Ian Welsh – Page 64 – The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

by Tony Wikrent

Crossing the U.S. Border? Here’s How to Protect Yourself

Nikita Mazurov, Matt Sledge, March 29, 2025 [The Intercept]

Searches of phones and other electronics are on the rise for those entering the U.S. Take these steps to help secure your devices.

Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers

March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]

Rep. Jaimie Raskin’s request for you to file FOIA with DOGE

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

The Biggest Scandal of the Second Trump Term Isn’t “Signalgate”

Alex Shephard, March 28, 2025 [The New Republic]

The national security chat debacle certainly merits attention. But the Trump administration is now blatantly disappearing students and others who are in the country legally…. Masked agents snatching legal residents off the streets and disappearing them—not so long ago, this would be unthinkable in the United States. Now it is not only a regular occurrence but something that the Trump administration boasts about….

By removing the authors of innocuous op-eds, Rubio seems to believe that he can surgically smother the opinions they were expressing. At the same time, this purge allows the administration to systematically attack higher education. Already, the administration has used student protests to attack a number of colleges and universities and to withhold hundreds of millions in federal funding from several. Allegations of antisemitism—and a list of demands that are more or less impossible to fully meet—are being used as a Trojan horse to withhold funding and to attack other sources of revenue. Many schools rely heavily on foreign students, who often pay full tuition. The Trump administration’s crackdown, even if it were to somehow stop today, has already seriously jeopardized that. Who would send their child to study in America in such a climate? Especially knowing their child could be swept off the street and flown to a detention facility?

What Will It Take?

Joyce Vance, March 26, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

Why use Signal in the first place when American leaders have some of the most secure communications technology in the world available to them? Is it just for convenience? If so, that’s sloppy, and they should be committing to do better, not arguing over whether the information was classified or not. (But if it looks like a duck…)

The truth is that by going to Signal, they avoided leaving a paper trail. No annoying records that could be unearthed down the road. Remember Trump’s first impeachment? It came about in large part because after the call where he threatened Ukraine’s president with withholding security aid if he wouldn’t announce his country was investigating Joe Biden for financial misconduct, records of the call were buried inside a classified information system where they didn’t belong. That was what got the ball rolling. It was about trying to hide records of an official call that everyone knew was wrong.

As far as we know at this point, there was nothing improper about the attack on the Houthis. So why were high-ranking members of the Trump administration communicating off the books? How pervasive is the practice, and who knows/authorizes it? We are a government of the people. Transparency isn’t optional. There are rules about public records that have to be followed, and this president who likes to operate in secret and at the margins of our laws has frequently tried to skirt them.

The Next American Constitution

AOC Is Bernie’s Heir Because She Was Loyal When It Mattered

By Ian Welsh

On March 28, 2025

27 Comments

Bernie and AOC are on a tour which is drawing large crowds based on a left-wing populist argument. Bernie is near the end of his career: he can’t run for President again, and he’s damn old even if he is holding together well.

This tour is Sanders re-anointing AOC as his heir: presenting her to the public. It didn’t have to be AOC and at one point it looked like it might be Elizabeth Warren.

Then two things happened:

Bernie had a heart attack, and it hit his campaign hard, and AOC endorsed him and campaigned for him at exactly that point, turning the media coverage around. She was there when it mattered.
Elizabeth Warren accused Bernie of being a sexist liar.

As I wrote back in 2020:

There was a lot of furor over AOC speaking at the DNC. First, that she had only a minute, then that she didn’t “endorse” Biden.

Both of these things come down to a simple fact: She was invited by Bernie to nominate him. As such, it wasn’t appropriate for her to talk about Biden. That she had only a minute is because that’s how long the nominations are.

AOC wouldn’t have been invited to speak at the DNC, really, if it was up to the people running the convention, Biden’s people, she wouldn’t have spoken at all.

She was there because Bernie chose her.

AOC is Bernie’s successor: She is going to be the leader of his movement when he no longer is, and this was his last Presidential campaign. She’s the progressive leader now.

It could have been Elizabeth Warren, but she called Bernie a liar and a sexist and waffled on key progressive priorities. AOC, on the other hand, when Sanders needed help most, right after his heart attack, came out, endorsed, and campaigned for him and made a huge difference.

Warren, in her short-sightedness, torpedoed herself in an attempt to win it all now, and then later to maintain viability with centrists. In exchange, she got a DNC speech, and in exchange she gave up her post as heir-presumptive to the progressive bloc. She will never be President.

I have my issues with AOC. I think she’s basically a sell-out. But she showed loyalty when it mattered and Warren didn’t. She was smart, and Warren was stupid and short-sighted.

So yes, AOC is being anointed and yes, she will run for the Democratic party nomination or as a third party candidate for President in 2028.

Absolutely Massive Collapse In Travel From Canada To America Incoming

By Ian Welsh

On March 27, 2025

35 Comments

I have to admit, I didn’t think it would be this big:

Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we’ve compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.

Parts of Florida will be hammered by this. But I’m shocked: seventy percent plus! I hadn’t realized just how unified Canadians are in this.

I suspect it isn’t all the tariffs and Trump’s annexation threats: there’s been significant press of US border services snatching foreigners who are crossing legally but perhaps don’t have their paperwork all right and instead of just sending them back, abusing them and locking them up.

I certainly won’t be traveling to America, probably ever again: after all I’ve insulted Trump repeatedly and said that Israel is committing a genocide and customs officers often search social media. Nothing in America is worth the risk of wind up in some prison camp because I think Palestinians are human beings and shouldn’t be mass murdered.

So far I don’t see evidence of a big drop in European bookings, but if that happens, and there’s plenty of reason to believe in might, well… bad time to be in tourism in America and a good time to be in tourism in alternatives. I think Mexican and Canadian destinations are doing very well out of Canadian’s refusal to visit America.

America wants to be alone, and without allies, and soon it will be. Trump’s hilarious attempts to cozy up to Russia are ridiculous. Putin will do business with America, but he will never, ever trust the US, no matter who is President. Meanwhile America’s real allies are mostly deciding, quite rationally, that one can’t trust America and therefore America can’t be a useful ally.

This will lead to a variety of knock on effects, like diversification from the dollar and use of local currencies in trade, and the American standard of living will collapse by at least a third. Americans have been living way beyond their means, and Trump is bringing that to an end.

So sad.

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Trump Doesn’t Have A Master Plan

By Ian Welsh

On March 26, 2025

32 Comments

There are a lot of smart people who think Trump has a plan. For example, that he’s deliberately reducing America to a regional power to avoid full Imperial collapse. Or that he’s using tariffs to rebuild American industry.

No.

Trump isn’t the type, he doesn’t have a master plan. Trump is driven by the idea that other countries are taking advantage of America: by a sense of grievance. He wants good deals, by which he always means that the US gets more than it gives, and he’s willing to end a deal if he thinks it isn’t good.

Trump has virtues (not all virtues are moral virtues.) Yeah, he started rich, thanks to Daddy, but he shits into a gold toilet, got a lot of good looking women, and became the President of the United States. He has a weird sort of charisma and tons of energy, as long as what he’s doing gets him attention of the right kind.

But he’s not a deep thinker. He doesn’t know much about the political economy, and he doesn’t make and execute policy plans. His purge of the “deep state” is driven by grievance: they went after him during Biden’s reign, so he’s going after them.

His tariffs are driven by looking at trade balances and feeling they’re unfair: Europe has about a 235 billion trade surplus with America, for example. That, to Trump is unfair. (The balance of payments is about 40 to 60 billion, which is far less.) Canada has a trade surplus, so that’s Canada taking advantage of the US to Trump, never mind that the US actually sells more goods to Canada than vice-versa and the surplus is essentially all energy trade.

If his tariffs were part of a master plan to re-industrialize he wouldn’t have gutted Biden’s industrial policy, which was actually working, and he wouldn’t be waffling back and forth on them. He’d institute them. (The smartest way would be to set a goal, and increase the tariffs by 1% every month or two to give companies time to reshore.)

Likewise his attack on NATO is primarily driven by this sense of grievance: the US is paying much more than everyone else and other NATO nations haven’t met their promise of spending 2% of GDP. (Which is fair enough, they did say they would, and they haven’t.) In the case of Europe there’s something there: the Euros are terrified of Russia and if they think Russia is really a threat (I don’t) they should be willing to spend on their military.

There are certainly people in Trump’s administration or outside planners with influence who do have master plans related to tariffs, reindustrialization, and ending the America Empire, but Trump? No. He’s too undisciplined a thinker and trying to work thru him must be endlessly frustrating to them.

Trump is also self-defeating in his fickleness. It’s impossible to make a deal with him, because you can’t be sure he’ll stick to it. Take his pressure on Egypt (which has massive fiscal issues caused by the Houthi blockade and Ukrainian war, since they got much of their grain from Ukraine, and thus is in a bad position to resist pressure) to take Palestinian refugees. To make it worthwhile he needs to not just offer the stick (we’ll end subsidies) but also a carrot—increased subsidies.

But Sisi has to figure that Trump might cut those subsidies off in a few months or a year or too, after he’s got 700K Palestinians refugees in his territory.

Now, even without a plan, Trump may wind up reducing America to a regional power. I’d say he probably will as a result of what he’s doing. But that he’s deliberately doing as part of a master plan based on a sound understanding of global political economics?

Seems unlikely.

And that matters, because there are smart ways to do things, and stupid ones, and stumbling into the end of America as the global hegemon will have some fairly serious costs like a crash on American arms sales, countries likely refusing to enforce American copyright and patents, national ownership laws taking much of America’s overseas ownership of land and industry, and so on. Plus, if you want to reindustrialize, the clumsy attack on universities and research is exactly the wrong thing to do when China is ahead in 80% of fields. (To be clear, American research needs to be fixed, but you don’t do it by defunding it massively all at once: you slowly change how funding is done so that there aren’t mass layoffs of scientists who then leave the US or stop being scientists.)

Trump isn’t some great statesman who has looked carefully at America’s position and come up with a brilliant master plan, he’s a deeply flawed man whose primary skill is self-promotion and who is driven by a negative sum view of the world based on the idea that if he’s winning someone else has to be losing, a deep sense of grievance at the idea anyone is taking advantage of him (because he takes advantage of others all the time) and who needs attention, adulation and ass kissing.

Too many people are reading into Trump want they want to see, not seeing what is actually there—and not there.

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America’s In the Position the USSR was in the 80s

By Ian Welsh

On March 24, 2025

32 Comments

Back in the 70s and 80s, the USSR’s economy was in terrible shape. It hadn’t always been, that’s a triumphalist myth: for a long time it out-performed the West, and economic textbooks of the 50s discuss the problem that the Soviets were growing faster than we were.

So Reagan’s administration came up with a plan: they’d increase defense spending, the Soviets would have to do the same, and the strain would screw over their economy. There’s various arguments, but it seems to have worked.

Recently Trump suggested that Russia, America and China all cut their defense spending in unison. Russia was interested, China said no.

Now, of course, the US spends way more than anyone else on its military, but that’s mostly because it over-pays for everything because of vast corruption.

But the real issue here is that China is a rich state, and the US is not. Forget GDP, it’s completely misleading. China is ahead in everything that matters: 80%+ of tech fields, has more population and the largest industrial base in the world and it’s the main trade partner of more nations than anyone else, including America.

This graphic is illustrative, but it applies to everything except planes and launch capacity, and soon it will apply to them too:

As Keynes once said, “we can afford anything we can do.” The corollary is that we can’t afford anything we can’t do. China can afford almost anything because it can do almost anything. Within four years it will have cheaper and more lift capacity than the US. Its civilian airliner industry is taking off, it’ll take longer, and the competition is Airbus, not Boeing, but they’ll win that competition too: even if Airbus avoids the Boeing quality collapse, Chinese jets will be cheaper and about as good.

China can easily afford its military budget. I’d guess it could double or triple it and be OK. The US is struggling: the Trump cuts are a reflection of that, and are at the same time reducing government capacity, of which China has plenty, and unlike America government, they’re competent and at this point not even very corrupt and what corruption does exist is honest corruption—you can take a cut, but you have to deliver on time and on budget.

So China’s laughing at America. “No thanks. We’ll just keep out-producing you and we know you can’t keep up, but feel free to try.”

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 23, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On March 23, 2025

6 Comments

by Tony Wikrent

Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers

March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]

Trump not violating any law

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

‘We’re Not Stopping’: Trump Border Czar Vows to Ignore Judges

[The Daily Beast, via MSN 03-18-2025]

Iran-Contra Paved the Way for Trump to Defy Democratic Norms

Sam Lebovic, March 7, 2025 [Bloomberg]

… In The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy (The University of North Carolina Press, March 4), Alan McPherson argues convincingly that Iran-Contra should be plotted not as a minor sideshow in the Cold War’s final act, nor as a case study in flawed national-security policymaking, but as a key moment in the collapse of democratic norms.

McPherson was inspired to return to the improvised, personalized diplomacy of the affair while watching the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2019. But his argument has become even more compelling in the first weeks of Trump 2.0. In McPherson’s telling, Iran-Contra was an assault on democratic governance by an extremist executive branch. The results — corruption, deception, willful illegality, lack of accountability — are starting to look familiar….

Defying Congress and the law required operating in secrecy, which also meant sidelining the federal bureaucracy. Policy was conducted instead by a small cluster of officials close to the White House, who delegated key tasks to a coterie of allies who weren’t elected, some of whom weren’t even really part of the government. McPherson is particularly good at highlighting the corruption that flourished in such a freewheeling environment. Weapons sales to Iran were managed by a small firm known, appropriately, as “The Enterprise” — operating for profit, its owners marked up the price of the missiles and decided to pay themselves millions of dollars in commission….

This was all part of a radical revision of the role of the presidency. Lawyers in the Reagan administration embraced what is known as the Unitary Executive Theory — a reading of the Constitution in which the president has sole and complete authority over the executive branch. That meant sidelining Congress and ending the independence of the bureaucracy. Edwin Meese, Reagan’s second attorney general — who would resign in 1988 amid corruption allegations — believed “the entire system of independent agencies may be unconstitutional.” Iran-Contra was a perfect illustration of the theory in practice: Congress could be ignored, and policy would run through the White House….

…In a 1992 article in The Nation, playwright Steve Tesich saw Iran-Contra as a prime instance of what he dubbed a newly emerging “post-truth” society: “President Reagan perceived correctly that the public really didn’t want to know the truth. So he lied to us, but he didn’t have to work hard at it.” The title of the piece was “A Government of Lies.”….

But McPherson is right to suggest that Iran-Contra is prologue to our present. The scandals presented an opportunity to send a clear signal that democracy had no tolerance for this kind of politics. The opposite happened. In 1992 Ted Draper, author of one of the first comprehensive histories of the scandals, concluded that “if ever the constitutional democracy of the United States is overthrown, we now have a better idea of how this is likely to be done.” Indeed, Iran-Contra taught politicians lessons — that one could find much room for maneuvers in the inner workings of the government, that the law was flexible, that there would be no consequences if you pushed the envelope or lied about what you were doing.

Stephen Miller Has a Plan

Nick Miroff and Jonathan Lemire, March 19, 2025 [The Atlantic]

During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker….

Miller’s approach is different this time. He has unleashed an everything-at-once policy storm modeled after the MAGA guru Stephen K. Bannon’s “flood the zone” formula. Drawing on policy ideas worked up in conservative think tanks during the four years between Trump’s terms, Miller’s plan has been to fire off so many different proposals that some inevitably find a friendly court ruling, three administration officials told us….

Three months after leaving the White House, in April 2021, Miller co-founded a Trump-aligned think tank, the America First Legal Foundation, that he fashioned as a right-wing counter to the American Civil Liberties Union. The group’s lawyers filed scores of lawsuits against the Biden administration and U.S. companies. They also provided legal firepower to Texas Governor Greg Abbott and other Republican officials launching state-level immigration crackdowns….

[TW: Democrats, “the left,” and many independents don’t appear to realize or understand that the Trump regime is looking for, even relishing, confrontation with the courts.]

With Orders, Investigations and Innuendo, Trump and G.O.P. Aim to Cripple the Left

Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher, March 19, 2025 [New York Times]

The president and his allies in Congress are targeting the financial, digital and legal machinery that powers the Democratic Party and much of the progressive political world….

…A small group of White House officials has been working to identify targets and vulnerabilities inside the Democratic ecosystem, taking stock of previous efforts to investigate them, according to two people familiar with the group’s work who requested anonymity to describe it.

Scott Walter, president of the conservative watchdog group Capital Research Center, which monitors liberal money in politics, recently briefed senior White House officials on a range of donors, nonprofit groups and fund-raising techniques. The White House group is said to be exploring what more can be done within the law….

Some of the president’s allies have welcomed the moves as payback for Democratic congressional investigations of Mr. Trump and Republican political networks.

“Democrats ran breathless investigations of Republican dark money for years, and I hope that this is a concerted effort to go after the left’s dark money,” said Mike Davis, a former Republican congressional aide who founded a group using what he calls brass-knuckle tactics to assail Mr. Trump’s critics….

Trump picks his next Big Law target

[Politico, via Wall Street on Parade, March 17, 2025]

President Donald Trump continued his retaliatory spree against major law firms on Friday, signing an executive order targeting New York firm Paul, Weiss days after a judge ruled that major parts of a similar order were unconstitutional.

Trump’s new order seeks to suspend the security clearances of attorneys with the firm and limit their access to government buildings, ability to get federal jobs and receive money from federal contracts….

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On March 22, 2025

37 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

MAGA Are Fundamentally Morons

By Ian Welsh

On March 21, 2025

21 Comments

The simple fact is that Trump isn’t going to “make America great again”. He’s speed running collapse. The most telling bit is his attacks on America universities at the same time as China has taken the lead in eighty percent, or more, of technologies and appears to have the lead in science as well. He’s dismantling the few good things Biden did, like his industrial policy and his appointment of Lina Khan to attack monopolies and oligopolies.

The shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will massively hurt low and middle income earners. The postal service changes will lead to many rural Americans having no mail service. Trump’s budget requires massive cuts to Medicaid, which disproportionately helps Red State Republicans.

Trump isn’t making America Great Again: he’s speed running the decline of America. There was a way to withdraw from the American Empire and become semi-isolationist again which would have been good for both Americans and everyone else, but that’s not what Trump is doing.

Anyone delusional enough to think Trump is good for America or most Americans is a moron. It’s that simple.

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