Ian Welsh

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

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Information Overlord: It’s Ari Emanuel’s World and We Just Watch Skydance In It

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On October 9, 2026

11 Comments

Nat Wilson Turner Information Overlord: Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

What I Released This Week

From me as Nate Wilcox at the Let It Roll Podcast

From me as Nate Wilcox — The MMA Draw & the Mad Squabbles Show

UFC Boss Brags About Backstabbing Vince McMahon — The Mad Squabbles Show (YouTube), 7 Oct.

What I’ve Been Reading and Watching

AI Bubble

  • A.I. Groups Are Spending Millions to Influence the Midterms — New York Times. “A New York Times analysis of federal campaign finance data shows that the political groups aligned with the two leading A.I. developers, OpenAI and Anthropic, have quietly but decisively intervened in key 2026 races, spending on campaign advertising and outreach to voters to the tune of $55.7 million.
    “So far, the spending has been concentrated almost entirely in the primaries. The two groups have spent $52.6 million on safe seats — those that are unlikely to change party hands but that often feature intense intraparty contests. The big A.I. players have also spent more heavily for Democrats than Republicans. They have boosted candidates who align with their agendas, helped defeat those they see as hostile to it and ingratiated themselves with front-runners who are likely to be in positions of power in the next Congress to make decisions critical to their bottom lines.
    “But with voters quickly souring on their industry — including demanding that lawmakers do more to regulate A.I. and halt or mitigate the proliferation of data centers — they have taken pains to obscure their involvement. With few exceptions, they have intervened without ever explicitly mentioning A.I. or data centers in the TV and digital ads they have purchased.”
  • The Empty Brain — Aeon. Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer.
  • Timnit Gebru Believes There Is No ‘Existential Threat’ From AI — Wired. One of AI’s fiercest critics believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity.
  • Are Big Tech bonds crowding out the US Treasury? — Financial Times.

  • The AI Cloud Oligopoly — Michael Burry. “I have recently considered that the tech giants, but for Apple, are spending as if their lives depended on it when their lives clearly do not.
    “Monopolies almost by definition need not spend wildly as if their lives depended on it.
    “This deserved no small further contemplation, although rather quickly it dawned on me that they expect this just to be another monopoly rent they collect, that they collectively have the expectation the government will tolerate their oligopoly on AI.
    “Nay, will tolerate and fear it.
    “So the evil gambit is to create and to allow this AI to grow on their machines, where they will threaten to control both economic and political forces greater than humanity has ever seen, overwhelming any politician’s, or politicians’, might.
    “Why are OpenAI and Anthropic and Oracle also spending so much? Surely they are not monopolies?!?
    “No, but they intend to be part of the oligopoly. None can imagine breaking the dominance of a Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta within each silo.
    “However, there is clearly an opportunity to join in that dominance under cover of a new paradigm. The power and riches expected by these companies are evidently so great that even Larry Ellison was seduced to bet his company on it.
    “This brings new meaning to technocracy, and whether such is what we face. What is really scary is that other than the grab for market power, all this spending does not have a defined goal or economic end-point. As such, the consequences are likely unknowable to all. Yet they do it anyway.
    “The governments most interested in this technology seem to be the autocratic ones and the United States. A good set-up for a lot of drama, if not terror.”

Ellison Empire

  • Looking at the Ugly Side of the Paramount-Skydance Merger…And How I’d Fix It — The Entertainment Strategy Guy. “More than one person sent me a note speculating that the big problem with Paramount Skydance buying Warner Bros. Discovery is the “Warner Bros.” portion of the deal. In fact, that’s a take I read a lot about Warner Bros., ever since they caught Netflix’s, and then Paramount-Skydance’s, eye. In short, multiple companies (Time, AOL, AT&T, Discovery) have bought and then regretted buying Warner Bros.
    “if you want to add a traditional Hollywood studio to your portfolio (be it a magazine publisher, internet service provider, cellular phone company, linear cable bundle or rival movie studio), you have to convince the owners to sell.
    “And that usually means overpaying. The opposing executive team has to want to sell, and then they have to clear it with their shareholders. Overpaying accomplishes this. (This is a variant of the winner’s curse in auctions.)
    “So that’s the price of the deal. And usually it shows up on balance sheets as…
    “Debt.
    “Indeed, the history of Warner Bros. buyers is folks taking on wayyyyyy too much debt to buy the company. Servicing that debt cripples the new combined enterprise. And they can’t invest in new opportunities. And often they make bad decisions to help pay off that debt. Eventually, this impacts the stock price, so they sell. Then the cycle with Warner Bros. starts again!”
  • What David Ellison’s Latest Moves Say About How He’ll Lead Now — Wall Street Journal.
  • A High-Stakes Gambit Clinched Paramount’s Warner Deal — Wall Street Journal.
    • Ellison waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign, people familiar with the matter said.He crisscrossed the country courting politicians, hired well-connected operatives and lobbyists to work regulators and lawmakers, cultivated allies among Republicans and Democrats and, in a pivotal move, even threatened to move his empire out of California.California Gov. Gavin Newsom publicly called on the two sides to settle the matter, and privately encouraged the attorney general to go to the table. Ellison met with Newsom on more than one occasion, the people familiar with the matter said.
      …
      Next, Ellison had to get the deal through regulators here and abroad.That task fell primarily to chief legal officer Makan Delrahim, one of Ellison’s first hires after acquiring Paramount. Ellison set up a war room on the Paramount lot where he, Delrahim and one or two other executives would meet daily to map out strategy and measure progress, said one of the people familiar with the matter.A former Trump administration antitrust chief, Delrahim was intimately familiar with Warner. As head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, he led the government’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to block AT&T’s acquisition of what was then called Time Warner, in 2018.

      One of Delrahim’s first moves was to tap Jon Leibowitz, who chaired the Federal Trade Commission under President Barack Obama, as an outside antitrust adviser.

      Getting approval from the Justice Department came with relative ease, as did approvals from the European Union, United Kingdom, China and other regions.

      But a hurdle emerged when California’s Bonta, joined by 11 other states, including New York, Connecticut and Colorado, sued to block the merger on antitrust grounds. The states alleged the deal would illegally consolidate markets including those for theatrical films and basic cable channels.
      …
      Meanwhile, Ellison and his team began making their case to Newsom and warned that Paramount would pack up and move to another state if the deal was blocked. The company spoke to officials in Tennessee about a potential move, The Wall Street Journal reported.

      While Bonta categorized those threats as bluster and blackmail, people close to Ellison said they were genuine. That message was conveyed to Newsom, the people familiar with the matter said.

      In early August, Ellison tapped former California Assembly Speaker and Democratic power broker Fabian Núñez to help build political support for the deal in Sacramento.

      Núñez, founder of the consulting firm Actum, met frequently with Bonta’s office in an effort to broker peace. Ellison also enlisted Democratic former California Sen. Barbara Boxer and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to help, both of whom are partners with Actum, people familiar with the matter said.

  • Ari Emanuel Tours His Book and Hollywood Yawns: ‘No One Gave a F—k’ — The Wrap.
    Hollywood didn’t bother to show up. A few rows up front were reserved for Emanuel’s friends and VIPs which consisted of some family members, his close pal, director Pete Berg, and some agents, according to one person who sat nearby. The green room had a small selection of friends, no more than 20, circulating afterward. The audience was made up of “civilians,” as one person put it, rather than the insider VIPs that Emanuel, as one of Hollywood’s most powerful players, should command.Just as well, though, because apparently Emanuel was really boring. He did not hold forth on the accumulated wisdom of his 40 years in the industry: building an agency, taking over a legacy rival, buying companies like the UFC and WWE for billions of dollars, pushing hard into live sports and going public and then private again.Instead, he fell back on his grievances with his previous longtime partner Patrick Whitesell, who he swears he will never talk to again; complained about Jeffrey Katzenberg and President Joe Biden; and parried Swisher’s probing about his friendship with Elon Musk. By all accounts, it didn’t land with an audience that wasn’t interested in these personal scores.
  • Paramount Stock CRUSHED After Merger with Warner Discovery Closes — Big by Matt Stoller.
    The transition is not promising. Consider the two things that David Ellison did after buying Warner Discovery. He organized mass layoffs, and he gave himself and his entire executive team a big raise. Specifically, Ellison awarded himself a $150 million bonus upon closing the purchase, even though he doesn’t need the money, and has accomplished absolutely nothing except saddling two historic movie studios with $80 billion in debt.His legal consigliere, Makan Delrahim, received $25 million, and his operating officer Andrew Brandon-Gordon got $38 million. To do the layoffs, he hired Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, and paid him $46.5 million. That’s all on top of the massive $550 million payout to former Warner CEO David Zaslav, which was negotiated as part of the deal.Amid that backdrop of endless zeros for executives, the layoffs will be significant, and Kreiz and Ellison sent a memo on the “difficult decisions” ahead. That’s a crushing blow to morale, since it says very explicitly, “we’re not all in it together.” Every employee at Skydance has essentially been told to act like a mercenary and to extract as much as he or she can while he or she can.

UAE

  • Khaldoon Al Mubarak is the man trying to pull City back from brink of football oblivion — The Telegraph. The Telegram fluffs Khaldoon. “It was November last year and City had just been beaten 2-0 at home by Bayer Leverkusen in the Champions League after Guardiola, as needlessly as inexplicably, made 10 changes to the team.
    “Al Mubarak was furious and expressed as much privately to Ferran Soriano, the City chief executive. “I can’t speak to him [Guardiola],” he said. “Honestly, I didn’t speak to him yesterday and didn’t message him and I can’t speak to him today I’m so angry. He’s put a mix in this that’s so unnecessary.”
    “But it was what Al Mubarak said next that cut to the heart of how one of the most powerful, influential and recognisable non-royals in Abu Dhabi likes to conduct himself.
    ““Let’s let this pass then we’ll talk about it in the right way with a constructive approach,” he said.
    “Perhaps it should be little surprise that a skilled business leader and government policymaker who has played crucial roles in brokering nuclear non-proliferation deals and long straddled the worlds of global finance and international diplomacy was not going to let his heart rule his head and overreact.
    “After all, you do not become the planet’s longest-serving head of a sovereign wealth fund and a key strategist by being a hot head prone to wading in with both feet when something irks you, even in a sport as emotive as football.”
  • A Soccer Cheating Scandal Has Ballooned Into a Geopolitical Problem for Britain — Wall Street Journal. The UK finds that selling your most beloved cultural institution to an amoral family fiefdom comes with strings. “The acquisition of Manchester City by an Abu Dhabi royal was always much more than a billionaire buying himself a shiny foreign toy.
    “From the very start, the project was the tip of a soft-power campaign to entrench the tiny Emirate deep in the British economy.
    “Now, 18 years later, it has emerged that the club was at the heart of the largest cheating scheme in English soccer history. And as City, which denies any wrongdoing, awaits an unprecedented penalty for financial doping, the scandal has rippled all the way to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
    “The predicament is especially awkward for Burnham, who built much of his political appeal on his everyman soccer-fan image, but now finds himself caught between a major investor in the U.K. economy and defending the integrity of the Premier League, Britain’s most popular cultural export since the Beatles.
    ““This does need to be done carefully without everybody jumping in and providing their conclusions,” said Burnham, who in his previous job as mayor of Manchester lobbied against punishing his beloved Everton for similar, smaller-scale infractions.
    “The U.K. has spent much of the past decade wooing the U.A.E. to invest in the country in an attempt to kick-start its slow-growing economy. A Sovereign Investment Partnership between the two counties, announced in 2021, initially targeting £10 billion over five years, has already seen nearly £30 billion committed across more than 50 direct investments.”
  • The chairman of scandal-hit Man City has worked with Trump and Macron as part of the UAE elite — AP. The UAE connects Trump, the Ellisons, Ari Emanuel’s TKO empire, and the UK in a web of corrupt dealings. “Khaldoon Al Mubarak, chairman of the scandal-plagued Manchester City soccer club, sat with Donald Trump in Davos this year, signing on to the U.S. president’s Board of Peace on behalf of the United Arab Emirates government.
    “He was with French President Emmanuel Macron at the Palace of Versailles in June at a signing ceremony for a business summit.
    “Al Mubarak, 50, also is a UAE special envoy to China, and welcomed Xi Jinping to the club when the Chinese leader visited England in 2015.
    “Why the head of an English soccer club — albeit one of the wealthiest, most successful and now highly controversial — should be a key player at such political events is easily explained.
    “Al Mubarak, the public face of the 2023 Champions League winner now embroiled in one of soccer’s biggest scandals, is a member of the ruling elite in Abu Dhabi — part of the United Arab Emirates — and the head of a $385 billion sovereign wealth fund.”

UK PM Andy Burnham on Man City — @BBCSport. “‘I haven’t downplayed the seriousness of the findings.’
“Andy Burnham has addressed concerns that he devalued the verdict against Man City after the club were found guilty of Premier League financial rule breaches.”

Israel

  • Nothing has changed, and everything is changing — Alon Mizrahi. “…since October 7, I avoided Israel as much as I could. And it hadn’t felt like my place and my home for a while before that. This didn’t begin on October 7. Nothing began on October 7. But since October 7,
    “as I had a very early realization that this was a fateful event and life was not going to return to normal. And even more than that, and I shared this a couple of times, I had a very strong feeling that this was the beginning of the end of Israel
    “and I needed to be somewhere else and I want my family to be somewhere else. And I did that. To make a long story short, I spent some time in Israel this year and also very recently. And this gave me a chance to look at Israel, to see Israeli society, to hear Israelis, to look at Israeli media.
    “It’s not the same when you’re in and when you’re out. It’s not the same. It feels different. And since I really love to observe people and societies, this is one of my favorite things in the world to do, really. I took the opportunity to look and see. Not that I was expecting any surprises.
    “I mean, this is Israel. After all, I grew up in it. I know it so well. It’s a society. It’s a… It is a political creation that doesn’t change. The discourse, the narratives, the beliefs, the talking points, everything is on endless repeat. Nothing ever changes and this is really a very clear sign of a manufactured identity.
    “If you always say the same things and think the same things and react the same way and repeat the same talking points, no matter what happens in reality, it means that your very sense of self and reality and where you come from is false. Because in real life, you react differently to different things.”

Trump Regime

  • The Speech That Gets You Banned From America — Ken Klippenstein. “Secretary of State Marco Rubio has formally decided to bar some on the political “left” from visiting America, according to a diplomatic cable he sent to embassies this week.
    “When I obtained a copy of the internal cable banning those in vaguely “aligned groups” of “far-left terrorists,” I couldn’t help but laugh at the timing. The next day, Rubio was in Greece where, with the Acropolis behind him, he celebrated “free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind.””
  • ‘Honey Please’: Kimberly Guilfoyle Pushed Donor to Wire $100,000 to Her Amex Account — Wall Street Journal.

Democrats

  • Democrats Have a Bill Maher Problem — The Nation. “Establishment Democrats obsessing over Hasan Piker’s every move seem to have no issue talking to Maher, despite his decades of open bigotry.”

Yemen

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Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years: Ukraine Part 4

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On September 30, 2026

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I’m back again to bury the Biden legacy.

Once again, I have to remind readers why I’m bothering with this when the Corrupt Dotard Donald Trump is in full-on florid psychosis and threatening to annihilate Iran while breaking all records for Presidential corruption.

Since Trump sucks so bad (and yes, I’d say he’s even worse than Biden, and there IS a difference between the kinds of administrations we get with the different parties), why bother with ol’ Plagiarism Joe?

The reason is simple.

Until Americans, particularly Democrats, reckon with just how disastrous the last three Democratic presidential administrations have been (yes, America’s neocon foreign policy starts with Bill Clinton blowing up Yugoslavia and turning NATO into an offensive alliance and has continued to warmonger ever since, regardless of which party was in power), we’ll keep getting stuck with more of the same “not quite as bad as the Republicans” bullshit; we will only continue hurtling toward the undeniable end of the American Republic.

There is currently a well-funded counter-revolution occurring in the Democratic Party in which centrist Dems and the MSM are aligning to destroy anti-genocide, anti-war candidates like Graham Platner in Maine (got him) and replacing them with consultant-pliable candidates who are willing to disappear their progressive bona fides, take pro-genocide money, stop talking like a local, and do embarrassing crap on social media.

If Dem voters don’t belatedly realize that their party establishment leadership is as corrupt as the GOP and actively push to purge them, we will not be able to vote our way out.

Never forget the Iron Law of Oligarchy.

So let’s get back to the Delaware groper’s (and credibly accused rapist) abysmal record as US President.

In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.

In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.

Part 3 finished out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.

This is the penultimate post in the series and will cover Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine throughout 2021.

I’ll come back to Trump’s term because the Donald laid the groundwork for Biden to entrap Putin into a costly and very bloody war in Ukraine, but I’m going to go ahead and rant about what Biden did in 2020 and 2021 that has cost so many Ukrainian and Russian lives.

Tough Talking Senior Citizen Made No Secret of His Plans

I’d written off Biden’s chances of winning the presidency throughout the early 2020 campaign season right up until Barack Obama and the utterly compromised and corrupt South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn conspired to rig the primaries (with the help of all the “moderate” candidates who dropped out en masse to help and Elizabeth Warren who stayed in despite having no chance of winning to hurt Bernie Sanders), only to be enraged and horrified by the 2020 campaign and the dreadful choice between more Trump and obviously senile and incredibly bellicose Joe Biden.

Biden made talking mad shit about Russia a centerpiece of his 2020 Presidential campaign (such as it was) from his January 2020 Foreign Affairs piece:

We must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms…To counter Russian aggression, we must keep the alliance’s military capabilities sharp.

To his Sept 2020 Town Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania:

I believe Russia is an opponent. I really do. But I assure you, they will pay a price.

To his Oct 2020 60 Minutes interview:

…the biggest threat to America right now in terms of breaking up our– our security and our alliances is Russia.

President Joe Was All Brinksmanship All the Time

Joe Biden entered office dead set on fanning the flames of war in Ukraine. Like all neo-cons, Biden’s contempt for Russia knows no bounds, and there’s no evidence he’s ever lost sleep at the thought of the devastation his actions have wrought on Ukraine.

President Joe wasted no time in turning up the heat on Putin, from his February 4 speech to Victoria Nuland’s State Department:

…the days of the United States rolling over in the face of Russia’s aggressive actions… are over.  We will not hesitate to raise the cost on Russia.

To his March 2021 interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:

You think he’s a killer? Uh-huh. I do. He will pay a price.

Putin’s reply was typically savage, for a playground:

…whatever you call me is what you are called yourself. I wish him good health.

Biden happily reiterated his support for George W. Bush’s aggressive policy of expanding NATO to include Ukraine at the June, 2021 NATO Brussels Summit.

And in July 2021, Biden revealed he completely underestimated Russia and had no concept of what an industrial autarky can do in wartime, saying, “(Putin’s) sitting on top of an economy that has nuclear weapons and oil wells and nothing else.”

Don’t forget this policy was considered so aggressive at the time that it caused Bush’s Ambassador to Russia (and Biden’s CIA chief) Bill Burns to fire off the infamous Nyet Means Nyet Memo, and inspired Angela Merkel to write in her 2024 memoir that it was a “battle cry” aimed at Putin.

But that meant nothing to our big talking Joe, who told the DC press corps on December 3, 2021 that “I won’t accept anybody’s red line.”

I spent the whole year of 2021 freaking out about the potential of war in Europe even though no one I knew in real life or online seemed to care.

Gaslit to the Point of Panic

I’d been terrified about NATO expansion since I realized we’d admitted Albania and the Baltic States into the alliance at some point late in the Bush administration.

I was alarmed but not surprised when war immediately broke out between Russia and Georgia, but I was relieved when the American electorate reacted with utter bafflement to John McCain’s claim that “Today, we’re all Georgians” and threatened war with Russia on the campaign trail.

Little did I know that the insane warmonger John “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” McCain would become a lodestone and role model to mainstream Democrats by the end of the 2010s.

It was reassuring when Obama laughed off Mitt Romney’s claim that Russia was “without question our #1 geopolitical foe” in 2012 by saying “the 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back.”

But after the Clinton campaign blamed Russia for losing the 2016 election to Trump and the liberal corporate media went into a frenzy over RussiaGate, there were no more reassuring laughs to be had.

Friends, family, work colleagues all turned into blood-thirsty warmongers who saw Putin as the villain of villains, solely responsible for the Trump presidency, and were not shy in calling me a “Trump enabler” and worse for being profoundly opposed to any kind of military conflict with nuclear-armed Russia and the deadly serious and quite competent Vladimir Putin.

Only the excellent Congressional Dish podcast by the brilliant and incredibly thorough Jennifer Briney provided some well-sourced reinforcement of my sanity with its December 2021 episode “Keeping Ukraine.”

So I spent all of 2021 in isolated terror at what I saw as Biden’s relentless efforts to provoke Putin and Russia, using Ukraine as his bludgeon.

As worried as I was, I could never have imagined the full-bore information war that would overwhelm the West in 2022.

We’ll get to that next time, but before I wrap, I need to go back to Trump, for completeness’ sake.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Despite Obama giving Biden, McCain, Nuland, and company a free hand to stir shit in Ukraine in his term, he refused to provide aid to the Ukrainian military, recognizing that Russia would always have “escalatory dominance” in the region.

Trump, perhaps stung by the Clinton campaign’s trumped-up (no pun intended, I lie) RussiaGate bullshit, handed his Ukraine policy over to neo-cons Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and had a much more aggressive policy posture than Obama had allowed.

Trump Arms Ukraine

Trump Gets Himself Impeached

The Democratic Congressional Majority had a principled opposition to charging Trump with violating the Emoluments Clause, despite the many open bribes he’d taken from foreign countries, but his clumsy 2019 efforts to get Zelensky to incriminate the crooked Biden family with naughty doings in time to impact the 2020 election brought the hammer down.

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Conditions for Revolutionary Change In The West: Fiscal

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On September 24, 2026

18 Comments

The traditional revolutionary change requirements are:

  1. An inability to pay military, police and functionaries.
  2. A split in the elite.
  3. Popular revolt.

As a rule, all three are necessary.

In the Russian revolution, the military was noticeably absent, or in the case of the Navy, actually revolted. Near the end, with the old government in the Winter Palace and protestors outside, the cadets being used as guards refused to fight, the Cossacks which the government expected to come rescue them never showed up, and navy sailors helped organize the crowds outside and storm the Palace.

There’s a lot of confusion around this issue, and a fair bit of comes from the idea that money doesn’t matter, because you can always print more.

Sure.

How’d that work for the Weimar Republic?

The bottom line is that money is only good for buying what exists or what is close to existing.

What we’ve been seeing for about 60 years now is:

  1. price increases higher than wage increases.
  2. Deindustrialization.

This means the West is making less of what its own populations need, and the populations can afford less of what does exist. Internal capacity is collapsing. (Ignore CPI, it’s not just a lie, it’s a damned lie. Expenses have risen far faster than it suggests.)

The solution to this, such as it was, was to trade: buy what is needed from other countries. The West was almost the sole supplier of goods that other countries wanted: planes, cars, advanced electronics, weapons and so on. For a while the USSR was an alternative, but as time went by that alternative became less and less viable, until the collapse of the USSR, at which point the West was pretty much the only game in town.

But Western elites were drinking their own kool-aid. They wanted reduced wages and environmental protection costs, so they decided to move production overseas, especially to China. Now China can make almost everything that any country might want: they don’t have to buy from America, and as the technical ability to avoid the dollar payment system increases, that means they don’t need the West.

Recently, what we’ve seen is a reduction in Western coercive ability. Not a complete loss of it (yet), as Venezuela and Cuba and Greenland show, but a serious loss in power. In fact the pivot to coercing weak nearby states and vassals is due to the weakness: the US can’t win far from its territory, but it’s still scary to Latin America and Europe.

This isn’t just about the US though, France had its own sphere of African interests, with military bases throughout multiple ex-colonies. It essentially ran multiple countries. Almost all of them have now run the French out. The French nuclear system, for example, used heavily discounted uranium from African vassals.

Trump seized Venezuela’s oil and has locked down Greenland’s resources, but he’s lost the Middle East. (Yes the war continue. Yes the US has lost and the American Middle Eastern Raj is dying and will not be saved.) Africa would far rather do business with China.

So would Latin America, but American military might, “NGOs”, diplomats and intelligence services have so far mostly been able to keep Latin America in the American sphere. So far. As the ability to use naval forces to project forces declines (and it is and will) this will end, though the process may take a couple decades and a lot of pain.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that the US is becoming much more poor and will continue to do so. Its coercive abilities are low, it has lost Africa and is losing the Middle East. Even Asian countries which have disputes with China (Vietnam, for example) are integrating with China’s economy.

Can’t make it. Can’t force as many countries to sell to the US for cheap. Has much less to sell to the world that it wants at a reasonable price, since China sells all the same things for less.

At this point the system’s only remaining pillar is dollar privilege. Everything is bought and sold in dollars, the US can print dollars, and the US can thus keep buying what it needs.

Except when it can’t, as with rare earths, industrial magnets, and other resources and goods China has decided to stop selling to America, which it can’t make itself and for which there is no adequate alternative supply. These goods, by the way, are necessary for American weapons, and without them the US military will keep becoming weaker and unable to rebuild its arsenal. (On the other hand, Russia and Iran and North Korea all get as much of these goods from China as they need.)

And dollar privilege is ending. Oh it goes back and forth, the US is fighting tooth and nail to keep it going, but the trend is clear. Abuse of sanctions, in particular, has made it clear to everyone outside the West, and even to some inside the West, that being in the dollar system: settling trades in dollars, is a huge vulnerability.

I assume the picture is clear: America can’t make as much, can’t force other countries to sell for cheap, has less to trade that can’t be bought for less somewhere else, and soon won’t just be able to print dollars and buy it anyway.

This brings us back to the enforcer class. Police in America are paid VERY well.

With overtime it’s not unusual for police salaries to hit the mid hundred thousands.

Cops are, generally, pretty well paid.

The military is less so, with salaries in the mid 30K range being common for non-NCO enlisted members.

Cops are well paid because they enforce the laws.

“Duh,” you say, but the point I’m making is that they break strikes, intimidate protesters, enforce property laws and steal more money from people than burglars do–but not from elites. Laws are set up to favor elites and cops are how laws that are unfair are enforced.

They’re frontline against the possibility of change. During the American revolution, those unhappy with officials would gather in large groups and go “have a talk” with their representatives. That sort of thing is basically impossible now.

It should be obvious why it’s necessary for the enforcer class: military and cops, to break from the elites for a revolution to succeed. They don’t all have to, but either you need some on the side of the new order, or you need them to refuse to do their jobs: as was the case with the Cossacks in the Russian Revolution.

A lot of people think that the first requirement of revolution: being unable to pay cops, military and functionaries (someone does need to keep things running) is impossible now in the US.

They’re right.

Now

But as the US becomes poorer and as prices continue to rise faster than wages, even police wages, and especially as actual shortages occur (sorry, we just don’t have any) that will change. You could pay them 10 billion dollars, but if it won’t buy the food, medicine, housing, internet and so on that they need or want, it amounts to “not being able to pay”.

And that’s where the US is in danger of heading. Can’t make a lot of stuff. Can force fewer and fewer countries to sell or “give” resources to them, can’t earn an honest buck in trade because China’s good are cheaper, and soon can’t just print dollars.

(I also expect that a lot of US copyright laws may be overthrown in other countries in about a decade to two decades. No reason to pay that ransom if you aren’t buying from the US, and it’s better to have domestic industry or your own internet companies.)

Every great nation thinks “it can’t happen here” till it does. For the US the endgame grows closer.

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Information Overlord: Houthis Roll, Hegseth Bumbles, AI Doomer Hype, Lots of Music Talk

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On September 11, 2026

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Nat Wilson Turner = Information Overlord = Flames Up = Phones Out = No Sense of Urgency

From me this week as Nat Wilson Turner

This week at Naked Capitalism I pulled a shift covering the Iran War and tried to connect the dots between Pete Hegseth’s Department of War and what’s going on with Meta and OpenAI.

I also continued my “Joe Biden’s Three Genocides in Four Years” series with the first installment of the Ukraine debacle.

More of what I wrote and recorded for The MMA Draw and The Let It Roll Podcast is at the bottom of this post but I wanted to feature the news links and think pieces.

What I’m Reading and Watching

The Iran War

  • The Iran War Has Just Had A Major Phase Change — Ian Welsh. On the interceptor math: the US runs out long before Iran does if Iran chooses to go all out, and hitting only three or four tankers a day was a choice rather than a ceiling.

“As I said day one of the war, the math is on Iran’s side: the US will run out of interceptors long before Iran if Iran chooses to go all out.”

Empire, and what it remembers

The AI trade

The AI Doomers really had their moment this week. I hope y’all know most of that crap is as overblown as the hype.

Money

What the heck is going on with the bond market, private equity, etc

 

Read More

Ansar-Allah’s Blitz Likely To Reduce Saudi Oil Exports To Near Zero

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On September 11, 2026

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The picture above is from an Ansar-Allah (Houthi) strike on Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline. That and the Red Sea are how they were getting around the Iranian blockade.

About the Red Sea:

Yemen appears to have captured four islands plus the West coast of Yemen, most of which they didn’t previously control. This is… remarkable… because they have no navy, no airforce and one of the islands had an air base.

Meanwhile, they completely routed Saudi mercenary forces, capturing vast amounts of land in thirty six hours:

Saudi (and a few UAE proxies) were routed. They basically fled on contact. This is what happens when merecenaries go up against real troops, and the US isn’t there to help. Saudi Arabia has a huge air force, but it appears to have done basically nothing. (It’s an open secret that the Saudi military is a complete joke.)

MBS begged Trump for help and got none:

Saudi Crown Prince MBS called US President Trump twice on thursday, urging the US to carry out strikes but Trump reportedly declined as there are currently no plans for direct intervention. (Axios)

The US is over-stretched, and not just low on interceptors on missiles, glide bombs and so on.

The war in Yemen was a big project for Obama, and it included a hell of a lot of US support. Even with all that support they were only able to contain Ansar-Allah, not defeat it. (It’s worth knowing that while most of Yemen is not under Ansar-Allah control even now, the areas they control have 80% of the population.)

This is what it looks like when an Empire is in fatal decline.

I consider this good news, overall, but it’s going to absolutely suck for almost everyone. I have warned before, I’m warning again: stock up on staple foods, fuels and so on. Ansar-Allah now has complete control of the Strait, plus that pipeline is down for a while, and they can take it out again, or hit more refineries. Combined with the Iranian blockade, hardly any Saudi oil will be getting out, nor will the precursors for fertilizers.

Much of what was holding the oil market down (other than massive manipulation and releases from the reserves) was China reducing its purchases for months, but they’ve started up again, so demand is actually increasing.

We’ll see if Saudi Arabia has more sense than America: the correct action is to make whatever concessions are necessary. The Sauds cannot protect their infrastructure, their army is garbage, their mercenaries won’t fight and Ansar Allah has them by the throat. If they insist on fighting on they risk losing everything, because without oil revenue, Saudi Arabia is not viable, right down to not having enough food.

Much like the Iranians, Yemen has escalation dominance and is more willing and able to take pain (they lost millions to the last war) than the corrupt and effete Saudis. The Sauds have LOST and if they refuse to admit that, the House of Saud itself may fall. (No one will miss it, except people like Kushner, whom it has bribed.)

I consider yesterday one of the best days, geopolitically, of my life. The American Raj is taking body blow after body blow and is fatally overstretched. But it is going to SUCK for most of us, as prices rise and there are shortages, unless Trump has surgery to correct his chronic case of head in ass and agrees to Iran’s terms, while the Sauds do the same with Yemen.

It’s hard to predict Trump, but my guess is his Israeli masters won’t let him make peace, so get ready: the next year is going to be awful in much of the world.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Another Big Profit Opportunity For Elites Is On The Way (Bonds/Carry Trade)

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On August 19, 2026

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Japan has, since the mid 90s, had very low interest rates. The Japanese carry trade was to borrow in Japan and invest in America. You didn’t even need to take any real risk. Borrow Japanese, buy safe bonds in the US that paid more. Or you could use the money for riskier bets.

This has been going on for more than half my life and I’m not young. It was one of those money spigots that insiders and wealthy people have access too, but most of the rest of us simply watch: free money for some.

Now it’s coming to an end. The Japanese Yen is under immense pressure and so far interventions have not done squat. So the Japanese are raising interest rates.

But more than that they’re selling large chunks of their US treasuries in interventions, and Japan is the largest holder of US government debt outside of America. (China is second.)

This happens at the same time as the US bond market is breaking. Treasury literally can’t sell all of its bonds. Rates are high, about at 2007 levels, and they’re selling short term bonds and using that to buy their own long term bonds.

Add to this issues with oil and distillates, especially diesel, the fact that the US military is basically out of a lot of weapons and has lost a war.

Then there’s the real-estate market:

America and Americans are under a lot of stress. Because interest rates are high and Biden and Trump love to spend but not tax there are also soaring interest payments on the US debt.

Now the big advantage the US has over most countries is that its debt is denominated in its own currency. The federal government cannot go bankrupt unless elites lose their will to print money, which so far they haven’t. They’ve printed literal trillions since 2008, though it’s concealed by pretending that Federal Reserve operations which create money out of mid air to keep rich people rich aren’t money printing.

The result was massive inflation in the top end, and a drying up of businesses aiming at the middle class and poor. You see this most clearly in Las Vegas, which used to have cheap rooms and food but now doesn’t, because why cater to people who have no money?

(In China prices are low, even at luxury hotels, because there is a mass market like the one the US had in the 50s and 60s.)

After all this add in the AI bubble and fertilizer and diesel shortages hitting farmers.

The entire system is cracking apart.

The smartest money isn’t the money that has been plunging into the AI bubble, it’s the people who have kept their powder dry, because as everything goes to hell, there will be significant buying opportunities. Warren Buffet, for example, built up a huge amount of cash, though his successor has spent some.

In a serious economic crisis, and one is coming, you can buy up companies and assets (and all those homes, which you then rent at profit maximizing rates which leave millions homeless) for cents on the dollar.

As for you, dear reader, well, probably you won’t be able to take advantage of this, any more than you could in the bounce after 2007.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks will have to decide whether or not to do bail outs, and whether or not to bail out the rich or ordinary people. They’ll choose the rich. But there is a problem with the whole “America’s debt is in dollars so it doesn’t matter theory.”

America’s a net importer. It has less and less to sell to the world that the world needs. There has been a slow but consistent move away from the US dollar as a reserve currency, a movement away from settling trade in US dollars and China’s now forcing companies to choose between America and China. If you enforce US sanctions, they’ll fine you and if you don’t pay, you’ll lose access to their market.

Ultimately the US dollar’s value comes from US strength: economically and militarily. Like the British Pound (which was once worth five times or more than the US dollar) it can be expected to lose value because there is simply less need for it. Everything you really need you can get somewhere else, unless like Europe, you’ve sanctioned other suppliers so much you’re destroying your own economy.

Anyway, all of these things all happening at the same time is all sorts of bad news. I’d expect some sort of financial crisis within a year and it will be a doozy. Wherever it starts it will hit everything in the US and Europe and the Anglosphere and much of the rest of the world. Central banks will have to spent trillions in another bail out.

But this will be the last major US bailout, because after this there will be nothing. The US will not have the tech lead in almost anything, is not creating the world’s future techs other than AI (which China is winning, anyway) and will have lost much of its military intimidation factor.

Welcome to the end of the American Empire. You’ll see it in food shortages, high prices and an elite determined to become an elite similar to India’s or much of South America’s: ruling over essentially poor nations, but filthy rich amongst the rubble.

 

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

America Almost Out Of Long Range Strike Munitions

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On August 4, 2026

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Why did Trump call off his big attacks? Why did the US stop attacking suddenly?

he U.S. Army has used up much of its stockpile of highly accurate long-range missiles during its five-month war with Iran, according to three people familiar with the data, raising concerns about the military’s ​readiness for future conflicts.
The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

There are also claims that the US is running out of long range air to ground munitions as well.

Combined these two things mean that if America wants to keep bombing Iran, they have to actually fly over Iran and put themselves in much more danger from Iranian anti-air, and by all accounts the Iranians still have plenty left.

This problem comes from the same place virtually all US problems come from: rather than optimizing for results (production) everyone optimizes for profits. Selling fewer missiles for much more money is a better business deal, yes?

And that the US cannot significantly increase the production is due to de-industrializing: sending most of America’s key industries to China, because hey, it doesn’t matter where things are made.

China is now the US in WWII. They could, in a war, easily retool to produce literally millions of drones. They can produce a hundred warships per warship the US produces. Etc.

These are systematic issues. De-financialization is politically impossible. Without de-financialization re-industrializing is not possible, as it would require companies to make far lower profits. Chinese companies are MUCH bigger than American ones, and make less profit (not revenue, but profit) and have far lower valuations.

In 2025 BYD sold 2.26 million cars. Tesla sold 1.64 million. And China has many auto companies.

The mindset for scaling and the mindset for profit-maxing are very different. American elites are all looking for moats: they all want to be able to charge more for a product than it is worth because no one is competing with them on price. (This is why Chinese EVs aren’t allowed in America: they compete on price and the American car industry would cease to exist on contact.)

America lost the Iran war over fifty years as it changed from an industrial power to a financial power. Power comes from what a country can actually do. What it can buy from other countries is a minor consideration unless it has the ability to force them to sell, and that ability comes from what the country can do. Against Venezuela and Cuba, the US is still strong enough. Against a middle power which prepared for war and knows how to use geography, not so much.

In general terms, everything that is happening was predicted decades ago by objective people looking at the trends. Power comes from capability, America was systematically getting rid of that capability to optimize for the number of rich people it could generate.

Military decline, industrial decline, technological decline: all of this comes from making profits the end-goal, rather than the mean by which worthwhile goals were achieved.

“We need to make a profit do X” is very different from “we do X to make a profit.”

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

“Nothing Ever Happens”

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On July 27, 2026

16 Comments

Oh?

Almost everything is on track.

  • Covid?
  • The financial crisis?
  • This war? China officially leading the US in tech and industry?
  • Global warming coming on faster than expected?
  • Massive wildfires every summer?
  • Trump being President?
  • The Ukraine war?
  • That little genocide in Palestine?
  • The US being unable to build enough weapons?
  • The complete breakdown of international law and (more seriously) the WTO trade order?
  • A revolution in war making technology which has allowed middle powers to fight great powers?
  • Multiple payment systems challenging dollar privilege.
  • Serious collapses in animal and insect populations, so much so that bug splat doesn’t exist in much of the world any more and that I rarely see songbirds.
  • Constant, inexorable rises in food prices, even before the war.

Notice that food per capita line. Remember all the screaming about fertility rates and look at the births line (though I think the collapse is more severe than modeled.) Industrial output is still increasing, as the chart suggests, but China’s about to go over a demographic ledge and I expect it will peak within ten years of the chart’s prediction. Resources are very definitely being depleted, though less fast than predicted. Still, it’s happening. Just read in detail about oil production.

Collapse happens slowly, then all at once. The post-USSR order has collapsed. It’s gone. The trade order has collapsed. Military supremacy is gone. Every summer we get wildfires and smoke in major cities, which did not happen before about 2019. This is a textbook example of climate change re-ordering the environment. What will grow up afterwards will be a different mix of plants and animals.

Things are happening. Big things. If you want the official “big collapse” well, it’s not here yet for the first world, but the death by a thousand self-inflicted wounds continues. As much as I admire what China has done, and as impressed as I am by solar and so on, they are still an industrial society based on planned obsolescence and over-production and are about to hit a demographic cliff (good in the long run, but it will cause issues.) The only escape from much of the resource trap would be large scale off world mining. Musk isn’t going to manage it. The Chinese are taking a shot, we’ll see. That wouldn’t, by itself, fix ecological collapse, however and won’t supply all necessary resources. It’s also unlikely to come on line in time, if at all.

You’re living thru an epochal period, similar to the WWI thru WWII period: everything is changing, but this time including serious environmental issues. There’s also all the social issues related to AI, phones, the collapse of reading and reasoning ability in some societies, mass surveillance and the rise of authoritarianism, even as civil liberties are contracting in almost every country in the world.

The post-war and post-cold war orders are dying or dead. The negative consequences of the industrial revolution are hitting home after we got the goodies for a couple centuries.

Things are happening. More things will happen over the next couple decades. If you can’t see that, you’re blind.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

 

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