Ian Welsh

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

If You Understand Only One Thing About Chinese Government

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On September 2, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Looking To Healthy Cultures (Review of “One Disease, One Cure” by Whip Randolph)

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On September 1, 2025

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One disease one cure cover

If you found yourself in a bad situation, say living in an extremely toxic and unhealthy society, but really any problem, what is the first thing a wise person might do?

One answer is they’d trying to find out if anyone else had a solution which had worked.

Now ever since the rise of Kings I don’t think there have been a lot of cases of civilizations which caught the disease of having rulers and ruled finding a good way out, but if you live in an unhealthy society, you may want to find a healthy society and see how it functions.

That sets out the end-goal. “We’re here, we need to get to something like that.”

Of course, you’re not an idiot, this doesn’t mean giving up all technology, say, if the healthy society has less tech. It means distilling the principles that makes a society healthy, and aiming for that.

This is what Whip Randolph set out to do in his life, and it’s what his book, “One Disease, One Cure” tries to explain to readers.

I have to admit, my eyebrows lifted at the start. Whip’s firmly in the “there are and have been healthy indigenous society and we should look at them.” There’s a whole genre of writing in this tradition, and eyes tend to roll at it, especially because one wonders if such societies could scale.

It’s not that societies which are more caring than ours don’t exist. There’s a ton of ethnographic literature and accounts from anthropologists, visitors and even missionaries who describe those societies. Even Christopher Columbus praised the Arawaks to the Heavens as being the best people alive, before proceeding to enslave and slaughter them, with generous sides of rape and torture.

The Founding Fathers of America praised the Iroquois confederacy. (They called themselves the Haudenosaunee, and Randolph spends more time on them than perhaps any other culture presented in the book.)

There’s also a series of books dealing with “how did this come about”, like “Against the Grain” or “The Origin of Inequality” or Graeber’s “The Dawn of Everything.”

And there are endless small groups in America who try to learn from the wisdom of such groups and engage in various spiritual practices based on what is remembered and survives of North American indigenous traditions. Mainstream Americans tend to roll their eyes and sneer at them. At best they’re seen as impractical Hippies.

Randolph’s in this group and spirituality is fundamental to his book. But don’t run! What he means by spirituality is fairly simply and straightforward.

Whenever you’re looking into fixing or changing a society you’ve got a problem at three levels. Individual, group, society. No solution will work at the society level if it isn’t supported by how things are done at the group or individual level. Our society, for example, is organized around corporations whose primary motive is greed. People are rewarded for making more money, with very few limits on how much they are allowed to hurt other people along the way.

Capitalism  is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all

— possible John Maynard Keynes

As is usual in books these days, Randolph starts with the story of his despair, then moves to his first experience indicating something better was possible: he spent time living with a healthy society, where no money was used, everyone was fed and taken care of and people were kind and caring as a rule. Children were raised by the community, there were no prisons or police and the leaders had no coercive ability.

It felt to him almost like utopia. Not “nowhere” but “oh my God, this is actually possible and no one can tell me otherwise, because I have now experienced it!”

This leads to the normal followups, and Whip follows up very well indeed.

  1. I’m personally not like these people and I can see they are better people than I am. How do I change to become a better person?
  2. Why isn’t my society like this when it’s obviously so much better in so many ways?
  3. How can we change society, or at least ourselves and groups of ourselves, to live in the so much better way I now see is possible?

At a personal level Randolph identifies three core spiritual practices:

  1. cultivating a practical, aware gratitude for all the gifts
    I receive;
  2. giving my own gifts fully;
  3. and living in reciprocity.

When you look at these you’ll see they all come down to generosity and gratitude. Give what you have, be grateful for what you are given. And this comes out of Whip’s diagnosis of the fundamental social problem.

Healthy Societies are Gift Societies and Unhealthy Societies are Profit Societies

Randolph means something other than capitalism. Ancient Egypt where the Pharoah owned everything is part of the large class of profit societies and so would be Europe in the Middle Ages or even the USSR. In all cases some people have more than they need and they don’t share with others.

In a gift society everyone is rich or poor together. A simple saying from my childhood encapsulates: “share and share alike.”

Leaders are those who give the most, not those who have the most.

There is no organized ability coerce in these societies. No police. Leaders can’t make decisions without community support for each decision. Those who violate the society’s norms are corrected, and if they can’t be corrected are ostracized or killed. The Zapatistas are a good example: when they took power they let everyone out prison except for rapists, murderers and drug trafficking bosses. (If you want the details of how this works, well, read the book.)

The core assertion here is simple. The moment you have rulers instead of leaders, your society is sunk. The moment your society operates on individual accumulation of wealth rather than sharing (gifting), you are sunk. (Remember that in virtually ever famine there has always been enough food. The famines occur because those with more than they need, horde. Likewise, the US has far more empty homes than homeless people.)

For a gift economy to work, we have to all want to give and we must abhor selfishness. We must know that everyone in our group wants to take care of us, and we must want to take care of them.

And that’s what Randolph’s three core spiritual practices are about.

But individuals are just individuals, and this is about creating a better society. The next level up is the group level, and here’s Randolph’s advice. A group should:

  1. define what challenge it’s tacking;
  2. decide what we’re going to do to meet that challenge; and,
  3. figure how we take care of each other along the way.

At the society level:

  1. Decide what the external boundaries are. Who’s outside the group, and who is inside it?
  2. Decide on internal boundaries. “what rules and systems of accountability do we want to have to ensure that, within
    our group, everyone treats everyone else and the land respectfully?”
  3. How do we want to live together and take care of each other?

Now, again, all of this seems pretty utopian, especially if you’ve grown up in a profit (greed) based society. Yet, at its basis, wouldn’t most of us agree that the role of society should be to look after each other? And wouldn’t we acknowledge that if someone’s hungry and someone else has way more than they can ever eat or use, it makes no sense for the other person to be going hungry?

Certainly those are the rules most of us were taught as very young children. “Share your toys. No one gets seconds until everyone has firsts” And perhaps “leaders get the last share, not the first.”

One problem with reviewing Whip’s book is that it’s long. It goes on and on, because Randolph tries to address all the ways our societies have gone wrong, from sexual abuse and authoritarianism, to lack of integrity, to education, to policing, to… (add your issue here, it’s probably covered).

So what we’ve done is hit the highlights: the big picture. But if you’re dubious: read the book, because a lot of the details are dealt with.

This isn’t to say that I agree with everything, and I think there’s a bit of “lack of plan”. Lots of diagnosis, some treatment. But the fundamental diagnosis is correct. The moment we have rulers and hoarding, we’re sunk. And we’re way down that path. There may also be some excessive idealizing of indigenous societies, but a society need not be perfect to be better, even much better.

Whip is also a bit of devolutionist, who wants a controlled reduction in the amount of technology we used. I have a few quibbles with this, but they’re secondary. No one with sense can’t think we need to stop using plastics, for example, or give up almost all use of fossil fuels. I think there’s a role for advanced technology, there just needs to be far more care and deliberation in what we use.

Overall I’m happy to recommend the book. Understand you’re going to get a lot of “personal journey” and lots of hippy vibes, but read carefully and see whether you agree with the diagnosis. Time and time again I did.

The book is “pay what you want” and you can get it here.

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 31, 2025

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On August 31, 2025

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by Tony Wikrent

Global famine deaths rise as leaders use food as a weapon

David Pilling and Heba Saleh in Cairo, August 25 2025 [Financial Times, via Funding the Future]

For decades, the number of people dying from famine was in retreat, reduced to almost nothing by a world intolerant of witnessing people starving to death. Not anymore.
From Sudan to Afghanistan, Yemen and Gaza — where a UN-backed panel declared a famine on Friday — experts say more people are dying of hunger as public opinion shrugs and humanitarian agencies lose their ability to counter leaders willing to use food as a weapon.
“About 10 years ago, famines began to make a return, and over the past few years we have seen the numbers dying from starvation begin to escalate in a terrifying way,” said Alex de Waal, a famine expert and executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.
[Wikipedia]
… the NSSM200 was drafted primarily by Philander Claxton and drew attention to the idea that global population growth was of concern to long-term US economic and other global stability interests.[1][3] The policy recommendations to address population growth was openly concerned with the potential appearance of “economic imperialism” and should be carefully approached so as “not be seen … as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or reserve resources for use by the rich countries”, with a written goal of “fertility reduction.” Local organizers were introduced to how aggressive population growth strains local economy and resources and to “emphasize development and improvements in the quality of life of the poor”, later explaining such projects were for these and “other reasons”.

“We live in a Fascist nation, what now?”- by Chris Armitage

kumarplocher, August 25, 2025 [Daily Kos]

“I researched every attempt to stop fascism in history. The success rate is 0%. Once they win elections, it’s already too late.”
“In 1933, German conservatives thought they could control Hitler. Two years later, they were being executed in their own homes. I spent weeks researching this question, desperately looking for counter-examples, for hope, for any time in history where people successfully stopped fascists after they started winning elections.
Here’s what I found: Once fascists win power democratically, they have never been removed democratically. Not once. Ever.
I know that sounds impossible. I kept digging, thinking surely someone, somewhere, stopped them. The actual record is so much worse than you think….
And here’s the part that breaks your heart. Violence works. For them. Fascists use violence while claiming to be victims. They create chaos that “requires” their authoritarian solution. Then they purge anyone who opposes them. Meanwhile, democrats keep insisting on following rules that fascists completely ignore. They file lawsuits. They write editorials. They vote on resolutions. And fascists just laugh and keep consolidating power….
The statistics are brutal. Fascist takeovers prevented after winning power democratically: zero. Average length of fascist rule once established: 31 years. Fascist regimes removed by voting: zero. Fascist regimes removed by asking nicely: zero. Most were removed by war or military coups, and tens of millions died in the process….
Based on the historical record, there are exactly three ways this goes. Option one: Stop them before they take power. Option two: War. Option three: Wait for them to die of old age….
So let’s stop pretending we’re in the “prevention” phase and start talking about what you do when fascists already control the institutions but haven’t fully consolidated power yet. Because historically, nobody’s been here before, not like this….
Garrett Graff, August 25, 2025
The United States, just months before its 250th birthday as the world’s leading democracy, has tipped over the edge into authoritarianism and fascism. In the end, faster than I imagined possible, it did happen here. The precise moment when and where in recent weeks America crossed that invisible line from democracy into authoritarianism can and will be debated by future historians, but it’s clear that the line itself has been crossed.

I think many Americans wrongly believe there would be one clear unambiguous moment where we go from “democracy” to “authoritarianism.” Instead, this is exactly how it happens — a blurring here, a norm destroyed there, a presidential diktat unchallenged. Then you wake up one morning and our country is different.

Today, August 25, 2025, is that morning. Something is materially different in our country this week than last….

Saying that our country has tipped over an invisible edge into an authoritarian state plainly is important — and easier than most in the media and pundit class will pretend it is. They will presumably for some period of time — perhaps even a long period of time — stick to euphemisms (with lines like “No president has asserted such direct and sweeping control over the nation’s capital” and “Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.”) and continue to give voice to “both siders,” but the reality is that only one political party is responsible for this moment. They will say that Trump’s motives are inscrutable or unclear — but the effect of Trump’s governing style is undeniable.

American fascism looks like the president using armed military units from governors loyal to his regime to seize cities run by opposition political figures and it looks like the president using federal law enforcement to target regime opponents.

American fascism looks like the would-be self-proclaimed king deploying the military on US soil not only not in response to requests by local or state officials but over — and almost specifically to spite — their vociferous objections….

It looks like a president, who is supposed to be the figurehead of the party of small government, is extorting US companies for the regular act of doing business — earning his good will in recent weeks has required seizing parts of major US companies or imposing bizarre taxes on others in exchange for his personal support.…

It looks like a country where our largest and most powerful corporate titans line up to pay tribute personally — delivering literal gold to the president in full view of cameras — and where foreign governments bribe him with largesse as gross as a 747 plane for his personal use after he leaves office, and where media companies have to censor their own staffs in order to be allowed to operate.

It looks like a country where inconvenient figures are kidnapped and disappeared overseas to torture gulags with no due process or dumped in countries where they have no possible connection. Kilmar Albrego Garcia has been punished for months with the full weight of the US government simply because he embarrassed the Trump administration. It looks like a country where the government, devoid of irony, is reopening concentration camps on the site of some of the country’s darkest hours of history where it previously hosted concentration camps.

It looks like a government where agency by department, people who try to uphold the rule of law are being purged — sometimes for nothing more than personal friendships or because they voiced an inconvenient fact, and where even the loyalists deemed insufficiently loyal are cashiered. Billy Long, the stunningly unqualified former cattle auctioneer placed in charge of the IRS, evidently was removed after he tried to uphold the most basic legal requirements for sharing taxpayer data.

It looks like a country where Trump assumes he can control and dictate our history, what books we read, our arts, and even our sports heroes. He assumes there is no line between his taste and our nation.

Just months short of the nation’s 250th birthday, Donald Trump is close to batting a thousand at speed-running the very abuses of power that led to the Founders to write the Declaration of Independence in the first place. Does any of this sound familiar:

  • He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
  • For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments
  • He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
  • He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
  • He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
  • He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
  • For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world
  • For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent
  • For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury
  • For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences….

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Open Thread

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On August 30, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Is Consciousness Reality’s Organizing Principle? (Beyond Biocentrism, by Lanza and Berman)

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On August 28, 2025

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Quantum mechanics is seriously weird. The majority of us have a model of the world based primarily on Newtonian physics. We believe in cause and effect. The universe is a giant machine following laws, and if there wasn’t a single conscious being in it, those laws would still be the same.

But in quantum mechanics particles like photons don’t exist as particles until observed. If a photon is given the choice of two paths, it takes both as a wave, but if measured and observed to see which path it took, it then takes only one.

The key point here is observed. If a measurement is in the past, the photon doesn’t choose which particle path it took until observed. (It may decohere, it doesn’t choose which way to decohere. Or that’s Lanza and Berman’s argument.)

Schrodinger’s cat is an attempt to scale this up to macro, and to show how absurd it is. “The cat is both alive and dead.” (It doesn’t really work, because the cat is conscious and observes.)

Lanza has written a series of books on Biocentrism, each more extreme than the last. Beyond Biocentrism is the third in the series.

Biocentrism takes the quantum physics at its face and tries to extend the consequences. It argues that nothing really exists except in potentiality (a range of possibilities) until it is observed by something that is conscious. This doesn’t have to mean a human, presumably any conscious being will do the job. Lanza discusses bird and fish and bats and dogs, all of whom observe the world differently than them, but I’d point out that evidence is coming in that at least some plants (almost certainly trees) are conscious. Perhaps single celled entities are, and we keep finding those in places like Mars and the subsurface oceans of moons and so on.

Lanza notes that the conditions for life, especially Earth life, are very specific. From atomic constants to the moon impacting the Earth in just the right way and winding up not orbiting the equator, nor destroying the Earth, the odds against a garden world like ours are astronomical. Even the odds of a universe existing which allowed for life in theory are astronomical.

Biocentrism resolves this by putting consciousness first. Concrete reality is formed by consciousness, so physical laws must confirm to what is required for life, since it is biological life which gives rise to consciousness. The odds go from astronomical, to “they had to support life, so they did.”

Lanza’s interpretations of the consequences of quantum mechanics or even of quantum mechanics itself aren’t always orthodox. For example, there’s a delayed choice experiment called the quantum eraser, in which finding out something in the future seems to change the past.

While delayed-choice experiments might seem to allow measurements made in the present to alter events that occurred in the past, this conclusion requires assuming a non-standard view of quantum mechanics. If a photon in flight is instead interpreted as being in a so-called “superposition of states“—that is, if it is allowed the potentiality of manifesting as a particle or wave, but during its time in flight is neither—then there is no causation paradox. This notion of superposition reflects the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Lanza interprets this as “no the change actually occurs in the past and there is a causation “paradox”, though in biocentrism it’s not a paradox, since consciousness is primary.

I don’t claim to know who’s right about this. Hopefully an experiment will be devised which resolves the issues. But Lanza brings it up in part to rescue free choice.

As you may be aware, experiments show that by the time we become consciously aware of making a decision, the decision has already been made. Biologists can tell that we’ll do something before we believe we’ve made the decision. Since neural activity is fundamentally quantum, Lanza attempts to rescue free will by suggesting that the decision is indeed made when we believe we did, it’s just that it changes the past thru the act of observation.

Without something like this, we are, in fact, biological machines and free will is an illusion. Blaming or taking credit for anything you have ever done, or anything you are, is ludicrous. You are just a cause and effect machine and your idea that you’re in control of any of it is an illusion. (Why that illusion should exist is an interesting question.)

I don’t consider myself qualified to judge Lanza and Berman’s work on Biocentrism. It might be substantially right and it might not be. But I do think he makes a good case that the science (which he describes at great length, including having appendices with the math) doesn’t allow us to cling to Newtonian or even Einsteinian views of the universe or our place in it. Something weird is going on when consciousness is required to cause packet collapse. Indeed, he even includes one experiment where the effect was scaled up to macro, though still a very small macro.

The world is strange. Far stranger than the still reigning consensus “folk” models suggest, and while biocentrism may not be correct in all its details, it’s worth reading and considering, because it takes quantum mechanics weird results seriously and tries to reason from them, rather than around them in an attempt to preserve as much of the older systems as possible.

At the same time, we must always be wary. After all, post-Newton very few people outside of some religions would have argued against a clockwork universe, and it turned out that informed opinion was, well, wrong. (Which doesn’t mean God made the universe in 7 days or any such nonsense.)

Still, this is the cutting edge, and we know at the very least that it puts a few nails in the clockwork universe’s coffin and at least a couple into the relativistic universe. To ignore it, and to pretend that consciousness isn’t much more important than we thought it was is head in sand style thinking. And Lanza isn’t some quack. His interpretation may be unorthodox, but he understand the science.

I think this, or one of the other Biocentrism books is very worth reading. Even if you wind up not buying the whole package, you’ll be forced to rethink what you “know.”

***

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

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On August 27, 2025

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

Seven Rules for running a real left-wing government

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On August 25, 2025

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

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

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

8/ Winters’ model of oligarchy:

1 Warring: armed oligarchs defend property claims separately

2 Ruling: oligarchs institutionalise defence

3 Sultanistic: 1 oligarch monopolises armed wealth and defence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on all this later.

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Yeah, America’s Gone Fascist

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On August 25, 2025

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I think we can put a peg in this. For years everyone’s being “we’re going fascist.”

It’s done. It’s over. The US has gone fascist.

  • Purges of the military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies to install personal loyalists;
  • Troops in the capital, armed, with law enforcement rights, and a promise to do the same in other cities;
  • Vast personal corruption by the man at the top, including blackmailing companies into personal bribes;
  • Masked men who often don’t show badges or warrants roaming the lands, forcing people to prove their citizenship (and often ignoring proof) and seizing people and throwing them into unmarked vans;
  • Full executive immunity;
  • A supreme court which has or appears poised to legalize all of the above; and,
  • Threatening ABC and NBCs broadcast licenses.
  • Yada, yada (add your examples in comments)

There isn’t much point in dancing around this. Perhaps there’s a technical case that this isn’t fascism, but some other form of nasty right wing government ideology, but whatever it is, the constitution and the important pieces of the constitution and bill of rights are dead or dying, including habeas corpus, the principle that no one’s above the law, the idea that troops shouldn’t be used domestically, etc, etc.

This has been coming for a loooonnnnngggg time, and plenty of people have warned about it. The fascism experts from Harvard who fled the country, much as many sneered at them, weren’t wrong in their diagnosis. Remember, a lot of people who left it too late to flee Germany (or Pinochet’s Chile, or your choice of example) got a permanent plot of land, a long government paid for stay in a small room or in Argentina a helicopter trip ending with a spectacular fall

(Pinochet is notable for training dogs to rape the wives of his opponents. Hopefully Trump won’t sink quite that low.)

I would suggest that the UK is almost there, and so is Germany. The EU as a whole, with its growing habit of just making protest and unwelcome parties illegal is trending hard. (Or, if you’re lucky, they’ll just make you a non-person, making it illegal for any bank or credit company to do business with you, or anyone to give you money.)

I don’t expect to spend a lot of time on this, though I’ll keep covering it. It’s been coming for a long time, it’s not a surprise and in some ways it’s not news. But a lot of people with suffer as a result.

For those who say “but Kamala” I note only that to win she had to either:

  1. Not say that she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden; or,
  2. Come out against genocide.

Apparently supporting genocide was a red line for her, and fascism in the US a secondary issue. Neoliberals will always choose fascism over anything remotely left wing, including the left wing value of opposing a new Holocaust.

This is where we are.

 

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