Ian Welsh

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

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2026

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On May 24, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 24, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

Americans are leaving the U.S. in record numbers and spending hundreds to learn how to do it

Jennifer Liu, May 17 2026 [CNBC, via DailyKos]

…A record number of Americans are leaving the U.S.: The country saw a net negative migration of between 10,000 and 295,000 people in 2025, according to research from The Brookings Institution. The widest estimated range was among people who left voluntarily, with Brookings estimating that between 210,000 to 405,000 people did so last year.

It’s the first time in at least 50 years that more people moved out of the country than moved in. Restrictive immigration policies and deportation efforts play a role, according to Brookings. Some U.S. citizens are emigrating for school, work, raising a family, retirement and everything in between.

Expatsi, a company that offers relocation tours for Americans, is becoming a sought-after resource for some….

The company, launched in 2022, held its second annual Move Abroad Con in San Diego on May 9 and 10. Some 600 Americans from around the country attended, double the number of people at the inaugural event held in May 2025, Expatsi co-founder Jen Barnett tells CNBC Make It.

A majority, 89%, said they want to leave the U.S. for political reasons, according to a sampling of 218 of the weekend’s attendees, per Barnett. Others say they hope to move for adventure and growth (73%), as well as to save money (57%). Roughly two-thirds of respondents hope to move within two years, they have an average monthly budget of $3,856 to work with, and hopeful movers are split among 44% individuals, 39% couples and 17% families with kids….

 

LinkedIn Is Doing What Bluesky Was Supposed to Do

[Popular by Design, via The Big Picture, May 20, 2026]

Rebuilding a public square on the platform you least expect. For a brief moment about a year ago, it really did look like Bluesky might work. Researchers and left-of-center intellectuals were flooding in, swapping starter packs, reassembling what felt like a nostalgic reunion of old Twitter. Then everyone arrived, and the center could not hold. A sharp argument that the post-Twitter intellectual conversation didn’t move to Bluesky or Threads — it quietly migrated to LinkedIn, of all places. Uncomfortable for everyone involved, but not wrong….

The people on LinkedIn are the people we should be trying to reach: policymakers, congressional staffers, civil servants, industry analysts, foundation program officers, and journalists at general-interest outlets. A 2025 Avoq survey of DC policy insiders found that 81 percent of Democrats, 84 percent of Republicans, and 78 percent of MAGA-aligned respondents use LinkedIn. Good representative data on LinkedIn compared to other platforms is notoriously hard to find, but this looks like a bipartisan footprint no other platform comes close to matching….

Discussion that actually moves understanding. The clearest evidence I have for all of this is my own cross-posting experience. I have often shared the same piece, including the more controversial ones, simultaneously on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn, and the pattern has been remarkably consistent. On Bluesky, the reaction is usually either silence or a small pile-on when the piece challenges prevailing consensus, and substantive engagement is rare. On X, responses are a mix of real engagement and the usual ratio of slop, bad-faith screenshotting, and reply guys.

On LinkedIn, the pushback I get is both the most civil and the most productive: named professionals who actually work on the topic, often from perspectives I don’t share, who write multi-paragraph responses that engage with the argument rather than perform outrage about it. This holds even for pieces and takes I expected to trigger the most hostility, because people disagreeing under their own name with their employer looking over their shoulder have strong incentives to be reasonable.

 

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Open Thread

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On May 23, 2026

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Year of Chaos: 2027

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On May 22, 2026

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Every society is three meals from chaos

-Vladimir Lenin

On May 4th I wrote that a year of hunger and famine is baked in for most of the world.

This was based on the effects of Six Week War and the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. But, in addition, we have the strongest El Nino is a hundred and fifty years incoming:


I’ve personally seen my food prices, before any of this is baked in, rise about 20% this year. I just saw a 33% increase in the price of tomatoes, beef is up over 40%, and so on. Almost nothing isn’t more expensive and this is BEFORE the absolutely catastrophic harvests we will have this year.

It’s easy to say that America and the West won’t have a famine because they can outbid most of the world for food, but the prices will be extremely high and a lot of people are going to go hungry.

I’ve been wondering for a long time what it would take to get Americans to actually do anything about their elites. The recent defeat on Thomas Massie (a noted Israeli critic) in his Republican primary has made it very clear that the powers of reaction in America are extraordinarily strong still.

Thomas Neuburger has an excellent article asking if the election was stolen. 

I don’t know if it was stolen, and I’m not sure that it matters much. If it wasn’t, well Jews spent 30 million and bought the election. If it was, well Jews spent 30 million and bought the election. (The most expensive House primary in American history.)

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

-John F. Kennedy

America has few problems it can’t, in theory, fix. It has no significant problems it can fix if current elites remain in charge, and its foreign policy can’t be improved as long as Israel controls Congress, and most State governments, which it does. (I don’t regard this as in question. Anyone arguing against it is arguing against massive evidence to the contrary.)

Opposing Israel is political suicide. That’s why AOC dances around pretending to be anti-genocide while actually covering for it. It’s why Mamdani has kissed the ring repeatedly.

They will come for you. If they fail, which is rare, they will try again. Eventually they will destroy you.

And that means that peaceful change is impossible.

Combined with the continued impoversishment of Americans, the building of AI centers in communities where the majority is opposed, mass lay offs due to AI, a very likely financial crisis next year, rising fuel prices, shortages of diesel, bunker and jet fuel, I’m going to be very interested to see how many riots there are and how many people  decide to go after politicians and CEOs.

As for the rest of the world: oh yes. There are going to be riots, revolutions, civil wars and coups in multiple countries. The question is how badly first world countries will be effected.

I remind readers to stock up now on as much as they can and I remind rioters that your job is to riot in the neighbourhoods of rich people, or industrial or office areas, not in your own neighbourhoods. Burning down your own homes is foolish.

I will also add that any competent government that cared could easily have made sure that most of the planting happened. Prices were the primary issue, and prices can be controlled and government can decide who gets how much diesel, prioritizing, y’know, tractors and trucking related to agriculture. This is something every western government could and would have easily handled in the 1950s.

Letting people go hungry and starve is entirely a result of government action (a war that was unnecessary, fought for Israel, not America), and government inaction. If people go without food next year, the people who caused it are known: they live in Washington, Tel Aviv and in every country which failed to take effective action they are your politicians the people who bribe them to not care about ordinary people.

You know who they are. They are you enemies. Their actions will kill or impoverish you, if they haven’t already.

And you know what you should do to enemies.

Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Freedom Under Representative Democracy (Freedom Series #2)

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On May 20, 2026

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In the first article in this series we discussed freedom under capitalism. The conclusion was simple: capitalist freedom for the vast majority of the population means the right to choose your master, your job, if you can find one. Once you have a master, you do what they say for most of the day, for most of your life. If you can’t find a master, you’re free to be homeless, hungry and eventually (few people survive being homeless more than about five years), and soon enough you’re free to die.

Yay Capitalism.

Note that this is structural: yes some people will become capitalists or otherwise escape the master trap, but the vast majority won’t and can’t. Someone is going to lose the dire game of musical chairs (jobs.)

Now let’s look at representative democracy.

In a democracy you’re free to choose your legislators or executives. You can’t vote for just anyone, though, only approved candidates. In most systems if someone runs without belonging to a party, they won’t win, and parties usually control you can become a candidate.

As a group the people who are elected will decide pretty much everything about how your society runs. Sometimes they seem to care about the citizens (FDR say) and sometimes they don’t. (Every American government since Nixon.) I can’t remember the last time food stamps were increased, rather than cut.

The number of elected people with real power is small compared to the population, and as an ordinary person your vote is generally meaningless. It’s never YOU who makes the difference. Big donors and other people who can organize groups of votes do, but that’s a vanishingly small number of people. So elected officials, especially at the national and State level pander to people with money or votes (pastors, for example. Used to pander to unions, not so much any more.)

Your choice of ruler is better than a hereditary aristocracy. Yes. But your actual power is insignificant. And Democracies have all the normal powers of government: they can draft you and send you off to die. They can send you to prison. They can take property to you. They can coerce you to work. Ideally they make it so people who lose the musical boss game are taken care of anyway, but often they don’t. Certainly they can do good and sometimes do.

But any freedom you have in a society is contingent on the government. Not drafting you. Making it so you don’t have to have a master. Making it so you can get health care, or not. Your freedom is contingent on what elected officials want: officials who structurally have every reason to pander to those with money or power: and that’s before we even get to the issue of bribery, whether while in office or after: Bill Clinton became very rich after leaving office. He was bribed post-facto and everyone knows that was the case. The last President who didn’t get taken care of this way was Carter.

Trump, of course, is just blatantly accepting bribes while in office, which has the dubious virtue of complete honesty.

A system where the people who decide what freedoms you have are structurally more likely to favor a small minority with wealth and power, and where if they are corrupt, you can’t bribe them, isn’t likely to maintain your freedom very well if important people think they’d benefit from you losing your freedom, is it?

Certainly people with money and power don’t really want you to not need a job and a master, because the people who have influence over them want cheap workers who will do anything they’re told to do.

Churchill quipped that Democracy was the worst system except for all the other ones we’ve tried.

Perhaps so, though the CPC and most Chinese disagree.

But even if true, representative democracy, at least in a system with significant wealth and power differentials, is a shit system where you have freedom only if elites feel it benefits them that you be free.

Perhaps in an egalitarian system it would work better, but under capitalism, which by its nature requires concentration of power, it does not

We’ll discuss other forms of organization as this series continues. For now, just note that representative democracy, by its very design, will tend to be more responsive to people who don’t want ordinary people to have freedom than to those who do want ordinary people to be free.

 

Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Are We Free Under Capitalism? (Freedom Series #1)

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On May 19, 2026

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The Goddess Libertas

The Goddess Libertas

Are you free if you need a job? For most people lack of a job means homelessness (indeed many homeless have jobs, that’s how far things have sunk) and you’ll go hungry, and almost certainly wind up dead sooner than otherwise.

This was well understood by the people who created capitalism. The central requirement of capitalism was enclosure (getting rid of common land which people could use for crops and animals.)

The fact is that peasants worked a lot less than workers. They had more holidays. They had to do some work for their lord, to be sure, but that was far less than the 12 hour days typical of industrialization, or even the eight hour days we now work. And, mostly, they controlled their own time.

The condition of having a job is that you do what your told. It was called wage slavery by Americans being forced off farms by low profits (because of railroad monopolies) for a reason: they had controlled their own time before. To be sure they had to work, even work hard, but they weren’t taking orders from a boss.

The fact that one can, sometimes, choose one’s master (for that’s what a boss is) doesn’t change the fact that they’re a master. In good capitalist times, in my experience before 90 or so, the worst boss behaviour was mitigated by plentiful jobs and easy choice: but today people put out hundreds of applications to get a job. Once you’ve got one, you can’t risk it by telling your master to bugger off if they order you to do things you find distasteful.

Bottom line, modern life is do what you’re told in school for twelve to twenty years, then spend your adult life doing what your told by bosses, then when you’re too old to work maybe you’ll be allowed a few years of declining health without a master. Quite likely you won’t even get that.

This is the modern form of slavery, where we pretend that most people have a choice. Oh a few escape, I have (at the price of poverty), and some others do, but the structure of the economy is that most people, the vast majority, must spend most of their life as wage slaves, doing what their masters tell them to. There is no way around this, it’s what giving control of the means of production (what you need to feed yourself, have shelter and goods) in the hands of a tiny minority of people.

It’s been a while since I discussed fundamental of how societies operate and what to change to make them better. We’re going to come back to freedom, a lot, as part of a series. We’ll also do a series on the fundamentals of societies: what is used to make them stick together, what determines how we run them, and how those are used against us or could be used by us to make a better world for 99% of humanity.

For now it is important simply to understand the chains that bind us, and not to fall for the lie that we are free or that our current civilization is the best that is possible.

Everyone reads these articles for free, but the site and Ian take money to run. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 17, 2026

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On May 17, 2026

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Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – May 17, 2026

by Tony Wikrent

 

War

Iran war has cost American consumers over $37 billion in extra fuel costs, Brown University tracker shows

[Drop Site Daily: May 12, 2026]

American consumers have paid more than $37 billion in additional gasoline and diesel costs since the war with Iran began on February 28, according to a real-time tracker developed by Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

 

Trump not violating any law

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

Trump Stuns By Saying ‘I Don’t Know’ When Asked Directly NBC’s Kristen Welker ‘Don’t You Need to Uphold the Constitution?’

Joe DePaolo, May 4th, 2025

 

Trump Isn’t Mentally Ill; He’s Evil

Thomas Meisenhelder, May 14, 2026 [Common Dreams]

…Nor are the mentally ill immoral. It is somewhat commonplace to find public figures, journalists, and other “experts” express that a person who commits a horribly immoral act must be mentally ill. This is a faulty presumption. Mental illness does not necessarily affect moral reasoning or understanding….

Donald Trump is not crazy, he is evil. The America Heritage Dictionary definition of evil has three components. The first one is that evil means morally bad or wrong. The list of the immoral acts of our president is too long to be included listed completely here, but consider just a sampling: participating in Jeffrey Epstein’s abuses, illegally detaining and deporting veterans, children, and others; using charitable donations for personal desires; separating innocent children from their families; fomenting racism and racial hatred; ridiculing the disabled; daily misogyny; supporting white supremacy; inciting violence; lying for personal gain; harming the lives of LGBTQ+ people; taking food and medical care from children and their families; and the list goes on and on.

The dictionary also defines evil as harmful or causing injury and pain. Rather than repeating the cruel and hateful list above, please consider this sampling of the harmful consequences of decisions of President Trump: ordering the murder of hundreds of people who have been in boats attacked because they were supposedly carrying illegal drugs; murdering nearly a hundred people in Venezuela when the country was attacked and he ordered its president arrested; causing death and injury to tens of thousands of Iranians during his war against the government of that country; partnering with Israel’s raining of death and destruction on the people of Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine; expanding the embargo against Cuba causing pain, injury, and death to ordinary Cubans; and his administration’s defunding of the medical aid and food assistance provided to less developed nations by the US Agency for International Development, which has damaged the lives of millions of people around the world….

 

INSIDER Exposes Trump’s SECRET EMERGENCY Midterm Plan!! (YouTube video)

[Legal AF, YouTube, May 15, 2025]

Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz interview Jonathan Winer, former State Department official, on the secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents, Trump’s intention to manipulate the midterm elections, his devilish designs, and how to foil them….

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Open Thread

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On May 16, 2026

23 Comments

Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.

The Haters Guide To Post-Modernism

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On May 15, 2026

25 Comments

To be read while listening to the Beastie Boys, Sabotage, at full tilt. Speakers, not earbuds you nit-wit.

In the beginning, circa 1989-93ish, post-modernism was out of step with mainstream academia. Derrida was a curiosity. Baudrillard was simply too dense to understand. (Confession: Baudrillard’s book, “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” is actually damned profound and prescient once you get past the kind of syntax that would make Yoda blush.) And Foucault, poor Michel (already dead by the time I attended university) was still dismissed as a fad—although of all the post-moderns Foucault’s work has aged the best and is worthy of respect. His discourses on the body, knowledge and the aggrandizement of power over all three by public institutions presaged neoliberalism. Credit where credit is due.

Sed tamen aberro . . .

Regardless, to the overworked and underpaid graduate students the post-moderns had the frisson of transgression. And nothing attracts the mediocre like a charlatan wrapped in the mantle of authenticity.

Eventually, those grad students became instructors, adjuncts and associate professors all over the country. Chipping away at the old ways by introducing Lyotard’s “incredulity towards meta-narratives” and Roland Barthes declaration that “the author was dead” both invalidating authorial intent and empowering the reader’s (usually baseless) interpretation, Derrida’s rejection of common sense and objective interpretations (known as ‘Deconstruction’) was the perfect mortar for the worst possible innovation.

It was probably Foucault, as his education included a substantial grounding in the history of science, who connected the dots leading from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, aka the observer effect, and grafted the concept onto his own thinking on the fluid and relative nature between institutions and power.

Then, in 1975 he took LSD. The experience changed everything according to Foucault. He completely revamped his work on human sexuality and its was here that sex took on the aspect of a social construct, to be negotiated. Sex was no longer an issue of pleasure, but of truth. (And thus our sexual identity politics were born.) Foucault’s popular discourse took on a life of its own, especially after his premature death in 1984.

The post-moderns soon expropriated wholesale the ‘observer effect.’ Unfortunately they abandoned rigorous analysis at the same time and like the good mediocre minds they were, adopted a pose I call, “la pose de Sarte.”*

With a highly dubious interpretation of science in one hand and quasi-erotic mojo in another students flocked to their lectures in droves. The ladies showed up for you. The men showed up for the ladies. And everyone ate up the half-baked but dangerously sexy contrarian theories on race, gender, and the negotiation of sexual identity.

Sometime between 2002 and 2014 when I returned to academia the entire coterie of post-moderns had infected all the humanities. And the observer effect acted like leprosy rotting the academy from every which way at once.

But the classes were full. Administrators took note. Professors got grants.

“Whoa, this grift is working?” They thought.

“Nicely done, Waldo.”

Now they’re wearing Zegna shoes and hand-woven black woolen Irish turtlenecks. Undergrad coeds hop in and out of their beds like Mae West on meth.

Soon they get published in peer reviewed journals by overworked and underpaid peers who just don’t give two fucks because university administrators have proliferated while tenured jobs have declined in nominal and real terms.

Big time college sports gobble up what is left of the academic budget, so universities start hiring half-assed adjunct professors and pay them slave wages.

And still, the post-moderns strike le pose, claiming their bullshit truth is equally as true as 2+2=4, when in actuality said theory is the the square root of wildebeest horns multiplied by baboon asses, divided by the Pyramid of Giza plus the Sphinx.

Making any sense yet?

It should not. It should boggle the mind, as not one iota of the post-moderns nonsense theorizing is scientifically provable or falsifiable. It’s bunkum. A weak attempt to prove there is no such thing as objective reality to anyone but the observer.

While working on my second masters I signed up for a seminar on the history of human sexuality. This was 2015 and we deconstructed the biological focus of traditional theories of sexuality. Now there was a masterclass of freeway rubbernecking idiocy. After that nonesense, we discussed Foucault, Jameson and finally Deluze, who more than any other post-modern flagrantly conflated science and mathematics to justify nothingness and subjectivity’s role on the observer’s effect, especially on sexual identity.

Give you one guess what conclusion we arrived at: sex is a social construct.

To be fair, gender is a social construct. The Thai’s have three genders, masculine, feminine and khathoey, or ‘Lady Boy.’ Kathoey are fully integrated and accepted into mainstream Thai, Cambodian and Laotian society. But sex, sex is not a construct.

I can prove the objective reality of sex’s falsifiability as a social construct.

Question: can you have an orgasm? Answer: yes. Then you are male or female.

Answer: no. Well, I respect your commitment, snip-snip, but you are neither male nor female.

Why would the professor care about any of this? He has tenure and his agenda. Besides, he’s getting laid more than Hank Moody in Californication.

Meanwhile the students grow stupider yet simultaneously more arrogant as they adopt le pose.

A vicious cycles ensues and we now find ourselves in the present moment, slaves to time’s relentless arrow.

But as the close neared its end it was time to put up or shut up. Yes, I know how to be a good suck up of a student and get high marks!

So, I wrote my research paper on the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine Cavafy and his catamite. I got an ‘A’ but the course, well, to be generous, it was a shit show of moral degeneracy and complete intellectual absurdity.

I’d have been better off in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. At least I’d have had more fun.

————————

*Sarte: French existentialist philosopher of high regard and mortal enemy of Foucault.

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