Ian Welsh

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

Category: Economics Page 1 of 100

America Continues To Destroy Its International Markets

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On October 1, 2026

20 Comments

Sanctions come with a cost. When the US, in Trump’s first term, put chip sanctions on China and particularly sanctioned Huawei (the leader in 5g networks), it galvanized China. They pivoted hard to supporting internal chip companies, and over time moved their government computers off US software. Huawei survived, prospered and created its own operating system. In the past couple years China has actually forbid import of US chips, though some still come in thru the gray market.

This isn’t an isolated issue. One of the reasons, ironically, that Iran is so strong in many ways is because of sanctions: they were forced to create their own industrial base, not just in weapons, but in things like railroads, engines, boilers, etc, etc… When Iranian infrastructure was destroyed by the US earlier this year much of it was very quickly repaired: to the extent they have dependencies, they are on China and to a lesser extent Russia.

The US can’t stop itself: as their military and industrial might has declined they have relied more and more on sanctions. Not only has this lead to other countries (particularly Russia and China) creating their own payment systems and offering those payment systems to their trading partners, but it has vastly decreased the market for US tech.

In  order to protect Israel and Netanyahu from sanctions, it hit one of its allies:

The Netherlands is following China, France, and Russia in moving to break the global stranglehold of US tech dominance, it was revealed this week.

The Dutch government was shocked into action after the US remotely disabled the computers of judges in the Hague who criticized Israel leader Benjamin Netanyahu. The sudden loss of ICC staff’s Outlook email accounts caused significant problems.

The US reserves the right to unilaterally sanction anyone, anywhere in the world–all your Google accounts could disappear in an instant. Bye-bye, gmail. “The Dutch government is creating its own digital work environment based on the Dutch Linux distribution NixOS,” said Jasper Bakker of news website Tweakers.

Once lost these markets won’t come back. Countries which create their own tech, will use it. Getting civilians to transfer over is harder, most non-government, non corporate computers in China still run Windows, but Huawei created HarmonyOS, and it’s getting traction. I would expect that in a few years China will cease the sale of Windows in China, and new computers will have to come with non US operating systems.

Every source of American power, for about 35 years, has been subject to systematic dismantling. Industry was offshored, they stopped refining and mining many key resources, sanctions were abused, dollar privilege was abused, and so on. Generally the external actions didn’t hit allies/vassals–until recently, but Trump has been on a tear: forcing the Netherlands to stop selling China chip making machines, for example, which the CEO of ASML predicted would lead to China developing its own advanced chip making machines. (They’re still behind, but they’ve progressed far faster than most people predicted.)

The thing about crippling sanctions is that they don’t work on real countries in the medium term. China and Russia are real countries, with their own industrial bases, plenty of scientists and engineers and access to resources the US can’t sanction. Cutting them off just speeds up internal development or shifts to other suppliers. If you’re going to exploit a critical vulnerability, you should do so only against those who can’t substitute or as prelude to a war: and that war needs to be soon, before they adapt.

Anyway, this continued nonsense is pushing even vassals to reduce their vulnerability, and while Europe is still prostrate, these sorts of actions build the basis for a break from US hegemony–and cost American companies billions. Likewise, as people move off US tech, as it loses its ubiquity, a lot of power is lost: people use many techs because “everyone uses them”. Network effects are huge, but each of these hits reduces those network effects.

It’s extraordinarily foolish (and Nvidia’s CEO pointed this out) but it’s US policy. America thinks its indispensable, and once it was, but it’s doing everything possible to make it so that other countries will do whatever is necessary to make it dispensable.

Truly, American elites, while vicious and cunning are some of the worst long term strategists I’ve ever seen.

 

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The Psychology Of Elite Depravity

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On September 26, 2026

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So, why are so many members of the elite pedophiles?

It starts with the fact that money or power gets you pretty much anything you want that’s legal. If you’ve wanted to do something, you can and you do. Hedonic adjustment sets in: if you can have all the boy toys and booze and fine homes and massages and trips and fine cuisine you want, after a while you get bored of it.

It comes second from “elite impunity”, the fact that in most countries a lot of laws aren’t enforced against rich or powerful people. Do crack, go to prison? Have a pricey cocaine habit, like half of American elites in the 80s, and you’re not touched. (Leaving aside immunities like being able to steal employees wages without usually being called on it, and when you are, not going to jail.)

The general observation is true: elites go to prison only when they prey on other elites.

The third bit is how sensual pleasures work. If something is forbidden, if it has powerful taboos around it, like pedophilia, or cannibalism or incest or rape or sacrilege, then when you perform those actions you get much more of a rush from it — powerful emotions are released when violate strong emotional prohibitions.

So you get wealth or power, you use it to enjoy all the things you wanted which are legal, and hedonic adjustment sets in.

All that is left are forbidden pleasures, and as a bonus, those forbidden pleasures come with an extra hedonic boost as long as you’re impaired in your guilt function. But if you’re rich and powerful, over time, your compassion and empathy die (this is well attested to in the literature). You’re used to having your way and to using other people as means to ends which benefit you, not them.

So–extra enjoyment from breaking taboos and unlike ordinary people, no guilt because you can’t feel compassion or empathy for your victims.

And you’re still basically immune. Oh Epstein eventually went to prison and was suicided, but we’ve all seen how those who partook of his services have been protected: how the Epstein files were redacted and no one was indicted.

All the taboo breaking hedonic highs with almost zero likelihood of going to prison.

Then there’s the simple fact that if you’ve got power, other people with power like to have blackmail on you. (Mossad says “hi”, but they are hardly the only panderering blackmailers.) After all, if you’ve got power, you might decide to do something that isn’t good for other elites: blackmail (and remember, Epstein’s properties had hidden cameras everywhere) takes that option off the table.

Elites thus are always at far more risk of engaging in egregious behaviour than ordinary people. It doesn’t show up in stats because elites are in charge and don’t arrest each other. Even those who don’t partake, either because they have some vestige of ethics left, or because they’re smart and don’t want to open themselves to blackmail rarely go after other elites because once there are enough corrupt evil blackmailed elites, there’s no way to get through that vanguard and if you threaten them they’ll band together and destroy you. (See Thomas Massie, the Representative who has pushed releasing the Epstein files the hardest and who lost his primary to a massive influx of outside money.)

Wealth and power are deeply corrupting. They don’t corrupt everyone, but they can corrupt a plurality, and once the threshold where a plurality have been corrupted by evil acts, the system becomes self-sustaining: impossible to stop.

This is the sort of thing that Xi headed off. The Communist party and wealthy oligarchs were becoming corrupt, though as far as I know not yet to the level of pedophile rings. He headed it off with a savage crackdown.

Eventually some future leader will fail to do so, and China’s elites too will become corrupted: it’s a virtually universal experience.

And once you hit that point it generally requires revolution of one sort or another to clean up the mess.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Conditions for Revolutionary Change In The West: Fiscal

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On September 24, 2026

18 Comments

The traditional revolutionary change requirements are:

  1. An inability to pay military, police and functionaries.
  2. A split in the elite.
  3. Popular revolt.

As a rule, all three are necessary.

In the Russian revolution, the military was noticeably absent, or in the case of the Navy, actually revolted. Near the end, with the old government in the Winter Palace and protestors outside, the cadets being used as guards refused to fight, the Cossacks which the government expected to come rescue them never showed up, and navy sailors helped organize the crowds outside and storm the Palace.

There’s a lot of confusion around this issue, and a fair bit of comes from the idea that money doesn’t matter, because you can always print more.

Sure.

How’d that work for the Weimar Republic?

The bottom line is that money is only good for buying what exists or what is close to existing.

What we’ve been seeing for about 60 years now is:

  1. price increases higher than wage increases.
  2. Deindustrialization.

This means the West is making less of what its own populations need, and the populations can afford less of what does exist. Internal capacity is collapsing. (Ignore CPI, it’s not just a lie, it’s a damned lie. Expenses have risen far faster than it suggests.)

The solution to this, such as it was, was to trade: buy what is needed from other countries. The West was almost the sole supplier of goods that other countries wanted: planes, cars, advanced electronics, weapons and so on. For a while the USSR was an alternative, but as time went by that alternative became less and less viable, until the collapse of the USSR, at which point the West was pretty much the only game in town.

But Western elites were drinking their own kool-aid. They wanted reduced wages and environmental protection costs, so they decided to move production overseas, especially to China. Now China can make almost everything that any country might want: they don’t have to buy from America, and as the technical ability to avoid the dollar payment system increases, that means they don’t need the West.

Recently, what we’ve seen is a reduction in Western coercive ability. Not a complete loss of it (yet), as Venezuela and Cuba and Greenland show, but a serious loss in power. In fact the pivot to coercing weak nearby states and vassals is due to the weakness: the US can’t win far from its territory, but it’s still scary to Latin America and Europe.

This isn’t just about the US though, France had its own sphere of African interests, with military bases throughout multiple ex-colonies. It essentially ran multiple countries. Almost all of them have now run the French out. The French nuclear system, for example, used heavily discounted uranium from African vassals.

Trump seized Venezuela’s oil and has locked down Greenland’s resources, but he’s lost the Middle East. (Yes the war continue. Yes the US has lost and the American Middle Eastern Raj is dying and will not be saved.) Africa would far rather do business with China.

So would Latin America, but American military might, “NGOs”, diplomats and intelligence services have so far mostly been able to keep Latin America in the American sphere. So far. As the ability to use naval forces to project forces declines (and it is and will) this will end, though the process may take a couple decades and a lot of pain.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that the US is becoming much more poor and will continue to do so. Its coercive abilities are low, it has lost Africa and is losing the Middle East. Even Asian countries which have disputes with China (Vietnam, for example) are integrating with China’s economy.

Can’t make it. Can’t force as many countries to sell to the US for cheap. Has much less to sell to the world that it wants at a reasonable price, since China sells all the same things for less.

At this point the system’s only remaining pillar is dollar privilege. Everything is bought and sold in dollars, the US can print dollars, and the US can thus keep buying what it needs.

Except when it can’t, as with rare earths, industrial magnets, and other resources and goods China has decided to stop selling to America, which it can’t make itself and for which there is no adequate alternative supply. These goods, by the way, are necessary for American weapons, and without them the US military will keep becoming weaker and unable to rebuild its arsenal. (On the other hand, Russia and Iran and North Korea all get as much of these goods from China as they need.)

And dollar privilege is ending. Oh it goes back and forth, the US is fighting tooth and nail to keep it going, but the trend is clear. Abuse of sanctions, in particular, has made it clear to everyone outside the West, and even to some inside the West, that being in the dollar system: settling trades in dollars, is a huge vulnerability.

I assume the picture is clear: America can’t make as much, can’t force other countries to sell for cheap, has less to trade that can’t be bought for less somewhere else, and soon won’t just be able to print dollars and buy it anyway.

This brings us back to the enforcer class. Police in America are paid VERY well.

With overtime it’s not unusual for police salaries to hit the mid hundred thousands.

Cops are, generally, pretty well paid.

The military is less so, with salaries in the mid 30K range being common for non-NCO enlisted members.

Cops are well paid because they enforce the laws.

“Duh,” you say, but the point I’m making is that they break strikes, intimidate protesters, enforce property laws and steal more money from people than burglars do–but not from elites. Laws are set up to favor elites and cops are how laws that are unfair are enforced.

They’re frontline against the possibility of change. During the American revolution, those unhappy with officials would gather in large groups and go “have a talk” with their representatives. That sort of thing is basically impossible now.

It should be obvious why it’s necessary for the enforcer class: military and cops, to break from the elites for a revolution to succeed. They don’t all have to, but either you need some on the side of the new order, or you need them to refuse to do their jobs: as was the case with the Cossacks in the Russian Revolution.

A lot of people think that the first requirement of revolution: being unable to pay cops, military and functionaries (someone does need to keep things running) is impossible now in the US.

They’re right.

Now

But as the US becomes poorer and as prices continue to rise faster than wages, even police wages, and especially as actual shortages occur (sorry, we just don’t have any) that will change. You could pay them 10 billion dollars, but if it won’t buy the food, medicine, housing, internet and so on that they need or want, it amounts to “not being able to pay”.

And that’s where the US is in danger of heading. Can’t make a lot of stuff. Can force fewer and fewer countries to sell or “give” resources to them, can’t earn an honest buck in trade because China’s good are cheaper, and soon can’t just print dollars.

(I also expect that a lot of US copyright laws may be overthrown in other countries in about a decade to two decades. No reason to pay that ransom if you aren’t buying from the US, and it’s better to have domestic industry or your own internet companies.)

Every great nation thinks “it can’t happen here” till it does. For the US the endgame grows closer.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Preparing For Bad Times, Trumpocalypse Edition

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On September 22, 2026

12 Comments

I’ve been warning that there would be serious problems from Trump’s war because of the effect on oil, fertilizer, helium, natural gas and much more.

This was obvious: world use was higher than supply, and stockpiles would eventually dry up. Trump, for whatever reason (I favor blackmail, but hey, insert your reason here), refuses to make peace. Then the Saudis decided to hit Yemen’s capital aiport and Ansar Allah said “you’ve made us angry. You won’t like us when we’re angry.”

There’s some dispute over exactly who hit the pipeline (Sauds say Iraqi militias, Iraqi militia’s say “that’s not our honor” but it doesn’t really matter. Ignore BS about repairs, they remain no more defensible after repairs than they were before repairs are needed.

I expect to see shortages (already here for diesel in America and France), price increases and in some countries, food riots. No real supply management has been done, the geniuses in charge figured “let’s keep prices lower than they otherwise would be, and for sure we shouldn’t make sure farmers have enough at prices they can afford, or any other critical industry.” Add increased fertilizer prices, and BOOM!

So, Trump and co. have blown up the world economy, and 2027 is going to suck extra rancid ass. What to do?

The obvious thing is to stock up, if you can, but that’s not enough unless you’re rich and sure that your income stream is secure.

What you need is to belong to an actual community: people who take care of each other. It could be a very tight friendship group, it could be a large extended helpful family (not a lot of those still around), but the easiest way to get such a community is to join an active church. Active churches and their members give you a support network by default if you get involved. (Don’t just go worship, volunteer for something.)

“But Ian,” you whine, I’m not religious.

Get religion!

Kidding, kidding. There are churches for non-believers too.

So find a church that suits you and start going. Make friends. Be useful and helpful. When you need help the odds of you getting it skyrocket.

If you’re alone, or part of a small family group, you’re always one bad bump away from fiasco. In normal times this is bad. In the the times which are coming, well, it could be catastrophic.

Again: things ARE going to be bad. How bad will depend on where you are, and how stupid and unwilling Trump and MBS, the the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, are to make peace.

But I’m sure everything will work out. Neither of them are evil, stupid and have a track record of failure at everything except enriching themselves and clinging to power, right?

Act on this. It doesn’t have to be my suggestions, but do what you can: Shit Mountain just liquefied and started rolling downhill to where you live.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Doom, As Predicted

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On September 17, 2026

28 Comments

Sigh:

Regular readers will know I have been predicting this for some time. And understand that this is before the effects of Yemen basically shutting off Saudi oil and natural gas entirely because of shipping times.

Diesel is what farmers use. It’s what truckers use. It’s what most mining equipment uses. Much construction equipment. It’s probably more important for the operation of domestic economies than gasoline. Add to this fertilizer shortages, because much of the precursors come from the Middle East, and we’re in a world of hurt. Next up, bunker fuel, the stuff used to run freighters and tankers and without which international trade crashes to a halt, since shipping the is backbone of international trade.

Meanwhile the international bond market is freaking out:

Ouch.

Also ouch.

Are you sick of all the winning yet?

The Feds also increased the Federal reserve rate yet again, and indicated there may be another raise before the end of year.

Perhaps you’ve wondered why high interest rates are used to cool inflation? It’s because borrowing costs are a cost for businesses and individuals: when they go up, people have less money, and thus spend less. This leads to what economists like to call “demand destruction.”

Demand destruction means less economic activity, and enough of it causes recessions and shitty economies, and that’s in addition to the fact that expensive or insufficient fuel will also lead to a shitty economy.

And by shitty economy I mean that I expect to see actual food riots in multiple countries next year. This crisis is one of choice, and on top of that since there was no proper rationing which made sure that diesel and fertilizer and so on got to those parts of the economy which needed it most (yes, that means farmers in particular, but not just them) we’re going to be in a world of hurt.

Everyone with diesel refining who hasn’t already will put exports controls on at the least. That means if your country doesn’t produce enough, it’s not going to be able to buy enough otherwise. Yet another case of “no, you can’t buy anything that matters when it really matters.” Food exports will likely be restricted as well. Can your country feed itself? A lot can’t: for example Britain.

In personal terms I re-iterate. If you can afford to, start and stocking up on staples, medicine, fuel and so on. If you don’t need them, great, you’ll use them up in time anyway, but odds are you will need them and at the least, even if your locale doesn’t have physical shortages, be assured prices WILL rise.

This isn’t a theoretical matter any more, or a case of “later” as it was when I gave these warnings months ago. It’s happening now and it’s going to get worse. The only route out (and even then there’ll be problems, because rebuilding takes time) is for America to admit it lost the war and go to peace on Iranian terms and for Saudi Arabia to do the same with Yemen. All this nonsense about repairing the Saudi pipeline is almost meaningless because Yemen can hit it again and again and has no reason not to until the Sauds end their blockade.

This is a three alarm fire in the economy. The basis of the economy is on fire, and the fire is out of control and spreading. Act accordingly.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Information Overlord: Houthis Roll, Hegseth Bumbles, AI Doomer Hype, Lots of Music Talk

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On September 11, 2026

26 Comments

Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week as Nat Wilson Turner

This week at Naked Capitalism I pulled a shift covering the Iran War and tried to connect the dots between Pete Hegseth’s Department of War and what’s going on with Meta and OpenAI.

I also continued my “Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years” series with the first installment of the Ukraine debacle.

More of what I wrote and recorded for The MMA Draw and The Let It Roll Podcast is at the bottom of this post but I wanted to feature the news links and think pieces.

What I’m Reading and Watching

The Iran War

  • The Iran War Has Just Had A Major Phase Change — Ian Welsh. On the interceptor math: the US runs out long before Iran does if Iran chooses to go all out, and hitting only three or four tankers a day was a choice rather than a ceiling.

“As I said day one of the war, the math is on Iran’s side: the US will run out of interceptors long before Iran if Iran chooses to go all out.”

Empire, and what it remembers

The AI trade

The AI Doomers really had their moment this week. I hope y’all know most of that crap is as overblown as the hype.

Money

What the heck is going on with the bond market, private equity, etc

 

Read More

If You Want Companies To Behave Well You Have To Punish Decision Makers

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On August 25, 2026

22 Comments

Regular readers will know that China has been going after billionaires hard. So much so, in fact, that the number of billionaires is dropping in China.

Back after the financial collapse executives did very very well. They had been lying repeatedly, had engaged in wide-scale fraud and to the extent that there was any punishment it was fines on the companies involved.

Not only were the fines less than the companies had made, but even in the rare case that the company went bankrupt, the executives involved still got to keep all the money they had made. Dick Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers wound up with a net worth of over 500 million — after his company was bankrupt.

The saying at the time when bad deals were made was IBGYBG. “I”ll be gone, you’ll be gone.”

So if you want to dis-incentivize bad executive behaviour, you have to really go after the execs. Here’s an example of China doing it the right way:

Notice that all his personal assets were seized. I’d also track down any family member he made rich and take that money away.

The only way to restrain capitalists is real prison sentences or execution (Vietnam is fond of executing corrupt execs) and taking their money, and thus power, away. The idea of corporations being used to shield decision makers and beneficiaries of illegal or evil behaviour from liability has to go away. Corporate personhood has to end, as well, or they have to be given the disadvantages of personhood. “Committed a serious crime? OK, the corporation is dissolved.”

Psychologically the most important thing here is for government officials to not identify with business leaders. Chinese CCP bureaucrats do not think of themselves as part of the same class as executives at companies. Organizationally there can be no revolving door between business and government. You can move from biz to government, but not vice versa. There can be no route for payoffs, including the old “I”ll hire or give your wife or kid a sweetheart deal.”

For most of Western history bureaucrats – aka. civil servants, were considered morally superior to businessmen, because they were working for the common good and by doing so earning less than they could if they were in the private sector. Business was what you did if you were morally inferior: a person who was concerned about yourself and not others.

That ethos produced some very competent and high powered government bureaucracies which were well respected, especially when combined with civil service examinations.

Government and business are two different things. There has to be some understanding between them, since government must regulate business, but government’s job is to make the people better off, not to make businesses richer.

When government operates this way it can control private enterprise so that markets work to the benefit of society. When it doesn’t, usually because it’s been corrupted by capitalists, it enables monopolies and oligopolies and exploitative practices and when there are crises, it bails out the rich, not the people.

All of this is well understood, really, it’s just that there’s a lot of money to pay for scummy intellectuals and journalists and experts to obscure the fact and pretend that there’s a trickle down effect or that what’s good for rich is good for society. (Hello Milton Friedman, you corrupt hack.)

Markets are a lot like nuclear energy. Great if you do it right, but if you don’t, it’ll blow up in your face, and the first rule is that the more money a capitalist has the more harshly they should be treated if they break the law or hurt the public. In China, that’s how it is. In the West, the rich skate and the poor go to prison for life or have their homes and savings and livelihood stolen.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Canada Refuses Last Minute Trade Demands From Trump And Ends Talks

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On August 24, 2026

43 Comments

I’m not a big fan of Canada’s Prime Minister Carney, the guy who blew two housing bubbles: one in Canada then another in the UK. He’s a neoliberal’s neoliberal.

But unlike most he is neither stupid nor a coward.

It was looking like there would be a Canada/US trade deal, and honestly? I was worried what Canada had given away to get it.

But then according to Carney (the US denies, but the when the Trump administration’s lips are moving, they’re lying), they added a bunch of last minute additions.

These are pretty close to annexation without the troops: the US would control Canada’s trade and have first call on all its minterals and would have altered our internal laws to suit them. I’m particularly intrigued by America wanting an end to Quebec’s language sign laws: what the hell does that have to do with the US?

It’s always hard to tell what is going on in the Trump administration, but these demands seem calculated to force Carney to refuse. He’d lose the next election if he agreed, the backlash would be immense. Certainly he would have been crushed in Quebec, and without Quebec he has no route to victory.

Moderately sane and informed American officials would know this. So, normally, one would assume they deliberately spiked the talks.

But this is the Trump administation, full of some of the stupidest and most ignorant people on Earth, ruled by a senile old man with the attention span of a grasshopper on cocaine.

So maybe they really figured “Canada has to do what we tell them to!’

Instead, the vast majority of Canadians support Carney, even prairie westerners who usually hate his guts.

And fortunately it worked out for the best. They pushed a strong hand way too far. The truth is that Canada has a ton of trade with America and is very vulnerable.

But the longer term truth is this: there’s nothing Canada buys from the US it can’t get somewhere else, often for a lot less (hello China) and there’s not much Canada exports that it couldn’t sell to nations other than America. We’re in a bad position because against the opposition of the majority of Canadians a feckless previous Prime Minister signed trade deals with the US which increased integration.

But what was done can be undone, because Canada is not naturally dependent on America.

One argument I keep hearing from Americans is that Canada needs America to defend it. To which the answer is a question: “From whom?”

The truth is that no one but the US is actually an invasion threat to Canada. Second biggest country in the world. Separated by large oceans or thousands of miles of land from every country in the world except America. The only nation America protects us from is America, and that’s what’s known as a protection racket.

Generally I don’t believe in making deals with Trump. No deals at all. He doesn’t keep his deals and if you make any concessions he always assumes that means there’s more to be had and comes back again with more threats.

The task for Canada is, indeed, to diversify away from the US. Trump is doing us a favor. If he’d offered a slightly shitty deal, we’d have accepted it. If he’d asked only for the moon, not the stars, he’d have gotten it. By making demands no Prime Minister could accept without losing the next election, demands which amount to “we control your trade relations with everyone else going foward” Trump made it possible for Carney to tell him no on the entire package.

And while that will suck for Canada; while Canada will be hurt by a trade war: it’s forcing us to do the right thing rather than put it off or do it slowly.

So I’d like to thank Trump.

“Thank you President Trump, for being a complete and utter asshole with the IQ of a squash and no empathy or kindness at all  Any President slightly smarter of slightly more able to understand other people could have had Canadian elites giving them cheap everything Canada has an integrating with the US even more. But you keep showing why that’s impossible and stupid.”

Now we just need a strong military deterrent. We have a lot of mountains and Iran has just shown us how to use them.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

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