Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Before I give my answers, I’d appreciate if you, the reader, would consider these three questions yourself. In the West:
- What is society for? What is it set up to do?
- What should society be for?
- What makes a society or group good?
Some years ago I considered the issue of who is let in to Heaven.
Good people, only.
That seemed pretty awful to me. No one wants to go to a hell and I don’t want even bad people to suffer.
But then I asked myself the question, “what makes a society or group good?” I thought back on my own experiences and I came to a simple conclusion: it’s always the people which make a group, of any size, good or bad.
Bad people. Bad group. It is really that simple. Leaders have an outsize influence, but leaders require buy-in from society, at least from the coercive elements and often from much more than that. (See my politics series for more on that.)
People who are cruel, power-hungry, greed, selfish or otherwise have nasty vices or personalities make a group hell. People who are kind, generous, humble and so on make a group good.
Again, it’s that simple.
So the conclusion I came to is that if heavens exist, they don’t let in bad people (or very few) because if they did, they soon wouldn’t be heavens. Bad people go to places with other bad people, and that’s what makes such places hell.
Now let’s move back to the first of our questions. What are our Western societies for. I think it’s close to inarguable that under neoliberal ideology, they exist to make sure that those with power and money retain their power and money and increase it. That premise predicts almost all the actions our societies have taken since around 1979 or so.
If you’re rich and powerful, you run the society and you run it for your own good.
This brings us to our second question. What should a society be for? This is a prescriptive question, there is no “correct” answer. The Pharoah, or Barack Obama or Elon Musk are going to give different questions than you or I, odds are (their true answer, not the one they tell suckers) and so is the Pope, let alone Torquemada. Mennonites have their answer, and so on.
My answer is a simple one. A society, or any group, should make its members happy, good, and if they are happy and good, it should make them strong. It should do that, as much as is possible, for as many of its members as possible and any society which doesn’t is a bad society.
Certainly it is impossible to create a lasting good society if the primary virtues of the society are greed and selfishness, as they generally are under capitalism and as they specifically are under neoliberalism. (New Deal capitalism did not exalt greed and selfishness.)
This is the start of a new series, “The Laws of Heaven”, where we’ll discuss the laws, principles and methods of creating good societies and groups. There is no current possibility of these principles being followed, but knowing what they are is important and opens up the possibility of a better future.
I hope you’ll join me in this exploration.
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Chinese and American flags flying together
Saw this recently, from the University of Chicago:
And it begins. No music history and theory, comp lit, classics, and on and on. pic.twitter.com/e2JxrCbm1k
— Dialectical Zach-Zack Loeffler (@thezachloeffler) August 12, 2025
The commentary is a bit of an exaggeration. But not too much.
Now if this was just one data point, it wouldn’t matter, but the bottom line is that funding for universities, including university research, in being massively cut in America and the UK, with issues in most Western countries. It’s not just about the humanities, science is getting hit hard, as is engineering.
As best I can tell, China has opened about 1,700 new universities and colleges in the past 25 years. Those that existed have expanded enrollment. It’s very reminiscent of the post war period in America. And the best of universities are excellent.
Americans are ostensibly rich, yes, but the society is not. A lot of the apparent wealth is false: if it costs one fifth as much to get dental or health care or one tenth as much to buy a good pair of earphones; if it costs one-third as much to buy an electric car, well, all of the extra cost in America goes to GDP, and Americans have higher incomes, but who’s actually richer?
And when you look at Chinese cities and provinces they are building infrastructure massively. The cities are beautifully lit up at night. There is a huge space program, even as the American space program is cut, and cut and cut. There are dozens of EV companies and in general there is competition in most of the cutting edge parts of the society. Coffee is cheaper (which is why Starbucks is getting shellacked in China). Everything is cheaper, there’s more of it and the government and private actors spend money on huge new projects, on research and on infrastructure.
China is a rich society, because they can do things. America’s last real gasp as a rich society was the Apollo program, ever since then, it’s been in retreat. Europe, well, Europe had a good time in the post war period, but since then, despite some success in the 90s and early 2000’s, it’s been in retreat and it has recently chosen the path of de-industrialization and xenophobic isolationism, which is not going to serve it. University cuts in the UK, in particular, have been savage, but Europe, even taken as a whole is behind China, the US, Japan and South Korea in research and technological advancement.
The Chinese have built massive high speed rail, lead in civilians drones, in robotics and are competitive in AI, which is 20x cheaper to run (more importantly, it uses FAR less energy than American AI, which draws more energy than entire countries.) They are ahead in most material sciences, catching up in civilian aviation (soon they will be ahead), have vastly more shipbuilding capacity, are ahead in missile technology, will soon eat SpaceX’s lunch in launch costs (no, I will not be wrong about this.)
China does thing. The government is rich. Corporations are not spending all their money in stock buybacks and acquisitions, but are actually competing and trying to create new and better products than their competitors.
The best parallel is probably not post-war America, but pre-WWI America. China has taken the lead from America, there is zero chance of America catching up absent a large meteor hitting China, but they don’t actually spend much on their military. I was shocked to find out that the Chinese military has about 2.2 million soldiers out of a population of 1.4 billion. All of this with a sincere effort to provide a decent standard of living to everyone and a genuine attack on inequality. (Chinese inequality is very high, but it is concentrated in the top 10%, not the top .01%, which is being attacked by the government.)
China is a civilian society, with a civilian economy. It is in a vastly expansive phase, one which could last as much as sixty to eighty years, assuming environmental or international issues don’t derail it. (They will.)
China is where the future is. If you are younger, learn Mandarin. It will be as essential as English was for the past hundred and twenty years.
Hope for the future now rests in China. You may not like that, but it’s just a fact. They’re the country that can actually do things, and whether our problems are fixed, or mitigated (more likely) is up to them, just as for a long time it was up to the US (which failed almost completely, play “I see no evil, I hear no evil” every since 1980.
I don’t know if I for one welcome our Chinese overlords, but it doesn’t matter. They’re here. The West has already lost the race and is retreating into a poorer, more backwards second world situation, similar to the late USSR and Warsaw Pact.
It will end as well for the US and NATO as it did for the USSR and the Warsaw Pact.
***
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Despite all the flakiness and back and forth Trump’s actions have a unified purpose. Like the Democrats, but even more so, they disproportionately benefit the rich. (We’ll leave aside the pandemic response, which is complicated and an emergency.)
This table is older, and based on the House version of Trump’s budget and tariffs, but should be substantially correct:
Tariffs effect the rich less, because they spend less of their income on goods. The biggest companies often get exceptions to the tariffs as well. Currently that includes Apple, Coca-Cola, Stellantis and GM.
We are also seeing signs of “Greedflation”, using the tariffs as an excuse to raise prices faster than costs. This was huge during the pandemic,and it will be huge this time. Overall the really reach will benefit from tariffs, not be hurt by them. Trump talked a good game about making sure companies wouldn’t use tariffs as an excuse to raise prices, but that’s all it was, talk. For tariffs to improve the lives of the working and middle class, they would have to translate into well paid jobs, and there is no effective mechanism for that in America.
Let us turn then to the “NATO nations must spend 5% of GDP on their military.” That’s a lot, and it means that either taxes must be raised (they won’t be except for consumption taxes on the poor) or other priorities must be slashed. So the poor and middle class in those countries will get it in the neck.
Now, if that 5% was spent on domestically produced weapons and on hiring more soldiers and support staff, at least it would get back into recirculation. Indeed, there’ll be some of it, but most countries have agreed to buy Americans weapons and equipment.
And who will that benefit the most? The American rich.
In some cases buying American is so foolish it boggles the mind. Canada’s only real active military threat is America, and American weapon systems these days are mostly online and can’t be used if America doesn’t want them to be, even leaving aside the possibility of simply bricking them with an update.
But in general, increased military spending was an opportunity for industrial policy and to cut the aprons to the US, and actual statesmen would smile at Trump, make the promises and use the 5% in ways that would benefit their own country. Instead most of the benefits will flow to America.
As for the idea that America is a reliable security partner, well, they couped Ukraine, built its army up massively, encouraged it not make peace when easy and favorable terms were offered and is now cutting a deal with Russia after extorting mineral concessions from Ukraine.
Never ally with America if there is any other option.
But the core point here is simply that the “does it make the rich even richer” metric, which works for American politicians as a group, is even more predictive of Trump. Oh sure, he’ll throw the hoi polloi some social policy red meat, and yes, some of the moderately rich are being hurt by his policies, but the real rich, they’ll mostly make out like bandits.
Until China eats their lunch, which they are and will.
Right now America’s policies appear to be “loot the satrapies and form a non-Chinese bloc which is smaller, weaker and poorer than the China bloc.”
Smells like the USSR to me, except the USSR started out very strong and with higher economic growth than the West. America is trying the strategy as its in terminal decline.
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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – August 17, 2025
by Tony Wikrent
Trump not violating any law
‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law’
Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025 [mediaite.com]
Pentagon plan would create military ‘reaction force’ for civil unrest
Alex Horton and David Ovalle, August 12, 2025 [Washington Post]
The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Jim Stewartson, Aug 11, 2025 [MindWar]
[The Guardian, via The Big Picture August 10, 2025]
Video from Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, 18, puts fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used to reach the Trump administration’s ambitious enforcement targets.
Trump: Now the Cops Can ‘Do Whatever the Hell They Want’
Harold Meyerson, August 12, 2025 [The American Prospect]
…D.C.’s police union reacted to Trump’s takeover with unconcealed glee; like many cop unions, it gives voice to those officers who see themselves as occupying hostile territory and being held back from sufficiently forceful action. The union, in an official statement it released yesterday, said it “acknowledges and supports the President’s announcement this morning to assume temporary control of the MPD in response to the escalating crime crisis in Washington, DC. The Union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety.”….
Just as the presence of troops in L.A. provoked protests, so Trump is hoping that the quality of his now enhanced D.C. policing will provoke protests even if the quantity of newly deployed troops and agents isn’t in itself up to the task. In his press conference yesterday, he all but ordered the cops to run amok. Currently, he said, “they’re not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”
Masked Border Protection Agents Open Fire on Family’s Truck After Smashing Its Windows
Brad Reed, Aug 17, 2025 [CommonDreams]
A video of the incident filmed from inside the truck showed the passengers asked the agents to provide identification, which they declined to do.
An agent was then heard demanding that the father, who had been driving the truck, get out of the vehicle. Seconds later, the agent started smashing the car’s windows in an attempt to get inside the vehicle.
The father then hit the gas to try to escape, after which several shots could be heard as agents opened fire. Local news station KTLA reported that, after the father successfully fled the scene, he called local police and asked for help because “masked men” had opened fire on his truck.
Steve Vladek [via Naked Capitalism 08-12-2025]
…it seems worth putting into context both the historical relationship between the federal government and the District of Columbia and the relevant current statutes. To make a long story short, the Constitution gives the federal government “plenary” authority over the “seat of government.” But just about everything else—including the fact that the District of Columbia is the “seat of government”—is up to Congress.
And although Congress has retained, both for itself and the President, more authority over D.C. than over any other federal enclave (including, as especially relevant today, with regard to the National Guard and the Metropolitan Police Department), the critical point for present purposes is that it was Congress that created and stood up a local government in 1973. Congress may have the constitutional power to return the city to true federal control, but the President can’t do it all by himself….
Trump’s crackdown hits Washington — federalized police NOT deployed in DC’s high crime areas
ZACK STANTON, 08/17/2025 [politico.com/playbook]
For supporters of the president’s actions, crime in the district is a blaring crisis that merits an overwhelming federal response to avoid something like failed-state status. They point out that crime, while on a downward trend, is unacceptably commonplace (the district’s homicide rate is still “almost as high as New York’s at its most dangerous, in 1990,” NYT’s Maureen Dowd notes). It demands a round-the-clock response, with FBI agents patrolling the street on foot. … And yet, much of the federal response has been concentrated in some of the safest areas of the city rather than those neighborhoods most devastated by crime. More than half of the district’s homicides last year occurred across the Anacostia River in Wards 7 and 8, The Atlantic’s Michael Powell writes; as recently as Friday, they had yet to see much of a federal response, per USA Today’s Josh Meyer.
How Pretexts Work — A manufactured crisis unfolds.
Hamilton Nolan, Aug 15, 2025 [How Things Work]
Trump’s Invasion Of D.C. Started On K Street
[The Lever, August 12, 2025]
Before the president seized control of Washington, D.C.’s police, corporate lobbyists posed as local businesses to drum up panic about local crime.
Heather Cox Richardson. August 11, 2025 [Letters from an American]
The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”
Ip points to the government’s partial control over U.S. Steel that it took as a condition for Nippon Steel’s takeover, the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners that Trump has claimed the right to direct personally, the 15% of certain chip sales of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices to China that will go to the administration (although who or what entity will get that money I can’t figure out), and Trump’s demand that the chief executive of Intel resign.
Ip calls this system of state capitalism “a hybrid between socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions of nominally private enterprises.” He notes that it is a “sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied.”
Ip also notes that state capitalism is a means of political control, using the power of the state to crush political challenges. “In Trump’s first term, CEOs routinely spoke out when they disagreed with his policies such as on immigration and trade,” Ip writes. “Now, they shower him with donations and praise, or are mostly silent.” Ip pointed out that Trump is deploying financial power and regulatory power to cow media companies, banks, law firms, and government agencies he thinks are not sufficiently supportive.
Trump Has a Bonkers New Rating System for Private Companies
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling, August 15, 2025 [The New Republic]
The Trump administration has released a scorecard to rank the endeavors of some 553 companies and trade associations to advance the president’s agenda and his “big, beautiful bill.”
Organizations are ranked on the sheet as strong, moderate, or low, Axios reported Friday, with ratings built off social media posts, press releases, video testimonials, ads, White House event attendance, and other budget law–oriented efforts.
The data is being circulated among White House senior staff as a temperature gauge on how to interact with companies and open calls with K Street (a nickname for Washington’s business district)….
Joyce Vance, Aug 14, 2025 [Civil Discourse]
This afternoon, a three-judge panel in the D.C. Circuit signed off on the Trump administration’s efforts to block funds for foreign assistance that have been appropriated by Congress. Despite arguments made by the plaintiffs that this violates Congress’ Article II Spending powers, the court ruled that only the head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has the ability to bring Impoundment Control Act (ICA) claims. Impoundment refers to a decision by a president to delay spending or withhold funds that Congress has allocated in the budget. The GAO was not a party to this lawsuit, although it has made multiple findings that this administration has violated the ICA in other regards.
The court’s decision was 2-1, with Judges Karen Henderson and Gregory Katsas in the majority and Judge Florence Pan dissenting. As Judge Pan notes in dissent, they reframed the issues argued by the government in order to rule in its favor, so that they could “excuse the government’s forfeiture of what they perceive to be a key argument, and then rule in the President’s favor on that ground, thus departing from procedural norms that are designed to safeguard the court’s impartiality and independence.” There will likely be a motion to ask the full court to rehear the case en banc, with all active judges sitting, before the losing party takes it to the Supreme Court….
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
One of the themes of this blog is that, with some exceptions, the people who are most dangerous are politicians. Since rich people own politicians, indirectly, they are included.
We’ve been, as a society, obsessed with serial killers for some time. They are seen, by many, as the ultimate evil. The average serial killer is responsible for about six deaths.
The Iraq war killed about half a million people (we don’t really know, since we didn’t count, but the post-fact estimates are credible.) That means George W. Bush, as the primary driver of the Iraq War, was the equivalent of over eighty-three thousand serial killers.
If we want to spread out the blame, US and UK politician who were for the war were the equivalent of over 83,000 serial killers.
The high end estimate of active serial killers in America is 2,000 active killers.
Recently I did a bit of research into the effect of Clinton’s “Welfare Reform” bill, in which he cut access to Welfare significantly. Interestingly, it’s really impossible to tell how many people the bill killed or made homeless (which is a delayed death sentence).
We don’t count.
But I’m guessing Bill’s serial killer number is pretty high. Let’s ignore how many Americans he killed. Iraq sanctions killed somewhere between 200K to a million people, with Madeleine Albright famously saying that if 500K children had been killed, it was worth it.
Even 200K suggests a serial killer count of over 33,000.
Obama’s policies deliberately helped banks steal (foreclose) American homes (steal is the correct terminology, they used documents with fake information and signatures.) Once again, we don’t really know how many people had their homes taken, but 750K were included in a single class action suit, so that’s the lower bound estimate. I wonder how many of those became homeless or died as a result? Again, we don’t know, but it’s bound to be a lot of people. There’s no possibility that it doesn’t massively increase Obama’s “serial killer count.”
Yesterday we discussed prosecuting those who have enabled the Gaza genocide. Of course there’s plenty of blame to go around, but assuming a death count of half a million, which is going to be a low end estimate, we’ve got a serial killer count of over 83K.
Don’t worry about serial killers. They kill hardly anyone.
Politicians, at the behest of their owners, on the other hand, now they have bloody, bloody hands.
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It’s time to start a movement for new Nuremberg trials. After WWII many Nazis were tried for genocide and various war crimes, and they were executed.
I remember a long time ago my friend Stirling Newberry told me that western elites had only one moral rule, “Don’t be Nazis.” Anything short of being a Nazi was OK: mass murder that didn’t quite reach genocide, mass impoverishment, police states that didn’t quite reach “we are the Gestapo” levels, etc…
This struck me as not much of a red line, you can do a lot of evil without being as bad as the Nazis, after all.
But they’ve crossed even this red line. They’re Nazis. Trump, Trudeau, Biden, Harris, almost every leader and politician in Europe, outside of Spain and Ireland, certainly virtually every German and British politician, has aided and abetted genocide. We’re not just talking looking the other way, they’ve locked up those opposed to genocide and they’ve sent weapons and in many cases (Britain) they’ve actively defended Israel from those trying to stop the genocide militarily, like Yemen and Hezbollah.
Nor are we just talking politicians. One journalist was executed at Nuremberg, and most of the journalists in the West have covered for genocide now. The New York Times, the BBC, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, the Guardian, the Telegram, every major TV news show, etc, etc… They knew genocide was happening, they lied about it, they did everything they could to make sure it could continue.
And, of course, almost every Israeli politician and almost all members of America’s congress, many members of Britain’s and Canada’s House of Commons, most Germany politicians, most EU officials, and so on.
All of these people need to hang from the neck till dead. All of them. If we don’t have “supports genocide” as a red line, we have no red lines at all.
This isn’t politically possible now. They’re in power. But they won’t be in power forever. Never forget. Never forgive. And ensure justice.
Fair trials and if they aided genocide, hang them from the neck till dead. There is no statute of limitations on genocide.
And if you’re completely selfish, understand this. They think they can even commit genocide and get away with it. This time it was a bunch of brown people in another country, but having crossed that line, the next line is “what if we mass murder white people in the first world? Could be we get away with it? They let us make them poor and homeless, is killing them that big a step? They’re just useless eaters, anyway.”
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