Ian Welsh

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

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 2 of 16

European Leaders Realize They’ve Put Themselves In A Vise

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On January 20, 2026

26 Comments

It seems that EU leaders have realized that the US can squeeze them, not just with tariffs, but with natural gas supplies. It used to be that Europe got most of its natural gas from Russia, till the pipelines were blown up, probably by the US. Now they pay much more to get shipped LNG from America.

Trump has hit European countries who oppose him annexing Greenland with increased tariffs. That’s not a big deal, but an LNG squeeze would be. It’s not that Europe wouldn’t be able to get enough LNG, if it wasn’t sold to them directly, they’d get it indirectly, just as they have continued to get a lot of Russian hydcrocarbons, but they’d pay more and energy prices are squeezing European (German) industry to death.

At the end of the day Ukraine is not a member of NATO or the EU. Denmark belongs to both. For Ukraine and the US, the Euros submitted to de-industrialization. They also sent almost all their weapons and ammo to Ukraine, and are damn near disarmed.

This policy is essentially hysterical, based on cold War trauma and driven hard by various Eastern Europeans and the Baltics.

But the situation the EU finds itself in is fundamentally simple. They’re de-industrializing. France is losing its overseas vassals, and with them cheap resources. They can’t get cheap resources from Russia and the expensive resources from America are controlled by a hostile and untrustworthy power whom it is impossible to cut a deal with. Say what you will about Russia, but they keep their deals and even after everything has happened if they were to agree to sell to Europe, they’d keep the deal.

Now I want to be very clear about the stakes here. Europe has no resources at scale other than farm goods to sell to the world. It has a very high population for its land mass, and its industry is legacy industry. When you look at tech lead lists, the EU as a whole is not even in the top four. (China, America, Japan, South Korea.)

To put it simply if they mishandle this the European standard of living is likely to crash by half in twenty years. 

A deal must be cut with both China and Russia. Of the two Russia is more important. This is currently impossible because the Eastern EU nations will not allow it and the way the EU system is set up they have enough power to stop it from happening.

At the same time they are essentially welfare recipients, receiving stipends from Germany and France, who are the two real EU powers. Most of them should never have been allowed into the EU in the first place, especially the Baltics, who are undefendable and offer nothing.

Germany and France need to decide what to do to save themselves. If that means changing the EU or leaving it and forming a new association that’s what they need to do. They need to re-arm with their own weapon stack, not American weapons, and in the meantime they should probably buy Chinese weapons, but to do so they’d have to leave NATO or kick the US out of it, which, again, they’re going to need to do anyway, because, as the line goes, “the threat is inside the house.”

If they don’t sort this out and soon, they will suffer a catastrophic loss of standard of living. If that happens they face internal revolution.

The current EU leadership is some of the most pathetic in the world. Trained and raised as American vassals they just cannot understand that the world has changed. It’s not just Trump, Biden was draining them dry too, his administration was just smart enough to, as it were, “boil the frog.”

While the EU still has an industrial base it needs to act to save that base.

As for current tactics, what should be done is simple enough. Counter-tariffs make no sense. Break the DMCA and go after American internet and tech companies which make vast amounts of money in the EU. Force Ireland to cooperate. Let people break the digital locks on American tech, and give them right of repair. If it goes far enough break patents and start producing in the EU. (The US broke Germany’s chemical patents in WWI and basically US chemical industry is based on those broken patents.)

The other step is to stop EU money from flowing into America and force EU wealth to be used inside the EU to create industry and improve tech. The EU sends vast amounts of investment money to the US. Stop that, repatriate as much as possible and get to work with real industrial policy. This will hurt Trump’s real base, the oligarchs, and help Europe.

Europe must end its US vassalage and cut deals with its “enemies” because the US is a greater threat than China or Russia. And if the Eastern EU states aren’t willing to go along with this, cut them loose. They offer very little and are a drain on the actual productive parts of Europe. (Not just Germany and France, but Italy, the Nordics and the low countries.)

The Euros don’t have a lot of time to deal with this, there in severe decline that will end in, not just disaster, but catastrophe.

(And no, I don’t think they’ll do most of this, but there’s value in laying it out.)

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The Accelerating Nature Of Financialization Collapse

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On January 1, 2026

21 Comments

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

No.

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

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

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

It’s not how the US economy works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bottom is not yet close.

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Western Leadership Is The Most Worthless In My Life

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On December 22, 2025

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Which is saying something,  because worthless has been in charge of the West for generations. There are no leaders in charge of any major Western country who aren’t functionally morons.

Europe is run by utter idiots who want war with Russia, refuse to acknowledge that Ukraine is losing, are actively speeding up their loss of industry and imagine they can bully China and think America was their friend before Trump.

Trump is the stupidest president of my lifetime. No one else even comes close. Reagan with Alzheimers was better. Congress is a sewer of morons. Every major American politician, even AOC and Bernie, are functionally psychopaths. (Yes, both Bernie and AOC have repeatedly voted to send more money and weapons to Israel.)

Britain’s Starmer is the stupidest PM of my lifetimes and stunningly incompetent and evil. Yes, his job is to make rich people richer and suck off Netanyahu, but a competent pol would do that without destroying Labour as a party.

Macron has accomplished nothing for France except to make it weaker and its citizens poorer. Germany’s government is presiding over the destruction of a German industrial base that is 150 years old and one of the greatest in the world: the very foundation of Germany’s power and affluence.

Australia is acting as if America is more important to them than China with a military buildup, which is insane since Australia’s future is with China, or it has no future. Japan is antagonizing China, again, insane, without a serious plan. Either make nice or try and get nukes, there are no other paths.

Everyone is destroying free speech to symp for a genocide. Everyone is immiserating their own populations, setting up serious future political instability.

The US is all-in on AI, spending trillions it does not have, driving up energy prices, and creating a larger more concentrated bubble than the real-estate bubble which caused the 2008 crash. If AI is everything they say, it will utterly destroy the US economy by replacing 30% of workers, and if it isn’t, it’ll never pay back all the resources spent. Plus China will win the AI race anyway, since no one with sense will pay for a proprietary model when Chinese open source models are about as good and mean you can’t suddenly be hit with a massive price increase or rate restrictions.

Politicians are either ignoring climate change and doubling down on fossil fuels (which are more expensive than solar) or using climate change as an excuse to immiserate their own people.

Britain is destroying their own farmers.

Meanwhile morons are constantly whining about fertility rates when humanity is in population overshoot so severe that it is causing the second fastest great extinction in Earth’s history. Most countries would be better off with fewer people, but because they don’t know how to stabilize an economy whose population isn’t always growing leaders and their intellectual dupes are panicking.

Only China is handling this with some grace, but they’re not Western. They’re trying to increase fertility somewhat but have accepted there will be population decreases and are moving hard on robotics to care for an aging population and reduce the need for workers.

There isn’t a single major challenge that the West is facing that our leaders are not actively making worse, not better. Not a single one. It’s extraordinary. Even Nixon managed to sign Clean Air and Water Act and to pivot on China. Reagan reduced nuclear weapons. Clinton made everything worse long-term, but was able to manage the economy during his Presidency, at least, so that it felt good to ordinary people, including pushing oil prices under $20/barrel. George Bush Sr. managed the collapse of the USSR with grace. Biden had good anti-trust policy and half decent industrial policy. Trump has done nothing good of significance. Nothing. Even when he has a good idea (tariffs, reduction in H1-B Visas) he fucks it up completely because he can’t execute and has the attention span of a coked up flea.

This reminds me of the Weimar Republic or the late Roman Empire. Most things can be fixed in principle: in theory. Nothing can be fixed in practice because leadership is beyond corrupt and incompetent, high on their own wealth and convinced they are the masters of universe and that reality is what they want it to be.

Prepare, if you’re in the West. By all means feel free to keep working at the politics, but don’t count on it. Instead prepare as individuals and groups. Government isn’t going to save you, not in the West. Your leaders are the number one danger to you, more than any outsider, “terrorist” or “foreign enemy.” Treat them as such, and protect yourselves from them.

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Higher US Profits Are WHY The US Can’t Compete (American won’t re-industrialize)

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On December 15, 2025

14 Comments

A couple weeks ago we discussed why money still flows into America: returns are higher.

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind.

This is a good thing (sort of) if you’re rich and own a lot of assets in the US. It is a bad thing if you don’t, and you’re American. (Europe is similar, but in some ways better for ordinary people.)

American companies just aren’t competitive, because they are always seeking higher profits, which means higher prices, and they actively work to make sure there is no real competition inside the US. Everyone wants to be a monopoly or part of an oligopoly. They want a “moat”, something that means other companies can’t compete with them and government refuses to regulate price gouging.

That produces higher returns, but if you’re going up against a country which has actual competitive markets you’re screwed because they have lower prices and always will. This is the argument for tariffs, to keep American companies competitive in America against cheaper foreign goods. To re-industrialize it would have to be profitable, and it isn’t. The US market is increasingly only America and whatever allies can be convinced to tariff China (which many do, but will they continue to do so?)

Plus, even then, American companies won’t invest unless they can make profits higher than what Chinese companies would accept.

American companies are all financialized. They’re looking for unfair profits, they’re not actually competitive and worse, they don’t want to compete.

OTOH, a lot of Chinese companies are sharks. They compete savagely and they are willing to cut profits razor thin to gain market share.

Additionally the Chinese just move faster, and they have 90% of their own stack in China, while the US has less than 50%. America, ironically, needs China’s help if it wants to rapidly re-industrialize, it needs aggressive anti-trust enforcement, and it needs to change various laws to make financialization far more difficult.

Start with just outlawing PE. Get rid of stock buybacks. Stop pumping the stock market. Ruthlessly go after everyone deliberately raising real-estate, rent, food and other prices.

Slash, in general, all excess profits (like healthcare). Crash the cost structure. Free up consumer demand.

Everything’s being spent on AI, which is increasing energy costs for every other business in the country, and draining investment from anything actually productive. and the US cannot win the AI race, it’s impossible. At best it can get a draw and I doubt it’ll even get that. Chinese AI is open source and uses far less energy, plus the Chinese are building new energy like crazy.

To re-industrialize and compete with China is impossible for the time being. Not in theory, it’s possible theoretically, but it is impossible in practice.

Why? Because NO ONE in power or who can get into power wants to give up their outsized unfair financialized profits.

This is why it’s all Kabuki bullshit. China will keep pulling away. The US cannot compete, because the US refuses to compete. Its only effective policy is to loot its vassals, but that won’t save it.

To a large degree this is why I don’t bother with wonky analysis any more, except occasionally to show it’s pointless. The game is over. The US lost its last chance in 2009, everything since then has just been playing out a game the US cannot win because its elites will never allow the policies necessary to win.

The only way out is thru. The US economy will have to essentially collapse, this type of elite will have to be driven entirely out of power and replaced by industrial elites. Only IF and THEN will it be possible to re-industrialize. That is, best case, a decade in the future, and will start from an even worse position than now.

By then we’ll have even worse climate change and cascading environmental problems.

The next 40 years are going to be UGLY for most of the West.

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The Loss Of American Dollar Privilege Is The Second Most Important Factor In US Decline

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On December 9, 2025

16 Comments

Dollar privilege: everyone using the dollar for trade, and the US controlling the system that moves currency around the world is important. When it goes away, and it will in the next five years, I’d guess, the US will take a huge hit to its ability to command the world’s resources and will lose most of its ability to sanction anyone outside the US vassaldom area. (And the vassals will find it easier to leave if they choose.)

But to see the loss of dollar privilege as primary is a huge mistake. It’s downstream from the only thing that really matters: actual national capacity.

Industrial output, tech, secure resource availability (people, food, energy, rare earths, oil, uranium, etc.)

Fundamentally everything flows from having the most industry and the tech lead, combined with enough resources to make use of that industry and tech lead. Dollar privilege happened because after WWII the US controlled over 50% of the world’s manufacturing ability and was the most powerful non-Soviet state in the world. As such, in a cold war situation, it took charge and created a “free” world in the image it wanted. That certainly included controlling money and money flows, and if you wanted or needed anything you either had to get it from the US and over time its allies (Europe, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan) or from the USSR. When the USSR went away, the US was able to go hog-wild with sanctions, because there was not alternative to using their system and buying from them and their allies.

Now there is. Almost everything you want you can get from China, Russia or some nation outside the “West”. There are exceptions, but they are small in number and that number is decreasing every year. It won’t be long before China delivers satellites to orbit cheaper than the US and had domestic jets that don’t have to buy jet engines (one of those last things) from the West. And hey, virtually everything the Chinese sell is cheaper than if you buy it from the West.

But this is not just about civilian stuff. The fact is that China’s military tech is now more advanced than America’s in most areas. Better missiles. Better drones. Better jets. On top of that they have far more capacity to build ships and drones and missiles and weapons and ammunition than does the West.

Industry/tech (and the resources to use them)=military power. America had a tiny army before WWII, but was able to ramp up seemingly overnight because it had more industry than anyone else. There is zero possibility of America winning a conventional war against China. Zero. Cannot happen. The last chance of doing it was a “resource choke” but that can’t be done now because Russia isn’t going to cooperate. It required Russia as an ally.

To return to our initial point, dollar privilege is a lagging indicator. You get currency domination after you’ve already won, and you lose it after you’ve lost. Once you are no longer the world’s leading industrial and technological state you will lose it, the only question is when. America could have kept it for quite a long time if America’s leaders hadn’t abused it with constant sanctions because while currency privilege has advantages it’s also damaging to the actual productive economy of whoever has it and China is going to great lengths to avoid this.

But as it stands everyone with sense wants out, so the US will lose dollar privilege soon thru most of the world, without, if China can manage it, China creating Yuan privilege.  America may retain it in relation to the usual vassals: the anglosphere, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Europe, but once the alternative exists (and the Chinese and Russians have and are building those alternatives) and has reached critical mass, one by one even the vassals will move to using other systems in addition to SWIFT and will make themselves largely sanctions proof.

This is another “last days of the American Empire” thing, and thank God. Dollar privilege has been used, literally, to kill many millions of people thru the world, and to impoverish hundreds of millions. It will be a great day for every non-American when it ends.

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The Financialization Hoover Effect & The End Of The American Dream

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On December 1, 2025

15 Comments

The great problem with financialization is that produces higher returns than productive investments do. If you want to industrialize or stay industrialized, you will have lower profits than a financialized economy does. This leads to situations like the below:

Generally US assets are highly valued and money tends to flow into the US over other countries. This is because US assets out-perform. The Chinese stock market, like the US market of the 50s and 60s, trades sideways. The US stock market since Greenspan never stops going up: crashes are just speed bumps. Likewise, US housing prices just keep going up, and so on.

On its face, money flooding into the US seems odd. After all, it’s not even close to the world’s most dynamic economy. China is ahead in 80% of technologies, the world’s largest manufacturer, and increasing its lead. In the last 3 years it has increased the numbers of cars it produces by five times, surpassing the US, Japan, South Korea and Germany, all of whom it was behind. It has the largest drone market, the most robots, etc, etc… It is the world’s strongest economy.

But China is a competitive market, and in competitive markets, profits are low, because the second they start to rise, someone new jumps in. That’s how capitalism, in theory, is supposed to work. The problem is that it only works that way with aggressive government regulation and enforcement. The CPC, being Socialist, doesn’t “believe” in markets. It uses them as a tool, without an ideological commitment. There’s no nonsense about markets being self-correcting, about rich people being good, about trickle down, etc, etc… If a market isn’t working to improve mass welfare, the state intervenes, and it will let, and sometimes force, “too big to fail” companies die.

This is, ironically, “real” capitalism, something the West no longer practices.

So America in specific, and the West in general has spent about 45 years now hollowing out its real economy. In exchange a great deal of money has been created, and if you as an investor want money, then you invested in the West.

This is coming to an end. It is in its last five or so years. It relies in the destruction of the real economy by jacking up prices, loading up debt and liquidating industries, often, ironically, to send to China. Once the real economy is gone, there will not be enough financialization opportunities to allow vast inflows of foreign money. This is especially true because, increasingly, US consumers are tapped out. The decision to end large classes of Obamacare subsidies is just a nail in this coffin.

Right now the US economy is bifurcated. Most people are under huge financial stress, but about 20% of the population is doing well and spending more. They are attached to a financialization spigot of some sort. This will end, or rather contract to about 5% of the population over the next decade. As financialization opportunities go away, the number of people benefiting from remaining financialization will of necessity contract. This contraction has been going on for decades. At one point a majority of people benefited, but as time went by more and more had to be sacrificed and the losers soon outnumbered the winners. The 2008 crash was when this became impossible to deny without straight up lying.

What will be left is a sclerotic economy, with a lot of rich people (relatively, in absolute numbers, not so many), a lot of poor people and a small real middle class. (And to be in that middle class you will need to earn low six figures minimum, because financialization makes everything expensive. You’re better off living in China with half the salary of an America. Maybe a third.)

It’s weird being, well, me. Because this is the endgame. I’ve been writing about this for decades, and now I’m seeing my Cassandric prophecies all coming true. None of this was, in one sense, necessary: up till about 2010, it could have been reversed, in theory, by correct policy. In another sense it was inevitable, because the people who make all the decisions were all in, and benefiting immensely, and were unable or unwilling to understand or care about long term consequences. For many of them that made cold hard sense. They were engaged in a “death bet”, they bet they’d be dead before the game ended. Others are just fine being the richest or most powerful people in a shitty country. They don’t, yet, understand what they’ll lose when China is recognized by everyone as the most important and powerful country in the world, or what the decay of American military ability (entirely a product of a now lost industrial and tech lead) will mean to them.

This the middle of the end. The beginning of the end was when Obama and Bernanke decided to bail everyone rich out during the financial crisis, and pass the cost to ordinary people, including by stealing their houses.

This is also epochal. For the first time in centuries, the West will no longer be the most powerful or the most technologically advanced region.

The consequences, for everyone in the world, will be vast.

 

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By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

19 Comments

The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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Trump Has Achieved Biden Levels of Delusion and Denial

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On November 11, 2025

14 Comments

I mean…

Not to mention firing BLS workers because he didn’t like the stats, which even Biden didn’t do. Given how dubious most BLS stats relating to inflation are already, that’s some impressive cope.

The fact is that prices keep going up, and if you aren’t in the golden AI Ponzi Scheme, the economy sucks.

Rosenberg Research did some analysis:

If they aren’t in expansion, they’re in contraction. This is also known as a recession, even if they didn’t shade it.

Some further supporting data:

 

Sure doesn’t look like those tariffs are causing manufacturing to flood back into the US, does it? Data centers and power station building are both AI-related, and as for hospitals, they are part of a protected oligopoly, or, they were until the ACA subsidies were cut. That’s not likely to be good for the health “industry,” which would be wonderful — except that people will die and suffer as a result. “Get rid of part of the shitty way we provide health care now without replacing it with something else.”

Anyway, unless you’re in a monopoly/oligopoly, and have some control, or you’re connected to the AI spigot, the economy is ass. And remember, major tech companies are engaging in mass layoffs, so just working for tech companies won’t protect you; the reverse is true. Unless you’re actively working on AI, you’re first to the gallows, as their workers are where they’re starting with the replacements.

For decades, I warned coders (“engineers”) that their days of being King Shit of Turd Island, pretending their skills were super-special, would eventually come to an end. The moment senior management could figure out how to replace them, they would. Unless you’re truly at the very top of your field, you’re always replaceable — mediocre isn’t as good as average, but it’s usually a LOT cheaper.

Anyway, the end days are nigh. There isn’t much left of the middle class in America, with little left for the rich to steal. The US either changes its politics radically (and Trump has always been a billionaire whose policies are good for billionaires) or the US continues its descent to becoming an unutterable shithole for about 80 percent of its population.

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