good pair of earphones; if it costs one-third as much to buy an electric car, well, all of the extra cost in America goes to GDP, and Americans have higher incomes, but who’s actually richer?

And when you look at Chinese cities and provinces they are building infrastructure massively. The cities are beautifully lit up at night. There is a huge space program, even as the American space program is cut, and cut and cut. There are dozens of EV companies and in general there is competition in most of the cutting edge parts of the society. Coffee is cheaper (which is why Starbucks is getting shellacked in China). Everything is cheaper, there’s more of it and the government and private actors spend money on huge new projects, on research and on infrastructure.

China is a rich society, because they can do things. America’s last real gasp as a rich society was the Apollo program, ever since then, it’s been in retreat. Europe, well, Europe had a good time in the post war period, but since then, despite some success in the 90s and early 2000’s, it’s been in retreat and it has recently chosen the path of de-industrialization and xenophobic isolationism, which is not going to serve it. University cuts in the UK, in particular, have been savage, but Europe, even taken as a whole is behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea in research and technological advancement.

 

 

The Chinese have built massive high speed rail, lead in civilians drones, in robotics and are competitive in AI, which is 20x cheaper to run (more importantly, it uses FAR less energy than American AI, which draws more energy than entire countries.) They are ahead in most material sciences, catching up in civilian aviation (soon they will be ahead), have vastly more shipbuilding capacity, are ahead in missile technology, will soon eat SpaceX’s lunch  in launch costs (no, I will not be wrong about this.)

China does thing. The government is rich. Corporations are not spending all their money in stock buybacks and acquisitions, but are actually competing and trying to create new and better products than their competitors.

The best parallel is probably not post-war America, but pre-WWI America. China has taken the lead from America, there is zero chance of America catching up absent a large meteor hitting China, but they don’t actually spend much on their military. I was shocked to find out that the Chinese military has about 2.2 million soldiers out of a population of 1.4 billion. All of this with a sincere effort to provide a decent standard of living to everyone and a genuine attack on inequality. (Chinese inequality is very high, but it is concentrated in the top 10%, not the top .01%, which is being attacked by the government.)

China is a civilian society, with a civilian economy. It is in a vastly expansive phase, one which could last as much as sixty to eighty years, assuming environmental or international issues don’t derail it. (They will.)

China is where the future is. If you are younger, learn Mandarin. It will be as essential as English was for the past hundred and twenty years.

Hope for the future now rests in China. You may not like that, but it’s just a fact. They’re the country that can actually do things, and whether our problems are fixed, or mitigated (more likely) is up to them, just as for a long time it was up to the US (which failed almost completely, play “I see no evil, I hear no evil” every since 1980.

I don’t know if I for one welcome our Chinese overlords, but it doesn’t matter. They’re here. The West has already lost the race and is retreating into a poorer, more backwards second world situation, similar to the late USSR and Warsaw Pact.

It will end as well for the US and NATO as it did for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

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Elite Opinion In Canada Begins To Shift From America To China

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On July 16, 2025

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The Globe and Mail is one of the two main “newspapers of the elite” in Canada, and the older of the two. (The other one is the Nation Post). So this article is important:

Canada’s “deal” with the U.S. to drop the digital services tax, which benefits U.S. tech giants such as Meta and Netflix at the expense of Canadian fiscal sovereignty, and the Trump administration’s latest threat of a 35-per-cent tariff on Canadian goods perfectly encapsulate our current predicament: Washington no longer views Canada as an ally, but rather as a subordinate from which to extract concessions. It’s a stark reminder that trade diversification is no longer optional – it’s an urgent national imperative.

 

The rub is that our longstanding subordination to the U.S. is also holding us back from partnering with China, one of the world’s most important economies. To achieve economic sovereignty, Canada must break free from the made-in-Washington narrative that China is an unreliable trading partner bent on world domination. Instead, Canada must forge its own relationship with China – a relationship anchored in Canadian, not U.S., interests.

As the largest economy in the world on a purchasing power parity basis, China is set to be a core driver of future global economic growth. It also now accounts for a third of the world’s manufacturing output, more than all the G7 countries plus South Korea and Mexico combined. And not just low-cost manufacturing, but rather advanced production and world-beating technology. China leads in 37 of 44 critical technologies, from AI to green energy.

Everything said above is correct. I’d add that China is not an existential threat to Canada. They have never threatened our sovereignty the way Trump and the US has, and they never will. They cannot conquer us and are not stupid enough to believe they could, we are too large and too far away.

Of course we’ll have to kiss China’s ass if we want to move towards them. We’ve been very hostile for the last decade or so (we were friendly before that, it’s a policy change made by Trudeau).

I can’t see that kissing China’s ass is any more obnoxious than the deep tongue action we’ve been applying to America’s behind since 1984, with only a brief interregnum under Prime Minister Chretien (who used lips only.) In fact, China is likely to demand a lot less: mostly we have to stop discriminating against them economically (we can and should negotiate some carve-outs) and shut up about Taiwan. Given the size of our Navy our opinion on Taiwan is meaningless, and China isn’t going to Gaza the Taiwanese when they finally do unify, so this isn’t a very big concession.

It should be noted that Chinese military equipment appears, overall, to be superior to American and if we really intend to move away from the US, we shouldn’t be using American military gear. (I hope the reasons are obvious.) Moreover, China’s lead in military technology will just continue to grow.

Canada has three main geopolitical problems:

1) How to disentangle ourselves from America without getting invaded or economically crushed; and,

2) how to regrow our manufacturing capacity, so as to not become a 21st century Argentinian-style basket-case.

3) How not to go down with America.

We also have a number of serious domestic issues, a lot of them coming from American cultural, political and economic influence on Canada. Basically, we’re neoliberals, and we need to stop that, but America is dead set against it.

Anyway, America wants to cannibalize its allies to slow its decline and Canada would be stupid to go along, whether or not we fix our domestic issues.

It’s interesting to see that Canada’s elites are beginning to realize the bind. There is zero chance the Globe And Mail article would have been published if there weren’t powerful people in Canada who want the shift.

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Imperial Presidency Watch: Congress Loses Control Over The Purse

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On July 15, 2025

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So, the Supremes have decided, without even bothering to write an opinion, that the Department of Education can be massively reduced without Congressional approval:

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the Trump administration may fire more than half of the Department of Education’s workforce — mass terminations that, in Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s words, are “the first step on the road to a total shutdown” of the entire department.

The Court’s decision in McMahon v. New York, was handed down on the Court’s “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other expedited matters that the justices often decide without full briefing or oral argument. As is often the case in shadow docket decisions, none of the Republican justices explained their decision.

This is, in my opinion, and in line with most lawyers, 100% unconstitutional.

The McMahon decision is particularly unnerving because it suggests that President Donald Trump is allowed to “impound” federal spending — unilaterally refusing to spend money or to continue federal programs that are mandated by an act of Congress. While McMahon does not explicitly authorize impoundment, it allows the Trump administration to fire so many federal workers, in so many key roles, that the practical effect is to cancel entire federal programs.

Most of the creep of imperial presidency has been Congress giving its powers away: war acts which make it so the president can go to war without Congress, for example, or giving the President tariff authority (which Trump has misused, pretending everything is “national security”) and so on. Some have been unilateral grabs, such as using “signing statements” to change the clear intend of laws.

But this is a Presidential grab that the Supremes are waving thru. Even if they later rule that some stub of the Education department must remain, it’s clearly allowing the President to over-ride spending that Congress has mandated. I am unaware of any reasonable reading of the Constitution that allows this: the President is to execute Congress’s directives and does not have the authority to say “nah, we’re just not going to do that any more.”

Especially of interest here is that the Republicans didn’t bother to explain the ruling and didn’t give it a full trial. They know it’s completely indefensible on legal grounds, and they aren’t even going to try.

Ever since Citizen’s United I have told Americans to get out if they can and if not to prepare for horrific times. Children, we are now at the start of the collapse. Before this it was mostly gradual, but this is the real thing.

I mention Citizen’s  United (which allowed unlimited cash into US elections under the proposition that money is speech) because, of course, smashing the Department of Education while it’s something that Christofacists want, so they can ban books and write fantasy textbooks and fire teachers and Professors for saying things like “gay sex might not be bad,” or “American slavery was terrible” and so on, it’s also about privatizing as much of the education system as possible.

Remember that Trump’s main act, amidst all the Kabuki, was his budget, which slashed four trillion in taxes from rich people while cutting health care for poor people to partially pay for it. Trump’s priority, as per his actions, is to make the rich, richer. (His tariffs, while real, have been TACO: Trump chickens out when rich people start screaming.)

Make the public education shit for poor people, let the middle class have vouchers for some shit “charter” school and the upper class, as always, will send their kids to elite private schools.

A Republic, If You Can Keep It – Benjamin Franklin

Kept it for almost 250 years, but if this stands, if Congress loses its last real power, it’s over. A Republic is something rather specific, a divided form of government. And if one of the three branches has no effective power left, it’s not a Republic, especially since the Supremes, in other orders, are gutting the Judiciary’s power. The end of nationwide injunctions is particularly instructive. And let’s not forget the President’s Gestapo force, ICE, arresting Judges who try to interfere with immigration snatches.

Nothing is over till it’s over. But no one with sense would offer good odds that the US is going to come out of this era as the sort of place anyone with sense would want to live. Say what you will about China, but it’s light authoritarianism and actually delivers prosperity. At this point everyone not in the top 1% is seeing declines in wealth in America, plus you’re losing your civil liberties (citizenship revocation is very likely), plus you’re losing your Republic.

I consider it my duty to try and give a clear picture of the world to my readers so they can make good decisions. Other than the necessity of eating and not dying of exposure, it’s why I write. So… If you can get out. Get out. If you can’t, make preparations for Hell.

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