A little economic context

 

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— NO CONTEXT HUMANS (@HumansNoContext) January 9, 2026

How is labor doing?

 

Released this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ labor share of income for Q3 2025 is the lowest on record. pic.twitter.com/LvcUIPGHDD

— Mike Konczal (@mtkonczal) January 8, 2026

How to solve the "housing crisis"

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Several online commenters have written about the "housing crisis," suggesting off-site, modular building, or reduced regulation, etc., would solve the problem. I'd suggest these amount to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

First of all, there's really no shortage of built homes. There are more vacant homes in the US than its current, biggest-since-the-Great-Depression homeless population. San Francisco has five times as many vacant homes as its homeless population, for one.

Is there any suggestion to raise property taxes on vacant properties, as Vancouver did to solve this problem? [Crickets]

Nixon stopped the federal government from building affordable housing, and Reagan--as he lowered taxes on the wealthy roughly 50%, and with his successor raised payroll taxes eightfold--cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. Clinton signed the Faircloth amendment limiting federal affordability support, too, so the attack on the poor is bipartisan.

Setting that history aside, we could build mixed-income (poor among the wealthy), mixed-use (offices and retail among the residences), and remove a regressive tax imposed by sprawl--i.e., having to own a car. People could walk to work, school, or shopping. Four- or Eight-plexes among the mansions would accomplish this, and the poor (more generous, less materialistic) might be a good influence on the wealthy.😊

Build pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use at sufficient densities (11 units per acre and up), and we would have enough customers and transit riders within a walk of those destinations that local commerce and transit would be financially viable.

People often say they don't want denser neighborhoods--something that dramatically lowers land cost per unit--but many people pay premiums to live in NYC or Hong Kong.

The problem with density is that public services are absolutely critical. People are concerned about crime (yet per capita crime rates are lower in densely built NYC than in sprawlified Phoenix, AZ), and need things like parks, museums, etc. As I've pointed out above, the public realm (what's available to everyone) has been aggressively defunded since LBJ left office.

Implementing this would be a bit of a turnaround in a country where people are shocked to hear public enterprises actually beat private ones in providing goods and services. Publicly-owned SMUD is 35% cheaper than privately-owned PG&E, for just one example. Yet gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer somehow thinks "competition" will improve a natural monopoly like an electric utility. Wouldn't public ownership be an option? [again: crickets]

Unfortunately, the US population is eager for a deck chair rearrangement rather than a genuine solution, and kept that way by the massive marketing machine that tells us the post office is bad, and the courts are crooked, etc. And there is no shortage of well-funded saboteurs scheming to make those criticisms come true. 

For a little validation:

It's a myth that U.S. housing supply is short X million.

Simply divide total housing units by population.

We've never had more housing per person.

The problem is demand is FAR, FAR, FAR more sensitive to prices (price elasticity) than supply. https://t.co/yiDozYdP2V pic.twitter.com/LTdRGXnQMe

— John Wake (@JohnWake) January 9, 2026

How to (really!) improve the economy

 

Hey, what's a little crime amongst oligarchs?

 

Never forget:
-The only Republican US attorney fired in GWB's great purge of the DOJ was the guy who was about to indict the Sacklers
-Then Obama went and made Purdue's former defense attorney his AG https://t.co/V8yHZAQkKn

— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) January 5, 2026

American Thuggery Echoes History

 

In the last Gilded Age, Wall Street virtually controlled our government and turned the U.S. military into “a high-class muscle man for Big Business.” We’re living in the Second Gilded Age now, and history is repeating itself.

We can do better in this country. https://t.co/0LhCyHgK1N pic.twitter.com/w7Spe8Hf69

— Basel Musharbash (@musharbash_b) January 3, 2026

"Hope" = "Nope" ... The Obama "Justice" Pursuit

Alec Karakatsanis 

In 1997, Ezell Gilbert was sentenced to more than 24 years in federal prison in a crack cocaine case. Because of mandatory sentencing (treating crack 100 times as severely as powder), he was put in a cage for a quarter century, and even the judge said this was too harsh.

At sentencing, Gilbert noticed an error that increased his sentence by about *10 years* based on a misclassification of a prior conviction. In 1999, without a lawyer, he filed a petition complaining about the mistake. The Clinton DOJ opposed him, and a court ruled against him.

Ten years later, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in another person’s case, confirming that Gilbert had been correct about the error in his case. A public defender helped him file a new petition for immediate release from prison back to his family. He had served his time.

The federal judge sided with Obama/Holder, and Ezell Gilbert remained in a cage even though everyone agreed he was now in prison illegally. He had the audacity to hope that courts would follow the law.
A federal appeals court disagreed with Obama/Holder, and in June 2010, three judges set Gilbert free after more than 14 years in prison.

The judges rejected the DOJ’s argument as a departure from fairness and common sense. They said that it could not be the law in the U.S. that a person had to serve a prison sentence that everyone admitted was illegal. Ezell Gilbert went home and stayed out of trouble.

Here’s where it gets interesting. There are many people like Gilbert in federal prison whose sentences are illegal. Did you know that? Instead of rushing to ensure that thousands of people illegally separated from their families were set free, DOJ decided to fight and appeal.

The Obama/Holder DOJ argued: If prisoners were allowed to file more petitions, the “floodgates” would open and many others — mostly poor — would have to be released. They asked a larger group of judges to reverse Gilbert’s victory.

In 2011, a larger group of judges, led by a Republican majority, agreed with Obama/Holder that the “finality” of sentences was too important to allow prisoners to be released on a second rather than first petition, even if the prisoner was correct all along.

Ezell Gilbert was rearrested and sent back to prison to serve out his illegal sentence in a cage. Here's a link to one of the most shameful court opinions I've ever encountered, and one of Barack Obama and Eric Holder's most enduring victories: https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/200912513op2.pdf

An 87-year-old Republican judge wrote a dissent. Having served in WWII, he called the explicit decision to illegally keep a human being in jail “shocking.” He wrote that a “judicial system that values finality over justice is morally bankrupt.”

Addressing Obama/Holder argument directly, he said: “[T]here are many others in Gilbert’s position — sitting in prison serving sentences that were illegally imposed. We used to call such systems ‘gulags.’ Now, apparently, we call them the United States.”

Major media ignored Ezell Gilbert’s case at the time. Eric Holder did something similar in an even more egregious effort to preserve illegal sentences in the cases of Cornelius and Jarreous Blewitt, which consigned tens of thousands more people to federal cages illegally.

In 2013, two years after sending him back to a cage, Obama granted Gilbert clemency, and the media praised Obama for his leniency. Tens of thousands of other human being remained in prison illegally. You’ve never heard their names.

These legal precedents, and the unaccountable formations of lawyers, judges, politicians and bureaucrats who make them possible, are essential to the authoritarian project. They normalize the unjustified deprivation of liberty.

Once this normalization of the senseless deprivation of a single person's liberty is allowed to sprout, it is almost impossible to contain. This is the enduring import of the civil rights work that we do, and why telling these stories matters to the hope of a better world.