Ian Welsh

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

The Killing Of Two National Guardsmen In DC

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On November 28, 2025

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is ironic in a number of ways.

As Sun Tzu pointed out about two and a half millenia ago, you should always treat traitors well. Never really trust them, but treat them well, because if people know you don’t, they won’t betray. (And be clear, this man was a traitor to his own country.)

To cap it off it turns out that he was a highly trained murderer. Highly trained murderers with shitty morals (most of them) need to be treated very carefully. Either take care of them well or kill them. At the very least, don’t bring them into your country and then abandon them to a shitty racist society without any support. (Aka. give them a job. There are tons of meaningless well paid government jobs. Give people like this one, plus a nice health care plan.)

Fortunately (or is that unfortunately?) he was in a rage and killed two national guardsmen, who while obviously willing to kill for Empire (like him, but probably less so) had no real power or responsibility for what happened to him. If he’d been thinking straight he would have gone after a politician or admin official. Even easier, a lot of the people responsible for how he was mishandled are no longer elected officials or high admin officers and thus have no real protection.

Seems a bit silly to kill a couple of peons. The people responsible won’t give a damn, they’re just talking points. But if it was one of them?

Not, of course, that I would ever condone extra-judicial murder of people who are responsible for a stupid, hopeless war and thus all the deaths, murders, rapes, torture, starvation and homelessness a stupid, hopeless war entails.

Anyway, treat traitors well, but never trust them. Sun Tzu knew. If I were a member of the elite, I’d be wondering if the next pissed off veteran, foreign born or not, will connect the dots and decide to go after actual responsible parties. Perhaps jobs should be found for them, and health care, just out of self-interest?

Oh, and do note that he did not kill civilians. That makes this act, in at least one way, morally superior to 95% of the decisions made to use violence by elected members of Congress and every administration official of my lifetime.

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Trade Is Not The Primary Driver of Currency Rates

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On November 27, 2025

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The misunderstandings packed into this little bit of writing are stupendous:

Over the past few years, China has been in deflation, while the US has been in inflation. Yet despite this stark divergence, the CNH has still depreciated more than 10% against the US dollar. This combination — falling relative prices in China and a weaker currency — has made Chinese goods and services extraordinarily cheap in global terms. A vivid example: a night at the Four Seasons Beijing costs roughly $250, compared with more than $1,160 in New York

First, a 10% drop does not make a hotel room cost one quarter as much in Beijing as in New York. That’s ridiculous on the face. Almost everything costs less in China than in America. America has an economy optimized to drive prices high to extract maximum profit. China has economy with actual competitive markets: if you raise prices someone else will come in underneath you. Almost all of America is operating in or as if it is in an oligopoly. There is little actual price competition because even when there are competitors they figure that competing on price is stupid: it hurts both of them. Why not both raise prices to usurious heights? Win/Win.

This doesn’t happen in China because it has competitive markets and it has competitive markets in large part because China will throw executives in prison or execute them if they engage in this sort of price collusion, whereas in the US, though ostensibly illegal based on the laws on the book, such collusion has been made legal by decades of court decisions and prosecutorial decisions. (Prosecutors mostly don’t, and when they do courts almost always refuse to convict.)

China also has lots and lots of firms and genuine low barriers to entry. If you try to collude, someone from outside your industry will enter and undercut you, and often this will be someone with deep enough pockets that you can’t win a price war with them.

Second, currency values outside of hyperinflation are driven primarily by demand for currency. That isn’t primarily about trade, it’s about investors and financial carry trade. China unquestionably has a more dynamic and larger economy than any Western nation, but it isn’t financialized: Chinese companies don’t produce the sort of returns that American companies have over the last 50 years. This is deliberate policy: if they did, then China’s economy would suck for ordinary people, like Western economies suck for ordinary people because prices would be much higher. (See that Hilton room, though it cascades thru the entire economy, with rent and food at the low end much cheaper in China too.)

It is also pretty hard to invest in China as a foreigner, while the US is set up for foreign investors. Even if you want “China exposure” it’s hard to get.

So the Yuan isn’t in massive demand, because there aren’t bullshit over-sized returns like the AI bubble. The central bank doesn’t run its policies based on “the stock market must always go up.” America has spent 50 years burning down its real economy to produce outsize “profits” due to asset pumping. China keeps asset prices under control, and when a bubble does occur, as it did in real-estate, they deliberately deflate it, bearing the cost.

None of this is particularly unique, by the way. It’s basically the way the US economy was mostly run from the 30s thru the mid 70s or so. The policy details, the ways things are done are different, but American policies were meant to encourage real economic growth and if you look at a stock market graph you’ll see it traded sideways. No 50 year bull market. Asset bubbles were discouraged. You can’t have a good economy with high real-estate prices, just can’t be done and the stock market is a secondary market, not a primary one. Emphasizing it is sheerest insanity.

There is very little that China has done which is genuinely unique, despite jingoistic assertions otherwise. The playbook they have run is the same one almost every successful industrializing nation after Britain used, and very similar to the Japanese model. What is different are two things. First, the scale, when 1.4 billion people industrialize and modernize, it shakes the world. Second, a genuine desire to help the poor, which is extremely rare during industrialization, though not unheard of. (The Gilded Age did not care about the poor. Britain’s industrialization period was driven by hurting the poor as much, or more, than they could bear. They were far better off as peasants than in factories.)

Anyway, countries can be real rich (lots of genuine productive capacity with low prices and dynamic markets) or they can be fake-rich, with financialized markets that squeeze the last penny out of consumers and immiserate workers, leading to non-competitive markets and oligarchy. China is rich. America is fake-rich.

 

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Are Multiple Russian Breakthroughs Imminent?

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On November 26, 2025

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In my Nov. 7 analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian War I missed two serious developments on the line of contact that I simply didn’t have the bandwidth to notice. After paying closer attention I came away with a big picture question: has Russia pierced the line of contact in three places or are my sources exaggerating? For the last two weeks there has been talk and rumors, some of which I have been guilty of passing along, that Russia achieved such a goal. But where?

Most observers are in rough agreement that the following five Kupyansk, Siversk, Lyman, Huliapole, and Constantinovka are under dire threat. Pokrovsk and Myrnograd are done. Finis.

But these three are the standouts.

The first, and most obvious, is in the immediate environs of Pokrovsk. As I noted November 7, west of Pokrovsk—is all open steppe land with little to no defensive terrain—all the way to Pavlograd. Will the Russians move forward? Doubtful. I stand by what I wrote two weeks ago: “Russia will consolidate its gains in and around Pokrovsk, after the Ukrainian soldiers in the pocket are killed or surrender. For some time after I foresee Russia utilization of tactical defense within an offensive framework.” But the Russians, when they are ready, will move across the steppe towards Pavlograd, en masse.

The second and most unlikely involves troops now taking Lyman, who afterwards will move south, in tandem with troops north of Pokrovsk, to encircle both Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, two large towns serving as the final obstacles on the road to Poltava. This encirclement, if attempted, would make the Pokrovsk-Myrnograd cauldron look likes child’s play. It is doable, however, and an encirclement of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk might be just the right bait for the last of the Ukraines reserves; with only enough reserves to fight in one place, this is where they’d stand. Russia can afford to tease the Ukraine as it retains the strategic initiative. It can feint, sucker punch and attack pretty much with impunity at this point in the war. Yes, Ukrainian forces can mount local counter-offensives, but the days of counter-offensives across the entire line of contact are long past.

The third—which is the most serious for the Ukraine—is in the south, where an imminent encirclement of Hulyiapole, will wrap up the flank of Ukrainian forces in the south elimanating all resistance to Zaporozhye. This operations seems well on its way to success. The Ukrainians have no answer to the Russians here.

As I mentioned above there are other places the Russians are pressuring: Kupyansk, Siversk and Constantinovka. In all three places Ukrainian defenses crumble, Russia hammers supply lines, drops FAB-500 on mustering points, lobs Iskanders on ammo dumps and bridges, and hurls thermobaric bombs at makeshift barracks and more. The Russians are doing this as near to the line of contact as possible. Everything to a purpose: shattering the will of the Ukrainian soldier to continue the fight.

Meanwhile, Russia’s strategic bombing and drone campaign against the whole of the nation escalates sans mercy.

Of the three points I mentioned above, I see the Russians grinding away deliberately and slowly; advancing at speeds of their choice around the Pokrovsk environs, and in and around Lyman. In other words, more attrition. Maybe a feint at encirclement will draw in the last of the Ukraine’s strategic reserves, which would then be attrited away as the Russians have been doing so since 2023.

Poor US TV generals, still have no big flashy red arrows or armored movements to get their war porn on.

Only in the south might we see a real breakout; a breakout that posisbly rolls up of the entire Ukrainian flank to Zaporozhye. The Russians might be at the gates in two weeks. Maybe less, maybe more. Maybe we’ll see an operational pause and then a deliberate resumption of the churn.

One fact is beyond obvious at this point: the Ukraine has lost. The question now is: how much more will they lose.

By The People? For the People?

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On November 25, 2025

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The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders.

This is not always true, of course. It is less true on the Republican side, where primarying incumbents often works and where a vocal but grassroots minority does have significant power in choosing candidates. On the Democratic side it’s mostly true, but some candidates do slip thru: Mamdani for New York City mayor being the most recent example.

Still, overall, it’s questionable that Americans really choose their own government, and that’s true in most Western countries. In Romania, for example, the unacceptable candidate who was going to win was simply arrested and banned from running and there is a movement to make Germany’s AfD illegal. In Canada the party leaders simply refuse to allow pro-Palestine candidates, even those who are selected as candidate by their riding, to run.

The more accurate view is that political parties in most ostensibly democratic countries are political oligarchies. How much this is true varies. First past the post system tend to have very strong oligopolies, while proportional representation countries allow more flexibility.

Perhaps worse when outsider candidates do break thru and win they usually don’t wind up voting for and doing what they ran on. You can see this (though it’s a bit of a stretch to call him an outsider) with Trump. It’s visible with AOC, the darling of the left who has voted for almost all Israeli aid packages and who has clearly decided to become an insider.

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn, where one academic study found that about 80% of all news stories lied about his policies.

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.)

And we all know that most Western governments aren’t “for the people.” For fifty years they’ve been immiserating their own people, becoming rich themselves and forcing money upwards, creating a financial oligopoly on top of the political oligopoly. I often say that for most Westerners their most dangerous enemies are their own politicians. Putin isn’t a danger to you as a EU member or America. But Macron or Von Der Leyen are. They’re the ones destroying your standard of living and piecemeal destroying social supports. This is even more the case in Britain, where there hasn’t been a Prime Minister whose primary legacy wasn’t hurting most Britons since the 70s. (Well, maybe Tony Blair had that as his secondary goal, his primary goal being hurting Iraqis to toady to America.)

Great systems are judged by their great opponents. For much of the 20th century that was the USSR and it is not entirely a coincidence that when the USSR was strong, Western governments treated their people well. Of course that isn’t all there is to it, there were the oil shocks, Vietnam, etc… But the West was ideologically scared of communism and when it seemed to work, they felt they had to make capitalism work.

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. They’ve brought more people out of poverty than anyone else ever has. They keep rent and housing and health care prices low, as deliberate policy. Incomes are lower than in the West, but costs are much lower. You can buy enough food to feed someone for a week for $50 in most of China, with ease.

They also create the future: high speed trains, for example. They build real public infrastructure. I was very impressed when they built rest and relaxation places for delivery workers: they cared that such workers were miserable and exploited. And they build things like this:

Now it’s fair to say that this isn’t precisely “socialism” vs. “capitalism”. There was a time when the West built lots of public parks and so on. It’s the difference between a real rich society and a financialized society. One has plenty of excess capacity, the other has plenty of money but very little actual ability to build and create and no desire to do so if someone can’t make an unfair profit from it.

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it?

The risk here is that the anti-democratic forces in the West aren’t the CPC, they’re billionaires who think the problem with the current government is that it still does some things for ordinary people which aren’t primarily about benefiting billionaires. They’re fascists, at best.

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.

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Long Covid Disabling Continues

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On November 24, 2025

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One of the predictions I made many years ago was that Long Covid would slowly cripple workforces. Covid still exists, and that we deliberately don’t try to count cases any more doesn’t change that.

This is typical of our handling of all problems. We just pretend they don’t exist and won’t have serious consequences if we ignore them. While China is somewhat better, with their hard push on clean tech, their willingness to deflate housing prices and their policies reducing the number of billionaires, they too have ignored Covid.

Ironically this is because the Chinese government IS quite sensitive to public opinion. Zero Covid was the right policy, but it was done stupidly and as a result huge demonstrations occurred and the CPC backed down.

Shutdowns made sense in the early days of Covid. This is public health 101 during a pandemic. But as with everyone else the Chinese did them too late and too long.

The actual solution is the one we used for water borne diseases. We cleaned up the water, and we have to clean up the air. All public buildings and all apartment buildings and condos need filters and UV to clean the air. It’s a huge project, to be sure, but it’s more than doable, for less than we are spending on the insane AI data center push. The result would be a lot less Covid, less disabling and at the same time less flu, colds and other airborne diseases.

It’s simple. We have the technology, and we aren’t doing it. Insanity. Not even in most hospitals. Emergency protocols like masks and isolation make sense, but they are emergency protocols and not for long term use. Find out the vector and find a long term solution to the vector.

This solution was understood as early as 2021. Many voices were raised. Nothing was done.

Our predecessors did what they could. If you remember the old steam and hot water heating systems, you know they usually ran too hot so that people had to open windows to cool down, even in the middle of winter. This was deliberate, the designers wanted those windows open to increase ventilation, because they knew the great post-World War I flu pandemic had been airborne.

We have better tech, and better solutions and we’re just sitting on our thumbs and rotating.

Pathetic.

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

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On November 23, 2025

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

by Tony Wikrent

 

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

“Riots Raging”: The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops

[ProPublica, via The Big Picture, November 16, 2025]

After reviewing coverage from the network and hours of social media videos that preceded Trump’s decision, ProPublica found that Fox’s portrayal of “Portland rioters” routinely instigating violence was misleading.

The Comey Hearing: This Would Be Hilarious If It Weren’t So Scandalous

Harry Litman, November 20, 2025 [The New Republic]

…I was in the northern Virginia courtroom Wednesday for the argument before Judge Michael Nachmanoff on former FBI Director James Comey’s motion to dismiss the case….

Nachmanoff pressed the government lawyer about how Halligan could have been the decision-maker when she came to the case only a few days before she sought the indictment.

It was in chasing down the implausible timeline that Nachmanoff cornered the government into conceding that the grand jury had not even reviewed the actual indictment in the case.

It was a gobsmacking, Perry Mason moment of the sort that doesn’t happen in actual hearings; except it did. The spectators emitted a kind of silent gasp while Judge Nachmanoff pursed his lips and remained silent for several seconds.

The bizarre and unprecedented chain of events happened because the grand jury declined to return the first of three charges in the government’s proposed indictment (and it approved charges two and three by reportedly very narrow margins). But instead of presenting to the grand jury a new indictment with the two approved counts—not only standard procedure but the only conceivable one—Halligan and her colleagues simply cut and pasted the original indictment, removing the first charge and renumbering the remaining two….

It’s hard to convey how consummately boneheaded it was to try to slip a revised indictment past the court rather than presenting it to the grand jury. Earlier in the week, Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick had referred to the situation as “uncharted territory.”

As this all spilled out, Nachmanoff summoned Halligan to the podium to confirm that when the second indictment was presented, the full grand jury wasn’t in the courtroom. Halligan acknowledged it, and Nachmanoff curtly dismissed her….

…Perhaps more seriously, the [Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick’s] opinion outlined two fundamental misstatements of law that Halligan made to the grand jury, each in response to juror questions. The opinion redacted the statements but described them sufficiently to reveal more breathtaking prosecutorial malpractice.

Halligan mischaracterized Comey’s Fifth Amendment right to remain silent in a way that could have suggested to jurors that the burden of proof lay with him. And she told them that if the government’s evidence appeared thin, they need not worry—additional evidence would come out at trial….

In its filing yesterday, the government did little to dispute the facts, arguing instead that if Halligan misled the jury, dismissal would be inappropriate unless the court found prejudice. That may be true in the abstract, but nothing about these errors feels harmless: The misstatements were grave, fundamental, and, given the grand jury’s already narrow votes, plainly consequential.

And on this score, another malefactor surfaces: Attorney General Pam Bondi. DOJ filings assert that Bondi reviewed the grand jury proceedings and materials and, on that basis, ratified both the indictment and Halligan’s authority. If so, she necessarily signed off on the very misstatements Judge Fitzpatrick highlighted. Her willingness to act as a shill for Halligan implicates her directly in the ethical and constitutional violations….

What Happens When The Government Loses Its Credibility: The Comey Prosecution

Joyce Vance, Nov 18, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

…The Judge called what happened here “a disturbing pattern of profound investigative missteps, missteps that led an FBI agent and a prosecutor to potentially undermine the integrity of the grand jury proceeding” and granted Comey’s request for access to all of the grand jury proceedings. He ordered the government to turn over those materials by 3 p.m. on Monday. Predictably, the government pushed back….

The Trump Administration’s Favorite Tool for Criminalizing Dissent

Quinta Jurecic, November 18, 2025 [The Atlantic]

Federal prosecutors have charged more than 100 people with Section 111 violations. Was their crime anything more than opposing Trump’s immigration policies?

The videos have become commonplace. Federal officers wearing masks and bulletproof vests subdue a moped driver in the middle of a busy D.C. street. A 70-year-old protester in Chicago is pushed to the ground by an armed Border Patrol agent holding a riot gun. In Los Angeles, an agent shoves away a demonstrator.

These videos capture the aggressive tactics of immigration officers under the second Trump administration. But they share something else, too. In each instance, following documented violence by federal officers toward protesters and immigrants, the Justice Department pressed charges—against the victim of that violence. Those three people, according to the DOJ, had all broken a law prohibiting “assaulting, resisting, or impeding” federal officials….

Michael Steele’s [Malcolm Nance’s] GRAVE WARNING about Trump Will Give You CHILLS

[Your Daily Political Fix, November 18, 2025, YouTube]

1:14
…we are at the point of danger now. Uh, this administration has convinced themselves based on their own fantasies wrapped within their heads watching footage that’s five and 10 years old … they want to kill Americans that other American citizens now need to be designated as equal to a foreign terrorist group or armed vigilante gang or armed gangs in El Salvador in an effort to poison the mind of onethird of the electorate to attack and potentially kill another third of the electorate.

If that sounds familiar, that’s what Adolf Hitler did. He won with 33% of the vote. He got the other 33% to join together to try to wipe out the democratically elected 33%. We are in a very very very dangerous place right now. Well, I don’t know what else you call it when you’re sending red state, you know, troops into blue states without their permission. That feels inciting of a a civil war or whatever you want to call it. when you openly say insurrection act … and even a Trump judge says it has no relation to reality.

2:44
Well, what we’re seeing here is quite simple. It’s military occupation. And he’s sending forces from people who he thought from states that were supposed to be Trump supporting. Let me tell you
something. These guardsmen go where they’re ordered because that’s their their job for the weekend, right? So when they get mobilized and activated, they’ll go there. But with few exceptions, this the force is 40 to 45% African-American, Latino, and women. And they’re not going to go out and start shooting people. We haven’t even seen any evidence of where they actually are other than doing support. It’s ICE, the secret police, the new American Gestapo. And I will call them that professionally because what they are doing is the technical term in my manual that is used throughout the world. The terrorist recognition handbook is state terrorism where all instruments of government and law enforcement the intelligence apparatus carry out acts of terrorism in order to intimidate the entire nation into a state of fear.

White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats

Ellen Nakashima, Warren P. Strobel and Alex Hortonibe, Nov 22, 2025 [Washington Post]

President Donald Trump and his top White House aides pushed for lethal strikes on Western Hemisphere drug traffickers almost as soon as they took office in January, and in the past 10 months have repeatedly steamrolled or sidestepped government lawyers who questioned whether the provocative policy was legal, according to multiple current and former officials familiar with the debates….

So much for constitutional conservatives — CBP violates federalism, civil rights, and state laws as Republicans cheer.

Thomas Mills, Nov 21, 2025 [PoliticsNC]

Earlier this week, I wrote a piece about the Border Patrol’s invasion of the state, citing their assault and abduction of an American citizen in Charlotte. I concluded the piece asking, “Where are the lawyers?” Well, one attorney replied.

John Runkle sent me a letter he had written in July addressed to Governor Josh Stein and Attorney General Jeff Jackson. In it, he reminded them that Republicans passed a law banning masks in public with few exceptions. The Customs and Border Patrol agents in the state are brazenly defying it.

John writes, “It is clear to me that ICE agents wear a mask solely to hide their identities and operate through threatening tactics. On its face our Mask Law prevents these actions.”

The Republicans who passed that law should be outraged. People from outside of North Carolina are flaunting their disregard for the state’s laws and the GOP’s deeply held conviction that masks should not be worn in public. Republicans were so committed to that belief that they overrode then-Governor Roy Cooper’s veto. Now, they need to either demand that the law be respected and enforced or admit that it was a political stunt to satisfy their base that believed COVID was a hoax.

In addition to the masks, who thought wearing military-style camo gear is a good idea? These guys aren’t in the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of Vietnam. They’re in the Home Depot parking lot. They are supposed to be carrying out police actions, not military ones….

The south rises again

Trump, Border Patrol Retreat in Failure from Chicago

Garrett Graff, November 17, 2025 [Doomsday Scenario]

In the last few days, roving Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino decamped from Chicago, where his military-style raids have terrorized that community for weeks, for Charlotte, North Carolina — a somewhat inexplicable new target (more on that below) — and a move that underscores what has to be the growing conclusion of the now six-month-old campaign of “acting president” Stephen Miller to turbocharge immigration enforcement: It’s failing. Bigly.

The Border Patrol retreated from Chicago in defeat, not victory.

Writing about the Border Patrol a decade ago, I referred to it as a “fiercely independent agency—part police force, part occupying army, part frontier cavalry,” and watching Bovino’s tactics, I’ve come to believe the analogy has even more truth in the current moment.

Bovino is basically leading a rebel cavalry, a la Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who raided and terrorized communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the Civil War. That latter analogy holds up particularly well in one specific respect: Forrest became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. In many ways, in fact, Bovino’s shock troops have the most in common with the Klan “night rides” of the Reconstruction and Jim Crow era South, where hooded Klan members on horseback — often “respectable” leaders of the White community like the local sheriff — terrorized Black families and abused their civil rights. Bovino seems focused on becoming the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the Trump immigration era, complete with the blatant racism, illegal tactics, and ignominious losing place in history….

Here are five important conclusions we can better understand now, six months into the increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement efforts nationwide:

1. Trump and Bovino face diminishing half-lives.…

2. The politics aren’t working…. 

3. The data shows Trump’s lies — these aren’t the worst of the worst….

4. Most of the arrests are being rounded up in “Kavanaugh Stops.” ….

5. Operation CHARLOTTE’S WEB is horrid, ahistorical, and anti-American.…

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Open Thread

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On November 22, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

Larry Summers Being Awful Has Little to Do With Jeffrey Epstein

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On November 21, 2025

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After three decades of creating ruin and disaster across the globe, Larry Summers is finally being pushed from the lofty heights of power and prestige.

The proximate cause of his downfall are recently released emails between Summers and suicided arms dealer/sex trafficker/intelligence asset/money launderer Jeffrey Epstein.

The emails show the married, middle-aged Summers going to Epstein for advice on how best to manipulate a woman he claimed to be mentoring into a sexual relationship.

Summers comes off like a complete putz in the exchange:

Summers: We talked on the phone. Then “I can’t talk later”. Dint think I can talk tomorrow”. I said what are you up to. She said “I’m busy”. I said awfully coy u are. And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming” She said no his schedule changed after we changed our plans. I said ok I got to go call me when u feel like it. Tone was not of good feeling. I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.

Epstein: shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.

While it’s nice to finally see Summers pushed off the world stage (we hope!), Matt Stoller, Rudy Havenstein and others are pointing out that Summers’ loathsome exchange with Epstein is the least of his sins.

Surely it’s more important that Summers was “wrong on the big important stuff for most of his career” as Stoller put it than that he was a creep who looked to a monster for advice on attempted adultery.

Politico sums up Summers’ prodigious rise in politics, for which he abandoned his Harvard tenure:

Summers would never achieve the type of intellectual breakthroughs that his uncles had. Perhaps he was too attracted to — too distracted by — the more muscular life of political power and influence that he first experienced in 1981, when he went to Washington to work with Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. The year after winning the Clark medal, Summers headed to the capital again to work at the World Bank, then joined Lloyd Bentsen’s Treasury Department in the new Clinton administration.
…
(Summers) would become Robert Rubin’s deputy when Rubin took over from Bentsen in 1995. Their work together on the international debt crises of the 1990s made Summers famous; in February 1999, TIME magazine put him, Rubin and Fed chair Alan Greenspan on its cover, with the headline “The Committee to Save the World.” A few months later, Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury Secretary, serving until the end of the Clinton presidency.

Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:

…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.
…
As a rising economist at Harvard and at the World Bank, Summers argued for privatization and deregulation in many domains, including finance. Later, as deputy secretary of the treasury and then treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, he implemented those policies. Summers oversaw passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed Glass-Steagall, permitted the previously illegal merger that created Citigroup, and allowed further consolidation in the financial sector. He also successfully fought attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Clinton administration, to regulate the financial derivatives that would cause so much damage in the housing bubble and the 2008 economic crisis. He then oversaw passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which banned all regulation of derivatives, including exempting them from state antigambling laws.

Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:

When other economists began warning of abuses and systemic risk in the financial system deriving from the environment that Summers, Greenspan, and Rubin had created, Summers mocked and dismissed those warnings. In 2005, at the annual Jackson Hole, Wyo., conference of the world’s leading central bankers, the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Raghuram Rajan, presented a brilliant paper that constituted the first prominent warning of the coming crisis. Rajan pointed out that the structure of financial-sector compensation, in combination with complex financial products, gave bankers huge cash incentives to take risks with other people’s money, while imposing no penalties for any subsequent losses. Rajan warned that this bonus culture rewarded bankers for actions that could destroy their own institutions, or even the entire system, and that this could generate a “full-blown financial crisis” and a “catastrophic meltdown.”

When Rajan finished speaking, Summers rose up from the audience and attacked him, calling him a “Luddite,” dismissing his concerns, and warning that increased regulation would reduce the productivity of the financial sector.

But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:

after the 2008 financial crisis and its consequent recession, Summers was placed in charge of coordinating U.S. economic policy, deftly marginalizing others who challenged him. Under the stewardship of Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke, the Obama administration adopted policies as favorable toward the financial sector as those of the Clinton and Bush administrations—quite a feat. Never once has Summers publicly apologized or admitted any responsibility for causing the crisis.

Incredibly, before the release of his Epstein correspondence Summers had been playing a leading role in formulating the Center for American Progress’s Project 2029, intended to guide the policy for a potential Democratic administration to follow Trump 2.0.

The highest-profile think tank on the center-left, the Center for American Progress (CAP), has assigned several high-profile policy types to lead an effort that documents show was internally described as “Project 2029.”

According to two people with knowledge of the arrangement and a member of CAP, one of the leads on the economic policy plank for this project is Harvard professor and former Treasury secretary Larry Summers…

They also said that Summers was the final sign-off on a CAP housing policy paper set to be released next week.

Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people?

No matter how vast the conspiracies of Jeffrey Epstein, no matter how deeply tied he was to American and Israeli intelligence (and Drop Site News has proven Epstein was both), Larry Summers ruined vastly more lives, caused more death and suffering, and did more harm in his public roles as an economics advisor to two Democratic U.S. Presidents.

It’s also important to note that he started his political career working for the Republican Reagan administration and seamlessly transitioned to the Democratic Clinton and Obama administrations to complete the neoliberal economic transformation begun under Reagan.

Now that the U.S. economy is completely hollowed out and its days as a global hegemon are rapidly coming to a close, Summers is finally being pushed from his high seats at Harvard, Open AI, and the Center for American Progress.

Too bad it came at least 20 years too late.

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