Ian Welsh

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 6, 2025

by Tony Wikrent

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

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

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

Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers

March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

No Person Shall Be Deprived…

John Ganz, April 02, 2025 [Unpopular Front]

On Monday, the Trump administration admitted that it had deported a Maryland man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia “because of an administrative error” to El Salvador where he was thrown in the nightmarish CECOT prison. In 2019, Abrego Garcia received protected legal status from an immigration judge who determined he could be tortured if he was returned to his home country. He was denounced by a secret informant as a member of MS-13, a characterization Abrego Garcia denies and local police in Maryland did not believe. But, of course, the entire regime is lying and claiming that Abrego Garcia was a “convicted” gang member. What they are really saying is, “We can declare people unprotected by the law and deport them by fiat.”

But now that Abrego Garcia is no longer in U.S. custody, the government says there’s nothing they can do — and technically they are right: A petition for habeas corpus, a Constitutionally-defined process where the imprisoning jurisdiction to produce justification of detention, only applies to someone who is held under U.S. authority. This is where I strongly suspect that this was not an “error” as such, but part of a deliberate policy experiment. What this regime is attempting to do is to find a way around habeas corpus protections: You spirit someone across the border quickly before their lawyer can file a petition, dump them somewhere—say, a concentration camp run by a friendly client state—and then say, “oopsie, no more habeas for them.” ….

How Donald Gets the Constitution All Wrong

Tom Hall, April 2, 2025 [La Progressive]

The recent deportations of “enemy aliens” from countries with whom we are not at war, and countries which have not invaded us, ignored the actual language of the law which the Donald’s lawyers pretend justify his Orders….

…We are told that the Donald is “relying on” the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. But has anyone told you what those acts actually say, and provide for legally?

The 1798 Congress was the 5^th Congress since the ratification of the Constitution and formation of the new government. Many of the men (it was all men) who drafted and ratified the Constitution were still alive and knew what they had meant by ratifying the Constitution. In the spring and summer of 1798, they passed three laws dealing wth aliens (www.archives.gov-1798 Aliens Acts). They knew what aliens were, and they knew what the powers of Congress, the Presidency and the Courts were.

The first law, Signed by President John Adams, on June 25, 1798, provided that the President could order an alien expelled from the United States, if the President believed the alien was dangerous to, or had committed crimes against the nation. Section I of the act provides that the President’s Order had to be served the alien with an order telling him to get out of the USA, and setting a reasonable time for the alien to do so. The same section provided for aliens to have an opportunity to present a case against removal, and apply for permission to stay. The alien was allowed to “prove…by evidence” that he did not pose a risk. The same section also provided that an alien who had been ordered deported, but had not left, could be imprisoned and permanently barred from citizenship “on conviction” of such a charge.

Missing from this first section of the act was any authority for the President to abduct people from their homes, college campuses or sidewalks and deport them without any hearing, trial or conviction….

PATRICK LAWRENCE: American Freefall

[Consortium News, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

The extent to which the U.S. has embarked on a departure from reality is only a question for empires in their waning decades.

Trump makes history by pardoning a corporation

[The Hill, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Criminal Corporations Are Not People, But Trump Just Pardoned One Anyway

Brett Wilkins, April 03, 2025 [CommonDreams]

With Detention of Beloved Farmworker Organizer, ICE Comes for the Labor Movement

[Truthout, via Naked Capitalism 04-03-2025]

The Great Grovel: How Trump forced elite institutions to bend to his will

John F. Harris and POLITICO Staff, via Naked Capitalism 04-02-2025]

Trump’s Attacks on Press Freedom Are Paving the Way for Authoritarianism

[Vanity Fair, via Naked Capitalism 03-30-2025]

Trump Executive Order Calls for End of Paper Checks for Taxpayer and Government Payments by Sept. 30; Industry Official Snort About Deadline; What About User Payment Charges?

via Naked Capitalism 03-31-2025]

Resistance

Perkins Coie gets 500 lawfirms and 300 retired judges to help battle Trump

Bill Addis, April 5, 2025 [DailyKos]

Over 500 law firms have filed an amicus brief (PDF) in support of Perkins Coie’s case against the U.S. Department of Justice, the named defendants, et. al..

The firms signing on take up 12 pages of the 24 page brief, filed on Friday. As evidence, it lists Trump’s executive orders against WilmerHale, Jenner & Block and Paul Weiss, and the specific suspension of security clearance and contracts at Covington & Burling.

The lead law firm filing the brief is Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP….

Big Law Is Winning in Court—Now Is Not the Time to Fold

John Relman, April 06, 2025 [Common Dreams]

The law firms fighting back against Trump’s executive orders are winning, and those cutting deals with the White House are suffering irreparable damage behind the scenes.

If the Chamber of Commerce is Listening . . .

Gerard N. Magliocca, May 31, 2019 [reposted 04-05-2025 at Balkanization.blogspot]

…The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which is the statutory authority cited by the President, grants two types of authority. One gives the President the power to freeze the assets of foreign nationals and/or foreign governments. The other gives the President the power to suspend commerce (or types of commerce) with another nation. Nothing in the Act suggests that the President is given the power to levy tariffs on another nation. Indeed, there are many reasons to doubt that such a power exists.

First, Congress has delegated tariff authority in other statutes that do not apply here. For instance, the President can (and has) imposed tariffs on China in response to unfair trade practices based on clear statutory authority. The lack of such an express delegation in the IEEPA implies no tariff authority.

Second, there appears to be no precedent for a President using the IEEPA to impose tariffs. (I say appears because I cannot find an example. If there is one, then I would like to know.)
Third, there is no indication from the legislative history of the IEEPA that Congress intended to give the President the authority to raise tariffs.

Fourth, there is no judicial authority for the President’s proposed tariffs. Moreover, the Supreme Court’s careful analysis of the IEEPA in Dames & Moore v. Regan is considerably narrower than the President’s view….

In conclusion, the proposed Mexican tariffs are illegal. Interested parties should prepare to file suit.

China in 1999 versus China in 2025

By Sean Paul Kelley

On April 5, 2025

Comments

Question: I’ve been presented an opportunity to go back to several places in China I visited in the past–namely Beijing, Xi’an, Yangshou and Shanghai. Probably three weeks.

I will also spend a week in South Korea with old friends, where I lived in 1993-94.

Is this a trip you, the readers of Ian’s site, would be interested in?

A Well Laid Trap By Putin

By Sean Paul Kelley

On April 5, 2025

Comments

Putin recently said,“I agree in principle to a cease-fire.”

That’s a brilliant PR and propaganda coup. It also has a very pragmatic, realistic purpose. He said this, damn well knowing Zhelensky and the Ukrainians and the Brits and the US have so many hurdles to get through until they can achieve a cease-fire that what Putin has ultimately done is give the Russian army carte blanche to continue capturing key territory for as long as it takes for the West to get its act together or the Ukrainian army collapses, whichever comes first. My money is on a mid-summer collapse.

Nota bene: Putin is making Trump look like a piker in just about every encounter, except, he lets Trump keep his ‘face.’ Putin is puting on a master class.

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On April 5, 2025

Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts!

Trump’s Liberation Day: This Boy Could Fuck Up Boiling Water

By Ian Welsh

On April 3, 2025

Comments

So, Trump’s tariffs are out. He claims they’re half of what each country tariffs the US, but in fact they appear to have been determined by dividing how much the US sells to a country by how much that country sells to the US.

In other words, the more your trade surplus is, proportionally, the higher the tariffs.

This isn’t, on the face of it, necessarily stupid. But… it’s being done very stupidly.

The first problem is the most fundamental: much of what the US buys it can’t make or grow or dig up itself. New capacity takes time, so in cases where the US could in theory make whatever it is, tariffs should either be phased in, or there should be a delay “in two years the tariff will be X%.” As it stands, in a lot of cases, all this is going to do is make Americans pay a lot more.

Then there are things that the US can’t produce itself, or produce enough of. Potash from Canada, for example. The US can’t produce enough. Period. And farmers MUST have it.

So this means that there’s going to be a massive economic shock: prices will go up and/or profits will go down and the US government will need to provide massive subsidies to some industries at the same time as Trump’s budget plan massively cuts revenue due to tax cuts for the rich.

The tariffs on each country should have been individually determined based on what America buys from them, and what America sells to them. If it’s something the US can’t make, or given opportunity costs shouldn’t make (do you want to build more power plants for AI, or use it for aluminum?) then those things shouldn’t be tariffed. And if you’re buying what you really need from them, and can’t make yourself or shouldn’t (Canadian potash and aluminum, for example) then why are you tariffing? The Canadian example is a good one: Canada imports more manufactured goods from the US than it exports to America. Tariffs encourage Canada to buy less goods and re-industrialize, reducing demand for American goods and encouraging American de-industrialization.

Instead of selling goods to Canada, made using Canadian primary and secondary resources like wood and aluminum and hydro power, America is encouraging Canada to use its own resources to make its own goods. I mean, as a Canadian I think this is great and I’m very grateful to Trump, but this is stupid, really stupid, of Trump for America.

The second issue is that that one goal is to get foreign companies to buy American goods. But most American goods aren’t price competitive, especially not with China. Add on top of that the retaliatory tariffs which most countries are going to respond with, and the likely end result of this isn’t countries buying more American goods, it’s them buying less.

Now some countries are in a different situation. The EU, for example, is very vulnerable here. They have a massive trade surplus with the US, and it’s in goods and their goods are more expensive than Chinese goods, so they’re fucked: who are they going to sell to if they won’t sell to America?

The EU trade surplus is about 600 billion. America sells the EU more services than vice versa, by about 100 billion, however, so the combined services and trade surplus is around 500 billion. Yet if you drill down to balance of payments overall, it’s closer to 200 billion: the US gets a lot of investment income and other streams from Europe, for example, all those patent and copyright payments, 30% at app stores, etc, etc…

A 200 billion dollar balance of payments deficit is about 1.2% of the EU’s GDP. The correct action for the EU is to hit the US hard on services and income: tax the hell out of that and just get rid of it it in some places. Break the DMCA and set up their own app stores, for example. The screams from Silicon Valley would set off Richter 7 earthquakes.

Let’s look at another country. Japan, has a 68 billion goods trade surplus, about a 25 billion services deficit, and actually gets about 50 billion in misc payments from the US. They’re rolling in it and actually much more vulnerable than the EU because of all that payment income, which is easily disrupted. It’s hard for them to retaliate and not come out hurting bad. But there are reports they’re coordinating their response with South Korea and China, and if true, it makes sense, since they have little leverage alone.

China’s trade surplus with the US is now about 1.8% of GDP. Most Americans think it’s still 2008. It’s not. China will be fine and that’s why their official response has been, in essence, “if you want a trade war, let’s have a trade war.”

Generally speaking the correct response for most countries (but not Japan!) is going to be to go after payments: copyright, patents, app stores and so on, and to tax services.

And this leads to third issue: hitting everyone at once. This allows coordination. If the US had just hit a few countries, everyone else would keep their heads down and hope to be ignored. One country, alone, breaking patents say, or getting rid of DMCA compliance and breaking US app stores, would be crushed. But if it’s done in a coordinated fashion, the US is toast. They can’t sanction everyone, the US financial system will just be treated as damaged and routed around. A universal clearing currency is NOT needed. In fact, for a variety of reasons, it’s one of the worst things possible. Make the deals in local currencies. Done.

Additional add-ons to all of this include the probability of a lot of free capital flows going away. Countries that want to re-industrialize with domestically controlled supply chains, and many now will, need to keep capital at home and the retaliation against the US is going to be against a capital flow/investment system which has, with a few exceptions like Japan, mostly favored the US.

I can’t even imagine how much US property in other countries is likely to wind up forced to sell to locals, or even nationalized outright.

All of this leads to the fact that this will speed up the loss of dollar privilege, and with the loss of dollar privilege and everyone reluctant to sell to America, well, there’s no way that the US standard of living doesn’t get hit hard.

There’s a lot more to say on this. The US is counting on countries needing to sell to it. The Chinese have far more manufacturing capacity than anyone else and a cheaper cost structure. This leaves places like the EU fucked, hard. They can’t really sell to the US profitably. They can’t sell to China because their goods are too expensive. They don’t have a lot of resources to sell except food.

The correct response is to move to internal demand and collapse the cost structure (rent, housing prizes, all monopoly pricing, etc…) but neoliberal policies don’t allow that, so they’re going to try military Keynesianism, but that won’t work well either.

Truly screwed if they don’t get their heads out of their asses and ditch neoliberal bullshit, start taxing the rich, and figure out their energy situation.

But, they, they have it coming.

Long story short: the US is going to be hit by a huge inflationary shock, a decline in standard of living and, unless other countries are stupid, lose most of its overseas rentier monopoly income. The EU is in for a world of hurt, but has options. China will feel it, but they’ll be fine, they don’t need the US as a market any more.

In the longer term this might lead to improvements in the US economy: it will force reshoring, it’s just doing it in the stupidest way possible. But the US risks winding up in semi-autarchy, with an oligarch controlled economy, authoritarian but ineffective politics (think Yeltsin) amid a huge collapse of standards of living, even as it destroys its scientific and academic communities.

The road back will be a hard one and the suffering in between will be massive. And all this assumes that the political problems in America don’t boil over into civil or serious foreign wars.

Americans aren’t going to take a one-third reduction in their standard of living well, especially when so many of them are just a few hundred dollars a month away from homelessness.

Welcome to the end of the American century.

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LePen Being Banned From Running For President Is Not Lawfare

By Ian Welsh

On April 1, 2025

Comments

I should note that this was NOT my original assumption. I assumed this was like Georgescu, or Khan in Pakistan or the arrest of Istanbul’s Mayor: politically motivated bullshit, designed to make sure a popular politician can’t run and either disproportionate or a stitch-up.

It’s true that LePen is leading the polls and would probably be the the next President, yes, but as best I can tell it’s also true that she’s guilty of misusing public funds and that the court case and the sentence are not politically motivated.

The sentence is:

4 years prison (2 years suspended, 2 years at home under electronic monitoring), a €100,000 fine, and most devastatingly, 5 years of ineligibility for public office with immediate execution.

The best summary I’ve found is this one by Arnaud Bertrand. But I’ll summarize the salient points:

The case started in 2015, and it was dragged out so long by LePen’s own lawyers who filed every delaying motion they could think of, the timing is not a government plot.
Parties, including LePen’s, were using EU parliamentary assistant funds to pay for party matters. LePen is not the only one to do this, but she did much more of it than the other French party, the MoDems (Macron’s party): 2.9 million vs. 204,000, plus did it longer and the MoDems stopped before being forced to while LaPen kept doing it until she couldn’t. The MoDem’s punishment was minor, LePen’s is savage, but this appears to me to reflect the seriousness of what each did.
There really isn’t any question that the RN and LePen are guilty. They are.
Being forbidden from running is part of the law: if found guilty, you can’t run for office. However the court could have delayed that until after appeals.

So the questions are:

Is the sentence disproportionate to what was done to the MoDems. (No, I’d say.)
Is the timing based on LePen now being the front runner. (No.)
Should the court have held off on banning LePen from running until the appeal?

Again, I’d say no. There’s no question she’s guilty. If it was a case where there was some doubt, then holding off would make sense. The intent of the law is clear: if you have misappropriated funds, you shouldn’t be in office. This seems like a reasonable law: we don’t want politicians who misuse public money in office. The appeal won’t change the fact she’s guilty, and if guilty, she shouldn’t be allowed to be President.

This is unfortunate but the law is reasonable, there’s no case that she’s innocent and she did do something wrong and didn’t stop until forced to.

This isn’t Lawfare. This is justice, and the system working the way it should (except the case took too long) to enforce a law which is entirely reasonable, and not un-just. The higher penalty compared to the MoDems is also reasonable, because it is proportionate to the different actions of different defendants.

It’s easy to be cynical right now, to assume that law enforcement and justice is always corrupt, because it so often is. But on the rare occasions where it is reasonable and just, we should admit it and celebrate.

LePen is guilty, and she shouldn’t be allowed to be President of France and the court was right to rule both things, and was following a law which is actually reasonable and just.

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’s Negotiating Is Failing

By Ian Welsh

On March 31, 2025

Comments

If you want to call it negotiating. Iran refuses to even talk, unless America removes sanctions first. Putin will talk, but he clearly doesn’t intend to end the Ukraine war except on his terms, and certainly won’t agree to a ceasefire without massive concessions. China isn’t panicking over tariffs, but simply counter-tariffing. Europe’s getting uppity. Even midgets like Canada are standing up for themselves. Oh, and Ukraine still hasn’t signed that mineral “deal.”

Trump has said that if Iran doesn’t give up their nuclear program “there will be bombing like they’ve never seen.” He’s threatening Russia with secondary sanctions on oil, and he’s talking about tariffing everyone.

Apparently America doesn’t want any allies, or friends, and soon it won’t have any. This is batshit crazy, loop-de-loop nuts. The way to do this sort of thing is to single out one or two targets at most, and make everyone else think they’re safe, then move on. Trump’s acting like it’s 1991 or 1950, with the US at the top of the world, not like America’s in serious decline.

Oh it may seem like a response to America’s decline, an attempt to reshore industry, withdraw from Imperial over-reach and so on. Superficially it looks like that, but he’s just picking too many fights all once, his tariff threats are incoherent and unplanned, he’s defunding research and forcing brilliant scientists and engineers and scholars out of the US, has no industrial policy worth speaking of and is destroying America’s governing capacity with capricious cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

More to the point, he’s giving everyone else reason to route around America like it’s damage: to stop using the US dollar, to move to using local currencies for trade and to stop buying American goods and services, and yes, to stop selling to the US. The smart move, and it’s going to happen if he keeps this up, will be stop enforcing US intellectual property, end the DMCA clones and the prohibition on breaking digital locks, and to stop paying American internet giants their usurious fees.

The US isn’t agreement capable: you can’t trust them to keep their deals. This was true before Trump, but he’s super-charged them. Iran is right to say “well, we’ll talk after you keep the last deal we signed with you” and everyone else is coming to the same conclusion. If he won’t keep America’s deals, or even his own (the USMCA trade deal with Mexico and Canada is his) what’s the point of even talking? Just stop doing business with the US, period.

Smart policy isn’t to do this in one huge crash, because the US is very reliant on goods, resources and money from everyone else. You boil the frog, make things predictable and ease out of the problem. This isn’t Russia, which had China and India to backstop it when sanctions hit and which wasn’t massively in real trade deficit, making it up with non trade fees from its vassals and from countries which wanted to sell to it.

If you can’t sell to the US, why do business with it? What does it have that you can’t get from someone else? The obvious answer is food, oddly, but if even China is willing to put tariffs on both US and Canadian food, that dog won’t hunt.

It’s not that the US can’t do autarchy. It’s still a continental power, it’s still high tech, it still has plenty of scientists and engineers. But all that was true of Russia after the USSR collapsed, and the first decade and a half were ugly, and only got better because of Putin and the secret police taking charge—and they were able to do so thru a huge economic campaign to sell resources to the rest of the world.

And that’s where the US looks likely to wind up, after a period of chaos and deprivation: its’ behind in 80% of tech, it’s cost structure is too high, so it’ll have to sell food and natural gas: if anyone else is willing to buy. (The Euros may have no choice, everyone else does, because they aren’t blinded by insane fear and hatred of Russia.)

This sure is speed-running imperial decline. An accelerationist’s dream.

And if there’s a real war, what happens if Iran is able to sink an aircraft carrier? What happens when the US campaign against Yemen fails, as it will? What’s left of America if people aren’t scared of it? Nukes and complete pariah status and a massive nuclear proliferation scramble?

Likewise the whole sanctions regime bullshit is possible because almost everyone trades with the US and goes thru American and European banks. If they stop trading, they don’t need the banks and if European banks opt out, well, shit. So the fear of sanctions and the fear of military force goes way down.

Nothing to sell, no fear, and no one wanting to do business with the US, including buying its weapons.

This appears to be Trump’s endgame.

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – March 30, 2025

By Tony Wikrent

On March 30, 2025

Comments

by Tony Wikrent

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

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

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

Managing Unexpected ICE Visits: Best Practices for Employers

March 19, 2025 [IndustryWeek]

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

Trump not violating any law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will It Take?

Joyce Vance, March 26, 2025 [Civil Discourse]

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

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

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

The Next American Constitution