African Reality

 

This is the danger of only learning Eurocentric history pic.twitter.com/Hw5hOTu2gP

— Vanessa Jaye (@vanessajaye) May 17, 2026

Limits to Capitalism

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

I just bought some sandwiches for a trip at Noah's Bagels.

Noah's sandwiches were previously delicious, as were their side dishes. And don't get me wrong, the bagels still are still delicious, but the filling and side dishes were second-rate.

After a little Googling, I discovered that Noah's chain first went public and was later sold to what appears to be a private equity firm. You can practically hear the bean counters crunching the numbers and eliminating the delicious side dishes (cole slaw, potato salad). But ya can't eat money! Now you can eat stale potato chips.

This is going around, too. Rubio's closed its California restaurants, blaming the higher ($20/hr) minimum wage. Actually, its private equity owners took on so much debt that it couldn't afford to pay its workers in California.

There's further evidence that homebuilders are colluding to keep land in short supply, even as rents rise faster than wages, and the US has the biggest homeless population since the Great Depression.

Almighty profit blesses such collusion, and even conspires to make sandwiches worse. This is one of the genuine limitations of capitalism.

 

The Affordable Housing Conundrum

(c) by Mark Dempsey

A local pundit recently wrote that affordable housing is nice to talk about, but difficult to build. The costs are exorbitant (he quotes a reader saying $400-$800/sq ft, excluding land!) and our resources are already stretched to their limits, never mind the bothersome question of where to get the money.

This discouraging line of talk was echoed by an HVAC technician's comment to this writer about affordable housing he worked on. The poor occupants "trashed" their homes, he said.

So let's clear up a few of the misconceptions that include "housing is too expensive," or "it's too difficult to build," and "it's unappreciated by poor people." Talk may be cheap, but it's important that it be accurate.

First of all, nationwide, there are more vacant homes than homeless. San Francisco has five times its homeless population in vacant homes. As for the expense, Google tells us that Sacramento's median home price is $339 per square foot, including land. And that's for built homes, not theoretical ones. New construction on large lots in a nice neighborhood in eastern Sacramento County sells for less than $370 per square foot, including the land. Overstating the costs or shortages is not helpful here.

Incidentally, "it seems kind of crazy that large homebuilders would be doing joint ventures with each other on land acquisition, when that could very easily lead to holding supply off the market and preventing smaller developers from competing to build cheaper homes." Yes, monopolies in land and building supplies are raising prices. The US stopped prosecuting most antitrust violations in the '80s. Markets aren't competitive if the players collude to raise prices.

And what about the money? The government makes all the dollars it needs whenever it needs them to pursue whatever priorities the governing class wants, whether it's affordable housing or warfare. Incidentally, the sentiment that "printing" money is inflationary is baloney, but let's save that conversation for a later article.

Actually, the lack of affordable housing is a public policy choice. This shortage began when Nixon stopped the feds from building (more) affordable housing, and, as he cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half, Reagan cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. The largest homeless population since the Great Depression isn't an accident; it's the product of the generations-long, bipartisan attack on the poor.

Won't the poor trash the housing, though? Yes, poor people are comfortable with squalor. They are not concerned about material things; that's why they're poor. The positive side of that attitude is that they're generous and compassionate, sentiments that would profit the wealthy if they ever chose to pay attention to them.

So building affordable housing without either mixing the poor and the rich populations to have neighbors pressure poor people to pay attention to the condition of their homes, and neighbors instruct rich people to be more compassionate and generous...or budgeting not enough maintenance if rich and poor are separate, is a subtle form of sabotage. Rich people get to say, "See! They don't appreciate the crumbs we let fall from our table!"

Incidentally, Finland gave its homeless population homes. Reportedly, 85% of the re-housed had jobs within six months of that change.

One of the key components for affordable housing is affordable land. Want to cut per-unit land costs in half? Build two units on the land. Why don't we do this?

Multi-family housing has problems that public policy makers are eager to ignore. Smaller or non-existent yards--that occupants would otherwise have to mow--mean people need bigger public parks. Parks, culture, and education are the kinds of public amenities the governing class has downplayed in the US for generations now. Public policy makers have done everything they can to say "We can't afford that cultural/educational stuff!" while assiduously casting the isolation and cultural deprivation of suburban life in concrete.

Just about all the complaining about overregulation and intrusive state requirements is overblown. Locally, land speculators seldom find zoning or regulations they can't change to make their bets pay off.

Building codes do increase costs, but not nearly enough to make homes as expensive as they are now. In fact, increased insulation and solar panels requirements make utility costs lower, and earthquake readiness makes insurance less expensive. Nevertheless, there is no shortage of complaining about the "cost" of such regulation.

So to deal with the homeless (40% of whom are employed) and the homes for the poor and even the not-so-poor:

• We don't necessarily need more homes; we need to distribute them more evenly. Vancouver, Canada, began taxing homes left vacant to restrict supply and boost rents, and rents receded after Vancouver implemented the tax. California's governing class would like you to ignore this, but it's true.
• We need to be realistic about how much affordable homes cost to build, and understand that money is always available for society's priorities, without necessarily inflating other costs. USDA used to make ("Farm Home") loans subsidized so even farm workers could afford to own their own house. Needless to say, the Farm Home loans are seldom funded.
• We need to expect poor people will be less attentive to material conditions, and account for that in any affordable housing plan, whether mixing the poor with the rich (multiple units among the mansions) or stand-alone affordable housing (with a larger maintenance budget).
• To reduce land costs, and not incidentally make such things as economically viable neighborhood commerce and public transportation possible, we need denser housing than sprawl. If there aren't enough riders within a comfortable walk of transit stops, then we'll just roll around a bunch of empty buses or trains. The lower threshold is about 11 units per acre, says Berkeley planner Robert Cervero. That's slightly more than duplexes, and amounts to an occasional 4- or 8-plex among the single-family homes.
• Amenities like parks, culture, and education are not optional for more concentrated housing to work. We've tried defunding the "public realm"-- what's available even to the poor--for decades now. That defunding began with "white flight" (i.e., racism)--but it's a dead end.

So...that's what is not just possible, it's necessary. Will it happen? Intelligent pundits discourage it, and try to persuade other it's not even possible, ignoring accuracy in the process. Facing up to the obvious is not automatic.

Scoring a goal for the opposing team is called an "own goal." When people vote against their own interests, it's a version of the "own goal." A large part of political commentary tries to deceive people into "own goal" behavior so the plutocrats can continue to direct resources, even resources they don't use in a tragic pursuit of conspicuous consumption. That's the current state of play.

Cowboys & Conquistadors vs. Indians

 Here's Charles Mann's short version of his book 1491 delivered as a lecture. Highly recommended.

 

 

How to Master Life

From X/Twitter: 

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived. 

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear. 

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range." 

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence. 

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it. 

Chess works that way. Most things do not. 

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who  quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read. 

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on. 

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked. 

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different. 

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore. 

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport. 

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers. 

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them. 

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career. 

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding. 

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science. 

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway. 

Match quality matters more than head start. 

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose. 

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath. 

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was. 

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in. 

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

The Healthcare Update

 

The USA has been left behind because they kneeled to the billionaire class. They don't give a fuck about you. pic.twitter.com/svQ15smLAH

— Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 27, 2026

"Gambling is a tax on ignorance." - Warren Buffett

 

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.

Americans wagered $165 billion at legal sportsbooks in 2025.… pic.twitter.com/edLe9hAO2Z

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) April 26, 2026

An Italian Economist: Why Capitalism Isn't Natural or Inevitable, It's Enforced.

 

Jail Talk

(c) by Mark Dempsey 

A "listening session" for the Sacramento County Jail Master Plan (PSJA@saccounty.gov) just occurred. It sought to shape the jail's future, and a presentation, eventually, to the County's Supervisors. The county is motivated to change because it lost the Mays Decision, a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of mistreated prisoners.

The Mays Decision itself doesn't request bigger facilities; jail personnel are the problem. Public comments said this remains unchanged, and jailers remain abusive, even denying inmates their medication.

In fairness to the County, the jail is full. However, the County did not mention that 60%-80% of the prisoners are not convicted of anything except being too poor to afford bail. The US and the Philippines are the only two countries that require cash bail. Illinois and Washington, D.C., have abandoned it for selected crimes without bad consequences. The public, not the County, brought up eliminating cash bail.

The US incarcerates at five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada, and Canadian crime rates are lower. Prisons do not prevent crime.

The only prisoners described in the County's presentation were mentally ill or addicted. There was no mention of anything to address the poverty that prevents prisoners from posting bail. That's despite the largest homeless population since the Great Depression--driven primarily by poverty, not mental illness; in a country where 40% of the population can't afford a $400 emergency, and 60% of workers live check to check.

Santa Clara County has Destination: Home, which supplies emergency funds to those on the verge of homelessness. It took the public, not the County, to bring this up.

Will the "listening" produce any change in the County's willful ignorance about poverty driving people to desperate behavior like crime? Let's just say I'm not holding my breath.

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:

• Wages that lag far behind cost of living
• Housing markets that function as speculative assets rather than human necessities
• Healthcare tied to employment or priced out of reach
• Education systems stratified by zip code
• A labor market that oscillates between exploitation and exclusion

 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:

• Cheap labor requires economic vulnerability
• High rents require housing scarcity
• Private healthcare profits require limited access
• Consumer markets thrive on debt and instability

These dynamics generate inequality. And inequality, in turn, generates crime.

At the same time, entire industries profit from the management of crime:

• Private prisons
• Surveillance technologies
• Security services
• Insurance markets

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.

• Ending cash bail for low-level offenses
• Reducing excessive sentences
• Expanding parole and reentry support
• Using restorative justice where appropriate

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?

.... Crime is not an isolated pathology. It is a system output.

Update:

Finland gave every homeless person a house and within 6 months 85% had a job and were financially independent.

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

— BladeoftheSun (@BladeoftheS) April 24, 2026

War is the priority

 

The spending on police is the domestic version of this. See 

Public Safety Is Not a Police Problem. It’s a Political Economy Problem.

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."

Biden wanted to attack Iran too

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.

The Return of Full Employment Policy - Randall Wray

 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

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.”….

The Real Story of Crypto

 

.@ben_mckenzie on how crypto helps criminals and hostile states evade sanctions — and how Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick profits from it. #theweeklyshow #jonstewart #politics pic.twitter.com/cVzlhiq5ST

— The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart (@weeklyshowpod) April 15, 2026

 

So...besides enabling ransomware, and significantly contributing to global warming, crypto corrupts our government.

 JFYI, China has outlawed crypto mining. 

Update: Bitcoin Gets A Dark Money-Backed Assist In Congress

Veronica Riccobene, Apr 13, 2026 [The Lever]
 

Bitcoin’s secret backers celebrate a bonanza. A dark money pro-cryptocurrency influence group with deep ties to Trumpworld is lauding a new Senate bill codifying President Trump’s plans for a crypto-boosting strategic Bitcoin reserve and onshoring Bitcoin mining. The Lever’s Freddy Brewster reports that the Satoshi Action Fund — a 501(c)(4) group that does not disclose its donors — has shared top personnel with the Koch network of right-wing think tanks and dark money nonprofits. That includes the Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 plan to overhaul the government under Trump. An executive with the pro-Bitcoin group even wrote the Project 2025 chapter on dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency. A federal Bitcoin stockpile could boost the crypto token’s value to nearly $1 million a token, more than 10 times its current value — a massive giveaway to the largest Bitcoin owners, two percent of whom own more than 90 percent of all of the currency in circulation. The new bill was co-introduced by Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who is not seeking reelection after serving a sole term as a senator, during which she bestowed the title of “the Senate’s first and finest bitcoiner.”

  

MMT vs. Austrian Economics

Austrians want to make microeconomics the foundation of macroeconomics. Sonenshein, Mantel and Debreu proved, mathematically that micro is unsuitable as a foundation of macro. Two plus two would have to equal five before Austrians could be true.

Microeconomics: Savings is a good idea.

Macroeconomics: If everyone net saves, and your spending is my income, then we get the Great Depression. 

One other Austrian myth: Money supplanted barter, and credit ultimately replaced money. The sequence here: barter, then money, then credit.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of credit from ~3500 BCE, primarily marks on clay tablets for pay stubs, bar tabs and other obligations. Money (coins) arrived at ~800-600 BCE, literally millenia later. The correct sequence: credit, then money, and very, very rarely, barter.

David Graeber observes, in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that there has never been economic money (not magical money) without a supervising authority like a temple, king, or state. Never!

States create markets like this: If the king wants to hire 1,000 soldiers, he has a logistical nightmare ahead. He has to pay, clothe, feed, train and supply the soldiers and their steeds. How does he do it? He pays them in the authorized currency--let's call it "crowns." Then he taxes the entire population in crowns. This is obviously a simple example, and real world markets are more complex, but you get the idea. The Austrian idea of markets originating with "free people" with "free exchanges" is not something supported by history. 
 

Why are things so expensive?

 

pic.twitter.com/DxQ6g4oY3x

— Thursday (@ennui365) April 7, 2026

The costs of war

 

China's high speed rail costs about $17-21 million per km to build.

China built over 1,000 km of high speed rail for the cost of US war on Iran so far https://t.co/CWy3p1Hfgp pic.twitter.com/A0i87Cvgrs

— Carl Zha (@CarlZha) March 16, 2026

From Every Country That Lost It All Passed Through This Moment First — The U.S. Government Has Been Converted Into a Single Family’s Financial Instrument

Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, whose work on why nations fail identified the transition from inclusive to extractive institutions as the single most reliable predictor of national economic deterioration, documented this sequence across centuries of comparative history before this administration took office. Extractive institutions are those designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a narrow elite at the expense of the broader population. Every country that completed this transition took the same path: oversight capture first, financial extraction second, institutional hollowing third, and population bearing the biological cost last….

The critical variable in every case is not the volume of theft. Plenty of governments have sustained corruption without producing failed states. The critical variable is the deliberate destruction of the institutional layer between the extraction and the population.

 

Business as usual

 

Watching the discourse around the plane crash in Iran.

Everyone’s arguing over the aircraft , the recovery operation, the timeline, the flight path, the debris, the radar data…

Meanwhile, nobody stops to ask the most obvious question — whether the entire ridiculous story is… pic.twitter.com/bB3KMP1kw0

— Morgan (@MorganC000) April 5, 2026

Houston...meh!

Houston is often touted as the apotheosis of the "abundance" agenda, and is revered by anti-government libertarians. Why? Because it has the most minimal zoning possible, specifying only minimum lot sizes and road design. If you live in a single family home and want to open a bar in your living room (and the private subdivision restrictions don't forbid it), you can. It's a libertarian paradise!

One other observation: if you look at cities (and counties) with complex zoning restrictions--e.g., Sacramento City or County--you will see they look almost identical to Houston. Zoning, at least as practiced in parts of California, is completely ineffective, and regularly ignored, especially if someone politically influential wants a zoning change. (I've discussed this before here.) 

A new bit of information is that Houston's lack of zoning does not lead to prosperity or more affordable housing.

 

Notice that three Texas cities populate in this poverty ranking, but only two California cities appear.  The ranking is even more one-sided when one compares the availability of affordable rentals.

 

From replies to the Tweet that is the source of the above:

What's the percentage of the population that is classified as rent burdened?

 Alicia Gerardo: According to Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, about 51% of renters in Houston are rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than 30% of their income on housing. Additionally, more than 25% of renters spend half of their income on rent.

 Philip: Any info on the right graph as to what was considered affordable?

Alicia Gerardo: The National Low Income Housing Coalition's The Gap Report defines affordable housing as "Housing units with rent and utilities that do not exceed 30% of a given income threshold."nlihc.org  

The U.S. has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income renter households. Find out more. #TheGap26

 Philip: Nice, thank you! I think what the “just build more housing!” crowd doesn’t get is that no amount of new housing is ever going to drive prices down to a price affordable to people making 30-40k a year, which is a gigantic chunk of people.

 

The Meaning of Home Ownership

 

perspective pic.twitter.com/CL11i4GLtP

— Financial Physics (@FinancialPhys) April 4, 2026

Matt Stoller's take on what it will take to solve current problems: What does a non-oligarch driven America look like?

From Twitter/X: The reason Democrats have no position on the war is because no one has a coherent view on what to do. It’s not on them. 

The U.S. is basically the bank account and army for global oligarchs. This positioning is not good for Americans and it’s not good for the world. But it’s also impossible to imagine an alternative. 

The foreign policy establishment sees their work as a hobby. The U.S. is so endlessly rich and heroic that it’s all a game. They don’t think that the realm of foreign affairs should be good for ordinary people; that’s a rhetorical afterthought. To them the deindustrialization and erosion of the middle class at the heart of the destabilization of the world is sad but necessary, if they bother to notice it at all. 

The left foreign policy world is not actually that different. They are libertarian and hostile to Americans, and they don’t care about economics. Foreign policy to them is a hobby of the rich, it’s just the U.S. is the central villain instead of central hero. They do not understand or care about deindustrialization as a result of Chinese overcapacity, which is a central and fundamental foreign policy challenge. To them that’s handwaving away as ‘economics’ and boring. Let’s just do ‘care’ work, they imagine, as if a nation that makes nothing and imports food can afford to have its young people do nothing but wipe the asses of the old. 

What does a non-oligarch driven America actually do? What does it look like? Well for starters we pull back dramatically from the rest of the world. No troops in Europe, maybe offer some defense weapons to East Asian nations. No presence in the Middle East. Cut Israel loose entirely. Total revamp of our bloated and incompetent military and its corrupt establishment. Fire most admirals and generals and put in a new generation capable of actually thinking. 

This change will require us to be a LOT more protectionist. We put up huge trade barriers so that we can rebuild our industries. We also impose capital controls and confiscate or tax assets held by foreigners. No foreign ownership of land. We are not your bank account, Mr. Saudi Prince or Chinese money launderer. 

Finally, we crush capitalism. Rebuild our farms and factories. No more driving our corporations for shareholders. Lots of public utility regulation or nationalization of assets. No more private equity. No more crypto or corporate gambling. If you want to make money, you do something useful. Otherwise it’s poverty or handcuffs. 

America needs to be run for its people, not for the Epstein Class or for weirdos who can’t go over the Iranian overthrow of the shah or for lefty hobbyists funded by Koch industries to deindustrialize what’s left of what we have.

Rent Controls

 

We had rent controls in Britain until 1915 to 1988 and during this time housebuilding regularly hit over 300k per year. Since they were removed, the house price to income ratio has gone from 4:1 to around 8:1, and housebuilding numbers have collapsed. https://t.co/qRKr062FVg

— Gareth (@g_f_red) March 29, 2026

The myth of supply and demand

 Supply and demand may actually operate in microeconomics, but as Sonnenschein, Mantel and Debreu demonstrated (mathematically!), micro is not a suitable as a foundation for macroeconomics.

 

Vienna has fewer homes per capita than Vancouver. By supply-and-demand logic, the Austrian capital should be more expensive. Yet prices are 50% lower. Why? Because over half of Vienna’s housing is non-market. The issue isn’t supply. It’s commodification. https://t.co/LBo9u2Iic1

— Canadian Dimension (@CDN_Dimension) March 26, 2026

The Historical Precedents for America's Temperament

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner

Thinking about what it took our forefathers to come to the colonies in the New World is daunting. They encountered unimaginable wildness, Indians, and more. It's sensible to conclude that a peculiar insane optimism is one thing that could account for the post-Columbus migrations from Europe to America.

Spanish explorers like Columbus, Cortez and Pizarro made war on the native societies, even discarding their achievements in medicine and mathematics as they did. But what led to most of this largest-historical-genocide that killed 90% of the New World's population was the Old World diseases brought by the explorers themselves, particularly yellow fever and malaria, although measles and smallpox played a role too. 

So the European immigrants encountered a much-weakened native population, and vast stretches of land they abandoned as they died out. And even then, the Europeans fought them.

To work the land where malaria and yellow fever were rampant, the Europeans imported African slaves who had at least some immunity to these diseases. Slavery thrived between the Mason-Dixon line and the northern border of Argentina, where the vector mosquitos for those diseases were. Slavery was necessary, not optional, to grow all that cotton before mosquito eradication was discovered as a preventive.

Meanwhile, when Andrew Jackson stole the southeastern US from the natives--defying both Georgia's and the US Supreme Courts--the cotton planters were ecstatic. They quickly borrowed to buy slaves and farm what was the Cherokee's land as the Indians walked the "Trail of Tears" to move to what would become Oklahoma.

Then, in 1835, Andy Jackson did what many people even today believe would be a good idea. He paid off national debt entirely and closed down the central bank. This meant there were no publicly-issued dollars. People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private bank notes of varying reliability. 

The planters with their new, stolen land, were unable to pay their loan payments because the cotton surplus made the price of cotton hit the floor, even with 60% of the crop warehoused, and Jackson's debt payoff depleted their dollar savings. A wave of  asset forfeitures and foreclosures ensued. As is the case for all significant reductions of national debt, the economy tanked in the subsequent "Panic of 1837." 

One further bit of encouragement for civil war: slaves tend to not care about long-term soil health, so the typical slaver would deplete his soil, then move west to get more. The North was unwilling to bless making new states in the West slave states.

What can we conclude about the historical precedents for the American temperament? First, unrealistic optimism was an absolute requirement for new immigrants from Europe. Second, perceived economic necessities trumped any reasonable accommodation of the natives, even if they had something to offer. Third, slavery was a clear dedication to putting some (white) people in the driver's seat.

So...has much really changed? 

Meanwhile: JFK and LBJ's Defense chief Robert McNamara dined with his Vietnamese counterparts after the Vietnam war was over and done (and lost by the US). The Vietnamese asked McNamara why the US bothered with Vietnam in the first place. McNamara--by all accounts an intelligent and even charming dinner companion--responded by saying it was to contain China. The Vietnamese were outraged. "We've been fighting China literally for millenia!" was the gist of their response. So that war was simply a waste of men and money. Yet large populations in the US remain optimistic that warfare--now in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran--can have a miraculously wonderful outcome. 

How to respond? Is it sad? Frustrating? Testimony that "The more things change, the more they remain the same"? [sigh!]

The Corruption in the Punishment Bureaucracy

 

I’ve been studying the punishment bureaucracy and suing judges, prosecutors, and police across the U.S. for more than 15 years. One defining feature of our legal system is that there is rarely any accountability for massive corruption and criminality by those with power. This… pic.twitter.com/TELvR3SPWR

— Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec) March 22, 2026

A Letter to Sacramento County Supervisors about Homelessness

 

Dear Public Servants,

I recently attended one of Supervisor Rodriguez's public meetings and was nonplussed by the way she spoke about homeless people. To her (and her accompanying policeman), homelessness is a "choice," driven by mental illness or addiction.

On the other hand, recent surveys of the homeless population say that the number one cause of homelessness is that they are too poor to afford rent, as the following graph amply demonstrates.

 

Truth be told, there are more empty homes than homeless in the US--five times San Francisco's homeless population! Is there any discussion of doing what Vancouver (B.C., Canada) did successfully, enacting a vacant home tax to discourage investors from buying homes and leaving them vacant to artificially curtail the supply of housing? Not that I've heard.

There are some signs of progress in addressing the lack of affordable housing--the Beech Hill Apartments on Beech and Greenback in my neighborhood, for one, but these are slow to appear. And the narrative that says homelessness is the result of some shortage of housing, or a "choice" by the people, or mental illness, or addiction, doesn't help.

Evicting homeless populations from their camps and/or criminalizing homelessness are the County's responses. Even worse are the moves to incarcerate people for the crime of being poor. The County Jail is full, true, but 60% - 80% of its prisoners aren't convicted of anything except being too poor to afford bail. Any discussion of no cash bail or supervised release? Not that I can detect. 

Incidentally, the US and the Philippines are the only countries on earth that require cash bail, and both Illinois and Washington, D.C. have successful no-cash bail programs.

So...are they really mentally ill/addicted? Really? 

Even our response to addiction is misdirected. Here's a video entitled "Everything you think you know about addiction is wrong." 

 

 

 

I encourage you to view it and take it to heart. Sacramento County's management of homelessness and addiction needs to make a U-turn.

Your Constituent,

Mark Dempsey

The Wisdom of the Ages

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch-22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have … enough.”

Update: Thorstein Veblen Question: If much of modern consumption exists not to meet human needs but to signal status and superiority, why do we treat rising consumption as evidence of prosperity rather than as evidence of social rivalry and waste?

John Mearsheimer Evaluates the Iraq War (Hint: the US is losing)

See the full interview with Chris Hedges here. Excerpt:

You know, we go far enough up the escalation ladder and the Iranians really go after the Gulf States and really go to great lengths to destroy their oil infrastructure and gas infrastructure, the consequences could be disastrous for everyone on the planet. And the Trump administration understands that. They don’t want to take any chances here. This is why you see evidence that the Trump administration is looking for an off-ramp.

Chris Hedges

Well, the Iranians aren’t going to give it to them, are they?

John Mearsheimer

They’d be crazy to give it to them unless they get a good deal. You hardly see any talk about this in the mainstream media, but all of the talk revolving around the question of an off-ramp in ending this war has to do with how we think we fared in the end and how we think the Israelis fared in the end.

In other words, the Israelis are fearful that if we cut a deal now without regime change or without destroying Iran, this will be a victory for Iran and the Americans might be happy, but we’re not happy.

The Limitations of AI (Ever wonder why Amazon had an outage last week?)

 

🚨 Do you understand what's happening at Amazon right now?

Their own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly "decided" the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost.

Amazon's SVP called thousands of… https://t.co/1p9QeSm4us

— Tuki (@TukiFromKL) March 12, 2026

The State of Play in Iran 3/11/26

 

Reaganite Nostalgia

(c) by Mark Dempsey

An acquaintances yearning for more peaceful politics reminded me that he was a fan of Ronald Reagan and was nostalgic for simpler times. Reagan is hardly a remedy for our current woes. 

A few of Reagan's policies:

The Savings & Loan Crisis 

Before the subprime/derivatives meltdown in 2008, the largest financial and political scandal in US history was the S&Ls. It was orders of magnitude bigger than Teapot Dome, or Credit Mobilier, the previous "biggest-ever" scandals, and took nearly a half trillion dollars to cure, if you count the interest on the bailout. It was huge.

It happened, and was it so big because Reagan made a rather ordinary bank scandal worse by deregulating the S&Ls. Rather than "growing their way out of trouble," they just made more crooked loans. For the details, see Martin Mayer's The Greatest Bank Robbery Ever: The Collapse of the Savings & Loans. 

In fairness, Reagan and Bush 41 regulators actually acted to stop the crooked S&Ls. According to regulator William K. Black, they filed more than 30,000 referrals for criminal prosecution, and the Justice Dept prosecuted more than 1200 cases with a 90% conviction rate. They got big fish, too, Mike Milken and Charles Keating among them. 

In financial terms, the more recent subprime/derivative meltdown--the "Global Financial Crisis"-- was 70 times bigger than the S&L scandal. The scandals are getting worse, not better. The number of referrals for criminal prosecution filed by the Obama administration's regulators: zero. 

Obama prosecuted about a dozen cases, all small fish. One Swiss banker went to jail, but the big malefactors were given slap-on-the-wrist fines and walked away with the vast majority of their loot without even an admission of guilt, which makes the cases for civil damages harder to prosecute. No one lost his job, no one even lost his bonus. America's net worth declined by 40%, there were 8 - 10 million foreclosures. People lost their homes, their jobs and their savings. It was an economic bloodbath. It's no surprise Trump won in 2016, after the economy digested this outrage.

My Democratic friends send me YouTubes decrying Trump's pardons, and the billions they cost the courts and the victims of the pardon recipients' frauds. But, according to our central bank's own audit, during the Global Financial Crisis, it issued between $16 and $29 trillion in credit to the same financial sector whose frauds crashed the economy. 

Just a reminder: a trillion is 1,000 times a billion. And Obama didn't have to pardon people because he didn't jail the criminals. Reagan set the direction; Obama pressed the accelerator.

Iran/Contra

The Reagan administration wanted to wage a war against Nicaragua because Nicaragua elected a socialist government. Congress disagreed and withdrew funding for the mercenaries ("Contras") fighting the elected government. 

Reagan's advisors then sold classified weapons to Iran, through Israel, and used the proceeds to fund mercenaries fighting the elected government. "Weapons laundering" through Israel made this possible because the public outcry would have prohibited it otherwise. After all, at the time, Iran had just released the US embassy hostages when Reagan became president. 

To pressure Iran to release the US embassy hostages, the defeated Jimmy Carter had refused to sell the Ayatollahs spare parts for its US weapons bought by the US-supported Shah, but Reagan lifted that prohibition--a concession Carter advisor Gary Sick (October Surprise) says made Iran delay releasing the hostages for Carter. That almost certainly lost Carter the presidency. Not only that, Reagan sold not just spare parts, but classified weapons Iran did not yet own to get money to pay the Central American mercenaries. 

This amplified previous US aggressive impulses. Carter and Congress previously funded the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. That's where Osama Ben Laden got his training, which he later used for the World Trade Center bombing. So the "uniparty" behaved as usual.

Reagan famously asked the Mexican President to endorse the war against Nicaragua--one of the two poorest nations in the hemisphere--because Nicaragua was such a threat to the US. The Mexican president replied that he would be happy to go along with his friend Ronnie if there was any way he could do so without being laughed out of office. 

Update: 3/22/26 from Thom Hartmann

…Tragically for America and the world, it all came crashing down when a faction of Iran’s most extreme rightwing mullahs helped the fossil fuel industry’s candidate, Ronald Reagan, replaced Carter in the 1980 election. Reagan then killed the solar bank and the solar bond programs, and removed Carter’s 32 solar panels from the roof of the White House.

As a result, we’ve actually increased our consumption of fossil fuels so much that the fossil fuel industry’s billionaire investors have made an estimated $52 trillion in profits in the years since Reagan’s presidency. And global warming is now driving climate wilding that’s killing Americans and threatening all life on Earth….

During the Carter/Reagan election battle of 1980, then-President Carter had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abdolhassan Bani-Sadr to release the fifty-two hostages held by students at the American Embassy in Tehran.

President Bani-Sadr was a moderate and, as he explained in an editorial for The Christian Science Monitor, successfully ran for President that summer of 1980 on the popular position of releasing the hostages….

Carter was confident that with Bani-Sadr’s help, he could end the embarrassing hostage crisis that had been a thorn in his political side ever since it began in November of 1979 and support a moderate government emerging in Iran.

But behind Carter’s back, the Reagan campaign worked out a deal with the leader of Iran’s most hard-core rightwing radical faction — Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini — to keep the hostages in captivity until after the 1980 presidential election. Khomeini needed spare parts for American weapons systems the Shah had purchased for Iran, and Reagan was happy to promise them….

Kemp-Roth -- Tax Cuts for the Wealthy & "trickle down"

Kemp-Roth is the name of the legislation that is one of the hallmarks of Reagan's administration. It cut the top income tax brackets for the wealthy roughly in half. It's also worth mentioning that between Reagan and his successor, payroll taxes also increased eightfold. Gosh, I wonder why there's such a big income divide in the US now!

Meanwhile, here's what GDP growth looks like in the US over time:

 

Notice that, in the 1980s, in return for his "trickle-down" policies, the reduced taxes on the rich that increased national debt by a record percentage, Reagan got what amounts to an average business cycle recovery. The Wall Street Journal called it "Morning in America," but it's very modest in comparison to the New Deal and that big public works project called "World War II" whose peaks appear earlier in the graph.

For reference, the government took over 50% of the American economy during WWII. Implementing the Green New Deal would only take 5%.

Reagan was also a fan of Milton Friedman's economics. Friedman says that the central bank (The Federal Reserve) should manage the money supply, and that would save us from the then-current "stagflation." This was tried and abandoned. Like most of Friedman's prescriptions, it didn't work.

Immigration 

I've written about this before, but Friedman's economics was given an even more extensive test in Chile after the Nixon administration overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende, and assassinated Allende and thousands of others. During the term of Allende's replacement--human rights abuser General Augusto Pinochet--Chile's economy grew by 8%. Neighboring South American nations had roughly 40% GDP growth. After Pinochet, Chile's unemployment rate was higher than when Pinochet began his rule.

This is related to immigration because it's standard policy for the US to create refugees who flee north to get behind the battle lines. Between 1798 and 1994, the US was responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders, leading to a constant stream of political and military refugees coming north. Allende's niece, Isabelle Allende, lives in Marin County, California, and writes novels.

The economic manipulations that create refugees are as bad or worse. One might guess that Mexican corn farmers were harmed by having to compete with subsidized Iowa corn imports, and NAFTA gave the big farmers a bailout. True, NAFTA was a bipartisan collaboration between Harvard-educated Carlos Salinas Gotari, G.H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, not really Reagan's treaty, but Reagan would have agreed with the economics behind it.

In the wake of NAFTA, Mexican real, median income declined 34% (says Ravi Batra in Greenspan's Fraud). One has to go back to the Great Depression to find a decline like that in the US. The little subsistence corn farmers were only growing obscure varieties of that important crop that kept the disease resistance and genetic diversity of corn alive; but they weren't making any money for Monsanto, so forget them! 

Reagan's contribution to the immigration discussion, besides the military refugees created by Iran/Contra,  was an amnesty--something Republicans accused their Democratic opponents of advocating.  It's a non-starter in the Trump era.

Antitrust

The Reagan administration effectively stopped enforcing antitrust legislation in the '80s. Breaking up monopolies is absolutely necessary to ensure the markets can operate and do legitimate price discovery. 

Monopolies defeat markets, setting prices to maximize their own profits. Monopolies (and oligopolies) are price setters, not price getters--which defeats the free market's claim to make things affordable. The prices of EpiPens and insulin are just some of the latest instance of monopoly rents increasing prices.

Classical economics says there's a law of declining profits. Completely free markets without significant barriers to entry, or dominant monopolies/oligopolies, mean that competition drives prices lower, and with lower prices come lower profits. Firms know this and do everything from buying the competition to selling goods below their production costs to drive competitors out of business.

Here's an example from New Hampshire: "Here's a blow-by-blow of how utility regulators and utilities collude to screw you. In this case, Eversource, New Hampshire's largest utility, got a 43% increase in the fixed monthly charge consumers pay. 43%." (from monopoly specialist Matt Stoller)

Recently, Wright-Patman, a law forbidding different prices for large customers (e.g., Walmart) and small customers (mom-and-pop stores), has been revived, but it has been ignored since Reagan, too. The courts are reviewing one case now, but the game of different prices for the big guys vs. the little guys has been going on for a long time now.  

Education/Homelessness 

When Reagan was governor of California, he removed "civics" from the schools' curricula.  Heavens to Betsy! We can't have educated voters!

He also closed the state's insane asylums, basically evicting the inmates to suffer the tender mercies of homelessness and the streets. In a bipartisan move, the Democrats did something similar to the big federal asylums during the Kennedy administration. The proposal was to close the big, isolated asylums and make transitional housing that integrated the inmates into society again. Congress terminated funding for the federal asylums and failed to fund the transitional housing. 

In the presidency, as Reagan cut taxes on the wealthy roughly in half and increased payroll taxes, he also cut HUD's affordable housing budget by 75%. The current homeless population--the biggest since the Great Depression--is the result of public policy, not some accident. 

War Crimes

This is hardly an exceptional accusation for really any president since WWII, yet Nicaragua qualifies as a war crime, as does Grenada.

Thatcher

Reagan and Thatcher were allies in economics, both promoting "trickle down" theories that favored the rich.  Thatcher famously declared that "There's no such thing as 'society,' only families and individuals" -- a statement roughly equivalent to "You have only cells and organs; you have no body." Childhood poverty in the UK increased three-fold during Thatcher's reign.

Where we are now:

Real, median income for the bottom 90% of US incomes has increased $59 since 1972, says investigative reporter David Cay Johnston. If that increase were an inch on a bar graph, the bar for the top 10% would be 141 feet high; the bar for the top 0.1% would be five miles high. The distortions this wreaks on society are everywhere to be seen. From the precarity of employment, to the largest homeless population since the Great Depression, we are all suffering from the policies that favor the rich and attack the poor. 

Consider the alternative: The Carnegie Endowment pointed out that China’s entire strategy for competing with the United States has been to lean into economics, technology, construction, and training. Not military alliances. Not bombs. They build roads, ports, rail networks, energy systems. They invest in other countries’ infrastructure. They compete by making things. In the US, we compete by breaking things. And we’ve spent decades proving it.

We can’t build a subway line in under twenty years. We can’t make insulin affordable. We can’t keep a hospital open in a rural county. We can’t build housing fast enough to keep families off the street. But we can flatten a city on the other side of the world in a weekend. We’re really good at that part. We’ve had a lot of practice.