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

for whatever reason, Americans take allegations like these much more seriously than gross corruption, bribe taking, insider trading, or mass murder.

And now an allegation against Platner which was organized by a Democratic establishment lawyer has lead to Platner quitting.

Which is exactly the wrong thing to do. He says he didn’t do it, the Maine party will pick the new candidate through a meeting of six hundred insiders, so the candidate won’t be a strong progressive, and by stepping down he removes protection from those who supported him.

How much more obvious can it be that this Platner ‘scandal’ is an attempted ideological purge of the left?

A lot of people played into it because they just don’t really hold to their stated values. https://t.co/fDlTIFgzAf

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) July 8, 2026

The reason Stoller is on this is that like me he came up through the Netroots. We’ve seen this playbook over and over and over again. We recognize it.

The idea that it is principled is laughable. I saw Fetterman attacking Sanders for supporting Platner, as if Fetterman doesn’t support Israel, who rapes as policy and raped at least one person to death (and it won’t just be one.) Oh, and that genocide.

The left is getting scary to the center. They won quite a few primaries, and the goal now is to take them out post-primary. The most important thing is always controlling the party, winning is secondary, especially in America where the duopoly means that whichever party is out of power knows it will soon be back in.

This is why Starmer purged the left, including kicking out Corbyn.

Platner may or may not be guilty. I don’t know. But I do know that he just made a mistake in folding. To be fair, practically all his support in the party “un-endorsed” him, but frankly, who cares. At the least he should have stuck firm till he got to choose his successor. Make it clear that they’ll have him around all election season, drawing media attention the party doesn’t want, one way or the other.

Folding never gets you anything. There is no honorable peace between the left and the establishment: there are no rules of war, and the left needs to stop acting as if there are. Platner will be smeared as a rapist either way (even if he’s never charged) and the people who believed in him will be fucked over.

(And yeah, he had plenty of red flags and someone else should have been found. But charisma is a thing, and he had it and the safer candidates didn’t.)

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 Attacks Iran & Declares The Truce Over

By Ian Welsh

On July 8, 2026

23 Comments

From the orange man’s mouth:

“As far as I’m concerned, it’s over,” Trump said at the ongoing Nato summit in Ankara when asked if the truce with Iran was now finished.

“It’s just a waste of time dealing with them,” AFP reported.

He blasted Iran’s leaders after Washington launched strikes on the Islamic Republic and Iran said it targeted US bases in the Gulf.

“They’re sick, there’s something wrong with them,” he said.

Treasury also re-instated oil sanctions on Iran.

The simple calculus is that the US was trying to re-open the Strait through Oman waters, and while they got a few ships thru, the Iranians stopped most of them hit some. As long as the Strait stays closed, the US is under pressure, because there is a physical economy, and reserves are running down, leaving aside shortages in fertilizer, helium and so on.

Iran just needs to keep the Strait closed to put pressure on the US homeland. As usual, the US can’t be hit directly by its enemies, so this is Iran’s way of hurting America even though its missiles can’t reach American cities.

On the other hand, the US can directly hit Iran, and if they didn’t actually want peace on the terms of the MOU, which apparently they didn’t (though I think this is a factional dispute inside the administration), then going back to hitting Iran makes sense.

Problem is that if the Iranian military does what it’s threatening to do, which is to blow the hell out of oil infrastructure in the Gulf States, the shortages will last years.

And the US isn’t leaving Iran with a lot of other options in terms of escalation.

Anyway, we’ll see what happens. Trump’s decisions have the consistency of runny jello, the real question is if the Iranian hard line faction wins their internal debate and is given the green light to go all out.

Unintended Consequences: Germany Sick Leave Edition

By Ian Welsh

On July 7, 2026

17 Comments

So, Merz has announced that German workers will need a note from a doctor day one of calling in sick, and they must get that note in person: phone calls are no longer acceptable.

All the usual garbage: uncompetitive, high costs for employers, blah, blah, blah. (This comes after raising the retirement age.)

Here’s the actual sick leave situation:

Hey, it suddenly increased after 2020? Is anyone surprised? Bueller?

Anyway, doctors and clinics are a fixed resource. Forcing people to go in and see a doctor (normal wait times in Germany are two to three days) mean taking more time with the patient. That means pushing other patients back. So wait time will increase.

Second more sick people will go into work. Some of them will be infectious. More people would wind up sick than if you just let people stay home.

Sub voce this is “we don’t trust people, we think some of them are lying” plus “people really should work when only slightly ill. Suck it up sunshine.”

But the increase in sick time is clearly Covid related, presumably long Covid, so it isn’t likely there’s a sudden epidemic of malingering. And while you can’t pass on long Covid directly, it still means that other people who do have diseases they can donate to their co-workers will come in.

Governments rarely seem to think thru these second order effects and ask if they’re worth it. The City of Toronto has been forced by the Province of Ontario to shut down supervised injection sites.

Now if you’re a normal human person you’re probably thinking “oh no, people will die!”

And that’s true. But Premier Ford doesn’t give a damn about that. There is another effect, however, that he should give a damn about, because voters care, and the Conservaties do have seats in Toronto.

Average wait times in emergency wards are a bit over an hour thru the province. But they’re much higher in Toronto. As of this writing the closest emergency department to me has a wait time of a bit over five hours.

According to ER doctors overdoses can drive those times up significantly. Overdoses require priority treatment, after all. So if more drug users are overdosing (or their drug wasn’t what they thought it was, because the supply is so adulterated), then wait times will go up more.

And voters care about this. A lot. (Last time I went to an emergency department I waited over eight hours. I needed stitches, it was overnight, but I was in no danger, so I got to wait a very long ) People have in some cases died because of wait times, since it isn’t always obvious how bad something is, and while the number may not be large, the bad publicity often is.

This is something Ford and the Conservatives should care about, but it’s rarely mentioned. Bleeding hearts (which I mostly am) tend to lead with “drug users will die”, not getting that to Ford that’s probably a good thing. But “regular citizens will wait longer in the ER and some of them will die” is not something he wants. He may not personally care (I doubt he cares about anybody but himself), but he does care politically.

As for Merz, he’s the worst German leader of my lifetime, trying to run military Keynesianism and letting Germany’s industry be destroyed while he fiddles with marginalia. A few extra sick days aren’t why Germany’s losing its industry and it won’t make the least bit of difference. What is required is innovation and driving down energy prices, but that would require making peace with Russia and Merz is a warmonger.

Ruled by fools.

Most US Jobs Won’t Support An American Lifestyle

By Ian Welsh

On July 6, 2026

27 Comments

Over at Interfluidity there’s a good post titled “Why Are Americans So Unhappy?”

Part of the answer boils down to this graph:

What this measures is what percentage of expenses of employees wages pay.

You’ll notice it keeps going down. It peaked near 100% around 1968 and has been trending down since. It’s now under 80%. Note the spike in 2020 when the government let lose the taps and actually helped people. I know a lot of people who, contra the “lockdowns sucks” remember 2020 as the only time they got to take a paid vacation. (And suicides in the under 18 group dropped massively, because school sucks.)

What makes up the rest of the money people use to support themselves? Well, for the better off its assets based wealth: dividends, capital gains and all that good stuff. But for all intents and purposes if you aren’t in top 10% the amount of money you get from these sources is infintesimal. So, in fact, what actually makes it up is having two people working where one plus maybe a minor part time job would cover it.

The post is worth reading in total, but I want to point out something simple: this is deliberate. This is a result of policy. This is what American elites worked hard to create.

There are a lot of moving parts, but the most important for a long time was that the idea of NAIRU, that unemployment below a certain level was bad and caused inflation, so every time unemployment got low, the Federal reserve would crush the economy. (This is why good employment news would cause the market to go down, and bad employment news would cause it to rise all through the 80s to 2000s.)

Low unemployment is when employers are forced to raise wages, since there’s more jobs than applicants. It’s when labor has pricing power. So the Federal Reserve spent over 30 years (and still does occasionally) deliberately suppressing wages because they figured that wages were the most important form of inflation.

Or that’s what they said. There’s lots of sources of inflation, but somehow the Fed was never concerned with bubbles, never concerned with moral risk, never concerned with oligopolies and monopolies, never concerned with actually supply as opposed to demand. Nope, it was all those nasty workers who wanted raises.

Now a cynic, or perhaps a realist, might think “if there were a lot of ways to deal with inflation and the only one they did was crush wages” that perhaps inflation wasn’t at least 50% just an excuse to crush wages.

A realist might notice that everything else happening, like tax cuts on the rich, the end of Glass-Steagall, deregulation and much more all seemed to have as its effect making the already rich richer, and notice that wages are an expense to rich people, not their primary source of income, and that crushing wages thus also helped make the already wealth even richer.

Since many people pointed out, as early as the mid 80s, that the result of the policies being pursued would be rampant inequality, and indeed it was showing up in the stats as early as those 80s, one can safely assume that decision makers, whether at the Fed, Congress or anywhere else understood what the results would be.

But, after all, they are the important people. The good people. The job creators. The people who are worthy of having lots of money. Nurses, orderlies, janitors, clerical workers, garbage men: pretty much everyone who has a job that actually does something the economy actually needs done and when it isn’t done people scream, they’re putzes and don’t deserve to have a good life. Just disposable trash.

At its heart it really is this simple. There were plenty of ways to deal with inflation, and many were suggested at the time. The most regressive path, one everyone knew would cause a lot of poverty and increase the wealth of a minority massively was chosen. It was chosen because it benefited the people in charge and their retainers, and those people didn’t and don’t care about anyone else.

Along the way the morons also managed to piss away America’s industrial and tech lead and lose America’s superpower status. But being fake rich (because it’s China that’s actually rich now, no matter how many billions of US dollars you have) and crushing their lessers was what was important to them.

And yeah, plenty of people, your kind and gentle host included, predicted this, well in advance. It was known. If you didn’t know, it was because you metaphorically had your fingers in your ears as you chanted “it doesn’t matter who makes things, or where. The market is global and fungible. It doesn’t matter who makes things, or where the market is….”

Anyway, it worked out for a few people. A few million. It’s a big club, as a comedian once noted, and you aren’t in it.

Your living standard was crushed, your wife was forced to work (not just permitted, but forced) and your children’s future was pissed down the drain deliberately, along with America’s place in the world, because it made a few million people rich, and a few thousand so rich Gilded Age barons would be jealous.

There was a class war.

The rich won.

You lost.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

By Tony Wikrent

On July 5, 2026

11 Comments

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 05, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

UNhappy birthday, America

Reconsidering the Constitution’s Preamble: The Words that Made Us U.S. — University of Wisconsin Legal Studies Research Paper Series Paper No. 1718

David S. Schwartz, September 25, 2021 [37 Constitutional Commentary 2022]

[TW: I now refer to the GOP and its members as (anti)Republicans and the (anti)Republican Party, because they believe in a philosophy of governance that is repugnant to the original principles of civic republicanism on which USA was founded. The two major principles of civic republicanism are promoting the general welfare, and justice, as explained by Senator Charles Sumner in a speech on February 5 and 6, 1866, The Equal Rights of All: The Great Guaranty and Present Necessity, for the Sake of Security, and to Maintain a Republican Government; Speech in the Senate, on the proposed Amendment of the Constitution Fixing the Basis of Representation. (Here are excerpts.)

[(Anti)Republicans have openly and explicitly rejected the founding principle of promoting the general welfare. This rejection is centralt to their attacks on the “welfare state.” See Randall G. Holcombe’s 1992 article arguing that the major improvement of the Confederate Civil War constitution was the elimination of the General Welfare mandate. Holcombe served on Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors in Bush’s 2016 presidential campaign. Also see Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s May, 2011 misinterpretation of James Madison, enumerated powers, and the General Welfare mandate.

[Recovering the meaning of the General Welfare Clause necessarily includes a rebuttal of conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist attempt rewrite the Constitution with their pet theories of constitutional originalism and enumerated powers.

[Until they were shocked by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, liberals and leaders of the Democratic Party have been blind to this reactionary project. Democrats and “the left” have committed a grievous error of omission by ignoring the historical record of the fight within USA between republicanism and oligarchy, and rejecting out of hand USA Constitutional law and political history as mere instruments of an oppressive and exploitative capitalist system tainted irremediably by slavery, racism and bigotry. This omission has crippled the ability of “the left” – not to mention the leadership of the Democratic Party – to comprehensively understand how thorough, insidious, and deadly the reactionary project is. They mistakenly believed liberalism was a derivative of civic republicanism instead of seeing how much of liberalism — with its emphasis on “private property” and “individual liberty” — was shaped as an oligarchical response to civic republicanism and the rise of the American republic. Thus they were disastrously outflanked by the Rehnquist / Scalia / Thomas assault on the law and persistent undermining of the principles of civic republicanism.

[Nevertheless, some constitutional scholars and historians — such as those listed in the excerpts below — were quite aware of the reactionary assault on the USA justice system, and working to correct a historical record that had been hijacked by the conservative / neoconfederate / (anti)Federalist project. The liberal / Democratic / “left” response to “the right” is bound to fail until it incorporates the work of these constitutional scholars and historians.

[Conservatives and originalists dismiss the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution as a “stylistic flourish with no operative legal significance,” but “the drafting history of the Preamble, observable by comparing the preambles in the Articles of Confederation, the Committee of Detail draft of the Constitution, and the Committee of Style’s final version, demonstrate that the Framers considered the Preamble to be substantively meaningful.” There is room to debate the exact meaning of the Preamble — “it might be viewed as a rejection of compact theory, as an interpretive guide to the powers granted in the body of the Constitution, or as a source of implied powers.” But concluding that the Preamble is “a legally inoperative flourish has no basis as a matter of text or history.”

[In his 1833 three-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States — long considered the most through and faithful exposition of Constitutional interpretation — Justice Joseph Story wrote that while the Preamble does not confer any “substantive power” on the national government, it does “expound the nature, and extent, and application of the powers actually conferred by the
constitution,” and should be used as a guide to interpreting the Constitution when “the terms of a given power admit of two constructions, the one more restrictive, the other more liberal.” Further, interpretation should be “governed by the intent of the power;” that is, Constitutional interpretation of federal powers should “promote” and not restrict — Story uses the word “defeat”” — that power. Schwartz writes,

“For Story, then, the preamble is an argument against strict construction of federal powers: a statement that the Constitution’s grants of powers are to be liberally construed, to promote such things as “the general welfare.”

[This is, of course, the exact opposite of the doctrines of conservatives and originalists such as William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, not to mention the entire (anti)Federalist Society. Schwartz makes the important point that

The argument that the preamble meant nothing more than a stylistic flourish … was highly congenial to compact theorists, nullifiers, and secessionists.

[We have seen this throughout American history: the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution have tried repeatedly to have the Constitution reinterpreted in ways that limit and even abrogate the powers of the national government. Today, the “domestic enemies” of the Constitution want to dismantle “the administrative state” and allow “free enterprise” and “private property” free reign to foul our environment, alter our climate, exploit our labor, limit our economic prospects, mute our political participation, and surveil our lives.

[Schwartz ends by noting that at the time of ratification, the Anti-Federalists fully understood that the grand objectives proclaimed in the Preamble meant that the federal government was not at all strictly limited in its powers, but pointed to an expansive realm of implied powers, as Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton would argue in his February 1791 report to President Washington on the constitutionality of establishing a national bank.

[Schwartz writes,

The Framers felt they had to clarify that the new government was a truly national government, and moreover, one based on republican principles—that is, authorized by the sovereign people, not by a grand interstate compact.

Significantly, nothing in the Preamble makes “limited enumerated powers” an object, or—pace Madison—an essential characteristic of the national government. The preamble does not list “federalism,” or “state sovereignty” or “balancing national powers with the rights of the states” among its great objects. [p. 10] ….

Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debates and early republic both understood the Preamble “as reinforcing a theory of sovereignty and national union that expanded the scope of national power, beyond either those powers that were enumerated or those powers that might be aggregated from that enumeration.” This nationalist reading, channeling the constitutional vision most acutely expressed by James Wilson, was thus a prominent reading—although so read with horror by Anti-Federalists—as Federalists in the early post-ratification years argued that the Preamble was indeed a legitimate source of implied powers. [pp. 11-12]

[There is plenty of history that clearly demonstrates the wild inaccuracy of “originalist” interpretation: Hamilton’s reports, Justice James Wilson’s law lectures in the first years of the republic [and it was actually Wilson who wrote most of the Constitution; Madison is better known because he took notes on the proceedings and later became President], Justice Story’s Commentaries, and more. Never forget that yhe Southern slaveholders insisted the slave states were the true republics in their time. Failure to understand what a republic really is at that time, and repudiate the slaveholders accordingly, led to civil war. ]

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On July 4, 2026

23 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. If you’re in America, I hope you enjoyed the holiday.

The Surveillance Society Is Here Courtesy Of Private Enterprise

By Ian Welsh

On July 3, 2026

17 Comments

In China they have cameras everywhere. I’m not a fan, but by most accounts the government doesn’t abuse this power much and it has made Chinese cities far safer. (If you want to argue they do abuse the power a lot, please look at incarceration per capita in China compared to the US. China seems to suck at police stateing. Yes, I know that’s not a word, but this is my blog and I’m going to use it anyway!)

In the US it’s flock cameras. They’re everywhere it seems.

⚠️Ten years ago we saw videos of China’s wall‑to‑wall cameras and said, “Glad that’s not us.”

Well… are we there yet?

HT: @jamesmadisonaudits pic.twitter.com/AfOR5WQCrx

— Jason Bassler (@JasonBassler1) June 17, 2026

The network currently is mostly about license plate readers, but the cameras are being expanded (no facial recognition yet, but I’d lay long odds they have it soon.)

Flock has recently expanded into other technologies, including advanced cameras that monitor more than just vehicles. Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock’s “Drone as First Responder” platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock’s drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.

The key thing here is that police can get this data easily, without a warrant. Even if you’re smart enough to leave your phone at home, pretty soon they’ll be able to track everything you do. This data will be stored, and if it’s ever time to get you, they will have years of data. What was innocuous at the time (that organization wasn’t on the watch list when you were involved) can be used against you, especially since America’s laws are so labyrinthine that practically everyone has committed something a prosecutor could call a crime.

And the idea that only police will have access to the data is laughable.

Trust America to create a panopticon which is worse than a government controlled one. Not only does the government get your 24/7 activities, but so can corporations and connected rich people.

God bless the Free market.

Old timers will know I used to write a lot about the coming surveillance society. Well, it’s pretty close to her. Less than five years, I’d guess, and anonymity will be essentially totally gone. Welcome to fishbowl world.

I also wrote many years ago that I’d know people were getting serious about freedom when they started destroying surveillance cameras, and there’s some signs of that:

🚨 BREAKING NEWS: People are straight-up DESTROYING Flock cameras across the country right now.

They’re out at night with power tools, sparks flying, cutting these surveillance poles down like it’s nothing.

Is this the start of a real privacy uprising… or just reckless… https://t.co/GYWmc1DFOF pic.twitter.com/WaMdqo5rH4

— Noah B. Price (@TrueOnX) July 2, 2026

A sliver of a silver lining, but better than nothing.

As for China, the CPC may be using this mostly responsibly, but it’s a loaded gun waiting to picked up when the government turns tyrannical and if history tells us anything it’s that over a hundred years or so, that’s almost guaranteed.

A surveilled world may be safer in some ways, but the price is significant.

The Basic Elements of Meditation: Meditation As Exercise

By Ian Welsh

On July 2, 2026

5 Comments

Meditation is simple.

Not easy, but simple in the same way exercise is. You do reps, with proper technique (bad technique can injure you or make the meditation unsuccessful).

Over time these reps teach your mind to operate in different and hopefully better ways.

To meditate all you need is a simple algo. Concentration meditation:

Pick an object of meditation. Your breath, a mantra, the center of your forehead, a flame, pretty much anything., Put your attention on it. When you notice you’re not paying attention, congratulate yourself for noticing and put your attention back on the object.

That’s it. It really is that simple, though as you advance there are various tricks and so on which can help. But you could go all the way just with that.

Vipissana (one type)

Notice something in your consciousness. Place your attention on it for a few seconds, then dismiss it gently (with love if you can), move to another object, do the same thing again. If you notice you’ve stopped this sequence, congratulate yourself for noticing and go back to it.

Not exactly rocket science, is it? It’s just that we are never trained how to use our minds or control our attention or awareness. There are plenty of different variations, but at their heart, almost all of them are like this.

Any type of meditation of this sort of also trains meta attention, which is just knowing what you’re paying attention to at any time. If you’ve ever intended to do something and realized you’ve been doing something else for a few minutes, or longer, then your meta-attention failed. For most people, this is frequent. You can’t control your attention if you don’t know if what it’s doing is what you intended. This is probably the most important meditative capacity, and it’s useful in life as well.

There are two types of meditative accomplishments.

The first are like exercising to stay in shape. If you stop doing cardio your resting heart rate goes back up and you can’t run for very long without losing your breath., If you stop lifting weights the muscles slowly go away. Concentration meditation and the altered states it can get you into (which are VERY nice) is like this. If you want this capacity you’ll first have to get into mental, probably at a retreat, then you need to maintain the ability, which is about two hours a day.

The second type is like learning how to throw a ball or ride a bike. If you keep meditating/exercising, you’ll be a better, but if you stop you don’t forget. These sorts of accomplishments include things like being less reactive and more relaxed, various psychological improvements and various attainments that are sometimes considered enlightened such as viewing the world as yourself, having no self (interpretative difference), lack of suffering on automatic as opposed to requiring meditative tricks and so on.

The second type are often called insights. They aren’t like intellectual insights (though intellect can be used to help gain them), they are changes in how you view the world at a subconscious level. Sometimes this can go back, there’s a whole group of shrinks treating meditators who drove themselves crazy with depersonalization or derealization. Both “I am not a person” and “I am not real” are insights, but if you can’t handle them, they go from good to bad.

So the general rule of meditation is that if starts getting really scary, stop. Consult a teacher you trust, but take a break. Now this doesn’t mean stopping at any unpleasantness because as soon as you make actual progress there will be unpleasantness. Your mind starts to calm, the chatter grows less, and all the garbage and trauma and fears and desires that have been suppressed start bubbling up.

It’s ugly. The more screwed up you are (and you may be more screwed up than you think) the more it sucks. Over time, if you stick it out, you learn to let all this crap go, or most of it and you feel a lot better. But the process isn’t fun.

Anyway. Meditation is just learning how to control your own mind, or learning about the mind in general, since you sure can’t control a lot of it. It’s pretty simple, the complications all come from what happens when you begin to realize you aren’t who or what you thought you were. That can be ugly.

Find a meditation you like, do the reps. Always be sure to include some lpving kindness or concentration meditation, never do just insight meditation except under the instruction of a teacher you trust who is monitoring your progress.