Ian Welsh

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

Fiscal Failure & The French Revolution

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On April 23, 2025

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(Post by Bruce Wilder, Elevated from the Comments)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On April 21, 2025

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Top Tax Rates

—And thus, inability to run the state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – April 20, 2025

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On April 20, 2025

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by Tony Wikrent

 

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]

 

Trump is Opening The Enemies Briefcase: Congress Paved the Way

Andrew Cockburn, April 19, 2025 [Spoils of War]

We can’t say we weren’t warned. The emergency powers Trump has invoked to impose the largest tariffs in a hundred years, fast track energy and mineral production, and militarize federal lands on portions of the southern border were at least on the public record, authorized by Congress in The National Emergencies Act of 1976. The act permitted a president to unleash 150 statutory powers by declaring a national emergency. Legislators thought they had curbed the possibility of untrameled presidential power by adding the proviso of a “legislative veto” giving Congress the ability to terminate an emergency with a simple majority vote. But in 1983 the supreme court nixed that with a ruling, INS v. Chadha, that declared legislative vetoes unconstitutional. Trump’s first term deployment of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, passed by Congress in 1975, to build his border wall excited comment and alarm, but no effective action to stop him.

But in March, 2020, Trump cryptically remarked “I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about.” He was referring to “presidential emergency action documents,” or PEADs, orders that authorize a broad range of mortal assaults on our civil liberties. Kept in a locked safe at the department of justice, these documents, in the words of a rare official description, outline how to “implement extraordinary presidential authority in response to extraordinary situations”

These instruments of dictatorship have not only never been authorized by Congress, they have remained almost totally secret. Elizabeth Goitein, senior director for liberty and security at the Brennan Center, is one of the few to investigate this momentous issue. As she told me when I first covered this topic in Harper’s Magazine, “This really is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, but though the PEADs are secret from the American public, they’re not secret from the White House and from the executive branch. And the fact that none of them has ever been leaked is really quite extraordinary.”

Thanks to Goitein’s sleuthing, we know that in the past, PEADs have enabled the following: ….

 

American Concentration Camps

Chris Hedges, April 16, 2025

Those who build concentration camps build societies of fear. They issue relentless warnings of mortal danger, whether from immigrants, Muslims, traitors, criminals or terrorists. Fear spreads slowly, like a sulfurous gas, until it infects all social interactions and induces paralysis. It takes time. In the first years of the Third Reich, the Nazis operated ten camps with about 10,000 inmates. But once they managed to crush all competing centers of power — labor unions, political parties, an independent press, universities and the Catholic and Protestant churches — the concentration camp system exploded. By 1939, when World War II broke out, the Nazis were running over 100 concentration camps with some one million inmates. Death camps followed.

Those that create these camps give them wide publicity. They are designed to intimidate. Their brutality is their selling point….

 

‘Open Enemy of the Constitution’: JD Vance Ripped for Defending End of Due Process

Jake Johnson, April 16, 2025 [CommonDreams]

In his post on X, Vance—who has a law degree from Yale University—placed due process in scare quotes and claimed that “what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors,” not the U.S. Constitution.

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Open Thread

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On April 19, 2025

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

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

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On April 18, 2025

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Guest post by Whip Randolph

 

[From the One Disease One Cure Newsletter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvard Decides To Fight And America’s Elite War is ON

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On April 17, 2025

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So, Trump sent a bunch of demands to Harvard, which basically amounted to “we run this university now.” In the wake of his demand that Columbia submit to a consent decree, Harvard decided to fight and is trying to rally other universities.

This isn’t about free speech or any civil liberties values. Harvard was happily crushing Palestinian protestors. The issue is power: Trump wants to take power away from the people who run it now, and they aren’t willing to give it up.

This comes back to the simplest problem in negotiating with Trump: you can’t actually cut a deal, because he’ll always come back for more. American elites are beginning to realize that they can’t conditionally surrender: they can’t give Trump some stuff and expect to be otherwise left alone.

I think the odds of significant elite opposition are high. They don’t want to, but Trump has backed them into a corner. It’s fight or exit the elites.

This is going to be a nasty fight. Trump’s weaponization of the immigration system and presidential orders, especially dubious presidential control over spending means he has powerful weapons, including the threat of deporting citizens to prison camps for life.

But Trump has moved into “beyond a fuck-up” territory. He’s moved too fast and made too many enemies too fast, both domestically and internationally. He’s turned allies against him, and made everyone scared.

That’s not smart. The rule of purges is to do them fast, yes, but that once you’re done, you’re done. And when you make deals you need to keep them. No one feels safe, but they haven’t given up their power yet.

Worse, Trump is almost certain to lose Congress in the mid-terms. I’ve never seen a President more likely to be impeached, because he has made it “me or you”. Non-Trump aligned elites will go for his throat as soon as they can, and he’s turning a lot of elites who were pro-Trump against him with his “trade” policies.

American elites wanted to give in to Trump, but he’s forced them into a corner, and like the rats they are, they will fight when threatened with loss of their own power.

So buckle in and buckle up, sunshine. It ain’t over till it’s over, and it’s far from over yet.

 

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No Food Has Entered Gaza In Fourty-Four Days

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On April 16, 2025

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I keep seeing headlines about “food insecurity.”

SHUT UP

The word is “starvation”. Starvation. You media weasels.

Now despite what a lot of people think, starvation isn’t fast, and there were some stores, but those stores have run out.

So Israel is deliberately starving something like 1.7 million people, to death.

Meanwhile the only nation in the world trying to stop this is Ansar-Allah (the Houthis). And what is America doing? Sponsoring a ground invasion by the “official government” of Yemen.

The Houthis had no blockade during the ceasefire. When the Israelis announced they would cut off all aid to Gaza, the Houthis said they’d give them two days, then start up the blockade again. Which they did. (Note also that America offered Ansar-Allah an end to all sanctions, recognition and rolling the official government into them if they’d stop the blockade. So the Houthis are doing this at GREAT cost.)

People roll their eyes when Iranians and whatnot call America “the Great Satan” but… seems pretty accurate to me. Helping a genocide, and attacking the only nation in the world trying to stop the genocide.

One can always be “more evil’, but the US is pushing the boundaries here. Israel, of course, has been evil for every second of its existence and the national sport is “how can we be even more evil, while screaming “never again?”

The only good news is that America is speed-running imperial collapse. But even so, it’s likely to come too late for the Palestinians.

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

“The Chief Justice Has Made His Ruling Now Let Him Enforce It”

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On April 14, 2025

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So, basically, the Supremes ruled 9-0 that Trump had to obey a lower court when they court said to return Abrego Garcia, whom Trump sent to prison in El-Salvador, who is not a gang member as Trump claimed.

This case is wrong in every way:

  • It’s not legal to send someone to another country’s prison;
  • The ICE agent who said the hairdresser was a gang member was kicked off the cops for dishonesty, then got a job with ICE;
  • There was no due process before the hairdresser or any of the other kidnapping victims were sent overseas, many of them are clearly not gang members;
  • ICE is making arrests wearing masks, not showing ID and grabbing people off the street into unmarked vans. Straight up Gestapo shit.

But what’s particularly offensive is that Trump is saying “I can’t get him back” at the same time as El Salvador’s President is claiming “I don’t have the power to return him.”

This is “I’m telling the sun is pink, with blue polka-dots” level bullshit. Everyone knows they’re lying. This, alone, should lead to impeachment, the sheer fucking insult of such an obvious lie. And every newspaper and news show should be leading with “President Lies.”

Next is the simple fact that legality aside, even Trump has admitted the guy is not a gang member and that they made a mistake. Anyone with even the faintest scintilla of decency would arrange for his return.

Assuming there is a “plan” here, and that’s always questionable when dealing with Trump it is obviously to put the President entirely above the law: what he’s doing is illegal, he’s lying to everyone’s face, the Supremes have ruled against him 9-0, and everyone knows he’s punishing an innocent man. His administration has said they want to start deporting citizens in the same way.

“I can do anything I want and you can’t stop me.”

The obvious next play from the judiciary would be contempt rulings and to start locking up administration members for perjury, which would cause an obvious constitutional crisis, but the US is already not a Constitutional Republic at this point. I can’t even count the number of actions Trump has taken which should lead to impeachment. Due process and the first amendment are clearly dead-letter, he’s violating separation of powers repeatedly and his unilateral shutdowns of Congressionally mandated departments and programs are 100% un-Constitutional. He doesn’t have the right to change Congress’s spending decisions that way. Oh, and he’s publicly blackmailing law firms and universities “do what I say or I’ll hurt you.” Publicly bragging about it.

His tariffs are all based on “national security” clauses allowing the President to declare tariffs, which is, again, obviously bullshit, though it’s also true that Congress is entirely complicit, since they could take that power back. (It shouldn’t be possible for one branch to delegate powers to another branch. The founders never intended for the President to be able to declare war, for example.)

But really, it’s the “sky is not blue” lying that is most offensive to me.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

– George Orwell, 1984

 

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