Ian Welsh – Page 17 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 01, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

Iran Calls Trump’s Bluff as Deep State Rebels Over War

[Simplicius, via Naked Capitalism 02-27-2025]

…Trump’s initiative is collapsing before his sallow eyes amidst internal revolts as staff leak all kinds of damaging bulletins to the press. The latest from the Pentagon stovepipe is that the US only has munitions for days of a sustained high-intensity conflict with Iran, a fact we’ve known all along….

It’s clear an internal revolt is taking place—from the potential sabotaging of the carrier by its crews, to yesterday’s sudden firing of the Director of the Joint Staff, Vice Admiral Fred Kacher….

Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute Daniel McAdams writes:

“My guess – and it is based on limited but not extensive contact with Navy warfighters – is that he holds the position that a war on Iran would be a disaster. I don’t want to be too specific, but I believe from what I know that this view is widely held among particularly Naval personnel in the Pentagon.

“It’s becoming more and more clear that many inside the Pentagon believe the US will face generational disaster if it over-commits to a large-scale conflict with Iran. The going theory cited by experts, which I agree with, is that Trump has boxed himself in by amassing a huge armada that was meant to intimidate Iran into surrender. Now that Iran has called his bluff, Trump is faced with the humiliating choices of either TACO-ing out or allowing the US military machine to be exposed in a disastrous war of attrition….

“Trump is one wrong move away from imploding his administration, and his legacy along with it. An Iran war would likely also send oil prices skyrocketing, handing Russia a massive boon that would nullify virtually every hostile economic action against its energy sector of the past year, and ensuring another huge boost to the Russian SMO efforts.

“Trump is left with few good options: we can only assume he will have to take a major compromise on Iran while gussying it up in his now-infamous style into some kind of “victory”. More than likely, he’ll lie by twisting the result of the “deal” into something it actually isn’t by announcing major restrictions on Iran’s uranium enrichment which will be gross exaggerations of the contractual reality; this has been the precedent that has defined Trump’s elliptical style during his second term.”

Trump not violating any law

‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]

‘Batshit Authoritarianism’: Trump Allies Drafting Order to Give Him ‘Extraordinary Power Over Voting’

Brad Reed, February 26, 2026 [CommonDreams]

A group of right-wing activists is crafting an executive order that would let President Donald Trump unilaterally ban mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the order being drafted by Trump allies would give him “extraordinary power over voting,” even though the US Constitution explicitly gives individual states the powers to run their own elections.

An advocate for the order, Florida attorney Peter Ticktin, acknowledged in an interview with the Post that the Constitution does not give the president any role in shaping elections, but he said Trump needed to act to prevent China from supposedly interfering with American elections.

“Under the Constitution, it’s the legislatures and states that really control how a state conducts its elections, and the president doesn’t have any power to do that,” Ticktin said. “But here we have a situation where the president is aware that there are foreign interests that are interfering in our election processes. That causes a national emergency where the president has to be able to deal with it.”

The activists drafting the emergency order said that they are working in coordination with the White House….

Trump Says He’s ‘Entitled’ to Illegal Third Term as Allies Draft Voter Suppression Decree

On Friday, Democracy Docket published an April 2025 version of the draft order provided by a Trump ally, which the outlet described as “riddled with errors.”

Trump Officials Attended a Summit of Election Deniers Who Want the President to Take Over the Midterms

Doug Bock Clark, February 28, 2026 [propublica.org]

…According to videos, photos and social media posts reviewed by ProPublica, the meeting’s participants included Kurt Olsen, a White House lawyer charged with reinvestigating the 2020 election, and Heather Honey, the Department of Homeland Security official in charge of election integrity. The event was convened by Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, and attended by Cleta Mitchell, who directs the Election Integrity Network, a group that has spread false claims about election fraud and noncitizen voting. …

ICE Whistleblower Confirms What We Already Knew This Week in Democracy, Feb 27,

While testifying before Congress, an ICE whistleblower sounded the alarm on the agency’s “deficient, defective, and broken” training program for new deportation officers.

Ryan Schwank, who previously worked as an ICE lawyer in the department’s training academy, noted the standard 584-hour training program had been cut by 240 hours, and he received “secretive orders” to teach new recruits “to violate the Constitution by entering homes without a judicial warrant.”

….Later, as part of his new role combating the so-called “war on fraud,” Vice President JD Vance announced that the Trump administration will withhold $259 million in Medicaid payments for Minnesota – another move driven by anti-Somali racism.

Cuban man’s death at El Paso tent camp was result of “spontaneous use of force,” ICE says

[Texas Tribune, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]

Witness who saw friend fatally shot by immigration agent in Texas last year dies in car accident

[AP, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]

High school students protesting ICE remain jailed days after police assault in Pennsylvania

[WSWS, via Naked Capitalism 02-25-2025]

Monopoly Round-Up: Trump Loses on Tariffs, Has His ‘Withdrawal from Afghanistan’ Moment

Matt Stoller

Trump’s DHS kills again–this time a US citizen and a blind immigrant

Dean Obeidallah, Feb 26, 2026

There are two reasons why Trump’s Department of Homeland (DHS) agents—be they ICE or Customs Border Patrol (CBP)—so easily kill people. First, they have been told by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and others in the Trump regime that they are immune from criminal prosecution. And second, Trump, Vance, Miller and others have dehumanized immigrants—and even US citizens who oppose them—to the dangerous point that they don’t view them as human beings….

The most recent horrific case involves the death of Shah Alam, a 56-year-old Rohingya refugee in Buffalo, New York. Alam–who has only been in the United States since 2024—doesn’t speak English, is blind and per his family can’t use a cellphone nor does he know his family’s phone number….

CBP knew that Alam didn’t speak English, they knew he was blind, they even knew he had a lawyer given they just picked him up from prison. Add to that the CBP’s statement admits they knew where Alam lived, noting they dropped him at “a location near his last known address.” (A random coffee shop miles from his house,)

Well then why not drop him at his actual last address?! Or why not simply make a phone call to his family or lawyer!? As Alam’s son told the press, “Nobody told me or my family or attorney where my dad was dropped off.”

Shortly thereafter the family filed a missing person’s report when their father could not be located. But sadly he was discovered days later dead. The exact circumstances surrounding his death are still unclear….

Bufalo Mayor Sean Ryan noted in a statement, “A vulnerable man − nearly blind and unable to speak English − was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location,” He added, “That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane.”

Journalists Jailed by ICE Are Revealing the Horrors of Incarceration

[Scheerpost, via Naked Capitalism 02-22-2025]

ICE Took Their Papers—and Won’t Give Them Back

[Mother Jones, via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]

Trump Cheers Lethal Doxxing

Ken klippenstein [via Naked Capitalism 02-26-2025]

…From the killing of Bin Laden in 2011 to the present, the US (and Israel) have conducted more and more regular decapitation strikes, a method of warfare that is nothing like the many failed attempts to take down Saddam Hussein. Aided by ubiquitous surveillance, tippy-Top Secret techniques, and artificial intelligence, individuals can now be found and tracked in real time….

What Trump celebrated in the State of the Union—and what no one has really named—is this practice that I call lethal doxxing: the acquisition of someone’s most sensitive personal information revealing their up-to-the-moment location, followed by the lethal part. It’s doxxing at nation-state scale, with a kill chain attached….

And as with Internet doxxing, the information age has made this easier than at any point in human history. Maybe that’s why ICE is so paranoid about it, treating doxxing as a life-or-death threat to their officers.

The killing of Mexican cartel leader “El Mencho” is just the latest indication of a quiet shift toward lethal doxxing as a routine instrument of diplomacy, statecraft, warfare, or even just revenge. That shift, scarcely discussed at all in the mainstream, has taken place for reasons that make it likely to outlive the Trump administration….

Trump’s ICE is now holding a political prisoner for one year—and unless we speak up, she won’t be the last!

Dean Obeidallah, Feb 22, 2026

Donald Trump’s ICE is doing exactly what he wants. And now they are holding a political prisoner for nearly a year in an ICE detention camp simply because 33-year-old Leqaa Kordia dared to champion views the Trump regime opposes. This should concern all Americans especially given the recent warning from concentration camp expert Andrea Pitzer—who explained on my SiriusXM show that history tells the Trump regime building massive ICE detention camps will ultimately be used to imprison political prisoners….

That is why the case Leqaa Kordia demands far more attention given it’s a sneak preview of what we can expect from Trump for not just immigrants–but also U.S. citizens. Leqaa is a 33-year-old Palestinian woman with family in Gaza and the United States. Her mother is a US citizen living in Paterson, New Jersey—which is where Leqaa was staying and working as a waitress until she taken by ICE….

Trump’s War on the Constitution

Josh Marshall, February 27, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

It’s a cliché and more or less true that the Constitution’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” language can mean whatever Congress wants it to mean. That is not only because in this area Congress’ decision-making is certainly un-reviewable. It is because the Constitution’s writers were intentionally expansive in their definition. They were most focused not on statutory crimes but misrule. I wanted to take a moment to note that what we have unfolding in Minnesota is really a definitional impeachable offense.

I say this with no expectation that he will be charged with it, let alone convicted and removed from office, certainly not under Republican rule. But these are precisely the kinds of abuses of power, unconstitutional actions, that are most squarely within the impeachment mechanism’s meaning.

President Trump first undertook what amounts to an invasion of the state, with poorly trained and abusive paramilitaries creating menace, mayhem and death. The aim of this action was to terrorize and dominate the state. It wasn’t about immigration enforcement. Now, having been forced to scale back at least the visibility of their invasion of the state, they are resorting to cutting off budgetary support for social services programs. This money is distributed pursuant to congressional law. The executive branch has no right to impound it based on some vague definition of not being a good “custodian” of the money.

I don’t expect to get much disagreement when I say these are illegitimate actions. I doubt even the administration expects this decision to withstand judicial scrutiny. These are abuses that go far beyond statutes or criminal law. The president is elected to see that the laws are carried out, ensure the national defense and prosperity and provide civilian leadership of the armed forces. He has no right to go to war with states or regions he disagrees with politically, or has a vendetta against, or to try to coerce or punish them into compliance.

The fact that Trump won’t be impeached for this, at least not this year, shouldn’t obscure the fact that he should be, that these are the basic forms of misrule that merit removal from office, that quite apart from the statutory legality of specific actions, the entire class of actions — coercion by violence and theft of funding — is ruled out entirely.

Donald Trump, Jeff Epstein and the Politics of Impunity TPM

Josh Marshall, February 23, 2026 [Talking Points Memo]

The Simple Math Of the Iran War

By Ian Welsh

On March 1, 2026

40 Comments

Thaad interceptor missiles have a production of about eight a month. Stockpiles are in the low hundreds. Ground based interceptors.

Patriot missiles had a production of 620 in 2025. Stockpile numbers are unclear, but low thousands is likely. They miss a lot, and usually two to four are shot per interception attempt.

Thirty-nine SM-3 missiles were produced in 2025. Stockpiles are at about 500. These are used by AEGIS naval defenses.

Note that none of these can be manufactured without supplies from China.

Estimates of Iranian missiles are around two to three thousand. Iranian drones? Tens of thousands. They used many up during the last war, but China has helped them rapidly manufacture more.

The math is simple. If Iran keeps firing, and the US/Israel does not take out the launchers and missile stockpiles in large numbers, Iran will run the US and Israel (it has its own variants, but the same supply issues) out of interceptors. At that point Iran hits everything it shoots at.

If Iran just keeps going long enough, it WILL win the war. The main danger is Iran’s leaders accepting a cease-fire too soon. If they are smart and have learned their lesson, they will keep going, and when they have supremacy, they will flatten Israel and all US bases, including taking out Israeli power and their desalanization plants.

If they don’t, the US and Israel will be back in a year to try again.

Iran is in this situation because they repeatedly stood down and did not establish deterrence. They had the theoretical capacity, but refused to use it, making America and Israel think they could just keep attacking Iran and there would be no significant retaliation.

And yes, the US or Israel could use nukes, but if they do, all bets are off, the repercussions would be seismic. (And Iran can make a dirty nuke any time they want, they already have that ability. One dirty nuke hits Israel, a postage stamp sized country, and it is uninhabitable.)

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The Second Iran War Is On

By Ian Welsh

On February 28, 2026

37 Comments

The US and Israel claim to have killed Khameini. Iran says they missed. Either way it doesn’t matter much, the Iranian response of hitting US bases and Israel hasn’t been effected. They’ve also declared the Straits of Hormuz closed. If Khameini was killed, he is far more likely to be replaced by hawk than a dove. It’s his refusal to fight, over and over again, and his willingness to let Iranian proxies like Syria and Hezbollah be defeated in detail that lead to Israel and the US thinking they could keep attacking whenever they wanted because Iran was run by people who weren’t really willing to fight.

That and his refusal to get nuclear weapons, which Iran could have had years ago. If Iran had nukes, a lot of Iranians would still be alive.

That said, Iran seems (seems) to have learned their lesson. Before this war they said that if attacked they would hit everywhere the US attacked from, and not let up. They’ve started doing that.

They have hit radars, military bases and even some Trump associated businesses.

Central Israël burning pic.twitter.com/pSrwBchmJP

— Sprinter Press (@SprinterPress) February 28, 2026

This is going to be a long slog, especially if Iran has finally learned its lesson. They should not quit until they’ve destroyed every US and Israeli base in the region. During the 12 day war they quit when Israel was about a week to ten days from running out of interceptors. Iran has more missiles and drones than the US and Israel have interceptor missiles. Keep attacking till they run out, then pound them into the dirt.

It is also good to see that collaborating regimes like the UAE, Jordan, Bahrain and Kuwait getting hit. Hosting a US base in your country should come with risks.

If the Iranians don’t wimp out, my prediction is they’ll win this war, and do so decisively. The main risk is when Israel starts losing decisively they may wish to use nukes. I don’t think even Trump would allow that, and if Israel does anyway, remember that even with nukes Iran can create a dirty nuclear missile. One hit on Israel (which is postage stamp sized) and the country becomes uninhabitable.

We’ll keep an eye on this as it goes on. If the US loses decisively here, the America Empire takes a huge hit to its ability to inspire terror and compliance. Oh sure, they can still strangle weak nearby countries, but genuine middle powers with real militaries will know they can fight the US and win.

Update: Iran has confirmed Khameini is dead. Absolutely stupid of the US and Israel. He is most likely to be replaced by someone more hardline than him, and his fatwa against nuclear weapons can be revoked by his successor. Notice that his death had zero effect on the Iranian military command. Assassination doesn’t matter to real states.

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Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On February 28, 2026

2 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. Nothing on the new Iran war, I’ll have a post up on that soon.

Friday Morning Highlights and Lowlifes

By Sean Paul Kelley

On February 27, 2026

48 Comments

~by Sean Paul Kelley

Couple of random notes this Friday morning, mostly economics related, some silver news and my personal reaction to portions of the discusssion in Ian’s “Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?” post.

First, econonomics. It looks more and more like we are heading into a 2008-style credit crisis/crunch.

Don’t believe me? Well, the FED flooded the US banking system with $18.5 billion to ease liquidity concerns during the week of Feb. 17 because cockroaches be busting out of just about every private equity/credit shop present. And we all know, if you just don’t turn on the lights, you don’t see roaches.

These kind of economic events don’t do what you think they are going to do. Many people assume any economic crisis in the US will lead to a rapid dollar hegemony collapse. But as I explain, the dollar will actually get stronger:

“[W]hen the credit crunch gets a full head of steam it won’t lead to reserve status collapse of the dollar. It will, counter-intuitively, but inexorably pump the dollar higher and stronger as NYC becomes a 2008-like Black Hole for cash allocated dollars world wide desperate to fill potential insolvency holes in banks and shadow-banks/private equity credit boutiques . . . . “

That’s what happened in 2008. As I conclude, “Dollar reserve collpase will be a result of national insolvency, not a global credit-crisis/crunch.”

Basically what End Game Macro is saying in this post is the following: the economy grew little to naught post-COVID to present. It basically did what equity markets sometimes do: trade sideways for years, decades even. For example, after the 2008 Financial Crisis the S&P 500 traded sideways for four years until it broke out in late 2012, early 2013. That’w what the US economy has done since 2020: move sideways, although Biden-inspired over-immigration skewed the growth numbers, as End Game Macro notes:

“From 2021 to 2024 the U.S. saw over 11 million arrivals, more than 3 million in 2023, and net migration around 2.4 million per year in 2021 to 2023. That can lift GDP and payrolls while masking weaker per capita momentum. As the surge cools, the masking fades.”

I’m not being anti-immigrant here, I’m just stating the facts. As Trump dug his heels in and unleashed his ICE goons, the econ surge faded, and fast. End Game Macro also notes, a lá 2008 that system-wide credit stress is popping up whack-a-mole like in almost every category:

“As of February 2026 serious delinquency is flashing late cycle strain. Auto loans 5.2 percent, credit cards 12.7 percent, student loans 9.6 percent 90+ days past due with estimates as high as 16.3 percent turning delinquent late 2025, and FHA delinquency 11.52 percent. Job quality also reflects strain.”

And I’m not even going to touch on the downward revisions to US employment except to say we’ve not gained a single job, but actually lost millions. The BLS hints at the size of the disaster in jobs “recovery.”

Last econ note: big move in India just confirms my thesis/argument/assertion that the combined wealth of the West is undergoing a multi-decade transfer back to the East:

“For decades, the price of silver in India—the “diamond hands” of the silver world—was dictated by a small group in London and USA. Indian ETFs used the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) prices, which often had nothing to do with the actual physical demand on the ground in India.

The Move:

On February 26, 2026, SEBI officially announced that starting April 1, 2026, Indian mutual funds and ETFs will no longer rely solely on London’s “AM fixing” prices. Instead, valuation will be based on polled spot prices from recognized domestic exchanges like the MCX.”

That’s one serious high hard one to the Comex and LBMA! This is a big fucking deal.

Next up: war in the Ukraine.

I’ve repeatedly argued that the Ukraine has lost all any and all possibility of regaining strategic initiative, and this reinforces it, way wickedly:

As I have noted ad nauseam for months now: the #Ukraine has lost any chance to sieze the initiative on the battlefield. All the #AFU can do is ineffectively counter-attack like a punch-drunk boxer. Trading lives for time will not work out for #Zelensky in the end and the end is coming sooner than he thinks.

On that note, the Red Cross confirms the Ukrainian to Russian KIA ratio. And it is bloody awful: 34/1. People often tell me that my belief in realism in foreign affairs is deeply immoral. Fuck that shit. International liberal hegemony is 100% at fault for all the deaths in the Ukraine. All. Of. Them. The denizens of Davos are uttely complicit.

In another grim note: Russia is in the initial stages of attacking The Big Banana. For the first time artillery shells are falling down with impunity on the city of Kramatorsk, like rain does on an average Portland Wednesday.

In regards to the conversation on Virtue and especially regarding the 800,000,000 number of Chinese lifted out of poverty. Well, Ian is correct. I did the numbers here back in September.

As regards Chinese leaders being better or worse than those in the West, especially the US: Ian, again is correct. The best way to view the argument is by winnowing it down to two prepositions. The Western view of liberty has its origins in peasant upward mobility in the aftermath of the Black Death and the clash of classes. Ergo: in the West we have the freedom “of” speech, assembly, bear arms, etc. . The Chinese view of liberty derives its origins from a long exigetical tradition of the origins and limits of dignity. In essences, the Chinese see liberty as freedom “from” poverty, warlordism, chaos, illness, crime, rapine, etc. . . Both views are valid. Both views are limited. But at present the Chinese view of liberty is more effective in increasing the common good than that of the West.

On the posssible, now looking more probable, war with Iran, the US has ordered the evacuation of its embassy in Israel. I don’t know what could make it more obvious, you?

More as it happens.

And more happens. This comment by Ray Dalio reminds me when I was a young broker I read Robert Rubin’s memoirs, In an Uncertain World, and took to heart many of his investment rules, going so far as to write many down on old fashioned white catalog cards–this was before the internet, btw! and memorize what I wrote down. Don’t judge me. I was young and dumb.

Love Rubin or hate him, like James Carville said, when I get resurrected I want to come back as thet bond market. Rubin knew how to invest and make consistent returns. So did Barton Biggs, long time chief investment strategist at my alma mater, Morgan Stanley. Those two men shaped my view of economics, markets and political economy more than anyone or anything else. And yes, I read Jesse Livermore’s memoirs. They did little for me precisely because at his heart Livemore was un-disciplined. And discipline is key to making money.

If you take your own advice you’ll do well. If you’re like me and stayed retarded longer than markets remained illogical, well, you’re fucked. If I’d taken my own advice I’d have a small fortune like a handful of former clients do to this day.

One of my key rules: if you want to get rich, speculate in the stock market, but if you want to be truly wealthy, invest in bonds. In other words, the real wealth, massive cash-flow comes from debt service. That’s just an ugly reality humanity has yet to escape.

Another rule to live by: if an investment goes more than 15% against you, cash out. You can recover from a 15% loss, but a 25% or 30% or even 50%? Not a chance in hell. Ever.

Last rule: if you double your money in an investment, sell half of your gain and let the rest ride. I guarantee you’ll never lose a dime on that investment if you follow that rule.

One last comment on Rubin: he was a ‘careful contrarian’ and being a contrarian has served me very, very well. It’s a painful and lonely place to occupy at times so be prepared to man up. In the end recognize when you feel the least amount of risk is the precise moment of the most risk, the instant before you lose your ass.

Maybe more, maybe not. Time dictates all.

So the muse is a fickle-bitch. This analysis of the transcripts of the Trump-Xi phone calls is brutally and hysterically accurate:

This time it’s particularly funny because the Chinese transcript (fmprc.gov.cn/eng/xw/zyxw/20) has Xi telling Trump: “It is always right to do a good thing, however small, and always wrong to do a bad thing, however small.” This proverb might not sound like much but it’s actually extremely meaningful when you understand the reference.

The reference comes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, China’s Illiad and Odyssey plus the Aeneid and a smattering of Dante’s Inferno for good measure. It’s indicative of how urbane and historically literate the Chinese are. And a clear notice that China is what historians, anthropologists and others of such ilk refer to as a “high context” culture:

China is a High Context culture, a communicated message has different layers of meaning, While America as majority of the West is Low Context. The other culture/language that is High Context is Arabic. To understand the spoken words one need to be deeply rooted in its culture, its history and religious tradition.

Spoken like a true scholar and humble student.

I want the last word. Heh! But seriously, silver trading at the Comex closes the day sharply higher, firmly walking through a wall of resistance at $92, ending the day at $93.06, up 7%. A very bullish closing price for silver. Silver bugs should sleep happy tonight.

Western Elites Are Making A Play For Eternal Oligarchy

By Ian Welsh

On February 25, 2026

36 Comments

We have a very odd spectacle right now: Anthropic’s CEO has said the US government cannot use Anthropic products if they will not guarantee that they won’t be used for autonomous military robots (firing without human intervention) or mass surveillance. The Pentagon has responded by threatening to eminent domain Claude, and make their own version. The Secretary of “War” has summoned Anthropic’s CEO to a meeting today. We’ll see if he cracks. I’m sure they won’t just threaten his business.

A core problem faced by elites who want to rule is that they must rule thru other people. Enforcers: cops, military, judges, prosecutors and various bureaucrats. They can’t rule alone, and the enforcer class isn’t always reliable. Many joined the Russian revolution; the French; the American. Praetorian guards tend to be corrupt, incompetent and untrustworthy.

The solution to this is AI. Autonomous robots which fire when ordered to and have no conscience. But, if those robots are controlled by a mass of technicians and engineers, well, that’s no good: you’ve just got a different enforcer class.

But what if AI gets to the point where it can write its own updates and can run entire factories with no human intervention?

No soldier who won’t shoot. No technicians or bureaucrats who get in the way of what the rulers want. The elite is served by robots who always obey orders and will do anything. They no longer need to rely on retainers who might be a threat to them.

That leaves the masses. Of course autonomous military and police bots go a long way to making sure the hoi polloi know their place and stay in it but there are two more tools to deploy.

The first is mass surveillance. As Anthropic’s CEO points out in the current/old days even if you had mass surveillance it didn’t do you much good, because no one could be aware of all of it. But AIs can map out an entire opposition. They can read it all, pick the important nodes and tell the autonomous robots who to deal with.

The second is electronic cash. We’ve seen this repeatedly. Germany has been particularly forward about this, de-banking critics of genocide and making it a crime for anyone to give them money, food or aid.

In the old days you could get around de-banking with cash. Most places accepted it, you could pay your rent with it, go on holidary with it, you didn’t even need a credit card till the 80s or so.

But with everything pretty much electronic now, plus mass surveillance, anyone our masters want to completely destroy they can just cut off. No money. No home. No food. No medicine. If anyone tries to help, mass surveillance will catch it and they can be de-banked too.

AI plus autonomous robots gets rid of the need for retainers. AI, mass surveillance and electronic cash means that any attempt by the masses to organize can be crushed by rendering anyone homeless, starving and ulitimately dead. And in most countries all it takes is an administrative order. No need for a messy trial or anything.

This is the plan. The oligarchs time, under normal circumstances, would be coming to an end. The support they need from the 90-99% is going, mass support is dying, their societies are crumbling.

But get the autonomous robots, e-cash, mass surveillance and self-writing self-manufacturing robots going and they can stay in charge forever.

Or that’s their bet, anyway.

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Is Virtue An Advantage Or Disadvantage For Societies?

By Ian Welsh

On February 24, 2026

47 Comments

There’s an idea going around that virtues are anti-competitive. That being loyal, honorable, honest, generous, kind, etc… puts you at a disadvantage.

It’s one of those half true statements. It’s true if your society is shit, but in a decent society it can be disadvantage, and if a society has predominantly virtueless people in charge, or as the majority of the population, then the society as a whole is at a disadvantage against virtuous societies.

In a society where everyone is out for themselves or a small group, and where any behaviour is acceptable as long as it “wins”, like the US (notice that even child rape is acceptable to US elites, if it wasn’t, they’d punish it) having morals will hold you back, no question. If you won’t make decisions which impoverish mass numbers of people, or kill them, if it’s in your self interest or the interest of your small group (bank, political party, corporation, family, whatever) then you’re at a disadvantage.

The problem is that such societies self-cannibalize. Instead of growing the pie they fight over who gets how much of a slice, and what they do makes the pie smaller than it otherwise would be. (Ignore every dipshit who tells you how rich the US is. It’s less rich in real terms than it was 60 years ago compared to its competitors and in many cases even to itself. A CT scan in China costs about $50, and you get it the same day.)

Whatever one thinks of China, the fact is that its elites concentrate on making the population more prosperous and the country stronger in real terms. They aren’t offshoring their steel production. They can build ships. They lift people out of poverty, they don’t shove people into it. There aren’t massive homeless encampments everywhere. They arrest senior party members and billionaires for corruption and even execute them for crimes.

They are better people than Americans. Doubtless that will outrage many, but if you think otherwise you’re engaged in special pleading. How many countries have they invaded and destroyed? How many people have they killed or impoverished, including their own people? They’re expanding education and healthcare, working hard to make housing cheaper, etc, etc…

This is an old observation. Societies which work for more people out-compete those that don’t. Lee Kuan Yee, the founder of Singapore was massively impressed with the Britain of the 30s and 40s because he saw, for example, that newspapers were simply left in a pile, people would take one and leave money and no one cheated. They dynamism of 50s thru 90s America (all a result of post-war government spending, by the way, the internet is a government creation all the way up and down) massively impressed him as well.

Good is stronger than evil. It always has been, because cooperative societies defeat societies which are competitive in the wrong ways. It’s alright to have some competition, but when it becomes existential and unbounded by ethics, it damages the host society. America can’t even ramp up weapons production any more because the firms in the business want to charge 10x what weapons cost. Russia and China, no problem increasing production if they choose.

None of this is to say that being evil doesn’t have advantages. Of course it does. But evil, as Tolkien observed, consumes itself over time: it is a war of all against all, with any alliances temporary and untrustworthy.

This is true even when dealing with “evil” societies. It isn’t the evil which makes them effective, it’s the parts they have that are good. Mongol loyalty and discipline and bravery, for example. Genghis Khan never had a single senior general or administrator turn on him. Not one. At the very least a nation needs to be good to more of its own members than than its opponents, but even this has problems, because what you do to external enemies eventually seems reasonable to do internally.

Good isn’t weak. Instead it’s hard. It’s easy to be evil, to betray, to hurt and to take advantage. But if you run your group or your society that way you will weaken it and in time that weakness will lead to destruction.

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The Weirdness Of Getting Old

By Ian Welsh

On February 23, 2026

35 Comments

So, I’m now fifty-eight years old. My body feels it, though that’s more residual damage from various health problems than age, but my soul doesn’t: I feel like I’m still who I was when I was five years old, staring at multicolored fish in tide pools, making sand castles and telling myself stories about the freighters I saw steaming past my grandmother’s beach home.

When it comes to my life work, to understand the forces of history and civilization, it’s mostly given me a sense of the pace of change, and a feeling for momentum in human affairs. A human life, even a long one, isn’t very long. Human history operates on generations, with three and seven seeming to be the numbers which matter most.

A normal sub-ideological cycle (New Deal and post-war liberalism, neoliberalism) is about 3 generations. Sometimes they can go longer, but making a bet of about fifty to sixty years for a run will usually work. The changes FDR made stayed substantially in place till 1980 with Reagan. Neoliberalism is dying as we speak. There’s always an overlap period, where the old order is dismantled, but substantial spars remain in place. It takes till the late 90s to repeal the major market reforms of New Deal liberalism, for example.

I was born in 1968. I was twelve when Reagan was elected. I lived the very end of the post-war order, and my entire teenage and adult life has been under neoliberalism. I watched as social services were cut, as every building went from “just walk in” to having security guards. I saw Universities go from being open to the public to closed. I remember the old “middle class” economy and I lived thru the transition to one where the top 10% does over 50% of all spending.

I predicted the ways that the neoliberal order would end, and was right about almost all of it: the rise of China, the end of dollar hegemony, elite capture, the effects of surveillance and electronic money, but in terms of a human life it has all felt like very a long time.

It isn’t, really, in historical terms. Fifty years isn’t very long, unless you’re living thru it.

Young adults today have the same relationship to the 80s and 90s that I do to to the 50s and 60s. They don’t remember them, but they grew up with adults who lived thru them. Heck, I knew adults who remembered the Great Depression, the 20s, World War I and II. My span—what I either experienced myself or what I heard about from people who were there goes from about 1910 to the current year. My teachers included Old Edwardians, Lost Generation types, Hippies and square jawed GI and Silent Generation types.

My parents had me late, so I was really raised mostly not by Boomers, but by the Silent Generation. My father was in training as a pilot when the war ended. Had it gone on another six months he’d have been deployed.

They were very foreign people, not at all like those who are adults today. There was an acceptance of personal violence that has faded, but also a sense of honor which no longer exists. The male adults who were most important in my life were all men whose word you could trust. They might be assholes, many of them were, but if they said they’d do something, they did it. They rarely lied, and they believed in duty and honor.

That’s all gone now in the West. I hardly meet anyone who has principles I trust them to stick to under duress. There isn’t even a pretense any more. Hypocrisy as the tribute vice pays to virtue is gone in America. Trump and the people around him don’t even pretend to be honest, good or honorable. They’re all cruel bastards looking out for number one and willing to hurt or kill anyone, and they don’t even pretend otherwise.

One can see that as preferable to the hypocrisies of Clinton, Bush and Obama, and in some ways it is, but it’s also an indication of how far we’ve fallen, that our lords and masters (and they are our masters, and we are their slaves) don’t even pretend to have any virtues. The only virtue left is being rich or powerful, if you’re neither, you’re nobody and if you’re nobody, in the eternal words of George Bush Jr, “who cares what you think?”

They have, of course, in becoming virtueless scum, destroyed their host nations. Both Europe and America are going down, and hard and it is precisely because of the loss of virtue in the ruling class and the inability and unwillingness of the ruled to do anything about it.

It’s not that you have to be “good”, precisely. It’s that if your culture is lead by people who are cowards, faithless and concerned only with personal wealth and power, well, they can’t run a society effectively. They will always run it into the ground. The punishment for neoliberalism is China’s rise and the end of hundreds of years of European superiority.

And I (and most of my readers) have had to watch this. The destruction of our societies and the aggrandizement of the worst among us. I assume these days that if someone is very successful, either in politics or private enterprise, that they are untrustworthy and effectively a psychopath, and the vast majority of the time, I’m right.

It’s felt very long. I knew it could not last. I knew how it would end. I fought to change it, and failed (no surprise).

This is nothing new, of course. Confucius felt this way, and died convinced he was a failure. “Stop doing all these evil things,” he screamed, and no one listened. The Chinese are good at this. They recognize there are times when public affairs are so evil that good men and women can do nothing but withdraw and try and live good lives, because any success in public affairs can only come at the cost of one’s character. To succeed, to become a billionaire, in America today, is to scream to the heavens “I am evil. I make money hurting people. I care only about myself and perhaps a few friends or family.”

But the torch passes on. China has its problems, but the Chinese leadership has, in fact, mostly made their people far better off. When they say they’ll do something, it isn’t a lie, they track what they do and publish the results against their promises. If they say they’ll build a thousand parks, be sure a thousand parks will be built.

And so it is this I have seen over the span of my life: the civilizational torch passed from the West to the East, from Europe (America is European, sorry) to China. I’ve seen the West lose its virtues, get rid of the civil liberties which were our greatest glory, and in losing its virtues lose its place.

Now we come to the rise of the Chinese century. I wonder how much I’ll see, and how weird it will be to no longer be a member of the important, ruling civilization, but only a barbarian, watching my civilization collapse and the glory and the future move elsewhere.

May the Chinese do more good than evil with their time in the Sun, and may they remember too, that the sun always sets.

And I’ll keep watching, because while most of this has sucked, the one virtue of interesting times is that they are interesting, and age’s great advantage is perspective.

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