Warren Buffett, in his first sit-down since stepping down as Berkshire CEO, gave the cleanest indictment of legalized gambling in a decade. He called it a tax cut for the wealthy. The math proves him exactly right.
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) April 26, 2026
Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025.… pic.twitter.com/edLe9hAO2Z
(c) by Mark Dempsey
I recently attended the "listening session" for the Sacramento County Jail Master Plan, hosted by Eric Jones (PSJA@saccounty.gov). The ostensible reason for this session was to inform the County's plan for its jail. One of the primary motivators for the County to "change" its ways, jail-wise, was that it lost a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of the prisoners.
Build or not Build
A large part of the
From William Murphy here:
The United States does not have a “crime problem” in the way it’s usually framed. It has a social organization problem—a system that reliably generates the conditions under which crime becomes rational, predictable, and, in many cases, unavoidable. ....
When large sections of a population face economic precarity, unstable housing, inadequate healthcare, and underfunded education, those conditions shape behavior. Not in a simplistic, deterministic way—but in a probabilistic one. The more pressure you apply to a system, the more predictable its outcomes become.
In the U.S., those pressures are intense:
Under those conditions, “crime” is not an anomaly. It is one of several adaptation strategies.
The key point: these outcomes are not bugs in the system. They are features.....
And it leads to a fundamental contradiction: the same system that produces the conditions for crime also deploys force to contain its consequences. ...
Under capitalism, certain social conditions are not just tolerated—they are functional:
These dynamics generate inequality. And inequality, in turn, generates crime.
At the same time, entire industries profit from the management of crime:
This creates a feedback loop where the system has no structural incentive to eliminate the root causes of crime. It only has incentives to manage and monetize its effects.
If the problem is structural, then the solution has to be structural. Not cosmetic reforms, not rhetorical shifts—material changes.
Here’s what the evidence shows works:
1. Economic Stability - Cash transfers, wage increases, and employment programs consistently reduce property crime and, in some cases, violence.
2. Housing as a Right - [Also] Lowers overall system costs
3. Universal Healthcare Mental health issues and substance use are deeply intertwined with crime, particularly at the street level.Treating these as criminal issues rather than health issues produces predictable results: cycling people through jails without addressing the underlying causes.
4. Education and Youth Investment - These are not quick fixes. They are long-term investments.
5. Community-Based Violence Reduction - ...don’t rely on coercion. They rely on legitimacy.
6. Justice System Reform The current system often exacerbates the very problems it claims to solve.
The goal is not to eliminate accountability—but to make it constructive rather than purely punitive.
7. Redefining the Role of Police - Not every social problem requires an armed response.
At the same time, accountability for use of force must be real, not symbolic.
The Real Question ...The deeper question is this: What kind of society are we trying to build? One that manages inequality through force? Or one that reduces inequality so that force becomes less necessary?
Finland gave every homeless person a house and within 6 months 85% had a job and were financially independent.
— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 24, 2026
Less crime, less hospital visits, less suffering and even including the cost of the house, LESS COST than the UK/USA method of abandoning them on the streets. pic.twitter.com/G7hnCGa9bO
The spending on police is the domestic version of this. See
How structural insecurity and capitalist waste turn public safety into an expensive system of crisis management instead of prevention
Excerpt: "We’re told the U.S. has a 'crime' problem, but most of what gets policed is just poverty in motion. If you actually removed the economic pressure producing survival crime, you wouldn’t need half the policing apparatus we currently fund. The real question isn’t how to police better—it’s why we’ve built a society that manufactures instability and then pays billions to contain it.
"The United States treats policing like a technical issue: more funding, better training, smarter deployment, new tech. But that’s like treating a flooded house by buying better mops.
"The real driver of 'crime' in the U.S. is not individual pathology—it is structural insecurity produced by the economic system itself. When people are priced out of housing, buried in medical debt, and trapped in precarious labor markets, survival begins to reorganize itself outside formal legality. What gets labeled 'crime' is often just the informal survival logic of a stressed society."
Quoting neocon Hochstein from a CBS interview. Is the agenda to persuade us that the Iran war was inevitable a la Boss Tweed ("I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates")?
From Caitlin Johnstone:
Former senior Biden advisor Amos Hochstein said during an interview on Sunday that the Biden administration had been preparing to bomb Iran if they had won re-election in 2024.
Hochstein was asked by Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, “In July 2024 Secretary Blinken claimed Iran was one or two weeks away from having enough fissile material breakout capacity to eventually make a weapon if Iran had decided to do so. There were indirect negotiations that the Biden administration did, but it went nowhere. So when President Trump argues that he did what no other president would, is it just simply that the bill was coming due and it fell on his watch?”
“I do think there’s a certain element to that, and that’s why I was supportive of President Trump joining in in June to take the strikes that we had thought internally in the Biden administration, we may have to take if there was a second term,” Hochstein replied. “We thought that the spring, summer of 2025 was probably, we may have to be there in the same place. And we did, we did war games. We did some practice runs on what it would look like to look into it, because that may have had to happen under our watch as well.”
Hochstein, for the record, is an Israel-born IDF veteran who reportedly played a major role in the Biden administration encouraging Israel’s horrific bombardment of Lebanon in September 2024. And his narrative that an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities “may have had to happen” under a theoretical second Biden term is false.
In March of last year, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard testified before Congress that the intelligence community “continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and supreme leader Khomeini [sic] has not authorized the nuclear weapons program that he suspended in 2003,” contradicting both the claims of President Trump and of Antony Blinken the year before.
But even if you accept that Iran was a nuclear risk, there was nothing stopping the Biden administration from simply restarting the nuclear deal that the Obama administration secured with Tehran in 2015. The JCPOA was working fine while it was in place; anyone who says otherwise is a lying warmonger. Trump and his handlers torched the JCPOA in 2018 because it was the primary obstacle preventing them from getting to war with Iran, and the Biden administration refused to reverse this move because they wanted war too.
The Democrats were beating the drums of war for Iran well ahead of the 2024 election. Here’s an excerpt from the official 2024 Democratic Party platform explicitly attacking Trump for not going to war with Iran in his first term:
“All of this stands in sharp contrast to Trump’s fecklessness and weakness in the face of Iranian aggression during his presidency. In 2018, when Iranian-backed militias repeatedly attacked the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq Trump’s only response was to close our diplomatic facility. In June 2019, when Iran shot down a U.S. surveillance aircraft operating in international airspace above the Straits of Hormuz, Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team. In September 2019, when Iranian-backed groups threatened global energy markets by attacking Saudi oil infrastructure, Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies. In January 2020, when Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops in western Iraq, Trump mocked the resulting Traumatic Brain Injuries suffered by dozens of American servicemembers as mere ‘headaches’ — and again, took no action.”
Kamala Harris, who controversially replaced the dementia-addled Biden as the Democratic candidate late in the race, labeled Iran the number one enemy of the United States. In their 2024 debate, Harris repeatedly slammed Trump for being too soft on America’s enemies and announced that she “will always give Israel the ability to defend itself, in particular as it relates to Iran and any threat that Iran and its proxies pose to Israel.”
I’ve seen a lot of people trying to argue that Trump’s depravity in Iran proves everyone should support Democrats, but it’s clear the Democratic Party is just the more polite-looking face on the same evil power structure.
The war with Iran was always planned. Analysts like Brian Berletic and Richard Medhurst have been laying out solid arguments that this American war is more about attacking the economic and energy interests of Russia and China in a last-ditch effort to retain planetary hegemony than it is about assisting Israel. This places the United States on a dangerous trajectory toward increasingly hostile escalations between nuclear-armed powers.
These moves were planned years in advance, and would have been rolled out regardless of what impotent meat puppet happened to be wheeled into office in January 2025.
You don’t get to vote out an empire. Whether or not the US will continue working to dominate the planet will never be on the ballot. We will continue seeing reckless US wars of immense human consequence until the empire falls, or until the American people bring the revolutionary change to their country that the world so desperately needs.
An accompanying primer.
These Articles should help those who do not understand what a government is with monetary sovereignty and who do not understand Public/Federal Debt which does not operate as a household budget.
Bill Mitchell: If you think you know what ‘debt’ is, read on
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=24850
Bill Mitchell: There is no federal public debt problem in the US
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=15490
Bill Mitchell: DEBT IS NOT DEBT
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=3346
Bill Mitchell: Been searching for a public debt overhang - didn’t get far
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=26289
Bill Mitchell: The US government can buy as much of its own debt as it chooses
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=25161
Bill Mitchell: Direct central bank purchases of government debt
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=29140
George Monbiot: 1) Neoliberalism - the ideology at the root of all our problems
https://goo.gl/LOferJ
George Monbiot: 2) Neoliberalism: the deep story that lies beneath Donald Trump’s triumph
https://goo.gl/vHveSG
Warren Mosler: “The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy” located here from Mosler's website: https://goo.gl/xOeKRT
Austerity creates fascism
Cory Doctorow, April 12, 2026 [Pluralistic]
…”Austerity begets fascism” is one of those things that makes a lot of intuitive sense, but it turns out that there’s a good empirical basis for believing it. In “Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right” four economists from the LSE and Bocconi provide an excellent look at the linkage between austerity and support for fascists: Public Service Decline and Support for the Populist Right – Evidence from England’s National Health Service (pdf) Here’s how they break it down. Political scientists have assembled a large, reproducible body of evidence to show that “public service provision is crucial to people’s perceptions of their quality of life and living standards.” Good public services are the basis for “the social contract between rulers and the ruled” – pay your taxes and obey the laws, and in return, you will be well served. When public services go wrong, people don’t always know who to blame, but they definitely notice that something is going wrong, so when public services fail, people stop trusting the state, and that social contract starts to fray. They start to suspect that elites are lining their pockets rather than managing the system, and they “withdraw their support” for the system. Fascists thrive in these conditions. Fascists come to power by mobilizing grievances. By choosing a scapegoat, fascists can create support from people who are justifiably furious that the services they rely on have collapsed. So when you can’t get shelter, or health care, or elder care, or child care, or an education for your kids, you become a mark for a fascist grifter with a story about “undeserving migrants” who’ve taken the benefits that should rightly accrue to “deserving natives.”….
