Ian Welsh

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

Author: Ian Welsh Page 1 of 404

Liberal Party Wins Canadian Election

By

On April 28, 2025

Comments

Canadian Flag

Canadian Flag

Update: minority Liberal government which will require help from the NDP to survive non confidence motions. Hopefully the NDP will be smart and tough enough to hold out for electoral reform in exchange.

The left-center NDP is being slaughtered and seems likely to lose its official party status.

Five months ago I would have said, and did say, that the Conservatives would form the next government, with Poilievre (a Trump figure) as Prime Minister.

Fortunately, Trump truly is a Christ-like figure, and raised the Liberal party from the dead. Poilievre mishandled Trump’s threats, saying that Trump had a point and so on. Living in an right wing echo chamber he thought that Canadians aren’t patriotic, and most are. This was an unforced error. Ontario Premier Ford did the opposite: he ran against Trump, called a surprise election and won handily. I despise Ford, but he’s a smart politician. Poilievre, on the other hand, is just an attack dog, and a true believer in Trumpist style right wing politics.

This isn’t to say I like the Liberals or Carney. Carney has the dubious honor of haveing beeen in charge of Canada and Britain’s central bank, and is the only central banker to blow housing bubbles in two countries. As for the Liberals, they were a terrible government and the only good things they did were forced on them by the NDP, whose support they needed to stay in government.

Trudeau’s liberals let in record numbers of immigrants and the result was massive increases in rent and a smother of wage gains.

The mistake that Canadian Conservative voters made, which Trump saved Canada from, was the assumption that Poilievre would be better. He would have been far, far worse. There was even talk of creating a Canadian “DOGE.”

Canada, much like America, needs a proportional vote system, so that the two and a half party monopoly can be broken up and a Trump-like figure locked out of government unless they can achieve a genuine majority.

We’ll see how Carney does. Though I don’t like his record, he has said some very sensible things about re-industrialization in Canada, including proper vertical integration. There’s almost no mineral resource Canada doesn’t have, if we want we can easily re-industrialize. He’s also talked some sense about the housing market.

Whether he carries thru remains to be seen. He won’t be fantastically successful, he’s still a neoliberal and committed to policies like low taxes on the rich, but as neoliberals go, he may turn out not too bad.

Fingers crossed.

Update 1: Looking like Poilievre may lose his own riding. For context, Poilievre is an MP in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, where the largest employer is the Federal government. Poilievre said he would gut the civil service and even threatened to DOGE it. Truly in the running for stupidest politician in the world.

 

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

How Biz Profs Destroyed Free Markets

By

On April 28, 2025

Comments

Economics is largely a worthless discipline. Its axioms, like humans being rational utility maximizers, are simply wrong and everything built on top of them is thus flawed. It reminds me of pre-Copernican astronomy, which was based on the idea that the sun and planets revolved around the Earth. The difference is that pre-Copernican astronomy more or less worked and economics mostly doesn’t.

But there are insights in economics, and there’s a cluster around free, or rather, competitive markets. In order for competitive markets to work:

  1. There must be lots of buyers and sellers, so no one has pricing or buying power.
  2. There must be no significant barriers to entry. If you can’t start a new business doing whatever it is, market incumbents can jack up prices. Barriers to entry are both legal and technical: if there’s no availability of whatever is needed to make the product, that’s a barrier to entry.
  3. Products must be roughly the same. If one producer is able to produce much better products, then people will buy that. This means, in effect, that intellectual property laws must be open, or people won’t be able to produce roughly equal goods.
  4. Collusion in setting prices cannot be allowed, nor can special deals like larger buyers getting better prices. (A large supermarket which pays lower prices will drive smaller ones out of business till there are only a few major supermarket firms left.)

Now the problem with competitive markets, from the point of view of capitalists, is that they keep profits low. If you start jacking up your prices, your competitors will get the business, since the products are about the same and since other firms can easily enter the business.

Competitive markets lead to fast innovation and low prices, with any high profit periods due to innovation lasting only as long as it takes for others to reproduce the new product. If you want high profits over a long time period you have to keep innovating, you can’t make essentially the same product forever and expect to make more than average (low) profits.

But business hate competitive markets, exactly because they do make it almost impossible to make high profits over the long term.

So business profs and consultants read the economic literature and said “if we want to make high profits we have to find or create businesses which are not competitive.

Reverse engineering, high profits come to companies which are oligopolies or monopolies so they have pricing power; to companies in industries where there are significant barriers to entry, whether thru intellectual property laws or vertical integration; to companies that have a better product because no one else is allowed to make that product (pharma is great at this); and to businesses which collude on prices. Right now, for example, a lot of landlords subscribe to a software service which sets prices and even keeps rental properties off the market in order to keep rents high.

There are other tricks, of course. Health providers, in general, have an advantage. When someone’s seriously sick they can’t really comparison shop and they’re desperate, they’ll pay whatever they have to save their life or get well.

Another one is network externalities. If everyone’s on one site or a few, then other sites have a hard time competing. Think of Facebook’s suite of sites, or think of Google’s monopoly on search.

When Private Equity and investors who provide seed capital roll up firms or invest in new firms, they’re either looking to liquidate those they buy (PE likes this) or they’re trying to destroy a competitive market so they can charge much more than a competitive market would normally allow.

One of the things which has made China so dynamic is that it has much more competitive markets than America or Europe. There are dozens of EV firms, for example. Tons of drone makers. Multiple space companies. Absolutely massive supply networks where you can buy anything you need to make whatever it is, or get them to make anything new you’ve thought up. IP laws are weaker, and often not enforced, and so on. Where there is market power, the government often steps in either to regulate what firms can charge (in natural monopolies like power distribution, for example) or to prevent the use of that market power to freeze out competitors.

As the US and the West have financialized, they’ve destroyed most of the laws which were in place to keep markets competitive. Eggs, for example, are not high priced primarily because of Avian bird flu, but because there are only a few oligopoly suppliers in the market, and they’re making more money with shortages than they would by providing as many eggs as people really want to buy at lower prices. Those prices would still be profitable, but they would be obscenely high.

Almost all Western industries are now entrenched behind various barriers designed to give them pricing power: to allow them to charge more than they could in a competitive market.

So China, with competitive markets, produces EVs which cost under 20K in many cases. Everything they produce is cheaper than in the West. This isn’t all about barriers and non-competitive markets, but a lot of it is and most of what seems to not be about competitive markets, like needing to pay American workers more, really is. American workers need more money because of high rent, high health care costs, high tuition, high real estate prices and just, in general, high prices. When Chinese show Americans their grocery bills, Americans are startled and some even cry, they are so much cheaper.

So driving up prices deliberately makes US goods in particular, and Western goods in general non-competitive because it jacks up the cost structure.

Matt Stoller, of course, is the premier thinker and activist around this and his BIG column is worth reading regularly.

But the simple takeaway is that your life sucks and the West can’t compete because of non-competitive markets and the regulations which are bad are those which make it non-competitive: horrific IP laws, non enforcement of anti-trust, allowing huge mergers and so on.

If America and the West are ever to be competitive again, we must make markets competitive and where they can’t be, in natural monopolies like energy and water and so on, we must have regulations that directly control prices, as we did in the 50s and 60s, where utilities were basically guaranteed a 5% profit, and forced to reinvest in infrastructure (no California fires because PG&E would rather pay dividends then replace century old power lines and poles).

This isn’t really a hard problem, conceptually. We know how to create competitive markets, and regulate non-competitive markets. We’ve done it before. It is entirely a political issue, because incumbents with tons of money also have tons of political power.

But don’t let anyone spew nonsense like “it’s complicated” or suggest it’s an unsolvable problem, it isn’t.

 

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

The End of Anti-Semitism

By

On April 25, 2025

Comments

We live in a weird time: the accusation of anti-semitism has never been more common and the consequences have never been more severe, but the accusation has never been more likely to be a compliment.

In most cases today, if someone is accused of anti-semitism, they are being accused of being against genocide. Against the mass murder of ci civilians. Against children being deliberately shot in the head and against prisoners being raped to death

To be sure, real anti-semites exist, but if someone hasn’t been accused to anti-semitism, one knows they have no ethics and are either a wimp, unwilling to even say “genocide is bad” or an evil person who thinks genocide is good.

On the other hand the phrase “pro Israel” means “supporter of mass murder, the deliberate killing of children, and of raping people to death.” If someone describes themselves as pro-Israel they are evil, they have condemned themselves out of their own mouths and no decent person will have anything to do with unless coerced.

The irony, of course, is that by wrapping themselves in Judaism Israel has made the charge of anti-semitism bear no moral weight and has increased real anti-semitism, as many people no longer take the care to distinguish between Zionism and Judaism. This is unfair to the many Jews (almost all outside of Israel, Israel is in the running for sickest society in history) who have opposed Israel’s genocide.

If you ever asked yourself “what would I have done were I alive during the Holocaust and aware of it?”, well, the answer is “whatever you’re doing right now.”

Your soul has been weighed, and many should pray it does not fall under Ma’at’s gaze.

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

Trump Has Made It Impossible For America To Resist China

By

On April 24, 2025

Comments

Chinese and American flags flying together

For a long time I thought the new world order would be a perverse mirror of the Cold War: two blocs facing off, periphery war, minimal trade between them (There was some trade, mostly in commodities.) The difference this time would be that the US was leading the weaker block, not the stronger.

Trump has made this very unlikely. His tariffs and threats have broken the unanimity of the alliance and vassal circle. The EU is in China right now seeking to cut a trade deal with the possible of end of many sanctions on the table. Canada’s presumptive PM has said the old order is dead. When China cut off US LNG who stepped into the gap? Australia and Canada. Even Japan, the most loyal of vassals, has noted that you can’t make a deal with Trump, because blackmailers always come back for more.

With the EU, Japan, South Korea, and the Anglosphere, the US had a credible trade and military bloc. Without them, there’s no goddamn way. They don’t even have to go over to China’s bloc, they just have to be neutral.

And that’s the way this is tending, economically, with signs that military is to follow. The EU is attempting to remilitarize and it is trying to stay away from American weapons as much as possible. Canada is reconsidering both Aegis and F-35s. And so on. Without allies to buy its weapons, the US mil-industry complex will wither. If Japan isn’t considering getting its own nuclear deterrent, it would be geostrategic malfeasance.

Trump thought that the US was still the essential nation. That if it put the pressure on, everyone else had to buckle. But those days are gone, and Trump’s stupidity is not only going to cost the US its empire, its dollar privilege and inflated standard of living, it is costing the US even its leadership position.

This is likely a good thing for the world, overall, though lack of some sort of secondary great power able to resist China somewhat will have costs.

But Americans will regret it bitterly.

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

Fiscal Failure & The French Revolution

By

On April 23, 2025

Comments

(Post by Bruce Wilder, Elevated from the Comments)

The French Revolution is in many ways, it is the prime historical example of state failure related to fiscal failure (the inability to tax the rich in particular) leading to revolution (and post-revolution, to the unleashing of state capacity in Napoleonic empire building)

Ancien Régime France at the end of the 18th century had an underdeveloped financial sector, was overpopulated relative to its agricultural productivity, had lost a big chunk of its colonial empire and despite the theoretical advantages of its 17th century legacy of centralizing absolutism, was a litigious society of particularism, privilege, and resentment.

The crisis when it came found many fissures in the fiscal firmament of the state. The privileged often enjoyed exemptions from certain taxes, sometimes purchased with office by some ancestor. The collection of certain taxes was in private hands. At the time of the revolution, an extensive wall around Paris was being built by a consortium of private “tax farmers” expecting to grow rich on their role in colltecting such taxes. So, it wasn’t just that the rich and powerful avoided paying taxes, key figures were also skimming from the tax revenue collected.

The expedients of a fiat money and a central bank had been tainted fatally by John Law and the Mississippi Bubble. The Paris financial sector was entirely in the hands of Swiss and Dutch bankers and speculators. One of these, Necker, followed in the tradition of Colbert, and was quite popular in part because he created a system of State pawn shops, which relieved some of the inconvenience.

The political parallels and contrasts with the UK were stark. The UK had had its own South Sea Bubble at the same time as the Mississippi Bubble, but in the UK, the South Seas Company was folded into the Bank of England and the national debt was serviced ever after at a “risk-free” rate, a floor for other rates. The French Treasury paid rates to the Dutch and Swiss bankers that reflected the increasing risk of default. State finances in France were obscure. Necker would publish the first accounts in what historians now regard as a propaganda exercise. Once the French state was borrowing to meet its obligations to repay earlier loans, it almost didn’t matter how tax revenues were trending, because the debt began to compound and the servicing cost was escalating.

The UK had used its fiscal capacity and central bank to outspend France in a series of wars beginning at the end of the 17th century. There had been a pause, but the rivalry had resumed, culminating in the Seven Years’ War, with Britain subsidizing its continental ally, Prussia.

The inability of the UK to tax their 13 American colonies to finance the war debt caused the American Revolution before the French Revolution. And the example taught the French.

The UK had experienced an agricultural revolution of sorts in the late 17th and early 18th century as Adam Smith’s “improving landlords” began very fine calculations on the advantages of Jethro Tull’s inventions, turnips and forage in crop rotation and the profit from further enclosing the commons, a process underway since the Tudors. The gains in land and labor productivity were small but significant and fed a growing urban population. The population of England nearly doubled in the course of the 18th century.

France was not so fortunate. French agriculture was notoriously backward and resisted the promotional efforts of royal reformers and intendants. Feudal dues were collected in large areas by the church or impoverished nobles with no power to manage or improve the properties.

The nascent “business cycle” of 18th century France was an agrarian cycle of boom and famine: a good harvest could feed an expansion of mercantile and artisanal sectors. A famine would drive France into a business depression. The Physiocrats observed the pattern and made a theory out of it. And, from the Physiocrats came the liberalism of Turgot.

The same Dutch and Swiss bankers took liberalism and fashioned an argument for a laissez faire response to famine: let the price of grain be what the market will bear. Very appealing argument to grain speculators financed by Dutch and Swiss bankers.

Failing to control the price of bread or the distribution of grain stores had a profound effect on the course of the Revolution, motivating the common people of Paris to march and riot and so forth even as their betters debated the Rights of Man.

The Proximate Cause Of Revolutions Is Inability To Tax & The US Is Well Down The Road

By

On April 21, 2025

Comments

Top Tax Rates

—And thus, inability to run the state.

In the modern world this causes a great deal of confusion. I guarantee some MMT follower is gleefully planning a comment saying “a state’s ability to spend is not based on taxation.”

Technically true, practically false. A state which uses its own currency can always, in theory, print money.

But taxation is best understood more primaly than “the people send us money, we spend it.” Rather it is the amount of the economy which the government can control.

Every country has an economy. The economy is what the people of the nation actually do. Dig stuff up, refine stuff, grow stuff, manufacture, stuff, take money from idiots as consultants, waste everyone’s time with advertisements, destroy the digital commons, and so on.

Near adjacent to the economy is what it could do if we wanted it to, because we know how to do whatever it is and we can easily get the resources: so we could easily build more homes, for example, or train more doctors or nurses, or hire more Professors or build out more solar power and so on.

The final part of the economy is what you can get from other nations. Call this the external economy. Does someone else make it, will they sell it to you, can  you afford it? Most of the time countries won’t sell other countries nukes, for example, and for much of history countries tried not to sell other countries the knowledge required to make advanced techs. When they didn’t prevent this, they paid big time: Britain was de-facto subjugated by America and America is now losing its Empire.

This is why being the richest King in Africa in 1850, even if you had been richer than England, would have done you very little good. You could not buy what you needed: industry, and even if you could buy a few weapons and machines you couldn’t maintain and repair them.

Taxation is the ability to command the resources of other people. That is all it is.

Now, in the US and the West generally, since some point in the sixties, the state has been increasingly losing the ability to tax the rich. The rich insist on controlling more of the nation’s wealth and economic activity and every decade they have increased that control. Every time something is privatized, that’s the state losing power to tax—to control a piece of the economy. Every tax decrease on the rich is, obviously, a reduction in ability to tax the rich.

The amount of control the State has has been reduced, and amount of control the rich have has been increased. This is an effective loss of the ability to tax.

What is happening right now is that the US is losing the ability to tax the rest of the world. Dollar privilege was “we’ll take American money and make what Americans want for them.” It was the ability of America to direct other people’s economies to do what America wanted. The vast power this implies is mind-boggling.

It is that ability to control other nations’ economies which made the US an Empire, even if it directly militarily occupied few countries. It didn’t need to. It could still tell them what to do.

Since the US didn’t need to make and dig everything, it didn’t: it just made everyone else do that. This was, in many ways a bad idea, but it did mean that the US got the benefits of industry without a lot of the downsides.

So, since JFK and especially since Carter/Reagan, the US has been losing its ability to tax the rich. It has increasingly chosen to tax the rest of the world, moving industry, in particular, to other countries. Those countries made what the US needed, and sold it to them in US dollars, of which they were willing to accept nearly infinite amounts even though, in most cases, they didn’t need nearly as much from the US as the US did from them. (What they did need, in the early and middle years, was capital goods and knowledge, almost infinitely precious, though. Now with China leading in 80% of fields, well, not so much.)

Right now a huge tax cut for the rich is being paid for by cutting 800 billion from Medicaid, even as DOGE savagely cuts a federal civil service which has not grown in nominal numbers in sixty years, and thus has really already been contracting. State capacity is being savaged and services and jobs are being removed from the lower and middle classes.

Now let’s bring this back to the original topic: revolutions happen when states can’t command enough of the internal or external economy. It does not matter how much you can print or tax in nominal terms. In the Weimar Republic people would take a wheelbarrow full of cash to the store: all that matters is what you can actually command/buy with the money. For a long time the US dollar could buy pretty much anything.

But what happens when it doesn’t? What happens when you give it to cops and bureaucrats and soldiers and brown shirts like ICE and it doesn’t buy what they need, or even what they want?

You get what you pay for. This blog is free to read, but not to produce. If you enjoy the content, donate or subscribe.

Open Thread

By

On April 19, 2025

Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

(Guest Post) Where Do Racism and Hatred Come From?

By

On April 18, 2025

Comments

Guest post by Whip Randolph

 

[From the One Disease One Cure Newsletter]

Remember that old story “The Emperor’s New Clothes”?

A con man tricks an emperor into believing that he is dressed in beautiful, expensive clothing when, in fact, he is wearing nothing at all. Afraid to be called a fool by this very confident man, the emperor pretends that he really is wearing beautiful clothing, and his close officials go along with it. The emperor then goes out among the public stark naked, and the masses of people pretend to admire his fine clothing. Everybody maintains this pretense until a child blurts out that the emperor is stark naked.

Why would all the adults pretend to believe an obvious falsehood? When I first found this story as a child, it seemed silly! Eventually I learned that this story actually explains one of the major drivers of racism and hatred in the world, including major events happening in the news right now.

So what does The Emperor’s New Clothes have to teach about ignorance, racism, and hatred happening right now?

In this story, the emperor is the ruler, meaning he decides on the laws and how they’re enforced, and he can punish people who express beliefs that he doesn’t like. The people in this story know that, and know that it is safer to believe that he is beautifully addressed, or at least pretend. After all, acknowledging the truth could lead to imprisonment or worse.

It’s simply a common pattern in unhealthy cultures for authorities to punish people for saying uncomfortable truths, and I believe this pattern will continue until we can generate healthy cultures again.

Let’s look at some historical examples to see how this works.

In the US pre-Civil War south, slavery was assumed to be good for the slaves by all right-thinking people. Doctors even had a diagnosis called “Draepetomania” where any slave who tried to escape was believed to have a mental illness! Why would they believe such nonsense, even highly trained doctors, instead of simply recognizing the evils of slavery and acknowledging peoples’ healthy desire to escape?

The answer is simple: any white Americans who acknowledged the evils of slavery were heavily punished. In the slave states, people could be imprisoned for 10 years for having a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book that showed slavery in a sympathetic light. Draepetomania represents what I call a blind belief where people believe something because authorities make it the safe or convenient thing to believe, not because it’s true. In other words, it was safe for doctors to believe the runaway slaves had mental illnesses, and it was unsafe to see runaways as healthy and slavery as evil.

Likewise in the Soviet Union and China in the mid 20th century, the government and society were assumed to be great and getting better, so any activists were assumed to have mental illnesses as well. Many activists were arrested and accused of having mental disturbances and sent to prison hospitals where they were treated like the political prisoners they were. These activists were behaving legally and trying to serve their people, and authorities made up theories of mental illness as a cover story to justify imprisoning them.

In this social pattern, authorities punish people for speaking the truth, making it safe and socially acceptable to believe falsehoods. Unfortunately, this can also cause huge amounts of racism and hatred in a society, as people are encouraged to adopt racist or hateful attitudes, and those who don’t are punished.

The Ku Klux Klan was a campaign of paramilitary violence operated by wealthy ex-slaveowners in the US South after the US Civil War. Most Americans know that this violence was directed at black people to scare them into remaining second class citizens. But few know that this campaign also attacked any white people who sympathized with those black people!

In other words, whites who were racist were left alone or even rewarded. Any anti-racist white people risked rape, murder, having their house burned, or other atrocities. I believe this is a major driver of anti-black racism in the US South: authorities wanted that racism to avoid solidarity among poor white and black people, and for centuries they brutally punished any white people who tried to stand for what’s right. Many KKK members were sheriffs and politicians, so the law was part of the problem!

Similar stories abound from unhealthy cultures around the world — that is, societies where a few people rule over everyone else. Nazi Germans and Soviet citizens were each trained by their governments to hate the other side during World War II. Anyone who didn’t hate risked being called a sympathizer and traitor and going to jail. When these authorities wanted war, they propagated hatred among the populace and punished anyone who spoke the truth and refused to hate.

Why did so many Germans learn to hate Jewish people after World War I? Well, the German monarchy, business leaders, and generals had really screwed up and lost World War I. Knowing it was a foregone conclusion, they surrendered before the enemy had crossed into German territory. Unfortunately, they had lied to the German public, and the media contained propaganda which said they were winning the war until the moment they surrendered. Thus many Germans were really confused: why did they surrender if they were winning?

The political, military and business leaders wanted to avoid accountability for losing the war and spreading lies, so they propagated a “stab-in-the-back” narrative, blaming Jews, labor activists, liberals, and others for undermining the country from within.

A tragic number of Germans believed this nonsense, and it wasn’t an accident: propagating hate and ignorance towards Jews and activists and blaming them for Germany’s WWI defeat was a way for the ruling class to avoid accountability for losing the war and lying about it in the news. Tragically this was one step on the road to the Holocaust a few years later.

Racism, hatred, and ignorance can thus be widely propagated by authorities for a variety of reasons. It is confusing to discuss because authorities will punish someone for one secret reason, but publicly accuse them of something different. For example, a Nazi German peace activist may have tried to convince his neighbors that ending WWII would be better for the country, but he’d be arrested and accused of spreading Soviet propaganda and undermining the army. The activist was only trying to speak the truth or share a perspective in service of his people, but he was punished and accused of something different.

The more examples I found like this — where people are punished for acknowledging the truth, or punished for not being racist or hateful in ways that serve the needs of unaccountable ruling classes — the more I saw it play out right in front of me in the news.

Right now, the United States is supporting Israel in its genocide of the Palestinians. Israel has occupied Palestine for decades, keeping Palestinians under intense surveillance. The control was so tight that even many years ago the Israelis were literally counting the calories of food being allowed in to keep the Palestinians at starvation levels, continually a notch above famine.

The Israelis began the genocide in October 2023, with tremendous US support in the form of weapons, surveillance, fuel, political cover at the United Nations, and more. But just how bad has the violence been? Many news stories say that only 40-50,000 Palestinians have died — surely a tragedy, but not a genocide.

Before the present conflict started in October 2023, the Palestinian population was estimated at 2.2 million. When US President Trump took office, he stated the Palestinian population as around 1.7-1.8 million.[1] Other estimates confirm this, using normal techniques to estimate military+civilian casualties in war. So between October 2023 and February 2025, Israelis had killed ~400,000-500,000 people through military violence, famine, disease, and so on while extremely few Israelis have died.

How have the Israeli and American governments trained their population to tolerate and even support this genocide? You guessed it: spreading racist and hateful propaganda towards Palestinians, and punishing anyone who tried to speak the truth and stand up for what’s right.

Many government statements called the Palestinians subhumans deserving immense cruelty. For example, Israel’s defense minister Yoav Gallant said, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Israelis were trained to see Palestinians as a threat on par with Nazi Germany, rather than victims of a cruel occupation.

In Israel, a school girl expressed sympathy with the Palestinians, saying she hoped they could return to their homes soon. She was suspended from school as other students threatened to burn her house down and the Ministry of Education accused her of “incitement against IDF [Israeli] soldiers.”

In America, we see similar disturbances. Anyone who tries to acknowledge the truth about Israeli aggression towards Palestinians is accused of antisemitism. President Trump is deporting many people for attending what he calls “illegal” protests and accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism for allowing protests against the genocide. This is only an expansion of the policy that his predecessor president Biden started.

And it’s not just the government that tries to scare protesters away from acknowledging the truth: many business leaders are trying to scare people into submission too. One businessman, Kevin O’Leary, went on television and said all activists were being monitored with AI-enabled cameras, and their protesting would be recordered and show up in background checks, and they would never be hired again! In fact, North Carolina outlawed wearing face masks outside just to make this possible.

Just like American slave owners scared poor and middle class white people into hating black people or remaining silent so they wouldn’t oppose slavery, modern day political and corporate leaders are trying to scare us into submission so we won’t oppose their genocide.

Why are Israeli and American government and corporate leaders supporting this genocide? People can only speculate: is it part of a plan for creating a major new west-Asian trade route through Israel? Accessing gas deposits off the Gaza coast? Developing beachfront real estate? All the above, or something else? When unaccountable leaders refuse to speak the truth, it can be difficult to know why they behave as they do.

So let’s take stock: the protests are legal, and the Israeli genocide against Palestine is real, and it’s not antisemitic to point these things out. But a strong coalition of American and Israeli business and political leaders have decided to support this genocide, and they’re punishing people for standing for what’s right by accusing them of antisemitism and using this as a cover story to justify punishing them.

This shows how ancient patterns of nations with rulers (or ruling classes) are playing out again all around us. America may not have a king, but anytime one person or a group can impose law on the rest, and choose how that law is enforced, you wind up with the same kind of tyrrany. This is predictable in any society where people are punished for upholding their own law (because that’s supposedly the police’s job, but of course they have to just follow orders). Ancient Rome, Germany, the Soviet Union, Israel, Canada, communist China, the capitalist United States — all of them have shown this pattern where authorities punish truth-tellers and propagate racism and hatred when it suits them. All these countries are actually dictatorships: cultures where some people dictate the law to everyone else, and everyone else is expected to just accept it.

These stories of selfish rulers contrast vividly with countless of stories of generous servant-leaders of healthy cultures. The Haudenosaunee describe how, when they were able to live in a fully traditional way until the early 1800s, their spiritual leaders were their political leaders, and to become a spiritual leader a person had to give away huge amounts of material goods. In other words, their leaders were the most generous.

Martin Prechtel described a similar pattern with the Tzutujil Mayans of central America. Leaders were expected to never campaign for office — it was up to others to see who should be leader and lift them up, due to their generous service. And each time a leader reached a new level in their hierarchy, they were expected to give away more and more goods, returning to total poverty so that they would be on the same level as the rest of the society. Like the Haudenosaunee, they chose the most generous leaders, the ones most willing to act in service of their people. They maintained this way of life until about 1990, when the Guatamalan military inflicted tremendous violence with American backing.

These stories seemed amazing when I first found them, but they are actually quite normal in societies that maintain a baseline of mutual respect as normal way of life, where everyone stands for what’s right as a normal way of life.

In these kinds of societies, I don’t see racism or hatred. So many problems, including racism, hatred, sexism, pollution, poverty in the midst of abundance, corruption, greed, child abuse, and more are symptoms of the root cultural disease where a few people rule over the rest. Any culture with this disease will show these symptoms, each in its own way. And I believe a single cure could end all these terrible troubles: creating cultures where everyone stands for what’s right, and no one rules over anyone else.

This is the theme of my free book One Disease One Cure. It explores examples of 69 different healthy cultures, including many alive today and others in the recent past, who maintain a baseline of mutual respect internally. They show that humans can live without racism or sexism or hatred. We can live without corruption and greed, with leaders that serve the people instead of selfishly serving themselves. Nations like the Ashaninka, Yequana, Haudenosaunee, Zapatista, Mbuti, traditional Cherokee and Nootka, and many others show that these terrible things are not inevitable. But so long as we remain in unhealthy cultures, with unaccountable rulers who behave extremely selfishly and punish anybody who stands for what’s right, all these terrible troubles will continue.

I will end on a positive note: the nations that make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy have maintained their healthy culture for over 900 years till the present day, and they did this after experiencing a period of intense warfare 1,000 years ago. The Zapatistas are a collection of many different indigenous cultures in southern North America that experienced oppression for five centuries until 1994, when they rose up in resistance. They didn’t just install a new ruling class, but actually generated a new, sovereign healthy culture where the leaders serve the people, and everyone is expected to stand for what’s right. As but one example of the deep transformation, interviews with many Zapatista women attest to a dramatic decline in sexism.

These stories showed me that we’re not doomed to having unaccountable rulers. It’s possible to have deep change. But in order to do that, we must recognize the root cultural disease, and find a way to cure it: by creating cultures where everyone stands for what’s right, and nobody rules over anybody else.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-gaza-population-relocation-1.7457559

(The book contains citations for all this material, except Trump’s Palestinian population estimate which occurred after publication)

Page 1 of 404

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén