Ian Welsh

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

Category: Class Warfare Page 1 of 36

The American Delusion

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On February 28, 2025

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So, Nick Kristoff is crying about USAid, and I agree, mostly:

I’m hearing from experts around the world about what the destruction of USAID is meaning: “a global health massacre,” in the words of a doctor who has devoted her life to humanitarian work on the front lines. Millions of malnourished children left to starve. Pregnant women not getting micronutrients to prevent neural tube defects. Programs against schistosomiasis abandoned. HIV positive patients left without ARV’s. Water no longer purified. Surveillance against Ebola and bird flu set back. TB patients unable to get medicine. I’ve long argued that USAID should be reformed, but this Trump/Musk demolition is cruel and incompetent and benefits China, while killing children just as wonderful as our own.

It’s worth reading the replies to this. The usual one is “we have lots of homeless and sick people, we should take care of them first.” Trump’s budget cuts 400 billion to Medicaid, to pay for tax cuts for rich people who have more than enough. MAGAts are delusional cultists.

USAid is skeezy in many ways: lots of nasty intelligence shit hidden there, but it also does a lot of good, and the price tag is trivial. If you want to house and feed and give healthcare to Americans, cut the defense budget, raise taxes on billionaires, and get on with it. It’ll even be good for the economy.

Americans aren’t homeless and sick because of foreign aid, they’re homeless and sick because for 45 years all the money has gone to rich people and they’ve jacked up the price of homes and healthcare, and gotten rid of millions of good jobs. That’s all.

This has been a bipartisan project. Democrats hands are not clean. I remember Clinton’s massive welfare cuts and Obama helping banks literally steal people’s homes with fraudulent documents as two of thousands of possible examples. But anyone who thinks Trump wants to fix this rather than accelerate it is so delusional they should be in an asylum.

I have no patience left, none, for either Democrats or Republicans. All of you are monsters who have hurt the weak, destroyed the middle class and made millions of Americans homeless while denying them healthcare. You’re all monsters.

America has always had enough wealth to feed and care for all Americans and even help a lot of foreigners, but the entire project since Reagan has been to make the rich richer, and fuck everyone else. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or delusional & a piece of human garbage.

America is a shithole because that’s what both Democrats and Republicans wanted, and it’s what they worked hard for.

Every time an off-ramp was offered, and there was almost always someone running in Democratic Presidential primaries who was against this, they were crushed. Usually the number of primary votes they received was so small as to be a joke. Democratic primary voters wanted what has happened. So did Republicans.

Welcome to the America you voted for, again and again.

 

 

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Understanding the Core Goal Of Western Governments & Western Decline

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On February 27, 2025

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I was talking with a friend the other day and he said the problem with democracies is that policy can swing 180 degrees with each election.

And in some ways that’s true: Trump’s switch on Ukraine is a good example.

But it’s not true when it comes to the core goals of western government since 1979 or so.

The ur-rule of neoliberalism is that the rich must always get richer.

Trump’s budget cuts 600 million from Medicaid and other health care in order to give tax cuts to the rich.

Trudeau’s big change from previous Prime Ministers was to massively increase immigration. The effect was to depress wages and increase rent and real-estate prices.

When European countries talk about increasing military spending there is the inevitable comment that this will require slashing social spending. Somehow the idea of taxing the rich and corporations more is never raised, even though that would easily cover the cost.

DOGE’s civil service cuts will lead to massive outsourcing of whatever the government really has to do, which will cost more than doing it in house and profit the rich.

Starmer’s extate taxes on family farmers will force them to sell their farms to agri-business or developers (and, overall, make the UK even less able to feed itself.)

Trump’s proposal to cut the military budget massively in concert with China and Russia would open up more room for tax cuts. The savings won’t be used to help poor and middle class Americans, you can be sure of that. (It also isn’t going to happen that way, because China can easily afford its military budget. More on that in a later article probably.)

This isn’t to say there are never exceptions, but they are exceptions.

This is quite different, by the way, from China.

China used to be willing to mint billionaires, but they figured out it was harming the majority of the population, so they are dealing with it. This is one of the reasons why China has won, and the US has lost. (Another part is that China doesn’t talk about free markets, but actually has them, while the West talks about them but makes sure they never happen.)

Neoliberalism is in the process of ending, but until the ur-rule of always making the rich richer by screwing everyone else ends, the most important part of the oligarchical state will continue. What’s really happening under Trump is the tech-oligarchs taking lead trace away from the banking oligarchs. It’s an internal shuffle of power, while the looting continues.

Since a board prosperous population combined with massive industry is what actually makes post-industrial revolution societies powerful, American and Western decline will continue as long as the determination to fuck over ordinary people remains.

 

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Trump’s Budget Will Cause A Recession

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On February 26, 2025

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The new budget is going to hurt the economy massively. There are 4.5 trillion in tax cuts to high earners and corporations and 880 billion in cuts from “Energy and Commerce”.

Energy and commerce probably sounds innocuous, but that committee overseas healthcare and it has only 200 billion in spending that isn’t health care, which means cuts to Medicaid, CHIP and ACA.

DOGE has put in some massive cuts to research, but the cuts hit research hospitals hard and are going to result in a lot of loss of hospital jobs because of loss of overhead.

Tariffs will also hit the economy hard, especially tariffs on energy, where there’s little ability to domestic producers to eat cost increases.

Tax cuts to high earners and corporations don’t increase the strength of the real economy: the money will go to buyouts, stock buybacks, executive salaries and luxury goods, not to investment in production and new jobs. Cuts to the civil service also have an obvious negative effect on the economy, though some will lead to higher profits due to no longer needing to comply with regulations and laws. (IRS cuts to auditors are the worst of these.)

If you want to re-industrialize you have to force companies to invest in new production, which means ending things like stock buy backs, executive options, and various other ways for corporations and rich people to juice their income without doing something productive.

In other words this is a very good budget if you’re rich, and a very bad budget if you aren’t. It’s going to hit red states harder than blue states, since they are overall more dependent on federal budget spending.

This budget will make America weaker, damage administrative capacity and hurt everyone but maybe to the top 5% or so.

Welcome to Trump’s America.

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The Competency Crisis Is Not About DEI

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On January 15, 2025

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That DEI (women and brown people) are responsible is a constant right wing cry.

The competency crisis is a result of an economy where making money without making a product is easier than making something. We prioritized financial profits—multi generational rises in asset prices that were faster than inflation. Housing went up. Stocks went up. Private equity earned money buy buying companies, larding them up with debt, and running them into the ground. Profits were juiced by moving production offshore and engaging in regulatory and labor arbitrage.

The best profit came from playing financial games and rentierism. You didn’t have to make anything or delivery anything, you just had to find a way to squeeze money out of something by making it go up faster than inflation, or by destroying something which was already built, taking all the future value now and giving it to yourself. Even the (old) Middle Class got in on this, by buying houses when they were cheap, watching them appreciate faster than wages, then selling them when old and moving south to be have their bums wiped in cheaper southern states by brown immigrants.

Everyone wanted to make money without having to create to get it. Mostly they either wanted to get unearned money from appreciation, to destroy what others had built, or to capture a market in an oligopoly or monopoly so they could juice prices.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing floor moved to China and elsewhere. The people who knew how to make things retired, moved to other jobs, retired and eventually died.

We can’t build most things because we haven’t prioritized building things, or getting better at building things since the 70s. The eighties are where predatory capitalism took hold, and since then the whole game has been rentierism, unearned gains, predation and arbitrage.

DEI doesn’t much matter in comparison. The people running the economy for the last 45 years have been mostly white males, and that doesn’t matter either. Women or brown people would have done the same thing. Margaret Thatcher was a woman, and one of the founders of this mindset.

No one’s competent at actually doing things, except profit extraction, because our societies haven’t prioritized doing anything but extracting profit for over 45 years. Everyone who lived in a society that was about really delivering products and making things is dead or retired.

if you want a competent society again, make it so that no one can get wealthy, let alone rich, without really making something or improving people’s lives. And no, Facebook and Google and so on don’t count, because they were started as good, and made shitty to increase profits. That’s the opposite of what’s needed. (AI in the US will be the same.)

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Elon Musk Threatens Congress Successfully

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On December 20, 2024

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This is some amazing shit:

Congress was about to vote on a bill called a “Continuing Resolution”, which would fund the operations of the federal government. But yesterday, Musk started tweeting around the clock about how he hated the bill and that he would fund the campaigns of politicians who ran against Congress members who supported it.

….Shortly after Musk decided he was against the Continuing Resolution, Trump and JD Vance issued a statement saying they were against it, too. The politicians in Congress fell in line, and now it looks like the government funding plan is dead.

Here’s the thing. Being rich only means you’re good at making money in a specific way. It doesn’t mean anything else. Gates, for example, pushed the “Common Core” education changes, and there’s no evidence they did any good and some reason to think they were harmful.

We have a rich man (maybe a billionaire) as President. We have Musk, the world’s richest man, who spent a lot money helping Trump win as one of the most important people in the new administration, who has said he wants to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Money is the ability to tell people what do. It let’s you control their actions, either directly or indirectly.

FDR defined fascism as:

Ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power

The US has been trending towards oligarchy for ages. The final victory for oligarchy was probably “Citizen’s United”, which made money the same as speech and thus protected under the first amendment.

The famous Princeton oligarchy study, which used data from 1981-2002, which is to say from back when the rich weren’t nearly as powerful as they are now, found that:

…when one holds constant net interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change (refer to the top panel of figure 1).

By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time. Similarly, when support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels of figure 1). Footnote 41

Musk is the world’s richest man. He threatened members of Congress using his money, and they caved.

It’s always amusing when Americans call Russia an oligarchy. It isn’t. Russia’s oligarchs have very little power compared to Putin. If they cross him, he destroys them. They do what he wants, when he wants or they go to jail or have to flee the country, giving up any wealth in Russia.

America, on the other hand, is sickeningly an oligarchy and it’s going from indirect to direct oligarchical control.

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Why Assisted Suicide Bills Will Proliferate & Deaths Will Increase

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On November 25, 2024

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Nothing saves money on people who are old, disabled and unable to work like just killing them.

Covid killed mostly old people. That saved the government money in the long run, although in the short run it was expensive, except for Sweden where they just euthanized their old people with Covid instead of treating them. (Gave them opiods even when they had enough oxygen and drugs.)

Since Covid, however, there’s been an unfortunate increase in people who can’t work because they’re chronically ill.

This isn’t hard to understand. Britain is massively importing young people who can work, or older people who have lots of money, but at the same time the number of people who are liabilities, financially speaking, is exploding. If you have a liability the easiest way to get rid of it is to… get rid of it.

Canada’s in the same boat, and these bills will spread.

Assisted suicide isn’t automatically a bad thing, mind you. If people were properly supported and cared for I’d support it. People who are in a ton of pain and won’t get better ought to have the option.

But when the government is whining about benefits and cutting them, as in Britain, one doesn’t expect this is being done from a humanitarian impulse. And the medical and social workers, in hospitals and palliative care centers that are overstretched and don’t have enough nurses or doctors or beds, well, convincing someone who’s taking up time or a bed to just die already will have to be pretty tempting, sometimes even with somewhat good motives: to free up resources for people who can be cared for.

But, of course, what will often happen is that chronically ill people or homeless types who could live for quite a long time and with proper care could be fairly happy will wind up dead because in Britain and Canada we don’t help them enough: to get enough housing, food, help and pain meds (given the way we’re so scared of opiates.)

Wikipedia lists some known cases of abuse of the law:

  • In 2017, a mother of a young woman with cerebral palsy was told by a doctor that not applying for MAID was “selfish”. Her daughter was in the room when the conversation took place and described the experience as traumatic.[71]
  • In 2018, Roger Foley was being treated for cerebellar ataxia at an Ontario hospital. Foley alleged that his only options were to be forcibly discharged from the hospital and then treated by an organization that had previously failed to provide him adequate care or apply for MAID. Foley hired a lawyer for a charter challenge.[72]
  • In 2019, Alan Nichols successfully applied for MAID while being hospitalized for suicide ideation. The reason given on his application was hearing loss.[1]
  • In September 2021, Rosina Kamis, a 41-year-old Malaysian woman, applied for MAID citing fibromyalgia as the reason. However, in conversations and recordings shared with friends, she mentioned financial hardship and social isolation as additional factors influencing her decision.[73]
  • In February 2022, an anonymous Torontonian suffering from extreme chemical sensitivity syndrome with the pseudonym Sophia had a medically assisted death after failing to find affordable housing that was free from tobacco smoke and other chemicals.[74] This case was addressed by her health care provider in testimony provided to the Special Joint Committee on MAID, and was referenced in their final report.[75]

One can safely assume there are many, many more. The fact is that even doctors and social workers think some lives are worth more than others. No one who’s spent time in the medical system believes otherwise.

The West is in decline. Our elites are wedded to austerity as a “solution”. They often, probably usually, feel that people who are non-productive are useless eaters and a burden on the state.

That combination is going to lead to a truly vast expansion of measures intended to get people off benefit rolls.

In a way assisted suicide, or euthanasia, is the most honest of those policies and maybe even the most merciful. There’s nothing honest about deliberate policies which make people homeless, leading to most of their deaths, after all. Politicians know that winding up on the street long term is essentially a death sentence, they know that policies like mass immigration without increasing the housing supply to match will cause homelessness, so they know their policies cause homelessness and death but they can pretend it’s an unintended side effect.

Just killing people is at least not hypocritical.

***

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What Is A Communist?

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On November 11, 2024

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One annoying tendency in modern political discourse is right wingers and centrists calling people communist.

They don’t know what the word means.

A communist believes that the means of production should be owned and controlled by the proletariat: the workers.

If you don’t believe this, you aren’t a communist. Wanting universal healthcare doesn’t mean you’re a communist unless you think the health workers themselves (or, just perhaps, the party or government) should control the healthcare providers.

Wanting universal healthcare, in the modern context, makes you a socialist.

Now there’s a lot of argument around what it means for the proletariat to control the means of production. If the “Party” controls it, like in the USSR or pre-Deng China, is that communism, or is it just old fashioned government authoritarianism?

Is modern China communist? About half the economy isn’t controlled by the Party, and worker co-ops are minor players. There’s clearly a capitalist class controlling vast amounts of the means of production, though government is very willing to intervene. The Chinese Communist party says this is still communism but that seems like a stretch to me. The same is true in Vietnam: the Communist party is in charge, but the economy isn’t communist.

Note that you could have a market economy which IS communist. If workers co-ops or something similar control most of the organizations, that would be communism, and it’s something that a lot of intellectuals in America and Europe during the 50s pushed for: a sort of “best of both worlds.”

Centralized control economies like the USSR, from this point of view can’t really be communist, because the workers aren’t really controlling capital.

For myself, I’d say moving away from stock companies and towards a mix of worker owned organizations and perhaps mutual companies (or mixed versions) would be the best way to move towards something that might both be communist and workable, allowing the dynamism of the market.

Generally speaking my time in the workforce convinced me that upper management is usually clueless because they don’t do the job and haven’t done it in ages. You have to be on the front lines to have some idea what the issues actually are.

Communism is worker control of capital, and nothing else. We’ve never really tried it.

Scratch A CEO, Find A Fascist

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On July 19, 2024

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Not that they require fascism, but they’re OK with it:

David Zaslav, the CEO of CNN’s parent company, at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Tuesday:

Asked about the upcoming Presidential election, Zaslav said it mattered less to him which party wins, so long as the next president was friendly to business.

“We just need an opportunity for deregulation, so companies can consolidate and do what we need to be even better.”

One of the few things Biden has been good on is anti-trust, so this means Trump.

In a similar vein:

The pull quote:

“France’s corporate bosses are racing to build contacts with Marine Le Pen’s far right after recoiling from the radical tax-and-spend agenda of the rival leftwing alliance in the country’s snap parliamentary elections”.

The left, and real left, not the so-called “Center Left” will always be opposed by corporations, just as most of them opposed FDR. They want to get bigger and richer, whether that’s good for the country or not. High marginal tax rates, vigorous anti-trust and high corporate tax rates with laws forbidding stock options and other nonsense produced America and Western Europe’s best economy in history—the post-war states from 45 on.

Of course, during that time period the CEO/Worker pay ratio tended towards 30/1 or so.

But, as we all know, workers made enough so that a single wage-earner could support a family, and as for GDP growth rates, well:

These charts are pretty clear. Consolidation and deregulation do not lead to higher GDP growth, and that’s leaving aside redistribution.

This is important because the argument for deregulation and allowing consolidation was that it would make growth better and that there would be a “trickle down” which would leave everyone better off even if inequality soared.

Well, we did get trickled on, I suppose

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